[Music] Cheers Jordan. Welcome to the call. Thank you. >> Cheers. Thanks for having me. >> We have our friend Jordan Clemens at the >> NYC Jazz guitarmasterclasses.com. >> Awesome. So, welcome to the call. will do uh the approach that you discussed in your video which is instab uh which is a method for improvising over chord changes that's sort of in a way a compliment or an extension of my own approach I've been sharing it's called the bullseye method you guys can look it up description I have this pinnacle method as well so today's going to be sort of an unofficial chat where you will walk me through the stuff uh on guitar using progressions bob tunes etc but first I want to know uh if you could give us the elevator pitch of your background and what qualifies you to have this sort of method like where does it come from and um it's the story is fascinating so just for everyone for the audience. >> Yeah sure born in New York raised down south North Carolina learned to play was really lucky to have some incredible mentors down south who let me hang with them. Got okay okay okay enough to fight my way to get to New York City which I moved back here in 2012. fell into hanging and playing and studying with John Scoffield and Peter Bernstein and Brad Shepek and all these incredible wildly fascinating >> Brad as well. I wasn't aware I knew for Bernstein and SCO but Brad is monster. >> Yeah. Wow. >> Absolute monster. uh had like three incredible years gigging at the Blue Note at uh you know a bunch of clubs here in the city, playing with those guys, studying with those guys, teaching as an adjunct at New York University and then um was rushed to the hospital, put into the ICU for about 40 days, two brain surgeries, survived but lost the ability to play and had to start over. And um I found that my with my with my time with my mentors, we really never had traditional jazz guitar education conversations. That was just not what they were interested in talking about. It was not what they were interested in working on. Sometimes they were actively telling me like, "Hey, you're kind of good at that. You should stop doing that forever now. Like don't ever worry about that stuff anymore." And so I had this whole different set of priorities and practices and wisdom that they'd handed me. And when I needed to relearn to play, I just decided I I want to figure out what appeared to me at the time a more direct path to getting to what my mentors were saying was important, not what all the books and magazines and, you know, college classes that I took growing up were telling me because, you know, these are the cats right here. So, um, so yeah, I just put my system together based on on what they were recommending mixed with, you know, some of my own personal choices. So hopefully this is what we're going to be discussing today, which is the way which is a straighter path to doing bop improv and creating lines that you you sort of honed in after you had to relearn because you said you had limited time when you resumed playing, right? >> Uh yeah, we can get a bit into that. There's I I have like these different pillars. I guess I could just call them skills and each one sort of stacks on the next. So Instab is not skill one or pillar one in my approach. So, we'll probably we'll probably start sort of at the end of pillar one and do like a little bridge lesson that'll start to wind us into Instab, which I can then point out some things that you can take with you uh to work on. >> Nice. And for everyone as well, the what I loved, what what hooked me onto your approach is the fact that you had time to, you know, learn it and forget it while keeping all the brains and everything, but you had very limited time to make the approach tangible. So for people that are watching this that are 50 plus go I want to learn jazz but it's going to take years of Bbop scales and I do transcriptions whatever you're here you're proof to go like you can shortcut this and do an approach that makes sense that's musical that that sounds good. I don't like to be too like used car salesy about this, but I will tell you full like transparency because I was so sick, biological issues, medical issues. The first year of my playing, I I was actually working with a hand surgeon because like I was so broken. I I lost the ability to walk and see. Like my eyes stopped working. I was literally I had an eye patch on my eyes. You might actually see a a picture of me hanging with Peter Bernstein right after I was released from the hospital. and I have an eye patch on my eye because my eyes weren't working. I was using a walker to get around. Um, so I had to work with a hand surgeon to deal with my hand. And almost the first year of my relearning process, I was restricted to about 5 to 15 minutes of practice per day. Not per session, not like once in the morning, on per day. >> Per day. Wow. >> Like doctor's orders. You can play 15 minutes, you stop, you ice, you don't touch the guitar for until the next day. So that in some ways taught me I I don't want to like trash talk my mentors, but that year probably taught me more about how to learn music than anything my mentors ever told me just because I finally was humbled to the point of realizing, okay, I can't I can't fake any of this. And I can't just bull my way through with the 8 to 10 hour practice days like I had done for plenty of years in my life. Now it was finesse, strategy, like what are the priorities here and how can we internalize them as quickly as humanly possible. [Music] So the first pillar, the first skill that I uh that I worked on for myself and that I work with uh other musicians on is is emotion ear training. I sometimes refer to it as practical perfect pitch. The outcome that we're after, the skill is practical perfect pitch. Emotion ear training is the way we get there. So, I'm going to kind of give a very brief summary of what that is and then we'll immediately put it in action and start working towards instab which is skill two. The idea of emotion training is to get beyond intervals. We want to like develop a deep, visceral, emotional, physical, body centered connection with our notes. Okay? I'm sure you could hear this versus this, and you just know that one of those is a major chord and one of those is a minor chord. Sound has emotion built into it. Uh, and the way we're going to try and get beneath the intellect alone is with body movements. We're going to try and find body movements that uh express and emote these personalities cuz every every pitch has one. So, for example, here's a really easy one to spot. I'm just setting up the tonal center of C major. [Music] I call this one the Navy Seal note. And this is our body movement. This is our way of learning to like feel what this thing is beyond just understanding that it's the tronee. It's not about the interval. It's not about singing like you don't need to hear this note first. You can approach that note from anywhere. Um, [Music] right. There's like a there's like a story going on inside this melody. They were these tunes were written to be sung on stage by actors telling human stories. Body movement helps us kind of get to that end goal that most of us, myself included, generally wait 20, 30, 50 years to sort of transcend theory and really start playing like an art form, an expressive thing. Um, this is one of my body movements. Here's another really basic one. This is the question mark. [Music] This is the two of the scale. I just call it the question mark. Right. [Music] Wes is like he's not making a statement. He's asking a question. He's like ending here. And then the response be uh beat but he takes us into the the change. Right. So this is kind of coming out of pillar one. Right. All 12 of our pitches have these different uh these different emotions and stories and characters. >> I think you have a you have a Mini video. Well, you you have a Mini quote that goes into that. That's your course. