How – Page 41 – The Practice of Practice

Time, time, time, is on your side (yes it is)

And I like messing around in the engine room of music. Seeing what happens in the rhythm section area. Bill Bruford

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If you’re interested in playing music, you’ve gotta have rhythm. If you think you don’t “have it,” consider the words of Taylor, a teacher, djembe-player, and all around good guy. Taylor has students feel their heartbeats. It’s a rhythm we all have. But it’s an internal rhythm, and it’s part of an unconscious rhythmic ability we all receive when we receive a heartbeat from our parents. We may have trouble making that natural rhythm come out consciously under control. But that, too, can be practiced.

Jazz Resources

Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny. ~Frank Zappa

I don’t care too much about music. What I like is sounds. ~Dizzy Gillespie
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This coming weekend I’m hosting at the computer lab at the Evanston Township High School Jazz Festival, a jazz fest for high school jazzers in and around the Chicago area. I’m putting together some resources that the budding jazz musician will find helpful, including listening, blogs, freeware, software, podcasts, and anything else that might be useful. Some of the software I’ve mentioned in one or two earlier posts (Sibelius, Aviary, NoteFlight, Audacity, Band in a Box, etc). I’ll put links to that software here, but won’t go into much detail. If you’re not into playing jazz, you should certainly check out some of the listening opportunities. Great stuff there…. Enjoy!

Tiny Grains of Sand: The Warmup and the Breath

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present. Victor Hugo ——— 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,…

Performance as Practice

Nicholas Barron says he’s never practiced. A lot of people can say that, right? But how many are musicians who can play and sing like this:

Your Plastic Brain (redux)

Learning changes your brain structure. My neurons underwent some serious alteration this weekend, all naturally induced, thank you very much. One of the world’s foremost grand masters of the djembe, Mamady Keita (vid to follow), was in Chicago to give beginning-, intermediate-, and advanced drum workshops. I’ve never had a djembe lesson before. I signed up for the beginner session and would learn very quickly what “beginner” actually meant to this crowd. Good thing I didn’t know that Keita’s definition of “beginner” is most people’s definition of, “I know what I’m doing.” If I’d known this, my stomach would’ve been in even more of a knot about showing up with little to no real djembe experience. Nothing like a good challenge to get you to really pay attention.

Circle (of Fifths) Your Wagons!

If you’re practicing a melodic instrument, the circle of fifths (also called the cycle of fifths or circle/cycle of fourths) is a fantastic tool to help you navigate most musical waters. It’s a tool that helps to explain how music moves harmonically, and applies to almost all forms of tonal music. When you practice your scales or chord progressions, this guide can help you practice them in the way that you’ll find them in actual performed music. If you practice scales in this order, you’ll be doing double duty: not only will you be getting the scales/chords under your fingers, but you’ll be practicing the order in which you’ll find them and you’ll be getting the sound of how these move from one to the next into your consciousness.

Practicing Tempo

I got bored with the old way – it came too easy. I worked until I could play chord changes at any tempo in any key, and then said ‘What else is there?’ Now I’m finding out. — Don Ellis, trumpeter, drummer, composer The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything…

Your Plastic Brain

A recent study looked at the growth of white matter in the brains of young adults learning to juggle. Yes, jugglers. After 6 weeks of training, and around 30 minutes of daily practice, their brains were significantly different from non-jugglers.

Software Practice Aids

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. —Robert X. Cringely The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. —Edsgar W. Dijkstra ——–…

Book Review: “Effortless Mastery” by Kenny Werner

Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen,…

Deaf Musicians?

It amazes me what some people have gone through in order to play music, and it makes me realize (once again) that the passion and drive to have music in one’s life is more powerful than more paltry things like knowledge of how to practice. One researcher whose name slips me at the moment, calls…

A Key to Practicing Tunes in All Key Signatures

If you want to really learn a tune, you should learn it in every key. Start by learning it in all the regular keys, like Bb, C, D, etc. Basically, the regular keys are those with the least amount of accidentals. On a side note, learning tunes in all keys also includes, indirectly, learning scales…