You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Struggling To Grow Your Playing?

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

Adam and Peter share their tips on how to foster your creative skills in any environment. Growth can be difficult to manage so let the OS team guide you to success with this episode of YHI. ��� Links from the pod ↓Peter's 27 Essential Jazz EtudesHave a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open Studio🎹 Head over to our YouTube channel for a better look 👀.Follow us on Instagram

And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Jazz Explained. Explained if you want to go on a deeper dive, go to Open Studio Jazz. No, Open StudioJazz.com. Not Open StudioJazz. Anyway, go to Open StudioJas.com and go on a deeper dive for... He's back.

2024 style. New Jazz listen needs. That's out of Manish, y'all. I'm Peter Martin, and we would like to welcome you to 2024. They said it wouldn't happen. Peter, they've been here in 2024 for like a week and a half. That's true. Right.

This is exciting because today, we're here with you. We're officially here. That's right. And we are officiating this officiado's guide to jazz today. It's an officianto, like cigar aficionado. Exactly. Oh, we should make a magazine, jazz aficionado. I'm pretty sure there is one already.

Is there really? Yeah, oh, yeah. It's called Downbeat. Shout out. No, there's not a jazz officiant. Are you sure there's got to be? You know what? We're going to trademark that before this comes out.

Note to self. Oh, yeah. Jazz officiato. That's a billion dollar idea. Yeah. No, we want to thank everybody for being here for yet another year of the pod. We appreciate you guys so much. We hope your holiday season, wherever this finds you, went well.

And we're starting out the year with something very topical to what's been going on in the studio here today. And that's struggle. Struggle is real, man. The struggle is real. We've been struggling to get this episode going, but you know what that means? What? Usually when we struggle, great things happen. Almost always.

Almost always. I don't know why you introduced any doubt to it, but thank you, sir. Oh, the almost? Great. Well, we've got to start over. Right. No, but I mean, we're talking today about how to, the struggling and how to overcome

the struggle to grow in your playing. And I think that growth is something that we're, of course, everybody's looking for in any hobby or profession or vocation, whatever it is, whatever you're, however you see your interaction with this music, you want to grow. Growth is fun, you know what I mean? It is. But it is a struggle sometimes. So it's, but if you think about it, like, if you're growing and you're playing, you might have to wait a little longer to see that.

You might have to have a time horizon of like a month or three months or, God forbid, a year. You got to have some patience. Right. But you're going to, but there's going to be all these cool things that happen along the journey. As opposed to just like the struggle being, I want to play better. It's like, no, think about what are the activities and hopefully we can talk about some things that are fun and that, you know, might be some hard work, but are like actual, the kind of fun work that you can. can get lost in that will grow your playing on a week by week, month by month basis so that as you look back, of course it's fun to look back, but that doesn't become the only joyful time,

right, of your growth. Because we can grow every day. We can't necessarily chart our growth every day. No, sometimes. No, I was going to say, sometimes you're going to hit plateos. Right. It's inevitable. And that's part of the process. Sometimes we even going to backslide. It's part of it. It is part of the process. I mean, even if you look at the grates, right? Miles Davis. Sonny Rollins. Famously, both of those players, two of the best ever to ever do it.

Players. Had periods of well-documented struggle. Sonny Rollins quit for a year to play on the Manhattan Bridge and practiced because he wasn't feeling what he was doing. Of course. What a great marker for growth

during that period. Of course, yeah. And Miles Davis quit the trumpet for years. And then, because he wasn't in touch with what he wasn't feeling what he was doing. His attention was in other directions artistically,

and then came back stronger than ever. I mean, it's part of the process. It's part of the process, everybody's process. So if you're hitting a plateau or hitting, even, like you said, a backslide, don't feel frustrated. Just know that everybody has gone through that, even your favorite players. What we want to present today, though,

is maybe some ideas, or at least one, I think one really strong idea for when you are really wanting to sort of focus on one thing. Yeah. Organize the growth, right? organize the growth. Even if it's like just, I want a period of time where there's this one thing that's been bugging me. Right.

This is a new year. Like, there's a lot of people like to take this time sort of reset, recalibrate. Well, you know, I don't, I'm not a fan of that phrase. But I am a, I am, I'm not. I'm not a fan of New Year, new me, but I am a fan of organizing your growth, like you said. Okay. Didn't quite have the same ring, but I got you. I know, it's not as catchy.

