In weightlifting there’s an idea called Rate of Perceived Exertion, often abbreviated as RPE, that is used as a subjective measure of difficulty. Often people think about it in terms of “how many more reps you could’ve done.” And this can change from day to day. Your strength changes from day to day.
This means that progress, in terms of weight on the bar, is not linear.
Learning music is similar. The process is not linear.
Some days you will be better at playing or writing or singing. Some days will be a off days and you won’t be as good at those things.
Some times you’ll get great opportunities. Some times you won’t have many opportunities for a while.
These periods of time may be weeks. They may be months.
But if you look at progress over long periods of time, like years or multiple years, then you’ll be able to see if you’re making progress.
I’ve been listening to Porter Robinson’s new album Nurture and the first song on that album starts with a solo piano and this busy electronic texture in the background.
Creating that texture in the background is complex and the rhythms involved are complex, but its hidden in a way. It’s not in the foreground.
The complex parts are hidden and put into the background.
Depending on how you learn some things might take more time than others. Learning ear training might take longer than learning to read music or learning music theory. Not everything will come easily. And not everything needs to.
I was much better at picking up music theory from the written notation than learning ear training. Learning music production ideas went quickly when I learned the mechanical parts of the process rather than trying to reverse engineer a specific sound. Learning to sight-read took a while because I needed to read through a ton of music.
Sometimes classes cram a lot of material into a short amount of time and the students don’t get to full digest the information. Take time to digest the information later. You don’t need to remember everything right away and you don’t need to pick up everything super easily.
Take time to learn at your own pace. You’ll have a deeper understanding of the concepts if you do.
I write all of my music out by hand in a notebook. Even if it’s electronic music. I’ll write it out by hand while sitting at the piano. There’s a surprising difference in the feel of how different pencils and paper feels. I also recently upgraded to Reason 11 from Reason 9.
If you have the extra funds invest some money in the tools that you are using. That might mean keeping your software up to date. That might mean buying nice paper and a nice pencil or pen. That might mean buying high quality instruments.
Those high quality tools won’t immediately make you a better musician, but they’ll make making music more enjoyable. Using a higher quality instrument will feel better (physically) to play than a lower quality instrument. It’ll make it a little easier to make better music.
Recording yourself is basically a necessity now if you’re a modern musician. With COVID so many studios are closed, and even before that studios can be incredibly expensive, so learning to record yourself is a very useful skill to have. It allows you to take remote recording gigs and opens up so many different possibilities for you.
So here are a few tips that I’ve found from having recorded myself singing, playing piano, guitar, ukulele, melodica and violin.
Set a timer
Practice before you record
Record full takes
Comp takes together
Let’s start from the top.
1. Set a timer
I’m a big fan of the pomodoro technique. The pomodoro technique means that you set a timer for 25 minutes, focus on working for those 25 minutes. After that timer is up you take a break for 5 to 10 minutes. Rinse and repeat.
Keep doing that a few times and then take a longer break after maybe 3 or 4 times through that cycle.
It’s a great way to keep yourself focused and fresh without getting burnt out and tired from trying to focus for too long of a period of time. It makes working for 2 hours straight feel really easy, and often I get much more done with this technique than if I were to just try to power through those 2 hours.
2. Practice before you record
This one is simple. Make sure you know the music and can play it well. Even if you’re sight reading a piece it can be useful to read it through a few times before you record. If you have the chance to do this while you’re recording at home it can help make the process go by faster.
After you hit that record button the stakes are high. When you’re practicing the stakes are low. You can stop and go back whenever you want. When you’re recording you can’t do that. The pressure is on when you’re recording so you might feel that each take matters more. They don’t really. If you’re recording at home (and not in a studio that you paid time for) then you can make as many takes as you want.
But practicing more can help you need fewer takes. If you can practice it enough where you can play the piece perfectly within the first 4 takes then you’ll save time while recording.
3. Record full takes
Often when recording I’m tempted to stop any time I make a mistake, no matter how small. This can be incredibly counterproductive because it prevents me from getting a full take recorded.
This might mean you have to play through small imperfections and mistakes. We’ll deal with those in the next step.
But keep playing through those things. Keep playing and record yourself playing the entire piece. Even if you make small mistakes you can fix them later. Or you can record a better full take later and use that take instead.
But having 3 takes that are pretty good will be easier to deal with than 10 takes of only the first half of the music and 0 takes of the second half of the music.
4. Comp takes together
After you’ve recorded 3 good takes you can comp them together. As long as the gain levels, microphone, and microphone position stay the same you’ll be able to put multiple takes together fairly easily. You’ll want to add crossfades any time there’s a cut between two takes but that’s about it.
What you want to think about as you’re recording is “do I have a good recording of this section already?” Maybe you’re playing a song with two sections and on the first take you play the first section perfectly, but you make a mistake on the second section. On the second take you play the second section perfectly, but you make a mistake on the first section. That’s still useable because you can comp them together and have two perfect takes.
As long as you can comp a few good takes together you’ll be able to put together a record that sounds really good.
You don’t need to play it all the way through perfectly. It doesn’t have to be one take and most professional recordings likely aren’t one take. You just need to play through each section perfectly. Then with some not so fancy audio editing you can put those few takes together and have a awesome sounding recording.
I’ve been learning Deep Purple solos by Ritchie Blackmore recently and I’m definitely stealing some licks.
A lick is basically a short piece of music, often from a solo. They’re just short phrases of music. They can vary in length, but they’re often 1 to 2 to 3 measures long.
If you’re playing your own solo, or improvising a solo, but don’t know what to play or don’t have any ideas you can start by using licks you’ve learned. This is a great way to start getting into improvising and playing your own solos. Start with a short piece of a solo you’ve learned. Here’s one of my favorite Ritchie Blackmore licks that I’ve heard him play in a number of different solos:
It’s a simple lick and it’s a variation of a pretty common lick. This short little thing is in the solo for “Smoke on the Water” as well as a number of other Deep Purple songs.
You could take this lick and use it in your own solos if it works over the chords. It’s such a common piece of musical vocabulary that it’ll just sound like you’re quoting Ritchie Blackmore.
This is quick way to learn how to solo. Learn solos you think are cool. Take some snippets from them. Incorporate those snippets into your own solos. Suddenly you’re solo.
When I’m writing music I often try to expand on every single idea, but that doesn’t need to happen.
Sometimes certain ideas can be used only once. Not every idea needs to be expanded and varied and fully utilized.
I was listening to the Song Exploder episode with Jon Batiste where he was talking about his song “We Are.” They had a few ideas that only played once and didn’t repeat or only repeated once. It sounded new. It sounded fresh.
Playing some ideas only once means that those ideas are new and fresh related to the rest of the song.