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> That's awesome, guys. Check it out. Link in description. >> Yeah. Thank you. And at some point, I'll probably do a follow-up video. A lot of people wanted me to show all of the notes. I just wanted to show that this was possible. And like here's step one to get started. Now go listen. Cuz like if you hear some people hear the notes differently than me. Awesome. Like that's not a bad thing. That's a great thing. That means you're you're connecting, >> right? The goal is to get to the point where when you're improvising, you just have this like gut feeling where you're like, you really want to play a certain it's like a chef who tastes their their sauce and they're like, "Oh, it needs more rosemary." Great. Don't trust the other chefs. Like, taste it. See what it, you know, get to know the flavors of your herbs and spices. And that way when you're cooking, you can just see what it feels like and you can improvise a better dish. That's that's the gist of practical perfect pitch. Now, where it starts to get really fun for me, it's already pretty cool, but it's sort of like a party trick if I'm being honest as a standalone skill. But when it starts to get really cool is when we start to bridge it into Instabot. And I like to use the simplest elements possible because the simpler things are, the easier they are to become playful with them. So, for me, it's all about triads. Let's do this. Okay. Can you play just the stupidest, simplest, most kindergarten level third position G major triad? I left the position. I shouldn't have done that. Sorry. Woo. Oh, >> I'm already started with the preview of coming in. >> Yeah, this is so great. like you already went to step two, which is the second you add a non-triad note, something interesting is going on. It's like like that chef metaphor I used a minute ago, the major triad or any any pure triad. [Music] It's just like plain pasta. Like there's no sauce on it. It's really boring. No one wants No one's going to go to an Italian restaurant and order plain pasta, right? maybe like your two-year-old nephew or something, but even they're going to probably want some butter, like something thrown on top. The minute, the moment you add a non-tri to this, if you're patient and don't cram all of your non-triotes to this, cuz there's nine possible non-triotes right now, right? We have 12 pitches in all of music. Three of them are the tri, which means there's nine non-triotes that we could add. Each one of these is going to provide us a different emotion, a different color, a different flavor. Uh, the minute you added, I believe you played the flat 6 is what I think I heard. Such a great tension note. It's so angry. It's so pissed off. I call the flat 6 the Batman note. Uh, I don't know if you saw the the most recent Batman movie. Um, [Music] like that that note right there, that's the Batman. That's flat 6. It's all over the soundtrack. Why? Because composers, musicians, even if they don't use the words I use, the terminology of like emotion training and using body movements. Like, we all get this stuff in a deep visceral way. It's everywhere. Okay. I'm just pointing I'm just I had a teacher fortunately that pointed this out to me, showed me how to practice it with body movement. And now I'm just I'm just putting what you already feel under the microscope and saying, "Hey, did you ever notice this?" So the minute we add a non-tri, we get tension, resolution, we get color, we get emotions, we get phrases. [Music] Notice that it really wants to pull back in. And there's like a there's like a center of gravity. Now, [Music] now that's a really pissed-off note right here. Is like tension flat 6 is the bad guy. He's coming in. He's like going to mess some things up and all of a sudden I get freaked out, right? So now um yeah, I'm the trionee. I'm the sharp four. Okay. But that that doesn't tell a human story. the body movement, the emotion does. [Music] And then there's the guy in the corner. It's like, what's the big deal? I don't get it. Like, who cares? That's the two. >> Can you hear these different colors and emotions? >> Oh, yeah. This is the bridge between what I think of as skill one, which is getting the ears open, but in a very physical, visceral, emotional way, and skill two, which is just how do you know how to play authentic phrases, knowing what every note's going to be ahead of time, uh, consistently. So, we're never trapped inside of scales or just out outlining arpeggios and chord tones. So this framework, this idea of a a stable triad with a single tension note, I was already combining, what did I what did we combine? Three different tension notes. We can combine them, but it's a it's an ear training tension resolution game that's worth playing one idea at a time. And I call this structure a quadratonic. It's a four note scale, but it's so much deeper than a four note scale. It's an ear training practice. It's a phrase machine. It infuses emotion into what we do. It It shows you where everything sits in the simplest way possible. And I'm a big fan of just sitting. When I was relearning, I would just pick one quadratonic per day and I would just sit and do little games like this. So simple. [Music] I think of this as like speaking simple little sentences and then I take my hand away which is me learning to just close my mouth. Does this make sense? And we're not we're not practicing technique virtuosity. We're literally practicing if you think of music as a foreign language. I'm literally practicing the simplest most basic conversational necessary phrases. Hi, my name's Jordan. I need help. Where is the bathroom? Like the most essential things you need to go to a foreign country and be able to communicate with people, right? I'm not quoting PhD literature or Shakespeare or attending universities. It's just like conversational fluency. It does not take a long time. Each day when I was relearning during that first year, I would pick a different triad and a different tension note and I would just explore. I would wake my ear back up, get my fingers honed in on it, and I would always remove my hand away. Okay, good. >> Does this make sense? >> It does. It's amazing. >> You want to give it a shot real quick? >> Uh, okay. Um, pick one. Uh, so G major triad plus pick one and I'll give it a try because I haven't really rehearsed. >> Sure. I Yeah, all good. I I refer to the uh the nomenclature the way I refer to them as G major tension two because it's not just the two. We're not adding the ninth like the chord tone. It's the same pitch, but it this idea is all about function. It's all about splitting the notes apart into a yin and a yang. A stable and a resolution and a tension note. So I I respect that tension note by stating it G major tension two. So, G major. Okay, I'll try. Yeah. [Music] [Music] No, no, no. You keep doing you. >> I wanted to provide some more advanced harmony underneath you. I didn't mean to to throw you off your game. I was playing an F. You were playing G tension 2. I put an F7 while an F13 voicing underneath you. Yeah, thought it was awesome. [Music] Right. There's the angry Batman note. There's the question mark note. But these are all based on G. I'm superimposing them over F dominant. >> Yeah. >> So G major tension too is G B D with an A note. Chord tone wise, that's the ninth, the major third, the sharp 11, and the 13. But, and when I added the Batman note, the flat 6, that's uh E flat, which is the flat 7 of the F dominant. But we're not hearing this big clunky like advanced sounding melodic minor. We're hearing these simple little hi, my name is Jordan sentences. >> Yes, >> that they're just lyrical, right? And we'll take it one step further. Anytime anytime this is a melodic triad, Ten Commandments, it was etched into stone on on Mount Si. Uh, anytime you're playing a major triad with attention too, there's a blue note hiding a half step above that two, >> right? [Music] Nice. Now, that makes sense from the standpoint of just basic chord scale theory thinking, but here's an F7 again. [Music] Now, the question is, does that sound like a wrong note to me? It does not sound like a wrong note. Sounds like a blue note. >> Define wrong. >> Yeah. Well, here's what's interesting is that we are now playing, we're suggesting a relatively advanced mode of melodic minor. This is F Lydian dominant. So, we're suggesting C melodic minor. F Lydian dominant has a sharp 11 in it. >> B, >> which is B natural, right? What's