Overwhelmed by amount to learn?

[Kirk Garrett]

Me personally? Yes. In general, I just think the advice to “just work on tunes” kind of falls into the “practice more” or “listen to the masters” sort of advice. Where it’s an offhand way of describing a process that’s more complicated than it sounds.

In addition to ears, a guitar and a practice habit, you need at least two of these things to “learn tunes” as a jazz guitar novice:

— teacher
— instructional books and/or videos
— other musicians
— hours and hours of free time every day
— lead sheets / Real Books

[Rick5]

This has been a great thread. I know the thread has gone in a lot of different directions, but my OP was not from a beginner perspective. I play in a quintet and have played many jazz gigs over the years (I have one tonight). I think the better you get, it feels like there is even more to do!

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[pamosmusic]

This has been a great thread. I know the thread has gone in a lot of different directions, but my OP was not from a beginner perspective. I play in a quintet and have played many jazz gigs over the years (I have one tonight). I think the better you get, it feels like there is even more to do!

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You know more stuff, but you also know what you don’t know.

When you start out, it’s all blissful ignorance.

[Kirk Garrett]

This has been a great thread. I know the thread has gone in a lot of different directions, but my OP was not from a beginner perspective. I play in a quintet and have played many jazz gigs over the years (I have one tonight). I think the better you get, it feels like there is even more to do!

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What specifically have you learned or picked up from this discussion that helps you? It might also help me :0)


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[Rick5]

You know more stuff, but you also know what you don’t know.

When you start out, it’s all blissful ignorance.

Yeah, my big thing for the last few years has been working on wes-style chord soloing. Super hard (at least for me). Doing that stuff at a reasonably fast tempo ain't easy.

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[Rick5]

What specifically have you learned or picked up from this discussion that helps you? It might also help me :0)


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I think some of the comments reinforced what I already now and how I normally think of things. I wasn't feeling great the day I made the OP. You can't learn everything, but have goals and focus on doing smaller things really well, etc. For example, when I started working through that pat martino book, I never thought I would be doing it this long. Now I think I will still be working on it 5 years from now. That's way better than bouncing around to different things and not having any of them mastered.

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[Rick5]

As I think about it more, besides learning and reviewing tunes, most of my practice time over the last year has focused on Pat Martino's linear expressions and block chord soloing. I am on Barry Greene's site, but I really haven't looked at it in a while. The other things have kept me more than busy enough.

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[pamosmusic]

I have a friend (classical guitarist) who says after a certain point (which I took to mean a certain level of competence) working on any one thing with real focus for any reasonable amount of time will make you better in ways you can’t really account for.

But what is reasonable?

I think maybe the question isn’t “what should you work on” but rather “how long should you work on it, and at the expense of what else.”

[Rick5]

I have a friend (classical guitarist) who says after a certain point (which I took to mean a certain level of competence) working on any one thing with real focus for any reasonable amount of time will make you better in ways you can’t really account for.

But what is reasonable?

I think maybe the question isn’t “what should you work on” but rather “how long should you work on it, and at the expense of what else.”

I think for me, if I can't make whatever it is appear in my playing on an actual tune, then I haven't worked on it long enough.

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[tbeltrans]

I suppose it all depends on what your goals are. Go into any guitar store and you will see and hear people playing licks and aimless chords, but rarely will you encounter somebody who sits down and actually plays a recognizable tune. Yet, when people ask us to play something, that is exactly what they expect to hear. So I would go with those here who are saying to learn tunes. Anything we learn should really end up in one tune or another anyway.

David Sudnow, in his home study cocktail piano course, would say "Learn everything in the context of a song.". To me, that alone would dictate what to learn as well as what not to learn.

Tony

[Tal_175]

I suppose it all depends on what your goals are. Go into any guitar store and you will see and hear people playing licks and aimless chords, but rarely will you encounter somebody who sits down and actually plays a recognizable tune.

Well, I can see why. Guitar is an ensemble instrument in 99.99 percent of the recorded music that involves a guitar. You can often recognize what tune people are playing the parts of (intros, solos, chord riffs etc.). It is natural for musicians to test instruments and amps by playing things that reflect their real life applications.

