![]() Learn to play them slowly at first, with a metronome, then gradually increasing the speed. But if you want to build up your speed, dexterity, and finger technique – and you can stomach a lot of repetition – then they can be very useful. Personally, I think playing actual songs is much more interesting and useful than just playing scales, arpeggios or finger exercises. While they can be boring, monotonous, and painful, they do also server a purpose. Flat keys are much more prevalent in Jazz than sharp keys, so if you’re going to neglect anything it may as well by the sharps!Ĭlassical music teacher LOVE finger exercises. If you don’t have the time (as most people don’t), at least learn to play everything in a few keys – all taken from the left of the circle of fifths (i.e. Mind you, this is quite challenging and I’m certainly not competent in every key. The best way to be able to play these songs well, is to be comfortable playing in every key. Many Jazz songs change keys often and quickly and in odd ways (think Giant Steps and much of Wayne Shorter’s stuff). If you want to be a highly competent musician, you need to learn to play and practice everything in every key. He would take a song (say, Cherokee) and learn to play it in every key Charlie Parker famously spent four years practicing up to 15 hours a day the song.Bill Evans spend hours practicing every possible chord, in every possible inversion, in every possible voicing, in every possible key.John Coltrane was fascinated by scales so he practiced them for hours, running up and down each scale in every key.Most of the Giants of Jazz practiced every day, for hours at a time. A question I get asked relatively often is: “Well, all this theory is well and good but how should I actually practice playing Jazz?” So before we dive into the some heavy Jazz Theory, I thought I might say a few words about how you should put this theory into practice. ![]()
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