Jonathan Harnum

SoundSlice: YouTube Learning Goodness

If you’re like me, you get a lot of learning done on YouTube, but isolating a passage and repeating it, let alone notating it in some way, is difficult if not impossible. Not any more! Check out SoundSlice.

SoundSlice is a fantastically useful tool geared towards guitarists, but it’s useful for anybody who learns by watching video. Adrian’s done many cool things as a programmer (check his site), and has an album out of his most popular fingerstyle tunes here, most of which you can also find on SoundSlice, like the Beatles tune, Yesterday. Check out the link to Yesterday for a good example of how the site works.

Performance as Practice

When I asked Nicholas Barron about how he practices, he said, “I never practice.” I was intrigued, because the dude can play guitar and sing, and has clearly spent a lot of time doing it. Over the course of the next 90 minutes, he shared the details of what “I never practice” means to him. Performance-as-practice is a focus Nicholas shares with a lot of pop musicians.

Nicholas Barron is a soulful Chicago singer-songwriter who looks like Vince Vaughn (but funnier), and he sounds like the love-child of John Lee Hooker, John Hiatt, and Joni Mitchell. James Taylor called Nicholas “undeniable” at New York Times’ Emerging Artists Series in 2007. Nicholas’s songs are playful, thoughtful, and heartfelt. I’ll tell you a little about his performance-as-practice approach.

Check out the vid of one of his more popular tunes, “I’m Not Superman” below.

Samskar, Chicken Embryos, and Places of Practice

Zing-Yang Kuo was a biologist who was interested in investigating behaviors that were thought to be instinctual, or innate (his early research on this topic was in the 1920s). He studied chicken embryos, because it was believed the distinctive pecking behavior chicks show immediately upon hatching was an instincutual, innate behavior. Zing-Yang Kuo believed that labeling a behavior as “innate” or “natural” or “instinctual” didn’t help anyone understand the behavior. He watched chicken embryos develop by coating eggs with warm vaseline, rendering the shells translucent. And here’s the thing:

A Killer App for Practice With a Rhythm Section

iRealB is one of the best practice tools I’ve come across in many years. Absolutely brilliant! If you need to practice with a rhythm section in just about any style (jazz, bluegrass, pop, rock, etc.), you’ve got to get this app. It’s available for both iOS, MacOS, and Android devices). Here’s a comprehensive video walkthrough of most of its features:

Duke Ellington, Cootie Williams, and the Wise Musician

I love Duke Ellington’s music. And last February, after hearing a smoking middle school septet (yes, I wrote that correctly) do a superb version of Duke’s Black and Tan Fantasy, I think it’s safe to say Duke’s music will be a long-lasting legacy.

Here’s a vid, a short bio on the man. The gem comes around 2:40. “Every musician in the world has some limitation. There is no musician in the world who has no limitation…. But, the wise players are those who play what they can master.”

Johnny Cash on Failure

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”

Here’s another iconic image of Johnny Cash. I love this one, and like to think this is a good representation of my own attitude towards failure. The story of the image is told by Alex Selwyn-Holmes on his interesting website Iconic Photos. After the quote is a 1959 video of Johnny Cash playing Folsom Prison Blues.

On The Value of Mentors: Bootsy Collins, Mark Mothersbaugh, et al.

Some good advice about finding and working with mentors from James Brown’s funky bassist Bootsy Collins, DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh, Pro Skater Javier Nunez, rapper Anwar Carrots, young impresario Levi Maestro, and Dale Crover, drummer for the Melvins and, briefly, Nirvana. They’re chillin’ and shillin’ for Scion, but there are some good nuggets of advice in there. The reason I put this up is that every single professional musician I’ve talked to about music practice has had at least one mentor who changed their lives.

12 Rules of Practice, from Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis is a musician who knows how to practice. As a younger man, he was equally at home in front of a symphony orchestra playing the Haydn concerto, or laying down some serious jazz with Art Blakey. Check out Wynton’s discography for more evidence. For a while now, he’s turned his full attention to traditional jazz…

Where You Practice Matters: Ogle Hans Zimmer’s Lair

Want to learn more about the best ways to practice? Get an e-mail with a discount code when The Practice of Practice is published (June, 2014). To learn more about the book, check out a sample from The Practice of Practice. Hans Zimmer is an award-winning film composer and music producer. You can seem more pics…

Learning to Practice

I’d like to share this old video with you that documents Gypsy guitarist (and fiddler! I hand no idea) Dorado Schmitt teaching his son, Samson, who looks to be around 10 in this video. They’re playing one of Django’s solos over his tune Minor Swing, no small feat. It’s a great example of teaching and learning for many reasons.

Few musicians I’ve talked to have ever been taught how to practice. We’ve all been pretty much on our own. When teachers do influence us, it’s by making reasonable and very specific demands that make it clear exactly what is to be practiced if not exactly how to go about it.

Mr. Bean’s Imaginary Drum Set, or, Mental Practice

Here’s Rowan Atkinson with a pretty funny skit. It’s like he’s mentally practicing drums, and we get to hear what he’s hearing inside his head to hilarious results. Enjoy, and use this to remind you to inject mental practice into your own practice routine.

The Zen of Alan Watts + South Park Animation + Music

Below is an interesting, truthful talk from Zen master Alan Watts, animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the wacky creators of South Park and other hilarities. What I love about the talk is that Watts not only invokes music, but is also justifiably critical of our education system, and our way of engaging with the…