If you're like most people who are strapped for time to practice then you may wonder
how do I improve my jazz skills while practicing less well today I'm going
to show you a practice routine that packs a huge punch in only 30 minutes let's do this
what's up brent here from learn jazz standards where we help musicians just like you learn how to
play jazz all while shortening the learning curve no matter what instrument you play on this channel
we do lots of jazz theory jazz improv and deep dives into jazz standards as well as jazz practice
itineraries like we're gonna do in today's episode so make sure you hit that subscribe button the
bell notification button to never miss out on anything going on one of the most common things
i hear from my subscribers is i just don't have enough time to practice and it's kind of rooted
in the belief that you have to practice a lot in order to improve it's just something that's
been instilled in a lot of people from you know teachers who have told them this but honestly it's
not that true you can make huge improvements and even just 30 minutes which i'm gonna
show you today exactly how to do that but make sure you stick around to the end because i'm going
to show you how to take just 30 minute practice sessions and compound that so that you get
bigger results over time so this practice routine is based off of my inner circle power plan which
is a bonus course i give to my inner circle members to help them get a lot of value in their
first 30 days of membership and we learn a jazz standard in one month so the framework of this
30 minute routine is that we're learning a jazz standard in one month and we break it down
into four weeks just doing 30 minute practice sessions three times a week so it's only 90
minutes of practice and i think for a lot of us we can probably find 30 minutes three times a week
to to practice and to learn and as i go through this practice plan i want to instill some
mindsets for you to help you understand how you truly can get big results with
just 30 minutes at a time so stay tuned for those as we go through this as well
okay so we're gonna learn a jazz standard and we're just gonna go over the very first week of my
practice plan and just use this as an example the first step of learning a jazz standard in my mind
is to learn the melody i mean jazz standards learning them is biggest bang for your buck as far
as practicing as far as i'm concerned and so we're gonna learn a jazz standard but a very methodical
way that makes things easy so let's go over practice session number one in practice session
number one we're gonna learn the first four bars of a jazz standard and the one i talk about on my
inner circle power plan is doxy because it's a fairly simple melody as well it's only 16
bars so we're just gonna learn the first four bars of doxie which is just this okay that's it
now what you're going to do is you're going to learn this from recording by ear and i think if
you really do this if you really learn it by ear from a recording and you get just those notes what
i want to instill in you is that the simple stuff is the big stuff okay it's a mindset i really want
you to adopt even just learning that simple little bit there by ear strengthening your ear learning
just that part of the melody which we're going to learn more later that is a good day's work so you
can leave that 30 minute practice session feeling confident feeling powerful in the fact that you
are going to be improving and moving the needle so the simple stuff is the big stuff so even just
now you've learned jazz language now you've learned the first part of the melody and then we
can move on to the next session in session number two you're going to learn the next eight bars
of the melody of doxy now the reason in this case eight bars instead of
four more bars is because actually the second four bars of doxy is kind of the same
right just that last note that's a little bit
different and the next four bars are part of the bridge
right so that's the next eight bars of doxy so once you've gotten that down again you're
gonna have learned more of the melody have more jazz language to learn and use and of course you
can use all this stuff in your solos over doxy as well again only 30 minutes in session number three
you're going to learn the final four bars of the melody of doxie and this is actually
really simple and i only would want you to spend 15 minutes of your practice session doing this
because it's actually just a repeat of the first four bars
okay just the last four bars and then you're done but an important thing of any single practice
routine or itinerary is review so after you're done doing that learning the last part you're
going to review the entire melody and be able to play it along with a recording perfectly so that
you feel like it's solidified what i want you to understand and this is the second mindset i want
you to adopt is that you can achieve a lot even in just 30 minutes okay you can achieve a lot
even with less practice time or another way i like to say it often is you can achieve a lot with only
the amount of practice time that you actually have now it's hard to get rid of the old mindset that
we have to practice a lot we have to learn more stuff we have to learn more complicated stuff than
just the melody of doxy in order to improve it's hard because we've been told that for so long but
what i want you to do is really start meditating on some of these mindsets the simple stuff is the
big stuff right and you can achieve more with just the amount of practice time you have now this is
obviously just week one of my inner circle power plan 30 minutes at a time here's how you take 30
minute sessions though and you compound them to get achievable results you'll notice in week one
the goal was to learn the melody right so that's one goal but that's one only one aspect
of learning a jazz standard there's three other aspects of it so the second aspect is learning
the chord changes so in week two you do something similar with its own process for learning chord
changes in week three we do something called a chord tone map where we're mapping out all the
chord tones the most important notes to target in the jazz standard so that you're able to
really know all the notes for your bass lines for your comping for your solos and then finally
week number four is actually improvising over it so we do is we learn 12 bars of an etude
or a solo so that you know some jazz language and then you go and actually compose your own
16 bar solo over top of doxy and you can do this just by yourself so that's how you take those 30
minute sessions and you keep building and building and building and building until after one month
you've learned a jazz standard you can play the melody you can play the chords you can improvise
over it and then you can go and move on to other jazz standards and keep learning and keep growing
and keep building 30 minutes at a time so i highly recommend you go through this process in this
framework start adopting some of these mindsets and if you want to get help with all this and
take this step even further do check out my ljs inner circle membership go to ljs innercircle.com
but also leave a link for that here on the screen so check out ljsentercircle.com uh we do have our
inner circle power plan that you know helps you do that exact process uh in one month so
it could be really powerful for your playing to get involved in that also leave on the screen
a video that is another practice routine itinerary that could also help you as well
so do check that out make sure you like this video if you've gotten value out of
it subscribe and i look forward to seeing you in the next video