But the thing that I wanted to talk. talk about today, Peter, which is something that you've done quite a bit, which is a restrictive practice challenge, right? And this is, I've learned this from you, is really taking one thing and practicing it every day. Even this podcast, you know, we're, we have this podcast because you walked in and said, let's do a podcast every day. Right. And we did it every day for like two years, seven days a week. That was crazy. That was so, can you imagine? I was so sick of you during that period. and it's only gotten worse. But then, you know, we got good at it.

We got good at making a podcast. We can now make a podcast so easily. The podcast makes itself. Bumps in the road are non-existent, right? But no, like, it's that everyday touch. It's hitting that one thing. It's saying I want to focus on, in this case, making a podcast, let's do it every day.

You could do that in your music practice. So I would say that if you're struggling to grow, you might pick one, first of all, step one, is pick the one area that you want to grow, not 10 areas. That's right. Don't say I want to get a better... That's like the first restriction. Yeah, the first restriction is picking something.

It's like, I don't want to get better ears and better time and more language and better cords. Pick one thing. What's the one thing that you want to work on, let's say, in a period of a month or two months, right? Right. Six weeks, eight weeks, whatever it is. And then you can start focusing on what that looks like every day. Yeah, and I think that this is like a lot of folks are going to be starting to not off.

because they're like, oh yeah, of course, I know that. That's obvious. But like, this is the part that folks miss, right? That one thing because it's so easy to be like, well, yeah, I, I, there's something about playing music that is just humbling. It's so, it's the same part of it that's so exciting. You know, no, I mean, it is. And it's like the highs and the lows. I love it. I love being humbled. And then I love hitting that high. And then I love when I listen back. And I'm like, oh, the high wasn't as high as I thought. That's all part of it. You know what I mean? But because it's humbling kind of thing. It's very hard for anyone that actually has some humility, which you have to have to play this music, or else it will humble you anyway. But it's like, it's very hard

to be like, oh, there's only one area that I need to practice. And that's kind of what this requires. So most people are going to be like, well, but my ears suck. And my technique is trash. And my repertoire is no good. And like, that's a natural thing. And objectively, you can always find comparisons that would point you to thinking that. And so it becomes counterproductive in that we don't focus on one thing because people think, well, no, I have to work on all these different things. And full disclosure, I'm a hypocrite, okay, because I do talk about, and we talk about, you're a hypocrite too. We talk about developing in all these different areas at the same time, which you can. But what we're talking about is really a focus. So it's not an exclusionary thing.

You're still going to be working on other things, but you're restricting yourself to one specific thing for focus. There will be ancillary benefits that come along that you don't have to to think about. Which is actually the fun part. That's the part that gets fun. Yeah. Like if you were, you're a runner,

Peter, if you were to take, you know, six week and just work on sprints, right? That's not going to hurt your long run game. Right. In fact,

it's probably going to help and benefit you grow some muscles that you're not going to work on on just all long run. I don't have gross muscles. You're right. Gross muscles. But it's the same thing here.

If you decide to work on voicings, that doesn't mean that you're not going to be working on your ear or your time or language or or repertoire. You can actually be working on all of those things, but you're just picking your one focus here. Everything you do is going to be making those voicing sound better. So that's sort of rule number one is pick the one thing that you want to work on. And then rule number two is... And give it enough,

oh, maybe, sorry, I'd be jumping ahead. Can I throw it number two in? Yeah, yeah. Give it enough time. Yes, patience. Like one month, like you mentioned six to eight weeks, that might seem like a long time horizon for some folks, but it shouldn't. Oh, that's nothing. Yeah. I would say a month minimum for this kind of a thing. Where you're just working on this. this one thing for a month. Yeah. And that's like every day or at least five to six days a week, which I guess we've compromised. Well, if you're going to really challenge yourself. So here's number, so that's number two, is pick your duration of when you want to just focus

on this one. Yeah. And don't make it a day. No. Make it at least a month. I would say six weeks is like optimal, at least for my own experience, just of like, I'm going to hit this every day. And then it's every day.

