Practice
This!
February 2009
Two Years, Twenty Tips
It’s been two years since the first edition
of Practice This! appeared in Earshot Jazz, so we
thought it was time to compile some golden nuggets
from the many talented musicians who have lent us
their time, insight, and knowledge. If making practicing
a priority was one of your New Year’s resolutions,
you’d be hard pressed to find a better place
to start than this group of tips and ideas:
1. Practice everything in all twelve keys. (Bill Anschell,
April 2007)
2. The first step is to familiarize yourself with
the chord tones in a linear fashion throughout the
range of your instrument. (Chris Spencer, March 2007)
3. The key to using a scale is to learn them in every
key and to get comfortable enough with them to play
them starting on any note of the scale and on every
chord tone. (Jay Thomas, February 2007)
4. As a daily exercise, take your instrument and
create sounds you have never produced before. (Neil
Welch, December 2008)
5. We know our own comfort zone, so with the risk
of possibly making a mistake, try a different combination
of notes, play something you might normally play but
in reverse, play something soft instead of loud. (Paul
Rucker, December 2007)
6. Attack your weaknesses. (Bill Anschell, April
2007)
7. You can get bogged down with patterns and scales
and all the nuts and bolts of playing an instrument
and forget the bigger picture of playing music, which
is to convey something to the listener. For most musicians,
style is the way they get their message across. (Mark
Taylor, July 2007)
8. When improvising, I like to use the intervals
in the melody of a tune to play off of. If the last
two notes of a tune’s melody are an interesting
interval, rather than just using the last two notes
as a starting place to improvise, I can think of the
interval between those two notes as a starting point.
(Dawn Clement, June 2007)
9. One way to practice using space is to try to play
things that you don’t already hear in your head,
that is not already lodged in your mind. Then, you
can make each of your musical collaborations a conversation,
fresh and new. (Hans Teuber, October 2007)
10. Instead of changing the melody of the tune and
improvising a new melody, which is the common practice
among jazz improvisers, you can start with just changing
the rhythm of the melody. (Greta Matassa, November
2007)
11. Practice staying out of the upper register of
the instrument until you need to create excitement
in the solo. Going from low to high is one of the
easiest ways to create excitement. (Rick Mandyck,
January 2007)
12. Focus less on note choices and more on playing
with a good time feel (and remember that swing feel
is triplet based). (Dave Anderson, October 2008)
13. Try devoting part of your practice time to developing
a direct line of communication between what you hear
and the physical act of playing your instrument. (Steve
Treseler, August 2008)
14. Explore the full range of grooves and feels,
instrumentation, and musical possibilities you have
at your disposal. (Thomas Marriott, June 2008)
15. Start recording yourself on some level. Record
with your voice, or primary instrument, or whatever
makes you feel comfortable. (Kevin Nortness, May 2008)
16. Anyone can improvise by stretching the time and
playing in different tempos, but it’s important
to keep your place in the tune and maintain a sense
of the pulse with the rest of the band. (Steve Korn,
May 2007)
17. Whatever a band is trying to do, all the members
have to work together to achieve that specific goal.
(Marc Seales, August 2007)
18. Be sure to practice the tunes you like in a variety
of styles and tempos. (Marc Fendel, April 2008)
19. Remember that by intentionally doing these things
when you practice, you are training your intuitive
ear to hear this way; the idea is not to think this
way while improvising, but to spontaneously create
the same drama. (David Marriott, September 2008)
20.
Gravitate towards what it is you like and investigate
that. Be open to new things and to experiencing new
forms of expression. (Stuart MacDonald, September
2007)
Wow! I don’t know about you, but I’m
inspired to practice just writing this article! If
you’d like to read any of the complete articles,
or to play the corresponding audio and video clips,
they are all available online at http://www.earshot.org.
We’d love to hear your suggestions – if
there is a local artist you’d like to have discuss
practice strategies and techniques, let us know! Until
next month, here are our twenty tips from two years
of Practice This! to get you going in 2009.
- David Marriott
