DjangoBooks.com
Welcome to our Community!
Categories
- 20.1K All Categories
- 1.1K General
- 490 Welcome
- 60 Archtop Eddy's Corner
- 151 CD, DVD, and Concert Reviews
- 385 FAQ
- 26 Gypsy Jazz Italia
- 27 Photos
- 209 Gypsy Picking
- 21 Unaccompanied Django
- 15 Pearl Django Play-Along Vol.1
- 17 Gypsy Fire
- 45 Gypsy Rhythm
- 1.4K Gypsy Jazz University - Get Educated
- 131 Gypsy Jazz 101
- 233 Repertoire
- 230 History
- 710 Technique
- 51 Licks and Patterns
- 6 Daniel Givone Manouche Guitare Method Users Group
- 20 Eddie Lang Club
- 1.3K Gypsy Jazz Gear
- 818 Guitars, Strings, Picks, Amps, Pickups and Other Accessories
- 466 Classifieds
- 52 Recording
- 64 Other Instruments
- 18 Violin
- 5 Mandolin
- 23 Accordion
- 7 Bass
- 11 Woodwinds
- 354 Gypsy Jazz Events
- 146 North America
- 113 Europe
- 95 International
In this Discussion
Who's Online (0)
Today's Birthdays
Comments
yeah there were some basic ideas that I didn't get about jazz. It is a bit painful to think about because I think I wasted years and years being frustrated. The Lego like nature of plugging in ii V or other sort of licks into tunes seemed uncreative to me and I thought there must be some other better way but really it's pretty elementary to be able to do that. CVH has been super helpful, that's a big part of his stuff is different ways to plug in different licks on different chord progressions. But I could have gotten that from a lot of people, it was mostly my own pre-conceived ideas that screwed me up.
Oh well, I'm glad I learned sometime....
It really surprises me but I know people, good musicians too, who think, at least the way I understand it, that if they learn the phrases to use in the improvising context, it's not improvised any more. I'm like, well you have to have some sort of building blocks, whether they're learned phrases or triadic shapes or scales or...and then practice them over and over. How else is it going to happen? By divine intervention? No, it won't. However once you have those building blocks truly mastered, you can get creative with them on the spot and not repeat them by rote.
I did hear people like Jimmy Bruno say, I just choose colors I want to use from the 12 notes available. Ok fine, he's at that level but there's no way to get to that level by starting there. You have to walk the path. Then Tim Lerch, he said, oh I just play what I hear. Same thing, that's not what he did his entire life. You have to get there step by step. It's like belts in martial arts, you have to earn each color to eventually get to the black belt and continue further.
Yeah I think that stuff is unhelpful and damaging. You hear stuff because you practiced it probably a million times.
It's like I'm going to France and I want to learn French and someone is like well I just make words out of the alphabet and I say what I feel.
I remember watching the wonder in my son's face as he learned how to open a basic door knob. What previously was closed to him suddenly was able to be opened at whim. He spent a half hour or so just closing the door and then proving to himself that he could open it again at any time. I remember being struck by this and how the world is full of similar wonders that I've learned and summarily forgotten the "wonder" of them. Now, I doubt any of us think twice about the mechanism when we twist the knob to let ourselves in (or out!).
So it is I think with some of these musicians. Maybe they don't remember a time when they heard something but didn't know how to play it or didn't hear "colors." They've been playing so long and playing a certain way so long (with the ability to either know or instinctively know how to play what they hear), that they might as well just be opening door knobs. They are speaking a language over which they have absolute fluency.
That's a really elegant analogy, Bill. And my kid made me remember when reading felt like an astonishingly amazing superpower.
Adding this what I wrote in a different, Anki, thread for my own notes keeping...
Well, this is my update to this topic. Anki is cool, great tool. I still use it.
However I'm coming to think that acquiring and retaining the musical language that's to be used in the improvising context comes only through the brute force repetitions. I think you need to take a small piece of information and cram it in there. For an hour or longer. A single ii V I at the most. Nothing longer than that. Even that you should break down into smaller chunks and take it through the paces in various contexts.
Because what needs to happen is it needs to be accessible instantly. You don't have any time to think about it. It just needs to happen. So not only that you need to learn it, that might happen in a few minutes, not only that it needs to be fluid, that might happen in 10-20-30 minutes, it needs to be sent to the unconscious part of the brain. Sometimes you hear music educators talk about that as something negative, like they might say you always need to be aware of what you're playing and practicing. Well now I believe you need to go further past that and send it to the parts of the brain where the playing just happens without you thinking about it or being aware, if that makes sense.
