Hey guys. Welcome back to the podcast. It's Marc here. And in this short episode I want to talk more about a thought experiment, or at least a questioning that you may bring to your own jazz guitar practice.
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This is something I encounter a lot in my daily teaching and coaching of up and coming jazz guitarist. Question is, hey, I'm doing something that's quite simple in practice, but isn't jazz supposed to be complex? Isn't the end result really like convoluted phrases and interesting trills and triplets and really complex techniques? And my answer is, well, yeah, but let's think about it.
If the end result of the craft of any sort and I will put sports in that category, like, say, the game of basketball or the game of soccer or, or even hockey, and the end result is a really refined, complex set of skills that is coming together. Does this mean necessarily that the practicing of it has to be complex and convoluted?
And the short answer is no. Right. basketball player can drill on a single thing, see a dribble, between the legs for, you know, ten minutes in a row, or someone may decide to be at the three. I don't even play basketball, but I'm saying the three point line, and just throw balls at the at the goal, at the rim, like forever.
The player may do 100 repeats or a thousand repeat. Does this mean that the game is not complex? No. Of course the game is strategy and you got to pass the ball in and do all sorts of things. But in practice, in try to elevate the skills, it doesn't. It does not mean that the skill building exercises have to be in of the in and of themselves complex, which is why, whether we do martial arts or jazz music or classical music.
Again, the devil is in the details in that we have to drill very specific foundational elements do karate, which again, I don't practice. It is still punching and kicking, blocking and spinning and whatever. But it's really tiny, tiny movements, tiny, really important foundational elements that come together. So for jazz, yes, it might be that Wes Montgomery is flying over like seven different chord shapes in that bar during his really hectic soloing.
That blues. However, if we look at it, it's just still playing on one dominant chord with a bunch of variations. So in my teaching philosophy, I love to refer back to this to a, a tree trunk versus the leaves. So the tree trunk would be dominant chord. Hey, it's B-flat blues, right? And the leaves are, passing diminished ascending arpeggio or octaves, you know, Wes Montgomery style.
the rhythms may be that there's a bunch of things that happen in the solo that's very complex, and the way it's put together is like, wow, it's a flash. It's like a, we say in French or should Buchanan, which would say like, it's a light show, humor to smoke and mirrors. But in the end, there's still four quarter notes to the bar.
It's still a bar for four. Right? So this is more of a reflection to look at your practice and go, well, am I trying to do too much or too many things that are complicated? And the remedy to that, if you say yes, well, it's to add constraints to look at one thing you're working at once. If you're looking at a tune and saying, well, I got to pass all these arpeggios and scales and I have to use this inversion and this and that, you're going to do none of it very well.
And I call this constraints practicing, meaning that there should be one area of focus. So one way we could use our awareness, which is limited onto that one thing we're trying to do better. it's unfortunate because we think we should practice everything. And once I publish a video on YouTube about this, citing a PhD, where they have these studies about playing video games that are complex, so we can play the game.
While all of the elements are complex and focus on one thing. So narrow down the focus for a session or 2 or 3 and then do it again on another area of focus, another, another and the end results. Scientists in studies has been proven to be exponential. It is crazy. So it's better to spend three days working on scales, three day working on arpeggios rather than trying to do scales and arpeggios in one go in the same solo.
And then you wind up saying, well, I'm not getting it, it must be me. That's the problem, because I'm defective, because I know these scales and they should come out and they don't. So the idea again, for this very micro podcast is back to the basics is never wrong, ever. Unless you're bored, unless you're not pushing yourself where you're just playing things you can already do.
So there's a fine line of finding the resistance point which brings you to flow so you're not bored and you're not utterly challenged. And to keep moving the needle like that and you will eventually tackle more and more complex progression. So walk. Sorry. Crawl before you walk. Before you run on that note, I'll let you go. Thanks for listening to the podcast.
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