what pitch is the blue note that I just played? >> B flat or A sharp. >> Yeah. Yeah. Which is what chord tone? The natural 11. So the reason I refer to it as a jokingly tongue and cheek as like a wrong note is because most people would say that's an avoid note like this is Lydian dominant. Do not play the natural 11. For the love of God, please play the natural 11. Just learn to hear it as the blue note and then use it so that you've got these cool, lovely, lyrical, bluesy, soulful phrases [Music] inside of what should sound like an overly excessively academic harmony. >> Seven sharp 11. Yeah. Like the whole >> interesting. >> Um, is this all making sense so far? >> It's it's tremendous. So recap, three main notes that are at the heart and center could be over a G major chord. Now we just see it could also be over another chord like F is one that you played plus one tension note that has a a sense of tension and release into the three good ones. >> Exactly. >> That's tremendous. And the way you know that you're headed in the right direction is that the root note of the triad should sound like the most stable resolution point you have. I call it melodic do. It's not the It's not the root note of the chord. The root note of the chord is F. You want to hear something freaky? Check this out. Watch this. [Music] That's like the James Brown vamp, right? It sounds like the flat 7. It's the F. It's the root. I'm playing the F note melodically over the F7, but it doesn't sound like the most resolved note. It sounds like the James Brown funky flat 7 wanting to resolve up. Why? Because I'm structuring everything around the stability of the G major triad. So that reforms and reshapes the entire melodic framework. Does this make sense? >> Yeah. In our ears and emotionally as well as you mentioned. That's the >> Exactly. >> I mentioned when we met last time that there was always this note that would be playing over pentatonic superp position. I'm like how does the one of the chords sound like attention and it was on the cyian whatever. I don't know what we talked about and now you sort of answered that for me. It's like emotionally melodically the framework makes this even in theory it's like it's the root of the chord we're playing but the root in the context of this melodic improv sounds not as stable as an under note which is crazy. >> So the way that I try and essentially what we're doing right now we're discussing polyonal music. So I spent quite a number of decades exploring sort of traditional chord scale theory thinking and then I was introduced one of my mentors Stefan Harris introduced me to uh more polyonal thinking Bill Evans style postba piano which I'll get back to in a minute but what I've come to realize is that chord scale theory is totally right. It is absolutely correct, but it's a correct way of looking at a two-dimensional. It's a correct two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional world. So, it would sort of be like uh if we had a sphere floating in front of us. If you just look at it without moving around it, it looks like a circle. And it would not be wrong to say, "Hey, look, there's a circle floating in the air." But the minute you start to walk around it, if it were a two-dimensional flat circle, the minute you start to walk around it, that circle would start get turning into an oval and would eventually morph into just a line. >> Exactly. >> Because you're standing on the side of it. But if you if you walk around a sphere, it's going to look like a sphere no matter where you stand. So Stfan Harris, what he showed me um and I spent quite a long time studying with him and he influenced what I now refer to as our fifth pillar, our fifth skill, which is the imaginary piano player framework. And it's built on the the concept that the reason piano players are so much farther advanced than guitar players, is not because they have 10 fingers. Like look at any transcription from any of the great piano players. You will pretty much never I'm going to go ahead and say never, but at least almost never. You will never see 10 notes at the same time, >> right? >> But you will 95% of the time see stuff happening in their right hand and their left hand either simultaneously or back and forth. And when you actually break it down and look at what they were doing, quite often, like quite often, >> it's a triad or some slight variation of a triad in their right hand >> with a simple shell voicing or some variation in their left hand, but they're superimposing, let's say, a G major triad over a F7 shell. And because of that, they have these two different hands. They can literally look down and see them. that gives them the ability to do two very simple things at the same time and it creates it's almost like a mirage in the desert. It's an optical illusion. There's really nothing complicated going on or advance. It just sounds like it sounds >> and that is effectively what we're doing. We are taking on this framework of having two hands. We're using letting our right hand play around with this G major triad. It's just a G triad, but we're goofing around with it. And then our left hand is playing this F7 shell. >> Tremendous. >> That's fairly advanced. But does that make sense conceptually? >> I mean, I feel from little piano I've done for, you know, functional harmony, whatever. You're giving me like I have a hunch right now just to drop this on the floor and just go and play piano because like yeah, it's all there like but I I wouldn't. But uh yeah, totally totally get it. >> So what ends up happening is that in the left hand the harmony to it's an F7 like super simple. That's not wrong to say it's F7. The F note, you know, if the bass player is playing F and C. [Music] That's what they should be doing. It's supposed to be that. But the right hand of the piano player is not doing the same stuff. That's what I mean when I talk about two-dimensional versus three-dimensional. If you only think of F7 as mixelyian or Lydian dominant or 1357, like none of that's wrong, but it's it's basically describing the piano player's left hand without ever taking into consideration the fact that they have a whole other limb that they are doing things with and very often very simple things, but just unexpected like a G major triad. So, if a piano player, if Bill Evans were to play some lines um with this harmony and resolved it to like the most in sounding note, it would likely be the G major note even though his left hand is leaning into the F natural note. Did I say G major? I meant G natural. >> Yeah. And one thing uh when I talk to students generally a lot of them would say, "Oh, you're substituting." And that's where I'm like, "Well, not quite. You're super imposing. you're think about doing something very very basic but doing advanced well it's triads >> or simple structures on top of it which could be three or four notes >> just how they relate to that it's like you didn't sub anything it's not even a tronee sub it's nothing it's just but >> I get asked that all the time and it's it's the trickiest thing because I they're not wrong and I understand why they're asking that because from chord scale theory they're like oh it's a you know but that's again that's like looking at the circle and saying oh I can take that circle and move it around No, no, no. Just treat the circle as a sphere. But you have to learn to to sort of let go of some of the preconceived ideas. Um, and to start to see the reality of this three-dimensional object. I don't know if you remember the in the '90s, um, it became, I think it was in the '90s, it became really popular. They had these like 3D posters, right? >> And when you buy them, you hang it on the wall. Like I remember people would put it on the wall in their house and it just looks like a bunch of blurry lines. and then you you walk up and you stare at it long enough and all of a sudden your eyes like go out of focus and there's like a whale floating in the air in front of you. Polytonal music doesn't have to be that complicated, but it is a lot like the aal version of those 3D posters. Until you see it, it looks like a big mess, but the minute your eyes come into focus for us, our ears, everything