You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - When Am I Done Practicing This?

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

On this episode, Peter and Adam discuss the importance of knowing when to end a practice session.Links From This Episode:Getting your regular practice in has never been easier thanks to our Piano Guided Practice Pass - featuring all of Adam's daily Guided Practice Sessions, exclusive daily live practice sessions, and the brand new Guided Practice AppThere's a new course from Open Studio: Rhythm Section Workout is available now! Play along with Peter Martin on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Gregory Hutchinson on drums as they teach you the tips and tricks to playing with a bandToday's Open Studio Live Events (All times in EDT):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)For the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkIn light of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, we understand that money is tight for a lot of people right now. That's why we've decided that for the duration of this crisis, we'll be running a Choose What You Pay campaign at Open Studio. Choose whichever course you want and then let us know how much you're willing to pay - that's it. For more info, click this link.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. Are we finally done with this podcast? Well, I mean, how do we ever know when we're done? We just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. That's what I'm saying. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily music advice. Coming at you. Peter, we're old school here. We're actually having a recorded audio-only podcast. We're not on Instagram. We're not live anywhere. We're not going to YouTube.

We're just talking to our people as if they're They're commuting like normal people, and it's not... That's right. You know, some kind of weird time. It still is. It still feels weird, but it's, you know what I'm saying. But maybe some folks are commuting. You know what?

Hong Kong is, I was just listening to an NPR story about that. They're like back in school and doing stuff, but we got some listeners and fans there. So shout out to Hong Kong and some other parts of China that are, you know, moving along. So maybe they're listening on their commute. I hope it's a good, safe one. Well, and today's episode is sponsored by Anytoon. go to anytune.us to check out one of the most useful tools you'll ever need for learning music.

You can transcribe music fairly easily. I mean, never, we don't want to say that it makes it super easy because transcription by definition should be a little bit challenging on your ears. But any tune makes it easy to get what you want to get out of the track and be able to hear the information that you're trying to get. And it just is such a great tool for transcribing music, especially jazz, I think. It really is. And I think that what any tune does is it brings you right up to that edge of getting all the riffraff and the things that are going to make it difficult for you to transcribe something or just learn a tune.

It gets all that out of the way and gets you right to that practice that is difficult, as you say, but it's difficult with a purpose. So it's like getting everything. It's like having a personal assistant there that arranges your desk. You walk in all the work that only you can do. and it's going to benefit and profit your musicianship is ready to go for you. And it's just beautiful. I love it. They call it, what is it, music practice perfected.

And that is not an overstatement. And I'd also just like to say, we recommend highly they're doing a series of live tutorials. Check out Facebook.com slash AnyTune and get on their weekly or just look at one of their replays. And it's a great way to kind of learn about the app after you download the free version and then consider the pro version. But go to anytune. com. You'll hear it to learn more. Love it.

Well, today we're going to tackle something that we get asked a lot about on these live sessions. We've been doing so many live sessions here at Open Studio, openstudio, jaz.com slash live to go check out all of our lives. We're live pretty much every day. And we get now, I don't know about you, but I've started to notice a theme of different kinds of questions. Yes. You know, the same questions get asked a lot. And for good reason, because they're important questions. We get asked a lot about practice. And one of the things that we get asked a lot about on how to practice is how long. should I practice one thing? Or a variation on that is like,

how well should I know something before I move on to practice something else, right? And it's a great question because I think our instinct is, as we're learning anything new, is like, you know, traditional education taught in school is like you just learn a fact and then you know it and then you move on to the next fact. And so we think, again, thinking theoretically about music,

oh, well, I need to learn this in all 12 keys and know it perfectly 100% before I can do absolutely anything else. And so people have questions about, well, I'm not learning it 100% and it's been a month and I'm getting burnt out and what should I do. And so we're hopefully going to help answer that question

and give you a good perspective on maybe how much you should spend on one thing. And just really this is about a broader perspective of your workload as a musician. Yes, I love it. Let's jump in. Yeah. So the first thing I'm thinking about this is let's just look at our overall practice session, right?

