Tag Archives: practice

The KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) is well known among engineers and software developers. It strikes a chord because there is a natural human tendency to overcomplicate, even when the most effective or aesthetically pleasing solution is more straightforward.

The same theme crops up again and again in music. Beginner musicians are often in a hurry to tackle flashy techniques. But advanced musicians understand the importance of nailing the fundamentals. Their total command of the basics is what makes them sound so impressive. As Leonardo da Vinci put it, ‘simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’.

Most great jazz solos are built with surprisingly simple vocabulary. Listen to John Coltrane’s solo in ‘Giant Steps’ and you’ll hear that much of this famously complex solo consists of repeating a very simple 1-2-3-5 pattern. Analyse the note choices in other famous solos and you’ll find that most of the content is based around guide tones (thirds and sevenths) and common chord tones (1, 3, 5, 7, 9).

What will make most difference to your playing? Beginners may spend hours trying to shoehorn advanced concepts into their solos. More experienced players will focus on the fundamentals. They work on guide tones, chord tones, and a small portion of simple vocabulary. They focus on assimilating and owning this material. Once you’ve achieved this you are well placed to expand and embellish it.

10 tactics for keeping it simple

For practice to work you need to keep it fun and rewarding. Please, don’t punish yourself, and avoid injury! Set the bar at a sensible level so you can enjoy the satisfaction of clearing your goal in the foreseeable future. Learning to solo 12 choruses circular breathing at 320bpm is not a smart goal for beginner or intermediate players. So start where you are now. Break any complex or longterm goals down into smaller, manageable chunks that you can tackle right now, within your current range of ability.

1. Long Tones
Playing long tones is simple enough. The hard part is trying to stay awake. Keep boredom at bay by playing guide tones (3rds and 7ths) around the cycle of fourths. Jamey Aebersold play alongs vol. 24 Major and Minor and vol. 84 Dominant Seventh Workout contain useful play along tracks to help you practise this. Next try the same exercise over standard chord progressions (eg Autumn Leaves, All The Things You Are) starting on different chord tones (1, 3, 5, 7, 9). Finally, try gradually interrupting the long tones with very simple jazz rhythms such as the Charleston.

2. One Step At A Time
Compulsive multi tasking is on the increase. Don’t let it take over your practice. If you feel overwhelmed by the impossibility of learning a gazillion things at the same time, try a ‘one step at a time’ approach as Hal Crook recommends in How To Improvise. For the next year, think small and choose just one focus each month for in depth study. This could be a chord tone (the 9th), an interval (eg 3 to b9), a jazz rhythm (the Charleston), a pattern or lick (Cry Me A River lick), triads, a chord type (min7b5), a mode or scale (locrian), or eventually an entire song.

3. Love Your Sound
It’s easy to forget that sound is the first thing to impress an audience: not technique, speed, or note choice. A great sound turns heads every time. So focus on this as you practise. If you don’t identify and love your sound, how will your audience? Get your sound clear inside your head first. Start by imagining who you would like to sound like. Choose 5 recordings as reference tracks for your ideal sound, isolate the easy bits then copy the sounds in your practice. Record yourself and compare results to your reference tracks.

4. Get good time with simple jazz rhythms
After sound, developing ‘good time’ is the next big thing to practice. We instinctively respond to rhythm before harmony or note choice. Everybody loves performers who swing hard with total rhythmic confidence. Mastering a strong swing feel, together with two or three basic jazz rhythms such as the Charleston will pay immediate dividends.

5. Resist the Cult of Speed
Practise slow. Speed comes from accuracy. Never underestimate how slow you need to practise something new in order to get it right. Once you play it perfect at slow tempos, speed can follow all by itself. Do not reinforce errors by playing faster than you are able. Start by practising the elements of a difficult phrase out of tempo, with no set pulse. When you are ready, practice the phrase with a slow metronome beat and focus on perfecting the sound, rhythm, phrasing and articulation. Finally, keep the tempo slow and work on technique and economy of movement – reduce tension, apply minimum pressure, move fingers minimal distance.

