You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - The Most Important Tool for Getting Better

Episode Date: March 11, 2020

With all the tools available to help you become a better musician, what is the one you need to have to build your skills? Peter and Adam let you in on it in this episode.Coming soon - a new course from Open Studio! It's the long-awaited sequel to our Rhythm Section Fundamentals course, where you'll learn how to get the piano, bass, and drums to play as one well-oiled jazz machine. Stay tuned for more details, and check out the original Rhythm Section Fundamentals to prepare for part two.Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Peter. Hey, growth or constriction? Are we talking weight or mindset? Mindset. Okay, growth for sure. Every time. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin.

That's Alex over there, and this is the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily music advice coming at you. I like giving a shout out to our engineer interns. We've had several on this podcast. You know, we've been doing this podcast for over two years. Oh, I know. The longest two years of my life. Exactly.

The longest slightly over two years of my life as well. We're good. We've had, let's talk. Andrew, who is now our head audio engineer, was our very first audio intern. Yes. What do you know about? Eli.

Remember Eli? Eli was a high school student. He right. Remember that? He was off in the Marines now being deployed. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know where he is. I think he's at some hoity-to-to-dy college, though.

He's not in high school. He was a smart kid, Eli. Shout out to Eli. What do you know about Brianna? Remember Brianna? Yeah, she was awesome. She was good. That was back at the beginning.

beginning of the pod cave, I believe. Possibly even pre-pot podcave. I think it might have been pre-pod cave with Brian actually and she moved us into the podcaves. Right. And then Ryan, remember Ryan? How could you forget Ryan? Of course. He was here a couple days ago. Yeah, he still comes in every often. And now Alex, who's back to. That's right. Yeah. Alex, possibly, I know we had a high school intern. Alex is not in high school, I dare say, right? He's one of our more mature interns. Still a young guy, though.

No, but he's clearly, are you millennial? He's like, yeah. But he's like a grown-ass man, that guy. He's like, well, that too, yeah. You can be both. I feel like we're in trusting hands when Alex is behind the board. Alex, I mean, we've had a great rapport with all of them.

Alex, Alex, loves humor. I don't know if you notice that. You know, his favorite, his favorite thing. Byron Lovelace. We do that just for you, Alex. He knows it every time we say it. We can't even have it on YouTube. It's great.

He turns red and is cracking up, and we feel like great comedians. So there we go. All right, today's topic is something I pick. because we've been talking a lot about it here at Open Studio. If you don't know, we have this little website called Open Studio where we do online jazz lesson courses, and we are always trying to get better at presenting the courses

and reaching a wider audience. And so we're always in a growth mindset. Wider. Wider audience. Because a wider, that's what I said. Yeah, a broader. Broader. There you go.

That's better. Because, yeah. So we're always in this growth mindset because we're, a startup and we're really trying to grow at all times. That's right. And then we've noticed that our bodies are growing at all times as well. No, that's because we got a dispenser jellybellies out there, my friend. Jelly bellies.

Hashtag jelly belly. But we are noticing the similarities between trying to grow our business and trying to become better musicians. There's a lot of things that we have just naturally done as pianists and musicians that we can apply to the business, but we want to just. focus on tools you can use to get better as a musician with this growth mindset in mind. Okay, having said that, you titled this today. We put a little pressure on because you didn't say the tools that are important. You said the most important tool for getting better.

And it's not jelly belly. Come on, Alex. Don't put jelly belly in the notes. No, it is a growth mindset. That is the most important tool for getting better. It's having the mindset in the right place. if you don't have that, you can have all the practice journals and playalongs or whatever, but if you're mind, if you don't get your mind in the right place for growth, then it's going to be hard.

Yes, absolutely. But the beautiful thing about this and kind of the flip side, as they say, the B side of that, if you get it in the right place, which is what we're going to talk about today, we're not just going to give you, we don't say, like,

what's the most important tool for getting better? And then we're like growth mindset. You'll hear it. Done. Now come on. Yeah, yeah. We go deep. We go deep.

Well, relatively. But the beautiful thing about the growth mindset is once you put it on, it has the, it's very simple. But it's not easy to actually activate it. You know, we actually, everybody has this, I believe. I believe we're all born with this, this growth mindset. If you think about little babies, you want to, you know, kick your feet out and then, you know, and then walk. You're trying to do things. You're trying to grow as a human.

