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Practice the hard stuff

July 6, 2022 Published by

I’ve been teaching a few students over the summer and one thing I like to emphasize to them about practice is that you only need to practice the hard stuff.

If you can already play something well and cleanly and musically you don’t need to practice it.

You only really need to practice the difficult stuff. That’s what will improve your abilities and push you to new levels of playing ability.

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Practice ear training everyday

March 24, 2022 Published by

I’ve been practicing ear training every day. It started with me just practicing guitar every day, but now I’m focusing specifically on ear training. Every day I want to learn something new by ear. Yesterday it was a chorus of a Sonny Rollins solo over “Tenor Madness.” A few days ago it was the walking bass line for the Tony Bennett recording of “Give Me the Simple Life.”

Some days I don’t have a whole lot of time, so it might just be half of a chorus of a solo or a partial melody. Or I’ll even make sure I can play the chords to a song that I learned while repeatedly listening to a song in the car. It isn’t always a lot of music that I’ll learn, but I’ll make sure I learn something by ear.

And this has had some quite good results.

I’ve learned quite a number of songs by ear by doing this, and it’s improving my ears more than anything I’ve ever practiced. I took ear training classes while I was at Berklee College of Music that definitely helped a whole lot, but just focusing specifically on learning things by ear and practicing until I can play along with the recording has helped the most.

Hearing chord progressions is a little easier, and hearing scale degrees in a melody is also easier.

I highly suggest people that have the time and resources to try this out. Just try it for a few weeks. See if it helps. My guess is that no matter how good your ears are it’ll help a lot.

Just the act of listening, figuring out what something is, and playing it yourself will expand your playing abilities and your knowledge of how to play different phrases on your instrument.

Another plus is that you’ll learn a whole bunch more music and expand both your musical vocabulary and your repertoire.

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