Now you've probably heard classic practicing advice like get rid of distractions plan out your
sessions ahead of time or keep a practice journal and while those are all really good tips i'm not
going to be talking about those today you see most of us don't have as much practice time as we would
like or at least that's how we feel so what i like to focus on is what's called the pareto
principle or also known as the 80 20 rule which says that 80 of your results are coming from 20
of your efforts so i want to help you find out what that 20 is so that you can start
cutting out all the rest of everything else and just focusing on the things that work
and shorten your practice time so i'm going to walk you through five filters that i want you to
filter all the things you could possibly practice down each one of these filters and once you get to
the very last filter you should have a really good idea of what you should be practicing and what you
shouldn't be practicing in such a way that will easily get you better results than if you were
just going about your old way of doing things filter number one is filtering from your master
goal now all of us have different goals that we're trying to achieve in jazz and if we don't really
know what those are it's possible that we could just be wandering aimlessly from youtube video
to youtube video and not really getting results in our jazz playing so it's important that you think
about what your musical mountain top is you know a lot of us are climbing the side of a mountain
and we're climbing this cliff of jazz practicing and becoming a better jazz musician but we really
don't know what it is on top that we're trying to shoot for so make sure that you identify what your
master goal is your musical mountaintop and the important thing to do is to make sure that
this goal is measurable it's something that you can measure your results is something that is
attainable like it's not way out of the scope of reasonable achievement for you but also that it is
challenging something that will take some effort so once you really identify what that is whether
it be i want to play at my local jam session or i want other people to start calling me for gigs
or i want to learn this many jazz standards once you know that you'll have a better idea
of what you should be practicing and shouldn't be practicing and then when we go through the
rest of the filters everything is going to be so much clearer so now that we've established our
master goal filter let's go on to filter number two filter number two is the three pillars of
jazz improvisation now the three pillars of jazz improvisation is what i have found throughout my
entire career through teaching students through playing as a professional jazz musician here in
new york city and through my colleagues are the three main things that every single jazz musician
needs to be practicing and focusing their time on and those three pillars are number one technique
number two jazz repertoire and number three jazz language so in general we're talking about
technique we're talking about instrument specific technique like trumpet players playing long tones
or guitar players working on fretboard mastery piano players working on two-hand syncopation
and technique together right so those are instrument-specific techniques but also i'm
talking about jazz techniques such as being able to play chord tones and guide tones and even yes
some chord scale theory some basics that will help you navigate your instrument better and achieve
the actual technical side of playing jazz on your instrument and then we talk about jazz repertoire
i'm talking about jazz standards learning as many jazz standards as possible and i'll talk more
about that one in just one second but the third pillar of jazz improvisation is jazz language
so this includes learning jazz language such as learning licks such as learning parts of jazz
solos but it also includes composing your own jazz solos and improvising your own jazz solos giving
yourself the room to take what you've learned from other great jazz musicians and apply it to your
own playing for yourself so it's important that whenever you're practicing you're thinking about
not only what your master goal is but also are you working on something has to do with instrument
specific or jazz technique are you working on jazz standards and are you working on learning
jazz language if you focus on those three pillars you're guaranteed to get results a lot quicker
than if you're going outside of those three things so now that we've applied the master goal filter
and we've applied the three pillars of jazz improvisation filter let's move on to the third
filter now the third filter is the jazz standards filter now obviously learning jazz repertoire was
one of the three pillars but we can break those three pillars down even smaller to understanding
that every single thing that we learn and we practice we can apply it to a jazz standard
hands down the best thing you can do for your jazz playing is learn more jazz standards that'll teach
you all the harmony to know that will help you start exploring different chord progressions and
how to improvise over them all the lessons that you need to know about jazz are within the jazz
standards themselves so what i like to think of i like to think of jazz standards as like a
pizza right you have this pizza that's the jazz standard and let's say you have pepperoni and
cheese on there right so the cheese that's like the technique right you're that's the technique
you can apply technical exercises like core tone maps guide tone maps even you know long tones and
things you would do on your instrument to a jazz standard the pepperoni for example could be like