And in fact, you grow. I mean, that's part of the biology or whatever. But the thing is, if you can adopt this kind of mental attitude, this mindset of growth, it doesn't happen immediately unless you already have it. But as it becomes stronger with you and as you commit to it, it's like anything you have to commit and then stick with it. it has the potential to affect you getting better in virtually every part of your life and so true

and virtually every part of your playing that's what's so exciting about it. It's not like, you know, sometimes we'll talk about tools that you need a specific tool like a practice journal or like a certain exercise for the piano

or a trumpet, the arbin thing can get one part of your playing together very important or you're working on your ears and this thing but this is something that's even higher level than all that can affect all those things.

Because if you have this going, it doesn't not matter what the tools are, but you can make any tool work for you in some way. Right. You have to have that, you're right, you have to have that first level of the mindset that I'm here to grow. So, let's

talk about some bullet points for this that I think are important. The first one that came to mind when we started working this one out was humility. That being humble in the face of the project, in this case, music. Yes. Right? Having humility when it comes to your

place in it where you are, where you need to be, can be an incredibly powerful tool. I was just listening to this Tim Ferriss podcast with this ex-Navy seal named Jaco Willink. Oh yeah. You know this guy? I've seen him speak live before. Yeah, he's very imposing guy. Yeah, yeah. He's like, it's up at 4 a.m. every morning.

Yeah, exactly. And then some guys started copying him, so he started getting up at 3. Yeah. And he'll post, you've ever seen his Instagram? I follow him now. Yeah, he posted a picture of his watch every morning. He's like, let's get it. 3 a.m.

Yeah. Yeah, guys intense to say the least. I mean, you know, he's a former name. He dropped out and gave me a gross mindset. He's written a bunch of books on leadership, and it was a fascinating interview. He's a very interesting dude. It's not all, it's, um, don't tell me. But something ultimate, not ultimate leadership.

Ownership, extreme ownership. Extreme ownership. That's great. I read that book. That's a wonderful book. Yeah, yeah. Highly recommend. So check him out, Jaka Willick.

But he was asked by Tim Ferriss, like, what's the difference between a, a leader, like a Navy SEAL leader and someone who's maybe not a great natural leader. And he said, well, first of all, there's no such thing as a natural leader, which I think is really important here, that just like if you were playing a video game and you have all these attributes,

no one comes in with straight tens, right? Maybe you have some things you're better at than others, but everybody's working to sort of put up all their attributes to get those scores as close to tens, so don't feel like you have to be born to do this to whatever, which I thought was actually really interesting. But he said, I know the difference between someone who's going to be a good leader and someone who doesn't have that yet

because if they, let's say we're doing a drill and something goes wrong, the person who doesn't have that yet, I say, what were wrong? He said, well, you know, my gutterman didn't follow this order and then that guy didn't do what they were supposed to do. And this person over here wasn't, you know, they messed up or whatever. And he's like, that person is not ready to be a leader. The person who I say, what went wrong? And he says, well, I messed that one. and then they get out a notebook and they say,

what happened, what do I need to do next time so that this doesn't happen again? That's awesome. He's like, that's gonna be the leader. That's gonna be a Navy SEAL leader. And so I think that kind of humility of not thinking that you know everything out of the gate. And it's hard with music because we have these skills, right,

that we develop at our early age usually, and so you think like, I know this, like, I got this. You don't. No. None of us do. No. And so be humble in the face of the music and come at it from a place of,

I always have more to learn, you know, no matter how great you just played. There's always, there's always growth to be had. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's something normally more associated with as you get older. This gets to be clearer and easier to understand because basically you go through situations where you either act humbly or you don't act humbly. And so then normally when you're humble, and we're not talking about being a pushover. It's not about that.

It's about truly what humility. means when you're humble and you're able to learn and derive it's it's actually kind of a selfish thing in a way to be humble oh yeah when you have it you know enveloped in this growth mindset and so once you start to see what you get out of being humble you know it's just like if you have a you know people like oh that guy's got a bad temper you know that woman is always getting mad or whatever and it's like same thing you're not necessarily born everybody everybody has anger and joy and all these different emotions they they're appropriate different times or whatever but when you start to learn that like you know i have a bad temper and then

every time you want to fight somebody that it doesn't really work out great for you in life, whereas if you have a little bit of humility and say, okay, hold on, let me take a breath and step back. And things start working out better for you, you know. For sure. But that's why we also advise, you know, younger folks sometimes, especially with music, because like what you mentioned, a lot of times musicians is similar to, you know, athletes and different things where, you know, sometimes the skill is seemed as so extraordinary and, like,

solitary that they're celebrated at a young age in a way and lionized at a way at a young age that you push some of that humility out until you get to be more mature. So a lot of times we have younger players that are like, oh, I'm so great. So now you're not humble. Now you're having trouble growing. You are good before your age, but you're stunting your own growth because you're not humble. So a lot of times we'll advise them to go to a situation, like we've seen this in St. Louis, you're coming up kind of smaller pond, good players and stuff.

