Hey, guys, it's Marc back here with you. Welcome to revelation 2025, which is, you know, this platform is 16 years old. It's smelly teenager. And here are the big takeaways that can immediately benefit your playing in this episode. Right now we're going to look at the second revelation which tells you you can master half a dozen or even a dozen jazz standards quickly by taking these five steps and eliminate 90% of what you've been told to practice. So this is five steps, which I'm going to describe now, and I'll tell you how it came about and how to exactly implemented in your playing. And you can also look at what you've been told, quote unquote, on YouTube or browsing through fire or googling stuff. People will tell you practice these scales practices and you can pretty much eradicate 90% of it. And I'll show you how simple it is, how we can benefit you directly. If you haven't listened to the previous one, by the way, the first revelation was to tell you that there is a proven system to become really good at jazz guitar in limited time per day, which is you can be confident that's 45, 60, 70 minutes, not like three hours a day. And I described exactly how it came about. And what are the key components of doing that. If you are already doing that, fantastic. It could take you ten 15 minutes to listen to the podcast, figure it out and implement your playing. And now you can get going with my second revelations about the standards.
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 Marc, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy French accent, make sure to subscribe.
The promise for this podcast, a big promise is you not like anyone could or whatever it not you. The listener can play a dozen jazz standards, beginning to end with Cornell, the improv and comping and everything. You can do that relatively quickly in five steps and sort of put the rest on the back burner, the rest of scales and stuff. So how the story came about after doing the first revelations, I had students that had a practice plan that was good, it was limited, it was easy to track. It was easy to maintain and be consistent. And then people started to pick up momentum like, oh, shoot, look, you're playing this much, much better because you're not attempting to practice 20 different things every day. You're not attempting to do your training in theory and all inversions, all, all strings, like whoa, whoa, whoa, let let's focus.
And then I realized, working with the students and realizing my own playing, that there are phases of my life where I made the most progress musically, where I got compliments on my playing. I just felt more confident. I felt more in time and in tune. And, you know, my technique improved. I could hear better everything. You know, it's an The Sound of Music soundtracks like, wow, you know, dancing in the field of flowers. How was that happening? How does that happen? I'll tell you the secret.
The five steps I'm going to describe are about learning the tunes. And if you've been watching any degree of my YouTube stuff or reading a blog or following me on the podcast, you'll know that I really preach building repertoire, which is a French word for building a list of tunes I can perform with ease, and that hopefully I have memorized. And I can play the melody, the comping, I can play some chord melody, maybe an a basic level of improv. Those times in my life where I focus most on playing right on the tune, I made the most progress. Not to say that learning scales and arpeggios and positions and different techniques and hammer ons and pull offs and chord inversions and bebop scales not that these things are not important, but here's a thesis of it and how it came about.
These all this list laundry list of things is important, but it has a place in time when I have a large enough repertoire to use back these ideas into the songs. So before I have 5-10 tunes, no business doing flat nine arpeggios and this and that. Right after ten, preferably 15 tunes, stuff starts to happen. Stuff starts to happen because my time is more solid. I can play within the form. I know that the chords are passing by and it's a real like jazz, vernacular. The real jazz style are real things that are happening.
So basically you want to play 12 bar blues. There's 12 bars count before. That's got to be crucial. And that's what I call the conveyor belt, which is the second step in the whole like five steps. So, I got I drilled really on the negative aspect, right, going like, you shouldn't do this, but I'll tell you, you should definitely do that. Everything. The laundry list of Bob Scales and Madness and Barry Harris things and whatever it has a place after I know 1015 tunes. So isn't it reassuring to check?
Do I know ten tunes? No. Okay, perfect. I don't need to do any of that check again. Do I know ten tunes? No, I know seven. Perfect. Three more to go before I go to do the Bob scale madness. Ask again. Do I know ten tunes? Yes. Okay, well, now we could talk about that, which is my step six and seven, which I'm not going to talk about today, but you can head over to jazzguitarlessons.net/process to just get this complete breakdown.
And you can scroll down to step six and seven to find out what they're about. They're about building a vocabulary. But these five steps that I want to talk in that revelation 2025 today is how to master, say, a dozen standards really, really quickly with five steps. And I'll give you the recipe and then I'll dig deeper.
At first we want to be able to comp. We want to be able to pull the form down with relatively simple jazz voicings on the form. I think people over complicated and they say, you got to learn the ninth chords and the 11th, and there's this thing you got to move with the minor two fourths like you will.
Yeah, later on. At first you look at the chart, it's from the real book and you're doing Autumn leaves. If you haven't done Autumn leaves, you got to do it. It's it's a rite of passage. Right. The if you don't, the jazz police will pick you up. You know, they put you in jail. So look at autumn leaves or whatever tune you're working on within your first 10 to 15 tunes, your B-flat blues and your summertime and your all the things you are.
And you're Stella by Starlight and your girl from Ipanema and your blue bossa and your whatever. Okay, body and soul, you can do wrong. Midnight. You can do so. What you can do la you can do. Have you met Miss Jones? You can do. How insensitive is doesn't matter. It matters that you do it more than than the actual songs.
Right? Look at each of the chord symbol on the page and pick exactly one chord shape per chord voicing. So one voicing per chord symbol. If it says D minor seven, pick up a D minor, seven figure out how to play it. That's my step one. I call this staple voicings because for free on the website and the blog and on the Just our fellowship, you have this sheet.
There are four staple voicings. There are major, minor and dominant chords, and another category which will involve the minor seven five, the diminished whatever. So major minor dominant goes like 80% of the way. And you need that fourth category for the sometimes. Right. So you got these staples, put them on the guitar with your root or the bass note, the the root note of the chord on the fifth string or six string, the two bottom string guitar and learn these four.
