Welcome to episode 220 of the LJS Podcast where today I talk about how working on less is oftentimes the best way to improve as a jazz musician quickly.
It seems counterintuitive to many that practicing less stuff (or even for less time) will produce greater results in your playing. But in this episode I share what will make the biggest differences, and how to apply a less is more strategy.
Have you ever been going through YouTube or maybe a podcast like this or blogs collecting a bunch of jazz lessons? Just learning a bunch of different concepts, working on them, going to the next thing, and to the next thing, and to the next thing, and to the next thing. And then before you know it, you're not really quite sure what you've been learning, what you've been doing, what direction you're going in. You just kind of feel overwhelmed.
Or here's a different scenario. Maybe you learn a tune one week and then you learn another tune in the next week, and you learn a solo for that tune. So you keep learning a bunch of things really quickly and maybe you're reading it off a piece of sheet music so you just blow in through it and you're thinking to yourself, I'm doing all the right things. This is what everybody tells me to do but it's just a lot of stuff. Right. So you don't really get a lot out of each one. Well, I don't know about you. I've definitely felt like this before. I'm sure that you can relate to this as well.
And my message in today's podcast episode is less is more. So, today we're going to learn about what we should be doing, and some different methods for applying the less is more strategy.
In this episode:
1. The 80/20 rule applied to jazz
2. Working the 3 Pillars of Jazz Improvisation
3. The Single Project Method
4. The Batching Method
5. The 1 Big, 1 Small Method
Important Links:
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Free Guide to learn standards by ear: Learn Jazz Standards the Smart Way
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