I just watched a video that completely reframed how I think about learning jazz, especially improvised music. Turns out, try to improve everything at once. Might actually be slowing you down. So let's watch this together and I'll show you how this idea applies directly to how we practice jazz standards, improvised music, and comping.
So the video is from Benjamin Keeps PhD. Please check his YouTube channel in this video called The Rotating Focus. Let's start at the very beginning.
Some skills are hard to learn because you can't break them apart into smaller pieces. A skill like brewing a cup of tea involves a discrete set of steps that can be practiced alone. Pick up the kettle, pour the water, put the kettle down.
You can practice each part separately and then put them together without too much difficulty. But many skills involve interdependent parts. Playing StarCraft, for instance, involves a bunch of different skills that all depend on each other. You have to collect resources, build buildings and units, scout your opponent, attack, defend, retreat, and overall respond organically to what your opponent is doing.
Your overall skill level depends on the interaction of all these different components skill, but you can't really practice them separately either.
So in a nutshell this is jazz Improvization right. You've got the rhythms. You got the time feel. You got the tone. You got your fretboard knowledge. You got outlining the harmony, the vocabulary, the voicings. And it's the drummer rushing. It's all happening at once. So how do we actually get better if we can't specifically isolate those things easily?
Well.
There are many ways you might go about it, but a very simple and effective way is just to change what you pay attention to. An old study on a video game that I guarantee you have never played before, called Space Fortress, illustrates this idea pretty well.
Space fortress, like StarCraft involves a lot of interacting parts. The researchers split learners into four different groups. The control group played the game for about 6.5 hours. Over the course of ten different practice sessions, the other three groups played the game for the same amount of time over the same number of sessions, but the researchers gave some special instructions to these groups.
Researchers instructed Group two to pay attention to these controls over the first six sessions and the last four sessions, they just played the game. Just like the control deck,
So they're all doing the same thing, right? But they're focusing their attention, their awareness differently. So now imagine for a moment, instead of just jamming on a song or going like my solo is not that good that you could think about only one thing, only about rephrasing, say, but imagine in my books I'll go like, yes, for sure.
You're playing slightly to the moon. You will take four courses of solo. The first one you will strictly think about the chord tones, the second one you will strictly think about your phrasing. The third time you'll strictly think about the court's passing mind. The last one you wrap up, you just go ad lib. This is the way I think the magic control is awareness.
We hearing players like Pat Metheny and John Scofield and of course Wes Montgomery and George Benson. This is how they can have multiple multiplicity of like complex situations, but they're able to narrow down the focus to work on the independent pieces, even though everything's happening all at once.
So let's scroll up in the video to see what kind of results these group got. This very surprising.
In the beginning, the group started out basically the same, but over time as the power of attention began to take hold, group differences started to emerge. After six sessions, the control group, which had just played the game but didn't have any particular instructions about what to pay attention to.
They were scoring about a thousand points. The two groups, who had focused on one aspect of the game for those first six sessions were scoring about 1500 points per game, and the fourth group had focused on two different aspects of the game. During those first six sessions was scoring about 2000 points per game.
After that, all groups continued to play the game like normal for the next four sessions, but that didn't stop for four. They continued to learn more than groups one, two, and three over the next four sessions. This is a finding that has been replicated in various other contexts as well. Paying attention to just one aspect of the skill helps our brain to create meaningful building blocks. For the more complex skill, we can pay less attention to the other parts, build the pieces we need, and then integrate them together over time.
So the next time you are faced with learning a complex, interdependent skill, try this method out. Just pay attention to one aspect of the skill for a little while, then pay attention to another aspect of the skill and maybe another aspect of the skill, and come back to that original thing that you worked on. Again, I'm willing to bet that you would get greater learning gains that way than if you were to just practice while trying to pay attention to everything equally all at once.
So we see focusing our attention is the secret weapon to learning jazz faster, learning any other skill. And it even counts when everything is happening. So personal story. Say I go to a jam session and very nervous. The sax player calls alone together a bit too fast.
And there's all these things happening. I'm not necessarily in the learning environment, but if I can narrow down my focus in going, I'm just going to try to play as beautiful, phrased quarter notes as I can during this. And I'm focusing on nothing else. I know some of the stuff in blues licks may come out. I know I may get lost in the forum. I know it's too fast, I know this, I know that, but I can still latch on so zooming into one element just narrows the focus. Helps is very reassuring. I would say the analogy to this would be like a baby sucking the thumbs like, oh, this is something I can latch on to instead of being overwhelmed by all the information.
And that's the beauty and the the problem with, say, learning complex skills like strategy games on computers or jazz. It's like all the elements can be overwhelming and there's no way to turn any of them off. You don't really have training wheels, but focus on one element seems to be in research. The way our brains work
the fastest.
So here's my practice challenge to you. Next time you practice, say, a solo, an improvization. Don't try to do everything at once. Especially if you're into learning, the learning phase or you're in your practice rehearsal room. Pick one thing.
I have one idea I could share. So phrase with only three notes. It could be three notes that you go bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, but that you repeat over and over.
Or it could be just three notes, and then you're done and you move on to the next phrase, what if you work on single string? That's pretty the good trick thing, right? So you could look at one string and go, I'm going to solo on all the things you are on my B string. Come with me.
Let's not judge. It's it's a constraint. and come to think of it, there was a blog post a while back on jazz guitar lessons. All that about constraints, practice. I think that's really the lifeblood of any really efficient practice. And here's a third idea. But it's useful on a two, five, one write in a Latin feel, but your focus is on ending each phrase clearly and properly.
That's your focus. The rest will be maybe not as good as you want, but at least you focus your attention on that.
So the main takeaway here is complex skills improve faster when we narrow down our attention and focus. So if you like this video, please watch my Building Better Jazz line. This one. One step at a time. Or you can watch a copying video for Harmony golfing on guitar.
And thanks to all of you guys, YouTube subscribers, old video games, and people with PhDs. I'm Mark from jazz guitar lessons, all that. I'll see you next time. Take care.
