The Practice of Practice

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…

Have a Plan, Man! (Axiom Brass)

This ain’t your momma’s brass quintet (vid below). They play contemporary stuff and a great example is a cool section in Anders Hillborg’s Quintet that sounds like a backwards recording. One of my favorite brass ensemble pieces in recent years is the Pacquito d’Rivera’s Three Pieces for Brass Quintet, especially Wapango. Visit their web site to catch that Hillborg clip, or just spend a dollar to buy the mp3. Better yet, get the album, New Standards.

Be Bold. The Mighty Forces Will Come to Your Aid.

The title of this post is my favorite quote by Goethe Basil King, and the content of the post is from an idol of my youth, Billy Joel, and audacious audience member Michael Pollack who was in the audience at Billy Joel’s talk at Vanderbilt University. Taking risks is a great thing to do, but you should be…

Lessons from Skateboarder Adam Miller

Winston Churchill once said, “Success is moving from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm.” Here’s that gem of advice as it might look to skateboarder Adam Miller. Adam Miller posted many shots of his failed attempts to land a trick (it’s both cringe-inducing and hard to look away). After that is…

Performance as Practice

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…

Django’s Lemonade: 3-Fingered Lightning

What would you do if your body was burned to the point that your doctors wanted to amputate your leg and told you that you’d never play music again? Django Reinhardt (already an accomplished banjo player at 18) decided to keep his leg and play the guitar his brother brought for him to play while…

Music and the Brain on Radiolab

Radiolab is one of my favorite podcasts: smart, funny, thoughtful, and at times mindbending. All artfully mixed and mastered into great storytelling that teaches. Here’s an episode on music and the brain that should be required listening for musicians. Covers music and the brain, music and language, sound as touch, and musical DNA. Hope you like it as much as I did.

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.

From Bad to Good

Music is abstract and fleeting. You can’t see it, and except for the past 100 years, music isn’t preserved, at least not in the way visual art is preserved. This makes it tough (or impossible) to see how musicians progress. There is however, a lot of evidence of how visual artists progress. It’s yet one…