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What confuses me is that there is so much contradictory advice for people trying to play better jazz. Some say learn every scale, others say no, it's all in the chords. Some recommend exercises like in classical music, but then there are those who say that's bad for one's improvising.
I keep listening and where possible playing along to records; it's good fun no matter if it pays off one day or not, but I hope to find a dedicated jazz teacher some time in the future, so it would be nice to do some of the legwork in now. Yes, I'm asking for free professional advice...
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02-18-2020 01:21 PM
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Originally Posted by Zina
Consider two different people...
Person 1 is a 16 year old. They've been playing rock/blues for about 4 years now, have gotten pretty good, but now they're getting into jazz, and they're ready to dive in head-first. They love Rosenwinkel, Metheny, Kreisberg, Lage Lund. They've been listening to a lot of the classic records, and especially gravitate towards Coltrane, the second Miles Quintet, Wayne Shorter, Monk, Bill Evans, Andrew Hill, and more contemporary players like Mark Turner. Their dream is to go to music school, and eventually move to NYC to "make it."
Person 2 is 52 years old. They have a family, a house, a good job. The kids are older now, and there's a bit more free time. They've always played guitar, for decades now, but it's been an on-and-off thing. They can strum chords well, maybe play a little blues, but that's about it. Now they've been getting into jazz, and it's a whole new world: Joe Pass, Wes, Grant Green, Django. Maybe now, with a little bit more time and disposable income, they can get a bit more serious about playing. They have no illusions about becoming a professional player, but it'd be great to be able to sit in a jam session and play some tunes every once in a while.
Person 1 and Person 2 both want to get better at improvising. But do they have the same goals? Would you give them the same advice? Even if they're both interested in "jazz guitar," are the kinds of music they want to play all that similar?
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Originally Posted by Zina
Tips for learning jazz:
1. Listen to a lot of jazz. No, that's an understatement. Listen to jazz constantly, until the music that plays in your head as you go on with an otherwise normal day, is jazz.
2. Stop thinking about chords and scales as different things, stop thinking about scales as things you play over chords.
3. Learn a bunch of tunes. Learn as much of them as humanly possible by ear. If a song has words, learn it from a version that has words.
4. Play often with people who are better than you. If you don't have people to play with, record yourself often and listen as if you were someone else who didn't care if they hurt your feelings. Actually, do that whether you have people to play with or not.
5. Transcribe/cop licks from players you like. You don't have to do whole solos. It's not even that important that you can play it. Just DO it. Process is important. If anybody online wants to argue the meaning of the word "transcribe" in regards to jazz, they've never done it and their opinion is invalid.
6. Don't forget to transcribe rhythms and phrasing--don't stop at the pitches.
7. Sing solos in the car while you listen to music while you drive. If you don't drive, sing solos while you listen to music on the bus or train. There's always somebody doing something crazier than that on the bus, so you'll be a breath of fresh air.
8. Concentrate on sounding good, not on sounding a certain way. Use your hands to get a pleasing tone out of whatever instrument you pick up. You can play very simply with good tone, articulation, and phrasing, and people will like it.
9. The melody is your friend. When you solo, don't play the melody, but never forget where it is.
10. Take all advice you receive online about playing jazz with great speculation. Try things out, if they work, keep them, if they do not, kick them to the curb and don't get hung up on them. Not everything works for everybody.
11. Think of music as "movements," or "chunks." There's a starting point, tension, and resolution. Don't be afraid to play past the bar line. Don't feel you need to hit every change (though it's good practice to learn how to nail every change, and then, just don't do that)
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Originally Posted by Zina
To me the scales, arpeggios, patterns, etc are there to loosen your fingers, strengthen your right arm/wrist/hand, and to prepare you (fingers and ears) for any and all possible circuits or routes on the fretboard that the melodic line which you are hearing may take.
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Having played now for 47 years I find working on tunes the best practice. No scales, no wild excercise as such but warming up a bit is good. I equate playing the guitar to athletic training in some repects if not many. Playing tunes and music is the goal and if exercises and the like work, they should be used. In my younger days I did plenty of that and it works. Play scales, arps, melodic patterns and generally working on hard passages as exercises.
