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 a better way??
We all seem to have been told somewhere along the line that practice makes perfect and that it’s simply a matter of putting in the time to get where we want to go.
And of course there’s truth in that – there’s simply no way around putting in a lot of practice at anything you want to get good at. However, jazz improvisation is a little different than other things…
You see, we need a skill set that lives inside our intuition, that’s accessible in an instant, ready-to-go with no preparation. Everything needs to be effortless.
But to get there it’s not just instrumental practice we need to focus on. We also need to cultivate the ability to practice in our head. We need BRAIN training.
Practicing in your head is essential for every jazz musician. It’s this brain training that will help you learn chord changes deeply, recall lines in all keys easily, and improvise with fluidity.
Our instrument is just a tool – an amplification of what’s inside us. The true music takes place in our mind.
Today we’ll take you through 3 different exercises that will help you learn some of the most important jazz concepts to practice in your head.
These are exercises you can take with you everywhere you go, making your commute, a wait in the dentist’s office, or any other part of your day a chance to practice jazz standards, language, and more…
And once you start practicing in your head and realize how effective it is, you’ll never want to stop!!
How to Practice visualizing jazz language step-by-step
Let’s start to practice in our head by understanding what it actually means to “visualize” when it comes to jazz improvisation…
Most of the time you probably think of visualization having to do with sight. I mean, the word literally is visualize, based upon the word visual which in general terms we might not equate to sound or touch.
But when we’re talking about jazz visualization, we’re talking about a lot more than sight…
When we visualize something in music, it should mentally replicate what it feels like to play it
Basically, you want to fool your mind…
You want your mind to think that you’re sitting there in the practice room, actually playing your instrument, going through the exact steps that you would go through to really play the material.
With visualization, your goal is to feel the sensation of what it would be like to play your instrument. Even though it’s called visualization, it encompasses the physical, the aural, and the emotional…
And that overall feeling is the most important part about visualization. Sure, it can be advantageous to mentally see the chord changes in your mind, or to see the written notation of a line in your head, but all of this is secondary to “feeling” the act of playing your instrument in your mind…
When you visualize, you mentally feel your fingers touch the keys and operate your instrument – there should be little to no distinction between mentally playing your instrument and actually playing your instrument.
And when this is achieved, you’re visualizing in an effective manner.
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