the jazz language i can learn a lick that has to do with a chord progression within a jazz standard
i'm learning i can learn the melody of that jazz standard that's jazz language i can learn part
of a jazz solo over top of that jazz standard i can also compose my own jazz solo over top
of that jazz standard so using the jazz standard as the framework to fit everything else on there
is super important so we can boil things down even further to just making sure that no matter
what we're practicing it always has to do with a jazz standard and working on a new jazz standard
so now that we've filtered through our master goal filter the three pillars of jazz improvisation and
finally our jazz standards filter we can move on to the filter number four now filter number four
is what's called your fun filter now this one is not to be ignored by any means it's easy for
us to completely waste our time get bored get unmotivated by the things that we're practicing
so even if there are great things to practice like some of the things i just mentioned in this video
already you may not really enjoy the process of doing some of these things or the way in which
you're doing some of these things so that's where your fun filter comes in and the whole
point of the fun filter is to essentially place psychological tricks on your brain to enjoy doing
something the way you like to do it so for example what do you like to do like what is actually
fun for you to practice maybe you have more fun working on chord scale theory than you do working
on playing arpeggios or playing exercises that you don't connect with as well so that's okay you can
focus more on those things or maybe you prefer to work on certain kinds of licks and exercises than
others that's okay so that's more like the what and then the how is how do you enjoy practicing
do you enjoy practicing with backing tracks and if that's something that's fun for you rather than
just exclusively practicing with the metronome then you're more likely to learn and improve if
you are doing something in such a way that is fun for you now there's so much more i could say about
this there's a lot of psychology that goes behind this and there's a lot of different examples
i could give you but i want you to think about what is fun for you to practice and how is it fun
for you to practice and focus on only practicing those things and you're more likely to get results
because you're just enjoying yourself and having a good time so now that we've gone through your
master goal filter through the three pillars of jazz improvisation filter through the jazz
standards filter and then your fun filter it's time to go through our very last filter filter
number five is your practice strategy filter now this is hugely important because i would say 75 of
the people i come across tell me that the biggest problem with them improving as a jazz musician is
they don't have a clear step-by-step process for achieving their master goals for achieving their
musical goals or learning new material they just don't have an actual strategy and sometimes jazz
can feel like a maze you're looking out at this maze and you go and you get stuck in one corner
and then you come out and go to another corner only get stuck again and eventually you do get
out of the maze but it takes you a long time but a practice strategy is essentially giving you a red
dotted line that gets you through that entire maze in the most efficient way possible so when you're
thinking about a practice strategy there's a few things i always like to think about and that is my
l r c practice strategy method and that's an acronym it stands for learn
refine and create so for example learning would be like learning the melody of a jazz standard
refine would mean while you're learning different parts of that jazz standard reviewing it and even
taking parts into all 12 keys really making sure that gets internalized and then creating is taking
what you've learned and creating something for yourself because the creation process
is more likely to be something that organically comes out of you the other thing i like to suggest
with practice strategies is what i call batching so for example if you're trying to learn an entire
solo by ear it's not the best idea to not have certain parameters around how much you should
learn i like to take 32 bars and chop that up into four different parts so that you're learning that
over the course of one month it's better to learn a little bit at a time and use that refinement
process throughout then learn a ton at once not to know it very well and only to forget it in the
end so to summarize your five filters are your master goal filter your three pillars of jazz
improvisation filter your jazz standards filter your fun filter and then your practice strategy
filter now by the way if you need help with any of the things i just talked about as far as practice
strategies as far as applying the three pillars of jazz improvisation we really do this through
a multitude of different ways inside of our ljs inner circle membership where you get step-by-step
practice programs we learn new jazz standards every single month and done all with an amazing
community of over a thousand other musicians so do check it out at ljs innercircle.com we'd
love to have you as a member also leave that on the screen right now and by the way if you are
looking for a good practice strategy and you don't have very much time to practice i did a video on
a 30-minute practice plan that i think you'll find really helpful so i have that on the screen
right now and go check that one out next alright make sure you like this video if you found this
valuable make sure you subscribe to the channel and we'll see you in the next video cheers