Monday, March 4, 2013
Separating Playing and Practicing For Musical Success!
One of the most common things I've found in students of various levels and styles of playing is that the terms "playing" and "practicing" are often interchanged and not clearly defined in how they approach them. Over and over again, as an instructor of guitar, and especially in the realm of jazz where the focus on improvisation can certainly lend to the ambiguity of these terms, a student may lack in separating them and as a result, progress can be stifled and one's musical language may become stagnant.
Theres been many times in asking my students questions like "What things are you working on?" and "How have you been practicing that?" Resulting in an answer occasionally involving passive playing with a lack of specific concentration, or not defining what they are working on to begin with. In response to this, I will define specifically what practicing can be, and how this is a completely separate thing from actual playing and performing. This analogy can be used and applied to all types of music and with students from all ages and levels.
This is the idea that practicing is like in baseball, warming up with a weight on your bat, so when you take it off the bat is light, easy to swing, and you have much more power and control than you previously had. In musical terms, it is limitation. Practicing should be the (or a given form of practicing should be) giving the student clearly defined exercises, or concepts or ideas, that are compartmentalized to work very specific areas of overall musicianship.
Take this for example: Assigning a pattern to use for a scale getting it to a specific BPM within several keys can be seen as the "weight on the bat". When they have completed this, it is the now the time to "get up to bat" where they will utilize the exercise within a real musical context. Here, I could have the student improvise using the scale and pattern, and now by me having gave them such a limitation with concrete, outlined terms, them now using this concept can have a feeling of being natural as well as musical far more than it had been previously and the student will have "taken the weight off the baseball bat"
To clearly define what the "playing" element of this is, which the student will be doing in tandem with practicing, as well as performing live, to me is playing their instrument while taking away the concrete, analytical, conscious part of the musical mind; and just taking part of "living in the moment performing". This is where the student will leave everything they had been practicing at home. Ever so often, one's playing can get off while attempting to remember their practice material an what they had been working on, or even forcing what they had been working on into the music, immediately taking the student out of the moment, and causing barriers in-between the hand, the ear, and the mind resulting in their playing suffering.
The definition of playing versus practicing, can be seen as something simple in the terms of being conscious about it, though clarifying this in big picture, can provide leaps and bounds of growth for a student, and may offer exponential amounts of success inside the practice room along with on the stage.
Theres been many times in asking my students questions like "What things are you working on?" and "How have you been practicing that?" Resulting in an answer occasionally involving passive playing with a lack of specific concentration, or not defining what they are working on to begin with. In response to this, I will define specifically what practicing can be, and how this is a completely separate thing from actual playing and performing. This analogy can be used and applied to all types of music and with students from all ages and levels.
This is the idea that practicing is like in baseball, warming up with a weight on your bat, so when you take it off the bat is light, easy to swing, and you have much more power and control than you previously had. In musical terms, it is limitation. Practicing should be the (or a given form of practicing should be) giving the student clearly defined exercises, or concepts or ideas, that are compartmentalized to work very specific areas of overall musicianship.
Take this for example: Assigning a pattern to use for a scale getting it to a specific BPM within several keys can be seen as the "weight on the bat". When they have completed this, it is the now the time to "get up to bat" where they will utilize the exercise within a real musical context. Here, I could have the student improvise using the scale and pattern, and now by me having gave them such a limitation with concrete, outlined terms, them now using this concept can have a feeling of being natural as well as musical far more than it had been previously and the student will have "taken the weight off the baseball bat"
To clearly define what the "playing" element of this is, which the student will be doing in tandem with practicing, as well as performing live, to me is playing their instrument while taking away the concrete, analytical, conscious part of the musical mind; and just taking part of "living in the moment performing". This is where the student will leave everything they had been practicing at home. Ever so often, one's playing can get off while attempting to remember their practice material an what they had been working on, or even forcing what they had been working on into the music, immediately taking the student out of the moment, and causing barriers in-between the hand, the ear, and the mind resulting in their playing suffering.
The definition of playing versus practicing, can be seen as something simple in the terms of being conscious about it, though clarifying this in big picture, can provide leaps and bounds of growth for a student, and may offer exponential amounts of success inside the practice room along with on the stage.
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