I do believe just like athletic talent some players are simply more gifted and can get away with much less practice than others. Myself I am a hack and have to work at it all the time nothing comes too easy. Some guys can run the 800 meter race in less than 1:50 and not train for months. Come back and get in shape and repeat it like before unlike some who simply could not run the 800 in less than 1:50 no matter how much they practice. That is not to downplay hard work and those who do what Kessel did and many others. I could play 5 hours a day ( not really it would drive nuts) and still never be as good as Barney. That is another thing too in as I age I find I still like to play a lot but not the amount of time I did in my late teens and 20's.
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Originally Posted by Zina
everything else can be safely ignored
So that whittles down the white noise a bit.
beyond that it’s true there’s little consistency, but there is some consistency, and that is - check out the music. Learn music and check out stuff from recordings. Use your ears. And play with others as much as possible, preferably the beat people you can find. And time is really important.
it is important to prioritise, because if you prioritise technical information over music, you end up not knowing any tunes or any music. I see this all the time.
scales, yeah, I mean they are a resource. I say ignore people who tell you to learn a pile of scales and stuff before venturing out to play. Follow their advice and you still won’t have left your practice room 40 years down the line.Last edited by christianm77; 02-18-2020 at 03:45 PM.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
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Originally Posted by dasein
i mean you might end up learning totally different styles, and one person might choose to be a pro or an amateur, but the journey is identical. No difference.
the notes are not as important as all that. I think jazz guitarists get a bit lost in the weeds talking about theory all the time. That’s details. If you check out the music you love and establish that virtuous cycle, that stuff will take care of itself.
but that initial step can be unbelievably intimidating to people.
also, improvisation is overrated at the beginner phase. Playing music is more important. Even if you can only play the melody and know three licks, if you make it sound good, that’s better than any amount of anaemic noodling.
i remember what Bill Evans said about the importance of actually doing something instead of doing a version of it. (The irony is the world is full of pianists doing an approximation of Bill Evans lol)
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Whichever approach somebody picks, there's a great player who did it that way and an equally great player who did it a completely different way.
Why did they pick the approach they used? Some combination of endowment (meaning inborn talent) and opportunity.
Which means, you have to figure out what will work best for your abilities and goals.
It's really hard to be more specific than that.
If you could explain you goals in detail, people might weigh in on their views of the most efficient strategies.
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Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
no one got good by not checking out the music directly, using their ears, and in great depth, and no one got good by never playing with other musicians.
tbh most other things are negotiable
sounds stupid, but you wouldn’t believe how intimidating those two things are to a lot of people. People get really good at coming up with reasons not to do that.
i know I do!
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Originally Posted by pauln
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Originally Posted by pauln
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Exercises are activities focused on development or refinement of skills.
Any musician striving to improve and evolve their craft will apply a variety of strategies to move their game forward. For some, constant gigging with high level musicians and playing music in sync with where your passions lie is all they need and/or all they have time for. However, this optimum for growth musical itinerary is not something available to many of us for a variety of reasons. Coltrane and Dolphy, I would say both achieved excellent by any standard skills and kept a very full calendar and yet still felt compelled to practice incessantly. While there are many things that I worked on in earlier years that no longer require attention, I remain on a musical quest to grow
by any means necessary and that includes "exercises".
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Originally Posted by bako
But then I thought maybe "yes" in the sense that everything one plays on the guitar is good for the hands and is in that sense a kind of exercise... in the same sense as walking to the store a mile and back not for the purpose of exercise but to buy something is mechanically the same as walking the same distance for exercise - mechanically, the purpose does not make a difference. Playing songs is also the mechanics of exercise.
Then, out of curiosity, I assigned a unit of "1" to the playing of a note, an arpeggio, or a chord, calling an instance of each a "note" and subsequently estimated that in that 90 minutes I played close to 30 thousand "notes", which certainly provides exercise, however one might otherwise characterize it.
That figure might seem alarming high, but I continue to practice from the same habits from day one - self taught by ear (with no amp for the first 6 years)... so no knob turning, no switching of switches, no effects to dial in, no pages of books to turn, and no internet videos to cue up, no online instruction with back and forth gaps and exchanges of playing, no pausing to do searching, no writing of transcriptions, and no written logs or notes of what I was doing... just continuous playing.
Anyone ever estimate how much of their practice time is comprised of not playing their guitar?Last edited by pauln; 02-20-2020 at 03:57 PM.
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Originally Posted by daseinOriginally Posted by mr. beaumontOriginally Posted by arielceeOriginally Posted by deacon MarkOriginally Posted by christianm77
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Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
Interesting someone mentioned meditation.... running exercises can be like meditation. I totally get that, being a meditation person myself. Because they require no (or much less) thought than for example doing arpeggios... at least until the arpeggios become 2nd nature, then you don't think about them either...
