Hey, guys. Welcome back to the podcast. It's Marc back here again with you for special series of podcast called The Revelations 2025. So I want to share with you the biggest, most impactful takeaways of years of coaching. Actually, this year in 2025, the endeavor, the podcast, the blog, everything is going to be 16 years old so that that whole platform is a teenager officially with acne and, you know, the mood swings and discovering life.
So here are the three main things that I take away. I will first stage them. And that's, of course, about 15 years of teaching online, probably about 20 years of teaching online and off, along with a career as a professional musician of over 20 years myself. And so if you don't know who I am, I'm Marc. I started this platform Jazz Guitar Lessons Dot net, along with the YouTube channel in 2009 and for the past years, I've been helping thousands of people explode their jazz guitar skills and become really confident at tackling improvization jazz standards, chord, melody, etc. so here are the the main takeaways, which I'll call revelations.
Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists to learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way. My name is Mark, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy French accent, make sure to subscribe.
Revelation number one. There exists a proven system, so you can use that system to become confident in playing jazz, becoming a really good guitarist in about 45 to 70 minutes a day without wasting your time, without wasted practice hours, without wasted effort. So I'll dig into this one. In this episode and the next episodes, we're going to have number two and number three.
So number two, you can learn, you know, half a dozen or a dozen jazz standards really quickly with these five steps, I'm going to describe and remove 90% of what you've been told to practice. That's my second revelation. And you see how they stack up to that. They're phases of my coaching. So at first like, oh, there's a system. Secondly, yeah, you can learn to standards. And thirdly, really frequent expert feedback will unlock the breakthroughs for you in your playing. Actually, I think it's the only way that it can reveal what's missing. And on your journey. Right. And then transform your playing so hard to do in a, in a vacuum. You need to get the feedback. So these three things I'm going to tell you and the story behind each so you can actually immediately implement and save you.
So basically I'm telling you hey guys, I took 1015 years to find this out. And now you get to find out in a few minutes on this podcast. Isn't that amazing? I love the 21st century. All right. So revelation number one, there is this proven system to become a confident jazz guitarist in 45 to 70 minutes a day without wasting your effort, without aimless practice, without head scratching.
So let me boil it down to a story I had with a, a, student that was local, but we took, like, lessons on Skype back then, so we would get together and, you know, for a 60 minute, and then I would assign certain exercises, scales and songs and stuff we discussed. And it mostly boiled down to what the student wanted.
So let's call the student Bob. Right. Bob wanted to do this and came up with a certain question, a certain piece of topic, a certain theory element, and we would just discuss this. So I became like almost like a therapist of jazz guitar figure, oh, this is what you're curious about? Okay, so here's the answer. Here's this year's death.
And come the next lesson, same process. Ask the questions. Find this out. Okay. Another one. And then I realized like, hey, whoa, whoa, wait. If I'm not writing any of this down and neither of us are, we're just wasting our time, right? So I start to take notes down, and then the need to track what was assigned sort of emerged.
And here enters the proven system. So the proven system was, hey, you, you should definitely. Yeah, you should definitely show up and ask me questions about what you're curious about. But we should have a plan, right? Like you should know what you're about to practice before you do so. And that was my experience going to college as well.
There's so much time in the day, so I have this much time to practice. So I should definitely have a plan of attack even before I pick up the instrument. Before I touch the guitar, I need to know what I'm going to do. Right? And this this has several little ramifications. So you know what? You have to practice. Secondly, with Bob wood, I said this with you have these 12 things we talked about so far. You can practice 12 things, not every day at least. So practice 3 or 4 things now for a month or 2 or 3. And then the next 3 or 4 things in the next 3 or 4 things. I used to have these laundry lists, you know, 20 things to practice every day.
And you don't practice these 20 things, not with a, a degree of success anyways. So that's that was a big revelation going, hey, there's a system. And realizing that we can only do so much focused practice, which is 45 minutes a day at a minimum, 30, 45 and my best, quote unquote, students in the accelerator coaching side, by the way, link in description if you're interested to be part of the next cohort and get all the bonuses and time with me and etc..
