If you find yourself struggling with an exercise, slow it down, simplify it, or sing it while visualizing yourself playing it.
After familiarizing yourself with the exercises, pick one or two to practice repeatedly until you can play them without any conscious thought.
Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery
The 4 steps is a method of practicing “letting go of the need to control the music.”
Kenny is fond of saying: let music, don’t make music.
This then results in being able to play without consciously thinking about the chords and notes, trusting that if the necessary preparatory study had been accomplished, the notes will take care of themselves.
4 steps:
1. Find a centered and calm place within yourself, call ‘space’.
2. Build on the state of mind experience in step 1.
3. Play a tune while maintaining the feeling of freedom, detachment, and effortlessness experienced in steps 1 and 2.
4. If you discover that you can’t successfully negotiate all of the chord changes or the tempo of the tune without striving and forcing, anlayze your harmonic and rhythmic weaknesses and formulate one or two exercises that, once mastered,will help you correct these inherent problems.
Practice these exercises or patterns using the principals of the Learning Diamond, until you have trained your body to negotiate the demands of the tune.
Learning Diamond
Practice of a song can be viewed as having 4 parameters:
1. Play with total effortlessness
2. Play in a fast tempo
3. Play the complete selection
4. Play the correct notes
Imagine each of these aspects as corners of diamond, with effortlessness being at the top of the diamond.
1. Effortlessness implies the absence of physical tension or mental striving. Everything played from this is second nature, requiring no conscious control. Of the 4 corners of the diamond, this is one corner that should never be abandoned.
2. If you can’t play a selection up-tempo without sacrificing effortlessness, slow it down until you find a tempo at which you are comfortable. Gradually increase the tempo seeing how far you can push it while maintaining a feeling of relaxed detachment. Be attentive to any physical tension and mental anxiety as you increase the tempo.
3. An alternative to slow down the tempo, practice at a fast tempo but only play a small portion of the music. If only 2 notes you can play effortlessness, start with that. Gradually add more notes. If problem occurs in the middle of the passage, begin at that point and gradually piece the entire passage together, maintaining a feeling of effortlessness.
4. To gain a sense of what it feels like to play the entire song effortlessly and up-tempo, allow yourself to play wrong notes. Keep your fingers moving in time. Do not sacrifice the other 3 corners of the learning diamond. You may find your conscious mind unwilling to accept the wrong notes ou hear, but remember how great wrong notes sound when Miles Davis plays them.
Additional thoughts:
1. When practicing or performing, keep your thoughts still and your body relaxed.
2. To quiet your thoughts when performing, helpful to concentrate on something outside of yourself, such as another person or an object or to place attention on maintaining a relaxed feeling in your body.
3. When practicing or improvising, imagine that you are not the one playing but a ‘silent witness’ to the event.
4. music is a reflection of your personal growth and the development of your consciousness.
Kenny Werner describes the process:
‘I never try to play anything I’m practicing. I’m only interested in the effect practicing has on my playing.”
Practice as slowly as necessary in order to play the most difficult passages cleanly and in rhythm.
Most players make the mistake of trying to play things too quickly. This reinforces bad technique and poor rhythm.
Start slowly and gradually increase the tempo.
An alternative to this slow, gradual approach is to practice at fast tempos but only a small portion of the exercise, gradually adding more notes until the entire passage is learned.
Extend the range, change the rhythm or create your own variations of each exercise.
Experiment with a variety of rhythmic accents and expressive devices.
Do not try to practice too many concepts simultaneously. It is better to thoroughly master a few patterns that appeal to you, rather than to superficially practice a large amount of material.
Whatever you choose to practice, work on it until you can play it without having to think about it. Only when you have learned something at this deep level will you be able to merge in an unpremeditated manner during an improvisation.
Sing while fingering the instrument without playing.
Also try practising away from the piano while imagining yourself playing.