Showing posts with label productivity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label productivity. Show all posts

How To Find Your Musical Goals

There was a comment recently about tips for trying to figure out your goals. This seems to be a tough thing for most people, especially musicians. There are tons of articles out there about how to get things done and succeed. They start off with you making a list of your goals and then move on from there. Unfortunately, figuring out your goals is usually difficult and timing consuming. Some people go through their entire life not knowing what they're goals are. Yet you're supposed to figure this out in a short time and then move on from there. Figuring out what your goals are like asking you what your favorite color is. It's all personal and one person's answers are going to be different than another. The key to figuring out what your goals are is all about asking questions; tons of them. Once you start asking yourself the right questions it will become easier figuring out what direction you should take.


The Musician's Most Important Skill

All too often we talk about how to practice and perform. You might think that the most important skill a musician could have is great dexterity or, a great imagination, or maybe even great creativity. Where these are important, that there is one skill that is the foundation of all that a musician must do. It's our memory. Memory isn't just used by musicians to remember tons of songs; it's used in every aspect (improvising, composing, performing). Musicians must remember songs, chord progressions, fingerings, lyrics, scales, idioms (licks), performance notes (dynamics, inflections, phrasing, breathing, etc),  recording techniques, engineering facts, song forms, theory, stage moves, gear settings, recording settings, software applications, etc. And this is just the musical applications! This doesn't include any of the marketing, PR, business activities that we have to do on a daily basis. Memory even comes into play in our ear training because ultimately, the ear is using our memory as reference point for all of those chords, intervals and sounds.

Practicing On Purpose

We seem to set out with the best of intentions. We try and practice everyday. We make sure we're covering the basics. We're trying to improve. Like we've talked about here before, it's important that you set apart some time to try and assess what your goals are. You try to figure out what you want to accomplish on your instrument and what you want to accomplish with music overall. But there's so much to learn. So much to practice. Every new skill seems to take forever to master. How do you know what you're supposed to practice and what not to? Of course having a great teacher is invaluable for this because that should be a prime consideration of theirs every time they see you. But how to do you figure this out on your own? How do you practice with purpose?

Musician's Top 10 Getting It Done List

Being a working musician is tough. You're pretty much on your own. You have to take care of all of the business, networking and finances. On top of that you have to find time after a busy day to try and be creative and make some great art. Here are a list of things to help you keep focused and on track.

1. Move away from abstract ideas to actionable goals - There was a study done with two groups of people. Both groups where given a set of tasks to complete. Group A's tasks where clear and concise (like go pickup this, go here etc.); whereas Group B's tasks where a little more abstract (like having to pick out 'interesting items'). Group A completed all of the tasks whereas Group B had trouble completing the list. It's much easier for us to complete concrete, measurable goals. This especially applies to musicians because so much of what we do is abstract. For example your goal maybe to write a song. That's not well enough defined and also may not be something you can complete in one go. A better goal would be to finish a first draft of a pop song or ballad. This applies to everything; your writing, business and practice sessions.