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Hey.
This is serious here now.
We practice our asses off with routines that scar our souls.
What we need is every session to lift us, mean something, do more! We need that.
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02-26-2026 03:18 PM
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I just play songs
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Maybe that's what you do, but I enjoy practicing. I don't do much in the way of scales, exercises, etc. anymore and mainly focus on learning tunes and exploring different ways to play them, but I find all of it engrossing and fun. There's nothing scarring about it at all.
Originally Posted by emanresu
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I enjoy playing, if I didn't, I wouldn't.
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Did you nail it? Originally Posted by GuyBoden
I enjoy playing, if I didn't, I wouldn't.
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I find playing slowly on technique at the start of practice pretty meditative and helps ease in on the focus. Transcendence and stuff...
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Honestly, I think holding every practice session to this standard is a good way to burn yourself out. (He said, as if speaking from experience.) Originally Posted by emanresu
Sometimes you just need to play scales for twenty minutes so your hands still work. Sometimes you just play tunes. Sometimes you practice like a virtuoso. Sometimes you take a break.
All good.
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A lot of enjoyment and goodness happens if you simply practice until you discover something new. Then work with it finding how and what it works with enough that you retain it for next time. Originally Posted by emanresu
You should end all practice sessions with a positive lift - learning, and especially discovering something new does that, means something (more vocabulary, technique, applications to tunes, etc.), and encourages doing more (for next time... pace yourself).
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Atm, I am training the alt scale for my all-by-ear hwhayz.
There are a few tricks to make it musical but since the aim is the dominants, the horrible unavoidable annoyance is there...
The fastest way is to buck up and dive in, finish it with hopefully still having some joy left for making music afterwards
Can't use a thing on a tune when the thing is not even half-ready.
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Actually, while yes - very true and good advice, J.Lage's very simple advice for himself that I just marvel - "start with something good and fun". Originally Posted by pauln
A lot of enjoyment and goodness happens if you simply practice until you discover something new. Then work with it finding how and what it works with enough that you retain it for next time.
You should end all practice sessions with a positive lift - learning, and especially discovering something new does that, means something (more vocabulary, technique, applications to tunes, etc.), and encourages doing more (for next time... pace yourself).
And we here have a recent thread that shows people doing "the pushups" first.
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"I enjoy practicing" is a trap. Originally Posted by John A.
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"I enjoy practicing" would work in 1989.
The competition is enormous nowadays. Either you do the most awesome thing ever done in jazz history or not much happens.
Up your game. Jazz is awesome but just the top part of it prevails. Can't go "triads now. intervals in 140bpm now".
This doesn't work at all.
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Sometimes the thing that is not even half-ready is one's mind, not hands, not the thing itself (method/concept/application). Originally Posted by emanresu
Atm, I am training the alt scale for my all-by-ear hwhayz.
There are a few tricks to make it musical but since the aim is the dominants, the horrible unavoidable annoyance is there...
The fastest way is to buck up and dive in, finish it with hopefully still having some joy left for making music afterwards
Can't use a thing on a tune when the thing is not even half-ready.
One of the things that I discovered was not for the aim to be the dominants. Instead of the alt scale I "invented" the Lydian Dominant scale, only later finding out there were such things already, both modes of the Melodic scale, and modes of each other.
The reason I met the LD first was that my targeting was for sounds, not directly mapping to named functional chords, so when sounding as the alt scale its tonic is the root of the tritone - in principle much easier to place it in the sounds I wanted.
2-5-1 of Dm7 - G(#9) - Cmaj7 you may imagine the
- alt scale with its tonic sharing the root of the "5" chord G(#9)
or
- LD scale with its tonic sharing the root of the tritone "b2" Db chord which might be Db(13) or Db(9b5) or some others...
From the LD perspective, it acts as a reference for a whole collection of things from which different shadings of type and quality may be expressed including aug and dim structures. That is surely possible from the alt scale perspective, but it is the LD that "spoke to me".
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Quite same here so far - LD is totally enjoyable to practice isolated, "technically", repeating it won't make the ears bleed
I also use the triads and not the 7th chords of the alt scale. Say, take Bm Am D E chords, build some silly progression and play the notes of a-melodic minor.
Sounds pretty cool. Those chords normally suggest a key change as those "epic progressions". But alt scale ties it all together perfectly.
The C-note against Bm chord works as the "avoid-note" though.
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I do enjoy practicing, even the "mechanical" part of it. As for the adding meaning and telling a story part, that can happen more easily during actual performance, provided you enter "the zone" and keep theory and technique in the background, or as a "safety net" only (in my experience, at least).
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I find I play better when I've given it a rest for a bit and done something else. No, really.
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You have to listen to a lot of good jazz in an analytical way. Originally Posted by emanresu
You should practice with good timing.
It"s better to play slower, but precisely with good "jazz time".
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Hm. Generally considered good? Originally Posted by kris
But why good? And what is good, even?
I am after impro. I do listen analytically, but not like "what scale or chord tones go where".
But rather, is the solo a full complete experience (very often not... but again, what is "good"?) and do all the parts make sense and are intentional, doesn't break the thread for something automatical or "funny" even. Things like that.
For example, the pianist's blessing and a curse is that when the left hand is playing the chord, the solo with the right hand can have such an easy job to outline the chord notes, but that tends to cut/restart the thread that had some melodic intent before.
Our curse (guitarists) and a blessing is that it doesn't happen such way, we have to work our behinds off to get the chord notes work fluidly in a solo, and when using them, I can hear that it was intentional (at least), and not that "easy peasy. lets relax and gather more thoughts for what comes next" type of situation.
Btw. A question that is nagging me lately - the word "meaning" has a very simple and clean meaning when talking about spoken language.
Using "musical meaning" is a pitfall because in music (the notes), the word "meaning" actually doesn't... doesn't work at all.
But what could be a better word for a similar thing in music? Something more specific than "feeling" I guess.
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You know, like Kenny G?
The opposite of that
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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The most wonderful thing about music is its Originally Posted by emanresu
connection to individual abstract symbology
of one's unconscious. Music is queen of the
arts because it is really completely invisible.
Music conceives ideation within you to form
'meaning' rather than force the conveyance
of ideas at you (commercial advertisement).
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