- Hey, everyone. Nathan from JazzGuitarLessons.net here with-
- Marc from JazzGuitarLessons.net.
- And today we're doing another masterclass for the Masterclass Series. And this one's on the topic of mindset, so it's less of a specifically concrete, practical approach to things and more of a philosophy side of discussion when it comes to learning jazz guitar.
- What's happening here.
- Exactly.
- Really important.
- One of my students just really, right off the bat, he said, "The mind is the instrument," or, "You are the instrument." I'm like, "Ooh, oh, that's some Mr. Miyagi stuff. I gotta write that down." First of all, I'll let Marc introduce himself. He probably needs no introductions, but go ahead.
- Of course, I need no introduction. I'm Marc from JazzGuitarLessons.net. I like to say I'm a retired professional musician, even though it keeps pulling me back in. I've been running this website for almost 12 years now, and I like to help people master, learn and master the fine art of jazz guitar. Started on YouTube and blog in 2009, and the rest is history.
- As for me, my name is Nathan Corr. I currently live in Toronto. I took a degree, a Bachelor of Music and a minor in business, at Carlton University. And then I forgot about all that, and then I just started playing , as they say, but I ended up moving to Toronto, got involved in the Toronto music scene. And I'm a composer as well. I compose my own music, and, hopefully, record it someday. But, yeah, I compose, I arrange, I perform all the curriculum building on JazzGuitarLessons.net. And so many of the courses that you see are, the outlines for them and the material that you're learning, I'm directly responsible for.
- And you're the guy, you're the guy doing the masterclasses with Marc.
- I'm the guy who does the masterclasses with Marc.
- Community management is you as well.
- Community management. That's right.
- Directly involved in all the things because I only have two hands. Nathan's been with us since 2016, and we're still building upon our skills and our knowledge, and we learn from the students on the websites, so it's amazing. And just to recap quickly, masterclass now, about this whole mental game aspect, mindset, last time we had the language analogy in parallel. We called it the language of music. And if you haven't watched this one, please do. It's a conversation between Nathan and I. It's a really good way to... Gets more from your playing, and this is exactly what the mindset masterclass today is also going to help you do, is get more mileage, more enjoyment, and a little bit of everything from playing and that's not strictly speaking of scales, and song, and whatever. So Nathan, why mindset matter? That was so ... Why does mindset matter? Help me out.
- Segue. So the biggest reason I can think of right off the bat, I wanna get the big idea out of the way first, and then we'll talk about all the different benefits and pitfalls, and all those things, but the very biggest thing that I wanna talk about is that learning music is a big, long process that stretches, hopefully, for the entirety of your life. And trying to do anything for your entire life requires grit and requires a mental philosophy that allows you to keep on doing that thing despite all the hardships that you might experience, setbacks, and also properly acknowledging all the benefits, and the accomplishments, and the triumphs that you experience as well in kind in order to just keep on doing that thing. So consistency and grit, those two things are probably the big overarching ideas behind how we need to hone and practice mindset, just like we need to practice technique, and our instruments, and all that stuff.
- I will add to that by saying that you hit it on the head when you said it's a lifelong thing regardless of the hobby you had. If you keep playing music, there needs to be a meaning and purpose. It reminds me of Viktor Frankl. I don't know if you read that book, it's really difficult, but "Man's Search for Meaning." He was a Auschwitz, he was a Auschwitz survivor, also a psychiatrist, and he developed this sort of therapy that's called logotherapy. Logo, is it logotherapy? It's meaning what's the purpose of that thing? What's the meaning to your suffering? And now we can talk about how having a mindset is like, what's the meaning behind the time you put on your instrument? And that's really what makes all the difference, so that's a few of the things I jot down. It's like, you get to work smarter and not harder when you have a good mindset. You get to access greater creativity. For me it was a big thing, the big judgment when you're playing a solo. It's like a little voice in your head: "It's not swinging enough."
- Yeah.
- You know? That thing? You know it. So that feeling of you're always missing a part. You're always failing at doing whatever. Once you work on that, things fall into place. You'll get more enjoyment in playing with your bandmates and, overall, better enjoyment of music, and most likely if your head is in the right, you know in English, you guys say, "Get your heard on screwed straight?"
- Yeah, get your head screwed on right. Yeah.
- So once you got that, things fall into place even though you have the whole journey to tackle.
- Yeah, and I definitely wanna say that this is a habit-building process, just like everything else we do in jazz guitar, except it's more meta, I guess. Less concrete, more meta, and it really is a process that you have to develop, a habit, I should say, where if you keep on practicing a particular type of mindset or a particular set of mindsets, that's like mind supersets, let's say.
- A super set of mind.
- Exactly, it'll become something that's a part of you rather than something that you have to continually think of. I think that's super important, where every process that we develop in order to build our skills on guitar and in swing feel and jazz, and all the component parts of the music, all those things, if you make sure that you turn them into internalized processes rather than external thought, conscious thought at all times, that's ideal because then it doesn't take up processing power when you're on stage, for example.
- Exactly.
- Actually, you sent me a book recently, a Jerry Coker book.
- I have, yeah.
- I got through the preface so far. I'm really interested in where it goes, but, sorry, it's "How to Learn Music by Ear"?
- "Hearing the Changes," I think.
- "Hearing the Changes," that's it. Sorry. I don't know why I parsed it that way. So "Hearing the Changes" by Jerry Coker and a couple of other authors. And, yeah, they talked about conscious processes versus unconscious processes. I think that's powerful. That's really powerful to delve into.
