Jazz Advice

Practice is an essential part of your journey as a musician. We all do it everyday…or at least we try our best to, however daily practice doesn’t always guarantee improvement.

Why?? Simply because not all practice is created equal. If you look at the big picture there are two basic types of practice:

• (1) “maintenance practice” in which you are doing the necessary work to maintain your current level and…

• (2) “improvement practice” in which you are breaking new ground, isolating problem areas in your playing and working on skills that you have not yet developed.

Both types of practice are necessary for performing at your peak. There is a certain amount of instrumental maintenance to perform each day to ensure that you are staying at your current level of musicianship and there is also a need to acquire new information and skills if you wish to improve as a player.

However, the barrier that most musicians encounter when striving for improvement is that they get stuck on maintenance practice. Day after day they spend hours practicing what they already know: the same exercises, the same lines, the same patterns, the same tunes.

Hours are being logged in the practice room, but the time is not being spent on the type of practice that will elevate your skills to the next level. Left unchanged, this process can go on for years where you’re just maintaining the musical level that you’ve already achieved, not learning anything new.… Read More

There is one important part of practicing and learning any musical instrument or musical style that many players are unintentionally missing. A necessary skill that’s so obvious it often remains hidden in plain sight. It seems to be the same across the board from absolute beginners to college music majors. It doesn’t matter if you are studying classical music or are working on improvisation.

This essential piece of practice often gets overlooked, taken for granted, and sometimes even skipped altogether, yet it’s an activity that can be one of the most beneficial and enjoyable things you can do for your playing. If done the right way, it can entirely change your conception of music and even speed up the learning process.

So what could this “thing” be? You practice your technique, you play some etudes, you do a few ear training exercises, you’ve studied your theory, you run through some tricky chord progressions, you review a few tunes you’ve learned, but you’re still missing it.

Any guesses? It’s listening.

Now you may be thinking I listen all the time. I listen when I’m walking to class, I listen to music at the gym, and I turn on a record when I’m reading or studying. However, are you just hearing music in the background or are you actually listening to it? (…and yes, there is a difference.)

Furthermore, is listening a part of your daily practice routine? Do you set aside time each day to listen to a tune that … Read More

We’ve presented tons of exercises on how to practice ear training, but many require that you have someone to train with. So what do you do when you don’t have a partner?

When you have no one to practice ear training with there’s just as many exercises you can do and better yet, you can really take the time to iron out your personal weak spots. Here’s a few of my go to exercises that are super simple and super effective.

Exercise #1: Interval pre-hearing

I love this exercise, in fact, I think it’s even more valuable for learning your intervals than if you had a partner! With a partner, we get into such a guess-and-check mindset, feeling rushed and oft forgetting that the point is to absorb the sounds we’re hearing on a deeper and deeper level.

By ourselves we can take our time, relax, and let the sounds echo endlessly.

To do the interval pre-hearing exercise, first choose any interval and direction to focus on, for example, let’s choose a major third going up. Next, play any note on a piano, or if you don’t have one, any tone will do, even if it’s hitting a spoon against a glass (yes, you can practice ear training anywhere even with very minimal equipment). Once you play the note, hear it in your mind and then, pre-hear in your mind a major third (our selected interval) above the note you’re playing on the piano, before singing it. Got it?… Read More

“Jazz is smart people music!”

I first heard these words from the great pianist Harold Mabern. Walking through the practice rooms at school one day, as was usually the case, a group of eager students was huddled around him as he told a story. An impromptu musical lesson that didn’t involve scales or chords, but just as valuable – maybe even more so.

This man probably has two stories for every tune he knows and he literally knows a thousand tunes. To hear one of them was to get closer to the music, the history you’ve only read about in books, your musical idols from Lee Morgan and Miles to George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, and Freddie Hubbard.

But, there was something about that particular phrase that stood out for me: smart people music.

If you’ve ever spent any time around this legendary musician, chances are you might have even heard him say this phrase and more importantly, if you’ve ever tried to play jazz or improvise, you know he’s not kidding around!

It’s no secret that it takes brains to play jazz. The typical improviser is determined, focused, dedicated, well-rounded, and studied…and that’s just a list of what it takes to get some basic instrumental technique and music theory down.

Getting up on stage in front of an audience and improvising in real time demands the utmost from both your intellectual and your physical senses. It’s an understatement that you need to be intelligent to survive in that … Read More

Each day when you get your instrument out of its case and set out to practice improvisation, your goal is to play the right notes. Whether it’s playing with great technique and great sound or finding the best line to play over that new tune, you’re looking for the fastest way to sound good over all those chords that you stumble upon.

Lucky for us, the right notes have been laid out for us in theory books and on the pages of play-a-long tracks. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself: “Why exactly are those notes the “right notes?”

What is it that makes them right and the other notes wrong? Are we just following the rules of music theory on blind faith or are those “right notes” right because we hear them that way?

Music theory is important in understanding the inner workings of harmony, but the true test of the “right notes”comes with your ear. What does it sound like? The interesting aspect of music is that this “sound” is different for every person. Listening is a truly subjective endeavor. What one person hears as pleasing, another person can find unlistenable, even unbearable.

