You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - The Craziest Practice Techniques We've Ever Tried - #85

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam talk about the craziest techniques for jazz piano practice that they've ever attempted. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is Adam Maness. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. Today we're going to give you our craziest practice techniques we've ever tried. Now, are we doing this as like actionable advice? Or are we saying don't do this at home? Well, it depends if it's, well, the one I'm thinking of was not successful.

So this is actionable to not do this at home. Okay, great. Okay. What about yours? Yeah, I'm still trying to think of my craziest because I do crazy stuff all the time. Well, I'll go first. So that'll give you a little bit of the time. We're very spontaneous here at the You'll Hear a podcast.

And I'll give you even a little extra time. We want to say thank you to all of our loyal listeners and our non-loyal listeners. We'll take you however you come. We don't really care. We're all about the stats. We're all about the stats, okay? You know what? You can even just listen to the beat.

Actually, no, you have to listen all the way through. Because part of our stats and our status and thus our sense of self-worth individually and together is based upon the percentage of time. that people listen to this. So we get all those stats from, well, we can't really tell you where we get them, but we get them. Just to say that Mark Zuckerberg emails those stats over daily,

along with some other demographic information, would be stretching it a little bit, right? Yeah, I think it would be, yeah. No, but for instance, we've had episodes where people listen on average to like 92% of the episode, which I think is funny. I'm like, wow, you made it that far? I mean, granted, it's an average,

but you made it all the way there, and you couldn't stick it out, really? You didn't want to get the tag. But then, I don't know if you've noticed this, Adam. We've had episodes where people listen to on average 112% of the episode. That's just weird. It seems impossible. Like, are you staying and just listening?

So all I can think of is maybe they really, really like it. Well, maybe they listen to it twice, and that's 200%. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, please keep listening and keep your questions up. You guys, you know, as you've heard probably half of our recent episodes have been from questions, which is a lot of fun. You can go to you'll hear it.com. or OpenStudio Network.com slash podcast and submit a question by voice,

or you can type your question in an old school style, and we will be happy to answer it, maybe, if we feel like it, if it will add to the thing. And also, please go and give us a rating and or review, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, we do the tags at the end of the show with that, too, but we like to remind you several times. Oh, really?

Am I overselling it now? Five star, five star, five star, five star. But do whatever you want. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so today we're talking about the creativity. craziest practice techniques we've ever tried. And I'm going to, you know, I was thinking about this. The craziest thing I think I ever tried ever, and this is going way back, is to learn a solo,

a new solo every day. And you couldn't do it? I actually, believe it or not, many years ago, I think I was 15 years old. So like, what, nine years ago now, I, not only did I think I was going to be able to do this, I actually made a schedule, like, in a list, like, for the first week. I was like, okay. But I mean, I was practical about it. I was like, let's not, let's not go crazy and like learn giant steps on the first day. You went like easy solo. It went easy as easy as I could find. And so actually the first solo that I scheduled was Miles Davis's solo because I'm like, Miles plays very simply. So I wanted to find a simple solo that he did on bags groove. Nice. So I was interested. Yeah, great solo. And I'm like, oh, I should be able to do that. Now, as it turned out, I got through one course on the first day and didn't even totally learned it. But I mean, I spent a few hours and kind of got the first. I think I was even writing them.

out at that time. So it was a little bit unrealistic, as in my percentage of achievement on that was zero. Well, you hadn't quite grasped the concept of absorption of anything. Exactly. Yeah, I was giving no, no, very short shift to, you know, organic absorption of the material. It was all about sticking to the schedule, which I didn't do either. That's fine. But that was pretty crazy.

And, I mean, overly ambitious would probably come. Oh, for sure. Yeah. But what that did was I set the bar high and failed to hit my head on the bar. didn't even hit my head. No, but I did, I was, during that period, I was in a very good schedule of spending time, like what I didn't realize was important, and what I should have set as the goal was spend time every day transcribing, learning a solo. That's really important. Have that part. So that did sort of teach that to be part of my practice routine. Yeah. And so, but that's probably

the craziest thing I ever tried. You know, I think all these crazy things, it's like, really, they're just extremes of things that you could or should be doing. Yes. So my first one is, I remember I was in high school and someone had told me that Wayne Shorter had practiced by, he would practice eight or nine hours a day playing just two notes for eight or nine hours in a practice. And I was like, oh, I'm going to do that. You know how you are when you're like that age and you think like that's the coolest thing? Yeah. And I did it.

I made it about four hours before I started to go insane. Right. And I probably didn't do it the whole time I was in there either than I didn't think about it. but I just played these two. I think it was like a D-flat and an E-flat. Well, you picked hard notes at least. I know. For two hours,

and the point was to try to get this much as possible out of them. Now, I'm going to say, it was an interesting experiment, and it was complete waste of time. Like, you could do that for an hour maybe, and you might get, you know, it's like a meditation or like a, you know, you come in a trance at some point

and try to get different things out of it. but after hour number one, there's a really diminished returns. Right. As far as that. I'm thinking after five minutes, you've, on the piano especially. Well, I mean, these waves start happening, right, where it's like, oh, what the, what am I doing? What's going on? What?

Oh, oh, I found this interesting thing. Oh, oh, I've lost it. And now I'm thinking about I'm hungry. And it becomes this like, this experience. Right. But it's not, it's not anything that it should be doing. So that's interesting. We both chose crazy practice techniques.

that were probably equally impossible to maintain, like even beyond the first day. Well, you did good if you made it three or four hours at least. I know. You know what? It's funny. I've never even followed up with that story to see if that's true if Wayne Schroeder actually did that. Like, my friend could have totally been making that up.

I would have no idea. Right. Yeah, but so, well, yeah, that's kind of our crazy practice techniques. I think, you know, some other things that I did that were actually a little crazy, but sort of achievable and very helpful where I would get into things where I would practice like one thing for the whole day and that's, I mean I never

got to like two notes. That's really meta. But I mean I would just really get into certain scales and like seeing how many different ways I could practice them and I would just get so obsessed with those. And that's kind of crazy because I think it's better in general to have some well-rounded practice time. Work on your ear training. Learned a solo.

But that makes sense though if you're into something. Yeah, but sometimes I think, yeah, if you kind of follow along, so it's a little crazy but it can be very productive. Yeah. So there you go. Crazy practice techniques. Done.

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