6. Learn a small amount of vocabulary
Mastering a handful of jazz vocabulary is one of the simplest ways to get soloing. This is the way most players get started. You only need a few phrases, but you have to be in complete command of your material. You need to totally own it, independent of key, and know its context in relation to the background harmony, so that it just bursts out of you whenever you hear that harmonic situation. Owning 10 phrases completely is much more useful than reading through 100 licks.  Jerry Coker's Elements of the Jazz Language is a great place to start.

7. Embellish triads with basic jazz soloing techniques
Once you own a small amount of vocabulary, it's time to work on assimilating it, embellishing it and using it to develop your own lines. Start by analysing where the triads and chord tones are in relation to your favourite phrases, then experiment with basic jazz soloing techniques to create pick ups, chromatic approach tones, enclosure, targeting etc. Use these techniques to embellish chord tones for a few bars to introduce and anticipate your lick. Leave plenty of space, use sequence and repetition, or question and answer to set up your lick. Guitarists should check out Corey Christiansen's Jazz Soloing Basics DVD.

8. Master the Blues Scales
Thousands of great musicians have made successful careers out of playing the blues scale. It is simple to pick up, extremely versatile and fun to play. In addition to learning the minor blues scale, also work on the relative major blues scale (C, D, Eb, E, G, A). Dan Greenblatt's The Blues Scales shows you how to use both major and minor blues scales to create meaningful solos with transcribed examples from famous recordings.

9. Learn One Octave Scales
We often practice two or three octave scales for music grade exams. But you rarely need a two octave scale to improvise. So work with smaller units, and focus on locating the chord tones. Instead of two octave scales, try playing a one octave scale round the circle of fourths, or a 1-2-3-5 pattern. Then try a short pattern from that scale that doesn’t start on the root.

10. Bebop Scales
Once you know your major, minor and blues scales, the bebop scales are the magic ingredient that will transform your solos into really convincing, good sounding jazz solos. David Baker first identified the bebop scales in response to the chromatic notes and passing tones played in bebop solos. Although not beginner material, bebop scales are relatively simple to grasp (no advanced theory required) as each scale is built by adding an extra chromatic passing tone to the major, dominant and dorian scales. The classic text to get on bebop scales is David Baker's How To Play Bebop 1.

 

 

Ask any musician about practice and they will almost certainly say they wish they had more time. Charlie Parker is reported to have practised up to 15 hours a day and Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule is often quoted as a practice milestone for high achievers. But throughout most of our lives practice opportunities are limited.A lot of the time musicians are just too busy for long practice sessions. We work day jobs, have family and social commitments, rehearse or gig evenings and weekends, or fill every available slot time with teaching, touring, writing, session or studio work. Even when you do get time for longer practice sessions, it can be hard to stay focused on achieving goals.

The trick is not to let yourself feel defeated by the amount of time you are not practising, and instead focus energy on what you can do to get everything you can out of the time you have. If 15 minutes three times a week is what you can commit right now, then accept that this is better than nothing and plan to use it wisely!

How to make your practice more effective

So what can you do to get more from your practice? There are several practical strategies to maximise your practice without needing to spend 9 hours in an isolation booth with Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. The most important strategies are:

1. Set some achievable goals

• Motivation is essential for maintaining effective practice. Setting some achievable goals in the short or medium term is a great way to boost your motivation.
• Spend some time developing SMART goals for your music and use these to inform and structure your practice sessions
• Get yourself a practice notebook and write your practice goals down. You are much more likely to achieve your goals just by writing them down, and our own experience suggests that you often end up achieving 80% of the goals you bother to write down.

 

2. Learn how to plan your perfect practice session

Corey Christiansen advocates imagining a burger or club sandwich approach to give your sessions a symmetrical structure. For a one hour session you could try something like this for example:

Warm Up	10 mins	finger stretches; relax, check posture, breathing; long tones
Old Material	10 mins	an etude, or chord/scale exercise
New Material	40 mins	new vocabulary, new melodies, new chord progressions
Old Material	10 mins	favourite songs and licks, playing freely with play alongs
Warm Down	10 mins	some slow exercises or patterns

Warming up and warming down is important to keep your playing relaxed. It is an opportunity to get in the zone or enjoy listening to your sound. Don't practise tense, or with muscles or teeth clenched. Remember practice is there to prepare you for performance, so don't practice stressed and keep smiling!