just makes sense. So, you're like, "Oh, okay. I get it." So, that was what I was getting at a few minutes ago, that the way you'll know that your ears are coming into focus when the root note of the triad feels like the most stable note. and whatever tension or tensions uh tension notes you're using start to feel like they really need to move somewhere even to the point that the chord's root note the harmonic root note the left hand should feel unstable. So, um let's let's mix this up. Yeah. Yeah. To make it easier for for our guitar player friends watching to try this because until you get the hang of this this not everybody has a sustain pedal and jumping between triads and shell voicings is is tricky. It it reminds me of theory like in a way we're doing theory but we're not really doing theory. I saw a meme this morning. It's a big bang theory guy. It's like looking at a paper. It's like why does it work? Why does it why does and then the fourth frame is like oh that's why. So, so now we're going to get the Oh, that's why here and not just like pure loan paper. Off we go. There's a an amazing Bill Evans quote that's a a great way to wrap up what you just shared and bring us back into the music. He said um I forget the exact words, but effectively he said, "A lot of people think jazz is intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling." which I love because he's one of the most intellective musicians we've ever had and even he is saying he doesn't say there's no intellect to it but it's a the art form is the feel which is why I love starting pillar one skill one emotion ear training move your body make funny facial expressions like connect with your notes down here yes understand them but like connect with them down here so they come out expressively as feeling so when I first started studying with Stfan and began and trying to translate his piano ideas onto the guitar. And then during my relearning relearning process, because we don't have two hands, >> the easiest way to start is to treat our open six string as a substitute for a piano player's left hand. So, I would always put everything into E. >> Okay. So, um let's take that G major triad and let's just move it up one fret to G sharp major. Okay. Okay. Got it. >> Yeah, you got it. Yeah. >> Okay. Um, now >> that go. >> Yeah. Keep that E note ringing out. Don't Don't play any freted notes on the six string. [Music] >> Oh, I heard tension too. >> If you're watching this on YouTube, did you guys feel that there was like a little booty? There's a question mark. Practical perfect pitch. I'm telling you, like you'll start hearing this stuff everywhere. Okay. Um, [Music] there's the blue note again. That's Monk right there. That's straight note chaser and the opening to reflections. I don't know if you ever noticed that. The same melody, the same motif he uses in strain notchaser is the same motif from reflections. Put that over E. [Music] >> This stuff is built. This is the quadonics are the building blocks of our of our language. Uh can you improvise for a minute while keeping that E note lingering? Ah, [Music] yeah. Now add tension flat 6 in. [Music] And it's the E, too. This is awesome. But use it the way it wants to be used, which it it's pissed off. It really wants to come down. Yeah. Yeah, even in that lower register. That's such a sax line, too. Like I've heard the I don't know Donnie McCasslin or some of like Chris Powder lines like there's that huge gap and then Awesome. Yeah. So I would refer to this what you're playing this is a pentatonic scale. Technically it's a hexatonic scale cuz you have a a sixth note that we added in a blue note. >> But the blue note that just comes from the the melodic triad um ten commandments. So we don't even have to mention it because the fact that you're playing a major triad with the tension two implies that you're allowed to add that sharp two. So what you were currently playing is a major triad G# sharp major tension two and flat 6 superimposed over E, >> right? >> And when you do that, you're essentially creating the mirage in the desert of E major 7 sharp 5. >> Yeah, it's like an augmented major 7. Now, here's where the two dimensional world really starts to crumble under our feet. anyone out there who's watching who knows some of their, you know, not really basic theory, but >> C# melodic. Yeah, melodic minor. This is that we're we're playing with a a relatively advancedish mode of melodic minor. This is C# melodic minor, but C#'s not stable. In fact, if you add C#, [Music] this is a whiny 2-year-old. That's the emotion of the four. It's like this little kid on an airplane throwing a tantrum. It's like what we've done with the F7 over the G. Like it's that same things like oh the F now is so now the thing that should be included in our chord scale modal system is just off. >> It it's you can add it in but it's a tension, right? And so it's C# melodic minor. Yeah. the notes we're using overlap with that. But really, we're playing our our root note melodically, melodic do is G sharp. So, this is you could say that this is C# melodic minor as a parent scale. You could say it's the fifth mode of C# melodic minor cuz we're leaning into the G#arp note, but we're superimposing it over E, which means it's the fifth mode of melodic minor superimposed over the third mode of melodic minor. Like, the whole thing just starts to not make any sense. But if you can just like do this with your hands and look down and just say, "Okay, you are a G# sharp major triad and you are an E major 7." That's it. That's all that's happening. And then we're just we're just ornamenting what the piano player's right hand would be playing. And what ends up happening, we get uh this is a relatively commonish pentatonic scale, melodic minor pentatonic. Um, we had G# sharp, A sharp, B sharp, D#sharp, and E natural. Superimposed over E. The chord tones are the third, the sharp 11, sharp five, sharp five, major 7, and root. But here's what's weird is that the root note, as you already pointed out, is unstable. It's the angry, pissed-off Batman note. like it wants to move. So the root note is unstable. The third is now the most stable. It's melodic. It's the most stable resolution point we have. The sharp 11 feels like the question mark note. Um right there's Charlie Parker. That's a major tri tension two quadonic. I'm just playing his opening motif to anthropology, but I'm putting it over E now and superimposing it over an unexpected harmony. But the tension two still feels like the tension too. The major third, the sweet pretty note is the sharp five. The blue note [Music] >> is B natural. It's the is the natural fifth >> should be the dominant, but it doesn't dominate anything right now. >> It it should be avoided. We're playing an augmented a sharp five harmony and the natural five is the arguably the coolest note we can lean into. Again, it's one of those moments where it's like don't avoid it. Play it. Just learn to hear it. Taste those flavors, right? If you're that chef, like taste the different spices and then start cooking with them and understanding what it is that they're going to yield for you. >> Now, I want to make the changes, but we're not going to make make the changes, but you know, get to where when stuff is moving. Now, we've been really uh drone based building phrases like crawling before we run, but I'm curious to see like in a full-blown Bbop like 250 BPM rhythm changes. What's your >> Where do you go? >> Rhythm changes. I have a whole set of fascinatingly simple like it's almost annoying how simple it is if you've been working on rhythm changes for a long time. Um I it like pissed me off when I first noticed it. I was like, "Wait, why is no one I've been playing I've been trying to play this for decades now. Why didn't anybody point this out to me?" If we can squeeze it in, we'll we'll come back. We'll we'll we'll see if we can squeeze that in at the end. Uh that might be a good segue into our third pillar, which I'll talk about right at the end if we have time. But let let's stick with Instabot first. In order to get Instabbot flowing, there are essentially two skills that we need. Okay, skill skill one is what I refer to as triad