Sometimes it has to do with personal taste, but more often not it has to do with exposure and experience. I remember the first time I listened to Schoenberg’s Pirot Lunaire:

To my untrained ear, it sounded overly dissonant, almost like noise. However, putting it on today it sounds surprisingly accessible. The piece … Read More

Transcription can be a real struggle sometimes. Some days it feels like you can spend an hour trying to learn a few measures, and after a dozen frustrating attempts, you end up in exactly the same place you started.

If this feeling rings a bell with you, you are definitely not alone. Many of the questions that we get every week have to do with this exact problem. How exactly do you make the transcription process easier?

In a perfect world transcription would be a breeze. You would hear a solo that grabs your attention, bring it into the practice room, and figure it out in a matter of minutes. The entire process would be seamless and easy: hear it, sing it, and play it; translating those harmonies and melodies right to your instrument and on to your solos.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, this is actually closer to reality than you might be willing to believe. You can get to this point in your playing, however, the path there is not what you may be expecting.

Getting simple with it

With any complex technique, advanced skill, or in-depth harmonic knowledge that you wish to acquire as a musician, the process has to begin with a very simple concept. A small exercise or idea that you expand, explore, and expound upon. You take this simple idea and master it; building it up step by step, until you are playing at an entirely new level and using skills … Read More

Recently I’ve been checking out a book called “You are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Execises.” The author, Mark Lauren, is a former instructor and trainer for elite special forces soldiers.

The central premise of his book, geared toward your everyday civilian, is that you don’t need all those fancy high-tech weight machines or even an expensive membership to your local gym to get in shape. According to the Mark Lauren, what most people don’t realize is that you already have all the equipment you need to completely transform your body.

You are indeed your own gym.

At first glance, it seems like a concept that’s too simple and too obvious to work let alone create elite soldiers. However after a few weeks of sticking to his program, the results speak for themselves. More important and far reaching than his workout program though, is the concept of intrinsic improvement.

This idea of self-engendered personal growth may not be a revolutionary concept in the realm of physical fitness, but in the world of music it is surprisingly rare.

Fitting the mold of the musician

In music, we constantly define ourselves and our musicianship by external factors: the instruments we play, the style of music we perform, the records we listen to, and the groups we play with. Classical musicians are supposed to play a certain way, jazz musicians have to play another way, string players play a certain way, drummers should focus exclusively on rhythm, horn players … Read More

Recently we’ve gotten a few questions regarding chord tones: how to work on hearing them, how to aim for them in your lines, and how to connect them when you’re improvising over a chord progression.

Understanding the sound and function of chord tones is important to your success as an improviser. However, it’s important to remember that chord tones are not the only aspect of improvising that you need to worry about. In fact, focusing only on these specific notes or ways to connect them when you improvise can lead you in the opposite direction then you’re aiming for.

Think of this ability to hear, understand, and utilize chord tones in your solos as yet another skill in your improvisational arsenal, one of many that you use daily to create the lines you’re hearing in your head. In other words, chord tones should just be one piece of the puzzle, not your only way to construct material to improvise with.

With this in mind, here are concepts to think about that will put you on track to understanding and using chord tones to your advantage. Along with each practice idea, I’ve included some links to some of our articles that will guide you through the process of acquiring these skills.

I) Adjusting your mental approach

While the focus of improvising should be the sound of the music, the way that you think about chords and their respective chord tones can have a huge impact on the way you play. The … Read More

You’ve heard it time and time again…”Play what you hear!”

But how do you actually go about playing what you’re hearing? And how do you hear the stuff that you want to play? Playing what you hear sounds easy in theory, but it’s much more difficult in practice.

When you think about it, it’s kind of the whole point. If you could hear everything you want to play and play everything you hear, you could play anything you wanted to. That being said, the advice, “play what you hear,” is not an easy task.

There are however many ways to get closer to the goal of hearing what you play and playing what you hear. Here’s a simple process to get the ball rolling and make quick headway.

Step 1: connect your voice to your mind’s ear

The first step to playing what you hear has nothing to do with your instrument. It’s just you: connecting the voice that produces sound in your mind, with the your singing voice.

Anybody can develop this skill. We all have the ability to hear voices and sounds in our head, in fact, sometimes it’s difficult to turn them off! Yet not everyone learns to control this inner voice. It’s this inner voice where everything comes from.

For this first step, sit in silence and close your eyes. Turn all your attention to the voice in your mind. Instruct your inner-voice to “sing” a solid continuous pitch. Focus even more on this pitch and … Read More

Everybody talks about learning tunes. I mean everybody. It’s the one common thread that you hear about at jam sessions, in music schools, and conversations with great players. So much emphasis is placed upon the need for more tunes it’s not surprising that most players have this burgeoning mental complex about knowing and learning tunes that hangs over their heads day after day like a black cloud.

With this ominous mindset, the simple act of learning a tune becomes a painful, long, drawn-out process that we try to avoid at all costs.

For years, I was stuck in this mental box and would force myself to try to learn tunes by pure memorization, from a piece of paper. Hours were spent in fruitless pursuit and it became easier to read tunes than to actually learn them. When it came time to perform these tunes, I was hanging onto these mental facts like a stranded swimmer holding on to a life preserver.

If I couldn’t think of those note names I memorized or that sequence of fingerings, I had nothing to play and worse, no aural skills to keep me afloat.

When you are learning in a situation like this, building a solid repertoire can seem like an impossible task. Even when you do manage to learn a tune, are you sure that you truly know it and will remember it?

If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably had the same thought I often had: There has to be a better … Read More