Right. And I like it. But here it comes with a caveat, Peter. There is a limit to how much time you can spend on it. There's a maximum amount of minutes. Restriction. The restriction of minutes. And that's how you can hit this every day.

Right. The restriction is six hours, right? Six hours at max. No, 10 minutes. 10 minutes maximum. Yeah. Can you spend 10 minutes every day on your rhythm or your repertoire? 10 minutes every day for six weeks.

If you can do that, you will break through a plateau. Yes. You will improve your playing in that time. And in fact, you will effectively improve your playing. Like it's so, it's so helpful to just have this, like, to make the decision once. Yeah. And then it's taken away from you for six weeks. So you don't have to decide, oh, I'm going to practice today, and I'm only going to practice

voicings, and I'm only going to practice 10 minutes. You don't have to decide that for six weeks. Yep. It was made in January. It was January 1st. It's your decision. And it's a good decision. It's a good decision.

And this is the thing, though, it's great about this 10 minutes is that that, you talk about other benefits that come along with it besides just the. ear training or whatever it is you're working on. By restricting it to 10 minutes, this may not happen on the first day, maybe not even the second day, but at a certain point, that's going to become the most essential and optimized 10 minutes of your practice routine. Because a lot of folks are going to start up being like, oh, 10 minutes, I can't really accomplish anything.

And then it's going to become, wait, hold on, I need to really accomplish something. A lot of times when we practice something, say, for an hour, there's actually only like, 10 minutes of really beneficial because we're just kind of like procrastinating or playing things that we know how to play. It's like make that 10 minutes mean something. We're not saying practice 10 minutes and that's it. We're saying practice 10 minutes on this practice challenge that you're going to do for six weeks. Fred Hurst recommends setting a timer for 10 minutes, 15 minutes.

And when that 10 minutes is up, you're done with this practice challenge for the day. And if you want to play more, play more. And what's great too about this is like this isn't the way you want to structure your whole practice routine. This is just one part of it. So if you have an hour to practice or even say 30 minutes and you've got 10 minutes where you're committing to really practicing this one thing, restricted practice, repeating every day. So it's going to get better, like over those six weeks. You may have some lulls, some plateaus for sure. You might even have some backsliding.

But like you're going to get to the point where you're really making some progress in that area. The rest of your practice, you've kind of banked that productivity, right? You don't have to be productive every minute of your practice. Actually, you shouldn't be. You know, there's got to be times for exploring. and kind of BSing and writing and maybe like trying something and it doesn't work out,

you're just committing to 10 minutes of that being very productive, restricted, and focused. Put in the comments what you're going to challenge yourself with in the next four to six weeks. Yes. And then we want to hear from you how it went.

Absolutely. And actually, you know what? We're going to do a little bit of a new segment here. I'm calling an audible here. And this is where we're going to promote something of our own. This could be anything.

But I think that this works well. Okay. I did a thing last year, a 30-day practice. challenge that really work well. Folks, it was great for me, and I just recorded what I practiced. And we ended up kind of packaging it together by popular request from the members, and it's called 27 Essential Jazz Piano Ato.

This was your restrictive practice challenge last year. Exactly, and I started, I think, on like, the second of January, and we've got it all put together. It's got great notation. So we'll put a link to that below. You can create your own, or you can use this one as a springboard. I think this one works well. You can check it out.

If you're already an Open Studio member, it is on your dashboard as 27. dashboard as 27 essential. This one takes away the decision about what you're going to do. Obviously, it's the same thing like we're talking about. It's very specific to jazz piano technique and working on things each day and taking them in all keys. But there's a lot of rhythm benefits and little things that I sneak in there that you're not even going to know your practice. So do yourself a favor. Make those decisions once.

Restrict yourself once and then let it ride. Take the guesswork out of if you're going to practice, how long you're going to practice, and what you're going to practice. Do a little restrictive practice challenge. set your topic, and the more specific the better, and set your duration, how many days, weeks, months, you're going to do it,

and stick to that, and then set your time. It could be 10 minutes, could be 15 minutes, but do not alter that, and that's maximum. And once that alarm goes off, you're done. That's right.

Step away from the piano. Step away. You want to be back on it the next day. That's right. Until next time. You'll hear it. It better be.