Getting into the Serious Jazz Practice Book..

[jazznylon]

I've been practicing out of the Serious Jazz Practice Book for a bit and I could see its the kind of book that requires a deep dive. Loads of exercises for practicing in 12 keys in positions and throughout the neck as well.

First scale exercise in triplets

(Excuse the keyboard typing sounds and mistakes)

But yeah the book starts off with the major scale and its up to one to explore other kinds of scales too for each of the exercises. Anyone else with experience on this book? If so what are your thoughts about it?

[pamosmusic]

I've been practicing out of the Serious Jazz Practice Book for a bit and I could see its the kind of book that requires a deep dive. Loads of exercises for practicing in 12 keys in positions and throughout the neck as well.

First scale exercise in triplets

(Excuse the keyboard typing sounds and mistakes)

But yeah the book starts off with the major scale and it’s up to one to explore other kinds of scales too for each of the exercises. Anyone else with experience on this book? If so what are your thoughts about it?

I love this book so much. I got it right when it came out and I’ve burned through two hard copies and finally just got it digital.

Pretty much everything in there is useful and it’s also plainly not exhaustive. Different keys, different rhythms, different scales, etc, but also modifications to the exercises themselves.

For me the big danger of this book is falling down a deep dark hole. Pick a small, reasonable, sustainable amount of time to spend on it each day and don’t go over it. You could pretty easily spend a decade on this stuff at three hours a day and not really exhaust it

[wolflen]

Have you explored the Solnimsky scales book...a lifetime of ideas from just a few of the hundreds of exercises

and a vid on your book

serious jazz practice book at DuckDuckGo

[jazznylon]

Nice! I find it tempting to get wrapped up in the book and work on it for hours on end.. but exercising some self-restraint is never a bad thing. I haven't explored the slonimsky book but have heard of it. The vid is interesting thanks

[pamosmusic]

Nice! I find it tempting to get wrapped up in the book and work on it for hours on end.. but exercising some self-restraint is never a bad thing. I haven't explored the slonimsky book but have heard of it. The vid is interesting thanks

I just got the Yusuf Lateef Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. A lot like the Slonimsky. It’s a lot. Hard to know where to start with something like that but it’s super cool.

[jazznylon]

I think I read sometime ago that coltrane went through the slonimisky book. Parker was also apparently a fan of books particularly the classical types.

With this book I think the sections that are potentially huge time sinks (for me) is the 7 note and pentatonic scale sections as I got loads of scales on my personal list. 38 parent scales for each 7 note and 5 note pitch collections, its still not all of them but anymore than that things get way too chromatic so I avoid them.

I think guitarists and other instrumentalists in general can get by fine with just four parent scales (Major, Melodic Minor, Harmonic Minor/Major). Exploring lots of relatively unknown scales can become too much of a mindf*ck unless you're Ben Monder. I go through them anyways because my tuning makes things simple plus exploring new sounds.. and I have the time.

In any case happy holidays everyone! Enjoy your time with the instrument and family. Here is the video book review in the link that wolflen mentioned

[jackalGreen]

I had a look at the preview pages given at the publisher's website.

It looks like this kind of material could dovetail nicely with Garrison Fewell's approach, which I'm still working at very slowly. Maybe's it my bias, but the first example of music given in the *Serious Practice Book*, a Charlie Parker-esque line (or it may well be an actual line...close enough, anyway)....I see triads and chromatic approach tones/enclosures.

Could be an excellent text for practicing sight reading, and for getting out of the "boxes" and playing the exercises up and down the neck ad libitum.

[pamosmusic]

Definitely not a sight reading text. I’d even say the point is probably to be off the page as quickly as possible.

[Jimmy blue note]

I love finding a good inspiring resource and I would hope that within the sheer amount of material that is covered within, that the user also learns a much more important lesson: Knowing when and why the book is useful and knowing when to put it aside.

It's like the question about the difference between a scientist and an engineer. An engineer knows when something is good enough. You say "I'm half way to the wall. Next?"

Let's add to that, an engineer knows why he/she is doing the work.

Of course we know that these things won't make you a better musician by itself, but as a part of a balanced diet, it can make one better able to realize things that can't be quantified.

I find practical resources useful when I'm struggling with real situations that come out of real obstacles and shortcomings in my musical process (Why does my time fall apart when I'm making position shifts between tonal areas?) and not idealized motivations (How do I become as fluid as Coltrane?). Ideals are the moving and unattainable halfway point to the wall. And I find they're not good metrics or motivations for myself because they're born out of someone else's practical motivation.

It's great to have so many roads to mastery in a single volume, but it's also good to remember that it takes time to master kinesthetic ability and it takes time to acquire the filters that make for musical, lyrical, phrase, dynamic, motific developmental, pacing, energy flow and compositional mastery. All THOSE things take time too, so do the math. If you can find your own musical persona within 9 frets after being aware of the total fingerboard, there can be a world to explore in THAT personalized way. Ben Monder practices a LOT (or he did when he wasn't always on the road) but there's tons he didn't address. All this to say it's important to follow your sense of priority and not to lose it in the humility of a resource like this.

Good tool in the shed. Good to remember that on the bandstand, nobody wants to hear you shoveling.

[Jimmy blue note]

...if you like this, you'll love Jerry Bergonzi's melodic and harmonic resources. Just sayin'

[Tal_175]

I find that any small phrase can be turned into an exercise much like the ones you see in technique books. In fact, that's probably how the authors develop the exercises.
Take a short phrase that you like, say it's some sort of triadic phrase with an added note:
- Apply it to all diatonic chords of the major scale.
- Apply all its inversions to all diatonic chords of the major scale.
- Do this for all keys.
- Vary the line by changing direction, rhythmic displacement etc and repeat.
- Break up the phrase into two or three note segments apply the exercises to the fragments.
- Go up a scale by alternating the direction of the line. (Go up from the first note of the scale, come down to the second note etc.)
- Now do all the above but think melodic minor.