Musicians relate to music they listen to and solo guitar arrangements is just not what most guitarists are into. They are into types music where the singer is responsible for the main melody. Unless they sing (which is a bit awkward in a guitar store) guitarist do not play whole tunes from beginning to end.

I personally like making solo arrangements or improvise in that style. But that requires a lot of dedication. You have to be really into that sort of thing.

[pamosmusic]

David Sudnow, in his home study cocktail piano course, would say "Learn everything in the context of a song.". To me, that alone would dictate what to learn as well as what not to learn

This is great advice but I just don’t think it’s quite as simple as you put it here.

I want to learn All of Me.***

So what does that dictate I learn?

Your next question will probably be: well, what do you know already?

The one after will probably be: what are your goals?

The one after that might be something like: who do you listen to, or what do you want to sound like, or something like that.

At that point, there are maybe too many questions to even put here. What kind of learner are you? What do you do well? What do you struggle with? And on and on.

So I’m not saying that you shouldn’t learn tunes. I’m also not saying you shouldn’t immediately put everything you work on in the context of a tune. That’s a great idea. But saying that a tune will dictate what to work on and what not to work on is misleading. Tunes aren’t technical studies. They don’t tell you what to work on. A single tune can sound almost infinite ways without sacrificing what makes it what it is.

Definitely put your practice in the context of tunes. That’s good advice. So is “listen to the masters” … but someone expressing some difficulty in figuring out what to do and where to go, almost by definition needs more than “go to the tunes.”

***(All of Me is a hypothetical example. Please do not inundate me with suggestions for how to learn All of Me.)

[Skip Ellis]

I've been playing a loooong time (60+y yrs) and making money for about 50 of them. Started out with surf (really wanted to learn Wipeout - quite a goal!) - went to Chet, then Urban Cowboy country playing pedal steel, then graduated to theater pit orchestra (my favorite!!). During all those years, my only goal was to learn what I needed to know for the next gig - I took exactly one lesson in about 1966 and ended up teaching chord construction to the teacher (and he still charged me). My philosophy (wrong though it may be [and probably is]) is that I don't want to spend time learning things that I'll never need in real life - just learn the tunes and get on the bandstand. Jazz is something that you can spend a lifetime studying without ever leaving your room and from some comments I see on the forum, that seems to be a common goal with some people - it becomes a 'learning by studying' thing instead of a 'go out and do it' thing. I've always been a OJT, learn by doing kind of person - I had a long and satisfying career in civil and structural engineering and as a licensed land surveyor by doing it this way. I've always learned better when I've been put in a situation where I 'had' to produce. Unfortunately, as much as I loved JS and Wes and Joe, I've never been in an area and around folks who played it. In my 'musical black hole' area, if you don't play electric blues or 'tiki bar/Jimmy Buffett, you don't play, so I strive to put together enough chord solos that I can go play at the local assisted living........getting close.

[tbeltrans]

This is great advice but I just don’t think it’s quite as simple as you put it here.

I want to learn All of Me.***

So what does that dictate I learn?

Your next question will probably be: well, what do you know already?

The one after will probably be: what are your goals?

The one after that might be something like: who do you listen to, or what do you want to sound like, or something like that.

At that point, there are maybe too many questions to even put here. What kind of learner are you? What do you do well? What do you struggle with? And on and on.

So I’m not saying that you shouldn’t learn tunes. I’m also not saying you shouldn’t immediately put everything you work on in the context of a tune. That’s a great idea. But saying that a tune will dictate what to work on and what not to work on is misleading. Tunes aren’t technical studies. They don’t tell you what to work on. A single tune can sound almost infinite ways without sacrificing what makes it what it is.

Definitely put your practice in the context of tunes. That’s good advice. So is “listen to the masters” … but someone expressing some difficulty in figuring out what to do and where to go, almost by definition needs more than “go to the tunes.”

