Practice regimen

I’ve been thinking about my practice regimen lately. (As opposed to actually practicing, which would require that I sit at the piano and work, which I just haven’t been in the mood for lately.) Back in March, I developed a sort of plan, a list made up of things that I thought might be useful to practice on a regular basis. I put it in a spreadsheet so that I could print out a sort of tracking grid to actually be able to see what I was practicing and when and how often and sometimes (if I noted it), for how long. It was an excellent idea and I kept at it for one whole month before it got shunted to the wayside. Since I’ve been working on some new things in my lessons, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit it, add to it, and start using it again.

Here it is:


Obviously, there is far too much here to practice it all every day, unless you maybe do so for just a few minutes on each exercise or practice for at least two hours – which is out of my reach at the moment due to a lack of discipline. I would think that a minimum of ten minutes per area is required to realize any sort of advancement, but I find I have to spend more than that on most things before I feel I’m doing any better on it (like scales and stride work.).

One of the important things missing from the sheet is tunes. I feel that after practicing, one must make time for playing. That can be playing just to play, or playing to implement what was practiced. More often than not, for me, it’s the latter, because I think that’s what makes me sound better, but I also an not entirely against the idea of just playing a few songs to make me feel good in general and forget about the burn in my knuckles.

And so, having written all I can write for the moment about practice, I think I will go and actually do some. School starts pretty soon and if I’m going to take some classes, I’m going to have to audition, so, I’d better practice.

Going around in circles (of fifths)

I did not have a piano lesson the week of Thanksgiving, and due to my instructor having a rehearsal, did not have one last week, either. Before the hiatus began, he instructed (what piano instructors do) me to work on three-note chord voicings going around the circle of fifths. This is a practical exercise for any jazz musician, one that can never be done too much. In my zealousness to learn our jazz ensemble's music and perform it adequately, I had not been practicing anything in the circle of fifths. Sad part is, practicing chord voicings based on the CO5 would probably have done me the most good.

So, after asking me to play three-note voicings around the circle, and being essentially unable to do so without a lot of mistakes and stoppages to think, that's what I've been practicing for the last three weeks. I've also worked some on four note chord voicings using the 9th and 6th notes, which in some respects is easier, but is difficult to get sounding right. I even learned to play Miles Davis' "Tune Up" using the four-note voicings.

It hasn't been enough. I need to do more of it. I need to work through the boredom.

If you are a jazz musician and you haven't worked through some skill on your instrument using the CO5, I humbly suggest you do so today, or at least, at your next opportunity. No need to thank me. The continual improvement of jazz music everywhere is enough thanks for me.

A new practice routine

Pretty soon, I'm going to write about my experience in buying music equipment. It will, I believe, be very practical and useful for readers of this blog, especially those who are truly new to jazz and the world of music, maybe need to shop around for and buy equipment, but haven't done so in a while. But first, I'm going to put down my practice plan.

This plan is to get me playing better, not to learn tunes (so much), as to just get better. My piano instructor says I need to know more chords and I need to know them more fluently and naturally to play jazz, and he's right. Plus with jazz ensemble being over (for now), I don't have to jam certain tunes into my brain. I can just do what my nerves, muscles, tendons, and will tell me. So, here it is:

-Play three note chord voicings through the cycle of fifths until I've got them down.
-Go through the Real Book and play every song I could play before the concert but haven't played in the last three months (there are a lot of them).
-Work completely through the jazz styles book that I bought and haven't even cracked yet.
-At least once during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays (each), go through Hanon in one sitting, front to back.
-Listen to (carefully) and review all the new music that I picked up over the last few months that I haven't reviewed on Amazon yet.
-Go through the piano chords newsletters I've received over the last two months and pay attention to them and work on them
-Work on Christmas songs
-Play four note chord voicings including the 9th and 13th through the cycle of fifths until I've got them down.

I should be playing pretty good by the beginning of next year if I stick to this plan. I'll let you know how it works out.

Now, to work!

Through sickness and in health...

Man, catching a cold in the middle of summer is no fun. I felt this one coming on as early as Sunday, and have been fighting it with Listerine and aspirin. Yesterday (Tuesday), it just started taking over at three in the afternoon, and by the time I took Mrs. S to dinner for her birthday, I was reeling. I used all my energy then, but knowing I have a lesson tonight, I wasn't going to blow off the piano entirely. I sat and played for about a half hour, surprised at my dexterity with the melody line of Ornithology, disappointed with everything on Maiden Voyage. I decided there would be no point in working on any drills in the state I was in, so I just watched the weather before going to bed.

I slept fitfully, if at all, last night, sweating bullets even with the thermostat turned down an extra degree. I used Helen Merrill's CD to lull me to sleep, but that only succeeded in making me have nightmares about trying to find new Helen Merrill CD's and finding there to be so many and most of them priced at $35, that I became despondent. No surprise then this morning when I woke up and felt like a dirty dish rag, if a dirty dish rag can feel like much of anything. I summoned the energy to shower, dress and take various sundry cold medicines in large quantities. I succeeded in driving myself to work, even stopping to get gas on the way. ($55 for a tank full - a new record for my G6).