Jeff's advice above, as always, shows wisdom beyond his years. #1 cannot be overstated. It's interesting because I grew up (literally from birth), being fed big band swing. I knew every note (literally) in my head of Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, et al... I could play those tracks in my head. I didn't pick up a guitar until 15 years later. But I could swing right from the start. I "learned" melodic horn lines before I was even a musician. Bebop type jazz (even the smooth stuff of Smith, Christian, and Burrell) is more difficult for me, not really trying to play that until the age of 35 or so. I still always listened to swing, but never tried playing it or bebop until then. No wonder I've had a hard time, and gravitate towards the more melodic/less-boppy players.
This paradigm (of constant listening to one thing) is also why I'm not stellar at anything... which is ok, not being a professional musician. (well, I COULD be a pro rock musician, or blues, but that's because I cut my teeth on that stuff). But I love so many different guitar genres, I'll never be able to hyper-focus in on just one. I might listen to Tommy Emmanuel for a couple weeks, then it's Steve Vai and Andy Timmons. Then I'll pull out the old SRV records, and some Tab Benoit. After that, I'll go through an Americana phase, listening to players like David Grissom, followed by a week or two of Christian/Smith/Burrell.... I just love it all so much. I sometimes wish I DID only have ONE music I worked on ALL the time; it seems so much simpler (note I did not say easier), and I wouldn't need so much gear either! LOL But I digress....
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Originally Posted by christianm77
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Originally Posted by Howzabopping
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I did a few push-ups the other day...
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Yes, Twenty to thirty minutes every practice session(1 hour) to warm hands: finger alterations, block chords in time, im/ma scales, arpeggios, pull-offs/trills, octave scales, tremolo, upper register exercises, and thumb scales. Then, I work on my program. If it is Jazz/Bossa, I'll work on a particular piece exploring ideas, sounds, and tonal possibilities. For Classical, working on problem areas and dealing with articulation, clarity, pacing, and rubato. One of my early mentors was P.Z.--principal bassist for Chicago's Lyric Opera. In addition to Classical, he played Jazz bass as a jobbing musician in Chicago for 50 plus years. He believed a day should not pass without picking up your instrument . . . even if that only meant playing scales for 15 minutes. If you believe a musician never stops growing, "exercises" are fundamental to growth. Good playing . . . Marinero
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Yes, part of my daily practice routine is to maintain technical stuff that I've slowly gotten better at. Then I also try to work on new ideas that are still too hard or can't play up to speed but would like to add to my playing. I'll never totally get there but practicing is totally fun for me so I love the struggle.
So all the exercises are things I would use in improv.
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I'm old... have played way to much music in all settings... I may not practice, but when I run into something new, I figure it out, which is like an exercise. When I was young... I started every day with hours of exercises.
Part of practicing exercises is the notating them out, understanding what they imply and where they start and end up.
If you can't play something and you want to be able to... it doesn't happen by having a teacher tell you etc... All practice is about organization of something. You can either understand the organization and apply or memorize the results of organization and figure it out later... maybe.
Generally the teacher thing is more about babysitting, right, helping you walk across the street, over and over... eventually you recognize most situations. Rather that teaching the organization... the Who, What, Where, Why, When... the understandings behind those situations of crossing the street. I know lousy analogy. But the point about the point of exercises is not.
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Here's pretty much as close as i get to playing exercises. It's a recent small video i did practicing lines over the altered scale. You can practice patterns and still aspire to be musical.
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Cool.... gotta love late night...
yea can hear the VI-7b5, the VII7alt. I-maj7, and the bIIIma7#5... even some V7b13 licks.
Sounds great... ever do same thing but using targets... like E7alt (and the other chords) all going to ...Amaj7 or A69, Amin9 and then A7 or 13. I use to like doing same thing with any chord and what it represents going to any other chord.
Then try and make the two chords become a Tonic, like (E7alt A13) as a Tonic or One chord
Anyway... great playin and thanks for posting.
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I've always tried to separate technical practice in three sections. First playing strictly the material, exercise, arpeggio, scale, whatever it might be. Second, something like the video above, where you still play a lot of the exercise, but mixed with other stuff, like call and response, where you keep coming back to it. Third would be going for musicality, and playing as you normally would, but using the practiced stuff. All three are useful!
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