Slow down your practice & finally get results

the essential skills of mastering the tempo at which we can practice in order to perfect material or at least get a good grassp and solid skills of material is massively massively underrated in fact I would say that most of what I see about learning jazz piano tends to be stylistic it tends to be about rootless chords and about whatever modes and decorations and voicings and whatever and cool solo phrases very little about the actual skills to get from want to play jazz to getting some fluency and within that over about three decades of teaching students I found that the number one thing that's the hardest to get people to do is to slow down the tempo at which they do anything it's just so common to be rushing all the time and working at a performing speed rather than a learning speed where we can actually get in there and really learn to get to know something what it feels like and get it right iron out the mistakes rather than just tripping up all the time and practicing being wrong so this lesson is really aimed at what I would call level one and two students now for me a level one student is somebody just learning the chords and how Jazz works you know the basic progressions level two would be has a few Tunes but no real Freedom it's pretty robotic there's no improvisation going on or hardly any and the tunes are played exactly the same way every time in exactly the same key and can often only remember the last one or two tunes that have been learned right so learning to free up so improvisation can exist and then a level three is somebody that can play for me 10 or more standards quite fluently and is looking to improve their movements or voicings or improvisation in general so this is really aimed at level one and two because yes if you're a level three and you're learning bbop heads and they're 100 m an hour and you're finding that ramping up the tempo more and more as you go is working for you fine however for everyone else these skills are essential and to be honest they're really important skills for level three students as well something I see all the time from students is when they play they'll often speed up for the easy bits and slow down for the hard bits so that there's no Tempo there so they might play like this I don't know I'll take a tune like Moonlight in Vermont so they might take just the chord in the left hand to start [Music] with now the tempo's already gone right there's no there's no [Music] tempo right we want to do a lot more than that anyway but if we can get some some pulse to the music and just slow [Music] down of course I'm doing I'm playing freely so I'm doing other things that just occur to me this isn't a lesson about what to play this is about how we're [Music] playing but you can feel that there's time now right it could be here [Music] here 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now that feels unnatural to most people if you're enjoying this lesson would you please give it a like And subscribe to the channel hit the notification Bell so you know when there's a new video a positive comment in the comment section really helps as well and if it's time to level up your playing and get some Freedom then consider joining us on Jazz skills more about that at the end for now let's get back to the lesson I believe that as a jazz musician you should learn to feel what music feels like at even that speed and I feel that the thing that's holding most people back is they can only feel music at a performing speed the speed they want to hear it played and if I say to them now let's slow down to stop making the same mistakes in the same places and to have more thinking time we'll come on to that in a minute they can't feel the music there so they find it harder and they're sure that this must be the wrong thing to do one of my students the other day kept making the same mistakes in the same places by the way it was obvious to me from that that he was going beginning to end beginning to end beginning to end of the lead sheet making the same mistake at bar six or whatever it was rather than taking four bar sections or even two bar sections and polishing them up before moving on and then turning them into maybe eight bar sections and working like that he'll end up playing the same amount of bars by doing that but what will happen is he'll get to know where the mistakes are and he'll really polish them up and work on them and become free of them so I said to him what would happen if I phoned you every day oldfashioned and asked you to play just one chord let's say we agreed that every hour for the next day I'd ask you to play one chord would you get the chord right with that amount of thinking time you said well yes of course and I said well what would happen if I gave you 15 minutes for each cord yeah I'd be right what if I gave you 10 minutes Y what if I gave gave you 60 whole seconds one whole minute to think about each chord then yes I'd probably be correct therefore isn't it just a matter of finding that speed I'm not suggesting you play one chord per minute but it's just a matter of time of finding that Tempo cuz people say well what is the right speed well the right speed for me is that one where you can be correct at a consistent Tempo and experience what music feels like there are three main things in our music melody Harmony the cord W the progressions and Rhythm and what a lot