Part 1: Overview
There are many layers and types of things you can do to practice guitar. I just traveled for a week on a business trip and took my guitar with me, for example, and I didn’t get to do as much as I would have liked, but I did more than nothing, and that’s still great. Practice doesn’t have to be joyless and it doesn’t have to be completely structured. I think that every moment that you’re touch a guitar should be better than a moment not touching it.
These next few posts are about thinking about what we’re doing when we’re practicing and how to design a practice routine and schedule.
I mentioned before that looking at the roots of words is a good way to understand what we’re really talking about when we talk about something. “Practice”, as such, comes to us from a Greek word, πρακτική, which is a noun form of the verb πράσσω. Looking at the verb in the LSJ, there’s an interesting few things in the first three definitions,
Pass through or pass over,
Experience certain circumstances
Achieve, effect or accomplish
Looking at these three ideas together, we have a composite idea of going through something, i.e., walking a route, such that specific things happen to you or you make specific things happen. The practical idea, as such, is the idea concerned with the doing or acting of things. As such, practice is serious business. Some people think that because the consequences for failure are low, practice is unimportant. Another way people think about it is that things done for practice are fake, as if they are not really done.
These are mistakes. Think of how we describe being a doctor or a lawyer, they practice medicine, they practice law. Similarly, we practice music, specifically, jazz. Practice is, as such, very, very real.
Most of your time spent in music is going to be spent in practice. Very little will be spent in performance. If something is 80%-90% of your time spent in an activity, how sensical is it to describe it as fake or insignificant? It’s not just your time spent in the activity, it’s the mode in which you are doing the activity. If 80%-90% of your activity is done in this one way, how sensical is it to describe it as fake or insignificant? Putting these two ideas together, 80%-90% of your time is spent in this activity, 80%-90% of your work is done in this way, it is very hard to describe this activity as fake, insignificant or lacking consequence.
I mentioned before that Kung Fu is skill or knowledge earned through hard work. In this understanding, then, the practice that we do is the training, the process of hard work to build the learning and knowledge. The danger of martial arts movies, whether Rocky or Shaw Brothers, is that they show the training in a montage, which collapses the experience of time, while really drawing out the combat scenes, which gives the mistaken impression that the combat scenes are more important, consequential or time consuming portion of the work. I haven’t watched a lot of movies about jazz, or, really, music, generally, but I get the sense that they would do the same thing, compress the parts of life that are about practice and emphasise the performances.
The thing about matches or performances is that they’re evidence that work happened. The real work of a boxer is not in the ring, necessarily, that’s the proof that work was done in the weight room, on the road, on the heavy bag, on the reflex bag, on the mitts, etc. Think of a match or a performance as like an inspection sticker.
So over the next few posts, we’re going to talk about things that we consider putting into a practice, then, how to schedule and structure it.
Here are some ideas we’re going to explore:
Ear training and sight singing
Physical attributes
Building blocks
Repertoire
Free play
Enjoy!