Hey, guys. Welcome back to the podcast. So in this series of mini podcasts, I call this a revelation 2025. I'm going to give you the takeaways from 16 years of this online platform. Yep. So jazz guitar lessons on it is a smelly teenager. And the takeaways I found from teaching and coaching for the past 20 years and performing live.
And you know, I've degrees in music. I've been around, played major festivals. Those takeaways are yours for free. All you have to do is take the time to listen, implement your playing.
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.
in this episode I call this a revelation number three, which broadly speaking, states that frequent expert feedback will unlock breakthroughs for you. And actually furthermore, I believe that it's the only way, not an exaggeration.
It's the only way to reveal your blind spot to hear what's missing, to finally transform your playing. so recap. So that's a big promise, right? To tell you, there's one way to really make progress. It's to be aware of what you're missing out. hopefully you can become aware of your shortcomings, but if you can't, one easy way to do it is two folds.
one you can do on your own. Another one you can do in an expert teacher. I'll detail exactly how this came about and why why it works. So before we get into the the third and I describe really how to get the feedback and and what's the relevance of it. I'll recap the previous two stages, which are two previous podcast episodes.
So number one is there's a system to become really confident in playing guitar and becoming a good jazz guitarist in 45 to 70 minutes a day. If you haven't heard a story, you go back. I talk about Baba, talk about a private student. I'll tell you about the system to become really good, really fast and how it came about and how to exactly implemented and the pitfalls.
The second revolution is the method to master. It doesn't jazz standards relatively quickly. And I mean like we mean like within within six months or in less than six months, you can get, you know, 10 or 15 tunes under your belt. Plus the benefit of this is you can just remove 90% of what you've been told to practice.
You know, you just remove these these typical hiccups that people say, well, yeah, I want to do the tunes and be a jazz player. But first, this online teacher told me I got to learn my skills in our positions. Right? Or all keys or, have to do this lick or, you know, people often have this fallacy prerequisite.
I'll tell you, it's it can't work like that. It doesn't. And here's my experience and here's my experience with students in doing these. So what I say in the second revelation, previous previous podcast is essentially you can take these five steps instead. And I described the five steps. All right. So if you haven't listened to the other one, go back and maybe bookmarked them for later.
And in the current revelation we're going to talk about expert feedback. So little Marc, maybe ten years ago, had the system in process to teach people with a practice plan, avoiding the pitfalls, using a timer, using percentage. Having a limited amount of topics, limited amount per day. So no, you don't practice three four hours. You practice a good workout like you go to the gym.
You can't do push ups like four hours a day. You do your push ups, you're done. Right? So I had that, and then I had the plan for mastering the tunes, which is the end goal regardless. So regardless what we do, we try to implement it in context, which is the context of tune. So I got that, and I noticed that certain students started to have way more,
a faster progress or more relevant,
alignment of the way they were moving forward with their music that that's a word salad to tell them they got better, faster.
And I was wondering what was going on with Steve versus Bob, what was going on with Carol versus, Brad or Scott versus like, what was difference? And what I realized by working with them, there are people that would really, I would really be able to hear and tell them advice based on what I was hearing. If you track with me and you're following, you will probably realize if you've taken online courses and books or if you've been hanging out with a private instructor, some private instructors are really, really good player players.
They will answer any questions you might have, but they never listen to you. That's a red flag. If you're a teacher does not listen to you, how could he or she knows, right? So that's the main takeaway here. It's like a really, profound change can happen when someone intently listens to you and goes, oh, I hear, did you hear you're doing this?
You see, your your right hand is not in the right place. Have you noticed that this chord does not sound really. Have you noticed? Okay, you could you hear right now you could go further with these next steps. Right. So this process of getting feedback number one can only occur when someone is listening to you. Right. So if you take a lesson like I want to sit down with I don't know Martin Taylor.
So Martin Taylor Spoon feeds me this golden knowledge, lesson by lessons like, yeah, you could do that. But if Martin Taylor and I love the guy, but we love his playing great guy. We have a lot of common friends. If Martin Taylor does not intently listen to you, and Taylor is feedback's feedback to your playing, you're not going to make as much progress as you could.
Although it may be fun to do that, or even to sit down with Pat Metheny or Bill Frisell or John Scofield, the the relevance of what you have to practice can only be measured and tailored for where you are right now. It reminds me of the jiu jitsu jiu jitsu gym. Like you go there, you wrestle a little bit, you have this belt color and a sensei or a master.
The teacher will tell you, oh, you're there. Like, you don't know that technique yet, or you know this technique, but it's not perfected, right? So what I notice now with students is that this feedback mechanism is the the core of all my coaching programs. By the way, if you're interested, link in description. If you want to be part of the next cohort and work with me and my team and get feedback on your playing and learn tunes really fast and not waste your time with, you know, books and courses, whatever.
If you're ready for change, you're tired of being overwhelmed. Just check it out. It works. That's what I've been doing. You know, 15 years online and it's such an important piece of the program that it's at the center. If you don't, well, I chase after you. Don't send your videos. So, two things. Number one, you can do it on your own if you want it, if you don't have the time or means or if you're not ready to really get full, coaching instructions, you could sit down and film yourself on what you're doing and then take the guitarist hat off.
So say your your name is Mike. Like, take the mike. I'm a guitarist. Mike the guitars hat off and put the Mike the coach hat on and play the role of the critic on what you just filmed. I'm just going to tell you, be upfront. It's going to suck, all right? Because you're going to notice all the things that you can't notice while you're playing.
