Headed north up to do a gig with my quintet Swang and it got me thinking about how performance figures into practice. We’re doing some recordings tomorrow and I know that playing a gig the night before will help our playing a lot. According to a lot of the folks I’ve interviewed, performance is considered a…
Category: Do This
Not Your Daddy’s Metronome: Alem’s Mad Beats
The metronome is a pretty useful tool. At a workshop, jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas said he gave up practicing with a metronome because it’s too mechanical and he felt rhythm and beat was more organic, less mechanical and unyielding. I get that, and agree, but I’ve found the metronome to be useful for especially challenging…
What Excuse Holds You Back?
Anyway, at the fest this year, in casual conversation, I recounted Victor Wooten’s presentation a couple years ago which I posted on the blog. A high school kid raised his hand and asked how he could overcome the problem of having large hands. Victor set the kid straight. This picture of Chinese artist Huang Guofu overcoming (read: crushing!) his limitations reminded me of Wooten’s words of wisdom.
Learn While You Sleep
There are some really interesting research projects coming out of the neuroscience lab at Northwestern University. A couple years ago, I wrote a blog post about a
study that shows we continue to learn after a study session if the stimulus continues while we’re doing something else. Pretty cool, right? But maybe you prefer to catch up on your sleep and continue learning.
Drone Your Way to Excellence
Several months ago I spoke with the fantastic jazz trumpeter Ingrid Jensen about practice. She mentioned that one thing she liked to do was practice with drones, using an Indian instrument called a tanpura (also tampura). She said that playing against a drone was a great way to train your ear/horn coordination. Practicing with a drone allows you to really feel how it sounds to play every note against the tonic, throughout your range. It’s meditative.
Ingrid Jensen
When I hear a great practice idea, I try it, and I’ve been using this one for a while and absolutely love it. I almost immediately noticed a greater ability to match pitch (my fellow musicians mentioned it in rehearsal), and a deeper awareness of sound in general. Part of the reason for this is that playing with the drone makes me aware of where the horn is naturally out of tune, whether because of the way a horn is made or because of the quirks of the harmonic series.
The 300 Pound Gorilla in the Practice Room: Inattention
Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every note and every word I sing – I respect the song. If I cannot project this to a listener, I fail. ~Frank Sinatra Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the…
Jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins
Jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins talking with Tavis Smiley about practice and striving for betterment. This attitude is why the man’s still a genius and still one of the most highly regarded jazz musicians of all time. Beautiful words of wisdom on practice, music, life, and getting right with yourself despite what anyone else says. Talks about…
Goals FTW!
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A journey of one thousand miles begins with a single footstep. ~Confucius _________________ A few days ago I realized that posts for the last few months have been interviews, with little writing, and I miss writing, because…
Lessons from a VW
Last Saturday at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, I went to listen to Victor Wooten give a clinic. A while ago I posted a review of Victor’s book The Music Lesson, which is up for an audiobook award. For the clinic, Victor Wooten played with the fantastic and funny bass player (yes, there is another bass player in his band) Anthony Wellington; legendary jazz bassist John Clayton showed up for an improvised tune or two. The clinic was a fantastic example of playing, teaching and telling it straight. It was so good and inspirational, I knew it would be worth sharing.
Getting Loopy: More Practice Tools/Toys
I like to use electronics to make practice more fun and I think, more demanding. In this quick post I’ll show you the Boss Loop Station. It allows me to layer recordings. It can be used with a microphone (that’s how I record trumpet and various percussion), electronics (you can input beats or any other digital media), and/or guitar. Mine is set up with a microphone and guitar input. I won’t get into the details of how the loop station works, but here’s how such a device helps with practice.
Cross-Training
We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color. ~Maya Angelou ——————- Want to learn more about the best ways to practice? Get an e-mail with a discount code when The Practice of Practice…
Quality v. Quantity
Some research shows that the amount of time doesn’t really matter, although it does matter a little since if you spend zero hours doing something, you’re not going to get better at all. But it turns out that the number of hours practiced doesn’t really matter, it’s all about the quality of your practice. What you do is important, but not how much you do. Duh, right?
This seems like a no-brainer issue, but researchers are notoriously skeptical about common-sense issues. We want to know for sure whether things are true. That’s one of the reasons behind a study by Duke, Simmons, & Cash (2009), titled It’s not how much; it’s how: Characteristics of practice behavior and retention of performance skills. These researchers had 17 graduate and advanced undergraduate piano players practice a 3-measure excerpt of Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra (here’s a clip of Shostakovich himself playing part of it). Here’s the excerpt:
The Practice of Practice 