Showing posts with label Outline. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Outline. Show all posts

Practice Doesn't Make Perfect



It's pretty much a universal truth; practice makes perfect. Musicians know all too well that if you want to master your art, there is no substitute for practice. The problem is that this statement is much too vague.

The Blind Leading...

Just blindly practicing without thought can do more damage than good. Thinking that you can just show up and go through the motions can install false hope and produce unrealistic expectations. It also may cause doubt and pain after a huge investment in time and money is made and there are no results or improvement. There are right ways to practice and wrong ways to practice. There are wrong ways to learn and wrong ways to work. You can actually practice hard everyday and not accomplish very much at all. The student who practices wrong may be doing more damage than good; wasting years of time and effort practicing the wrong things over and over. Or, they may be going through the motions of practicing without making any effort or challenging themselves at all. Essentially, it's not enough to just sit down and practice, you must make sure that you are going about it the right way.

Why Are We Here?

While this may seem obvious at the outset, a lot of students will go about practicing without thought to why they are doing it in the first place. Some musicians have the really bad habit of practicing certain skills without too much thought about proper fingering or technique. People like to practice the same material and skills over and over. Learning new skills and keeping yourself challenged takes some discipline. Keeping on track with planning, execution and periodic self assessment is hard. It seems so much easier just to get to it; even when we know better. If may be as simple as not looking forward enough to see how much could be gained by some planning and discipline.


The Two Finger Approach

A lot of the time, making that initial investment seems like more trouble than its worth,. We're simply too lazy, can't be bothered and just want to get down to the task at hand. There are some skills that people don't take the time to learn even though the investment would be quite small in comparison to the time and money saved. The best analogy of this is the simple task of typing. Many people spend most of their day on their computer yet never learn to type. Even though it will save them a huge amount of time in the long run, they never take the time to learn and practice the skill properly. Some people go through an entire lifetime typing with two fingers. If they took the time to learn the skill in the first place, with regular practice they could double their typing speed in a relatively short time. The best part is that this is a skill that will stick with you the rest of your life. With a little concentrated effort and planning you may achieve much more in a significantly less amount of time. When you take the time to learn the proper technique, you will only get better with time. It's a good idea to think about this when planning your practice regimen. Think about what it is you want to learn and how (or who to go to) would be the best way to go about it.

Do You Have One?

First of all, how many musicians do you think actually have a practice regimen? By that I mean a specific time set apart where the musician will sit down and follow a charted course of lessons and exercises. How many musicians a) practice simply when they have a spare moment or just whenever they feel like it? b) actually take notes during their practice sessions? c) record their practice sessions and periodically review their progress? Working at something without actually charting your progress seems ludicrous. Can you imagine practicing a sport without taking the time to measure your progress and results? Yet how many musicians do this? How many musicians take a haphazard approach to practicing, writing, technique and their overall progress? As a student of any other activity, you would never do this.


General Rules

I'm going to go over some general rules to always keep in mind when sitting down to practice. These principles can also be applied to any endeavor which takes daily, regimented action.

Always do the following when sitting down to practice.
  • relax and focus on the task at hand
  • be mindful about what you're doing and why 
  • review what you did in the last session
  • plan for the practice session
  • work on problem areas
  • work on new skills and ideas
  • take notes
  • stretch and challenge yourself daily
  • use a timer
  • include warm ups and fundamental exercises
  • make notes for next session
While this may seem like it would be a chore to do and hard to implement, it's actually like most other learned behaviours. Once you do it a couple of times, it becomes easier to do. After an extended period of time it will become automatic. It actually saves a lot of time and takes a lot of the guess work out of what you're trying to do. It's easier to stay on track because it's all right in front of you. There is little guess work. It may be hard for a lot of easy going, artistic personalities to get into such a regimen but once you stick with it for a while and start seeing results quite quickly, your attitude may change.

The Big Review

You're going to have to sit down periodically and do an overall review. These reviews serve two purposes. First of all it gives you a good idea of what you've done and what you want to accomplish. That way you can make sure that you're working on things that are going to get you where you want to go. With music, there are so many skills and things to learn that it becomes easy to work on many different things. It's easy to get into a whole set of skills that aren't related to what you wanted to accomplish in the first place. It gives you something to measure as far as seeing if you are actually moving toward your goal.

Secondly it also helps in motivation and keeping on track. It's all too easy to lose your place or even worst, lose your motivation when practicing. This after all, is just you. You have to try and be objective about what you've learned and if you're making any progress. If you've taken the time to write down what you want to accomplish, you can later go back and see if you've done what you've set out. A lot of the students I have taught get excited when they see the results in their playing. Sometimes, it's as simply as recognizing a chord progression on the radio, but once there are measurable results, it gives up the motivation to stick with it. There are always periods of what seems like no growth at all but then there are always moments of a-ha where you realize that have improved or accomplished something significant.

The Big Plan

One of the things that's important to do before you even start a practice regimen is figure out what it is you want to accomplish. Write down what specific skills you'd like to learn and what the big plan is. It should be within a given time frame. This could be a year or 6 months or even 3 months. Don't worry about being too accurate with your time frame if you're just starting out with a new skill. For a beginner this would include learning to play an instrument for an intermediate musician, it may be earning to write a symphony. You won't know how long this is going to take. As you get going with your regimen though, you should do a review after a couple of months. From this you will be able to tell if you're improving and it may give you a better idea of your time frame and how long it may take to learn a new skill.

