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Working as a musician (Video)

Quantity leads to quality (Video)

Practice improvising

I’ve been practicing improvising on both piano and guitar recently and I’m taking the approach that a number of my guitar professors at Berklee College of Music had; practice improvising. In addition to practicing all of the arpeggios and scales over the changes and everything you need to also just practice improvising.

You need to practice thinking of things on the spot and playing them, and trying to play the ideas you want to hear over the changes.

Because if all you do is practice arpeggios and scales then all you’ll do when you try to improvise is play arpeggios and scales.

Thinking of musical ideas on the spot and playing them is a skill in itself. And it needs practice.

Luckily for many musicians this will be the fun part of improvising.

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Use this practice tip to practice effectively (Video)

Only practice the hard stuff

If you’re trying to practice efficiently then you have to basically only practice techniques and musical ideas that are difficult for you to play. If what you’re playing is easy then there isn’t much of a reason to practice it.

So practice only the hard stuff.

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Learning Patterns

I’ve been practicing jazz piano recently. I’ve been working on learning standards by ear, improvising over them, and playing walking bass lines in my left hand on piano. Improvising over changes is something that I did on guitar, same with learning by ear. Playing walking bass lines is new though. It’s taken some practice, but I’ve improved quite a bit since I started practicing this summer.

Some things that helped me a whole lot were Aimee Nolte’s videos on playing solo jazz piano. She has some great videos about how to play standards on solo piano. She has a video on how to play walking bass lines on piano.

In practicing this I’ve learned that playing an instrument, and playing jazz is playing a lot of similar patterns. The walking bass line pattern that Aimee Nolte suggests is incredibly useful to play basically any type of walking bass line. I’ve talked to my bass player friends, and my jazz musicians friends about this, and none of them are as surprised as me. They’ve literally said, “yup that’s how you play walking bass.” That’s what jazz is. Obviously I’m using one method of playing a walking bass line, and there are tons of different patterns and ways to play walking bass lines, but they all follow similar patterns. It’s just that there are a ton of patterns to use and learn.

The same could be said for comping chords on guitar.

I remember when I was first starting to learn jazz guitar in high school my guitar teacher had me buy a book called “Jazzology” and I learned a few of the comping patterns in that book. I started improvising using those patterns. And then once I was comfortable with those I learned more patterns. It’s all about learning patterns and slowly adding more patterns and more ideas and eventually you’ll “speak the language.”

I’ve been doing the same with soloing and improvising.

I’ve learned a few jazz solos and used some of those ideas in my own playing. The more you do it the more comfortable you get. And you start learning those patterns slowly, and then you add slightly more patterns and more ideas.

At first this is difficult. It’s hard to focus enough and even harder to play something you think is cool, especially if you’re starting with simple materials. But the more you do it, the more comfortable you get. The more you’re able to add and eventually you’ve gotten to a whole new level of complexity in your playing. But it’s about slowly adding new patterns to your playing.

Another great thing about the whole pattern idea is that you notice patterns between songs. Many of the standards I’ve learned have similar chord progressions. Not just small pieces of chord progressions, like ii V Is, but larger chord progressions. Or literally the same chords, but just mixed around. That’s the case for “All of Me”, “Fly Me to the Moon”, “Autumn Leaves”, and “Moon River.” If those were all written in the same key there would be many similarities with the chord progressions.

So once you get used to soloing over a few of those tunes it opens up the ability to solo over so many other tunes.

It’s one of the reasons why jazz musicians are so comfortable in so many different situations. They’ve played over so many different things in different keys and different situations where they’ve just practiced a ton of different music and a ton of different ideas.

Go learn some patterns.

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Writing gets easier

One thing I’m noticing as I continue to write music more and more is that it gets much easier to do. The whole entire process gets easier. And I’m better at writing music that I’m proud of. The whole entire this is easier and better.

It reminds me that writing music is a skill. It’s just like any other musical skill; playing piano, playing guitar, playing an instrument, improvising, learning music by ear. Writing music is the same. The more you do it, the more you practice, the better you get at it.

And the better you get at it, the easier it becomes.

So keep writing.

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Repeat material

One thing I learned at Berklee while studying composition is about repeating material. One of my teachers said to never repeat the same material in the exact same way. Change something about it whenever it’s repeated so it’s slightly newer and more fresh.

While you might not always want to do that with every single piece of music you write it can be a great way to keep a piece of music sounding fresh even when you’re repeating lots of the same material.

It’ll also make the piece of music look a little more thought out because rather than repeat ideas in the exact same way you’re rephrasing them and saying them in a slightly different way.

One easy way to do this is to switch what instruments are playing the melody. Another thing you can do is re-voice the chords. Or you could change the arrangement slightly. Use slightly different rhythms that create a similar groove.

It can take some extra work to do but it’s definitely worth it so give this technique a try.

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You Have to Play Bad Solos (Video)

Composing is composing

I just finished writing a piano quartet. It’s the first piano quartet that I’ve ever written. I wrote it to submit to the Hear Now Festival. It’s a new music festival here in Southern California that happens every year and they perform a number of new works by living composers. It usually last a weekend long with two or three concerts.

I’ve never submitted anything and wanted to make sure that I start submitting my music to different competitions and readings.

So I wrote a new piece.

It’s the first thing I’ve written for acoustic instruments since 2016 (when I was at Berklee College of Music). I originally thought that getting back into writing concert music would be difficult and take a lot of effort, but it didn’t. Because I’ve been writing music since then I’ve kept up my music writing chops. I’ve also been lucky enough to conduct a youth orchestra and have arranged a number of pieces for them. That’s kept my Finale chops improving as well.

So one thing I’ve learned from writing this piece is that composing is composing. Writing music is writing music. Even if it’s a slightly different style or the instrumentation is different, it’s all still the same thing; writing music.

If you’re writing electronic music, but still thinking about music the same way you would as if you were writing for orchestra it’ll likely help your orchestral writing. It obviously won’t help it as much as writing for orchestra, but it’ll keep that skill improving and getting better.

So keep writing. Even if it’s a different style.

Keep writing.

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