I use the pomodoro technique. It can be really useful and the basic idea is incredibly simple. Plan out your tasks. Put on a timer for 25m. When that’s done take a 5m break and repeat. This technique has taught me one very important thing about getting things done; always take your breaks.
Taking that 5m break is just as important as focusing during the 25m that you’re working.
If you work through that break you run the risk of burning yourself out temporarily and getting tired or bored. That will hurt your workflow more than taking a short 5m break. Take the 5m break. Always. Even when you don’t feel like you “need” it and you still feel motivated to keep working. You’ll come back slightly more refreshed and ready to get things done. Working effectively for 3 hours is better than half-working/half-not-working for the whole day.
If you’re working for more than an hour, I suggest scheduling in a 10m break every now and then. And make sure you account for that break time in estimates for how long it takes to complete a task. You might be surprised at how quickly you can get things done when you do this; I often do.
When I think about practicing an instrument I often think of people that practiced for many many hours a day. 7, 8, 10 hour practice sessions. That’s what comes to mind. I’d never be able to do that. In college I was able to practice 3 to 5 hours a day, but now I have lots of other stuff going on, where that becomes less manageable.
I’ve also learned a bit about practicing since then. Practicing for 3 hours can be great … only if you continually do it. Practicing every day or every other day is more important than the total time of your practice sessions. If you only practice once a month and practice for 10 hours that won’t be as useful as practice every day for 20 minutes. By the end of the month you’ll have practice 10 hours, but doing it every single day will be more useful than one large practice session.
Make your goal incremental progress. Continual little steps. Rather than large steps.
Practicing every day, even if for only 5 or 10 minutes. That’ll help more than large practice sessions that are much more spread out. You’ll get rusty. You’ll need to review ideas you’ve already worked on.
Okay I know this title sounds funny. But I’m serious. Throw some dirt on your computer as you’re making music … okay. No don’t do that.
But what I mean is add some grime to it. It doesn’t need to be super pristine playing to be useful and to sound good. Rick Beato has a video about “perfect music” where he talks about everything being quantized. I listen to a lot of electronic music, so I definitely hear my fair share of perfectly quantized music.
But if I’m making my own music I don’t perfectly quantize everything. I want it to sound natural and like a human made it. So often I’ll play it in myself and adjust it.
Or if I’m playing an instrument on something I won’t edit out some of the “mistakes.” If there’s some slight noise from the guitar or some slightly sloppy playing on piano I’ll leave it in.
Now of course this needs to be done with a lot of discretion because you want to get the desired result. If there’s too much slop then it’ll just sound like a poor performance. But if you’re playing electronic instruments then the tuning will already be absolutely perfect (unless you adjust it) so then maybe having some notes that aren’t perfectly quantized can add some humanity to your music.
This is one of the reasons why I haven’t been a fan of guitar sample libraries a lot of the time. They sound too good. There isn’t enough slop in the playing for them to sound realistic. If you’re playing guitar, no matter how good your are, there’s going to be some extra noise. Maybe that’s string sounds. Maybe that’s the sound of the pick attacking the string. Maybe it’s in between chords where you have some tiny amounts of noise. Stuff like that is exactly what makes it sound human. And without it, it sounds robotic.
You can notice this with string libraries too. A string library will sound like a perfect string section, but that doesn’t sound real … because it’s not real. No matter how good every single player in that string section is, they’ll never start at exactly the same time. They’ll start close enough together where it sounds like one group, but they won’t be exactly to the millisecond starting at the same time. This goes for intonation too. They won’t be playing exactly 440Hz.
And you don’t want them to be doing that. Because then they’ll sound like violin playing robots. They won’t sound human.
You want them to sound human. That’s one thing that’s so enjoyable and emotional about music is that it IS human.
So then if you’re creating music, add some dirt into it to make it sound more human.