These are just some of the ideas that you frequently see in technique exercises. I don't know that having them written out in a book makes the practice session more efficient. A short book that teaches you how to come up with your own exercises with transcribed lines is probably be more beneficial in the long run. Just one opinion.

[James W]

It's not a short book, but in Comprehensive Technique For Jazz Musicians, specifically chapter 14 'Developing Jazz Exercises' demonstrates how a transcribed line, in this case from Charlie Parker, can be used, varied and altered, taken through a scale etc.

It's a good book.

[pamosmusic]

It's not a short book, but in Comprehensive Technique For Jazz Musicians, specifically chapter 14 'Developing Jazz Exercises' demonstrates how a transcribed line, in this case from Charlie Parker, can be used, varied and altered, taken through a scale etc.

It's a good book.

Thats a really good book. And more jazz specific too. Despite the name, The Serious Jazz Practice Book isn’t really jazz specific. I like that about it, but it’s worth mentioning on a jazz forum, I guess

[pamosmusic]

These are just some of the ideas that you frequently see in technique exercises. I don't know that having them written out in a book makes the practice session more efficient. A short book that teaches you how to come up with your own exercises with transcribed lines is probably be more beneficial in the long run. Just one opinion.

Huge benefit for me. Lots of them are not super intuitive and there’s enough of them that it can spur you off in directions not covered in the book too.

A good example.

I tell a student to play a scale up in thirds and they play ascending thirds up the scale (C E D F E G etc). I tell them to play it back down the scale and they flip the third so that it is *descending* (C A B G A F etc). I have done this with maybe forty students now and every single one has done this. When really a person should be able to play ascending thirds down a scale and descending thirds up a scale and so on.

So a book that draws distinctions and is hyper specific about all these ways a scale can be manipulated is, I think, a lot more useful than you might think at first glance.

[Tal_175]

Huge benefit for me. Lots of them are not super intuitive and there’s enough of them that it can spur you off in directions not covered in the book too.

A good example.

I tell a student to play a scale up in thirds and they play ascending thirds up the scale (C E D F E G etc). I tell them to play it back down the scale and they flip the third so that it is *descending* (C A B G A F etc). I have done this with maybe forty students now and every single one has done this. When really a person should be able to play ascending thirds down a scale and descending thirds up a scale and so on.

So a book that draws distinctions and is hyper specific about all these ways a scale can be manipulated is, I think, a lot more useful than you might think at first glance.

There is also a difference between descending by an interval and descending to an interval. For example descending from C to A is descending by the interval of 3rd but it's also descending to the interval 6th. In the first case the distance is constant, in the second case the relationship is constant. I find the second case to be more useful for learning the fretboard.

So the exercise of keeping the 3rd relationship constant is going up to thirds (C E D F EG etc), say for two octaves, then going down to thirds (ie descending by the 6h interval) C E B D A C etc. That's a good way of developing instant identification of every interval on the fretboard with respect to a given note (intervals above and below that note).

[pamosmusic]

There is also a difference between descending by an interval and descending to an interval. For example descending from C to A is descending by the interval of 3rd but it's also descending to the interval 6th. In the first case the distance is constant, in the second case the relationship is constant. I find the second case to be more useful for learning the fretboard.

So the exercise of keeping the 3rd relationship constant is going up to thirds (C E D F EG etc), say for two octaves, then going down to thirds (ie descending by the 6h interval) C E B D A C etc. That's a good way of developing instant identification of every interval on the fretboard with respect to a given note (intervals above and below that note).

That's an interesting exercise, and one I haven't though of. I might have to go down that rabbit hole and see how it changes the way I'm thinking about stuff.

Technically, the moving by an interval is a bit more flexible, though. For whatever that's worth. For example, you can ascend by thirds, descend by thirds, alternate ascending or descending, two thirds up and one third down, one third down and two thirds up, one third up and two thirds down, etc etc etc. That's a lot to practice, but it's also really good for being able to start stringing those things together into melodies.

[Jimmy blue note]

In the days gone by, many musicians were brought up on Oliver Nelson's Patterns for Improvisation. I liked that particular book because it was an excellent launching point for sequences, a good foundation for creating my own vocabulary once I could see the possibilities and at the time I got my first copy, it was a smallish book that only cost me a few bucks. Out of that book came my own "book" of sequences that continues to this day. It also disciplined me to come to terms with the challenges of executing these things on guitar since some things take more work to learn to play them smoothly; the easy way is not always the way that opens up all the possibilities.
It really helped me to listen to horn players when I was internalizing the use of cycles and melodic fragments and how they related to the longer phrase.

[pamosmusic]

In the days gone by, many musicians were brought up on Oliver Nelson's Patterns for Improvisation. I liked that particular book because it was an excellent launching point for sequences, a good foundation for creating my own vocabulary once I could see the possibilities and at the time I got my first copy, it was a smallish book that only cost me a few bucks. Out of that book came my own "book" of sequences that continues to this day. It also disciplined me to come to terms with the challenges of executing these things on guitar since some things take more work to learn to play them smoothly; the easy way is not always the way that opens up all the possibilities.
It really helped me to listen to horn players when I was internalizing the use of cycles and melodic fragments and how they related to the longer phrase.

I used to have this book.

I just got the Lateef Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Which is bananas. Who knows how much of it is practical. It's all cool though.

[jazznylon]

So many books so little time... my personal hope is that scientists find a way to extend human lifespan. But I guess I shouldn't complain, its a great priviledge to be able to study the instrument if anything