My Practice Routine
Over the past few months I have built up a structured routine that allows me to improve a range of key abilities as well as being able to interchange and add different sections when needed.
At the beginning of every practice, I begin by running through 4 different types of scales in every key. An example of a type of scale would be the major scale. Other scales I practice include the Natural minor, Harmonic minor, Dorian, Mixolydian, Pentatonic (major and minor) , Blues scale, Chromatic scale and octave scales.
Below are 3 examples of these scales –
When practicing scales I always use a metronome on beats 2 and 4 to emulate the feel of the hi hat in a standard jazz band. I practice 2 scales in swing style and 2 scales in straight style (I’ll go into more depth on rhythm further down this page). Currently (24th April 2018) I generally set the metronome time for 140 beats per minute, compared to when I began this practice which was around 120 beats per minute.
Practicing scales improves many different parts of my piano playing and music knowledge.
Technical ability – Practicing scales allows me to increase the speed of my playing as well as my accuracy. When practicing scales like the octave scale, it allows my hands to stretch and experience different positions on the piano, therefore overtime these become more and more comfortable. When starting to play jazz this year, I couldn’t reach in octave, however after months of practice I can now reach up to a 9th on the keyboard. This has allowed me to learn and learn different left hand bass techniques
- Rhythmic ability – Playing scales with a metronome has hugely improved my timing both when playing in a band and playing on my own. By playing both swung and straight scales every day I now understand the differences between the both of them and how to play each style. Although I will mainly be playing swing styles for this project, playing straight rhythms when practicing allows me to appreciate and articulate my swing rhythms in a much cleaner style. At the beginning of this year I couldn’t play swing rhythms, however using a metronome on beats 2 and 4 has really helped my swing rhythms develop.
Musical Knowledge – By playing my warmup scales in every key, I now know all of my warmup scales and modes in all keys meaning that when it comes to improvisation I don’t have to spend a long time thinking about how each scale is made up. This also allows me to transpose keys far easier as my overall knowledge of keys has hugely grown.
Ear training – Coming from a more classical background into Jazz has opened up to me the importance of being able to play by ear. When professional jazz musicians play and improvise they are often responding to one another and playing music as if speaking a language. At first I was hugely overwhelmed by this prospect, however by learning scales I have come to understand different scale patterns and I can now identify tonality in a song much more accurately. I still have a long way to go before being able to play by ear, however I believe I am progressing all of the time.
2-5-1s
A 2-5-1 is a chord structure that is heavily used in jazz standards and jazz in general. It comes in both major and minor forms with the latter being slightly more complicated.
Below are a few examples of 2-5-1s being used in jazz standards.
At the start of autumn leaves in D minor, there is a major 2-5-1 in G.
At the end of the song The Days of Wine and Roses, there is a major 2-5-1 in F.
Further on in autumn leaves there is a minor 2-5-1 in E.
Below is an audio clip of me explaining my major 2-5-1 practice routine.
Jazz Rhythms
An important part of playing a convincing Jazz performance is to be able to understand and use different rhythmic ideas. For example, when creating a good solo it is important to take the factors of rhythm, notation and phrasing into mind.
A big part of Jazz technique is made up by the use of swing rhythms to create an entirely different feel which separates it from other genres such as Rock, Metal and Classical music.
Above is a video explaining and demonstrating the basic differences between straight and swing rhythms.
In addition to the fundamental differences between swing, it has been pointed out to me that rock rhythms often push the ahead or are bang on the 1st beat, whereas many jazz songs are much more ralxed so the first note often falls slightly behind the 1st beat.
Stride piano
Stride piano is a piano technique that was made very popular by pianists such as Art Tatum and Fats Waller.
Below is a clip of stride piano –
The basic technique of stride piano is to play the root of a chord at a lower octave with the left hand and move up to play the full chord. Masters of this technique including Art Tatum and Fats Waller could do this at tremendous speed with incredible accuracy.
I will be playing one song out of my repertoire in stride style , this being Georgia. Luckily Georgia is a ballad, therefore I won’t need to play too fast, however I will need the accuracy in order to make it sound successful.
In my developing standards tab you can see how my version of Georgia began to take shape using a stride style.
Logging my rehearsals
Unfortunately I have had some issues with uploading photos due to exceeding a maximum limit, therefore I will link a weekly log of my practice below.
If you click on the link above, you can see the standard structure that my weekly practice would take, unfortunately I wasn’t wise enough to reproduce this log book every week. However I think if you look at how my pieces and work developed over the 9 weeks of this project, you will see how much I improved and hopefully how much constant effort I put into this project.
Below are a couple of examples of targets I would set myself weekly in order to improve and push forward on my project ideas. Reviewing yourself like this is very important as it helps you to understand what areas you can improve on. This is an important technique to have when operating in a professional environment to ensure that you don’t make mistakes when presenting work and to make sure that your work is to the highest possible standard.
Finally, below are some notes I made from a tutorial session with Darren and some targets he gave me to work on.