The Practice Room

Practicing

"If you don't have time to practice,then you should get out of the business."

   - Jazz pianist BIlly Taylor, quoted in Larry Coryell's Improvising: My Life In Music

[TJH]

Latest Lessons at WorkshopLive

Here's a brief summary of new music lessons WorkshopLive has added recently:

Guitar:

• Using Major Scales to Solo over Triads - Tom Dempsey
• The One-Finger G7 Chord and 3/4 Time - Lou Manzi
• The Full A Minor and E Minor Chords - Lou Manzi
• Time: Rhythms, Beats, and Measures - Lou Manzi
• Notes on the 2nd String - Lou Manzi
• Time: Rhythms, Beats, and Measures - Susan Mazer

Keyboard:

• 7th Heaven: Dominant 7th Chords - Andrea Amos
• Intervals Revisited: Minor and Major Intervals - Andrea Amos
• A Scale of Minor Importance: Introduction to Minor Scales - Andrea  Amos

New lessons are published constantly; check WorkshopLive's home page frequently or look for news in The Practice Room.

Peter

Practice Tips from Greg Horne

1. Do it a lot, but pay attention to what you're doing so that you don't waste your own life. Remember to consciously enjoy the sounds you and your instruments make. Listen, watch, listen, enjoy, listen...

2. "Learning" and "practicing" and "playing" aren't necessarily the same. "Learning" is the part when you're doing it wrong a lot and trying to figure out how to do it right. "Practicing" is when you're making a habit. "Playing" is when you do what you've built as a habit. Sometimes it helps to think about which verb you are enacting at any given moment.

Check out Greg's lessons on WorkshopLive.

[TJH]

Practice tip from Ben Verdery

You need to physically be comfortable with the instrument. That’s very hard to do when you’re younger. But listen to your body – if you’re stiff, you’re doing something wrong. There are 1,000 different gadgets – whether it be a pillow, or the A-frame that I use – that are built to accommodate different body sizes. The guitar is built for somebody who’s about 5’ 10” – it’s not made for tall guys. You have to physically develop a relationship with the guitar that works for you, knowing that each body is different. So one of my first things is to get the seating, the posture, hands, neck, shoulders back, sit bones all right. The chair is critical. Most of the chairs today are set up so that you will have back trouble. They’re all sloping; they have nothing to do with sitting on your sit bones; they’re all about sitting on your tail bone.

[TJH]

Why do we do this?

The question usually comes to me while I’m trying to master some oddball Martian arpeggio or while I’m staring at all the guitar books I’ve bought and not read over the years. Why do I still do this? The reasons I started, whatever they were, don’t apply any more – after all, I was 12 years old.  I’ll never make any money at it – I’m way behind on that score. Pleasure? Well, sure, but is that it? Do the hours of scrabbling at scales and arpeggios balance the momentary and fleeting pleasure of playing?

I was talking about this with a friend whose creative outlet is theater – he directs, produces and acts in amateur productions for his church.  He suggested that one reason (and in theater it’s a big one) is “applause”. He also said people like to feel they’re good at something. Then he told me about a book he’s reading called Beauty – The Invisible Embrace, in which the author, John O’Donohue, contends that people have an innate appetite for beauty.

I like that – “an innate appetite for beauty.” We are wired to look for things that are beautiful to us. Now that makes some sense. That’s a good reason.

It helps explain why I don’t stop, even though I don’t have anywhere near the time to spend on it that I need to. And it explains what it is that satisfies me when everything goes right.

[TJH]

What do you still find hard to do?

Every now and then we ask our WorkshopLive teachers, all of whom are established pros and great players, “What do you still find hard to do?” Here’s what jazz guitar teacher Jody Fisher said:

Everything is hard. It’s a very difficult instrument. Sometimes I feel like I’m starting over every single day. It’s hard to keep your technique up, it’s hard to keep composing, it’s hard to keep always updating your music, learning other people’s material, it’s hard to stay booked, it’s hard to be self-employed. The whole thing is hard, but the return is so good, I can’t fathom doing anything else.

There are some days I pick the guitar up and think, “Wow, have I ever touched one of these things before?” Usually in 10 or 20 minutes of warming up I’m in pretty good shape again. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would bet artists and actors would say the same thing – it’s just a tough thing to reach into yourself and do this.

[TJH]

Things my guitar teacher used to say

"Concentration is not about thinking harder. Concentration is about not thinking at all. It’s paying attention to what you’re playing, noticing what you have to notice and adjusting what you have to adjust, without words in your head. It’s doing without trying. It’s a mental state you have to practice, just like you practice scales." 

[TJH]

Practice Tips from Deepak Chopra

“Expectations are seeds. Once planted, they manifest into those things we gain from life, or lose. When you become aware of your own expectations, you discover the unspoken limits you have set on yourself. There is a huge difference between those who expect great things and those who don’t.”

     - from Life After Death – The Burden of Proof

[TJH]

Style

“A style is what happens when your phrasing hardens.” – Ornette Coleman

[TJH]

Relax those fingers

A practice tip from Scott Tennant’s Pumping Nylon: “It seems to me that the main cause of many peoples’ hand problems is the retention of tension. They hold the tension in their fingers and hand while they shift, change notes, or any other time they are not actually playing a note. There is no reason for this aside from technical insecurity. Know what your hand is doing at all times, which fingers are pressing and which are not - be totally aware. This is the first and most important step towards a secure technique. What you do or don’t do between the notes means everything.”

[TJH]