Jazz Guitar Exercises That Are a Waste of Time?

[Jonzo]

Seriously, without any intention to be a jerk here...Jonzo...how many tunes can you play?

I feel like there's a real imbalance with the way jazz is taught and learned by most folks vis the internet/ self practice.

Seriously, you kind of are. I like your posts about guitar, but you need to get over the gatekeeper thing.

[mr. beaumont]

I'm honestly not trying to be...

Look, I know you struggle with finding time to practice (so do i)...i know you've been looking for ways to categorize and rank importance in things like scales and chord voicings etc...but I never see you post about learning a song...if you want the most direct route, that's it. All this other stuff is not a prerequisite.

I'm sorry if I came out too hard with that...I dunno about being a gatekeeper, but I do think it's important to cut thru the garbage that's out there. Jazz isn't actually that hard to play...it's just that there's so much room to grow once you have the basics down.

I'm just an average player, but I've learned a lot the hard way. I see no reason why other folks should have to do the same thing.

[henryrobinett]

Relating to what markRhodes posted, there are a lot of folks who have a difficult - impossible time applying data. They can read it, study manuals, come up with theories but they cannot DO IT. They cannot seem to apply the data to anything. This is beyond just music. Things that requiring DOING just hog tie these kinds of people. They can blast through it when it's recognized, but they have to be willing to recognize it and blast through it. And the solution is to DO IT and not listen to excuses. Blasting through may even cause some physical discomfort! But it's temporary.

This may or may not apply to jonzo.

[Jonzo]

Mr. B--

Regarding learning songs--I get it. I read about Henry's approach to learning discrete skills. It interested me. I shared my approach.

This does not negate anything you say about learning tunes. In fact, I will admit that I do not work on tunes enough, and it is something I am trying to give priority in my practice (as for memorizing tunes, an efficient review schedule is beneficial there too). Most of the expert musicians I have read advocate some mix, like on Henry or Fep's lists, of skills, repertoire, and play and experimentation.

I am only addressing one facet. It is reasonable for you to remind everyone about that and the primacy of learning tunes and actually improvising.

I think this is what Henry is saying above too, and probably what people mean when they say "time with the instrument". It is just an inaccurate discription of what they really mean.

[mr. beaumont]

Ph, I definitely dig this doesn't negate learning tunes...all I'm saying is, for non pros like you and me with day jobs and families and limited practice time, we need to cut to the quick. Henry's a pro. His practice regimen doesn't work for everybody.

I also bet he knew a few hundred tunes before he started looking at his practice under a magnifying glass...but I could be wrong.

[Jonzo]

Ph, I definitely dig this doesn't negate learning tunes...all I'm saying is, for non pros like you and me with day jobs and families and limited practice time, we need to cut to the quick. Henry's a pro. His practice regimen doesn't work for everybody.

I also bet he knew a few hundred tunes before he started looking at his practice under a magnifying glass...but I could be wrong.

You are right. I often wonder if I should only be practicing arpeggios within the context of learning tunes. John McGann at Berklee used to say the job of the beginner is to learn 50 tunes--verse, chorus, solo, chords, lyrics--solid--in one genre.

...others say balance skills and repertoire.

Regardless of what you should learn, how to efficiently schedule review is an important topic.

Consider a simple question: should I review this every day or every two days? If every two days is adequate, you will increase the amount you can learn by 100%. If you think of practice efficiency like compound interest, you will understand that--all else being equal--8% improvement in efficiency will about double your results in 9 years.

To tell you the truth, Mr. B, I usually find your perspective more interesting than the pros because you squeeze practice into your day, like me, and because, as a teacher, you have expereince teaching every dumbass who walks in off the street.

I know that my style sometimes makes me sound like a know-it-all, talking about research and such. But I am always interested in reading why I might be wrong about something. I know I don't have it all figured out.

[mr. beaumont]

This is exactly why I advocate the song learning...think about it, if you practice everything in context, then you're reviewing every time you play a song....doesn't even have to be the same song...


Actually, to get back to the original topic and continue this discussion, I think the only thing that was a waste of time for me as I was starting out was thiking there was a separation between practicing technique and playing songs...everything needs to reinforce everything, especially in a limited practice time schedule...

[Kojo27]

I try again.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, once the interval is up to 4 days, there are only 17 more "okay" playings to do, over the next 18 YEARS (edit: NO, much longer than 18 years - a lifetime almost!.) I just can't imagine how one could hope to attain finesse and ease and fluidity – with a tune, or a scale fingering, or anything else – doing it this way.


kj

[Jonzo]

Remember. This is a maintenance schedule. It might take practicing every day for a year to get a skill to the level you want it. But generally the idea is that you want to break a tune down into sections, so you pracitce the hardest parts more. This system is generally used with small chunks of information. The larger and more complicated the item you are practicing with this system, the more problems you would run into.

The interval is based on the transfer of knowledge and skills from short term to long term memory. You can't really hold a whole tune in short term memory. So to learn a whole tune, you would practice small overlapping sections. A B C, C D E, E F G.

I would not perform a tune without rehearsing it just because the schedule says I am not due for review.

Also, if the skill decays to much, you just start the schedule over, practicing every day until you get it perfect. Remember, each review is a test. If you pass the test after a two month break, isn't it likely that you would in another 4 months?

You also need to modify what success means over time. If I want to know an arpeggio pattern, over time I will have many patterns at increasing speeds. I also create items that are just "improvise with this note group".