But we're like, no, no, go to New York, go to Berkeley, go to just so. that you can be around so that the situation will give you some humility. It'll be sink or swim. Think about it like this. You can be humble and aggressive at the same time. Yeah. You know what I mean? You can...

Ungressive, we call that. You can be... No, you know, aggressive. I feel like that's hungry and aggressive, which I get very often. No, but you can be... You can have humility towards how you approach music, but still do it and, like, have the confidence to be aggressive. Like, I'm not going to be meek about this.

I'm going to go in and give it my best. And I'm going to go in and say my piece. But at the end of the day, I'm going to respect that I don't know everything. And I can't play everything. Man, I got a great example. We were talking yesterday about Benny Green, the great Benny Green. And I remember years ago, this was like 1995. We were doing this double bill tour in Japan.

It was Joshua Redmond Quartet and the Benny Green Trio. And it was Benny Green, Christian McBride on bass with him, and Kenny Washington on drum. So it was kind of swinging. It was kind of as eye. Like I was like, the time was like semi-locked in, you know. Like it was cool, but like it just didn't have that feel. Right. But there was one night and we're playing like three, four weeks straight in around Japan, but like we were in Tokyo for a week and then Osaka at the blue none and like these kind of long runs.

And it was always, it was like double bills. So we'd play for like 35 minutes or Benny Green maybe. I can't remember who played first. But it was like 35 minutes and a quick change over and then like exact. It was very timed out. And there was one night when it just kind of. I don't know. Like we were sort of not happening.

I think everybody was jet. It was like the third day when you think you're over the jet lag and everybody got tired. It just, it wasn't that great of a gig on anybody. Like, you know,

when you kind of all know, but you're kind of like, ah, people won't really notice and they're still cheering, you know. And I guess, I can't remember if it just sort of,

that vibe enveloped the whole thing. And we're driving back and forth in the van every night, both groups. And we're all really, you know, tight friends. I mean,

I had known Christians since we were in high school. And Ben, I mean, everybody, Brian Blade, Chris Thomas, and a great group of individuals, Kenny Washington,

but it just wasn't that locked in either band. And I remember Benny, we were in the van, and we're all kind of joking and laughing like we always did. And Benny just sort of was like, hey, guys, you know what? Man, we got a really...

I don't remember exactly what he said, but he basically was just like, this was sad tonight. Like he got a little bit of a buzzkill, Benny. Like he was a little bit like, man, this was not happening. And it was funny because he went beyond, he was addressing all of us.

Yeah, yeah. Not just his group. So we could have been like, hey, hey, we don't worry about us. people the check's still clear we sounded good they were screaming whatever but he said it in a way that was like it was all about like let's serve the music it wasn't like come on man get like me he was just like man let's really like we always i can't remember how he said it but it was so beautiful like he he's the perfect person for that because he's he he's a great example of someone who is has

obviously enormous confidence in his playing is an is an aggressive player actually and has so much humility and is so humble in the face of the music, you know, that's exactly the right attitude. I think we're talking about here. Yeah, but he got aggressive, as you said, and that's what made me think of it. But he did it in the right way. It wasn't like, man, Peter, come on. You got, come on to my level. Or even like, come on, we got to, you know, it was like, man, we want to.

And he, I think he kind of, like, maybe people, they're excited to see us so they don't notice, but we notice. And he was never like, I notice. And yeah, man, it was a beautiful thing. It's awesome. That's so awesome. Big shout out to Benny. Green.

So, another. Another characteristic of a growth mindset, something that can help you along the way is to track your progress. So don't live in a boojo. Poojo. A Poojo. A practice journal. No, we talk about this all the time because it's so important. But you want to track how you're playing.

You want to track what you've been working on for a couple of reasons. A, you want to see if what you're doing is actually working. And B, you want to kind of motivate yourself to, you know, if you don't practice or you aren't motivated to practice and you kind of see that in your journal? Like if I look at my journal and I'm like, January 14th is the last time I hit it? Well, you know what happens?

You see it in the journal and then you hear it in your playing. No, it could be a super valuable tool and then one that you can reference back on. Or it could be something you lose and it's not super valuable. It's not super valuable. No, but we talk about it around here

all the time about tracking. How important is to track what we're doing so that we can then... Whatever. No, so then we can know where we're going. So if you are kind of recording yourself on the regular, record your performances, record your practice sessions, be honest with yourself without beating yourself up. You know, in the same way that Benny Green was honest with that whole van about like, we can be better than this without being a jerk about it.