And then, you know, talk about when am I done practicing for that session? And that might mean when am I done for the day, you know, depending on if you're kind of a sit down and practice my hour or my three hours or my 20 minutes. And let's just say that what we like to do when we give advice about practicing is almost like a percentage basis because we can't tell you. How long do you need to practice? I mean, ideally you're practicing as much as possible until it becomes less effective. And that's one of the big themes you're going to hear today. But, you know, depending on your life and kids and work and accessibility to an instrument. I mean, there's so many different things out of certainly our control and perhaps yours that we just want to think about how you're going to structure the time that you do have.

Very few people have too much time to practice. I mean, this is an interesting period where that might be happening for some people. But whatever the amount of time you practice, if you look at, like, say, I've got three hours to practice and it needs to all be, say, in the morning, because that's when you have access to a piano, then you want to kind of think about when is it time to kind of hang it up for the day. And especially if you do have extended periods of time, that can sometimes come before you get everything accomplished that you need to. But regardless, you want to make sure that you kind of step away from the instrument before, A, you get burnt out, before you start to get into some kind of derogatory type of process. practice or diminishing returns for sure or even something that you know you can be bringing a little bit of injury by from overuse and those kind of things so that's just sort of the big category of like you know you're done worst case scenario is when you're harming yourself when you're not improving

when you might even be getting worse oh just overall and just remember there's always another day and a lot of times this will happen late at night's like oh i really wanted to get this done today so i'm going to keep at i'm going to keep at it but sometimes you got to say you know what let me get some rest And then I found that I'll wake up in the morning, go to the piano, and the thing that you were working on, it's somehow kind of you were closer than you thought. And it sort of auto completes almost overnight. You know, at least you're closer than you thought. You may be a little bit more optimistic in the morning or whatever. But it's very important to tap into what your flow is for your overall practice session, I think.

Yeah. And, you know, it's a good point of the law of diminishing returns. It's not necessarily that you're going to get worse during that practice session. What's more likely is that you are just not going to remember what you've been working on. It's not going to stick. And then also has the added effect of burning you out so that maybe in the next two weeks after, you've really tried to stick on too long to one thing. You don't want to come back to the instrument, and so you spend less time practicing.

That's not good. You know, if you would have quit 20 minutes earlier, you might practice another additional three hours in the week than if you burnt yourself out and then you just don't feel like it. and there's a you've lost the psychological edge. And then there's another thing too about, like you said about overnight, it can lock in. There's actually some really great scientific evidence to back up that claim. Not that your sleep locks in, although it probably does. But we actually learn things, not the first time we work on it.

We learn it when we work on it and then we go to something else and we come back to it. It's that coming back to it that scientists have. have in some recent studies about how our brains work, that's when we lock it in. That's when actually we remember what we're working on. And so if you want to get good results of like, I'm working on something, it's going to stick, work on it, work on something else. Try to forget what you were working on and then come back to it. And that second time that you have to recall it is when it will stick harder. And actually, the more you do that, the more it works up into a point. So that's always good. And then now we're kind of getting into like the broader,

you know, if I'm, like, let's, how about this, Peter, for like an example, like, if you wanted to learn, let's say drop two voicings, right? Something that I know you love. Well, if I, I think I love it. I don't really know what it is. So I love the way they sound. So yeah. Let's say that you, you're like, okay, I'm finally going to get this freaking drop two into

playing. Here we go. I'm going to work on it. But it's been three weeks. You've been working on it in 12 keys. You have some things. And you're like, I don't have it mastered in 12 keys. Should I keep?