- You develop habits of mind too because often just a mind is, it's like a groove on the records. You get stuck in a certain groove and that you feel like you're right there, but this is the type of things we will talk about today. So just quickly going through, I wanna talk about the dangers because it's the format of the masterclass. I just go, "If you ignore that part of playing music," we'll just say the mindset. Last time it was if you ignore the fact of the language analogy, you run the risk of... So one of the things I heard a bodybuilder say, I forgot his name, but it was a documentary, and he said, "If bodybuilding does not have that deeper meaning, it just becomes sets and reps. You just grab the weights and do." So music and sets and reps, it's just a bunch of eighth notes and chords. It becomes very bland, very fast. If you start to, if you keep ignoring your mindset and the mental game, you might be perceiving music as a set of rules. You know, very common, I see this on YouTube comments, "These notes fit these chords." That's bad, and then, worst case scenario, strictly thinking in terns of fingering patterns. While there's a wide variety of, there's a depth of emotion through music that you can ignore if you don't think of these things.
- I think that's actually a really big pitfall, specifically for jazz.
- For jazz.
- Because we get really, really deep into, or we all... Sorry, students of jazz, in general, really emphasize and focus on the theory side of it, which is about creating a set of rules that allow you to predict and analyze and understand what might happen. But the thing that you wanna make sure you keep in mind is that, is keep an open mind to what might happen, rather than, like, "Well, we know that this happens when you do this." Good, that's really important, but what could happen if you combine these ideas? That's a powerful tool I think, too.
- And to take it as guidelines and a system, a theory of systems to explain what we hear and not the other way around, right? We can start from the intellect and then create a system. It's like, "Oh, this sounds like this. I wonder what this is. Oh, three notes together. Well, it's a chord, right?" So I remember a while back I had a comment on YouTube. A guy said something like, "Since when are you allowed to," and it was playing an A note over that chord. I'm like, "I don't know," you know? I probably responded something cheeky, like, "Yeah, the doorbell rang and it was the police."
- The jazz police.
- "They gave me a ticket for this," you know? So that's one of the dangers. Music becoming dry, becomes just a set, sets and reps, so eighth notes, these rules. Another thing is it's might become their... I like to say it's like a sport, athletic. It becomes very physical in nature, and then you can lose a whole side to music, that emotional side, whatever. And to me, for me, the last danger that I listed in that overview is that you lose sight of what really knocks your socks off. There are things that I prefer. I'd rather listen to Jim Hall than to Joe Pass. And that's not a judgment if you prefer Joe Pass or whatever. But when we ignore the mindset and we lose touch with ourselves, sorry, we sort of, we run the risk of losing touch with what we really like because we can mentally decide and rationalize, "Oh, this is better than this according to the sets of rules I've created for myself because this player plays way faster than this player." In summary, those are the dangers of approaching music without a good mindset for it.
- Yeah, and I think we should talk about what can drive you away from those pitfalls, what can keep you away from those pitfalls, and this isn't exactly written down on the checklist, let's say, but one thing that I wanna drive the point home to immediately, one point that I wanna drive home immediately is the notion of like, why do we play music at all in the first place? And then, furthermore, why are we drawn to a particular genre, like jazz, for example? And this goes back to that meaning thing that we talked about earlier, and, ultimately, the meaning is up to us to create, is ours to create. We all might do it for very different reasons or for a variety of different reasons, really. It's complex, but I think the overarching commonality between all of us is that we, and this goes back to the language analogy, we play music in order to connect to other people. We jam in order to connect to other people. We talk about music, like, "Oh, did you hear that? That was awesome," in order to connect to other people. And are we experiencing things the same way, and how are we experiencing them differently? It all goes back to this sort of, this human experience and understanding that we're not all just islands. We have a bunch of bridges that connect us all: art, music, languages. Is a language art? They're all ways of building those bridges between each other. So keeping that in mind is super important to not letting it becomes just a set of rules, just a set of physical motions, just a set of-
- Like chords.
- Yeah, chords and things. Not like just a competing sport, right? Like you said earlier. Actually, Adam Neely mentions a lot that music is not a sport. And not to put sports down; sports are great. It's a great way to connect in certain ways, but we're not competing to be the very best. Like, we are, some of us are, but some of us are using it as a driving force for us to develop, but there's no winning in music, or losing, right?
- Or is there?
- Or is there? That's just what a loser would say. Wow, I feel that. But, like, jazz schools might have you, or cultures of jazz schools, might have you believe that, right? Like, grades everything. But we're all winners in music if we partake in a way that allows us to connect on a deeper level with one another, and that's, you might say that's lame, you know?
- Frame this one. Frame this one.
- Frame this one? Oh, yeah, frame it in like an actual music score?
- No, frame it-
- Put it on a, write that down?
- Put it in a frame.
- Put it somewhere.
- I agree, and to talk about the solutions, I said, "What are the pitfalls? What are the dangers of not doing that?" So one of the solutions is, really, realize that it's self-expression.
- Yeah.
- It is. Like, why do we travel? Look at this. There's this ball in space. And then we were here, and now we're there, and we still see the same sky and the same sun. It's like, somehow, but there's a need. There's something that fills. It's very fulfilling to play music. It's self-expression. And I had a note jotted down. I had a lady friend who played alto sax while I was doing my studies, and she said, "It's when crying is not enough anymore." Like, that's when you pick up the saxophone. It's so beautiful.
- I love that. That's such a... Frame that!
- Frame that one.
- Playing alto saxophone is for when crying is not enough. Oh, I love it.
