Sunday, April 03, 2016

Practicing versus exercising and learning

As many of you know, I fill up my evenings and weekends with various jazz courses. While I think I've learned a lot by doing this and have certainly advanced my abilities, lately I've been feeling like I'm just rushing from one tune one course one day to another and I'm not focussing enough on the lessons or scales or even tunes that I need to be learning. Sure at the end of each session I can play the tunes, scat a chorus for each but I'm not sure I'm internalizing the knowledge.

I think I need a new approach to "practicing" and I think I need to rename it to "exercising" and "learning".  So rather than practising scales, I am going to start exercising my voice using scales, daily exercises. And rather than "having to practice" the tunes, I will "learn" the tunes by leaning the melody, learning the bass notes, learning the 3rds and 7ths (or 5ths and 9ths).

This session I'm reducing the course load that I'm taking and will spend more time on fewer tunes, really attempting to learn and internalize them.