dissecting music

A few more distinguished insights

These insights are the result of careful observation of the learning process troughout the years and the things teachers and fellow musicians have taught me.

• Teachers should teach technique, methods and concepts, not songs

So this is a big part of what’s wrong with music education these days (all education really). It’s also the reason why you can tell a really good teacher from a bad one pretty easiliy. Many teachers don’t really care about didactics, they just seem to assume that their ability to do something well, will automatically translate into their ability of conveying it well. But that’s a whole other topic. If you wan’t to read more ranting about teachers, check out my guide on How to identify a good teacher.

It is important to tell the student how a particular goal will be reached. A somewhat informed student will be more motivated, period. Seing the link between work and the desired outcome tends to do that to people. It will also make a person seem more competent as a teacher and build up trust with the protegé. Also of importance is the awareness of what you desire to learn from a particular teacher. Is this an expert for technique? Or will that person make you a versatile improviser? Know what you pay for. Feel free to ask questions – it’s a teachers job to answer those. Write them down and try to be concrete, so that your teacher knows what you wan’t to know. But you should also put some trust into your teachers estimations. If he says something like “you’re not ready for that”, ask what steps are necessary to get there and note them. It’s good if your teacher knows where you wan’t to go musically.

A teachers goal should’nt be to teach you a certain piece. He may however use a piece as an example for specific concepts. But those have to be explained. The ultimate goal is that the student can learn any song on his or her own, arrange it and apply whatever concept to it.

• Know the different kinds of practice

This is crucial. If you dont understand this, you’ll be noodling scales up and down forever and wonder why you’re not becoming a better player. As far as I can tell there are three forms of practice.

1. Dry Training – The memorisation of a simple element (a chord, arpeggio or scale) in one or more keys/positions
2. Application Practice – The creation of a sandbox, that simulates a real playing situation but allows you to focus on a particular concept. You can think of what I call a concept, like a filter you put over the simple element you memorised in dry training. I’ll explain that further in the next paragraph.
3. Application – The actual playing. Executing something perfectly further solidifies the learned content. But there is a crucial difference between improvisation and the recital of an arrangement. Improvisation makes you consider the musical possibilities and react to them (so you train the skill of improvisation and throw in various playing techniques concepts at your leisure), while recital only trains the execution of a certain body of music (and the technique needed for that).

• Incorporate the elements of old practice routines into new ones.

I learned this one from my jazz mentor. It is super essential for progress. I’ll try to break down what it means.

So, as explained in the first point, one of a teachers most important jobs should be to nurture a student up to the point of emancipation. At some point in their musical journey they should be able to analyze music, understand the methodology their teacher applies, as well as it’s benefits and, finally, construct their own practice routines based on those methodological insights. Once the student starts building own practice routines the real fun begins.

So, lets say you are practicing a given concept. You are applying this concept over a given harmonic, melodic or rythmic framework. Let’s say you have been practicing Major Triad Arpeggios. You practiced this melodic structure in all keys and all positions of your instrument. You have completed dry training, so to speak. Once you have the structure memorized, you should move right on to application practice. You train this structure for instance over a repetitive backing track. At some point you’ll get a feeling for it’s use and be able to apply it in a real playing situation. Then you’ll be practicing while actually playing. So far so good. We have now dealt with one dimension of practice: The journey from dry training to application. But there is another dimension. Each piece of harmonic, melodic or rhythmic content is scalable upwards in terms of complexity by adding concepts. So let’s say instead of playing the arpeggio like this:

1 3 5 1 3 5 1 3 5 1 3 5

you play it like this:

1 3 5 3 5 1 5 1 3 1 3

You are training the same melodic content but took it a step further in terms of melodic complexity. So by doing this, you’re training the basic structure as well as the melodic concept. Two in one – be aware of that circumstance. Another thing you can do is apply a rythmic or harmonic concept to it. For instance, what I like to do is taking a 4 over 3 polyrythm and apply it to my phrasing. Or I use it to arpeggiate a chord. Still practicing two things at once. You can take this combination trough the same regimen as the basic variant (dry training, application training and application), just be aware of what you’re training. Make the connections in your brain. See how the patterns on your instrument remain the same. If you get used to practicing and thinking like this, you can always move on to more complex things and won’t loose the grip on the basic structures. Obviously it takes practice to do that and there is an infinite number of possibilities of what you can do, so just choose something you like and try this method.

Thanks for following my smartass utterings so far. Stay tuned for some more of those in part III next week.