of people do is they either pay no attention to the rhythm part of it the time or they think it's something I'll add on later I'm just playing you know people are say no no no don't judge me on that I'm just playing the notes at the moment yeah but we learn the notes in time because if you want to improvise ever which is hopefully a big reason to learn jazz then you have to experience scales and progressions in time they fit together not randomly they fit together in 1 2 3 4 4 1 2 3 4 1 that it's not let's learn a lick and then hope it all marries up right the time is all there and that's essential another great thing about learning to slow down and feel music slowly is that you can address something else that often gets overlooked in this sea of what I call cool all over YouTube is that trying to fix skills problems basic skills problems of do I even know the key of E flat if I want to play Moonlight in Vermont do I know the chords in EF flat before I'm even trying to do that do I know that this is cord 1 2 3 4 5 6 and 7 could I actually recite those E flat major 7 f- 7 g- 7 a flat major 7 B flat 7 C Minor 7 dor 7 flat 5 and E flat major 7th or would I have to think about it too much in which case when I'm looking at a lead sheet I'm not training myself that when I see that cord it means something to me so I'm not really training myself to know those things if time is never involved because I can slow down as much as I want for the hard bits and speed up as much as I want for the easy bits but what gets lost in this sea of cool stuff all over YouTube is attention to those sorts of skills because we're not learning anything first of all if we're only focusing on tunes and only on the tunes because we like the tunes rather than because they contain any information that's helpful in our journey at this stage in a key that makes sense and isn't full of key changes so maybe that's not the best tune to choose it just happened to me in my head then we're not focusing on skills at all so the other thing that does get lost in this sea of just grabbing a coolit all the time is phrasing people aren't even aware that this is going on somebody might play a line like this let's take Billy's Bells now that was all staccato if we slow down 1 2 3 four and heard there's no breath to the line that's not how you're going to play on a saxophone going to go no you pass out right the best advice I ever got about phrasing from my first teacher Leon was phrase well phrase badly but for God's sake phrase so where I take a breath or accentuate a note or let there be a slight Crescendo or swelling of volume or you do doesn't have to be the same but there should be some intention there that sounds like something is being [Music] said it's going to swing more and when you slow down enough that's another thing that you can learn to feel that is just so difficult when the music's going past too quickly I'm even using YouTube's new custom slowdown feature to listen to solos slower so I can really digest them that's another tip that might help you actually recording yourself is a fantastic way to work on these things but I would really recommend do not overreact when you hear your own playing as I have done many times before as well I often tell the story of when I was playing with a bass player and we recorded it as I was playing I was in glear I thought this is this is great I'm loving what we're doing here and as I listened to the recording on the way home this is terrible this is worst thing I've ever done and I listened to it again the following day and thought well this is okay so within that time I'm pretty sure the recording hadn't changed but my reaction to it had but record yourself with a metronome or with a track or with other musicians and focus on your time what does it sound like because you'll notice things you wouldn't notice otherwise one of the things you might notice is this speeding up which is very very common in newer players I don't feel bad about it but one way you could work on that is to get an app like any metronome app pro metronome is really good for that so I'm going to be working at 80 beats per minute could be slower as well I have students working as slow as 60 even 50 in some cases fine now if you feel that in your recording you're speeding up and you're ahead of the clicks so people do this sort of [Music] stuff ahead of the clicks I'm exaggerating on purpose then what you can do with Prometric is you can silence your second and fourth Click 2 3 4 1 2 3 [Music] 4 so you can learn to not rush between the clicks cuz now you've got to do something between those clicks rather than just be tapped on the shoulder by the time okay don't just think about what you're playing and what you would like to sound like but think about your core skills and things you're already doing will improve so much I wish you well with it and if it's time to level up your skills then come and see us on J skills where we won't just flood you with information but I'll guide you through it and show you exactly what needs to be in place in which order and how to practice it with support from me and a Vibrant Community as well so I hope to see you there thanks for watching bye for now

Channel: JazzSkills

Views: 19,325

Keywords: Shan Verma, jazz piano lessons, barry harris, learning jazz piano, rhythm, Jazz Skills, fluency

Id: Rma0_cDG5ck

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023