***(All of Me is a hypothetical example. Please do not inundate me with suggestions for how to learn All of Me.)

Great points all around. Back in the late 1970s, I got a job as guitar playing sideman in a trio. We worked 6 nights a week and traveled to the next gig on the 7th day (we played a week or two in each gig). We did Holiday Inns, supper clubs, and resorts so we played standards, MOR, that kind of stuff. We were not a jazz group, but we borrowed from that harmonic sense as needed.

I had to learn what was needed to hold up my end, and at that time, it was pretty much Mickey Baker and Real Book, so I spent my days working my way through both volumes and the Real Book as well as learning the pop tunes by ear. My path was really clear - get the job done by learning what I needed to do that, so I did. When you look at Robert Conti's materials, it is quite clear to me that this is the learning experience he is recreating because that is how he said that he learned. He talks a lot about having learned on the bandstand, which is what I had to do, as well as how complicated he feels forum discussions make the learning process. But he was directly playing jazz, where we were not. By the way, after two years of doing this, I decided that always being on the road wasn't for me and I got out of it. Good thing I did because things got really difficult for those musicians as time went on.

While I can't fault what you are saying, it seems to me that what you are driving at sounds far more complicated than "we are adding this tune to our repertoire, learn it". I see that in the acoustic guitar forum to. It seems that forum discussions add a whole lot of complexity to things that could be much clearer, given some sort of external focus such as having to perform every night. As a hobbyist now, I can see getting all wrapped around the axle about all these details because I have no external driving criteria from which to derive my focus. All I do is play around with chord melody from fakebooks and find that quite enjoyable. If I want to expand what I can do, I find ways to do that. I have no interest whatsoever in "soloing over changes", so I suppose that would become a whole can of worms or rabbit hole or whatever one wants to call it that I don't have t contend with. In short, I try to keep things simple so I can enjoy what I am doing because I don't have to make a living at it anymore. The pressure is off and I can just do what I want. Maybe the OP doesn't have that luxury?

Edit: I see that the post just before this one from Skip Ellis is saying something very similar.

Tony

[tbeltrans]

Well, I can see why. In the 99.99 percent of the recorded music that involves guitar, guitar is an ensemble instrument. You can often recognize what tune people playing the parts of (intros, solos, chord riffs etc.). It is natural for musicians to test instruments and amps by playing things that reflect their real life applications.

Musicians relate to music they listen to and solo guitar arrangements is just not what most guitarist are into. They are into types music where the singer is responsible for the main melody. Unless they sing (which is a bit awkward in a guitar store) guitarist do not play whole tunes from beginning to end.

I personally like making solo arrangements or improvise in that style. But that requires a lot of dedication. You have to be really into that sort of thing.

What is the first question a non-musician will ask somebody who plays an instrument? Can you play "such and such"? Of course after that, the next request is for that oft-requested tune "play in the parking lot".

It seems to me that at least having a tune or two on the ready for such an occasion would make good sense.

Tony

[pamosmusic]

While I can't fault what you are saying, it seems to me that what you are driving at sounds far more complicated than "we are adding this tune to our repertoire, learn it". I see that in the acoustic guitar forum t It seems that forum discussions add a whole lot of complexity to things that could be much clearer, given some sort of external focus such as having to perform every night. As a hobbyist now, I can see getting all wrapped around the axle about all these details because I have no external driving criteria from which to derive my focus. All I do is play around with chord melody from fakebooks and find that quite enjoyable. If I want to expand what I can do, I find ways to do that. I have no interest whatsoever in "soloing over changes", so I suppose that would become a whole can of worms or rabbit hole or whatever one wants to call it that I don't have t contend with. In short, I try to keep things simple so I can enjoy what I am doing because I don't have to make a living at it anymore. The pressure is off and I can just do what I want. Maybe the OP doesn't have that luxury?

Edit: I see that the post just before this one from Skip Ellis is saying something very similar.

Tony

So what I’m saying isn’t far more complicated, I don’t think. I’ve been learning tunes now for a long time now and what it means to “learn a tune” is fundamentally different than it was when I was, say, a freshman in college.

