Your One Best Bit of Practice Advice

[jazznylon]

Getting a teacher that actually cares whether I practice or not worked wonders for me when I started out in music college. He was furious about my constant unwillingness to practice. After the ultimatum he gave me I was never the same and started logging in some serious practice hours afterwards. I wouldn't have made it without him, I was very fortunate

[Lionelsax]

Don't apply modal concepts on tonal tunes, you'll never learn to be fluent when you improvise but learn chord progressions as if you were a bass player, it's not so important to know where you are if you don't know where you go.
Act like a musician not only like a guitarist, music is not only made of shapes, diagrams and licks.
See your neck like a keyboard.

[kris]

Practicing at slow tempos, listening and recording - this greatly affects the development of a jazz musician.

[Bach5G]

Just recent.

Disconnect from social media. No Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Turn off your main stream media. No Fox, OAN, CNN, MSNBC etc. Read a bit of your local newspaper over a coffee occasionally, but cancel your online subscriptions to the WaPo, NYT.

it frees up hours that you can put to better use, including practice.

[Jimmy blue note]

Just recent.

Disconnect from social media. No Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Turn off your main stream media. No Fox, OAN, CNN, MSNBC etc. Read a bit of your local newspaper over a coffee occasionally, but cancel your online subscriptions to the WaPo, NYT.

it frees up hours that you can put to better use, including practice.

If your music emerges as being more important, exciting and satisfying than what you get from the media machine, you're on the road that the greats have walked.
Good advice.

[Roberoo]

Spend most of your practice time on tunes (e.g. 80%). You don’t get called to perform lydian dominant scales in 3 octaves (even though you might use it in a performance). We are mostly entertainers as jazz musicians although of course a small, small number will become artists in their own right.

[TAA]

Reminds me of a curb-side portable sign that I saw, while driving through a small town in western Wisconsin, this past summer. It said..."Stop watching and listening to the news and start living".

Advice for a different reason than #54 above. But the same result. Use your time to do something for yourself (including practicing your instrument), rather than watching someone else doing something or giving you their opinion and free advice. Could probably also apply to watching sporting events on TV.

FWIW

Tom

[emanresu]

Oh, the best practice advice that I've not heard often would be, "eventually, it'll all come together".
Meaning, people are impatient by nature, in every whay. Giving advice, receiving it.
I think I have quit something important twice just because it seemed either impossible or would take eternity.
But later turned out it just needed some more... hours or.. months or years.
And life actually is long enough to make them happen.

[Spook410]

There are no teachers in my part of the world. Would be nice.

So I would suggest that the single best way to improve practice is to play in public. It's hard for me at times to push onward and upward if there is no point other than getting better. A nebulous task with demarcations that can feel artificial. Having real end points like going to volunteer a few hours of wallpaper jazz at the library on Sunday afternoon or busking or coffee shop.. it forces you to focus because you will be performing the results.

[Litterick]

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.

[AllanAllen]

There are no teachers in my part of the world. Would be nice.

So I would suggest that the single best way to improve practice is to play in public. It's hard for me at times to push onward and upward if there is no point other than getting better. A nebulous task with demarcations that can feel artificial. Having real end points like going to volunteer a few hours of wallpaper jazz at the library on Sunday afternoon or busking or coffee shop.. it forces you to focus because you will be performing the results.

Usually it feels like I'm performing my shortcomings, but at least I know what to work on the next day.

[ragman1]

Play tunes.

(There's quite a simple one over on the Practical Standards thread at the moment but I bet no one does it).