How to Measure If You Are Improving Or Not

Learn Jazz Standards Podcast

Brent Vaartstra: Jazz Musician, Author, and Entrepreneur

Music Commentary, Jazz, Jazz Improvisation, Jazz Saxophone, Jazz Theory, Jazz Bass, Jazz Piano, Education, Music, Jazz Guitar, Jazz Solo, Jazz Standards, Jazz Trumpet, How To

4.8 • 536 Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2024

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Join Brent in this insightful Fast Track Friday episode, where he delves into the crucial topic of measuring your musical progress. He addresses a common concern among musicians: the feeling of not improving fast enough, or at all. He shares his empathy for this struggle and offers practical strategies to help you see your progress more clearly. He highlights how being too close to your own playing can make it difficult to notice improvements. Brent explains that measuring your progres...

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is sponsored by the Learned Jazz Standards Inner Circle.
0:03.8	If your goal is to level up your jazz playing this year and feel confident improvising over
0:08.5	jazz standards, the inner circle has everything you need and more.
0:13.0	With monthly jazz standards studies, a library of powerful courses, and a vibrant community
0:17.3	of like-minded musicians, you're guaranteed to improve your playing every
0:21.7	single month.
0:23.1	Podcast listeners can get 50% off their first month when you go to LJSinnerCircle.com.
0:29.5	That's LJSinnerCircle.com or find the link in the show notes.
0:34.8	Now, on to today's episode.
0:53.1	Music the show notes. Now, on to today's episode. All right, my friends, what's going on?
0:54.5	Brent here from Learn Jazz Standards.
0:56.2	Welcome to another episode of the Learn Jazz Standards podcast and another Fast Track Friday episode to close off this week of the show.
1:04.9	Fast Track Friday, that's where I go deeper into a particular strategy that's been helpful to me and my students.
1:09.9	Or sometimes I extrapolate on other episodes that have been gone on during the week. But today I want to talk
1:15.5	about a really important topic here, which is how do you measure if you are improving or not?
1:22.7	How do you measure if you're improving your playing or not? And to kind of, you know, get this started here and get your brain thinking around the context that I am,
1:33.3	one thing that I hear a lot from people is this concept of, I'm not improving, right?
1:41.3	I'm not improving.
1:43.1	I'm not improving fast enough. I'm not improving at all. I feel like maybe I've gotten worse. I've heard it all, really. Over the years, I've heard all of these things. I've heard this from players that are, you know, maybe very new to jazz and, you know, definitely are struggling a little bit to grasp concepts. I've also heard this from
2:01.6	players that sound really, really good already, yet still are expressing the exact same things.
2:07.2	I'm not good enough. I'm not improving. I feel like I'm completely stuck, right? Now, I do have a lot of,
2:15.9	I do have a lot of empathy for when I hear people say this, because first of all, I do have a lot of, I do have a lot of empathy for when I hear people say this, because
	...

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