An average for the highest performing was like 72 minutes per day. People say I'm going to practice three hours for. I was like, no, actually, that ties into my next point. You have a practice plan. You know what you have to practice. It's limited to a few topics. You should definitely do it for a limited amount of time because the whole, like Perito 8020 principle also states that if I give myself more time to complete a task, the task will fill up that time.
So using a timer is crucial, and using the timer is to stop myself from practicing for too long. For instance, I have these three things on my docket. I have an hour of practice, so it's 20 minutes each. If I don't stop myself, I may wind up just looking at that first thing and not even consider the 2 or 2 topics.
And then the hour went by and I'm done. So the the secret is to use a timer, not to practice more, but to keep me, keep me accountable to stop that topic and get back for it tomorrow. Right. That's how you build discipline. It's actually not in doing more. It's actually doing less time and being more diligent and focused.
Which brings me to my next point again. So I met with Bob a certain point, and I told Bob, all right, you have a practice session, you're going to do, 30% this, 20% this, and 50% this. So I signed it by percentage. So you have an hour splitting in two and three for work. Right. So figure out how many minutes of this thing you're supposed to do and then do it timer.
It goes off. Beep beep. You're done. Move on. Easy. Right. Next time I meet, Bob says. But Mark is given me too much. I'm like, how can I give you too much if I've given you 100%? So your practice time is an hour per day. You're using that hour to do these things. Where is too much?
Hey guys, just a quick note if you're enjoying this content and you're eager to boost your own jazz guitar playing, then connect with us. We've transformed the jazz skills of thousands of guitarists. You can find the link in the description or head directly over to Jazz Guitar Lessons dot net to begin your journey. All right, let's dive back into the episode.
So here's a false belief.
The false belief was I have to be done, quote unquote, doing all these things before I meet my teacher again, which is not true, right? Or before I get the feedback or before or whatever. this is a work in progress. It's like the analogy of that false belief would be to go to the gym and have a personal trainer tells you, well, you're here, you're lifting 100 pounds on whatever.
And eventually maybe in a year or two you'll be at 200 pounds, and then you execute the workouts, but you complain. The next time you see your personal trainer, you tell, hey, coach, you've given me too much. It's like, no, it's not too much. Now you're lifting 100 pounds with the aim of lifting 200 pounds down the line.
Right. And so that's that's the first revelation, the first, secret of teaching. I came up, I started to share things online. I started to have one on one clients, and then these guys told me, hey, you know, we need a plan. They didn't tell me explicitly, implicitly. People will go, I need to organize my time. Okay, let's do it this way.
But I spent too much time on this. Yes, you've been the rabbit hole. You let yourself be carried away with that single thing, and you should have stopped yourself. All right, you're trying to practice too many topics. No, we practice only 3 or 4 things. Which will be the next revelation. What? What do we practice now? We're structuring look like?
How are we going to practice 45 to 70 the minute, 70 minutes, consistently executed with a plan that does not change for the next 3 to 4 weeks using a timer, preferably. And that's part of the revelation. My my guys that are making strides in really short amount of time, they're typically doing two practices session per day.
It doesn't have to be overwhelming either. It could be like pick it up, do 25 minutes in the morning and later than I do another half hour. That's perfect so long as it's focused, right? So it's here. You got it. That's a revelation. There exists a proven system to become confident, and the proven system is to have a plan to be diligent about executing it.
Do not believe that you have to do it all, quote unquote, before you meet with your coach, before you encounter anything else, it's normal to tackle a two in a scale and exercise for months. So it's so that it's never actually finished. It's not like you can check off the box, like when you go to university and you study physics, so you have physics.
1701 okay. Then next semester if you pass, you get physics. 1702 right. That that would be you need to get the passing grade to move on and check these boxes with jazz, specifically with guitar learning. It's never that linear. Right. So that's the first revelation. So stay tuned for revelations 2025 for more episodes in the next, two episodes, we're going to tackle, how to master of half dozen or dozen standards quickly by doing five steps and eliminate 90% of what you've been told to practice.
And then we're going to look at the how to get expert feedback and why and how. What are the mechanics of getting breakthroughs? All right. I'll see you there in the next podcast episode. Take care. Bye.
