How to Practice in Your Head – Brain Training 101 For Jazz Musicians
After hours spent in the practice room are you still having trouble remembering the chord changes to a standard you endlessly practiced, or the details of a jazz line you drilled over and over? Why can’t you remember all this stuff, even after you’ve practiced it? Is the answer more practice, or might there be ...
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Your Jazz Improvisation Audit: 36 Questions That Will Show You What You REALLY Know
It’s time to get down to business…The business of finding out if you’re on track to achieve your musical goals and develop into the musician you want to become. While we often focus on the solos of master musicians and important improvisation concepts here at JazzAdvice, today we’re going to focus on you. Specifically the ...
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How to Think Like a Pro Jazz Musician: Michael Brecker and The Power of Simplicity
It sounds so complex. So difficult. So advanced. Great jazz musicians sound as though they’re implementing highly complex and difficult concepts that mere mortals could never hope to access, but in reality, professionals think simpler than you’d ever imagine. It’s the beginners and intermediates who study the pros and abstract what they think is going ...
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The Jazz Musician’s Most Important Tool: How To Strengthen Your Musical Memory
What is a jazz musician’s most important tool? Is it their ear? Their technique? The concepts at their disposal? All of these are extremely important, but without this one specific tool, they’re all useless… The jazz musician’s most important tool is their memory. Harold Mabern used to drive this point home to us all the ...
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How to Avoid the 4 Harmful Mindsets that are Sabotaging Your Practice Routine…
If you’re serious about reaching your musical potential or stepping up your jazz improvisation game then the majority of your time as a musician should be spent in one place: The practice room. It’s where you’ll do the dirty work of pursuing your musical goals and where you’ll build your foundation as a performer. It’s ...
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What To Practice: A Free Presentation on The 3 Essential Pieces of Practicing Jazz Improvisation
Nearly every day we get asked, “What should I practice?” And, this is not an easy question to answer. In fact, it’s pretty complicated. So, in an attempt to help everyone who has always wondered what to practice and what professionals practice, I began to put together what I had thought would be a quick ...
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Use the Power of Visualization to Improve Faster than Ever. We’ll show you how in our New eBook…
Picture this. You’re backstage before a big performance waiting for your turn to step into the spotlight. A few steps away from the curtain you can hear the murmur of the audience and your pulse starts to race. You take a deep breath and confidently walk onstage. The heat of the lights hits you and you ...
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Happy New Year! 8 Musical Resolutions That Will Change Your Playing
A new year is the perfect time to look back at what you’ve accomplished in the practice room and to look forward to what you still wish to achieve as a musician. It’s also a great time to make a fresh start, to realign yourself musically, and to set some new goals. So, Happy New ...
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Overcoming Mental Limitations in Music
I can’t. We’ve all said these fateful words at one point or another. Fill in the blank for your own situation. “I can’t (____)”…draw, run long distances, wake up early, stop eating cheesecake. Every day there are literally dozens of things that we convince ourselves that we simply cannot do, and playing music and improvising ...
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3 Simple Steps Toward Playing What You Hear
You’ve heard it time and time again…PLAY WHAT YOU HEAR!! But when it comes to improvising jazz, how do you actually go about playing what you’re hearing? And how do you mentally hear the beautiful jazz lines that you want to play? Playing what you hear sounds so easy in theory, but it’s much more ...
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Visualization One Key At A Time
They say that time is money, but in jazz improvisation, it’s even more than that! Time is what’s passing by while you’re desperately trying to recall the next chord change in a tune, the notes to the melody, or what to play at any given moment of your solo… Everything in jazz improvisation happens in ...
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Ingraining Jazz Language Through Visualization
We talk a lot about ingraining language. It’s vital to have an array of ideas at your fingertips for any given harmonic situation. And these ideas should be so ingrained that you can easily make them your own with little effort. Visualization can speed up the process of ingraining language tremendously. Can’t visualize it, can’t ...
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