ornamentation. Quadroonics is, in my opinion, the greatest form of triad ornamentation. Not only is it does it give you phrases and lyricism and blues and it unlocks all this advanced upper structure stuff, but it's also just the best segue out of practical perfect pitch and emotion ear training. It it gives you the tension resolution and the framework to start plugging in these body movements and emotions into it. Uh the other forms of of ornamentation would be things like leading tones, chromaticism. [Music] Like as long as you can see the steel frame of the triad, those are the it's it's like that game tag, right? You have like the if you're if you're touching the light post, you can't you can't get tagged. The triad notes give you the safe spots. The tension notes, the quadratonic tension notes give you the most lyrical emotion-driven ornamentation devices. Leading zones and chromaticism, as long as you resolve to a safe zone are great. Here's a a perfect example again. Charlie Parker um anthropology. That's the opening phrase to his bridge on rhythm changes. And if you break it, it's not a Bbop scale. It's not an arpeggio. It's not it's not anything. It's two D major triad tones. The the harmony is D7 [Music] chromatic passing tones and then a D major tension four quadroonic phrase 3 4 5 and then what does he do? 31 of the D major triad. This is both forms of triad ornamentation squeezed into one. It's chromaticism and quadratonics, but it's all built around the framework of just the triad or the stable notes. Always start and end on the stable notes at the beginning until you get the hang of things. The sec the second skill. Were you going to ask something? >> No. That I'm curious about the second skill. Like we have we've ornamented them. We've done tension two, tension flat 6, tension sharp two or you know just below the the third >> tension four tension four. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> This is all skill one for developing instab. Skill two is tried voice leading. >> Tried voice leading. >> Yeah. Um, and what I mean by that is, uh, triad, meaning we're not going to worry about seventh chords. Seven chords we can worry about later. Right now, that's you, you'd be shocked if you went through the real book and spent the time to look at every page in the real book and circle every 1 135 7 chord arpeggio in there. You would be amazed how few there are. >> Yeah. >> I'm not saying there's none. Seventh chords are important. I just said a minute ago, we'll deal with them later. But if you're studying guitar and everyone's telling you like, "You got to memorize your scales. You got to memorize your seventh chords." Like, yes, sort of. But also just look around and you'll notice that there's actually not that many scale runs or seven chord arpeggios in the language. >> Yeah. They're there >> melodically. Yeah. So like full arpeggios where you fully state it like regardless of order. Yeah. It's not very right. >> Very common. >> Right. That's what I mean. And and the reason that's important is that we're we're told to practice them as position runs. >> Yeah. >> You know, some some teachers are will will take it one step further and show you how to break down and and ornament them, do other cool things with them, which is great. >> But in my opinion, and this is based on what I got from my mentors and how I decided to relearn to play, the if we had to boil the entire art form down to one word, Bill Evans said it's feeling. That's a That's a pretty solid word. Another word that I might use is movement. This is an art form of motion. We're not supposed to just >> Yeah, we'll leave that cut like it's not supposed to be this very rigid stuck thing. It's it's flowing. It's it's organic. It's constant motion. Everything is moving. The swing rhythm is supposed to make you want to dance. The harmony creates these five ones, two five ones, these tensions, these pockets of harmonic tension that want to lift you up and throw you through the form. The melody, think about a Bbop scale, right? Uh chord tone, passing tone, chord tone, pass, like it's like a bouncing ball. Everything is supposed to move. The problem uh that I see with the way a lot of people are practicing, the reason jazz feels so hard is that we're sort of given these very most of us grow up listening to non-moving music. That's the first issue, right? rock and roll, funk, great styles. I grew up listening to it, but they are static. Like they're all about just staying put. Um, so making that leap from static music to moving music is is tough. And then beyond that, the conceptual ideas that we were told to work on are generally static ideas. Like you sit in a position and you just practice arpeggios up and down versus taking those concepts and and practicing flowing through them. That is what we have to practice if we want to get better. I liken it to someone trying to learn how to ice skate. Uh, you're Canadian, right? So, you could probably appreciate this better than I could, but you you put someone in skates and put them on on the ice the first time and it's like you're like, "Oh my god." And what what's the first thing we do? We grab onto the wall. We don't want to fall. We feel, you know, out of our element. So, we grab it on the wall. Makes sense. But the problem is, you can't learn to ice skate if you never let go of the wall. You have to let go of the wall. Yes, you're going to fall. You're going to feel offbalance. Like it's going to be uncomfortable, but if you just keep after it, you'll eventually figure out how to balance and then you can start to skate. So, um, skill one is tried ornamentation. That's phrases, lyricism, connection. Skill two is how do you start skating on the ice? How do you start moving? Voice leading. I like to do it uh using what I call the half note game. That's where you take your material. You raise at the half step. Is that the part? >> Not half step. Half note. >> Half note. >> Yeah. And full disclosure, it's okay if you want to laugh at me when I explain this to you because I literally laughed out loud. I was this punk little 20-year-old know-it-all when my first teacher asked me to work on this. And I swear I thought he was kidding. And I was so full of myself that I started laughing out loud at him. And he just sat there and waited until I was done. and I realized he was not joking. He put the metronome on and counted me in and I was lost in maybe five seconds. Decades later, I moved to New York. I was teaching at NYU and a musician at the program was struggling to play these changes in Scoffield's ensemble and I was I was hanging and playing with them as well. And Scott's amazing, but he's not always he's like so natural at this point that he doesn't always know how to explain to people how to he's just like go practice. You'll figure it out. like you've got it. Um, so I he was struggling to help the kid play the changes and I gave the kid this practice, this half note game. And uh I was worried that SCO would kind of laugh at me like I laughed at my teacher. And Sko goes, "Yeah, that's cool. I like that. Do that." So I often I often joke that it sounds simple, but it's Scoffield approved. Here's the game. You play only 135 of whatever harmony you're working on. >> Okay? >> And you only get half notes. So half notes one of the most one of the most restrictive things you could ever try. >> So when I said half steps I really misunderstood. So you mean half notes like two beats, not quarter notes, not eighth notes, half notes. >> Half notes. The beauty of this is that it takes all of your cool stuff away. Nobody has a whole vocabulary of hip half note riffs, right? So like if we're playing a 25 one A minor, right? I like to think in triads obviously based on the first part of our conversation. I think it's the best certain point cuz it's pure stability. We can ornament. You could do this with seven chords. I just don't recommend it. You know, do what you will. Here's an A minor triad. As soon as you can play that, even remotely, you should never practice it again because that's just holding on to the wall. Instead, play two notes from this triad and then move. Force yourself to move. No matter how slow you have to go, just move. [Music] This