Anki spaced repetition flashcards for Gypsy Jazz

paulmcevoy75

Christiaan Van Hemert says that Stochelo's whole vocabulary is like 30 licks. But he knows them in a million ways.

I fear not the man who has played 3000 licks one time but I fear the man who has played 30 licks 3000 times.

Buco

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/124735#Comment_124735

I guess to really nail down what I'm trying to point out is what do you do if you have 2 hours to practice and would like to add a musical phrase to your basket? Do you practice it for 15 minutes and then do something else for 1:45 or spend two hours on it? Before, I'd say the former. Now I'm saying it's the latter if you want to get to place where you can really improvise with confidence. I watched Remi's video again. My recollection was that he said he can easily spend an hour or longer on this short lick. But he actually said he can spend a whole day on it and then go back to it the next day.

voutoreenie

When I'm practicing I typically spend a brief amount of time working on a lick, like maybe 5-10 minutes max? I'm usually working on 1-2 licks/phrases at most so that's 10-20 minutes right there out of the 45-60 minutes I try to devote daily to practicing. On the weekend when I generally have more time, I'll shift focus to try and learn a new head if I'm feeling inspired or go through established repertoire plus generic exercises if I'm not, if only to maintain faculty.

But that's just me and as we've all discussed on here ad nauseam, practicing is ultimately a very individualist pursuit in terms of figuring out what works best for each one of us. And I think right now we're discussing the hardest part of practicing, understanding which route leads to the most retention (which is arguably the most important part of practicing to begin with lol). Certainly it was for me...especially when I was younger, less disciplined and lacking in enough mental cognition to even recognize bad practice habits, much less address them. More than anything, teaching is what actually pushed me into seriously self-reflecting on my own practice habits because it forced me into viewing the learning process through a different set of eyes, which led to adapting methodology on an individual level to maximize productivity and retention with each student, including myself.

e: added "level"

Buco

@voutoreenie now I wanna reread Effortless Mastery from this perspective because that's one of the things he says; only move on to something else after you master what you're working on.

voutoreenie

now I wanna reread Effortless Mastery

@Buco Yup, great book...think I still have my copy buried somewhere, should dig it out and read it again because it's probably been a good 15-20 years