Check, Check

You must make sure that you are checking your results and always striving to get better. It's possible to keep going over the same things and think that you are practicing but you're not. This is when people seem to hit that 'ceiling' and can't seem to improve. When learning new skills you may have to get 'worst' before you get better. There's the idea that mastering a skill takes 10 years but it's possible that you could work on something for a decade or more and see very little results. It's also possible for someone with a set plan, with the right materials and work ethic, to master something in a fraction of that time.

Outline Your Music Career

Diagram of a brainstorming sessionImage via Wikipedia

It seems like a lot of musicians out there, I've gotten into the habit of doing a lot of writing. These days it seems writing is becoming more and more useful and used in everyday living and especially online. This includes not only of the emails and correspondence that I have on a daily basis but also all of my online activities that includes blogs, commenting on other sites and reviews. Whenever I had something to write I would generally just start and see where it would lead. This would be fine for most activities but whenever I had to write something that was more than a couple of lines long, or had a specific point to make, I found I would spend a lot of time rewriting and trying to get the article to have some sort of consistency and cohesion. After struggling with this for a while I learned about the value of starting with an outline.

The Outline in Writing

An outline can do a couple of things that can help your writing immensely. First of all, it's a great way to get all of your ideas down in a hurry, just making points on all of the different things that you want to cover. It's basically brainstorming. You think of all of the topics that you want to cover in your article and make some points on each of the ideas. It also helps you to organize those ideas. You start just writing out ideas and soon enough you start to see some connections between some of your ideas. You may also come up with new ideas based on the ones you've already put down. It helps in organizing your thoughts. It may help streamline the article too by seeing which ideas don't fit the topic and may be useful in another article. You may find that after brainstorming, you have enough for a couple of articles. Lastly, it helps you keep your focus by looking at all of the points available and making sure that you stick to the topic and don't veer off course half way through the article.

Writing out an outline really helps your writing. It helps you effectively communicate with your fans and create interesting content for your sites. Second, it helps with your correspondence with others. Email is still the reigning king of communication and being able to articulate your ideas and thoughts well is a great skill to have. Lastly, and this is the point of this article, it can help in deciding what you're going to do with your music career and can help in making decisions and sticking with a desired plan.

Brainstorming

We're going to use the same process to outline how you want your music career to go as the process in creating a great piece of writing. It involves 3 basic steps: brainstorming, planning and action. The first two steps are the same processes that I talked about earlier in preparing to write. Basically it's just sitting down and writing down all of the ideas that come to you on a particular subject. I've mentioned it as part of the outline process because I generally will do both in one sitting: brainstorm and then create my outline on the same piece of paper. You may want to do this in a couple of steps but I find that it's better to complete as much as you can in one sitting. The reason for this is that sometimes when you sit and think about something for a period of time you may have a hard time starting but once you're in the middle of it, the ideas may start flying and it's usually a good idea to just let them fly and worry about limits or problems at a later date. We're not concerned with details yet, we're just focusing on ideas and at this point; none are bad.

Priorities

Once you've got all of your ideas written down. It's time to set about figuring out which ones you are going to pursue and make a reality, which ones you'll be tackling at a later date, and ones which will be have to be put on the back burner or completely eliminate. If you're worried about missing something, don't: all of your ideas are written down and if you come up with something at a later date, you can simply add it in.

For this reason I always carry a notepad with me and jot down any ideas that come to me. You never know when you're going get inspiration and come up with a great idea. If you think that you'll remember it later, think again. It's always better to write it down when you think of it, that way you know that it'll be there and you can free your mind to come up with more ideas!

Decisions

Once you've written down a bunch of ideas, it's exciting to see all of your ideas and dreams. It usually becomes a little easier to decide what you're going to do once you can see all of your options right there. Sometimes though, when you see all of the things that you want to do, it could become overwhelming trying to decide on what to do first/next. This happens sometimes when bands see all of things that must be taken care of when releasing a CD. Here again, our outline comes to the rescue. If you have all of the things outlined in front of you and you're a bit overwhelmed, the best thing to do is to just pick something on the list and get started. If it's the wrong thing to do, it'll become apparent pretty soon. Either way you've started and you have some momentum going. Once you've started on something, you can sit back and see if it brings any results. If it does then you know you're heading in the right direction. You'll still have to make some adjustments to your plan but you're moving ahead and things are getting done. Having the outline in front of you can help you decipher if what you are doing is bringing you closer to your goal or if you're heading in the wrong direction. It's having that outline there that allows you to stay on track. It's like having a roadmap and it case there's any trouble or questions, you just have to refer back to the roadmap.

Work in Progress

The difference between this and a real roadmap is this outline is a work in progress. It's going to have to be continually adjusted and updated. Once you've set out and done a couple of items on the list, you'll have to take time out and see if your actions brought any results and check if you're heading in the right direction. We'll talk in a future post about some of the decisions and questions you may want to ask yourself when going through your brainstorming sessions. This outline will have to be updated and new ones will have to be created on a regular basis. Once you get into the habit, it becomes easier to do and you'll be more effective in planning your future and seeing those plans to fruition. Writing out an outline is an effective way to organize thoughts and streamline the creative process. It helps in brainstorming, writing, organizing, and in this case, is very effective in planning your music career. Take time at least once a month to outline what you have achieved and what you plan on doing next and you may find yourself getting more done and getting further than you ever imagined.

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