- Plus, our teacher, and I'll name him by name, Dave Turner. Like, this guy that you're scared to play a solo after, any jam, because not a... It was very bluesy, very deep, old-era big band style that just, that level of, like, plug your guitar, instead of plug it in the amp, you plug it into your heart directly. He was an alto and baritone player, heavy Montreal player. And it was just so connected as a form of expression. So this is what we wanna talk about today. We want to ensure that you have a good mindset. You have to realize that learning music is a process of growth and change. Music is a form of self-expression. You get, on the meaning level, you get connected to the purpose of it, and the purpose calls back to you regardless of funk, jazz, guitar, bass, piano. It's really have your purpose, and that's a way of recharging your batteries because it's fulfilling. Another analogy I like to use is the tuning. You are the instruments, so if you tune yourself to vibrate, you have a good mindset. Steve, your student, said, "You are in the instrument." This is exactly it. Tune yourself and you can find music is food for the soul. And every masterclass so far, I think the tradition's gonna be to quote someone famous, and I love this because Nathan and I, we're looking at the same notes, and it just says, "Quote from someone famous." But I had one. I had one.
- Got one?
- If I'm not mistaken, it's Bela Bartok.
- Oh, yeah.
- And the quote is, "Competition is for horses, not artists." There it is.
- Yeah, I like that a lot because it's true. It's really easy, I think in jazz especially, or any, sorry, academized, academized, or academic music, or music that's been placed in an academy of some sort, like university. It's very easy to get so hung up on the competition side of it. You know, I wanna be the top student. I wanna be the top rising star, right? And it's not about that. I think those are important things for reaching further in music, but you can't get lost in that race, right?
- It's funny because probably, most likely, the people that win, win the conservatory competitions and whatnot, are not stuck in that race. It's all the second places. It's like if you're struggling, you're certainly not at a point where you're fully released on the emotional quality of that competition music, and I think it has been a problem for me in my 20s, for sure, not being part of the elite. Not attending the McGill University, let's say, whatever. There's always this second place type of struggle. All right, so let's move on. We talked about why it's important. We talked about the pitfalls. We talked about what are some solutions. One thing I will say before we really get back to practical things you could try, I'm gonna read out loud what I wrote because I think it's brilliant. Isn't it brilliant when I write stuff? In order to evolve your playing as a whole, you choose your mindset. So, to me, it's gonna sound deep and strange, but being human being comes with a really deep gift, and the gift is you get to choose what you think about. So it's not necessarily what you do that matters; it's more the mindset that you carry with it. So I see people in my neighborhood maintaining their gardens or doing some gardening in front of the house with flowers, whatever, and you see these older couples, some of them are doing it 'cause it's a labor of love, and some other people are doing it because they have to. They're reluctant to be doing it even though they like the result. So this is just a matter of mindset because it's the same freakin' gardening.
- I love that idea, what you said before about the gift of being human, right? I like to think about it as... When we think about human intelligence and insentience in general, I feel like it's a hack. Like, instead of being, to hold onto just instincts, we have instincts, we develop instincts, and, actually, we have to hone our instincts in order to play jazz without thinking 'cause thinking is kinda slow, right? But we get to hack the system and say, "Wait a second. If I shift my perspective or if I change my mindset, or I settle upon a distinct, streamlined mindset, I can actually change my behavior from the inside out, or I guess it's outside in? Yeah, no, inside out.
- Inside out, absolutely.
- No external forces are changing what you're doing. It's a choice that you make, which is very strange in the animal kingdom it seems, perhaps. Maybe we don't know.
- I think leading an inner-directed life is probably something that's very distinguished, like now we're following philosophy and whatever. I don't think my cat has as broad an inner life as she has an outer life.
- And she's probably got a very rich inner life. No, yeah, it's a cat.
- So, all in all, that's what we have to do. That's what we have to think about, your inner life. You have to think that you have the gift of choosing or modifying your mindset. And just before we get really to the exercises, there's... I think that what students realize, that to learn music in general, to learn anything new, to grow, there is a mindset. So practicing, improving, learning new things, but also the mindset skill for jazz in terms of improvising, it comes in very, very handy. That's the voice earlier, "Hey, it's not swinging enough." That's the voice you're learning to tame because it's just 1,000 monkeys in your head while you're improvising. None of this is more real than anything. You're just playing a bunch of eighth notes.
- Yeah.
- We all have this. So what we'll cover now as far as exercises is both for the general growth of learning anything, your general mindset, but also the mindset of an improviser, which is, in my mind, one of the most challenging things a human being can do. It's taxing on the nervous system. Just watch Keith Jarrett improvise. You're like, "Yeah, that looks pretty hard," but it's-
- Sounds pretty hard too. You hear him.
- I love that guy.
- Oh, my throat.
- But, all in all, it's very demanding, so there are ways to, the same way as like an Olympic sprinter, as it's very demanding. The Olympic sprinters work on their mindsets, the sport psychology that plays a large role in the final performance.
- Yeah, 90, what is it? "90% of the game is mental," or something like that? I don't know who that quote is attributed to, but probably a lot of people, but usually in sports, right?
- Yeah, look at top athletes in anything. It's like, well, they all kinda train the same way. They all kinda eat the same things. And at the cusp of the sport, what's going to make the difference? Who wants it the most at the end?
- Exactly.
- It's all mental.
- Again, we're not competing, but-
- We are not.
- But we are kinda competing with ourselves, right? We do wanna reach farther than we could before, and that's, I think, a part of growth mindset. And that's probably a few of the, I know that that's a few of the practical exercises that we have coming up.
- Mm-hmm.
- So let's talk about that.
