Hey, guys. Marc here from jazz guitar lessons. Welcome back to the channel. In this video, I want to tell you how you can
get
out of a rut, and I want to help you figure out why your practice may be scattered if it is scattered. So we'll assess this together,
and I'll give you a few solutions to get into what I call modular practice.
by the end of this video or podcast, you'll be able to definitely implement in your own playing on the guitar. It should take you only, you know, a few minutes to watch for,
a lifelong,
progress happening in your playing. So let's get going with the materials.
All right. Let's assess this is your practice scattered
if you're playing guitar or any other instrument, for that matter. And you look back at six months or a year and your skills are approximately the same, the challenges are approximately the same. You know about the same number of tunes. Your vocabulary is not better. Your timing's not better. You're probably doing scattered practice.
if you're scared that someone would ask you, hey, you know, you play, you want to play or something if you like, but your fingernails, then it's not a good sign, so you're probably there. Fine. This first step is accepting this. That is the case. Now
why does it do that? There's two things like I'll call scattered practice my own little my own little experience with finding different resources and getting number one overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I have to do, the different things I have to do in my playing, and, number two, I know I'm not progressing, and it's pretty easy to do that.
Like I have my own experience, grabbing, by the way, this, this funk book, this funk guitar book and this thing I saw on YouTube from, I don't know, open studio or tour. Great work on the right hand. And I have this book I signed, I purchased. Right. And if I'm there, I could project myself in 30 days, 60 days or 90 days and go, oh, that's Mark in the future, doing the scattered practice.
If you can relate, you'll go like, yeah, picking up the guitar feels like a chore. You know, it doesn't feel really inspiring. It's more like I should be practicing and I'm scared and it's not really going anywhere, so my motivation is lower. Yeah. So those are the symptoms. And the result of that is not making any progress. So what's the solution.
Solution is to make progress.
Easier said than done right. So let me hit on the words here that I will use. That is modular. I want to suggest a modular practice where I'll get back to this analogy, but I can project myself in 30 days and go, that's a parallel universe, Mark. And 30 days, 60 days, 90 days.
And that's Guy made progress. And I'll hit back on the idea of modularity modular because it could be implemented. It's like Mr.. Like you could do it like this and you can do it inside of it too. So especially for jazz guitarist, check this out. first I want to go to a story, so I'll go Adam Smith on you.
You know, The Wealth of Nation, I believe, was a book where they looked at assembly lines and they were assembling pins or needles or something. I can't quite recall. But the story goes that an individual worker could do, say, five pins in a given day. However, if I took ten workers and split the labor, it's called division of labor.
Instead of having 50 pins, by the end of the day it would be something like 5000. It's not not a little bit more. It's like exponentially more. So my thought is that we can do division of labor here to free ourselves up from all the scattering, overwhelm and brain fog and everything, and do 2 or 3 things in each practice session.
Yeah, I heard, I heard the world around. I heard the facepalm. Mark, are you crazy? I have all these skills I want to learn. I picked up the latest aber, sold, and Barry Harris says to rehearse this and I got to work on my technique. Oh my God, my technique. I'm not fast enough. So here's the thing. Your technique is just fine.
Your fingers work as well. Look it up. And medically our fingers all move at the same rate of speed. You're picking hand is just fine again, Troy Grady and watching you. Love your videos, by the way. But still, this is fine. This is not the problem. You don't need to know another skill. What you need is a modular thing that you could get back to with, with consistency, with 2 or 3 things to practice every day.
All right, that's it. For starters, I by the end of this video I'll give you three plans or a beginner and intermediate and advanced plan on how to do this in your playing pretty much right away. But meanwhile, I want to emphasize that you can do division of labor in tackling specific things. And again, back to my idea of future mark.
If I did these 2 or 3 things today and tomorrow and the day after and the day after and the day after it, and I consistently do that for sure. I can project myself in the future and go, oh yeah, there's scatter Mark, that guy all over the place, technique, alter scales, whatever. And then there's consistent, confident trust.
I have faith that this will yield results. Mark. So one of the biggest is to get back to the same practice plan every day. I know, I know, I've been teaching online like this for like 15 years, 16 years now. And I started to teach about 20 years ago and I can't recall a time where that was not good advice.
Look at this thing, give it a good beating and get back to it tomorrow and do that consistently and prepare to be amazed. link in the description if you'd like to join the coaching program. Of course. I've been working with thousands of people, getting amazing results, guitar lessons, authentic slash reviews, but I can't help myself thinking of people I worked with directly that would look at a single page of music, or an etude or standard and go never!
You know, I'll never be able to do this, I'll never achieve it. And then 3 to 4 weeks later is like, man, that's cool. That's so cool. I could play this game. Yeah. You know, what's the magic secret? The magic bullet. The secret ingredient is not a secret ingredient at all. It's actually to get back to the same thing.