So you have four chord shapes to learn at two locations. You do that and you literally copy and paste those on the form of your song. That's step one. That's the first step to mastering. To start every standard this way.
Hey, everyone, just a quick break here. If you're loving this episode and you want to elevate your own. Just our skills, reach out to us. We've got thousands of guitarists and becoming accomplished jazzers beyond their wildest dreams. So check the link in the description or visit Jazz Guitar Lessons dot net to get started today. Okay, now back to the episode.
Second step is the conveyor belt. So using the voicings you've determined you will play on the form of the song in time.
Know exactly how long is that cycle. So if it's a 12 bar blues, it's 12 bars. If it's autumn leaves, it's 32 bars, right? So you have to know the length of the cycle. And at all times where you are located in that cycle. That's the conveyor belt idea. So playing on the conveyor belt is probably the most crucial idea of all the ideas
and it's preventing you from going in that madness of doing things in a vacuum that are not on the form. If you do conveyor belt, you're safe. You're always on the form. You're always, always, always on the form. No exception. Always in time, always counting, always within a cycle.
Good. You got that down. Now you have a set of staple chords and you can perform these voicings on a form. And you're up for the third step, which I now call skinny chord melody. So people associate chord melody with like Joe Bass and players that are really intensively filling all the gaps. You don't have to play like Joe Bass.
You can perform a, minimal chord melody version, pretty much like Bill Frisell talks about. Or sometimes Scofield talks about, set up the melody on the top two strings, mostly of the top two strings, and then, simply put, chords where you can. I do have a training about this. It's called, the chord melody Crash Course. And that's the lesson play.
The melody and then fiddling with the chords wherever you have space for it. That's it. So recap. You got your first three steps. You have a voicing for each chord symbol you're playing in in time over to convey over the cycle of the chords of the song. And three you can play a chord melody that's minimalistic, so I call this skinny chord melody now, okay, step four is a bullseye method, and if you've been following any length of my stuff online, you know I'm a big proponent of targeting the third degree of each chord.
So if it's a C major chord, you targeted E note CD, right? There are nuance and subtleties to doing that. but if you do it well, it's going to inform your improvization later down the line. It could be a chromatic approach into the fifth, for sure. It can use the alter scale. Yeah, for sure you can do that.
But at a first glance of your tune, if you're able to put the third degree of the chord as a single note solo on each, beat one and then do a pick up line into your sixth. Then after you get all of that, you go to the fifth step and you will simply perform all of this in, in, not in rapid succession, but rather I would say in, in one go.
So I call this a jam session. And sometimes I use a term for key, which stands for for chorus exercise. For chorus exercise is just a measuring stick. Goes can I hold on for four choruses, playing the melody, playing some comping and some improv, and maybe the skinny chord melody for course exercise? It's play for choruses and you're done right if you.
So now for the nuance. That's a second revelation, right? So recapping the first revelation is, yeah, you need to sit down to have 3 to 4 topics. Use a timer, make sure you have a plan of practice. Yes okay. Good. Now secondly well most of that time should be focus on tunes while you're ramping up to get to 1015 tunes.
That should be pretty much 100% of your practice. If you don't want it to be all of your practice time, maybe there should be 80% of your practice, because after you got like five tunes, you're going to start to forget the tunes. So you need to have 1,015% of your time on retention. That is, remembering your previous songs.
Every day you pick up one that you've already played and you do the foresee on it, right? So the more finer details is if you can do that, you have a minimal amount of, skills required to play right on the tunes. And this goes much further, much faster then picking up a jazz book or a method and just memorizing licks or scales or chords, because the context dictates how you're supposed to perform, how you're supposed to play.
Remember, information is not changed behavior. So if it did have all these fitness books on my shelves and I would look like a Greek god, I don't look like a Greek god. Not yet at least. So for the guitar it's the same thing. Even with more information and more scales and more knowledge of theory, it doesn't change how you play.
So this five steps as promised, removes 90% of what other people tell you to practice. Just stop all that noise and focus on the thing that really matters, which is a song how segmented into five discrete steps, jazz guitar lessons, dot net slash process how yes, you will forget the tunes, start starter retention, process. And last but not least, those are five segments and I recommend for any given tune that you take approximately three weeks ramping up these five steps on a single tune.
It gives you five discrete things to work on that are pretty well established and documented. That you have it on my blog. You have it on just our fellowship on YouTube. We have it everywhere. You can do that by on your own, of course. If you need more coaching and help, see the link in description. If you want to be part of my next cohort of students.
But the the rationale, the logic is there. Like you can definitely do this on your own. it's it's, you know, less is more, really less is more. So any given tune, you could take three weeks to get it through the ringer. And I could recommend you do if you're comfortable doing two tunes. Samuel ten simultaneously. It doesn't matter that the two tunes are not at the same stage.
Maybe I'll start summertime today at stage one and I have my autumn leaves. That's already at stage three. That's fine. Just track your time. Remember the first revelation? Look at the system which is planning what you're about to do. And for bonus points, use a DPP, which I called a daily practice pulse, which is just a spreadsheet, just a tool to keep you accountable and see how much time you invest in your guitar, and make sure that you're getting your return on that investment, right.
It's not just wasted effort, etc. so on that note, we have two revelations already done. We have one more in the next podcast episode, which I'm going to talk about the importance of getting input from the outside, getting feedback, you know, how do you get breakthroughs? How do you see what can't be seen? How do you hear your blind spots?
And that's exactly what we're going to address. So I'll see you there.