- Speaking of which, so let's get in the exercises. There's a book called "Just Mindsets" by Dr... I'm ashamed, I should have known, but I read this last year, and this is actually exactly what you say: it's growth mindset and the opposite of that. She's a psychologist, I believe. So growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Fixed mindset is like, "I did not do well on this exam because I'm not good at math."
- Yeah, yeah.
- Fixed mindset. Growth mindset is-
- "I don't have a talent for it," right?
- Exactly.
- I personally want to abolish the history and the notion of talent.
- Same.
- There are some good things that come from that idea, that notion, such as the notion of the genius visiting you. I think it's a Baroque notion of the genius visiting you, leaving inspiration, and then it's gone. And then you take that gift where you can get it, where you can find it, and then you let it go, but it's not placed upon your shoulders. It's not your burden. And I think that's an important thing to balance with all of this, is that like, I wrote this down somewhere, I can't remember where, but we're gonna talk a lot about things that you can do to take responsibility for your mindset. Sorry, to develop a mindset to take responsibility for your growth as a musician. But I wanna balance all that by saying, like, your ability to play guitar does not reflect on you, your merit as a human being.
- Good one. Yeah.
- It's really easy for artists to get super down on themselves, like, "I am not good enough." It's like, whoa, hold up. Your taste is up here, your skill might be here, and that just means that there's a chase that you can go on, but it doesn't mean that you're not good enough. It just means that there's a gap.
- It's not who you are. Yeah, it's not like the being.
- Exactly.
- It's your skillset, and skillset is-
- It's tied to you. It's tied to... It's a part of you, but it isn't all of you, right?
- Exactly. Okay, good. Wow, let's get in the exercises before people fall asleep, and let's race through the exercises. So number one, there's a story I've heard of a very high-level concert pianist. I wonder who may be in the area. Well, she went to a cabin for like two weeks in the winter by a lake, and it was in... Maybe it was Angela Hewitt?
- Oh, yeah, yeah. NAC.
- Yeah, she's world class piano player. She's like 65? She's like 70 years old now? I've heard her last year.
- So phenomenal.
- Unreal. And she went to University of Ottawa, actually. She has a bachelor from the early, like, 1972 or something. But anyways, her, maybe not her, but someone was stuck in a cabin. Concert pianist, never played this or that piece, just draw the score.
- Nice, that was my therapy. Karen.
- I love Karen. Look at the score through the vacation and just sort of memorize the music. So the point is then that person had done 80 or 90% of the work in playing, performing that piece, right? And so the point of the story here is that... Are you still there? Are we breaking up? You're good?
- Am I frozen?
- Oh, it's okay. Typically, I do it with a LAN wire, but I forgot we're still on WiFi. So the point is the physicality of your music is secondary. So the practical exercise here is see if you can prepare for musical situations. If you're in the car and you know you're gonna get home practicing, you can prepare mentally for that.
- Yeah, what does the music sound like in your mind, right?
- Sounds-
- To start with.
- Feels like, even if you're like transitioning, you are practicing this, and then you're gonna practice the next thing and then look at it. And before you start the physical, see if you can work on that mental game just to raise your inner vibration, your thoughts about this. Same with a rehearsal, if you're on your way to play with friends or a jam or gig. So, to me, that exercise is like a little visualization or projection exercise. It works wonder because sometimes you're like, "Oh, this part of music is impossible to play," and then the more you do it in your mind, you're like, oh, oh, you tame it. And then your body's like, yeah, because your mind runs your body, not the other way around.
- Your mind is already building, like, that mental exercise is actually already building myelination in the neurons, in the neural network, or the neural pathway specifically, that builds that particular skill. Despite not actually doing it, there's a mind-body feedback loop that's continuous, where everything that your body does affects your mind, affects your body, affects your mind, and so on, right? There's this really good Adam Neely video. Again, I'm gonna probably always gonna quote different YouTube videos that you can search on YouTube.
- He should pay us.
- He should pay us. Yeah, we should totally sponsor. Call again.
- But he does a great episode on practicing without your instrument and this idea of audiation, which is picture this but not for visuals. It's a vivid mental picture of your music, vivid mental image. We don't have a word for it. It's like-
- It's a projection, but that's also in the "Forward Motion" book, the pianist, Galper; it's sorta the same thing.
- Galper.
- Musical projection. Another exercise you might want to do is developing a solid mindset through patience, and that's like, it's not so much a practical exercise as it is if you wanna achieve anything, it's gonna take you a while, so might as well collect the skill of patience while you're on your way. One thing I wrote in our notes is, "Determine who you need to be." It sounds strange, but I read this book by Todd Herman, and he says, it's called the "Alter Ego Effect." And it's like the Superman, Kent Clark. It sounds a bit, it's like, eh, but there are proven psychological effects to stepping in a role.
- Putting on the hat, right?
- Yeah, a hat or glasses, or whatever, and then going, "Oh, that's my personality slightly shift. I'm showing up as this guy that can play minor two fives and improvisation and all keys really well," right? So that's another exercise.
- You don't have to be mild mannered Nathan Corr. You could be millionaire playboy jazz guitarist Jimbo Mad Cat or something by night.
- Exactly.
- I can't come up with names.
- Something else. Oh, did you want to take the next exercises?
- Yeah, and the can-do attitude? This boils down to just having a positive mindset, but there's actually a couple of nuances behind this that are very important. So, yeah, you gotta keep a positive attitude whenever you're playing something. You're like, "I just can't get this passage." One of the nuances, one of the very simple nuances is that you should really try and change the way that you speak. So if you say, "Don't play the F sharp when you get to this point. It's an F natural now. Don't play the F sharp." If you say that in your mind every time you are practicing, and you make that mistake, like, "Oh, don't play the F sharp," you're gonna play the F sharp. The only piece of information that your mind processes is-
- [Both] F sharp.