So I could give you what those things would be. And one of the things, if you're more of a beginner spectrum would be to master some of these chord shapes. So namely, you can see the link in the description for what I call staple voicings or C major major 7 or 6 C minor. You know, C dominant.
I love 13 chords or nine chords. You learn these big bulky shapes and you learn to implement them over and over.
that's the first modularity aspect, by the way, which is I will get back to on several days on the same topics. for more intermediate players, it could be something like I want to be sure I performed a song front to back, so I have a piece of the melody we all have to do with.
Right. And then I want to do a course of copying and maybe a course of improv minimalistic and wrap it up
if you're advanced. It may be that you want to do, every single altered chord in the song. You want to do.
I know that there was a diminished scale, for instance. Maybe it's an advanced thing like, oh, I want to do a funky, diminished or altered scale, right? It's pick your poison. It doesn't matter. But if you could mark it down a single sheet of paper, it's January. People say, my New Year's resolutions. What if you go? Yeah, my aim is to do 21 days that darn same thing that I chose.
you will be amazed because that's that's the division of labor while I do this. I'm not scattered. I'm not overwhelmed that I produce results. And it's not perfect, but the amount of stuff I can do with that one thing over 21 days is exponentially greater than if I had 20 things on my list and tried to get to all of them and make minimal headway.
I had a really smart student, an engineer, who said, I'm, I'm going an inch deep but a mile wide. Right. And he put in my what? Don't do that. Go, go an inch wide and a mile deep. It's going to be much, much better. All right. so modularity is essentially picking up 2 or 3 things you get back to everyday.
Good. Now try to be less abstract and less cryptic. I will also tell you that thing about modularity. Before letting you go, you can modularity. Modularity is that even a word you can approach with modularity, things that you learn. So you have lateral implementation. More word salads. Mark, I know this is what we're looking for from a YouTube video.
Here's the thing. If I work on arpeggios, for instance, I'll pick autumn leaves and I go right, first quarter I'm on a seven second chord, D7, so it's chord geometry seven good. If I'm doing arpeggios and I tell myself
I heard it's really hip to do three, five, seven, nine. So instead of 12I want to do three, five, seven, nine, right?
Second chord 373579443579. I can do that on all the leaves and I can devise myself a little exercise. Here's where the modularity comes in. If I pick up a concept like this, a concept I can,
make more headway if I have different areas of implementation, different tunes, namely. So if I'm doing it on all the leaves and I, I bust my balls to do this super well.
So I'll try to, you know, lent myself to the game I've created for myself. I go like, okay, that's a chord. Then the, the leaves or that ditty to do.
Here's their arpeggio. 3579357935793579357. Missed it. 357. Flat nine. Right. Okay, I'm sort of there. I could do this for 21 days. Or I could tell myself, let me do it on autumn leaves. Let me do it on out of nowhere. Let me do it on summertime. And then there's the lateral implementation, which is also modular. So that's the big takeaway here.
Modularity means I can have an approach that has 2 or 3 topics, but that the exercises in it are varied. So topic A arpeggios, topic B copying whatever. Right. So 2 or 3 topics in which the materials move forward. Furthermore, when I want to dig deep and master a thing, I have to implement the same set of skills or the task, or to sing a device for myself.
That little game on a lot of different contexts. And that's where I maximize my progress. That's it.
So let's fix your practice this year. This is the 2025 goal. You simply need to get back to it. And I'll I'll leave you with some some words of encouragements with another parallel or analogy. Now the Adam Smith's one please, but analogy to working out. I go to the gym, I work out I'm yeah. You know people in January let's max out my bench press.
Yeah there's that I'm bench pressing and I, I'm doing squats or going out for a run. This does not mean that my movement with my body is reduced to that time in the gym, because I want to go, lay on the floor with my son and assemble a little Lego castle. Right. I want to do that.
If I'm invited to a wedding, I will want to dance. I want to take a walk with my wife. Right. So the point is, my movement is not limited to the time I am in the gym. I'm just simply focusing on that. So I'm going to do 30 pushups and then give it a good beating. Let it go to my room, come back, do 31 pushups if that makes sense.
So with guitar, I think this is some kind of a prison where I'm like, whenever I pick it up, it means I have to be disciplined. I have to do everything right, learn all the skills, and it becomes a chore or work. So I think one of the best advice I can give for 2025 is this can work the same way with a workout.
I go to the guitar, I give my workout a good beating. put it to the side and I'll pick up my guitar. I play with friends. I'll play a song for my son, I'll teach, and, you know, tinker around and look at things. But my workout is separate than my leisure time with the guitar, so leave yourself plenty of leisure time.
You can have a workout that's like 30 minutes a day, and you can still play another hour, and whatever floats your boat, right? So that that can, that can really work. And it keeps your spirits high, keep some motivation high. So on that note, I will let you go on Mark from jazz guitar lessons. See link in the description and please like and subscribe.
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Thanks.