I think it’s important that we call things what they are. Practice is practice. We shouldnt always ask that it be pretty or creative or artistically satisfying, even when it leads to a satisfying result. We also should be careful not to ask too much of “learning tunes.” If you learn a tune, you will learn the tune as well as you are capable of learning it, and with the tools you have. If you need to learn it better or deeper or wish to have different tools, then you need to look for that.

A tune is just that. It won’t tell you more than what it can tell you.

[tbeltrans]

So what I’m saying isn’t far more complicated, I don’t think. I’ve been learning tunes now for a long time now and what it means to “learn a tune” is fundamentally different than it was when I was, say, a freshman in college.

I think it’s important that we call things what they are. Practice is practice. We shouldnt always ask that it be pretty or creative or artistically satisfying, even when it leads to a satisfying result. We also should be careful not to ask too much of “learning tunes.” If you learn a tune, you will learn the tune as well as you are capable of learning it, and with the tools you have. If you need to learn it better or deeper or wish to have different tools, then you need to look for that.

A tune is just that. It won’t tell you more than what it can tell you.

I go back to what I originally said, which was it depends on what your goals are. In forums, people go on endlessly about these things and for some that is half the fun. So, have it.

Tony

[pamosmusic]

I go back to what I originally said, which was it depends on what your goals are. In forums, people go on endlessly about these things and for some that is half the fun. So, have it.

Tony

If I can take the liberty of being blunt — that’s exactly my point.

If it depends on what your goals are … then it is somewhat more complicated than telling a person to “just learn the tunes.”

[Skip Ellis]

So what I’m saying isn’t far more complicated, I don’t think. I’ve been learning tunes now for a long time now and what it means to “learn a tune” is fundamentally different than it was when I was, say, a freshman in college.

I think it’s important that we call things what they are. Practice is practice. We shouldnt always ask that it be pretty or creative or artistically satisfying, even when it leads to a satisfying result. We also should be careful not to ask too much of “learning tunes.” If you learn a tune, you will learn the tune as well as you are capable of learning it, and with the tools you have. If you need to learn it better or deeper or wish to have different tools, then you need to look for that.

A tune is just that. It won’t tell you more than what it can tell you.

The goal is to perform the tune to the satisfaction of the employer - to me, it goes no further than that - I am an employee hired to do a particular job. I don't care why the tune was written or which compositional elements were used in it's creation - that's of no interest to me. I'm interested in playing the music, as presented, to the best of my ability so, after I've played the 70 pages of a theater score and the show is over, I can look the other band members in the face and know I've held up my end. That's how I get my satisfaction.

[pamosmusic]

The goal is to perform the tune to the satisfaction of the employer - to me, it goes no further than that - I am an employee hired to do a particular job. I don't care why the tune was written or which compositional elements were used in it's creation - that's of no interest to me. I'm interested in playing the music, as presented, to the best of my ability so, after I've played the 70 pages of a theater score and the show is over, I can look the other band members in the face and know I've held up my end. That's how I get my satisfaction.

Again … if I might take the liberty of being blunt …

That is an idiosyncratic point of view, to which others (myself included) might not subscribe.

Im not saying it’s not valid for you. I’m saying that folks who hop in on a discussion like this and say “it’s simple. Just learn the tunes,” are being misleading. Because that might be valid advice for one very specific set of circumstances and goals. But it’s not for a wide range of other circumstances and goals.

Learning music can’t be “just that simple.”

So I am glad that you find satisfaction in that, but others have different goals and require different advice. So “just learn the tunes” is going to mean something entirely different to them.

So when someone comes into a conversation and says “just learn the tunes,” they’re assuming the people engaged in the conversation learn the way they do and have the same goals. I’m saying it’s more nuanced and more complicated. By which I mean, people have widely varied goals and learn and wildly differing ways.

[tbeltrans]

The goal is to perform the tune to the satisfaction of the employer - to me, it goes no further than that - I am an employee hired to do a particular job. I don't care why the tune was written or which compositional elements were used in it's creation - that's of no interest to me. I'm interested in playing the music, as presented, to the best of my ability so, after I've played the 70 pages of a theater score and the show is over, I can look the other band members in the face and know I've held up my end. That's how I get my satisfaction.