[MarkRhodes]

The only thing I might have a small exception to is the notion of trying it on a couple of things to see if it works or feels good. Very often things will not feel right because they're outside our comfort zone. It may be just what we need, but it's uncomfortable or hard or gives us a headache. Sometimes you have to pull up the chair and work it out well BEFORE you can have a valid point of view. That's what teachers are for. GOOD teachers any way. .

O, sure, I agree with that. But with Jonzo's suggestion of scheduled repetition, I don't know what a person could do other than try it out and see how it goes. He's not talking about a particular mechanic---like, say, a reverse rake, which comes easily to some players while others have to work at a long time to get it right and they work at for as long as it takes because they're determined to learn it. It's something they want to master.

One thing with Jonzo's suggestion is that one could fool around it outside the practice room. Try that scheduling with something non-musical you are trying to learn, or perhaps something music-related but not part of your playing, such as memorizing song lyrics or the sequence of John Coltrane's record releases.

Dr. Bjork's theory challenges a lot of things I always heard, and things I did as a student, so I want to see if his advice could help me in and outside the music room. I figure, what have I got to lose?

[Jonzo]

Kojo--

One other thing to mention is thatm 1.7 is a starting point for average people and average material. If you use one of the computer programs, it tracks how difficult you rate an item, and how often you fail it, and adjusts the number accordingly. So something that is very difficult might have a number like 1.2.

[Kojo27]

[Kojo27]

[MarkRhodes]

fep - That's a great chart!!! Very cool.

I agree. Great chart. It set me thinking, though, instead of a chart of what we intend to do, wouldn't it be eye-opening to have a chart of what we actually do (and how much time we spend doing it)? Playing music makes it hard to keep track of clock time. (This is why so many songwriters say they wrote song X in "five minutes." They weren't keeping track of the clock time; it's just a convenient number to use. Duke Ellington once talked about walking down the hallway to his bedroom after a gig and brushing his hands along the keys of a piano, stopping to admire the sound thus made, tinkering with it a minute, and the next thing he knew, the sun was coming up!)

I use a kitchen timer and set it for fifteen minutes for most things I practice. (If I want to do thirty minutes, I re-start the timer and continue for another fifteen minutes.) But sometimes I interrupt a 'session' to play a tune an exercise reminds me of, or forget to start the timer and don't know how long I've been at whatever I'm playing now. Then there's the after-practice stuff, picking up the guitar in the evening to play some tunes for fun: how much time do I spend doing that, and how much time on each tune? I don't know. Some tunes seem to get under my fingers much quicker than others, but I don't keep track of how long I've worked on "God Bless the Child" as opposed to "Stormy Weather" (--two tunes I've played a lot lately because I love them and just want to play them.)

One thing I've realized is that if I don't sleep well, or enough, my practices really suffer. Being tired slows my mind AND my fingers.

[Space Pickle]

What works best for me in any style of music is to get a gig and then focus my practicing on preparing for it.

[Krah13]

What are the exercises you later realised were a complete waste of valuable practice time?

Difficult question. I mostly practice music through the study of jazz standards. I am constantly trying to invent my own exercises based on excerpts of standard tunes.
Check out my work.
Guitar Chord Progressions-2. My Funny Valentine (excerpt)

[Limetones]

The term 'Advanced' was used deliberately because it would, I thought, provoke answers from a variety of players since the term is not easy to define specifically.

I have played for many years, forced due to circumstances to advance sluggishly. In EFL I'd call myself the 'World's Greatest False Beginner'. If one plays alone one has to plot a course between marks. Without steady, regular exposure to playing out with others, goals can be set but the way of getting there is anybody's guess.

It's important to be determined and patient and very modest. And given limited practice time, essential to learn efficiently which for the amateur I think, means being relaxed by having fun and not taking yourself too seriously. It was only when I realised this that I clipped practice sub-routines down to whatever I could transpose to any key, whatever sounded cool and especially, with rhythm chord playing in swing which I like - only that which could swing so hard I'd dance.

I'm an English language teacher and I know fun builds confidence in shy students and confidence enables students to focus more effectively which means they learn more, faster.

[Limetones]

Thank you Krah for reminding me. I've returned to Mickey Baker's book after umpteen years and now that my wrist has loosened up I can make the progressions really swing and since I've been looking at real book charts off and on for so long I can also hear the potential. Ignorance is a terrible thing. Only very recently I learned that all the time I've spent trying to develop the muscles in my wrist has been pointless (there are no muscles in your wrist). Now I keep a picture of the musculature of the arm, wrist and hand on my desktop ready to reference. You learn your own method over time. I have a very visual memory. In classical playing I learnt not to look at the neck and so restricted my development in playing electric guitar accordingly. If I could have pictured the precise arrangement of muscle tensions in my arm earlier I could have synchronised it with an understanding of mechanics from school. It happened in the end I suppose. It's true that you have to keep playing. I got nowhere for about twenty five years. Now I'm trying to figure out how to write lines I like over the changes I like. I record chord changes to Audacity and construct strings of scale tones, ornaments, stolen licks and arpeggios but it's painstaking and a study rather than music making. Essential though I think. If I improvise I start with some phrases I memorise and then just wing it til I get bored or I record the chord sequence to a standard, learn the melody and then try and wing it looping the progression. I've noticed that an understanding of theory makes it possible to reach for notes I haven't tried and a long time playing means I can jump to notes as they enter my head or, slide into them from close enough so they can sound more or less as close as I'd want them to. If I'm listening to Lee Morgan and he plays a line I like, provided it's in my head, I can find it on the guitar before I forget it. I see what Hal Galper means by getting 'faster ears'.