Instead of skipping out on one part of your practice or focusing only on a single aspect of technique, you can combine everything into one solid practice routine.

So much in developing our technique, expanding our repertoire, and learning the jazz language is interconnected and related. These two areas don’t have to be put into separate categories. However, if you approach your practice time with a different mindset, you can cover all of the essential aspects of your routine and devote quality time to improving as an improviser. We would do well to follow a common rule for our daily lives: Do Less, and Do It Better. The happiness of too many days is often destroyed by trying to accomplish too much in one day. As a result, we remain at the same level of musicianship, not excelling in any one area. We rush to cover every area in our routine, but don’t spend enough time with each area to see improvement. and a second focusing on the jazz aspects of your playing like transcription and learning tunes. One focusing on technique, etudes, scales/chords, articulation, etc. What ends up happening for most musicians, is that their practice session gets divided into two parts. If you spend your whole practice time learning a few bars of a solo, you’re sacrificing time that could be used to maintain your sound and technique. Or, you may want to transcribe some solos and acquire more language, but again, you feel the transcription process just takes way too long. You may only know a limited number of tunes, but you feel that spending the necessary time to learn a tune (a few days or even a week) is just taking away too much of your valuable practice time. This poses a problem when we’re practicing within a time constraint and attempting to cover other aspects of technique and musicianship as well. But, for many of us, the process of learning tunes and transcribing solos takes up a massive amount of time.

These two aspects of jazz improvisation affect your progress more than anything else. How do we decide which exercises to focus on and which exercises to sacrifice? Learning tunes and transcribing For many of us with a limited amount of time for practicing, this creates a major dilemma. Therefore, to make way for these primary activities, other topics like technique are sacrificed in their entirety.

This can be difficult because the things that make the most difference in our playing such as transcribing, inevitably take the most time. Occasionally, we can’t even find the time to get into the practice room at all.īecause of our limited time and life’s endless complexity, covering every area of musicianship every time we get into the practice room is rarely feasible. Some days we skip a few parts of our routine and on others, we spend all of our time trying to master one exercise. However, this neatly structured routine works a lot better in theory than it does in reality. Everyday we try to achieve a well balanced practice session that covers these key areas of musicianship. A “complete” jazz practice routine is set up the same way and each time, covers the same areas: warm-up, technique, scales/chords, ear training, etudes, articulation, learning tunes, transcribing, and developing language in all 12 keys. It’s the same story when it comes to practicing our instruments. When you put them together you have a complete work-out that will allow you to function at your peak and feel great. You’ve got your warm-up & stretching, cardio, strength training, resistance work outs, and the list goes on…Įvery exercise has a specific role and develops a specific muscle group. If you think about it, the elements of your practice routine are like the different sections of a well-structured work-out plan.

Daily guitar practice schedule pdf