It seems, reading your posts in this thread, that you and I have had very similar experiences playing professionally with regard to getting the job done. We are definitely on the same page here. For me it was a job at a time when there were few other jobs and I was paid to deliver. Nothing complicated about that.

Tony

[bediles]

I'm a bit lost in the thread so hope this is constructive

What does learning a tune entail:
(I'm talking jazz standards/songbook not learn 20 covers for your gig on Wednesday or read down a book for a theatre gig)
1. Listen to some versions of the tune
2. When was it written and why or for whom may be of interest
3.learn the lyrics if there are any
4. Learn the melody in one area/position. Find an octave that's practical
5. Learn the chords, practice playing them in time. Basic grips for now
6. Try to play a simple chord melody.. may involve some inversions, may not.
7. Play a simple solo that embelishes the melody

Now what's left:
1. Learning the melody in multiple octaves (pain for most Bop heads)
2. The vast expanses of improvisation
3. Becoming a better accompanist (improving your comping)
4. Playing a more fleshed out solo guitar arrangement... more vast expanses.

For the what's left category I imagine everyone has their own laundry list of stuff they may practice over a tune and use the tune as a vehicle or have a few pet tunes to work that stuff out in.

It's good to keep learning tunes because you're not going to get everything together before moving on and each tune teaches you something new. And obs you gotta at least fill out a couple of sets of music. Dm vamp playing the catatonic scale all night gets boring.

PS probably better (I mean more practical) to learn Joy Spring if you want some time in Gb then learning TWNBAY a maj 3rd down.

[Christian Miller]

Me personally? Yes. In general, I just think the advice to “just work on tunes” kind of falls into the “practice more” or “listen to the masters” sort of advice. Where it’s an offhand way of describing a process that’s more complicated than it sounds.

I was told about fifteen years ago to ‘work on your time’; in retrospect I realise the person who told me that hadn’t got it down themselves and they could only recognise that I certainly didn’t, but not necessarily give advice based on experience.

actually time/feel can be like that even for those who do have it - because to them it comes naturally.

Otoh what followed was a total rabbit hole for me that has slowly transformed into a more general understanding which might allow me to break things down for someone a little more.

but that’s the question as a teacher - how much do you tell students and how much do you lead students on their own path of discovery?

Learning tunes as you say is complex. But would I lead a student through all the info I learned by learning tunes myself? In my case probably yes, because I am an enthusiastic nerd like most jazzers today, but jazz advice used to be rather condensed and laconic because people played gigs and gave advice only grudgingly or as the need arose (it was apprenticeship). Nowadays everyone’s selling their knowledge on TrueFire etc.

[Christian Miller]

For myself, I find it quite hard to get motivated to anything unless it has a point.

Being able to play nice piece of music or working on things you can do on All The Things you Are obviously has a point. But the only way to get me to practice, write or arrange anything unless there’s a gig, in which case I will go off the deep end completely and spend, ooh I don’t know, two full days reharmonising Middle Eastern and North African tunes for a gig that pays like 70 quid which we might not even end up using. As pamo says, I think it all teaches something? (I hope.).

if that’s not in place I know that I tend to revert to sitting in my underpants watching YouTube videos about WWII fighter planes while eating dry cereal out of a bowl. And then the guilt! That’s the worst thing.

It’s not because I’m lazy, it’s because there’s so much I could be learning it’s overwhelming. Take harmony - should I focus on Barry Harris, Mick Goodrick, Quadratonics, Trad harmony etc etc?

I think tunes keep me on an even keel, but even then it can fell pointless if I’m not doing any straightahead gigs. Sometimes getting excited by music does the trick - you hear a great solo or tune and you just want to learn it.

Or I might listen to a recording of a gig I’ve done, find a bar or two i like and then think ‘oh I should do more stuff like like that on the next one.’

My YouTube channel helps too (I think?)

I think some people have a stronger inherent compass and I envy them. But I need a context.

[Christian Miller]

***(All of Me is a hypothetical example. Please do not inundate me with suggestions for how to learn All of Me.)

Lol, you know how this forum works….