keep working on it. This is the scenario that gets tossed to us a lot. Should I keep working on it? How long do I work on it until I get it? And should I move on? So the answer to that is, once you start to not want to really work on it, like once you start to get distracted, once you start putting off your practice routine because you're like, oh, this drop too. It's time to move on. It's time to move on. And the thing that you have to realize about it's like spouses. Once you get tired of them, it's time to move on, right? Exactly. Yeah. It's not going to start there. But once you're kind of in that headspace where it's like, this is a real drag, and it really is you can't pay attention, you're not focused, you're not in it, you're

unenthusiastic about what you're learning anymore. Move on and then you've got to know this. This is the long game. You're going to come back to this stuff, right? We're musicians for life. So we're going to be working on different aspects of it. So there's two important things about this. You're going to come back to it. And remember what we said about how we learn things. When we come back to it, it's actually going to stick harder. So move on, go on to something else you're interested in, get inspired again. listen to music, find something else to work on, come back to this week's, months, years later even.

It's like, it's all a long game. What you, the work you put in up to a point, let's say you got to 70%, that's good work, and that's going to come out and you're playing in the keys you worked on and probably actually. Well, that's technically it's a C minus. No, no, no. But maybe a couple months later, you were like, oh, I needed to get this in G flat. It's going to get, then it's going to come back.

It's going to be stronger. And also, there's one more benefit I want to talk about, about moving on and kind of cycling through different things to work on. Imagine you're a tennis player. You can sit there and practice your forehand and backhand from the baseline for three weeks straight. And that's great. You're going to have a solid forehand and backhand. And then you go to play to someone and they run you around the court and you can't, you lose all of your form after 10 minutes because you're in terrible shape. Whereas if you would have done one day of working on your forehand and back end of the baseline and another day of running mountains and then doing a three mile jog, you would have probably

won that match, right? Because you got a good forehand and back hand. It's not as good as if you would have spent every day on it for three weeks, but it's solid. And you're also in really good shape because you spent that time cross-training doing something that's as important for your tennis game. So look at it like that too with piano. You can spend all your time on drop two. You're going to get on the gig and you're going to be like, my left hand sucks. I got no hand independence. Everything I play is drop two. This is terrible. When you can switch it up and kind of add some cross-training in there, it helps. And it also helps with your drop two, man. Everything helps. That's great. That's great. And, you know, I'm joking with you about the 70%, but I think on a serious note about that, where people get tripped up is they get frustrated, they get tired, they think it's law of diminishing returns. It may very well be law of diminishing terms. Whatever the reason that they get to 70%, and then they leave that, what you're talking about and what we're preaching here is not abandoning. It's knowing when to leave it to come back to it.

That's right. But what most people do, unfortunately, especially, you know, something like a drop to a difficult advanced kind of thing that taking it through all the different keys. Well, in some ways, it can almost become a lifelong pursuit because there's so many different applications of it. It's not just like I'm learning the major scale. I've got 70% of them. Okay, now I'm getting tired of them. I'll come back. But you're going to get to completion.

These things that are kind of almost continually going, they require a commitment, not every minute of every day, not even every minute of every practice. session. They just require a commitment to get to, to get there some point. And I love the term long game, both in terms of tennis and in terms of how you said it, it can apply both ways, is that viewpoint, that mindset, that commitment, like it all becomes a kind of simplistic but foundational and fundamental approach to these core concepts and then to these more advanced concepts that can really continue to be joyful in your practice, as long as you do know when to step away and then to step back, you know,

and knowing that there's so many different other things. And, you know, this we can get into a similar question that we get from a lot of people in terms of how do I keep from getting overwhelmed with all the things to doing. A big part of that is knowing when to step away from one thing and to step into another thing, but to keep in your mind, or better yet, keep in your boojo or your Pujo, your practice journal, a note to come back to that at the appropriate time. And perhaps the appropriate time is when you're getting interested. it again. Like use your own

impulses, you know, as to when you're going to get in because then you can optimize, I mean, look, anyone who's got a strong personality and discipline can work on anything at any time. You know, if you're like a Navy SEAL and they're like dropped out and give me, you know, some, I don't know, what are they practice in the water?