And what a great example of that's exactly what the growth mindset is actually we should just call this the Benny Green episode because, I mean, just the fact that you're talking about, I mean, those are some great players there. And I'm not talking about Brian Blade. All of them. Everybody. I mean, Kenny Washington, yeah, but we were just kind of young guns. That's the A list.

Yeah. So, I mean, the fact that like, okay, we can grow. Let's grow in to be able to pull it. I mean, he's truly a leader, Benny, for sure. Okay, I want to, you maybe think of something important with this growth mindset that it's probably assumed,

but it's always a great thing. It's a little meta, but it's always great to come back to. And that is, I think the most important thing overall with the growth mindset in applying it into, you know,

your development is a, musician is believing in yourself that you can grow. That's right. Like, because if you don't believe that, and this is actually one that people kind of trip on because they'll say, oh, no, no, I know, I believe in myself. Yeah, this is actually, you're so right. We should have started with this. Yeah.

Oh, what was I thinking? I'll never grow. Well, no, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, but the fact of like, I think people think about it and it's obvious, but it's, you have to get in touch with the fact that it's a faith kind of thing because it's like something that you believe in yourself before you see it. So it's kind of like, it's like if you start going to the gym and working out and you're like,

okay, if you go with the attitude of like, I want to go work out so that I can look like ex person because I like the way their body and I think I can be that because they told me their routine or whatever. That normally does not work out because you're not going in with the mindset of like I envision myself, like you're envisioning somebody else actually.

You think you're applying it to yourself, but you're actually not. And so when we think of like, you can get tripped up in music because if you go to say, I want to grow, I believe I can be Herbie Hancock. You have to believe you can be as great as Peter Martin,

but you can't be Herbie Hancock. And the hard thing is, is like, you might need to listen to Herbie and even lionize and idolize him or whatever, but you can't use him as a model, you can use him as a model for specific things in your playing,

but you can't be like, because otherwise you're going to think you're not growing and you're going to limit your own growth because you will inevitably fall short of becoming Herbie Hancock. And, you know, I think in a way, this is the thing, you know, what I say about faith is that, like, you have to kind of put this helmet on before it fully fits. So you just have to kind of revisit it all the time, you know. And I don't mean like staring into the mirror and saying, I am somebody. I am.

And it's just believing, you know, and having a vision of where you want to grow. And then also with music, it becomes more esoteric as it should because it's a creative field than, say, bodybuilding. Like, you could be specific like, okay, I want to go to these. gym because I want to gain, I want to go from 12% fat, muscle fat or whatever. I mean, 12% body fat. And like that's a specific goal. With music, you can't really, I mean, you can say, I want to learn certain things, but the vision of where you can grow to is actually limitless, you know? That's right. So you have to like kind of put that on. And now you will see that with great athletes. Like, they're not generally like, oh, okay, I want to get to the point where

I'm scoring 32 points a game. They're just like, I want to, like, they don't quote numbers like that. They're just like, I want to go next level. I want to like, I want to grow. I want to, whatever. that is. You have to have the mindset that you can be good at anything. You can do this, that you can grow. That's number one. It's so great. I'm just looking at this little infographic. What do you know about those? Yes. About the difference between fixed mindset and a growth mindset and some sort of eye statements about this. So like the fixed mindset would be something like, I'm only good at certain things. Oh, yeah. And a growth mindset is I can be good at anything. That's right. A fixed mindset would be I give up when it gets too hard. A growth mindset is I try until I get the result.

I want. A fixed mindset is I hate challenges. Growth mindset. I embrace challenges. A fixed mindset. I take feedback and criticism personally. A growth mindset is I welcome feedback and criticism for sure. And a fixed mindset is I don't like doing what I don't know.

And a growth mindset, I like learning about things. I don't know. I think all these things, curiosity, humility. Curiosity did kill the cat, though. That's not for the cat. Well, that's so the same. But the cat had grown so much right before he died. It was a growth.

Yeah. And so I think a lot of those that you just listed, a commonality I see among them in terms of growth, in terms of like the fixed mindset, I think the debilitating emotion there is fear. For sure. Each one of those has an element of fear. And so, you know, the growth mindset, like you have to be able to be naked, you know, not in an inappropriate schoolyard kind of flash your way, but, I mean, emotionally naked or just humility naked, just to be like, okay, I am willing to do something that I'm not good.

