It’s monday. It’s been a while since I’ve done that but : I exclusively played guitar today!!! (except for that hour or so I spent working on JazzGuitarLessons.net).

I woke up and ate an entire pomegranate. I had a few great practice sessions throughout the day and started to compose a new tune (until I literally fell asleep). I didn’t even attend the weekly jam @ burritoville : I was too busy practicing!!!

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Here’s what I practiced :

• Playing, memorizing, chord-melodizing and improvising on Con Alma. Such a great tune.
  • I played this one a while back (in school?) and never really worked on it. Now’s the time.
• Playing and memorizing Scrapple from the Apple, the Charlie Parker tune.

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• Working on p.24-25 in Ted Greene’s Modern Chord Progressions book.
  • I can say that p.24 is 80% mastered (sound and fluidity wise). I also know 2 out of 7 progressions on p.25
  • My short to mid-term goal is to master those two pages.

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• Working in (and on, and with) the book Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony
  • Outline Exercices :
    • 3 outlines + outline #1 with octave displacement on II-V-I. All keys. In major AND minor.
  • Singing / Playing simple modulations to ii, iii, IV, V and vi using Outline #1 only.
  • Playing and working at “You Are All the Outlines”, a composed solo / study over standard progression. Played an octave up; Felt very good.
  • Playing through famous musical examples in the chapter “Outline No.1″
    • Reviewing my favorites (circled)
    • Circling a few more licks that “ring” with me
  • Even more work on this topic. I can’t get enough of this book and its principles.  I hear lines in my head all the time now!

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• Started to composed a new jazz tunes. It’s bop / post-bop inspired. I’ll call it “Messengers” in honor of all the great jazz improvisers.
  • I wrote a form with chords and started to write the melody. I never do that. I usually write a simple melody and add chords later… this time I really wanted to “outline the changes” and make it more boppish.
  • Fell asleep.

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That was great. That’s all I have to say!

It’s Sunday night and I didn’t “log” any practice / event since my gig Thursday night. That always happened using the “paper log”… so don’t worry, it will happen in the WWW version also.

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As you may or may not know, I had to spend a few days teaching (like every weekend since fall arrived) and I concentrated more energy than usual on building and maintaining JazzGuitarLessons.net

C’est la vie.

I practiced though. Hey, it’s not because I don’t write everything down (like a maniac) that I don’t play my axe! The main thing I practiced was the stuff from Bert Ligon’s book. It’s incredible. That also fueled my fire for a book review and a few examples from the book on JazzGuitarLessons.net

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A few days “off” the log usually bring back a few weeks of very orthodox and organized practicing and logging.

Haaahahahahhaaaa! (evil laughter)

See you there.

Woah, that is a biggie. Odd times have always been a huge beast for me. It took a lot of time for me to feel just “comfortable” playing them, let alone “go nuts and blow on All the Things in 7″ (like Brad).

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I asked pretty much everyone musician I trust and respect what’s their “take” on practicing and playing in odd time signatures. I had various answer from “I’ll have to think about it…” to complete methods and approaches.

After much investigation I realized what works for me : the bar has to feel “round”, the same way bulgarian music works.

I dont’ feel and hear 5 as being 2+3 or 3+2… I much prefer 2.5 + 2.5 !!! (By the way, I still have a hard time with 5, but 7 is on its way.)

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So here’s how I’m currently practicing 7/4 : I’m dividing it intro two bars of 7/8 and I use the metronome. So this bar of 7/4

becomes

or…

As you can see :

• The middle of the bar is clear. It’s really half and half.
• The grouping puts the “shorts” before the “long”.
• Everything feels “round” and no “trippy” (7 = 4 + 3 is “trippy” to me, i hate it!)

The metronome can then be set in three different way. Each accent mark is a click.

The metronome on “the second beat” is my favorite way. It’s not yet comfortable for me, but I can see the potential in it.

So, I do this on the forms of jazz standards : improvising, comping and playing the melodies. The latter is always harder for me! It set the metronome between 40 and 60. My comfort zone is really around 48-50.

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Remarks :

• This is the main way I tend to practice it, but I also group eights notes this way :
  • 3, 2, 2 aka long short short
  • 2, 3, 2 aka short long short
  • Other NON-symmetrical groupings such as 3-2-2 ; 2-2-3. (The metronome could be set differently if you do that!)
• I never got the hang of this in 5… and I tried!

