Hey everyone,
I’m writing this as I’m about to go away on holiday, but having just finished a teaching session where I touched on the idea of using a piece of music (in this case Stevie Wonder’s ‘Do I Do’) as a long-term study piece (in this case as a way of building yourself technically) I thought this was a concept worth me expanding upon in an article for you all.
Study pieces are generally used for intensive work in a specific area of music or for specific personal reasons. These reasons are wide ranging; they can be used to push your technical limits on your instrument, to improve your skill at navigating through difficult harmony, to improve your aural and analytical skills or it could be a seminal piece of repertoire that you want to tick off on your checklist (something I very much recommend having) among others. The key point with study pieces is that they are somewhat beyond your current level of musical ability, these are not musical works that you’ll be able to nail down in a week or two.
The value in working on study pieces over an extended period is a multi-layered cake, and I’ll go through the main points and benefits here for you!
Technical proficiency
This is perhaps the most obvious one. Pieces like the Bach Cello Suites (sheet music available at IMSLP.org!), Jaco’s Donna Lee or Teen Town or more recently Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick or perhaps Vulfpeck’s Dean Town are all used by players looking to work on their technical prowess and push themselves beyond what they’re currently capable of. One of the benefits of doing this is that your regular selection of repertoire will begin to seem that much easier to navigate, and your ‘B’ game (when you’re not at your absolute best) will also elevate as your ‘A’ game improves. One point of caution with this is not treating these pieces as pure technical drills. Having the raw technique to play them along with a click is one thing, having the skill and technique to make music out of them is another thing entirely. This means having the technical capacity to make musical choices even with hard music, so once you can get through the piece from a purely technical standpoint…then the musical work begins! Don’t neglect that!
Harmonic proficiency
Improving your harmonic awareness and your skill at fretboard navigation are ALWAYS worthy goals to have. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be blasting your way through Giant Steps. That’s certainly something of a harmonic benchmark, but it could be that you’re just at the point of being able to navigate a basic ii-V-I progression, in which case you might want to be considering working through something like All The Things You Are or Autumn Leaves. If we move away from the world of Jazz, you might want to consider tunes like Steve Wonder’s ‘My Cherie Amour’ or perhaps doing a harmonic analysis of some of the other, more complex, Motown tunes! The key thing with harmonic work is to start with your basics and more specifically, to be examining them from all angles! You’re good with root position triads around All The Things You Are? Now try those same triads in first and second inversion, then try all the inversions with different permutations, before you move to any other harmonic devices. Always see if there is another angle to explore with a given piece of harmonic information before you decide to move on!!
Seminal Repertoire
All genres of music have their pieces of seminal/essential repertoire, in other words those pieces/tunes that you should know and have in your locker if you want to understand the music. Within Jazz for example, you need to have Rhythm Changes down, you need to have Autumn Leaves, Footprints, So What, All The Things You Are, All Blues and various other essential standards down. Within Progressive Rock you’ll want to be aiming to have Money (Pink Floyd), Carry On Wayward Son (Kansas), Tom Sawyer (Rush), Roundabout (Yes) in the locker. If you’re into Motown that means tunes like My Girl, I Want You Back, Higher And Higher, Heatwave, Heard It Through The Grapevine…every genre has its staples! If you’re serious about wanting to dive into a particular area, I absolutely recommend making yourself a checklist of those tunes you want to have down and starting to work through it. As above, you want to make sure you’re covering all the angles with these. Sound, phrasing, note lengths, note placements, articulation, these are all aspects of the music that you should be paying really close attention to in order to understand the music (and the bass playing!) at a deeper level. The notes are one thing, how they are played is a very different thing. Take your time with this, endeavour to fully understand what it is that makes the music great and fully explore what you can get out of the music before you tick the box and move on.
Breaking Through Plateaus
Improving your skill level is never a linear process (much though we might wish otherwise!), we will often hit little plateaus where we feel a little stuck and that we’re not getting any better. Programming a study piece into your practice routine is an excellent way to break through these, because they take you down a deep rabbit hole that will really push you musically, which (as with work in the gym) will often break through a particular ceiling that is frustrating you. They also add some variety into your routine which often gives the brain chance to fully process the information you’ve been trying to take in from elsewhere in your practice.
Aural And Analytical Skills
Doing an in-depth analysis on a piece of music you love is a fantastic way to not only improve your skill but also to better understand yourself in a musical sense. We all have our own likes and dislikes within music, but we don’t always take the time to understand why that might be, and this is something which can not only help you understand yourself but also fast track you to developing more of your own ideas. Harmonic analysis is the obvious candidate here but rhythmic analysis (particularly of bass lines) is also a rich seam of inspiration you can tap into! Different rhythmic concepts produce different results within the music, which you can then transfer into your own lines so analysing music where the music is very different rhythmically to what you are used to can provide a real catalyst for fresh ideas of your own! Having and maintaining that curiosity is perhaps a topic for a separate article but always be guided and fueled by that feeling of ‘that’s cool, I have no idea what is going on but I want to find out!’.
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Teaching Yourself Patience
Patience is something I find most of us need to work on a little. In today’s world there is more (of everything) available to us almost immediately than at any time in history. You want food? You can get it delivered to your door almost any time of the day or night. You want to know a fact? You have the power of the internet right there on your smart phone. Music is, however, one of the things in our lives where there is no shortcut. You must have the patience and tenacity to do the work and working on study pieces is an excellent way of teaching yourself to be patient, because the only way you will achieve anything with them is through patience, practice and tenacity. It’s been found that people that go to the gym are more patient because they come to realise that results there only come with patience, sweat and trusting the process. The exact same thing applies here. Through working on large scale works like the Cello suites, or something that is well beyond your technical level of facility and pushing yourself to be better than you currently are, you’ll not only appreciate the process and feel a real sense of achievement when you get there, you’ll also have a more patient approach to things, something which, as a parent, is absolutely invaluable.
Hopefully you’ve gotten some ideas from this article for some potential study pieces of your own, I honestly feel they are an incredibly valuable area of practice to spend time on. If you’re going down this route do let me know in the comments what you’re going to be working on! Me personally? I’m recording this in a couple of months, so once i’m home from Portugal/Spain, this will be spending a LOT of time on the workbench!