Practice, Practice

[Winslow Yerxa <76450.3230@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice.

I suspect that most really good players practice as much as they
can. Whenever I'm with Toots, he's always noodling to himself,
playing along with the car radio, whatever. Hendrik Meurkens
tells me he doesn't feel like he can play if he doesn't practice
for at least two hours. Then he feels warmed up, and feels like
he has some tone. Howard Levy is another guy who's always
playing. Our interviews are filled with little musical
illustrations - far too many to transcribe, although it would be
nice to publish them.

Fun is a big part of it, and the joy and reward of achieving
something. Setting a short term goal is important, becuase it's
easy to measure progress. Long term goals, even very minute ones,
are important, too. For 20 years I tried to bend Draw 2 down two
semitones on a #365 Marine Band in C (the one that's tuned an
octave lower). I concluded it was an unlikely pursuit, but I
would try anyway. Then one day Steve Baker showed me that it was
possible - he could do it. A couple of weeks later, much to my
surprise, I had it! After a totally fruitless pursuit - I mean no
results. Then, suddenly, boom!

I have awful practice habits - mostly I noodle with some purpose
in mind - finding a way through a particular chord, or working on
some bend or overblow - but when I'm doing things right, I
like to spend about an hour playing scales with a metronome. This
really gets your breathing and tone going, and if you pay
attention and try to lock in with the metronome, it can do
wonders for your time. Plus the hypnotic aspect is relaxing and
makes me a little more receptive. Always start with a comofrtable
tempo, especially for new exercises. You'l always play it better
and with greater assurance at a fast tempo if you can first play
it slowly.

Once I've done that, I want to bust out, so I'll play along with
some Aebersold chord progression records, improvising. I find I'm
much more fluent and inventive, and have quicker responses and
better intuition if I'm warmed up. If I run into difficulty with
a particular progression (especially a new one), I'll devise some
kind of scale or lick exercise to find a way to "navigate"
through it on the instrument, and to hear my way through it on a
tonal level. I may sit down at the piano and play through the
progression to help with this process.

If I try to run through too much material, especially stuff that
isn't well within my comfort zone, I start to fatigue mentally,
so then I'll go on to some repertoire work, again playing along
with "music minus one"-type tracks that contain material inside
the zone. Sometimes I'll switch instruments and work on something
else - go between diatonic, chromatic, and bass in some
combination, just for a change. Or do something unrelated for
awhile, then come back to it.

I may also play along with records - not the playalong kind. This
is sort of creepy - the other musicians don't know you're there,
and you have to watch that you don't blunt you musical
sensitivity by imposing yourself on something that can't respond,
but if you're careful, you can learn things about fitting into
unfamiliar situations. However, it can help you gauge how much you can
fit in stylistically with what's going on. Plus, you can get
inspiration and insight by being close to the sounds of good players.

Playing along with live musicians instead of tapes or computers
is always preferable, becuase they're always more challenging,
even the bad ones - especially the bad ones. You don;t hear the
same thing over and over, and you gain exposure to different
styles, energy levels and idiosyncracies, and learn to interact.

Ultimately, the best thing to do is go out and gig. I've been
away from regular gigging for a few years, and it shows. When I'm
onstage, instead of thinking about how to give the music to the
audience through expression and creative interaction with the
other musicians, I'm worrying about balance, pacing, intensity,
stamina and ideas. Not a pleasant sensation. Gigging is the true
test. If you can do it in front of an audience of strangers, in
an environment far more vulnerable and less subject to your
control than the proverbial woodshed, you can do it anywhere.

I once gave a guy several pages of written-out scales, and he
gave me a look, and said - "How can you bring yourself to do
all this?" I told him I relished it - which was true. You'll dig
a deep hole if you know there's gold buried, and you may even
enjoy the act of digging if you enjoy the texture and aroma of
the soil and the feel of your body thrusting and swinging the
shovel, the sound and feel of the steel blade as it bites into the
soil. If you really *listen* to yourself, and work with what you
hear, you'll be amazed at the improvements you can make.

Three valuable things I've learned about stumbling blocks:

      Break a difficult task down into the smallest possible
      segments, and work on the part that's hanging you up. If
      several things are giving you trouble, isolate each one in
      turn. When you've got a better feel for it, put it back in
      its larger context. If it still gives you trouble, maybe
      there's some other contributing factor in that context that
      you need to identify and isolate, or maybe you've trained
      yourself through repetition to make that mistake in that
      context, in which case you need to untrain yourself by
      doing something different and then coming back to it.

      Sometimes you just need to give something some air. Go away
      from it for awhile. When you come back, you may find that
      the situation has "settled" and that there is an
      improvement. Sometimes practice needs time to sink in.

      In longer event chains, like scales or other linear
      exercises, sometimes mistakes in playing are due to
      mistaken identity - you're trying to do one thing, but your
      nervous system is substituting something familiar that
      happens to resemble in some way the thing you're trying to
      do. I notice this especially with scales on the chromatic -
      for instance, segments of the Eb Major scale play
      indentically to the C scale on the same scale degrees, but
      then, of course, they diverge. If you can identify the
      source of this substitution (where is the mistake leading
      you?), and keep the differences in mind, this can help
      eliminate the problem.

Hope some of this is useful.

Winslow Yerxa
Harmonica Information Press