You know, they own 200. 200 strokes in the water. Yeah, but you're like, well, I wanted to work out on land, but I'm a Navy SEAL, so I'm going to, I have the mindset of doing that. But, you know, let's not swim upstream when we have so many different things to do. Let's not just be like free love, whatever feels good, dude. It's not that either. But it's like the discipline of growth in ways that are really in tune with what you're playing, what you need to be working on during that day, but that also the optimization is like,

what's the part of the process that I'm as close to being in love with as I can be today. Man, I think that's exactly the right way to think about it. And I also love these sports analogies because I think we think about practice and music sometimes as like a, again, is information, right? It's theoretical, but it's not. It's a physical activity that requires muscle memory, and that's why we practice these things. So much like how LeBron James, every season he plays, even though he's LeBron James, he still works on footwork. He still works on his shot. He's never going to not work on his shot, even though he's got one of the best shots ever. You know what I mean? Like, that is not going to stop. And it's not going to stop with us as musicians. We're not going to

stop working on voicings just because we know a lot of voicings. Like, that's not how that works. We have to stay sharp. We have to stay in the shed. We have to stay comfortable on the instrument. And that just requires the acknowledgement that this is a lifelong thing. Like, we have to keep the muscle memory going. So you're going to come back to it. So don't think of it, like you said, as abandoning it. Think of it like, all right, well, I'm, I'm a little burnt on this. I'm going to move on to another important fundamental. And I'll come back to this at a later date because I'm a musician and this is what we work on. Yeah. And another thing from the sports analogy in, like say, LeBron or another a great athlete like that that we can really take to learn from is they're getting an athlete

is getting feedback from their body so the more intelligent of an athlete they are the more in tune they are to like what their body can take and what their body needs at a particular time so you see some really advanced athletes like a lebron james working on these very fundamental things the same thing you or i would go out and work on like a close shot i mean like he's not up there working on and warming up on like trick shots and stuff that's hard for him, he's like reviewing constantly and going back to these things and laugh. Like you see him warm up before the game laughing, but really paying attention to form and then doing difficult things as well.

But then, you know, what you don't see is him going to do the things that aren't as fun. And I'm sure, and I know that's from hearing some podcasts about him, like the purely athletic things, like the pump and the iron, the building up. The conditioning. Like he's choosing times. And a lot of times it's in the off seasons or it's on the off days or whatever. But the timing of it is right when he can connect with his passion for those things as well. And knowing that they all work together.

So we talk about scales. We talk about vocabulary development. We talk about learning souls. We talk about ear training. We talk about learning to play with others. All the different elements that go into the skills that we need to practice on, to optimize, and to work into our playing. We have to consider all those. The more successful of practicing is, and we're talking about when to stop doing something,

is as much as not stopping, when do we step away from one aspect of our practice, what do we step into when we step away? That's just as important of a question. Yeah, so if you're struggling to this, maybe make a list of five fundamentals that you want to put in your rotation, right? Five. And think about it like you're an athlete. These are muscle memory things that you know you're going to need. So you might as well just keep rotating them in and out. Scales, arpeggios, and then artistic fundamentals, too, you know, like how to paint brushes and. color palette. Yeah, got you.

No, but like being able to play in multiple keys and learning tunes and improvising and things like that that make us artists, you know, you can rotate these in and out. And they just like, you know, a basketball player with his form and his decision making on the court, they're practicing that every day. And then going and doing conditioning in the off season, you can do the same. You can swap those out. Yeah. And you know what?

