Amongst the most common questions asked by people learning jazz are 'what should I practice?' and 'How should I practice?'

These questions often arise because the student feels overwhelmed by the sheer number of things they need to learn to be able to play this music, and they think that the best way to improve lies in a disciplined and structured framework that will let them improve in all areas simultaneously - and what's wrong with that!?

If a question like this gets posted on a jazz forum, there'll inevitably be replies like this:"I'm a pianist and I usually practice for 2 hours a day, 6 days a week. My routine looks like this:

  • Scales - 20 minutes
  • Chord voicings - 20 minutes
  • Transcribing - 20 minutes
  • Taking things through all keys - 20 minutes
  • Learning new tunes - 40 minutes

This is all very sensible, very admirable... and absolute rubbish! I'm going to let you in to a secret: NOBODY practices like this every day.

These posters reply with what they THINK a good practice schedule should look like, rather than what they actually do. Nothing holds students back more than a simple lack of practice.

This doesn't mean that they never play their instruments. The reality is that there is a distinct difference between practicing and playing. It's also important to remember that pretty much everybody hates practicing and loves playing.

The verb 'practice' is defined by the free online dictionary as:

To do or perform (something) repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill.

This means that when you start to practice, you don't have a skill. In other words you can't do something. This is why practice is painful; you have to do something you can't do - a lot! Nobody likes to do things that they can't do. It is human nature to enjoy things that we do well and do more of those and abandon those things that we aren't able to do.

Playing is essentially the opposite of practicing. Playing is doing something that you can already do. This means that it's human nature to want to play more than you practice. This is why people stagnate. Once you have the ability to play a little, it's more fun to play what you know than practice the things you can't.

Here's an example. Most people would agree that if they practiced everything in every key, they would improve beyond all recognition very quickly. If this is true, why don't most people do it? Because, once you can do something, it's no fun to put yourself back in the position where you can't do it again - i.e. playing it in a new key. Even if you tough it out, the best you can hope for is to make pretty much the same sound as you were already doing - and where's the fun in that? Most of time, you stumble through two or three keys and then give up and just play something you already know.

You see if most beginners and average players were really capable of sitting down and practicing for 2 hours a day, they'd be giving the pros a run for their money in no time. However, whilst it's easy to play for 2 hours, it's very difficult (and no fun) just to practice things you can't do.

I hope you're starting to see my point. Practice is essentially doing something that you can't do until you can do it. Playing is the reward for what you have achieved in practice. It's a pretty good reward but once you have attained the reward for your initial practice, and can sort of play a little bit, it's all too easy to plateau and stay at the same level.

This is because you may have good intentions when you start to practice, but it's no fun doing all that stuff that's too hard for you at the moment. It's so much easier, and much more fun, to play the things that you can already play. This means that you don't improve.

So what's the answer? The answer is to do less practice and more playing of course! The trick comes in making the two dovetail to allow you to improve.

My suggestion is to pick one thing to focus on each time you touch your instrument. It absolutely must not be a Big Difficult Thing, but you should aim to master that one thing completely by the end of your session.

For example, don't set your practice goal as 'learning to play pentatonic scales in all twelve keys' and sit there and try and plough through them, one after the other. Instead, pick one key and focus on that in a session. It doesn't take long for most people to be able to play a scale up and down reasonably fluently. Then you have to turn that practice into playing straight away. Once you can get your fingers around the scale, improvise over appropriate chord progressions (playalongs, sequencers or programs like band-in-a-box are really useful for this). As you get the hang of the scale, you move from being unable to play it and having to force yourself to learn it (practice) to being able to use it musically (playing).

Whether you pick a single scale, one lick, a chord voicing, an arpeggio, four bars of a tune or anything else doesn't matter. What matters is that you turn the unknown into the known very quickly and start making music with it.

The only downside of this approach is that it doesn't really feel like practicing! Practicing is supposed to be difficult and requires discipline doesn't it? If you only spend 5 minutes learning something and 55 minutes playing with say, a single pentatonic scale, you've hardly accomplished anything have you?

Let's just think about that for a minute. If you've truly mastered that scale in an hour, it will be part of your musical palette forever. Next time you practice, you may pick one arpeggio - and it will be part of you musical palette forever. The five minutes spent learning it take you away from the practice stage, and the rest of the time you spend playing with it reinforces that ability, makes it really stick and is a lot more fun than moving onto something else you can't do!

If you're still not convinced, answer this question. If you learned to do one new thing, every time you sat at or picked up your instrument, how beneficial would that be to your musical development?

Give it a try for a little while, I hope it works for you and feel free to let me know how you get on.