PlayJazzGuitar.com Forum

[dustin]

Just wondering how some of u may lay out your practice time. I simply do a warm up ( could use some new ones though ) , then move to transcribing, learning as I go. Would like some chord progressions to add to the warm up. What u guys doin? Thanks again

[JakeJew]

geez at this point i'm pretty f**in meticulous.

At a certain point I think we might all have to ask ourselves, how much messing around am I going to allot myself and how dedicated and structured am I going to be? Music is, ideally, a form of expression and should be loose and communicative, but it takes a lot of hours to play jazz guitar well, and there are tons of technical things (like good time, meters, repertoire, reading, etc) that just take a lot of work, especially if you're like me and you can't get to nearly as many sessions as you'd like

Since I'm going a bit crazy right now I'll get long winded...

The first doctors I saw about guitar-related pain issues in my hands and arms said that it's imperative that every practicing musician try to not play for more than 25 minutes at a time. It's the max before you're putting your body under unnecessary strain. So it's 25 minutes playing, 5 minute break, repeat, repeat, as opposed to 3 hours straight or whatever.

While on one hand this blows because you can't just forget about everything and get into a good groove for a while, I've found some intense benefits of it.

First of all, understand that with my issues I have to follow several guidelines in my practice routine:

-I can only play so many hours per day, and it's not good to play too little and then go right back into my full routine
-I have to mix up my practicing - if I do some sort of linear thing for 25 minutes I make sure to do some sort of chord thing for 25 minutes
-If I want to play the full # of hours per day it's wise for me to make some of those practice sessions fairly light material, like soloing with half notes, or just right hand work.

So I'm in this situation where I have a finite amount of time to play the guitar every day, no matter how free my schedule may be. Right now I just want to be as bad ass as I can get with this stuff, so I figure I better be really organized, I better have a goal for each practice session, and I better have distinct and defined longer term goals.

I get 4-6 25 minute sessions every day. I always keep a list of about 4-6 things to choose from to do every day. Half of them more melody-oriented and have of them more comp-oriented. When I feel confident about one of these, I scratch it off the list.

I've taken some lessons lately, I come with a digital recorder, I record the lessons then later listen back to the file and take notes and then use those notes to determine what would be the best use of my practice time.

I guess my advice is, use sessions, lessons, and gigs to determine what your weak points are and develop a practice schedule, and honestly I'm pretty into this 25-minute session thing. I used to be incredibly unbalanced in my practice routine, now I just pick a small handful of things to work on consistently, rather than 12 different things or just one thing for way too long (great way to strain your tendons, nerves, etc)

but the flip side is that none of us (I don't think) wants to sound like a robot. It's important to do things to get in touch with creativity as well...I think this is an are where i personally am very unbalanced. I'll sort of just be in "creative mode" for a few years and not do any practicing, then just practice my ballz off for a few years but not really feel very expressive on the instrument. I've been working on this though, there are some ways around it.
_________________
"Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure that it is the antithesis of self-consciousness." - Aaron Copland

[JakeJew]

this might be useful to some people here, maybe not. I made this list to help organize myself as a teacher of beginning guitarists, but I think it's a reasonable tool to assess one's own practicing and playing.

How much do you do/work on the following? This is in order by my perspective of priority

1. Listening

2. Technique

3. Repetoire

4. Ear

5. Rhythm

6. Reading

7. Pitch/tuning/intonation

8. Theory

9. Writing/creating/composing

10. Improvisation

11. Fretboard knowledge

12. Tone

all right, forgive me pjg board, having a bit of an episode but trying to make good use of it
_________________
"Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure that it is the antithesis of self-consciousness." - Aaron Copland

[Sandemose]

Something I do everyday (or at least everytime I sit down to practice) is playing pentatonics. I love the sound, they provide a solid structure of the architecture of the guitar for me, they can be used over so many chords, hip alternatives when navigating through hard/easy chordchanges etc.

About 1 hour everyday following this ruitine:

I play over minorchords with different intervallic distance for each other. I program Band in a Box and set it on 120 bpm. One chord per bar. I try to play as long phrases as possible without stopping, sixteens notes and tripplets.


wholestep appart: Bm, C#m, D#m, Fm, Gm, Am (and starting from Bbm)
This harmonic movement sound hip over to create dorian sounds. Like Bm pentatonic-C#m pentatonic over Bm7, etc.

minor third appart: Bm, Dm, Fm, Abm (then starting from Bbm, and Cm7 same minor third relationship). This works great to create a altered chord sound over B7#9, Bm pentatonic-Dm pentatonic, etc.

major third appart: Bm, D#m, F#m (and starting from Cm, C#m and Bbm). I recently started with this and its quite hard only to follow the chords as the go by (my goal is to play this easely at 170-180 bpm). I think it might be used as a tool to play outside over a long vamp, caskading phrases ala Rosenwinkel perhaps. Over, like Dm? Maybe start on Am pentatonic one bar, C#m pentatonic half a bar, Fminor pentatonic half a bar, back to Am pentatonic. This should be cool over a long dominant chord as well, breaking up from mixolydian habbits.

fourth appart: just playing through the cycles of fourths, twelve bar periods.

fifth appart: same as above.

