One thing that I have always worked on with students is practice—what to practice and how to practice. For this post, I thought it would be interesting to take a completely different approach.
Everyone knows that practice is important. I heard an interview of an Olympic athlete who said she practiced 6-8 hours a day. Now, a typical topic that I hear from musicians is stressing smart practice habits, which is wise.
In my opinion, motivation is the most powerful way to get myself and my students to achieve goals. That said, it is very easy for professional and student musicians to lose motivation. Students sometimes lose motivation when they are only practicing to earn an A+ grade and professionals sometimes lose motivation when the primary goal is to earn money for a performance.
I often reflect on a well-known psychology experiment that took place in 1973 as detailed in this article. In short, a takeaway from this experiment is that music stops being fun when we are making music for a grade or money.
Keeping the Fun in Music
I thought it would be fun to keep my phone handy to shoot videos of a week of practice. My thought was that every time I was doing something that fun and unique I would take a video to include in the collage. We know that a practice session has to include productive things that will lead us to become better musicians, but I think that the key to enjoyment, perseverance, and life-long success is to include enjoyable activities that stoke our creativity, open our ears, and provide pleasure.
This is not a video to highlight things that I recommend for musicians to practice but to rather provide examples of things that make me want to pick up the instrument every day.
What did I learn, and why?
I learned these things about myself:
I play a lot of flute.
The flute was my pandemic project. I always played the flute, but in the past few years, I have worked even harder to make it even more intuitive and to become more connected. Also, the challenge of centering the air to play the flute is great for saxophone playing.I play a lot of alto sax.
Alto sax is my home base and all of the other saxes are played with respect to how I approach the alto.I play melodies to warm up.
A friend of mine was touring with Paquito D’Rivera, and I asked him so many questions about Paquito. One of my questions was how Paquito warms up before his gigs. The answer was simple: he just plays melodies. This is our best warmup.The piano is really important.
I use the piano to write music and to hear chord changes and I use a midi keyboard to compose music in my DAW.I enjoy working on mixed meter.
Mixed meter is great because it puts rhythm at the focus of our playing. It cuts down on playing “licks” or rote melodic lines. I like the freshness and it is fun to internalize mixed meters.I like to practice over tracks and not just solo with metronome.
It is fun to play along with Aebersold type of play alongs, but I also like the Drumgenius app and creating my own play alongs in a DAW.
I am curious what you do to motivate yourself?
What musical things do you do to excite yourself?
Another inspiring lesson for us, Jared. Dewey Redman’s statement about that it is all about sound continues to inspire my practice. I adopt your ideas of playing melodies after a warm up with overtone and “sound-related” things. I also use a way of warming up that includes playing a note, at random, singing the next note in my head, then playing that note, and so on. It is a perfect way to play in the moment. You can’t do this exercise otherwise. I continue by adding two notes and so on. David Berkman taught me this. Great musicians inspire me because of their sound first.