One of the most important principles of mine
while practicing is to work on a small number of things at a time.
There's a Bruce Lee quote I think about all the time which is, “I fear not the man who has
practiced a hundred kicks one time but rather I fear the man who's practiced one kick a hundred times."
And that, for me, is what musicianship, at least my musicianship, is all about.
I have a limited number of things that I'm good at that are core to my sound and my approach and
my message, and I focus really, really intensely on those things. So when I sit down to practice,
I keep that in mind and I generally don't do too many areas of study at any given time.
And usually I have like four areas of study which I'll go through for about three months at a time.
For instance, the way I like to do it, I'll pick those those four areas. It might be
playing new tunes, learning a bunch of tunes, another area might be getting better at the
key of B major. I'm not very good at B major. A third area might be, you know,
learning this Herbie Hancock transcription that I'm going through. And then a fourth area
might be some comping exercises, you know, voicing exercises or something like that.
It would be so great if three months from now, if I was a little bit better the key of B major.
It'd be nice if I learned 10 tunes or maybe 15 tunes or whatever. It'd be really nice if I had
this like Herbie Hancock transcription. Maybe I want to learn his “Dolphin Dance” solo or
something. That's a really great transcription if you want to learn it, highly recommend it.
Maybe each month I have like two or three voicing exercises that I'm learning and maybe they're all
related to one another. So in three months, I'll have, you know, nine or ten — eight, nine, or ten
new exercises that I'm really good at, that are all kind of related. It'd be nice to have them be
related, because if they're all separate, well then, you got 10 things that you sort of know.
And you're not going to use stuff you sort of know. I've never successfully
played something that I sort of know well. That's never happened. And if you
zoom out, and you look at what you can accomplish in three months that's a
really good set of things: You got a transcription. You got 15 tunes.
You're getting better at B major. Maybe you learn a couple tunes in B major. And then you've got
your voicing exercises that you're getting better at, to the tune of like nine or ten of them.
Well damn, if you did that for a whole year — that's a lot! Expand that out to
a five or ten year span — you're going to be killing it, that's a lot. And yet,
when you zoom really into what you can accomplish in just a month,
that's very a reasonable amount of work for someone at a certain level, I think.
Every month, the first of the month, I like to write down what I need to do to hit that
three-month goal. And then every week, I write down what I need to do to hit that month goal,
and then every night before I go to bed I write down what I need to do the next day
to hit that weekly goal, or whatever. So I'm, in a sense, I'm like writing my program
and then I'm executing it. I'm running it every day when I sit down.
A few things happen, when you do this. When you plan out your practice,
the first thing that happens is you know what to do. I think the biggest problem that students have
is they sit down, and when you don't know what to do, you guess. You just start playing something,
but then there's a thought in your mind — “what if this isn't the right thing?”
That thought should never enter your mind when you're practicing. If you
don't believe in what you're doing, you're not going to have very much
fun. Like is this even going to account for anything? Am I going to get better? Is this
what I should be doing? Should I be doing something else? Ah, this isn't working.
When those thoughts are entering your mind, you have a pretty low chance of continuing.
If you're organized, and you've planned out what you're going to do, and you see how it's going
to hit that longer goal, that belief, that confidence in what you're going — in what
you're doing — is going to make it much more fun, and in the long run, much more effective.
Then, once you have a couple practice sessions or a couple weeks, a couple months,
not only do you have that plan of going forward that's bringing you confidence, you also have that
past history of it having worked that's going to give you a lot of confidence. And you'd be amazed
what happens to your feeling about practicing once this happens. Once you do this for a couple
months, practice stops being this — it no longer is this, you know, tedious thing that may or
may not work. And slowly it'll become this thing where you've planned on it, you believe in it, you
know what's going to work, and you have a track history of it working. And then it's really fun.
When it comes to dividing my practice time, I really like the
15 minute period because that's enough time for me to really dig into something and focus
and commit something to memory. You know, if I'm only spending one minute on something,
the odds of me committing that to memory in a meaningful way is not as, it's not as strong.
At the same time, practicing something for 30 minutes or 45 minutes straight,
you know, if I'm doing the same four bars for 45 minutes, I might get bored. And so I like to have
a way to break up the practice a little bit so I keep things moving. What that might look like is,
let's say I'm doing a Herbie Hancock transcription, that “Dolphin Dance”
transcription I mentioned earlier. Something I might do is do, say, four bars in a day,
or two bars in a day. What I might do is play, say, the first half note of of the solo,
and do that for a whole minute straight. Just over and over and over again. Then I might play the
next half note for another minute. Then I might play that first bar now for two or three minutes,
just over and over and over again. Then I get to bar two and I do the same thing.
So at this stage, maybe I've spent five minutes on bar one, now I spend five minutes on bar two,
and then the five minutes that round out that 15 minute segment,
I might spend putting it together. So that's two bars in 15 minutes. That's pretty good.
You know, a lot of people when they learn transcriptions, they make the mistake
of — you stumble through bar one, you stumble through bar two, you stumble through bar three,
they stumble through bar four, they stumble through bar five, they stumble, stumble,
stumble all the way through, right? They've never played it before. So they're making hella mistakes
and they don't remember anything. And then you get through bar 32, then you go back to bar one and
don't remember how it goes. Right? Because now, since you've stumbled through the whole thing and
five minutes have gone by, you don't remember what you did five minutes ago one time with mistakes.
It's really important to break things up into small pieces and to do them over and over and
over again, because instead of stumbling through it for five minutes, you could
have just spent five minutes on that first bar, had it perfect to where you don't have to learn
it ever again. You know? For me, it's all about learning something once. Try to learn everything
once. You don't have to learn things twice. You will, you will have to do that at times,
but ideally try to aim to learn things just once, so you don't have to waste time going back.
My advice to anybody who's trying to come up with their own practice routine would be to think about
how you want to sound. First off, what sound are you going for? And then ask yourself,
what does my brain and body have to do to achieve that. And break it down into really
small pieces. If there is a certain bebop line or phrase that you want to get into your playing,
think, ask yourself, what is it going to take to be able to play that. It's not just learning how
to play it once or twice or even learning how to play it, like, perfectly so you'll always nail it.
There's also a part of your brain that has to think of it, that has to be able to pop into
your head when the time comes to play it. So I'm always thinking about what my mind has to has to
do in order for the playing to happen. And so when you're coming up with your own practice routines,
yeah, ask yourself how you want to sound and what it's going to take to get there. Then figure out
what those those small mental steps are. And then play them over and over and over again.
Do them over and over and over again so that you can come up with that the sound that you want.
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