Re: Advice on daily practice regimen

Thanks for the advice, there is some of these I was expecting.
First about a weekly lesson with a good teacher.
That's definitely a good idea.
So why to ask there ?
Probably because, relationship between a teacher and a learner
can be not quite as simple especially when there is money involved.
It's what I've observed the last couple of lessons I've taken these
last years.
Then finding a *GOOD* teacher is also very difficult.
A good player is not necessarily a good teacher and sometime a private
lesson ends in playing some tunes/standards with a professional
player.
Well, I'm still looking for a good one, not very actively right now,
but it's always something I have in my mind.
Maybe I have to search harder.

Well, there is one specific idea, in what I've gathered here,
it seems so obvious that I don't know why I haven't done that these
last years,
thanks to Joey:
"4. *Then* the two of you need to get back together and play the tune
*with* the metronome."
It's something I used to do before.

If you have time, I have also a few question, can you elaborate a
little bit about playing
an unaccompanied solos ?
It is something I can't do now, and I know I should work on that, and
I've already been advised to work on that.
But that is a kind of final goal, and seems really ambitious to me.
I would need some milestones to work on in order to reach that.
Here are the few ideas which comes to my mind:
1) start working from the simplest (or not too complicated) structure
to the most complicated,
and then find a standard that match these structure:
8 bar (summertime, sort of 2x8), 12 bar (blues and minor blues),
16 bar (blue bossa), etc ..
And stay to this number of bar until completely mastered then
switch to the next one.
I definitely would not start this with Stella for example.
2) Use simple rythm in the beginning to not get lost (quarter note for
example) in the form.
Then add complexity other the time.
2) In the beginning I would use a slightly more sophisticated device
than metronome.
Something which would be configurable to add a beat with a
different sound on the one
of the first bar of the structure. and maybe another one every 4/8
bars depending on the form of the tune.
Does that makes sense, or would it be cheating ?
4) "You both need to learn how to comp through these changes with the
metronome on all 4 beats, just 1 and 3, just 1, and just on 2
and 4"
Should I really work that in that order ? The metronome on only
the 1 seems the harder one.
I remember I've advised sometimes ago to have the metronome
hitting the 3 only,
I've never tried that either. Do you thing that would be
usefull ?
5) believe it or not I already own a metronome ;-), I'm must confess
I'm not using it very frequently,
that's going to change.

Then comes the focus on the tune:
Here are few rules, I would follow:
1) Learn a lot of tunes, don't depend anymore on a lead sheet to be
able to play
the tune (I can already do that but only for a very few tunes)
2) whatever material I'm working on, *ALWAYS* pratice it while
applying it to a tune
instead playing a scale/arpeggio/anything else without any
context.

So basically, I will split my 4 hours practice in one hour
to work on unaccompanied improvisation on dedicated simple form,
3 hours learning a new tune. I will do that for the next 3 month.
The cut of Stella has been done something like 8 or 9 month ago
and I was feeling like not improving these last months.
So I think I need more strictness/focus on my practice.
Thanks, I will let know where I'm going and if I feel improving or
not.

David Bariod
.

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