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Please email me if you have question.

Decided to spend more time building JazzGuitarLessons.net these days. It’s worth it but it cuts my practice time… I’m telling myself that it’s the same as practicing : the website is a long-term investment.

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Here’s what I actually practiced :

• Looking at minor progressions for Outline #1 in Bert Ligon’s book. (New ones that I liked and circled :  #33, 36, 37, 40)

• Playing in 7/8, C blues then completely free (metronome @ 48)

• Miles on Solar. Almost perfect. I will leave this for now. I have a lot of lines to practice from Bert Ligon’s book.

• Quick tune review : Wave, Stablemates, Like Someone In Love, Blues for Alice, I Should Care
  • Feels good to play!

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I went to La Petite Ardoise a few hours in advance (that’s where I play my gig on thursdays) and worked on JazzGuitarLessons.net for a solid 2 hours. Feels great to see this website growing once again. (I added this jazz guitar licks page with a few sub-pages).

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The gig went well. It was trio with Pierre and “Garbz”, a polish bassist; he’s always fun (and funny!) to play with. We were all a bit tired but we held it together (most of the time)

No practice.

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I spent the whole day washing dishes and putting some order in the apartment. One thing that I’m proud of is the new layout of my bookshelf. I’ve just too many books and now, finally, they’re all in order!

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I also played a little gig with the rock/blues project I’m in… yet another one with more people on stage than in the crowd…

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People usually say, “Yeah, there’s not really a crowd for jazz”. Sorry boys, I’ve been in many pop/rock band and I think it’s pretty much the same (on the local scene at least).

So you’re practicing jazz now huh!? Good!

You’ve been doing it for a while? Even better!

You’re improving? Great! That’s good sign. But, do you practice…

Everyday? Every-every-everyday?!

Really?! Every single day?

365.25 days a year?

Gotcha!

Me too. I skip days also, so don’t worry. (But still… worry a little at least. It will keep you going on the long run.)

You may have 5 or 6 practice sessions a week, and probably 3-4 really good ones (if you’re lucky). If you have less, I’m sure you’re aspiring to play more. If you’re already there you may wish to be more efficient with your time.

So here’s what you need to do :

1. Create Practice Time (by pushing other things around)
2. Maximize the Time Spent in Practice

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“Creating practice time” is just an fancy expression that means : “you have to take the time to practice”. Often is too easy to let the day go by and not play at all. You have to prepare, mentally and schedule-wise. Here’s an example :

Now it’s 11AM, I didn’t practice yet. I have a gig around 7PM and I know my girlfriend is coming back from work at 4:30PM (we’ll have supper together). Between now and then I have to do many things (including writing this post!) and I could easily do “everything” (and not practice) and it will be supper time already!

Here’s my plan. Right after I’m done with this post I’ll : have lunch, wash dishes, do laundry, make the important phone calls / emails as efficiently as possible. If I’m lucky, I’ll be done by 2PM and have at least 2 good hours of practice.

If I don’t “tell myself” those things, I will just take the whole day doing whatever. I know it (and you probably know how it feels also!)

In short, it just takes a little bit of organization and planning ahead to “create” that 1-2 hours practice session you’re dreaming about. Try it!

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Maximizing the time you spent in actual practice is as important as the practice session itself. Often you’ll find yourself with just 45 minutes to 1 hour (when you actually feel like doing 3 hours!). That happens to me very often. My problem lies in the gigs and rehearsals I have later at night. I can’t go nuts and practice 6 hours in my day if I have a 2-hour rehearsal and 4-set gig the same day! For example :

As you can see on my November 16th 2009 practice blog entry I had very little time and lots of rehearsal hours at night. I picked the topics I wanted to cover on that day for my practicing and I assigned a fixed amount of time.

I believe that’s still the best way to go : highly focused 5-15 minutes, depending on the matter. That way, an complete hour of practicing is worth a lot more than just “noodling”

In short, it also takes organization and planning ahead to have “good” practice sessions.

On a final note :

Most aspiring professional musicians believe that once you “make it”, you’ll just have so much more practice time because, hey, you don’t need the day job anymore! It’s so not true. Even when all you do is music, life continues! Your gigs and rehearsals take as much (if not more) time than the dayjob… and you still have  to bath, shave, eat, sleep on a weird schedule. There’s no doubt than in my case, I’ve less time than before going “pro”. Practicing becomes a matter of organizing your time and personal conviction. I may not have as much time now, but as I have more conviction and drive than ever.

