How many of you feel overwhelmed by the amount of material you’ve decided you need to get through?
You know those things you have to practice everyday?
That lick you want to learn in every key?
And how many of you go to sleep feeling like you failed because you didn’t practice for ten hours and play through every scale in every key?
Well you are not alone! I’m sure all musicians go through this at one time or another. Kenny Werner describes it beautifully in his book‚ Effortless Mastery. On pages 59-60 he states,”You feel as though there is a huge workload ahead of you with so little time. You experience a fear of dying before you’ll get it all together! You see, fear has ruined your practicing by rushing you through the material, rendering you unable to absorb anything. A fearful mind won’t allow you to concentrate and absorb. Even while focusing on one thing, the mind is exerting subtle or not-so-subtle pressure with the thought of the other things that need tending to. This creates a very anxious and insecure feeling. When you skim the surface, you acquire many bad habits with regard to tempo, fingering and other details. Repetition of these bad habits causes them to grow ingrained ever more deeply into your subconscious, so that you are actually doing what I call negative practice. in this way, one hour of practicing is better than two, thirty minutes is better than an hour, and no practicing at all would be preferable to that kind of negative practice”.
I am not suggesting that you stop practicing! I am suggesting you become aware of this tendency that most of us have and start to change the way you practice.
Kenny Werner is a brilliant pianist and jazz educator. In his book Effortless Mastery – Liberating the Master Musician Within, he shares his ideas on music, improvisation, education and more. I highly recommend this book. The main purpose of the book is to teach musicians how to enter what Kenny calls‚ ”the space”‚ a state of “no-mind” where the musician is free to follow the muse within. He explains step by step how to enter this meditative state and allow music to flow through you without judgment.
Like many of you I have so many books that I feel I need to master. The message from Kenny Werner is to master one thing at a time, and not waste time skimming the surface of many exercises and never really learning anything. This type of practice then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that re-enforces a deep-seated negative belief that we just don’t have what it takes. This is another powerful message of Kenny’s book. The old idea that some of us have it, and some of us don’t… This is just not true! We all have the potential. We just need to change our approach to practice, education, and listening and ultimately change our negative beliefs.