Here are a few ideas I like to use:
Play everything in
Play a real instrument on it, even if it’s a shaker
If you have an electric piano use a sound from there and record it
Record “room noise” yourself and add it in
Add a sample that you’ve recorded yourself … yes even if it was recorded on a phone
Sing a line and layer that in
Use your phone to record something, but lower the volume a little bit so it’s not front and center
With strings – add multiple layers
Record yourself on violin. Even if you’re bad the noise of the bow will help.
Use a second sample library and play that in a second time so that you have two different attacks and two sets of mod wheel data
Layer in a cheap string patch
Record each section separately – violins are on one track, violas another, cellos yet another, basses another
I hope that helps you create some more realistic and more human music.
I like writing about listening to music because it’s how music is consumed, but it’s also accessible to more people. Not everyone can play an instrument. Not everyone can produce music or write music. Many more people can listen to music.
So music is patterns.
The analogy of music as a language is tired and old and boring, but it does apply here. In the same way that certain words are reused and sentences have a structure, music has different pieces that are reused and songs have structures. This is something you can listen for.
To put it simply you’re listening for anything that you’ve heard before. Maybe that means you’re trying to see if you can recognize instruments. Maybe that means you’re listening for any repeated material within a song. Maybe you’re listening for if there’s any musical material you’ve heard in other songs. All of those apply here.
All you’re doing is listening for repetition. I often find this helps songs become much more easy to follow. Especially if it’s a genre of music that you don’t listen to often.
This alone can make a lot of classical music more approachable. Sometimes it can sound a little complicated, especially music written after the 1900s, but this idea should help. Music has repetition. At least most music does.
Try to hear that repetition. It might not be super easy at first, but eventually it’ll get easier.
You might not even need to really listen all that hard to hear repetition because of how often music has repetitive ideas.
That’s how I’ve been listening to Paul Hindemith’s string quartets.
They’re often harsh and have a lot of counterpoint, but if I go into listening to them with the idea of, “I’m just listening for if anything repeats”, then I’ll be able to much more easily follow them.
I’ve recently started listening to the Black Keys. Originally I didn’t think that I’d enjoy their music very much. I’ve heard, and played, a lot of different rock music and ended up having a bit of a grudge against certain types of rock music. Sometimes it was the singer, or the guitar tone, or the scales, or the speed, or whatever random thing that made me right away not give the music a genuine shot. Sometimes it was because of the person that told me to listen to that band … and sadly (and embarrassingly) had nothing to do with the music at all.
But I tried listening to the Black Keys.
And I didn’t just listen to an album once. I listened to two albums, multiple times. I really made sure I gave their music a shot. Because I know that often people enjoy music that is familiar to them, I wanted to give it a real shot.
Honestly I was wrong before. I actually enjoy their music quite a bit.
But it took a few tries. Right away I didn’t want to listen to their music. I only analyzed pieces of it. And once I was done analyzing pieces of it, it became a little less interesting. Almost as if I wanted to make it uninteresting to myself so that I could decide not to listen to it.
But after giving it a real shot; I’m a fan. Their music isn’t groundbreaking no. I’m not hearing chords I’ve never heard before. But I’m hearing guitar riffs that I haven’t heard before.
I’m hearing ideas similar to Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, but played in a more modern style. I’m really enjoying it. I like the straightforwardness of the grooves and the guitar riffs. I like the way they use pentatonic scales and how many different guitar riffs they’ve managed to make with just that one scale.
So my recommendation for today is to find a piece of music in a genre you don’t think you like and really give it a chance. Listen to it multiple times and try to get into it.
Often when trying to get better at something progress, at some point, starts to slow down. At the beginning there will be huge improvements and progress will happen quickly. Eventually that slows down, but that doesn’t mean progress is stopping.
In order to see that progress you’re going to have to zoom out a little bit. You can’t look from day to day anymore, or week to week. Look from month to month. And even larger than that; year to year.