- Yeah, exactly. So instead, say, "Play F." Go for positive reinforcement. Go for affirmative thoughts, affirmative thoughts. Things that are like, this is... It's actually linked back to the visualization side of things. You're just trying to picture what you want to happen. You don't wanna picture what you don't want to happen.
- That's a good point.
- Because then you're just picturing something that's not supposed to, that you're not trying to actually achieve.
- Like don't think of the white elephant. You've heard this one? Don't think about it.
- Now I'm thinking about the white elephant.
- And one thing I jotted down for this, for the can-do attitude, it sounds corny, but the point is, as an exercise, determine what your next big hurdle is. And I'm gonna go on a limb and shamelessly... I personally play pretty well when I have my guitar and a bass player and a drummer. If I wanted to learn, because I've seen guitarists do it, they can't really play with a piano player, and then they develop the ability to do it as a guitarist, right? I would need to do a lot of introspection, and a lot of growth, and a lot of work to go through that phase. So you have to put the weapons down, and go like, "All right, what do I need to do?" It's not just a can-do attitude. It sounds corny when we say it like this, right?
- Yeah, yeah.
- It's not just a can-do attitude. It's like, realize things. If you want to generate different results, things have to change.
- Take stock.
- And it's hard.
- Definitely. For me, there's also another side thing to this, where if you can put yourself in a situation where you just have to do the thing that you want to be doing, that you want to have gotten done, if you can put yourself in that situation, then you'll get it done because you have to. There's no other choice. Whereas if you sort of give yourself the choice between doing the hard thing and shying away from it, you'll usually go for the shying away from it option. So, for me, two examples. Number one, I find that it's really hard to, like I wanna practice in the morning or something like that, or I want to be beholden to myself, up for something that I wanna do. I find that really hard. But if instead I scheduled it in the calendar, and I get a notification that says, "9:00 a.m., you've gotta do this. You gotta get up and practice." Well, it's in my calendar. I gotta go. I gotta show up to the meeting. If you have to show up, you have to it. And a secondary example is this, where it's 2020, when we're filming this. There's the big quarantine of 2020, and we're all sitting at home. For me, I've been wanting to get together with my quartet for composing and for playing my original music and just playing with my friends. All we got right now is the ability to record audio clips to a click track and sending them to each other, and putting them all together on Logic Pro or something like that.
- GarageBand.
- GarageBand. Any sort of music production. I've had to learn music production techniques because I have to if I wanna play music with other people, there's no other choice, which before this, I thought, "Oh, I'll never be able to be a producer. I'll never be able to mix my own record. I'll never be able to do those things." And now it's like, "Well, I have to do it," so I go and do it, and then, "Oh, this is actually doable; I can do this," right? It's not impossible like I initially thought. That's the big one, is the change of mindset from, "This is impossible," to, "Oh, actually, I can totally do this."
- There's the whole reluctance. So I'll talk about this a little later as well. There's one coming up, but that's a great example. Moving on to another practical tip, what I like to call "notice and name" and eliminating the judgment.
- Oh, yeah.
- So name is, like, something happens, you collect data, and you make relevant non-judgmental, you know, it's not good or bad, observations about your playing, your habits, and your song. So you might be, "It's not swinging enough." You know, that voice again. Third time. Third time's the charm. You play a solo, and you feel that, you hear it, like, it's my thought, and you just make a note of it. Notice and name. Oh, when I solo, typically I have this judgmental prick in my left ear. You know, it's like, oh.
- You, you suck.
- No, it's personal. It's not business. It's totally personal.
- You suck.
- It's very personal, yeah. This isn't business. It's personal.
- Look at that. It's interesting. So see how you collect data about yourself. See how some of this could be actionable. And, to me, this is... When you notice and name, there's an experiment side to it that I like to say, what if a friend, a close friend, came to you and say, "Oh, while I'm improvising, I'm having that thought," or, "I have the habit of doing this." Sorry. Zoom issues. Am I still there?
- Yeah, I still see and hear you.
- I thought Zoom was about to crash. So just the experiment of notice and name, and see how it's actionable, but from like you're a scientist, and you're making a lab experiment, and you're observing things. So, remember, it's not necessarily what you think and what you do. It's what you do and what your habits are on a regular basis that form the basis of all your personality, basically, in everything you do. Sorry, yes?
- To add to that, my wife, Kayleigh, she's a Baroque violinist and a violin teacher. One of the things that she likes to say a lot, as in her teacher role, because she got it from her teacher as well, I think, is the notion that mistakes are just information, right? It doesn't say, again, going back to that other idea, it doesn't tell you anything about you as a person. No judgment. Mistakes are just information. Simply collecting data, like you mentioned. Keeping that in mind, super important.
- And the next practical tip, just to segue into that, if you lack perspective, record yourself. It's actually the same tip. You'll hear your mistakes. It's an experiment.
- It's just information. You're collecting data.
- Just information. And if you heard this one, the "Seinfeld" one, "Pain is just a lot of information coming in "very, very quickly."
- Yeah.
- Stub your toe.
- Awfully deep for that show.
- Stub your toe. It's like, ouch. Well, this is a lot of information that's-
- All just coming in fast. On that note, too, actually, I do want to mention, I have a student, Steve. We mentioned him earlier. I name him by name because he's... I'm really, really proud of what he's done for the past, for himself, for the past several months. And he put something on the members, for the JGL members forum, our exclusive Facebook group. He recorded a video for people coming into the program and for-
- Oh, I saw that. Saw it.
