You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - You're Not Getting Better Because of This 1 Thing - #44

Episode Date: March 15, 2018

In this episode, Peter and Adam talk about the importance of being impatient with your progress. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Today we're going to tell you why you're not getting better as a jazz player because of this one thing. It seems like a pretty personal title for a podcast. Are we sure we have the one thing? Yes, we are speaking to each individual listener directly. Adam and Peter, we are talking to you. Insert name here.

All right, let's do this. Okay. So the answer is you are two. patient. Now this is a crazy thing because learning an art form progressing as a jazz musician is something that demands and requires and rewards an extreme amount of patience. But in this one instance, I think, instance, I think many of you are being too patient. And that is you need to demand more progress from yourself on a day-by-day basis. So we want you doing all these things that we talk about to progress long term,

but you've also got to be doing things every day and demanding from yourself that you see improvement in these specific areas every day, or else you're going to get into this mindset where you're like, well, I'm working at it, but I'll be great next year, I'll get better in five years, and I'll get better in 10 years.

And what actually happens is it's these daily incremental improvements that add up to big moves over six months, nine months, one year, five years. But you've got to hold, you know, yourself to the fire every day and not accept, you know, that mediocrity to continue. So there's some basic ways that we can look at. The first one that I'm going to bring up is just learning tunes. Like, that's something that even if you feel like you're having trouble progressing with your technical abilities or your ears or your harmonic abilities or your melodic or your composition, all these

different areas we want to improve in, learning tunes and adding to your repertoire, day by day, week by week, is something that we can all do. And, you know, depending on the level you're at, yeah, you want to start with simpler tunes so that you can really tackle those, you know, don't jump into learning, you know, anthropology if you haven't learned C-JAM blues. But commit to saying, I'm going to learn a tune every day if you have time to practice, or maybe you're going to learn a tune every three days or every two days. But don't be patient and be like, well, I'm really working on this tune and I'm hoping to learn it

within the next year. You're never going to make any progress that way. That's right. Another thing you can do to get yourself going and moving and not sort of saying stagnant is to compare your weak areas to your strong ones and make weekly goals to lift those weak areas up. So what I mean by that, let's say the scale that you feel most comfortable playing is a B-flat major scale. Well, put the click on, see how fast you can play that scale comfortably, and then play an E major scale. And if it's not as fast or as even-sounding, you have work to do this week to get this. that up. And that's something actionable that you can easily fix in a week. You know, if you work on

that every day and try to get that to that number and to that feeling, you got it. It's this, you can do that with any part of your playing, whether that's, oh, my triplets don't feel as natural as my eighth notes. Well, work on it for a week. Get it up there. You know, make that your focus until it is. And then once you're weaker areas are as strong as your stronger areas, you're, you're getting in good shape now. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's one of those things. And I think what we're basically talking about is, you know, leveraging things that you can do in your practice that will give you immediate returns in your playing. So, you know, the things that are going to be more long term are kind of built in, but those immediate returns, you have to actually leverage

those yourself by doing specific activities. And sometimes we are kind of unconsciously scared of doing that because we don't want to be faced with these inadequacies on a day-by-day basis. But the quicker you, you know, as they say, eat that frog first. You know, you know, you're You've got the beautiful meal and the great wine and everything, but you've got a frog, too. Don't eat all the other stuff. Go ahead and eat the frog first, and then you can eat the other stuff. Yeah, we all probably know what our weaknesses really are. We just don't, you know, we get into this kind of like amorphous way of thinking about practicing or music or whatever.

Like, well, if I just shed on whatever, maybe it'll happen in a year or whatever. No, give yourself a week to get this half-hole, the minute's scale together. Right. You know what I mean? And make it happen. Yeah, and don't be patient with that. No. Now, it doesn't mean that you have to perfect it, maybe during, like, you're better off saying,

in this week, I'm going to learn this, you know, I'm going to get all the way through it. There'll still be work to do maybe after that, but you will have it learned during that time. That's right. Some other things I'm thinking of that you could do to really, you know, leverage things with immediate returns would be to learn, well, you should always be learning solos. You know, we're always talking about that. But learn very simple solos, because those will be easier. and quicker to learn.

Now, still pick great solos. That's not about that. But don't be so ambitious when you choose it that it's going to become something that you'll either never be able to finish or the timeline is like nine months away. You've got to be a little bit more impatient than that. So for pianists, you might take a horn solo

and say, okay, I'm not going to worry about learning a piano solo where you have to worry about multiple notes and it's hard to hear certain things. And you might say take a Miles Davis solo or you might take a Chet Baker solo. These are just kind of people that I'm thinking of that play solos that are very clear and simple. You're still going to get a lot of gratifying information and edifying stuff that's going to enhance your playing, but it's going to be coming at you in a way that you don't have to be patient to get to the end of each course.

That's right. And I think an important part of this is knowing which solo's not to pick, too. Like, you know, it's okay to be ambitious, but maybe don't pick the 30-minute, you know, Keith over Autumn leaves solo that turns into this whole thing it's going to take you a year to learn. There are simpler things you can do right now that you can learn just as much.

And also, you know, you don't have to always be like picking a solo that you think is beyond your melodic or harmonic or theory knowledge. Like you're going to learn something. Pick something that you think you already know because I guarantee you don't actually know everything in some of the great solos that you think sounds simple. Oftentimes

there's more behind that. So you know, the key to all of this, though, is the one thing that is really going to make you get better is to not be patient, right? That's right. Just be harder on yourself as far as like, I want to accomplish this soon. That's right. Then you'll hear it. Mm.

Nice. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hear it.com to get more information, submit a question, or just say hello. Right, you can do that. Absolutely. All right. And if you like what you heard, please leave a review and a rating below. Thanks.

Thank you.