My goals for tonight's piano lesson are simple:
-Work on and talk about mechanics, especially the scales and drills I've been fussing with.
-At least take a look at Ornithology and Maiden Voyage, even though (I've no doubt) I won't be able to play them
-Keep the lesson short and don't give the instructor my cold.

Modest goals, modest but steady improvement, and damn my virus weakened body.

Drilling, but not for oil

I'm drilling for skill, baby!

I've been a fiend for piano practice over the last four days. It's those lazy days of summer and with nothing much else to do, I spent the mornings over the holidays doing yardwork and the afternoons beating the daylights out of my piano. I've been working from my jazz chord book and from Hanon. In the latter, I made it all the way to the scales, and I have been working pretty hard on them for two days. I'm a little confused about the utilization of the melodic minor and "ancient" (I think that's what it's called) scales, so I sort of let that taper off for now until after Wednesday when I can ask my instructor about them. (I'm also going to ask him about the practicality of my current drill routine - though I don't think he'll say anything one way or the other.) In the jazz chord book, for now, I'm not trying to make any sense out of anything, just playing. And playing. I figure, this stuff has to become second nature to me, somehow, so for now, I don't need to analyze too much, just get the muscle memory going.

Of course, I also play a few tunes, and I can almost make Ornithology go, but I can't play the left hand parts yet. I've also managed to put a skeletal version of Maiden Voyage together, which is something. It's just good to feel my hands bending to the task. Now, if I could just get my back to do the same...

Maybe the secret is DON'T relax...

I'm off work from today. With the customers our company's factory supplies mostly shut down this week and next, the two days I did work this week were slow and uneventful. I guess you could say, I went into shut down mode as of last week.

And I think that's why I haven't been able to wring a single decent tune out of my piano in two days.

I tell you, I have really sucked playing since Sunday afternoon. I can't make anything swing. I can't put Maiden Voyage together, still haven't gotten halfway through the Ornithology licks, just...nothing. I can't play any songs from memory all the way through. Can't even make a simple tune like It Don't Mean a Thing sound straight up. Just...nothing. The only thing I can figure is that, since I play the piano mostly for relaxation, if I'm already mentally and physically relaxed, the playing doesn't go for me. Maybe that's it. I don't know. I know there are waves and that every musician will go through a phase where they can play well and then a phase where not so, and then a phase where they play poorly. I'm just wondering: why now? "Over relaxation", or call it, an altered mental state, is the only reason I can think of.

Anyway, my folks will be arriving in Alabama today to spend the Independence Day holidays with me and Mrs. S, so today I've got to focus on straightening the guest bedroom, vacuuming the house, and sundry details such as those. Maybe I'll play better this evening.

A thought about motivation and saving money

Over the years, I have, like many people, had a number of hobbies and interests. Some of them, like music and stamp collecting, I have been pursuing avidly, and more or less continuously, for thirty or more years. Some, like bowling and aquariums, I have been in and out of, seriously studying and working on them when I'm in, not even missing them when I'm out. Some pursuits, like disc golf and stunt kite flying, I went gangbusters from the get go and then suddenly stopped and just never went back. One thing, though, that all my pursuits, interests and hobbies have in common is that I tend to give them more energy and to do better in them when I have something new to pique my interest. Maybe a new bowling ball or wrist device for bowling. Maybe a new stamp album or catalog for stamp collecting. Maybe some pregnant guppies for the aquarium or a new long distance driver for disc golf. Whatever, it just keeps me involved. When I started back playing the piano, before I found an instructor, I set about building my own library of drill books and music, and that drove my learning for a long time. Inevitably, after a spell, I would stop making progress in one or more of the books, or I'd get tired of playing the same songs, or whatever, and my interest and enthusiasm would wane. Then I would read about or hear about this other drill book or method approach and I'd be all over it again and playing out of the new stuff and the old stuff, making real progress. Then I found an instructor and he led me to some other books and methodologies and again, everything picked up. Lately, I've been doing well without buying any new books in over a year (although I have bought a lot of music to listen to).

Well the other day, I was surfing around on amazon.com and I found another jazz piano book that was getting nothing but rave five star reviews. I had been going through a rough patch in my playing and was looking for something to excite me again, and I thought I found it. I was very close to dumping another seventeen bucks into my jazz piano education, but then, I stopped myself. (Yes. I may in fact be finally starting to mature.) I thought, you know what? I've got five or six drill books already, and I've worked pieces of all of them, some of them I've even gotten more than halfway through, and yet, not one of them, not one of them have I gone through cover to cover yet. Not one. Maybe I ought to prove to myself that I at least possess the fortitude and stick-to-itiveness to actually complete one book. So, I promised myself: I will not buy any more piano books until I completely play through one of the drill books I already have.

