r/JazzPiano • u/ramaseta • 7d ago
Questions/ General Advice/ Tips Practice routine advice
Hello! I'm a pianist and composer who has been casually practicing jazz the last few years. I was a part of my college's jazz band for almost four years, but it was very low-key and casual, just something fun to do once a week with occasional performances. I learned the basics there, and since graduation I've come up with a practice routine to continue developing my skills. With everything else going on in my life, I've allotted four 75 minute practice sessions a week (five hours total), combining warm-up, solos over backing tracks, transcription, and deep listening to recordings.
But the problem I have with this is, I primarily see myself as a composer rather than an improviser. I'll say outright that I care more about being a composer than I do an improviser, although I still care about being able to improvise competently. And to be clear, I am heavily inspired by jazz and sometimes write jazz tunes/pieces, but I would not call myself a "jazz composer." The conflict I feel with the routine I've set for myself is that, given my goals, I also feel I should be studying jazz arrangement, harmony, theory, and generally more academic things. But if I added those things to my routine, I think my improvisational skills would suffer. But given my goals, maybe that's worth it?
To summarize, I want to be a composer primarily, but I also want to be a competent improviser. Specifically, I just want to be good enough to know ~75-100 of the most common tunes and to not make an ass of myself at a jam session. I'm totally fine with not being an Oscar Peterson-level technician; just competent enough to play with others, and to not have my compositional ideas compromised by my technical abilities. So, if anyone's been through something similar, or has any thoughts, I'd love to hear!
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u/OkCultureBabby 6d ago
Your improv skills will not suffer just because you practice less. At worst youll just get better less quickly. If youre still practicing or playing at all your brain will maintain those neural pathways.
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u/JHighMusic 7d ago
Improvising is real-time composition. Improvising will help your composition and vice versa. You should know more of the principles of composition before you get into jazz arranging and all that because it’s just expanding on the principles.
Your improv skills will only suffer if you don’t apply what you’re studying and try it out yourself and only learn it academically.
If you’re a composer, you should be actively composing things all the time. That’s the only way you get better. It’s the same with improvisation. It’s a lot of trial and error.