is autumn leaves in E minor. I don't know if you can hear the changes. I'm playing two notes for A minor, two notes for D major, two notes for G major, two notes for C major. And you just keep moving, keep moving. And what ends up happening is that you start on one note. That's an A note. You can start anywhere. It doesn't matter. And then there's this little intervalic leap. Okay? Keep your leaps to at most one octave. Ideally less than one octave. That's just right. Some good pro tip advice, right? It doesn't have to be the nearest triad tone to it, but it can be. When you switch to the next chord, that's when you want to be really precise and try and get it. Doesn't have to be the smallest distance, but it should be really small at like one of the nearer notes to where you're at. You don't want something like [Applause] terrible voice leading. [Music] Lovely voice leading. [Music] There's a pretty hefty introd. That's okay because I'm inside of a chord. I'm not trying to move. You see the difference, >> right? Yes. >> This I don't think could be done enough. Like every time I work on a new tune, I run that tune through the half note game. It teaches you how to move all around the fretboard and it and hear the way lines are going to want to behave when you start playing the changes. I cut you off. Go ahead. No, that that was it. Like we can't do this enough. uh in that whatever comes after if it's based on that skeleton especially if it's heard right not just like oh I can find it's like yeah but do you hear like you played you played that like you you don't go out of your way to find like running the entire arpeggio the rest of the scale whatever it's like no no hear that triad and then you hear the changes ultimately like you just hear the chords >> awesome >> now I like to think of this as ice skating and juggling or walking and juggling. Like you would never go up like my nephews are pretty young. I remember watching them trying to learn to walk, you know, it was so fun to watch. I would never in a million years try and teach them how to walk and juggle at the same time. It's just it's not it's not possible. >> It's not responsible parenting. >> Yeah. Juggling knives on fire. Um, you just let them, you know, let them learn to walk. If you want, you could, if if you think they are prone to the circus arts and magic, like, okay, give them some bean bag balls while they're sitting down when they're not standing, show them how to start working on juggling without walking. Let them practice these as two completely different skills. They are different skills. One is phrases, one is motion. The end goal is to eventually be able to do both and then to be able to start doing them together. But that I don't want to say it happens naturally on its own. Like you do kind of have to work at it a little bit, but if you can do each skill separately, it kind of does start to just work together. And that's when you start to be able to play. [Music] So all I'm really looking at here and thinking about here is I'm basically looking at the shapes of these triads. I'm ornamenting them with my quadonic instincts because I'm just used to it. I know where those those different notes are. I know what they're going to feel like. I know how they're going to want to move and resolve within the triad. And then the second it's time for the next I'm ice skating. The second it's time to switch to the other leg, I just slide over to the other leg and I keep moving. And then it just becomes this like left right glide along the ice while I'm juggling and doing tricks. Does this make sense? >> It does. Yeah. And then you can step back further, build ideas, interact, keep your being anchored in the feeling of it, then build a architecture of a solo, but that's like for later. But after you got these skills down, then you're in business. Like you can scale this anywhere. Yeah. This is what I mean when I this is the concept of instab like you don't I I wasn't wasn't playing any scales. I wasn't using any scale positions. I didn't arpeggiate any changes. Hopefully though it did kind of sound somewhat like authentic uh jazz language because quadrotonics are inside the music every page of the real book. You might not find a seven chord arpeggio. You will find a quadonic phrase like they're all over it. So I'm relying on very authentic phrases and then I'm just being respectful of the changes. I'm not concerned with trying to outline them like a, you know, I sometimes tongue and cheek talk about as like being a little kid coloring, you know, with a coloring book trying to color in the lines. Like I don't really care about that so much. I want to be respectful of the changes. I don't want to be imprisoned to them. So the voice leading allows me to take any idea I'm playing and just glide it along the ice. Now, as we get better, yeah, this is just like I said, this is conversational fluency. This is the ability to move to India and hang there for a while and just talk to people, make friends, go to parties, get it like you don't have to be able to sit in on a PhD level class to visit the country. This is just the simplest, most direct path in my opinion to conversational fluency where it's all about feeling, motion, all the priorities that my mentors had that I see in the um the legends in their quotes. From here, we can totally if we want, we don't need to. If a if a witch or a wizard came and like cursed me and made it where I could never play anything beyond this level for the rest of my life, I would I might be annoyed every now and then, but like I would still be able to play music and and feel fulfilled because I'm still speaking the language. That said, there are all kinds of layers that we can move into. I didn't mean to do it. I shouldn't have, but I actually started employing some of those layers here that you may or may not have even noticed. I started using some of the upper structure triad poly tonal stuff, >> right? >> I don't know if you heard that, but let me slow it down in place of the D dominant. I used a B as in boy B major triad, right? Okay. If you superimpose a B major triad over D dominant stuff, you get the 13 flat 9. Love it. >> Yeah. So if we just half note game voice leading that's a minor mood B major but you you hear it as a 251. Oh we do. Oh yeah. I'm just in the upper extensions of that D dominant. I'm not I'm not imprisoned to the 1357. I'm jumping straight for the sweet spot notes, the upper extensions. Um, let's get really wacky with this cuz we probably I assume we need to start to wind down a little bit and I want to end with like a big explosion of like this is just the starting point, not the end the end goal. >> It could be for another for another call as well. I mean, we have done a while and we're basically like at step two out of I think you said five and maybe five would be like an exploration for another like podcast. Uh but just reminding me the coloring analogy. I heard a quote by um George Garzone who said like when we are forced to say play a full mode or full scale during a chord, we just blanket the chord instead of respecting it, right? We're just like it's brown like you mix all colors like so I see where we want to respect a chord without being bound. And I that's a big key takeaway for a lot of my audience which is typically older gentlemen who's listened to the whole like static like the Led Zeppelin and played blues which is hit a new chord then shred on that hit a new chord even like Dream Theater whatever hit a new chord shred on that hit but then we get to this realm where we go we you don't want to blanket the chord you want to pay respect to it and you don't want to be bound by this non fluidity. So how do you do it? So I think this whole like talk we had has been so valuable because you're you're showing like how do you make these changes happen without getting a PhD in music which we did by the way there's this trombone guy we had an interview with him he did a PhD in music he's a trombone player now he does some of the work he said the I did a PhD in music and I'm going to summarize it for you in 15 minutes so you don't have to. So then we spent an hour talking about you should showed me you know chord