You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Warming Up and Staying Loose - #128

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

In this episode, Peter and Adam respond to a listener question about staying loose in big moments. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Adam Manus. This is the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. And we are coming at you right now, and we're going to answer a user question. You say user. That doesn't make any sense. Listener.

I meant listener. They're listening to it. Well, they're a user of our web page and podcasting devices. I don't think that's a thing. They're a listener of our web page. I'm sorry. A lover. A lover of our podcast.

This comes from a lover in Berlin, Germany, named Andreas. Nice. I assume Andreas is a lover as well as a listener. as well as a listener and possibly a user. You know what? I'm a lover, not a fighter. In the words of Muhammad Ali. So we got this from you'll hearot.com

where you can leave a voicemail. You can write a comment and ask us a question, and that's what Andreas did here. And Andreas had a question about something that's been bothering for a while, and that's how do you find the right balance when you're playing? How do you warm up and how do you stay loose

once you're warmed up? He gives a scenario here. When I warmed up at a drum set, and then change the room to play on a different drum set for the audition, my careful preparation of my muscles seemed to have vanished in this short time, and I was as tense as before. I can't get my head around this. Have you heard this before?

What are your tips for approaching your instrument with the right mindset and body preparation in order to enter a performance or rehearsal without any burden? Well, first of all, we're not drummer, so we have no idea. Next question. No, I think that, I mean, obviously, Andreas, and thank you for the question, Andreas is a drummer. Yeah. But I don't think that this is as much of a physical thing.

Like, I think this applies to all different instruments. And I think I have experienced this. Yep. And I've heard about this a lot. And so I think we shouldn't, as much as possible, if we can personalize this, take away the personalization of the instrument. And maybe, like, he said something interesting there. He said, I can't get my head around this.

And that's an interesting thing. That's the key there. I think, you know, our muscles, our arms, our hands, our feet, everything, our faces, any tension that usually happens in our body, it's kind of manifested as we play an instrument, ultimately comes from our mindset. So the more care that we have, I mean, our mind is controlling our bodies and what we do with it in terms of training and all that kind of thing. And in the moment, usually the tension that we bring to our body

is that we are getting into a situation where it matters. You know, and that adrenaline is running and all that kind of thing. And it's like we're going out for battle. So we have to develop some techniques. And I know, Adam, you've gone over some interesting ones before. And are these necessarily applicable to an actual kind of audition or performance situation? Oh, yeah. And we've talked a little bit about this before in other episodes.

But I think, Andreas, the number one things that you can do, you know, the top things you can do are to be as prepared as possible and to develop some kind of routine. You know, it's interesting. So I just watch this candid. interview with the comedian Martin Short, right? This hilarious guy. And the interviewer was a really good interviewer. And he asked him, you know, he said, you're one of the greatest talk show guests in the history of talk shows. How much do you prepare when you go out? And Martin Short said, I prepare everything. I have every joke, story prepared. I might not do any of them. But what that does is if I have everything prepared and nailed before I go out there, I have the confidence to go

off of that and to do what I can do. And I think that's the key, right? It's developing routines, being prepared so that you have the confidence. So when inevitably the air in the room feels different, the piano feels different, your muscles feel different on the drums, you have that confidence to say, okay, something's different. I'm going to pull back or I'm going to just play simply, and that's going to be good too. Yeah. And then I can go off from there. You know, I think that's key. Absolutely. And so that really kind of understanding that and then, you know, adopting that as part of your mindset in general, not just on audition or performance days or times, is key. And that's not going to happen overnight. But if you think about that, kind of do some reading. And that's great

when we can take, you know, something like that, a comedian, something from another part of the arts that can make it a little less personalized, again, just to jazz or just to drums or whatever and see that this is a performance-related issue, really. You know, sports, comedy, acting, dance, all these things, you know, everybody, you know, deals with these same kind of issues. And I think the thing then, the preparation, because Andreas, you talked about, my careful preparation of my muscle seems to have vanished in the short time, and I was as tense as before. I think you should think, think less about your preparation, your kind of warm-up prep of that actual day, because that's not what's going to get you to a great performance in an audition.

