6 Steps to an Organized Jazz Practice Routine

This is a guest post by Steve Nixon. He writes for the website www.freejazzlessons.com
Photo Credit: Adrian Whelan

Photo Credit: Adrian Whelan

What is a good jazz practice routine? One of the challenges that aspiring jazz musicians face when practicing is the sheer amount of potential material to choose from. There never is a shortage of things to learn and review.

Unfortunately, as a result of the overabundance of jazz practice resources, many students practice very inefficiently. They jump from topic to topic in a very unfocused way.

The goal of this article is to “trim the fat,” so to speak, and help you organize a good and consistent personal practice routine. We’ll discuss the six steps of a good jazz practice routine.

Warm Up (5% of Your Practice Time)

Before you begin to practice, it’s always a good idea to warm up your muscles and joints. Playing an instrument requires strength, flexibility, and endurance. Getting the blood flowing and your hands warmed up is essential for preventing injury and keeping your hands healthy.

This is also a great opportunity to warm up your mind and prepare for the increased focus you’ll need to improve your skills in the upcoming practice session. Sometimes I’ll put on a recording that inspires me and use that as a mental springboard for the upcoming practice session.

Technical Exercises (10 to 15% of Your Practice Time)

Once your mind and body are warmed up it’s usually a good idea to start working on some technical exercises. This can be any combination of scale practice, arpeggios, interval studies, etudes, chords, or any musical exercise that is physically challenging. The goal of studying technique is to make the physical nature of playing easier.

Transcription (15 to 20% of Your Practice Time)

One of the best ways to learn jazz is to transcribe some of the playing of the jazz masters that have come before you. This is perhaps one of the most important elements of your jazz practice routine.

When you transcribe a player, it gives you an opportunity to really learn the ins and outs of their approach to playing. It’s almost as if you’re taking a private lesson with them and getting inside their heart and mind.

For example, if Wes Montgomery’s guitar playing really inspires you, the best way to learn to play like Wes is to transcribe him. When you listen to jazz, it’s very important that you pay attention to what brings you joy as a listener. That should be exactly the source material you try to learn from. This is the vocabulary that resonates most with you and is really a direct path to finding your personal voice on your instrument. This is also a wonderful way to train your ear.

Lick and Vocabulary Study (20% of Your Practice Time)

Once you’ve done some transcription, one of the next steps in your development is grabbing specific pieces of “vocabulary” or licks from the solos and integrating them into your own playing.

The first step is to take the lick and learn it in all 12 keys exactly like the recording. Make sure you match the articulation and rhythmic feel of the player it came from. This is just as important as the actual pitches in the lick. Jazz is a very rhythmic based music, and time feel and articulation have a huge significance in the style.

The next step is to break down and discover the “building blocks” or source material of what makes the lick work.

At this point you can practice doing variations on the overall concept of the lick using the “building blocks” or “source material.” Many players don’t take this last step but it’s a very important one. Personalizing a lick and turning it into your own concept is a vital part of the evolution of your jazz artistry.

Improvisation Practice (30% of Your Practice Time)

So, what’s a good way to actually practice improvisation? The very nature of the name “improvisation” means spontaneity or unplanned.

How do we get better at playing spontaneously?

Let’s turn to one of the greatest thinkers in history for our answer. Enter Aristotle.

It was Aristotle who once said, “Freedom comes through discipline.”

How can we apply Aristotle’s words to our jazz improvisation practice?

The answer is very simple. By giving ourselves focused limitations in our improvisation practice we can eventually gain more technical control in unplanned aspects of music. With increased technical control it becomes much easier to access our right brain and our creativity.

So, what kind of limitations can we put on ourselves to improve our improvisation? There are countless ways of doing this but here are a few suggestions to get you started.

1. Try incorporating a specific lick every time a particular measure comes up in a tune.

2. Practice controlling your phrasing by always ending your licks with a predetermined rhythmic figure.

3. Practice starting all of your phrases on a particular beat.

4. Only use a particular type of reharmonization or scale every time certain measures come up in a tune. Practice this until you can lead into the musical idea naturally.

Jazz Repertoire (20% of Your Practice Time)

Practicing licks, scales and chords is very important. They all can lose their significance though if we don’t actually have pieces of music or songs to apply them too. In addition, most audiences at a gig won’t want to hear you playing up and down your Eb altered dominant scales or whole tones scales all night. They want to hear tunes!

So, a percentage of your daily practice routine should include time spent playing jazz tunes. A certain percentage of this should be spent reviewing old tunes that you’ve learned before. I like to keep an organized list of tunes I know. Every day I’ll review a few tunes from the list to make sure I still remember them. This involves reviewing the head and also the changes to the tunes as well.

For learning new tunes, I personally have a separate list of tunes I work from. Most of the tunes on this list come from songs that I did not know that were called recently on gigs and/or jam sessions. After a gig I’ll make a note of some things I struggled with and write down any tunes I did not know or did not know well enough.

Final Thoughts

I do encourage you to fill in some of your own personal specific details but the overall framework of this plan will provide you a strong foundation to really improve your study of jazz. Don’t fall into the trap of changing what material you practice every day.

As a final reminder the deeper you explore any topic in jazz the better prepared and more knowledgeable you will be. That is why it’s very important to be organized and consistent with the scope of your jazz practice routine. To quote or friend Aristotle once again, “Freedom comes through discipline.”

I wish you nothing but success!

For more of Steve Nixon’s jazz lessons check out www.freejazzlessons.com

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Do you have a favorite jazz practice technique or routine? Share it in the comments section below.

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