The Art of Effective Practice (Part 2)

Ok, we up to part two of this article, practice tips four and five. Let's do this

Practice tip 4:

Music is not about thinking. It is about hearing. Make hearing the focus of your practice.

When I first began to get serious in my study of music, I always approached it as if it had some kind of solution. It was like I kept on examining all these musical structures, and seeing them somehow as different answers to a question I could not quite pin down, and just wanting to get to the bottom of it.

Thinking back on it, it was almost like I was doing math. And later on I did actually do a lot of math because it turned out to be something I was into. But I must say, despite the usual anecdotes one hears, I would argue that math and music are fundamentally different. They certainly attract a similar personality, the kind of person who likes to apply routine while learning things (and there is an strange cross over vibe between hours of time learning classical piano and spending hours working through calculus exercises of whatever). But that is about it. This lack of commonality is probably a rant for another time. 
 In any case, when taking this approach, I would spend months on end doing things like looking through Bach’s keyboard works. I would take a Bach three-part invention or a fugue or something, and look at all those notes. What was going on here? What happened when an Eb was used some particular key? What happened next? Was it on or off the beat? Off the beat? Why did he do the modulations happen in the way he did?

But it eventually dawned on me that the these were questions words couldn’t really answer. Bach did these things because they sounded correct to him, a natural outcome of their talent and taste and the musical context in which he resided. And it dawned on me that, instead of trying to solve this as if were some kind of mathematical problem, it would be better to find ways into how he heard music, to internalise it rather than interrogate it. So I started doing things like playing one part of a fugue, and singing another part, getting my ears right inside his music, to hear the tensions and resolution. It was like an amazing musical door had been opened and I was hearing all these hidden aspects of of this craft. And it completely changed my musical sensibilities and they way I hear and play.

Thinking about music is important. So is theorising about it, and this can be helpful. It has all sorts of applications to, both inside and outside of music. But the main thing is to listen. You can make lots of assumptions about music. You can work with general rules about right and wrong note choices and what is correct or not. Or this or that scale. But eventually your listening experience will guide you. It ends up just being about 12 possible notes in an octave that you play at some times, and don’t play at other times, and it is your ears that guide this decision.

In this spirit, I have found the biggest thing that has helped me with jazz is to transcribe solos. Slow down the recording, write out all the notes, and then, most importantly, memorise and play along with the recording. Sing them with the recording. Or play along with the recording at a slower speed so you are totally locked into the note placement, and soak up the all other aspects of the recording (like the bass and drums or whatever else is there other than what you have transcribed). For me this puts listening directly into my practice, enriches my practice and I find that at the end of my practice the experience is more like an intense listening experience. And it has been so helpful for all kinds of things, like my technique and my sense of time, and developing a deep sense of melody and harmony.

When I was studying music at university, we had this great harmony and counterpoint teacher. He always tell about the rules like hidden consecutive notes or when to use 6/4 chords or whatever and then roll his eyes and say we needed to think about it all differently. Because Bach surely didn’t think that way. So the class ended up just singing Bach Cantatas all the time. We all got really into it and had this crazy plan that we would learn to sing them all and record them all. At the time I can remember going home after class, standing at the train station after singing these things, and still having such a deep sense of how it all it sounded, like I could hear perfectly in my head that dissonance of a minor second and its resolution and the underlying movement of harmony. It was so cool, and it felt like I had become music, just notes drifting in and out of the chords. And that is what I was always want my practice to feel like.

Practice tip 5:

Always be reflecting on your practice schedule and reflect on its usefulness.

I think a lot about what is the best thing to work on. This is a difficult question because it is linked to something else. What should you do that will make you a better musician? And what does it mean to be a good musician, or to be a better musician? I read somewhere that apparently you could pretty much play anything to George Shearing and he could play it back to you. Mendelssohn was like that too. I have certainly met people who have that kind of amazing natural talent. I once knew this guy who was a heavy metal guitarist. One day I was telling him about Charlie Parker and I leant him a cassette tape, and he came back the next day and was just going crazy, saying it was the most amazing thing he had ever heard. He started singing the bits of solos that he loved, or playing them. It was amazing that someone could do this so fast. We ended up studying music together at university about a year later (and ended up both dropping out!) and by that time he had become this amazing sax player and always annoying the teachers because they couldn’t really teach him anything.

Now sometimes when people hear these kinds of stories, they get all worried that the world is full of better musicians, that they will never be good enough. But you don’t want to get hung up on this kind of stuff. Some things, music or otherwise, come easily to some people, some come slowly and with difficulty. Some people have lots of time and opportunity, others just need to squeeze it in somehow. Apparently Bill Evans found everything really hard, and had to work so much on his playing before it came together, and just listen to how amazing he is!

In your practice, reflect about specific things that may be helpful and focus on that. Like if you want to learn about improvisation, there are some specific things you should know that will help. Like the sound of chord progressions. What does a II-V-I actually sound like? Can you recognise it? When you listen to jazz standards on a recording, can you easily hear all the types of progressions? What does it sound like when you go into VI minor, or into IV? To help with this, make sure you learn lots of different versions of lots different standards by working them out from the recording. How does Miles Davis play ‘It Never Entered My Mind’? What about Sarah Vaughan? What about Keith Jarrett, who does something different with the chords of the bridge. The more you learn this way you realise each jazz standard has lots of possibilities, lots of ways through and they are all connected. And you can recall them so much more easily because you have embedded it in your aural memory.

Sometimes its hard to say what helps with practice and and what does not. I spent a long time learning how to sing twelve tone rows because I wanted to my ears to be better, more attuned. But it was funny because this only seemed to help me sing twelve tone rows, it didn’t seem to translate into the other things at all. I used to find with piano, Bach and Mozart helped my technique a lot. But other things that I would expect to help with technique (such as the Chopin Etudes) just kind of created a state of exhaustion. I have found playing Keith Jarrett solos on guitar at slow speeds completely opened up my technique. So the whole practice thing seems to be little mysterious sometimes, and you need to focus on working on stuff that somehow helps you connect with music and energises you. And change it up as needed.

Ok, that is enough for this second post! Will leave the rest to the final article.