Jazz musicians call the hard work of improvising being in the woodshed. To aid these skills they copy and memorize the jazz solos of the masters and experiment with their own ideas.
Her bestmusical ideas came after spending hours woodshedding.
To practice one's instrument. It is a term that comes from jazz culture. It originated from drumset practice due to the fact that drum sticks, after hours of playing, start to flake off small bits of wood (usually covering the floor around the drumset). This is reffered to as woodshedding. Although it originated as a drumming term, it is commonly used for any instrument. A shortened form of the word is shedding. Also, people generally refer to a place of practice as a woodshed or a shed.
See bikeshed: topics which have never recieved concensus and are likely to generate side-discussions and flames unless all participants are well-read on all the past history
Tom wanted to solve the world problems but everybody kept talking about something like woodshed