That said, you can be really easy on yourself and go, yeah, well, this works like find one thing you love. That's one of my mentor that said that one of the guys that works with me goes, I mean, by mentor, I do mean like people that have gone through night programs that are now mentoring other of my, new cohort students.
They're called mentors in the program. And actually, the guy I mentioned, we have the same first name. His name is Marc Andre. It's a French dude. This is around here locally. And this guy said, whenever I watch myself, I find one thing I love. And I say this like, yeah, I love that I was able to play the scaler in time.
I love that sound. I love whatever, my posture is really good. My back was relaxed, you know, I see I used to have an elbow problem. Now my elbow doesn't hurt, right? That's something to love about your playing. So always find one thing you love at the same time. see the stuff that you missed while you were performing, and that's okay.
You know, I forgive myself for doing that because when I play, I know I'm caught up playing, and it's okay, right? I'm there. I'm busy playing, so I can't at the same time observe myself and be the coach. And that's why we we need a coach. Because coaches are, in a certain liminality. That's why you see sports coach coaches be in the sports team.
They're in the team, but they're not quite in the team, but they're in but they're not. Right. So that that's what we call a liminal space. There's somewhere in between where they can see more of the game and you can advise, better than someone caught up in the game. So watch yourself. And my recommendation, of course, is to have someone else watch your yourself.
That's that would be a subject matter experts such as myself or your guitar instructor. The more you can do of that and you can start to implement this today, like from the next lesson from any time, the more objectively you watch yourself and the more you have someone else be an objective ear, the better. And I'll give you the secret of the process, which I never do.
The secret for me is when I watch someone like a student, I watch about, 14 of my students yesterday. They send in their videos. I sit down and watch intently, and I go, okay, what was your goal? What were you trying to do? Did you hit that goal or not? Good. And that's also good to go. Like if you submit a video to your coach or if you work with a private instructor, you go, I'm going to play you this.
I want you to to judge it or to assess it according to this, pair of lens, it's important to have scope go playing chord melody like Joe Pass is not in my scope right now. I'm trying to do this define it and performance. Good. So your goal is set up then what I do with clients and students is here's a reality check.
I'm seeing this, this, this, this, this. I'm making a list of statements of fact. Not good, not bad, not a judgment is just like this is what occurred on the recording yourself. Good. Then typically I move on and give 1 or 2 options to move forward, saying you are here, this is what's working, this is what's not. And if you want to have the most impact on your playing, I suggest you do this next, I try to keep it to one, sometimes two elements as to not be overwhelming because again, if you sit down with Pat Metheny, Martin Taylor or anyone they may give you this bucket.
It's like throwing a bucket of ice in your face. Here's all the stuff you got to work on to make this better. My takeaway from years of teaching is it's better to give the thing or two things I had that will have the most impact is implemented now here's an example of an element like this. I could go, well, you just got to do this.
Increase the tempo over the next month or so, just play faster. A second tip, maybe you need to isolate this section here in bars three and four. You're always messing up that change to the court. Here's here it is. Biggest benefit. It's maybe that it's more advanced improv and go perfect. You played that lick here I want you to take that lick and try two more keys.
this week. Okay. it may be the calm. It may be like, you know what, dude, you're all done. I talked about the the five steps in the previous podcast, which is jazz courses dot net slash process. So let me tell someone, look, this is your fourth tune that you ran through the first five step, five steps.
You're checking off that box and now you're moving on to the next tune. Put that tune in your back, log your vault and keep reviewing it. But you're done. Sometimes that's my advice. Like, yep, two thumbs up. Like, this is awesome. You're doing everything well at a, a level of proficiency, right? That those are examples. So after I said it, the goal, then the reality check and given 2 or 3 options or 1 or 2 options, I will give the way forward.
When can you make these changes? Do you have any questions? Do you think the time line for your next tune, like Out of Nowhere by mid-November is fine, right? So I will just ask these questions to open up the doors and you're set. So it's it's hard. This is one of the hardest keys, but since implementing this and oh, I would say it's been five years at least that I use this process.
my my players, my I say my players, my students, have grown exponentially faster. So they have a work plan. They know how to segment their work on standards. They know how to get feedback and the feedback is, again, to the beginning of this podcast. It's essential for hearing the things you cannot hear while you're caught up in playing for seeing your shoulder raise up for understanding that the second finger did not belong there, and you have this sort of hesitation.
And those are blind spots. And this is what really makes a change of playing again, for sure. The scales and arpeggios matter. The songs matter this, this matter. But if you can't be, naked in front of either yourself or a coach, you'll never know exactly what you're supposed to do. And if you don't, then you'll you'll keep, like, as we say, stabbing in the dark.
What am I supposed to do to get better? Then? It gets really discouraging. And then you just want to quit. And I've had instances of students come to me and go like, look, Marc, that's like, in football, they say, throw a Hail Mary, right? This this is my last ditch effort. It's either I put this guitar in the case and I go to the pawn shop and I'm done for life, or we're going to work together and hopefully, and I could attest that these guys.
Yeah, we made the change. I listened to their playing. We had a plan. We looked at the standards. And then come a month or two after three months, go, wow, this stuff really happened. Which will tie into my bonus next podcast, which is the fourth revelation 2025, in which I will tell tell you about the common elements of the people that are, quote, best students, unquote.
I don't like that term. It's like the people that make the progress the faster that understand the best. I use the resources and the have the one, the ones that have the most radical transformation. Because we can watch our videos from day one and then video from six months after we go, like, dude, that's not the same guy.
It's incredible. So I'm going to share more about that. Again, I'm Marc from Jazz Guitar Lessons. hope you enjoyed this podcast. I'll see you in the next episode. Time.