I have set this up so each project repeats 10 times (each vamp I have duplicated so they fit approximatly within 30 bar period which repeats 10 times). Playing through all this takes about one hour. I always feel hungry to practice more and warmed up, fingerwise and earwise when Ive done this. I always discover something new each time. I always feel more confident in my playing and more solid.



Best regards,

Sandemose
_________________
"Its just a problem, we´ll deal with it" Ted Greene

[stratocasturbator]

one thing that's been working for me lately is the avoidance of writing long detailed jazz guitar forum posts and putting that time back into practicing!

[JakeJew]

[Disco Volante]

Jake Jew and Sandemose. I like the ideas you guys have posted. I personally need a routine for Jazz guitar playing as I don't really have one at the moment and therefore my playing is pretty shocking.
I particularly like the 25min slots for different facets of playing.

[JohnB]

I go and see a guitarist in Manchester from time to time and he gave me some very good advice on practicing. It basically boiled down to practicing one thing until you have absolutely nailed it. My practice has become far more fulfilling and productive. Imagine, he said, that your in Beijing and you see everyone of their bikes and the all look better than yours so you get off your bike and try to get on someone elses. In the mean time someone cicks yours, leaving you with no bike.
STAY ON YOUR BIKE! take one idea, arpeggios in between the 3rd and 7th frets. Practice this until you are fully comfortable with it.
As for this idea of not doing more than 25 minutes practice at a time, im not a fan of that. Look at oscar peterson, granted he got arthritis but look at all the other musicians who just practice solidly until their happy with what their doing. Keith Jarret, Chick Corea to name two non guitarists.

My 2 cents.
_________________
he who kisses the joy as it flies,
bathes in eternities sunrise.

[Sandemose]

One thing to do is to divide genres within jazz and work with them for a longer period of time, in blocks over several weeks.

Im at the time working with blues/jazzblues (there of the pentatonic exercise above). I look through the whole realbook (pdf) only playing blues tunes. I write down notation in a worddocument if something stand out (like Fmajor7 in Blues for Alice etc.). You get "basic" blues tunes (Freddie Freeloader, etc) minor blues tunes (Mr. PC) and more advanced (like Alice) etc. You will get occupied with hard themes/heads. You will work with II-V progressions. You´ll learn a bunch of tunes etc. I will do this for like three more weeks (Ive been working with this for about one week now). If I play anything but the blues (hey, that just sounded like a title to a tune!?) I can only play songs that I know by heart or just playing freely.

I search all over the internet for information about different ways to play blues/jazzblues. Read about players, biographies etc. I search and look for substitution ideas, pentatonic ideas, diminshed, fourth ideas, etc. Just collecting all information available and putting into context. Get it to work within the tune(s).

Next genre could be latin jazz (all different kinds of claves, bossa, samba etc, chords, history etc). After that perhaps rhythmchanges, ballads or bebop tunes? Maybe work with one perticular instrumentalist/composes like Charlie Parker, Miles, Coltrane, Evans and only play tunes (all tunes in the realbook and/or on recordings).

The best thing is to limit your self, since within limitation waits freedom. To limit yourself is to be dicplined about your craftmanship.

Best, Sandemose
_________________
"Its just a problem, we´ll deal with it" Ted Greene

[JakeJew]

[JohnB]

ah right. cool.

Thats good advice but its not something that I do personally. Good sensible thinking though.
_________________
he who kisses the joy as it flies,
bathes in eternities sunrise.

[Jake Hanlon]

My personal thoughts on practicing in this link as a pdf download from my website

http://www.jakehanlon.com/live/video_popup.php/chapter_1.pdf?filename=dl_file&gallery=true&id=6&download=1&start_dl=1
_________________
Guitarist, Composer, Professor of Music St Francis Xavier University

www.jakehanlon.com


Debut Album Follow @ Itunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/follow/id406062013

[Viper]

For practice I have taken to playing air guitar. Well not quite. I just take a lead sheet and sing the solfa until I know it off by heart.

The idea is to really know the head so that its part of you. Ear training...

Does it work? I don't know but I will let you in a few weeks or months.

[andy_rothstein]