Probably one of the most common things I have discovered in students of all skill levels and playing styles are that the concepts of "playing" and "practicing" are often confused and do not have a clear definition in how they are thought of and approached. Time and time again, as a guitar teacher, and specifically in jazz education, when the focus of improvisation may lend a hand in the ambiguity within these two terms, a pupil may have a hard time separating them, resulting in their progress becoming stunted and their musical vocabulary getting stale.
Theres been many times in asking my students questions like "What things are you working on?" and "How have you been practicing that?" Resulting in an answer occasionally involving passive playing with a lack of specific concentration, or not defining what they are working on to begin with. In response to this, I will define specifically what practicing can be, and how this is a completely separate thing from actual playing and performing. This analogy can be used and applied to all types of music and with students from all ages and levels.
Practicing your instrument can be looked at just like batting in baseball, where being on deck and warming up with a weight on the bat, will make it easy to swing when you take it off. In doing this, you'll easily have far more power as well as control than you just had. If you look at this in terms of practicing your instrument, it can be looked at like limitation. One way of practicing like this could be seen as giving the student clear concepts, ideas and exercises to work on which are very outlined in detail, and that can benefit all areas of one's musicianship.
Take this for example: Assigning a pattern to use for a scale getting it to a specific BPM within several keys can be seen as the "weight on the bat". When they have completed this, it is the now the time to "get up to bat" where they will utilize the exercise within a real musical context. Here, I could have the student improvise using the scale and pattern, and now by me having gave them such a limitation with concrete, outlined terms, them now using this concept can have a feeling of being natural as well as musical far more than it had been previously and the student will have "taken the weight off the baseball bat"
Now, in my eyes to define the "playing" distinction in which they will do after working up the "practicing" as well as performing live, is to me, playing with eliminating the analytical, conscious mind; simply just "in-the-moment performing" with all aspects of self focusing on the music, leaving everything they had practiced at the door. All too often, a student's playing will get caught up in trying to remember what they had practiced, or being too forceful while trying to insert what they had been working on, and this will immediately take them out of the moment, and cause a barrier between their mind, their ear, and their hands, leaving their playing to suffer.
This definition and analogy of "practicing" as opposed to and related to "playing", could be looked at as fairly simple in these terms, but being conscious about it and clarifying this in the big picture, can provide huge growth opportunities for a student, and can result in exponential room for success in the practice room and on stage.
Theres been many times in asking my students questions like "What things are you working on?" and "How have you been practicing that?" Resulting in an answer occasionally involving passive playing with a lack of specific concentration, or not defining what they are working on to begin with. In response to this, I will define specifically what practicing can be, and how this is a completely separate thing from actual playing and performing. This analogy can be used and applied to all types of music and with students from all ages and levels.
Practicing your instrument can be looked at just like batting in baseball, where being on deck and warming up with a weight on the bat, will make it easy to swing when you take it off. In doing this, you'll easily have far more power as well as control than you just had. If you look at this in terms of practicing your instrument, it can be looked at like limitation. One way of practicing like this could be seen as giving the student clear concepts, ideas and exercises to work on which are very outlined in detail, and that can benefit all areas of one's musicianship.
Take this for example: Assigning a pattern to use for a scale getting it to a specific BPM within several keys can be seen as the "weight on the bat". When they have completed this, it is the now the time to "get up to bat" where they will utilize the exercise within a real musical context. Here, I could have the student improvise using the scale and pattern, and now by me having gave them such a limitation with concrete, outlined terms, them now using this concept can have a feeling of being natural as well as musical far more than it had been previously and the student will have "taken the weight off the baseball bat"
Now, in my eyes to define the "playing" distinction in which they will do after working up the "practicing" as well as performing live, is to me, playing with eliminating the analytical, conscious mind; simply just "in-the-moment performing" with all aspects of self focusing on the music, leaving everything they had practiced at the door. All too often, a student's playing will get caught up in trying to remember what they had practiced, or being too forceful while trying to insert what they had been working on, and this will immediately take them out of the moment, and cause a barrier between their mind, their ear, and their hands, leaving their playing to suffer.
This definition and analogy of "practicing" as opposed to and related to "playing", could be looked at as fairly simple in these terms, but being conscious about it and clarifying this in the big picture, can provide huge growth opportunities for a student, and can result in exponential room for success in the practice room and on stage.
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