- Yeah, yeah, super good because he came from a perspective of really low self-esteem for, like, "I'm not good enough as a player." And actually, relatively recently, he just put on his public Instagram a video of himself playing, and I don't think he would have done that when I first met him. On the note of collecting data, he actually just, like, he took that idea literally, he took that piece of advice literally, and he's a big data collection guy when he was in his career. So he took that idea, made an Excel spreadsheet, and it talks about his training program. It's an approach that we talk about in Private Instructor in a Box. If you have access to it, it's in the sidebar, the right sidebar.
- It's a bonus, yeah.
- Bonus, and very, very, very useful bonus. Really good for becoming your own coach. We'll talk about it more later. But he took that idea, he put it on a spreadsheet, he outlined what he's going to be practicing at any given moment for this practice session, and then he also went the step further and started collecting data for himself so that he could see his growth. And his motto and a motto in business is, in data management in the business, is if you measure something, it will improve.
- What gets measured gets improved.
- What gets measured gets improved. By contrast, what doesn't get measured does not get improved. You keep telling yourselves the same, you keep telling yourself the same myths that you've always been telling yourself about that thing. So, yeah, do the data collection. Don't judge yourself on on those data points.
- Notice and name. Notice, name.
- Notice and name. Oh, you wanna talk about the next one as well? We've actually talked about meditation in previous points, or ideas of meditation.
- So, just quickly, people know what meditation is, and they go, "Oh, Marc, I don't wanna do it." Well, you do whatever you need to clear your mind is what I think, but also coming back to a previous point, I said, "I'm gonna add this later," resistance is a big thing. If you want to ensure a kid does not do something, tell them to do it.
- Yeah, reverse psychology?
- The whole should, if you're in your mind going like, "Oh, I should really get down to practice," we resist even ourselves. And that's why I say meditation because it's a tool for letting go, for releasing expectations and whatever, and then eventually if you have something you want to do, you'll just do it because you wanna do it. I've been reading, so this is just a side tip, I've been reading and practicing the Sedona Method. Life changing, and not, like, I'm not saying this, like, literally life changing. And so letting go of the resistance is something you do through meditation or through other means. You might be released enough and let go enough on what you want, but typically if there's a should, should, could, it's like it's a recipe for disaster.
- I should be practicing. Instead, I'm filming this masterclass video with Marc.
- Yeah, what are we doing, man?
- I don't know.
- Okay, bye. Bye.
- That's it. That's it for today. I got to pick up-
- That's it. I have a minor seven flat five voicing to attend to. So I'm gonna take this one. Private Instructor in a Box is a module in the mastery program where you get to learn Marc's and Nathan's magic recipe for crafting a program for yourself, tracking yourself, when to review, what types of materials to choose. So it's a talking-only course.
- And also taking stock of your mindset. That's the first part of the module. We often focus on the practical side of things. That first section sometimes gets... Like, it's underrated. Taking stock of your dreams, your hopes and dreams, your favorite players, where you want to be, your 10-year vision. It's all business principles for envisioning how the growth of the company but adapted for... It's the same principles apply for growth as a musician as well.
- So, yeah, and I agree that it's a section in that module that gets overlooked, and people are like, "Yeah, I wanna design my program. Why do I need to spend time going, "What do I wanna do in a year or five years?" People don't see the relevance of it, but the relevance of it is the mindset, I think. You just establish that. Awesome, one more final tip that I wanna take on that's very practical: getting in the zone. So if you are not where you need to be, sometimes you need to pump yourself up before you go on stage. If you're delivering a good speech, or if you have a business meeting, or if you have a pitch for your business, or if you're about to spend time with your kids, sometimes you need to transition your role and ensure that you show up with the whole alter ego, who you need to be. So there's three different aspects I wanna talk about. I remember watching an interview with Pat Matheny, and he says every time he goes on stage, he thinks that could be it. "It could be my very last concert. It's possible I'll never play again." And he says that as a young age, he always had that mindset. Like, "I had a good run, but it's about to end," right?
- Better go out with a bang.
- Yeah, and it's not dark or anything. It's just he's really living that, every note, like it would be his last one. It sounds like it.
- Yeah, seriously plays with so much passion.
- And secondly, same guy, Matheny. He says there's always this mindset of, he says, "I play something's, it's like, not quite, almost." And it's not like the sad part of being a perfectionist more so that I'm gonna get there.
- Yeah.
- I think.
- The eternal taste. It's a thrill, right?
- But not eternal dissatisfaction.
- Right, right.
- There's a fine line, right? So Matheny said in that interview, he says, "I'm gonna record a solo," record it again, and go like, "Eh, all right let's give it a second take," and then... So, I love Pat Matheny. Deep personality. Anyways, and and the last tip on getting in the zone, Josh Waitzkin is a chess champion, and, also, he wrote that book called, I think it's "The Art of Learning." And he's also a Tai Chi master, but not Tai Chi Tai Chi, the martial art of Tai Chi, where they put themselves in a circle, and they try to unbalance the other guy. Anyways, very deep, like a prodigy of chess. And you know that movie "In Search of Bobby Fischer"? The movie was about that guy. He's about 30-something right now. Anyways, he was training baseball, a baseball pitcher, for instance, and just said that the whole, the baseball pitcher would say, "Well, my ideal game happens when I have lunch with my kid, and I take a nap, maybe have a snack. Then I get to the stadium and throw a thousand balls." It's a long ritual. And they work together to a point where the ritual instead of being six hours, it became six seconds.
- Oh, okay, I see.