Now, I could have chosen an easy one in the interest of just bashing through the book and getting to buy the latest thing that has caught my interest, but I thought that not only was that "cheating", but that it also wouldn't do much for my piano playing. So, then I thought, well, pick the hardest one then, but I realized that again, I would bog down somewhere in the middle and no doubt, lose interest, and even the promise of a new drill book could not excite me enough to push through and complete it. So, I chose one of my middling books, a jazz chord book, that I had previously made it through about twenty of the fifty exercises. And so, that is the one I'm working on now. I'm also using Hanon everyday to work on fingering and slowly, also, pushing my way through that book. I have a starting point that I return to everyday in each, and a max advance point, as well as a "start practice" point. It is possible I will make it through both of them at about the same time.

Then maybe I can buy two new drill books.

The point is, motivate yourself. The music will come on its own. And don't waste your money buying the latest thing until you've gotten all the value out of the things you've already invested money in.

Three-day weekend practice sessions

Or what I'm working on right now.

Surrey with a Fringe on the Top. Still trying to get it going. The chords are tightly spaced and the tune moves quickly and just playing that one repeated note for most of the bars gets irritating pretty quick. I'm trying to do more like Tyner's version, playing triplets and throwing in an E-flat to brighten it up a little. Still, the chords are giving me trouble. When I've had enough of that, I go to

You Took Advantage of Me. This one I'm having even more trouble with, mainly because the chords are so dense and I often have to stop and think about them (at this stage). Eventually, it will smooth out, but I'm using this song as my stride exercise, taking advantage of the chromatically moving bass line. This is one of my major weaknesses, and it will take more than a few minutes to work out of it. So when I get tired of sounding completely bad, I go to something just a little easier, like

The Blue Room. I play this like the Ella Fitzgerald version, with no chords on the first and fourth beats, with the chord changes coming on beats two and three, like a horn section punching in. When I played it at my lesson on Wednesday, my instructor, who'd never suggested I play that song or heard me play it, said it was the most "complete" sounding thing he'd ever heard me play (in nine months of lessons). Which is good, because it is. Of course, he cautioned me not to get too attached to that one style and to not overdo it, but he said that because he knows I get lazy and tend to stay where I'm at, once I reach some degree of facility and decent sound.

Today and tomorrow, while working on those tunes, I'm also going to pull the drill books out, especially the stride book. I bought some Bud Powell CD's today, but it will take a while for them to get here, so my aim is to work on the stride method and then hopefully be able to try some of the (easier) things that I will no doubt find on the CD's once they arrive. I just continue on, baby.

Tomorrow, I'll also make some additions to the Yoity Tot list, I think.

Creative Use of Drills

Back when I first started taking piano lessons, I spent a lot of time on drills. I felt (and still feel) it is important to continually work on the technical aspects of piano playing, and since my instructor and I are focusing mainly on learning "jazz", per se, we don't spend a lot of time or effort looking just at the instrument and accomplished playing of it. (Maybe we should. Jury's still out on that one.) I, therefore, took it upon myself to pick up a number of different drill books to more or less work by myself on playing better. I assumed that my jazz would get better as the drills did.

Probably some of you musicians, especially pianists, out there, know where this is going.

It wasn't long after this that I got pretty sick of drills. For a while, I could feel the difference the drills were making. I could tell my playing was better. I had more confidence. Songs sounded cleaner. My weakness is, I like to hear me make nice sounds, so once I reach a certain level of proficiency on a tune, I'm content to play it, as is, forever and ever. I never try to make it sound any better or any different, because if I do, I make mistakes and that makes it sound not as good as playing it the way I've learned it. And, of course, once the tunes flow, the drills are boring, even irritating, so I skip one day, and then the next, then I pull out the drill book and find I can't play anything at or just before where I marked where I left off, so I put the drill book aside to play tunes, and suddenly, it's five weeks later and I haven't touched the darned thing.

Yikes! No wonder I suck.

Some time just back when I started all this, I asked my instructor what to do about this problem of drills, sounding crappy, learning tunes, and getting better. I showed him a drill I was working on out of a stride piano drill book and he just said, "Put it in a tune." He grabbed the real book and quickly found a song with a lot of chords that last for one or more bars: Take the 'A' Train. And sure enough, it was simple for him to play a stride piano drill with facility through the entire song. When I got home and tried it, it sounded like crap, and while I knew that practice would improve it, again, I was too content to play something that sounded adequate, rather than try to get better.

Well, I hereby announce to all my faithful readers and myself: I'm going back to basics. I'm going to do drills, I'm going to put them into songs, and I'm going to play them and practice them, relentlessly, until they sound good. No more excuses. No more settling for "sounds good enough". Every song needs a new approach now and then. You never know what revelation awaits and how happy that sound will make you (or how much happier you'll be with your old sound because the new riff really doesn't sound all that good). Put more in, get more out. Put more in, get more out. I can do it. You can do it.

Let's do it.