Then you’ll start to see the progress. What were you playing or doing a year ago? What are you playing or doing now?
I even notice this in my own music. I’m putting together some new songs that’ll be released soon and comparing the music production to my album Expanding (An Electric Symphony), there’s a huge difference. The compositional technique is a little different, but the main difference I can notice is how much better I’ve gotten at music production and music synthesis.
That album was released just over three years ago. That’s three years of making music and producing music in between. I’ve made tons of songs in that time. Many of which have never and will never be released, but they were still practice. They still helped me improve.
So if you’re trying to get better at something or feel like you’re stalling try to zoom out. Then you’ll likely be able to see some progress.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about listening to music. I always think about music, and because of the public health crisis I’ve been thinking more about music than usual. But I’ve mainly been thinking about listening to music recently. How to better follow music. How to better notice what’s going on in a piece of music. How to listen with more detail.
I think a lot of those things can be improved simply from listening. Listening with some intent and purpose, as well as listening to notice things. Trying to pay attention to different things in music, and listening to pieces of music multiple times to really make sure you can follow them, can improve those things.
It’s a bit of an experiment I’m doing with myself. I’m going to take different pieces of music and listen to them multiple times and see what I can pick up simply from listening.
But the catch is that I’m not listening to analyze them in the exact same way I’d analyze the sheet music. I’m trying to listen simply as a listener. As someone that enjoys music. Not as someone that writes music. That’s going to be a struggle, but I think it’ll help me better appreciate certain types of music because I won’t be thinking, “oh yeah okay that’s a pentatonic riff. The song’s in 4/4. There are all of these instruments and the singer is mostly singing the first, second, and third scale degrees.”
I’m trying to turn that off, but still pay attention to where the music goes; to listen more broadly.
What I’m guessing will happen is I’ll start to listen to the form of the song more. I’ll listen for sections and big changes, motifs, and how different ideas are changed and varied.
Those are all things any listener of music can pick up. And those are things that are present in all forms of music.
I’ll post results in a later post. I think you can pick up a lot simply from listening.
I’ve been listening to Paul Hindemith’s 3rd string quartet recently and it’s a little hard to follow, even for me. I can normally follow most classical music, even Schoenburg’s 12 tone music, but I didn’t want to do any previous research before listening to Hindemith’s string quartets.
And I’m trying to make a mental map of the form in my head simply from listening. This means I’m trying to imagine what different sections there are in the music, as well as what order they are played.
Now I know a common form for the first movement of a string quartet, sonata, or symphony is sonata form. So I used that previous knowledge while listening. I knew what to listen for; what to pay attention to. I knew that I’m listening for two distinct themes and I’m listening for an exposition of both of the themes and a development section where those themes are varied and changed and a recapitulation section at the end where the themes are played again almost as they were in the beginning. I had some idea for what to expect.
This can be done with any piece of music.
Listen and compare it in your head to the patterns you’ve heard before in music.
Possibly the easiest aspect of music to do this with is form because you don’t need to have much prior knowledge to pay attention to form, but it can be done with chord progressions, scales, and rhythms as well.
If you know a common form for pop music consists of verses and choruses and possibly a bridge, try to hear those things.
Try to imagine a map of the sections of the song in your head as you listen. And listen multiple times (assuming it’s a song you enjoy) so that you can get a better image of the song.
I find this makes a lot of music more approachable and more “follow-able.” It can be some mental work to do, but as far as I’ve noticed it’s worth it.
I’ve started a new series of videos on my YouTube channel titled “On Listening.” I’ve been wanting to make a series of videos directed towards people that don’t have a musical background and don’t know much about music, but would like to know more. People who would like to appreciate music on a deeper level than just “I think it’s a cool song.”
I’ve got a new song coming out!! It’ll be out on February 5th, which is Bandcamp Friday. Check out my Bandcamp and make sure you’re following me on there.
The album artwork was done by Grace Poole. Check out their portfolio here.