- So that's what you, you see tennis players go boom. That three bounces is their heart going from 150 BPM down to 80 BPM.
- Right, yes.
- See if you can develop your methods for getting in the zone. For me, I'll tell you my tip. I focus on my hands. Hands, they become warm. And I just found out recently that they're directly connected to the heart chakra, which is totally like crazy spiritual stuff. I'm like, "Oh, this is what's happening." And when I get in the zone and I play, it just plays itself. I just show up and breathe.
- So a lot of these concepts and a lot of these quotes are from really high-level performers in their respective fields. For everybody who's just like, "Well, how do I use this in a practice realm?" and it's very simple. Whenever I talk about the the training program idea, where it's like, yeah, separate what you're gonna play or what you're going to practice, what areas you're gonna focus on, into specific percentages and things like that. You gotta make sure that you actually fill that out or figure out what you wanna play before you actually start playing. You don't sit down with a guitar right away, and you're just, "Okay, I'm practicing now." You say, "Okay, I know that at six o'clock I have an hour. Well, I want five minutes before that, just five minutes." Or six seconds, right? That's the ritual. Take your six-hour ritual down to six seconds. I gotta be ready to play guitar. You go down to five minutes before you play, and maybe part of the ritual is you take out that sheet of paper and you say, "Okay, well, I know that these are the things that I wanna work on." Okay, so this area, this area. Comping with shells, improv with guide tones, and 50% of your time should be spent on repertoire, playing actual songs. Yeah, playing standards, playing the music. Forget about the exercises, right? Well, you put all that stuff down, but you actually start to visualize what it is that you're trying to play, and you forget about, the important part is you forget about the day. You don't think about that argument you had with your friend at lunchtime, or you don't think about the fact that you're worried about that big job promotion coming up, or something like that. You've got to think about, "I have to be present over this next hour because it's all I get to play guitar," right?
- It's still projection.
- Yeah, still projection.
- Project yourself.
- Yeah, but with the extra component of not thinking about the white elephant. Like really making sure that you focus on what's to come and get into that moment, into that groove. Get in the zone, right? And that has to do with like if you can have a ritual, such as writing down that training program, I think it's a super useful one because it's super practical. There are no... It's a physical thing that affects your mindset. So sit down with a sheet of paper and pen, write down the percentage of time that you wanna spend on each of them, and, most importantly, what those things actually are that you wanna focus on. And then you're like, "All right, I know what I'm doing for the next hour." And you pick up that guitar, and you just play with a timer. Timer goes off, you move on.
- Or you hear the doorbell. Oh, it's Marc. I exceeded my seven minutes of comping. The jazz police again. Awesome, so we've given you these steps. Feel free to rewatch those things we went over quickly. I just wanna go... in French we say . So super quickly, I have this list of stuck in a rut. People say, "I'm stuck; I don't know what to do." There are things you can try. And let's, what do you say, Nathan, we alternate.
- Do you wanna start it?
- Okay.
- I love what you wrote here, but go ahead.
- Costanza the heck out of the situation. "Seinfeld" from the '90s. It's a sitcom. And on Sunday, George wakes up like, "Nothing's working. I'll just start doing the opposite."
- Great impulse.
- Yeah, you have this impulse, do the opposite. It's sort of crazy because we have this prefabricated hows, and I remember a student of mine going, "Hey, I wanna learn this. I wanna learn to solo with seven to nine arpeggios, 3-5-7-9. I said, "All right, let's do this." He's like, "No." He's like, "No, no, Marc. No, no, no, you're missing the point. When I do this, I have to first do that and do that, and then that client then does that." I'm like, "Okay, so you you believe that you have to do it in a certain way, but how's it working out for you? It's not working, and that's why I'm teaching you. All right, so see if you can Costanza this. Do the complete opposite." That's one practical getting out of the rut tip. The next one is-
- Practical mindset for getting out of rut using, you wanna try to eliminate the or statements. If you can actually just take the two concepts, two choices that you have, and be like, "Well, why not both?" Makes a big difference in terms of, in terms of what you're playing and what you're trying to achieve.
- Read some forums online. Oh, Joe Pass used only scales. Never thought about arpeggios. No, arpeggios are chord scales of like... Well, why don't you learn scales and arpeggios?
- There are countless arguments about all of these things, and it's like, guys, music is a big, complicated beast, and you can't just stick with one segment of it. I think it loops to something we said earlier, it's like some people sort of view guitar as like just shredding, that's it. There's nothing wrong with shredding inherently, but if that's the only part of the music that you gravitate towards, you're missing a bigger picture, right?
- Oh, yeah, and so that's the second tip. So first tip, Costanza. Second tip, go for the "and" instead of the "or" when you have a choice to make. Just do both.
- Open the mind to all of it.
- Open your mind to all of this. Further open your mind. Another mindset trick, allow yourself to play anything. If you're stuck in a rut and you wanna go out, stop. Take 24 hours, or a week, or a month, and don't even think of scales or arpeggios or nothing. Just play music. You'll be so surprised because you'll eliminate all the rules so that when you come back, you have, you know, maybe if you come back to rules, you bring some of that freedom back with you. It seems like it. Number four. Oh, do you want me to tackle this one? It's sort of crazy.
- Okay, yeah, go for it. Yeah, please.
- If you hear something you do not like in another musician, it's probably something you can't stand in your own playing. Or maybe you're already doing it, and you can't admit it. I'll just leave it at that. This is also a spiritual, personal development thing.
- Yeah, reflecting and projecting onto others. Number five-
- That's yours.