It's great about this. Once you kind of start thinking along the lines of what we're talking about today, and this won't happen overnight, but it does happen quickly, quicker than it takes to learn, drop two and all 12 keys for sure. But once you start kind of thinking about this mindset, you will start to, if you listen to your mind and your body and just kind of your instincts, you will start to find ideas for the right thing to practice as you lead, you know, just like you start to get a better feel for, okay, law of diminishing returns, let me step away from that for a minute. then pause don't go jump on your phone or go eat a snack or maybe go walk around but as you're

walking around and you come back to the piano maybe you take a five-minute break think about your instincts like what do you want to do that because sometimes it's like that might be a good time to practice scales if you're like i'm not feeling super creative but i'm feeling strong and i'm feeling like i can kind of concentrate on something maybe that's a scale time but kind of use your instincts because then you're going to get into something that you're going to be able to really get some good benefits whatever you do for the next 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe 40 minutes before you get back to that like, okay, I need to step away from this. But don't just force your self into even like, well, Peter and Adam, we're saying to practice

this. Yeah, we're telling you stuff to practice, but it's up to you to kind of figure out the right time, not only the right time, but the right time within your practice. And we've talked about this on many episodes in order to practice that works well for us and works well for many. But even that needs to be adjusted. I mean, I know that I do exceptions to that rule of the order of practice. many times we talk about practicing performance at the end of your practice.

Sometimes you need to do that at the beginning. You know, so allow yourself, see how that works, try it out. But get in tune with yourself because that's where the magic really happens in terms of practice, optimization, development, really making use of your time, especially as we move from this period where maybe people have had some time off and no gigs and into a little bit more regimented time so that we can take what we've learned and connected with the instrument into the journey that lives ahead. All right, man, I got to go practice.

I know, man, me too. I'm like, my instincts are telling me to practice, man. If we could just live all of our life, just whatever our instinct was. That's right. Well, I hope this answered some of those questions. Like I said, we get asked this at least once on every live. And I'm sure we will again, and that's totally cool.

Like, I think it's great to think about and could evolve even how we think about it. Yeah, and talking about it, like, I mean, I learned so much. And sometimes I'll think, like, you know, things that you say and things that you say and things that we learn from our members and our listeners. It's like, wow, I should have known that. I've known that I've been told that I had great teachers, but faith comes by hearing. A little thing called the Holy Bible teaches you that.

And that can really be applied to music. We want to keep saying these things. We want to keep hearing these things because the world is noisy. And it seems really noisy right now with a lot of crap and misinformation and stuff. So we don't want to just add to the clutter here. What we're hoping to do is sort of add to some things that ring true. at least in this little world of jazz piano and jazz in general jazz vocals, jazz instrumentals, just getting better playing jazz.

That's what we're all about it and talking about it, learning how to hear. So let's repeat these things amongst ourselves and continue the discussion as we say. So you might say that we're creating a little bit of a jazz education safe space? It's a safe space. It's a safe space for millennials, for boomers, for exenials. For the old exenials. I got it. I got it in there.

What's the name of they're calling them pandanials? We're already naming the kids coming up now. Yeah, yeah. Everybody. Well, don't forget to go to Anytune. com. It's really an amazing tool. Go to Open StudioJazz.com.

Hey, check out this new course we just released called Rhythm Section Workout. It features Peter Martin, Ruben Rogers, Gregory Hutchinson. It features a ridiculous amount of transcription. It's the most transcription we've ever had in a course, man. Our transcribers just knocked it out of the park. It's so awesome. You get to see everything Peter plays.

You get to see everything that Ruben plays. You get to see everything that Gregory Hutchinson plays. And you get to do some playalongs with one of the great working trios around right now. And it's just really amazing, man. We have worked in months, actually. No, and you won't for a while. But go check out Rhythm Section Workshop right now at openstudiojazz.com. Yeah.

And until next time. And maybe leave us a rating review if you're enjoying this podcast. We're getting back on the commuting vibe for some folks, which has been nice. And we know, maybe if you're listening at home, this would be a good time. Because you know what? We realize it's a lot easier to leave a rating review when you're not on your mobile or in your car. We want you to stay safe. Do it.

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