The Practice Session

Reading some of Jerry Coker's "How to Practice Jazz," and I'm thinking he makes some great points about practice.

1) Organization 

2) It's rigorous

3) Consider what you want to accomplish in the long term and how much do you want it? 

4) Progress isn't always linear

5) Relax when practicing

6) Consider logging what was practiced and for how long and what was learned.

Didn't read the whole book; will probably go back to it, but his approach regarding the whats of should be practiced seem different from the Conti approach. Conti emphasizes playing the instrument over getting too technical.

For now, I think points 1, 3, and 6 seem most important to me now. I want to keep utilizing Conti's approaches, and integrating those approaches with some of Coker's general ideas seems to be a good idea for me.  Number 6 can be easily integrated into this blog.

But I think I've been a little too easy on myself in terms of what to practice. Going to try to get more organized and disciplined with the Conti material.

Just some preliminary ideas:

GOALS: 

1) Play solo style guitar in the form of chord melodies. 

2) Improvise

DIVIDE PRACTICE TIME INTO:

1) Go over all chord melody forms in the "Assembly Line" book

2) Playing chord melody songs that I'be already figured out. Pick a different song from my repertoire every three days. Go for clarity and speed.

3) Working on a new chord melody song.

4) Going over new measures to tunes in the "Ticket to Improv" book.

I'm thinking maybe 15 minutes in each of the sections above would be a good start.

I can conclude of logging in this blog what I practiced, how long did I do it, and what I learned.