Old Material is important for two reasons. First, it boosts your confidence and reminds you what you can do on your instrument; and what you have achieved from practice in the past. Second, it also helps you to remember the things you've worked on the past (otherwise what's the point in learning it in the first place)

New Material is the meat of your session. Remember that by definition new material is the toughest part of any session, because this is the stuff you don't know yet or can't quite do yet. Stay positive and take it slowly, working note by note without keeping time if necessary until you get it right. Rember that speed comes from accuracy so focus on accuracy first and speed will follow all by itself.

3. Practise away from your instrument

You can achieve a surprising amount away from your instrument. This includes reading text books, planning practice sessions, and ear training. Perhaps most important of all though is spending time visualsing. Many virtuoso players from John Coltrane to Nigel Hitchcock have stressed the importance of visualising your music - this includes imagining your sound and imagining actually playing over sequences.

4. Steal time

It's surprising how the minutes can add up if you are able to steal odd bits of downtime and use them to practice. Think of practising a new lick every time you waited for the kettle to boil. Try keeping your instrument out of its case on a stand next to your computer, or on the kitchen wall and count how many extra hours of practice you inadvertently clock up each week.

5. Practice smarter - kill several birds with one stone

If you are short on time you need to make sure  all your exercises relate to actual music you want to play and the goals you want to acheive. Practice scales, arpeggios and licks for the songs and chord progressions you want to perform.

6. What's the problem?

You can't fix everything at once. So many educators advocate a 'one step at a time' approach. Identify your biggest problem, then focus any spare moments of practice time on fixing that one thing. Alternatively, if you have time for a regular routine, you may want to develop a specific practice routine aimed at nailing the solution to your problem, and stay focussed on nailing one issue per month.

I don't know what to practice - where do I start?

Nowadays we are very fortunate to have a huge range of tried and tested learning materials written specifically for practising jazz musicans. You should consult a selection of these to help you plan and and develop a practice routine that meets your goals.

Theory & Preparation

First, get a respected theory book such as Mark Levine’s The Jazz Theory Book for an overview of all the topics. Read this outside the practice room to help you set goals and plan your sessions. See for example: Chapter 4 ‘How To Practice Scales’, Chapter 12 ‘Practice, Practice, Practice’, and Part IV which covers song form and memorising tunes.

For more detailed guidance on what you need to work on in order to be able to improvise in a musical way get Practise Right Bundle and How To Improvise by Hal Crook.

Instrument Tutors & Method Books

Get at least one instrument tutor so you can work on material and techniques specific to your instrument. For example, for saxophone see Taming The Saxophone by Pete Thomas; for piano Jazz Keyboard Harmony by Phil DeGreg; or for guitar Three-note Voicings and Beyond by Randy Vincent.

Songs

You’ll want to devote time working on songs within your practice, so choose a reliable source of commonly played jazz melodies and chord progressions such as Jamey Aebersold vol. 54: Maiden Voyage or a fakebook such as The Standards Real Book.

Etudes

These are studies that are written as stand alone pieces for their educational value that are also fun to play. They are excellent warm-ups or warm-downs and you may keep playing some favourite etudes for decades. Greg Fishman, Bob Mintzer, and Lennie Niehaus have written popular etude books for saxophone. For guitar, try Barry Galbraith’s two volumes of Guitar Solos and Ike Isaacs More Moods.

Vocabulary, Patterns & Licks

Learning to improvise is just like learning a language. Spend time assimilating and ‘owning’ new vocabulary each time you practise. In addition to all the artist and instrument specific books of licks and patterns, there are also key pattern books by Oliver Nelson, David Baker and Jerry Coker, among others.

Other topics to consider

There are many fundamental topics that every musican chooses to work on in their practice at one time or another. These include: Ear Training; Long Notes; Sound; Rhythm; Melodies; Scales and Arpeggios; Vocabulary, Patterns and Licks; Etudes; Songs.