Allright, now’s the time to review some of the stuff I’ve been working on in my practicing. I’ll see what I’ll keep and what I’ll just dismiss for now.

• Kenny Werner’s principles
  • I tend to begin my sessions with this. It’s relaxing and puts me in a good “state/mood/mindset” for practice.

• Ted Greene’s Modern Chord Progression
• Solar transcription (from Miles Davis’ Walkin’)
• Tunes : Like Someone In Love, I Should Care, Wave, Stablemates, Blues for Alice
• Pentatonic patterns in five positions
• Practicing 7/4 and 7/8 with the metronome
• Phrasing + Articulation. Using triplet and 1/4 note triplets “more organically”
• (new) Lines from the Bert Ligon book.

I believe they’re all “keepers”… but it seems like 1 or 2 of the topics always get tossed away somehow. For example, I didn’t actually practiced pentatonics in at least 2 weeks. I wonder what I should do… maybe I can do the “every second day” routine.

Yeah! I had that idea once and I never applied it to my daily routine. I have eight topics up there : I can try to cover four today and four tomorrow, and so on.

Sounds like a plan!

That’s my promise to myself : I will start my sessions with what I missed in yesterday’s practice. That way, I’m sure to go through more material instead of going “all out” on some things and forget about others.

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Here’s what I practiced today :

• Werner’s “let go”  on Ab blues
• Modern Chord Progression (Ted Greene), complete p.24. The last example is certainly the hardest… with the “slant bar” index thing.
• Pentatonics Bbm / Db major in five positions. And a few patterns :
  • 4-note grouping up and down
  • Bergonzi’s formulas 1 and 5
• Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony going through, reading and shedding the lines I like (so far 17, 19, 23, 28 are my favorites.)

Short session… my excuse it that I really wanted to put more time on JazzGuitarLessons.net, and I did!

The rest of my day, I was working online and I taught a lesson at night (another student I’m grateful to be teaching to.)

It’s 1:23 AM… and I’m still working on this website!

Good night!

Woke up early again today. It feels great; I did yoga right away.

Then  I answered a few emails for JazzGuitarLessons.net and had very little time to practice. A lot on my plate today :

1. Practice Quickly
2. Teach a lesson on Skype
3. Meet with a friend @ Burritoville
4. Jam with friends @ Burritoville
5. Rehearse / Gig with this blues / rock project

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What I actually practiced :

• Kenny Werner steps  (on Stella)
• Miles on Solar w/o the album
• Lines from the Bert Ligon book (special attention to #17 and 19)
  • This is a book I’ve been saying I would do a review “soon” in many posts. It’s my new “discovery”. I don’t like to get too excited about a jazz improvisation method… but I surely am. More on that later…

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Then I gave a good lesson on Skype : am I ever grateful to have such interesting and passionate students. What I like the most about getting private students through internet (JazzGuitarLessons.net) is that they come to me with a specific interest. Thank you universe!

Right before leaving home for jam + gig, I quickly reviewed the tunes for the blues/rock band.

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At about 4PM I met with a German friend of mine… he’s going back to Germany (for good) this week. He’s a drummer and music teacher; we played together for the first time today. We met randomly at one of my gigs.

The burritoville jam was very special tonight : my German-drummer friend jammed and brought a bassist that is originally from Switzerland. A classically trained jazz pianist (that I met only Saturday!) joined in shortly after. The amount of musicians was decent, for once! We had

• 2 guitars
• a bassist
• 2 drummers
• 2 pianists
• a saxophonist
• a trumpeter

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Lastly, was my rehearsal/gig for the rock/blues band. It was simple and fun; we also had an open mic at the end. No comments.

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Debriefing :

Long, hard and fun day. I’m proud of all the music I make now. I must sleep and start over tomorrow!

I will have to get a new case for my guitar. I’ve been using a Gator (classical/acoustic) to carry an electric around. Now it’s falling apart… it has so much mileage! I know they’re not made for electrics but a least it fits (my Gibson has a big round ass, that’s why).

Sunday.

Not practiced much. I was teaching from the morning to 5 PM and had to cancel a few students because of a terrible headache…

I tried out a few of the concepts in this new book I got. I’ll post an article, this book is worth checking out.

So I had less than an hour of practice, again today. Tomorrow will be better.