scale theory was fun. >> Let's see how you can gently introduce maybe step three and leave it with a big bang so we can maybe meet another time. Uh if people are interested just drop a comment and >> we'll we'll go at it. >> So yeah totally. Um so pillar three skill three I'm actually going to skip that for today. We can save that one for later if you want just because there's really no shortcut to it. Skill skill three I call the melodic progression. I'll introduce the concept of it, but then I'll actually show you how to start thinking about skill four. Um, the melodic progression is based on the idea that there are triads and quadonics hiding inside of the melody of tunes. And everything we've discussed so far has been based on the idea of like, yeah, quadroonics and triads are are in the language. They're there, but we're still thinking about the chord progression, which is again, if a wizard or a witch cursed me and forced me to play that way the rest of my life, it's totally fine. But to truly breathe life into the art form is to play from the melody. And there are there are triads and quadronics hiding in the melody. Sometimes they're basic root structure, sometimes they're upper structure, sometimes they jump back and forth. Quick example. Um, Felonius Monk Round Midnight that has that's not right. That's not the minor with the descending C. Like that's that's the harmony. That's the piano player's left hand. But his melodic framework is just an E flat minor triad tension two. So what we can do if we want we can improvise from the chord progression in the left hand or we can look at what someone like Monk or Ellington or Miles anybody it doesn't matter look at what they were doing in their melody and ask sort of ask them it it takes it's an art form but ask them like what triads and quadonics were you hearing what are the important notes here and then that becomes instead of the chord progression the melodic progression that's where I like to improvise from the majority of the time because then I'm acting as a servant to the tune, to the melody, to the composer, to the tradition, which there's pretty much nothing I don't care how I'm not going to speak to anybody else. There's nothing I can play that will ever come across as more sophisticated than Duke >> being respectful to Duke or Monk or any of these guys. I am not the driver here. I should not be the driver. I can be. Occasionally, I'll do it, but usually I want to be in the passenger seat. I'm I'm the co-pilot. I'm like, "All right." I I pull out the GPS, you know, and I'm like, "All right, Duke, where do you want to go?" And I He tells me and I help him get there, right? Cuz he can't play the tunes anymore. Um, that's our third pillar. Our fourth pillar is all about chord motion. Cuz so far we haven't talked about seventh chords. Third pillar is uh fourth pillar, excuse me. Harmonic storytelling is where seventh chords come into the picture. This is this is straight out of what I learned from Peter Bernstein, who in my opinion is one of the greatest accompaniests on the planet. guitar, piano, it doesn't matter. He's so incredible. Like playing duo with that guy is like it's it's like surfing a tidal wave out in the middle of the ocean. Like it's just so much momentum. He just like lifts you up into the air. And it's so frustrating. When I first started hanging with him like, "Why can't I play like that?" And I I would ask him like, "How do I do that?" He's like, "I don't know. Just move. Just like stop playing the real book changes. Just move again. Move." And I'm like, "Where do I go?" He's like, "I don't know. Just play something else. Like stop playing that chord. do something else. Um, later I I studied big band arranging and I was taught these like time- tested traditional types of motion that you can use for uh, you know, writing out a horn section. And all of a sudden, I realized like, oh, that's what Peter's doing, but he's doing it with shell voicings on the guitar. So, as a quick example, um, the four movement types that I practice are dominant, diminished, uh, chromatic, and dietonic. Measure three in Autumn Leaves. If we play in the key of E minor, it's supposed to be a G major chord, right? Right to C major, right? 2514 G major, C major. Well, if you study chord motion, if you let go of the wall, stop playing the chords that are in the real book and think about the motion. Uh, a tune like Leaves is a little boring cuz like you keep resolving to G major and E minor. It's like G major, E minor, G major, E minor, E minor, G major. Not when I gig with my students, they go, "What are what?" I'm like, "Well, you got to you got to play, man. I I'm not Peter Bernstein, but this is the thing that I held local gigs, right, in coffee shops." And that's the test. Like, you do time with me. Well, you do your time, your sentence, then we get to that small coffee shop. I love that play standards and well, you should come. You'd be awesome. Uh, and the I play I mean, I play the changes, but I mean, after a point, after like a course or two, we're like, "Yeah, we're it's going to go to E minors." like what else am I interested in hearing? It's just a standard. It's not a Duke song. It's just a >> So then they would look at me and bizarre as if they they would need to catch up and latch on to that. I'm like, you don't need to. You just like play with >> you, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't matter. What do you do to your >> Yeah. So, well, the most obvious like the when I talk about dominant movement, people's eyes like glaze over and they're like, "Yeah, I know how to play five ones." I'm like, "Yeah, but you most people see five Most people see five ones as as the the prison the the cell door on their prison and they're like trapped and they want to get out." And I'm like, "It's not it. It is the way out. You just need to kind of like the circle in the sphere. You just need to rotate the prison door and instead of having bars, now you have a ladder that you can climb out of the cell." Dominant motion will give you near instant freedom in a chord progression if you learn to be playful with it. So, what does that mean? Well, think about how do you get where you want to go? We know that we want to go to C major in bar 4, right? Right. A minor, D7, G major, C major. Okay. What chord wants to go to C major? There's a lot of chords that want to go to C major, but the most obvious one is G dominant. >> Which means if you want in measure three, you could ignore the G major and play a G dominant chord. >> Absolutely. [Music] Do you hear how there was that little like that like longing to move? But it's a wrong chord. Doesn't sound wrong though. It sounds totally fine to my ear. [Music] Like there's a lot of different types of chord motion. We could even two five this. We can even do D minor, G m uh G dominant C. Yeah, when we're improvising, uh we can also improvise based on these changes. Even if if you and I were doing duo and you just played G major, I don't care. It doesn't matter because the whole point is to create tension and motion that carries us forward. So, one triad that I love to use over G dominant minor E major triad over G7. Stefan used to call it the baby chord. He's a father, so he had body movements for his harmonies. So, he would do this body movement. [Music] It's like holding his child. I don't have a kid, so I can't personally relate to that. So, I think of it as like the romance harmony. It's like ballroom dancing with the love of your life and you dip her and then you lift her back up. Well, this is an E major triad, which means I can play an E major triad over a G major chord, right? Interesting. [Music] That's E major tension flat 2. And then you hear how voice leads perfectly into C major >> and you're going somewhere. Yeah. >> And C major is not even like it's not even the root. It's a it's one of the chords of the song structure which is fascinating. >> Yeah. I'm just I'm just resolving to I used root structure A minor for the A minor 7. I used the B major triad for D dominant. I used an E major triad for G dominant. And then I finally resolved. I gave that nice clean root structure sound again. So, my my improvised melodic progression