I believe that I can do something that I can't do. I'm willing to take that leap. That's what it about. And you have to understand and kind of intellectualize and just beat down. Because there's always fears. Fear is a very strong emotion. Like fear of failure. Fear like, like you always think that like, oh, it's so much easier to latch on to success than to failure.

But actually fear because it's your. you're being afraid that you're going to fail, even though it's the inverse of what success is, that has the possibility of taking over more so. So it's kind of like, well, I want to be able to grow better as a piano player. But what if I, there's immediately like a but there's a fear of, but what if I don't? I've wasted my time. So now you've got a whole list of things why you can't do it. The one thing about getting better and doing the right stuff to grow is actually simpler. But fear can kind of creep in and show you all these different ways that you could fail. So you just kind of have to put that out of your mind

You work on it. It's not as easy as that But it is a simple thing. Growth mindset is a lot simpler than a fixed mindset. And remember, it's just like our dude Jocker was saying Like nobody comes at this with tens, right? No one's born with all tens on the growth mindset On all this stuff. These are things you can actually work on.

Oh, hence the growth. Hence the growth. No, but these are things that we're trying to get better at and the first step of that is acknowledgement is to accept that these are the things that we need to work on and then you can't grow unless you And we need to get Jocko in here to do Like with our open studio students

Drop down and give me some scale I mean like he'll get cats growing Oh yeah But so check this out This is what I was realized I was trying to sputter out But I think I can make it a little more clear When I say it's simpler

Like a growth mindset is simpler than a fixed mindset Okay say I didn't say easier I said simpler So say you have You know you don't believe And I know I use running a lot Because I'm doing that

But I kind of It's just a simple simple way. It could be walking. It could be doing anything physical. If you say, I, I can run five miles today. Yeah. So somebody would be like, somebody else might say, I cannot run five miles. So then you got to come up with a bunch. You like, you can come up with a bunch of different reasons, but it's very complicated. Oh, I can't because of this. I can't because of this. Well, actually this, whatever. I'm not saying it's easier, but it's easier. It's simpler just to be like, oh, yeah, I can. Now, you might not get it or you might take you all day. You might start and stop, you know, or

whatever, but if you go through all the reasons you can't do something, it's always more complicated than the reasons that you can. Now, it may not be possible until you grow some more or whatever, but it's always simpler, at least to be like, I can do that. I totally agree. Now, you can't restrict yourself on time. That's where it gets complicated, especially something like learning music, learning the piano. You can't be like, I am going to be the greatest panace I can't be today. That's a growth mindset that even I can't stumbling, you know? I love it. I love it. I knew that if I just set you off on this topic. Oh, you.

My biggest fault is that I like to talk about growing my mindset. Good. Well, what's a place? Is there like a place with a URL online, a virtual space that celebrates growth mindset? Yeah, it's open studio jazz.com. Oh, hello. Go to open studio jazz.com and grow with us. No, we actually create our courses with these things in mind.

We are thinking about these things and how we can help you to develop not only as a musician, but as a person who wants to grow at music. It's not just about feeding information. We live in a time where there's all the information you could possibly want is available instantly. So it's not like we're hiding the secrets from you. I'll show you later. I can get, I can. Yeah, yeah.

I'll show you. It's way more important to develop how you approach your growth. And that's why we have at Open Studio, you realize we have 100% return customer rate. 100% of our customers come back and buy additional courses. That's not true. That's not true. But we're going for that. That's my growth mindset.

We can do it. We can do that. Hold on. If we can do 100, why can't we do 110%? Because that's not possible. Ah, fixed mindset. Okay, I will change the laws of physics. That's fine.

I will bring people back to life so they can buy our courses again. You guys hear us talk about Open Studio a lot, but we don't talk enough about what our members say. So if you want to do this, we got quotes and stuff on our side, but just Google Open Studio Jazz reviews. And you'll see a bunch of independent reviews, you know, through Google and stuff, people, real people that are our beautiful members that have written about us. Oh, and you know, we got to do something. I know we're getting a little long today. But we said that every rating and review, we were going to shout out. And we got a little behind.

I'm going to give you some music here. But we're not going to throw one out there, okay. So make it a little happier review music because this was actually probably good. Boom, boom, let me find it. This one's from XA 35 And it's on Apple Podcast Here she is from Columbia Missouri, no, the country

Very different place All up in your face This guy Okay, XA says best podcast Oh boy Thanks for sharing us These amazing advice Okay, five stars.

You know what? My singing is going to grow amazingly. You're going to see, because I have a growth mindset. You'll hear it.