No matter how long you’ve been playing, it’s always good to evaluate your practice routine to make sure that it’s working for you. Today, we’re going to cover five practice techniques that will save you hours of practice time.
All of these techniques come directly from our resource “Better Practice Techniques for Rapid Growth,” which has five hours of instructional video containing workouts for technique, sound exercises, jazz repertoire building, a guide for internalizing vocabulary and a deep dive into how to memorize everything you practice. It also comes with a PDF workbook. Make sure to also check out our accompanying YouTube video, These 5 Techniques Save Hours of Practice Time to see how Nathan plays through these exercises.
Now let’s get playing!
Contents
Using one rhythm
One way to really strengthen your time feel and develop your rhythmic repertoire is to commit to a specific over an entire tune, while improvising your own note choices.
Here’s an example.
Try using this rhythm over all three chords of a ii-V-I … then try it over the full tune.
But you can also do longer rhythms too, like this two-bar rhythm.
Next up, you can borrow a rhythm from another time signature and see how it fits.
Here’s a rhythm from 3/4 time.
Voice leading guide tones
This next exercise is from the repertoire section of practice techniques. This one really helps with internalizing chord progressions and constructing lines that nail the changes at the right time.
This exercise is to play the root of each chord and then voice lead their third and seventh at the same time. Here’s how this sounds over “Lady Bird.”
Now we can also flip those guide tones and invert them to create another version of the exercise.
Using transcribed material
This next one will take some time, but it will give great results.
What we’re going to do is take transcribed material, master it in all 12 keys, then spam it everywhere that works within a tune.
Here’s a ii-V-I from Charlie Parker:
Now we’ll need to master it in all 12 keys—this is where the time element comes in. This may take a while until you can really feel it confidently. This could be days, maybe even weeks. Now you’re going to spam this wherever it fits.
Here it is over the bridge of “Cherokee.”
This process will take time for it to authentically show up in your playing, but it will surprise you when it does.
Solidifying your memory
This next tip comes from the memory section of the resource. There are a few steps here to get the full benefit, but you’ll find that it is worth it.
So what we need to do is write it out first and then break it down. This taps into what is called the “declarative memory.” So we’ll start by transcribing, but then we’ll need to look at it broken down.
We start on a pickup note on the b7 on F#m7, which is our ii chord. Then we go down the arpeggio and add a ninth in there. So we have 1, b3, 5, b7, 9, and we’re just going to walk down this shape for the entire measure. Charlie Parker voice leads up a whole step onto the 3 of our V chord, B7. From here, we have this diminished structure from the third. This gives us the sound of a rootless Bb7b9 or you can just think 3, 5, b7, b9. This b9 pulls us onto the root on this beat three here of our B7 chord, and we dip down and play a three-note diatonic enclosure around the third. This targets the Emaj7 and we’ll go down the E major triad but before we arrive to the 5 (B), play this nice bebop major scale sound where we have a major 6 and then a chromatic passing tone down to the 5. From here we diatonically walk down until we land on the third once more, then we go up an embellished version of a rootless Emaj9 sound. You can think of this as an upper structure iii chord, this is a G#m7 sound, which gives you this chord’s 3, 5, 7, and 9. We’ll finally resolve to the root to finish it off.
Now it’s doubtful that Charlie Parker was thinking all of this in the moment, but if you sat with him and asked him to break it down, he’d definitely say this and maybe even more.
The second part of this is to sing the notes while playing the chords on the piano. And if you don’t have a piano, a drone will work just fine, too. But what you need to do is sing every note in free time — no tempo, just taking it one pitch at a time to really internalize it and strengthen your auditory memory.
The third thing is to finger the notes silently—no pitch, no sound, just relying on your physical movements. This strengthens your muscle memory by dialing in how it physically feels to play the line. After doing this a few times, play it aloud just to seal it in. Then put it away for the day and when you come back to it tomorrow, it will feel much clearer.
Rhythmic augmentation
The last technique for today is from the flexibility section of the course, and this is something Nathan picked up from a classical violinist, and it’s extremely useful when practicing jazz.
This improves your overall accuracy of any line that you’re working on. What you’re going to do is take something you’re working on and play it in many different rhythms, which will feel unnatural.
In our video, Nathan takes this line and uses a few different permutations. This includes fast-short, short-fast, groups of three, triplets, and more. But the long-term benefit of doing this is that you’ll push your tempo and technical limits faster and gain some real dexterity.
Well that’s all for today, but if you take these five tips to heart, your practice game is going to increase dramatically. If you want to try even more tips like these, make sure to check out our resource “Better Practice Techniques for Rapid Growth,” and if you want to see how Nathan plays through these exercises, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, These 5 Techniques Save Hours of Practice Time.
See you next time!
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