It's all the preparation you do the days and the weeks before. And so that's what actually gives you the confidence. Of course, we should try to warm up as much as possible. But we've all been in situations where we don't have, I mean, as pianists especially and drummers too. You don't have access. Well, drummers are cool because they've got the little drum pads. They're just banging on something back there at the green room.

But I mean, I've been around, you know, some amazing singers, you know, that do these incredible warm-up routines and stuff. I remember doing a tour with a bunch of gigs with Diane Reeves and Bobby McFerrin, two of the great vocalists. most creative kind of vocal musicians. Some confidence on that stage. There's some confidence. And they both have like, you know, very personalized, you know, like, I mean, vocalists,

the instrument is themselves. So they have to know how to warm up and react to their body and what they eat and all that has a lot more to do with how they sound. But Bobby McFerrin on that tour was he was having some vocal issues and he couldn't speak at all. Like we're traveling and he would have a little pad and just, you know, draw. I mean, not draw. He'd write words if you wanted to talk to him.

saving his voice. So he couldn't do his normal warm-up routine. But do you think he got tense on the gig? Well, maybe he did, but it didn't seem like it to me. So, yeah, of course, we want to have this great preparation of the warm-up, but even if you don't have that, or just get it into your mindset that that's not the actual preparation. Everything you've done up to that point is a preparation.

So I think even just some sort of sitting, and like what I like to do, because I usually don't have an instrument right before a performance, is just give myself alone a couple of minutes, sometime within like 30 to 60 minutes before the performance, just to kind of meditate and think about the performance, sort of think about what I'm going to play as much as I know and just sort of get into that zone. And I don't even normally do it right before we go on stage.

Yeah. Because for some reason there's always like a lot of joking. I kind of like that too, like just being relaxed and doing something else. But having that preparation sometime, and I think for everybody, you know, some people need that right before they audition or perform. But at some point in the minutes leading up to, where you kind of concentrate, you're sort of making a commitment to yourself to be like, look, I don't know exactly what's

going to happen. I'm not going to be prepared for everything that might happen, but I am prepared enough. I've got the confidence to put forward the best thing that I can do today. Yeah, it is that attitude of like, no matter what happens, it's going to be fine. Yeah. It's going to be good. It's not brain surgery. It's not brain surgery.

It's going to be fine. I think that kind of attitude can really help you. And if you're dealing with other nerves, you know, we talked about this in our sort of nerves episode, which I encourage you to check out if you have a. I checked it out, but you know, you could try meditating regularly can help with your concentration and staying focused. You can certainly try adjusting your diet and how much caffeine and alcohol you take in before performance can can certainly affect how you perform. But other than that, I think, you know, you'll find with a regular routine and preparation, not, as Peter said, in the minutes leading up, but in the days and weeks before, you're going to see a big improvement. to have a little run through an affirmation session when I'm driving to my gig or I'm being

driven to the gig. A little Adam is special time. A little Adam is like, what's going to happen? What are we starting with? What's the tunes? What is? Where are the tricky spots? I'm fine.

Everything's going to be good. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that kind of thing, because it really, this is a mental game. You know, what was that? Wasn't there a book like something, it was about tennis, like the mental game of tennis or something like the early 80s?

that was really a play. I mean, I remember a lot of musicians when I was up at Juilliard were reading that and like trying to apply it, you know, to music and classical music and stuff. But that, it really is. I mean, this is, playing music is a mental thing. So all this stuff about physicality,

I would say one thing is, and I'm not a drummer, but, you know, piano has its own physical challenges that we have to think about in terms of being warmed up and approaching the instrument and all that that are different from drums, but I think are very real too, is that it sounds like your warm-up,

you may be kind of, you're talking about balance, posture, attitude, everything feels tense, you may be kind of putting too many things into your warm-up. You don't want your warm-up routine to be so complicated that it becomes its own challenge.

