I'd like to share some thoughts on Kenny Werner's book Effortless Mastery. I personally believe it is a must read for any struggling (or even complacent) musician/artist.
Anyone practicing Dhama will realize very quickly, this book is basically applied Dhama for musicians. All of those fears, anxieties, frustrations and dissatisfactions resonate with my own experiences.
One section of the book that really hit home, was about practicing. I find I'm often overwhelmed by the amount of material I feel I need to learn. And also with the infinite material available to us through the internet!
So when I plan out my practice session, it ends up being about 6-8 hours long. It looks something like this:
- 30 mins melodic minor scales
- 30 mins arpeggios
- new song (Confirmation)
- pentatonic shapes through new songs
- rhythm practice - waver between eighth note and quarter note triplets,
- sight reading 30mins
- transcribing 30 mins
then repeat on electric bass!
And after a day or so, you know..... life happens and the routine is broken.
I have set an unreasonable goal of trying to practice 8 hours a day.
So then I set shorter times for each exercise to get it down to 4 hours a day. People working full time jobs can probably even manage that! And so you start the new routine. It goes well for a while, but soon enough you get distracted. That 15 minutes of arpeggio's turns out to be:
- playing whatever groove you already know well
- messing around
- trying to imitate something you saw someone else doing the other night
So I agree with Kenny in that I think it's important to separate practice from playing. They both have a completely different mindset, and not to make this article too long I'd like to leave "playing" music to another article. In this one I'd like to explore practicing in more detail.
Music is basically melody, harmony and rhythm. And these are also basically the fields we should practice regardless of the style.
Practicing needs structure and repetition. Things that are difficult need to become easy. Pieces that are unfamiliar need to become second nature. Mistakes that are made in particular parts of a piece need to be singled out and worked on in a calm and relaxed manner. The practicing mindset needs to be inquisitive, constantly asking questions. Does it feel easy? Can I play it up tempo? Am I playing it perfectly? What would it sound like if I accent the 2nd note etc....
Here frustration is constantly interrupting the flow of things, as well as testing your patience. The mind will say things like... What? I've been practicing this idea for half an hour and I still can't get it??? Or getting bored and keen to skim over things... "Yeah, that's pretty much it" as you move on from something barely learned.
Whenever I find the mind reacting heavily in this way, I take a break. Try to do something non-music related to clear the mind like go for a walk, make a tea or coffee, or read a little.
But here is where I disagree with Kenny. What I have found through my experience practicing in this way is that you will get to a point where it seems as if you will never get it. You have reached a plateau.
For example I was learning a pentatonic phrase for a number of days. It was an eighth note up tempo thing and I was making headway. But it got to a point where it felt like I had hit a stumbling block. It wasn't perfect yet. And the problem was pretty much my right hand coordination sometimes fudging the first couple of notes. But it was close to perfect and the level was pretty much the same each day.
Now, Kenny has the idea that you should keep at it. Don't change the material until you have mastered it. It makes sense and there is logic behind it. But from my own experience I find it more useful to take a few days or a weeks break from the material you've been working on and move on to something different. The logic behind this argument is that often the mind is expecting results. It wants the outcome. And usually when you want something to happen too much, it creates a kind of blockage in the mind. It's basically not being patient enough and craving the result.
So just as a bit of a trick to get around that, what I do is simply forget about it. Just move on and start working on some new material. Something quite different would be ideal. Then after a few days or a week, you come back to it. Try it yourself but you might be surprised at how easy it feels. And now that the craving is gone, you can work a little more to master the idea.
Kenny's idea about not moving on until it is completely mastered I think is only for the most patient of us. I met an American in Northern India studying Tibetan Buddism. I'll never forget what he said about his interactions with his teacher. His teacher told him that if you find you aren't progressing on the path with your current teacher you should change to another after around 12 years.
12 YEARS! Can you imagine? Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, we'll be lucky with 12 seconds soon enough!
Perhaps staying with the material is the quickest way to get over the mountains, but we need to be able to navigate these fields ourselves. After all, our own experiences need to be the advice we listen to the most.
So in essence I believe the best way to practice is really with the right attitude. If we can practice with complete patience, humility, diligence, completely conscious and innocently curious, the only thing growing would be a great musician.