We all have our strengths as musicians, but that also means we all have our weaknesses. Usually we all have a key or area of playing that we feel less confident. Maybe the harmonies themselves are easy to understand, but we still struggle to play them.
This is totally normal for all players, and it is a great sign of where you can focus your practicing to improve.
Today we’re going to cover some topics from Nathan’s latest resource Key Builders: Techniques for 12 Key Mastery. This resource starts off simply in chronological order and then increases in difficulty. It takes you from simple scale workouts to all of the diatonic intervals, various ways to play dominant triads, seventh chords, pentatonics, several timeless melodies, and more. Plus, make sure to check out our YouTube video Struggling with Certain Keys? | Try This! to hear how Nathan approaches these exercises.
Contents
Using the full range of your instrument
Part of what may be causing a level of uncertainty with your playing is an unfamiliarity with the full range of your instrument.
When you practice something over just one octave—let’s say an F major scale, this form of practice is great for working on something that is brand new to you, but when you’re improvising, you’re gonna need fluency in all registers of the horn.
If all you practice is being in a one-octave zone, you are going to accumulate a technique imbalance in this one register. You may feel really good when playing in that area, but a little bit insecure when going higher or lower.
A great way to fix this is to play your exercises throughout the whole range of your instrument. When you have something you’d like to practice, start by taking the lowest possible note on your instrument. If we were going to play in F major on saxophone, that would mean taking the low F in the staff. Then you’re going to go up the scale as far as you can before you get into the extended range, so this will be high F. Then you’re going to travel down the scale to the lowest possible note, which is a low Bb below the staff. From there, we’ll travel back up to our root. This covers the entire range of the instrument and gives us a great mix of playing in different registers.
You can apply this full range concept to any exercise. Here’s an excerpt from an Ab melodic minor diatonic sevenths exercise.
How you practice
Our second concept is one that Nathan picked up from a book by Dr. Molly Gebrian called Learn Faster, Perform Better, which looks at neuroscience with musicians.
This concept is the “illusion of mastery” or the “illusion of competence.” In a study where they had a group of pianists practice a piece with what they called blocked practice (which is sticking to a section until they really know it before moving on to the next section) versus interleaved practice (which alternates a lot more frequently between material, where even before you’ve mastered something, you try various techniques like changing up the rhythm).
After two days all the pianists gave performances of their pieces, and they found that those who did interleaved practice actually sounded better, but reported that they thought blocked practice was a better use of time. Which is interesting—they almost argued with the better results.
What does this mean for us? Judging the quality of your practice session by how confident you feel at the end may be an inaccurate measure of how much you actually improved. The true measure is how good you sound the next day.
If you know that you can’t perform your material yet, but your practice session felt very easy and secure, you may have fallen victim to the illusion of mastery.
But in the end, practicing in a varied way is actually a better use of time rather than just playing in a super slow tempo with zero mistakes.
Use your brain!
If your goal is to play something by memory, it may come as a surprise, but you’re actually better to start playing from memory sooner rather than later.
When you read sheet music, it’s likely that you got really good at seeing a note on the page and obeying it by pressing the right fingering at the right time. That comes from a different kind of retrieval, where you’ve memorized fingerings and how they look on a sheet. But when you close your eyes and try to play something from memory and you’re drawing a blank, there is a whole process there that you’ve got to work through.
Studies have showed no downside to trying to get something into your memory even right on day one of learning. In the Key Builders resource, we’ve included several timeless melodies that you can work toward memorizing.
And while that practice may be straining on your brain, it’s really a good thing. We don’t want to fall into the illusion of mastery. So however long it took, it was actually a better use of time to memorize rather than to drill the sheet music over and over. It’s still good to have the sheet music handy, however, because you will want to fact check yourself or be ready in case you’re drawing a blank.
Flexibility makes perfect
As musicians, we often hear the phrase “practice makes perfect.” But that’s not quite true, and this premise can really hold you back. No matter how much you practice, you’ll never be perfect and you’ll never be immune to errors.
“Practice makes perfect” really backs you into a blocked practice mindset, where you’re just focusing on getting the perfect reps and if you make a mistake, you’ll beat yourself up over it. And then when you go to perform, you’re in a new place, maybe your hands are a little sweaty, and then you make a mistake and wonder where it all went wrong. Maybe you just needed to practice it all slowly more times, right?
No. It’s better to strive for flexibility rather than perfection. You want to be so strong in your preparation that if you’re performing a piece and a baby starts crying, it won’t even faze you. If you’re flexible you can adapt and still play great. It’s like Mike Tyson said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Same thing goes here. We can practice these perfect repetitions for eternity, but until you’ve truly mastered it, you may still crumble when you perform.
So where do we get flexibility? It comes from changing up the conditions of your passages. Let’s take this pivot arpeggio exercise from the Key Builders resource.
Nathan plays this through at 120bpm with no issue. But it’s not really doing him any favors, either. So let’s try changing up the rhythm. What if it was played as dotted eighth and sixteenth notes? What about the inverse—sixteenths and dotted eighths? How about a triplet with the first note accented? What if we play along with a metronome which is only giving us beats one and four?
But when you practice this way, pay close attention to the mistakes you make—they’re trying to tell you something. And the mental strain that you’re feeling is actually your brain trying to physically rewire itself. Mistakes are only bad when you don’t realize that they’re mistakes. You think you’re doing it right, then when you find out you’re not, you have to undo the habits you’ve built and that can be difficult.
The Goldilocks Rule
Our next idea is to follow the Goldilocks rule for a challenge. This rule states that humans experience peak motivation working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard, not too easy, just right.
Find a tempo that is too slow…then find a tempo that is too fast. Find one that you can do comfortably, and find where you get close, but can’t get on your first try. That’s where you want to focus your energy. This will give you a great sense of accomplishment, too!
Singing with a drone
If you’re not a singer, it’s still incredibly helpful to try using singing as a way to become a better musician. The more that you sing what you practice, the better you get at executing the ideas that you hear in your head.
Check out our YouTube video to see how Nathan tackles this exercise—by using just the tonic note, you have to fill in the rest with your voice, which makes it very intentional and helps you internalize the piece even better.
That’s it for today! Make sure to check out the Key Builders resource for some more ways that you can strengthen your playing in all 12 keys.
Until next time!
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