Practice This! is an educational project of Earshot Jazz with sponsorship from The Seattle Drum School. Each month in Earshot Jazz a new lesson by a different local jazz artist will appear for students to learn from and for non-musician readers to gain insight into the craft of improvising.

Practice This!
April 2007
Bill Anschell on Techniques for your Practice Regimen

Click here to download and listen to the audio clip of Bill playing examples of these ideas.

Before I write anything else, let me give you my two overriding, non-negotiable rules of practicing:

Practice everything in all 12 keys. It’s like your daily multiple vitamin: Not particularly easy to take, but ultimately good for you all over – your mind, fingers, and especially your ears. Whether you’re playing technical exercises, scales, or tunes, if you ignore this rule you run the risk of becoming a lopsided musician. In my practicing, I focus on one key for a month or so (e.g., “The month of E”), then move up a half-step for the next month; a year later I’m back where I started.

Attack your weaknesses.
If you’re in the midst of a solo, have a burst of inspiration, but find you can’t articulate it, take it home and flesh it out. If someone calls a tune on a gig and you don’t know it, learn it (in all 12 keys, of course; the best way by far to really internalize a new tune). If your time is squirrely, practice with a metronome. Be in self-diagnostic mode as much as possible, short of a nervous breakdown.

Those two rules wouldn’t fill up a column, and neither one is unique to me. So instead, let me tell you about my more personal practicing antics. They comprise a three-part system:

1) I find scales and harmonic systems I want to incorporate into my own playing. Some of these reveal themselves to me when I’m improvising and I’m lured down a new path that turns out to lie beyond my immediate reach. Others come to me through word-of-mouth among musicians, or from reading articles by or about other musicians.

2) I write exercises for myself that exhaustively explore those systems, with the goal of ultimately “hearing” them just as readily as I would hear a major scale or major scale harmony. I’ll practice them for years (prerequisite: age), adding new exercises as I discover new angles. These exercises can include both chordal approaches and right-hand lines; primarily the latter, which take the form of patterns. Typically, I’ll try to kill two birds with one stone by writing patterns that address my own technical weaknesses, such as getting more strength and independence in my fourth and fifth fingers.

3) I’ve developed a very specific regimen that insures these patterns won’t become mere licks that I insert verbatim into my solos. (While the best lick-based players can be among the most melodic, polished, and swinging of all musicians, I’m still chasing the elusive ideal of spontaneity). This regimen is certainly the most unique aspect of my practicing, and the one that has most shaped my overall sound, especially my rhythmic approach.

In a nutshell, it’s this: Whatever pattern I’m working on, I practice in almost every possible rhythmic permutation. I shift the accents of the pattern among each of its subdivisions and also practice it as it lays in or against several different meters: three, four, five and seven.

Each pattern has its own implied meter (e.g., a five-note pattern, one beat per note, is most naturally heard in five). Trying to really hear this implied meter against another (e.g., the five-note pattern played with every fourth note accented, as if in four) is a challenge that can ultimately help free a soloist rhythmically. In my world, playing a pattern against different meters is the rhythmic equivalent of playing it in all 12 keys.

The simplest application would be a four-note pattern using consecutive tones from a major scale; easiest to fathom, but not much too listen to. From there, you can add interest (and complexity) by:

* Working with more unusual scales;
* Creating more interesting pattern shapes within the scales (e.g., intervallic leaps, asymmetrical shapes);
* Writing patterns that are five and seven notes long. These patterns, played in/against three or four, give a powerful polyrhythmic propulsion.

On the “Practice This!” website, I’ll use two patterns for demonstration: a simple four-note major scale pattern and a five-note pattern using an eight-note scale often attributed to Barry Harris.

On paper, this may all look like dull math. But hearing the range of rhythmic possibilities built into a simple pattern can be eye- and ear-opening. For me, this is a practice regimen that accomplishes many things at once: exploring a new scale or harmonic system, building technique, finding a pattern-based concept that won’t generate predictable licks, and above all developing rhythmic freedom that transcends barlines and one-dimensional subdivisions.