I mean, the audition or the gig is going to be its own challenge. So maybe, like for me, warming up, and I mean, we did that, came up with that great warm-up that I don't always adhere to in elements of jazz piano, that was very, very simple at the piano. Remember that?

It was just like, what was it, a call to practice or something? The call to practice, yeah. And the idea being that it's really more about not physically warming up your muscles, although, you know, certainly that's good too. You don't want to roll right out of bed right to the drum set. But really starting with something simple that we can get in tune with the instrument, with our mindset, kind of a meditative thing where you're getting pulled in. So maybe if you simplified the warm-up routine, and don't worry so much about your posture,

and stuff. Yeah, attitude, you want to think about that, but again, that's sort of mental preparation before the day. And something, just one more thing to maybe add to this, Andreas, and this would go back to kind of your preparation leading up, and maybe your practice routine leading up to auditions or leading up to big performances,

would be to maybe practice the performance in your routine. Try to get as close to walking through what it's going to be like. Try to imagine there's an audience. Try to pretend like you're playing for, you know, players you think are really, really good, try to get yourself nervous, basically.

That's right. You know what I mean? So you can practice getting out of it. Yeah, I mean, and you can always find, you know, friends, family, homeless kids, something, you know, that you can drag to say, at this time, we're going to meet at this thing, I want to play this. And you go through the audition or the gig or the, or the song or whatever. And you don't, because when you're practicing on your own, I mean, you can also do this on your own, but you have to be very disciplined and say, after your practice, say, I'm going to go through this tune. I'm not going to correct anything. I'm just going to plow right through.

and I'm going to pretend like, as you say, that audience of people's there. But it's better to just grab some people. You know, our classical musician friends who are in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra here do this all the time. When they have auditions, they'll invite friends from the orchestra over

to just play for them and then kind of critique them on it. Right. But it's nerve-wracking for them because they respect their colleagues. Well, and I think they're doing that mostly for what we're talking about just to have an audience

and to force them into playing. Totally. Because when a couple of them first started asking me that, I was like, wow, they really wanted me to tell them about... Not really. telling this stuff, they're like, no, no, it's done, you can get out now. They just wanted somebody that knows about music there.

They want warm bodies to play the music in front of, that's right. Well, Andreas, thank you so much for sending this question. It's a great question. And, you know, we've done some stuff like this before, but there's so many nuances to performance and to getting the best performance you can out of situations that, you know, you're not familiar with. That, you know, we could probably do five more of these in nuanced ways.

So we appreciate that. I just want to add one just quick things. I see at the end of his question. I mean, and this is great the way he phrased all this stuff. It's very German the way he phrased everything. What are your tips for approaching your instrument with the right mindset? And I like that you're thinking of that first. And I think we touched on that and body preparation. I mean, I think the body preparation in terms of the relaxation we talked about is going to really spring forth from the right mindset in a lot of ways in order to enter performance or rehearsal without any burden. That's important. That's, yeah. I mean, as much burden as we can take off as we want to. But remember, there's, you're

to have some burden. Actually, I don't know exactly what that means in this sense, but if it's in terms of nervousness, tension, something, some of that is okay up to a point. I mean, don't expect to go into an important situation and be as relaxed as you are when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night with a glass of Rioja. Adrenaline can be your friend. Adrenaline, exactly. So maybe too, as soon as you kind of give yourself permission to have a little bit of burden, then that can actually make, get you into that right mindset of relaxation, I think. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, if you have a question for us, you can go to you'll hearat.com, just like Andreas here, and you can leave a comment as a question as he did, or you can leave a voicemail.

We have a little button there that you can just leave a voicemail right there from your computer, and we really appreciate that. Do we call them voicemails? No, we don't call them voice memos. I mean, that's still like, you know, late 90s, but we're getting there. And as always, if you like what you heard, we really appreciate any ratings or reviews. How many stars are we going for this week? You know what?

It's just like last week. We're going for six stars, buddy. If you thought you were going to challenge me on that. I just don't get it, man. That's our burden. I got a small... Andreas has a burden. I got to think outside the box.

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