that I'm just making up on the fly was [Music] right. A minor, B major, E major, C major. But so, you could literally plug the half note game into that. You have to be mindful. One of the most impactful quotes that I've ever heard and I heard it when I had just lo I just found out I lost the ability to play and was trying to decide do I really want to go through this. I hadn't come up with this concept of like can I come can I develop a more direct path. I was still dealing with the you know the medical trauma and then the emotional turmoil of whether or not I want to deal with this again. >> Um and I was I was just watching some YouTube and it it came onto this uh Bill Evans um interview. It was the with his brother the the um the universal mind. I don't know if you've seen that interview. Really amazing. It's there's it's on YouTube. It's worth watching. His brother is like, you know, they're they're both very well spoken. His brother plays a little bit, but he's just interviewing Bill about his whole process and they cover all kinds of territory. And one of the things his brother asks him about the learning process and students in general and you know you have to humble your ego to be willing to hear what Bill's trying to say. At the time I was beyond humbled. I had everything stolen away from me. And so it just hit home so hard. Bill said the the problem most music students have is they're trying to approximate the end goal rather than picking the most elementary standalone foundational components and just learning to be playful with them. So it's like, you know, we're all taught like practice your scales and arpeggios and then just like listen to Charlie Parker and try and approximate it. And there's there's definitely value to that. But if you think about what that's doing, it's always has you like reaching outside of yourself. You're like trying to grab something that's far away from you and you like you'll touch it. You'll you'll get your fingers onto it and then you'll probably it'll slip through your fingers. And Bill says that if that's the only approach you take that it will eventually lead you to so much confusion and frustration that you'll just never figure out how to move forward. And his advice, which is kind of antithetical to what every college class I ever took, every like everybody until I got to New York and started hanging with my mentors, his advice was just put all that stuff aside. Come back to the most basic things and be real and authentic and genuine about it. Learn to be playful. Learn to control a triad. learn to infuse just a silly little tension to like any, you know, he he didn't talk about quadratonics, but his advice was just to learn to be playful and authentic and real with the simplest things because then what we're talking about is instead of trying to find music out here, we're building we're planting seeds inside of ourselves and letting them grow and flourish. And you can do both. >> That's totally fine. I didn't have the the the luxury of doing both because I was restrained to 10 to 15 minutes worth of practice a day for a year. So, I had to pick like the fewest number of things to work on to get back to playing as quickly and efficiently as possible. And I decided based on that quote from Bill, uh he just inspired me so much with it as well as the wisdom from my mentors to just I'll come back to the advanced stuff later. I'll figure like that's icing on the cake. I got to figure out how to make a batter and then I got to get that batter into a mold and put it in the oven. Like I need a cake and then I'll figure out the icing. Um, so if that if that carries any inspiration for anybody, that was a huge moment for me. Such a life lesson too, like the authenticity and like very basics, but being playful could be a moment with family, it could be work, it could be like it could be gymnastics. I know people love other stuff. It does remind me that hearing certain pros like you said frustrated. I think there's a stigma like frustrated jazzer, you know, you walk into a club like he's really not feeling it. There are people I knew like people people in Montreal like so-called good career players 50 60 you hear them every solo I'm not going to name names but every solo seems like here's a guy who's perpetually dissatisfied with his own playing. I'm like I don't and I realized young I don't want to do that and I didn't go through the same health issues as you did. I'm like it's supposed to be something that's felt. So that's why I'm very um like leftrain, very cerebral, you know, I studied statistics, I'm a programmer actuary, I work for the government, you know, Right. So I'm a math, right? I love spreadsheets, you know, I do C++. >> You're alone on that one. >> Yeah. And I I just love that stuff. But um there was a point where I I just decided to be a space cadet when it came to this because it was the only outlet I could have. So people like what I would just go out, play gigs. I'm like, "Yeah, I know the changes, but I'm going to play absolutely what I want and what I feel over these changes." And I went through phases where it was like hard to go through with the mindset of like I'm going to play whatever. And then eventually I started to play more in the changes just because it was more authenticity and not just like, oh, this is correct, this is not correct. Like encyclopedic knowledge can be good, but I just elected not to apply like the left brain to that thing, which is I think why you and I met in a way. So, it's very poetic, but here we are. >> Yeah. Uh, if you don't mind me throwing in one tiny final point right at the end, this is something that that proved to be very powerful for me. It's a realization I had when I was relearning. Uh, and it's very similar to what you were just saying. And if anyone watching gets any inspiration from this, um, I had to figure out a way intentionally and consciously to develop two totally different minds when I was relearning. Um, and I talk about this with my own students quite often. I call it the the practice mind and the play mind. They're totally different. They should not bleed into each other uh unconsciously. Like you you should be able to to switch between them. And when you're playing, you should be just literally having fun. Like it's you're like a little kid at school at recess. Like you're just having fun with your friends or maybe alone. Um very rarely should you ever feel frustration or I'm not good enough. like you're just using you you've built your toolbox up in your practice shed when you play. You're just in the cook in the kitchen throwing stuff into the pan and seeing what happens. >> In the practice mindset, I often tell my students and remind myself of this. You should never experience zero frustration. >> But but you should never experience too much frustration either. You like your frustration is sort of the check engine light of the car. You want to keep it on but like it should be the least amount of frustration. And the game is to come up with something you can't do yet to sit down with it to feel a little bit frustrated but try and turn it into a game. Have fun with it. Be playful. And when you notice the frustration disappears, fantastic. It's like a video game. You just beat the level. Now you're done. Now move on to the next level. Make it a tiny bit harder. Don't jump from level one to level 17. Just go to level two. And now you're a little bit frustrated again. It should be built on what you just accomplished. You make it, you just change it ever so slightly. You're frustrated again. You continue moving forward. And it's like it's like climbing a ladder like one rung at a time. It's human nature to want to jump 17,000 rungs at once, but you're just going to you're just going to end up falling anyways. So just just step on the first rung. Like enjoy the process of it and then climb yourself up to the second. Enjoy the process. Like, and then when it's time to play, you put all of that stuff aside and you just trust that whatever you did in the shed, however much ladder climbing you did, will be enough to help you say something in the moment when you're actually in the play mindset. That's how I like to view things. [Music]