- Yeah, this one here I added. It was the idea of getting intimate with another instrument or getting really in touch with it and saying, like, piano, or looking at the way pianists comp versus the way that guitarists comp, or the way that saxophone players have to breathe in between phrases whereas guitarists don't. They often give you a different technical perspective or technical approach on how they conquer the challenges of the way their instrument is built, which allows you to have a completely different mindset on how that music is made as an instrumentalist of that sort.
- Agreed, very good tip. And the last one, I'm going to tell you go pick a copy of "The Advancing Guitarist" if you don't have that book. It's by Mick Goodrick, and there's a bunch of really short topics, and I remember some of those. Like, what if you could never play guitar ever again? Like, you're done. You can't play guitar. It's a thought experiment. Take a day off, take a week off, take a month off, change your strings. Yeah, it's all mindset. So think of the music, hear the music, listen to good music. Don't listen to music at all for a month. You will see what happens. And please, guys, so that's just a note that I've jotted down. Don't go out and shop for more gear because that's typically a distraction. People will just get into another pedal, another pick. But, ultimately, what you want to do is play. So we've given you a lot. I just wanna conclude the whole spectrum of exercises we've given you to work on your mindset. If you apply anywhere from two to five ideas in what we've discussed, you're well on your way to changing your mindset, developing a strong mental game for music. And one thing I jotted down inside, we've talked about sports psychology, and there's a good reasons sports team flock friggin' millions of dollars on sports psychologist, performance coaches. There's a lot of things, like, everything happens in our mind first. So that's what I have. Any additional thoughts, Nathan, before we conclude?
- I just wanna outline the key takeaways from all of this. So the idea is adopt an inside first, outside later philosophy. Everything should come from within and come out. Like I said, when my students adopt this philosophy, that you are the instrument, so work on you, right? Another one, another key takeaway from all of this, take a step back and do the notice and name exercise that we talked about earlier. It's not judgment, be letting go all the judgments, the value judgments that you're thinking. You're just thinking like, "I could change this," or, "This would change this and the effect would be that." Things like that. Data gathering, right? Use whatever methods, like meditation. Meditation is just a fantastic tool that you can use in a variety of ways.
- Headspace app. I love Headspace.
- My wife's started using Headspace as well, and it's just, like... It's just it's fantastically laid out, the entire, the app itself, from a practical standpoint. It's great. I want you to also realize who you need to be. So create the role in your mind and then step into that role. You don't have to be yourself at that point. You don't have to be your preconceived notions of who you think you are at that point. You can just step in that role and do the job, and doing so will allow you to do your job better with none of baggage, right?
- Agreed.
- And, yeah, I guess this last point's kinda cheesy again, but enjoy the ride, yeah.
- Enjoy the ride.
- Have fun playing guitar. Music is fun. Music is fulfilling. Music is a lot of really, really positive things. And if it wasn't, you wouldn't do it, right?
- Exactly, and to the the second to last point, I talked about the Sedona Method. So there's a few things. There's a Kenny Werner book you might wanna check out. There's that Mick Goodrick book, "The Sedona Method," but also stepping into the role also means that you are releasing on either, all of the above: judgments, expectations, value judgment. I am a not a good player. You keep it very light. As you said, it's not on your shoulders anymore. You just release on all of this. I think, well, sounds familiar. I think I got the same indication, but mine are silent.
- Oh, I'm sorry. I'm gonna be fired.
- Next time.
- You're fired, Nathan.
- That was a running gag for a while.
- Like a year or two. Yeah, these I think, all of this ends up being a matter of you wanna be present with your guitar and your art making. You wanna actually have your head in the game. And so that's what it all boils down to. That's what mindset is.
- I think so, yeah.
- And all of that really gets to the thesis of why we play music. Again, connecting with other people. You can't do it if your head space is somewhere else, right?
- I agree, one of the teachers I had in Montreal, he was a drum teacher, and he was teaching at McGill, and he says, "I get down in the morning at the firing squad," or whatever, all the small studio, like fridge door sealed. And you see these guys there. It's 9:15 a.m, and they're practicing scales, but they're already thinking about supper. It's truly mechanical. So get your head, as you said is... All of this boils down to can you be in the moment with your instrument, with that note that you played, and that chord that you played, and let just be, let that note be. Like, "Oh, no, it's not swinging." Again, that whole thing. Be present.
- On the one hand, that note that you played, did you mean it? What you said there, did you mean what you said? And then on the other side of the coin, it's like being super critical of yourself. Instead of just bullshitting, being super critical yourself, like, "Oh, shoot, I could have done that better." That also detracts. You gotta find this knife-edge middle ground. It's hard, but it takes practice. It takes honing another yet another skill. Just like anything else, it's not a talent. It's honing another skill that will help you in all aspects of your life, but, yeah, in jazz guitar specifically.
- Awesome. So we will let you go, guys. We both hope this masterclass was helpful. Feel free to rewatch. I note, jotted this down. It's like, rewatch this in a year or six months and see how much of this found its way into your playing and your mindset. If not the answer to some of your technical problems, and your guitar issues, and your skills, and your technique might not lie in the fingers but maybe more in your mind. And I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next masterclass as well. That will shoot probably in a few weeks. Any parting thoughts, Nathan?
- Fish ain't meat.
- Live long and prosper?
- Yeah, I have no idea. That's pretty much it. You said basically everything I wanted to again.
- So, yeah, if you didn't already know this, guys, we prepare these masterclasses, but when come times, we just have a discussion; we wing them. So hope you've enjoyed it. I will stop the recording right now. We'll see you soon on JazzGuitarLessons.net. Improve your jazz guitar playing with real teachers, and take care, bye.
- Thanks very much.
- Thanks.