Top players don't really go into the specifics regarding this. We know they work/worked extremely hard; several hours a day, every day, for several years. But there's been only a few instances where I heard someone say that they would take extremely small piece of musical information and practice it for an hour or longer.
A few years ago that was kinda unthinkable for me. Recently I did it with a few things I practiced. I felt it worked better than anything before. Something that would start as challenging, would then feel completely effortless towards the end of the hour. And it seems to stick much better. I might even have to repeat it several times. But in the end it's actually a lot faster way to retain stuff, than what I've been doing before.
Remi talks about that here
Another Noa video and YT interview, this time with Micah Killion. This one may be the best one yet. Micah is a classical trumpet player and a researcher in the field of musical practice, especially trying to figure out how experts do and what's different about their practice.
This is so well laid out that someone unscrupulous could take it and package it into a product, a system. It's like a step by step on how to when it comes to practice. One concept that he talks about a lot is needing to have a clear mental image of how you want yourself to sound like. This is recurring theme throughout. Whatever you're practicing, you need to have a clear image in head of what does it sound like. I've suspected as of recently that visualisation aspect is what separates top musicians from the rest.
One question top musicians in their studies constantly ask is: based on what just happened, what should I do next?
A lot of experts' practice is about trying something, hearing what the discrepancy is from what they formed as a mental image and matching the two. If you make a mistake, first he doesn't like calling it a mistakes, he likes to call it discrepancies. But when you hit an error, you immediately stop.
This is where another big concept comes in: doable-izing. You make it doable for yourself. He thinks it doesn't really matter much how you do it. Maybe you slow down, or play just two notes, modify it in some way so wherever the mistake was is now playable, doable. What's important is that you have many of those doable moments. But you do need errors. If you make no errors, you're not improving either. If you're making too many errors, same thing, you're not improving. They put the error percentage in a 15% ballpark. Then you build, little by little.
Another biggie is every time you restart, take some time and imagine how you want it to sound like, just a couple of seconds. This needs to become a habit. Their studies show that this is what the greats consistently do. He said guitar players are especially guilty of playing a starting note as soon as they played the ending note. Guilty 🙋♂️!
Many more brilliant moments in the video.
I looked over past posts and notes I made from other interviews. It's amazing how so many things others have said essentially boil down to the same thing.
Buco, I missed this post of yours from last Nov.:
It really surprises me but I know people, good musicians too, who think, at least the way I understand it, that if they learn the phrases to use in the improvising context, it's not improvised any more.
I completely agree and it's needlessly pedantic "technically speaking" "well, actually..." kinda logic. No jazz musician is playing completely new, organic improvisation that miraculously poured through them as though they were touched instantaneously by some kind of divine cosmic intervention.
My first response to someone trying to make this point has always been something like "so Charlie Parker wasn't improvising?" and not to imply I care about the responses, mostly just because it's fun listening to them try and jazzsplain away why "he was but also he wasn't" because that's typically how the goal posts shift when they begin trying to break down the spurious logic they're using (that they themselves never fully thought through to begin with)...it's kinda like talking with someone who's been smoking and using stoner logic to explain some spontaneous theory of existence that suddenly came to them; take nothing they say seriously and just enjoy the laughs.
it still is a little comical that we are all chasing around the same 12 notes. No one really has more than that (well...muslim people, indian people,everyone else around the world and also a bunch of western nerds but other than that), just 12.
And at this point every possible combination of them has been codified. You might be improvising for yourself but whatever you played has already been played. Just, hopefully, not the same way you played it.
Or something like that, anyway.
Thanks, Buco.
The Micah Killion interview is very thought provoking and the linked resources too.
The research Micah Killion has done on musicians resonates in places with research colleagues and I did on engineers in the workplace and their professional judgement.
I hadn't checked out Noah's practice-related materials before and I'm thinking it could help me a lot in optimizing practice time, developing expressiveness but most of all being consistent in performance situations.
@voutoreenie you see comments like that on CVH'c channel all the time. He actually takes time to address them in a video. He's nice. Also, stoner logic, lol: heeey maaaan, I get it maaan, I see it all now.
@paulmcevoy75 yes, more than twice as many letters in the alphabet but those 12 notes have so much more mystery to them. I wonder what would happen if there was some alternate universe where people spent as much time expressing themselves musically as we do talking.