Easily one of the most common things I've heard from students throughout all styles and levels of playing, is that "playing" and "practicing" are often terms that are confused, and don't have clear definitions within how they can be approached. Again and again, as a music teacher, specifically in the jazz genre where a focus on improvisation and it's practice could possibly lend to the ambiguity of these two terms, any student may be challenged in separating the two, with results of stunted progress and a stale musical vocabulary.
Many times in which I've asked a student "what are you working on?" or "how are you practicing that?" I get a response involving simply just playing passively without concentration of a given concept, or without clearly defining what they are working on to begin with. To this, I outline what I feel practicing should be, and how it differs from just playing. While this may be somewhat selective to improvised music, this definition can be adjusted and applied to whatever styles, levels, etc
Practicing your instrument can be looked at just like batting in baseball, where being on deck and warming up with a weight on the bat, will make it easy to swing when you take it off. In doing this, you'll easily have far more power as well as control than you just had. If you look at this in terms of practicing your instrument, it can be looked at like limitation. One way of practicing like this could be seen as giving the student clear concepts, ideas and exercises to work on which are very outlined in detail, and that can benefit all areas of one's musicianship.
Take this for example: Assigning a pattern to use for a scale getting it to a specific BPM within several keys can be seen as the "weight on the bat". When they have completed this, it is the now the time to "get up to bat" where they will utilize the exercise within a real musical context. Here, I could have the student improvise using the scale and pattern, and now by me having gave them such a limitation with concrete, outlined terms, them now using this concept can have a feeling of being natural as well as musical far more than it had been previously and the student will have "taken the weight off the baseball bat"
Now to define what "playing" or "performing" is, which will be done as a separate entity of "practicing" as well as performing live, in my eyes is playing an instrument while removing the conscious, analytical part of the mind; and simply "playing in the moment". This is where everything that had been practiced at home, will be left at home. Many times when playing, the moment can be lost while trying to force in practice material or ideas, into the music, immediately resulting in taking you or the student out of the moment and out of the real-time performance, and building a barrier between the mind, the hand, and the ear ultimately leaving the music to suffer
This concept of practicing vs. playing may be quite simple just in terms of being conscious of it, but being clear about it can in the big picture, help a student grow leaps and bounds, and offer them exponential success in the practice room as well as the stage.
Many times in which I've asked a student "what are you working on?" or "how are you practicing that?" I get a response involving simply just playing passively without concentration of a given concept, or without clearly defining what they are working on to begin with. To this, I outline what I feel practicing should be, and how it differs from just playing. While this may be somewhat selective to improvised music, this definition can be adjusted and applied to whatever styles, levels, etc
Practicing your instrument can be looked at just like batting in baseball, where being on deck and warming up with a weight on the bat, will make it easy to swing when you take it off. In doing this, you'll easily have far more power as well as control than you just had. If you look at this in terms of practicing your instrument, it can be looked at like limitation. One way of practicing like this could be seen as giving the student clear concepts, ideas and exercises to work on which are very outlined in detail, and that can benefit all areas of one's musicianship.
Take this for example: Assigning a pattern to use for a scale getting it to a specific BPM within several keys can be seen as the "weight on the bat". When they have completed this, it is the now the time to "get up to bat" where they will utilize the exercise within a real musical context. Here, I could have the student improvise using the scale and pattern, and now by me having gave them such a limitation with concrete, outlined terms, them now using this concept can have a feeling of being natural as well as musical far more than it had been previously and the student will have "taken the weight off the baseball bat"
Now to define what "playing" or "performing" is, which will be done as a separate entity of "practicing" as well as performing live, in my eyes is playing an instrument while removing the conscious, analytical part of the mind; and simply "playing in the moment". This is where everything that had been practiced at home, will be left at home. Many times when playing, the moment can be lost while trying to force in practice material or ideas, into the music, immediately resulting in taking you or the student out of the moment and out of the real-time performance, and building a barrier between the mind, the hand, and the ear ultimately leaving the music to suffer
This concept of practicing vs. playing may be quite simple just in terms of being conscious of it, but being clear about it can in the big picture, help a student grow leaps and bounds, and offer them exponential success in the practice room as well as the stage.
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