Great Advice on Practicing

I just got the JazzTimes Jazz Education Guide, and there's a great section in it with advice from all sorts of musicians on practicing. For the most part, it's clear that some incredible discipline is at work. However, there's such an amazing variety of techniques. Here are some highlights:

1. To swing to a metronome while playing scales, set the metronome to 60 and then imagine it's clicking two and four. (Several musicians mentioned this one. Haven't tried it yet. I've often used the beats on my Yamaha practice keyboard -- bossa, swing, jazz waltz, etc. -- and some suggested using drum machines, but you have to be careful you don't let the drum machine do all the work for you. That's an advantage of the metronome technique.)

2. Practice internally, "listening" to all the parts in your head before you begin to play or sing.

3. Practice in the car while running errands. Breathing exercises at stop lights, or drumming contrasting rhythms on the steering wheel while driving.

4. Practice s-l-o-w-l-y to gain muscle memory. I have to remember this. I try to practice too quickly (especially piano--for some reason I'm more patient with voice).

5. Practice in 20- to 30-minute chunks. "When somebody comes to me and says they just put in three to four hours on their horn, I really doubt that most of that was productive time because we simply don't have the ability to concentrate for that long to make it truly effective," says trombonist Harry Watters in the article.

6. Transpose pieces into all 12 keys (or at least several different ones) to really learn licks and fingerings.

7. Record practice sessions. Well, I basically never do this. But I did see a lot of improvement when I started listening to my solos at Grace Cathedral on the Internet after every Sunday night service, and later, in the process of recording my album. It was a whole new level of listening to my voice and approaching certain sounds I wanted to achieve.

There's lots more but that's all I've got time to cover today.