Recently, I’ve reflected a lot on a set of terms that have their origins in Greek mythology: the chronos/kairos distinction. Apparently, the greek had two words for time: chronos and kairos.

• chronos: linear, sequential time
• kairos: numinous, qualitative time

Origins in Greek Mythology

Before going into the actual differences and some ideas on how to experiment with chronos/kairos, let’s briefly dive into the fascinating world of Greek mythology to get some additional background information.

Greek mythology is rather rich and colorful. Ancient Greek Gods like Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Poseidon etc. come to mind. All of them had their own sphere of influence as well as characteristic traits. For example, Zeus the ruler of Mount Olympus wielded his signature thunderbolt and was considered not only wise, just and prudent, but also easily angered. Especially famous are his many affairs with various nymphs and even mortals that he consummated through his rather creative transformations and incarnations: swan, ant, bull, golden shower?!?

Half-gods like Heracles (aka Hercules) and Achilles live on in proverbs like “Herculean effort” or “Achilles’ heel”. Human heroes like tricky Odysseus and his adventures as described by Homer in the Iliad and especially the Odyssey are also familiar to most.

Chronos/Cronus Ambiguity

Initially, Chronos was the personification of time. Think of an old, wise man with a long, grey beard, similar to Father Time. Then there was the Titan Cronus who ruled the cosmos. In order to protect his rule, he had the habit of devouring his children. Finally, his wife Rhea got tired of that and hid the latest male offspring (Zeus) right after birth. She tricked Cronus into eating a rock instead. When Zeus grew up and was strong enough, he led a victorious revolt against his father Cronus and became the new ruler of the Universe.

Things get somewhat messy and ambiguous due to the fact that the Romans imported a ton of the Greek Gods and made them their own – like Jupiter, Venus or Saturn. Especially from the Renaissance onwards, lots of artists took inspiration from the colorful history and themes the Graeco-Roman mythology offered and combined and merged subjects together like in the case of Chronos and Cronus.

Why Is It Important to Know This Particular Lens?

Now what’s the point of all this? Who cares about the old Greek Gods anyways – and so what if there are two different words for time? Time is time and that’s it. Moments are special whether there’s a word for it or not.

The words might “just” be the labels, correct. As Alfred Korzybski (the founder of general semantics) famously popularized the idea that the map is not the territory, I’d argue that you still might get a lot out of this chronos-kairos distinction. And knowing the words, definitions and the what’s what is the first step.

In a way, these words are shortcuts to new mental models. Each mental model can be used like a lens to look at something differently. Sometimes this can lead to new insights, even different behaviors. All from selecting the right mental model for the task/problem at hand. Another helpful metaphor might be to view mental models as tools. And like in handiwork, it’s important to choose the right tool for the job at hand.

Definitions

So we have chronos for the linear aspect of time. Think of the word “chronometer”. Think of the measurable and quantifiable aspect of time. The dentist appointment is next Tuesday at 10:30. You practiced for two hours yesterday. Dinner tonight at 18:30? Four more weeks until event x.

Numbers, sequences, linearity. And like the Titan Cronus swallowing his children, linear time relentlessly continues marching on, devouring the present and future.

Kairos on the other hand is about the quality of time, the right time and about opportunities that might not come again. Being at the right place at the right time. Think serendipity, chance and flow state. However, it’s not just about huge opportunities that have the potential to radically change your life. No, it can be something simple like experiencing a beautiful sunset, spending a few minutes on a clear night watching the stars and reflecting on your place in this vast universe. If you are a parent, a smile from your child. A cup of high-quality tea. Feeling appreciation and gratitude for being alive. Those can be (beautiful) kairos moments as well – if you let them.

Clarifying that chronos-kairos difference lets you make a finer distinction between the various states of time you are in. In our hyper-productivity-obsessed world people have been conditioned to think mostly of the chronos aspect of time.

You Can’t Manage Time

• Time is the great equalizer.
• Everybody gets the same 24 hours a day.
• Don’t waste time.
• Time is money.

With proverbs like these, no wonder people get obsessed with time management and try to save time or squeeze the most out of it. The problem is, you can’t manage time. You can only manage yourself and the activities you do during the time that is available to you.

Saving time is also only possible in a rather indirect way. With e.g. money you can put money away and let it accumulate. That’s not possible with time. Time will be gone whether you use it for big or small stuff. So you can only save time by not wasting it on insignificant activities. Time is not money – time is more important: time is life.

So how do we get the most value out of our time?

Action Step: Questions to Ask Yourself

A helpful activity is to regularly ask yourself:

• Am I in chronos or kairos right now?
• Which kind of time-feel is more appropriate for the current task/activity?
• What can I do to facilitate the switch?

It’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that chronos=bad and kairos=good. Chronos and kairos, like the two sides of the same coin, belong together. You actually need to master both. The better you can deal with chronos the more prepared you are for taking advantage of kairos.

Just becoming aware of the different qualities of time – and your own states of mind/energy – can already help you detect issues that you might want to change or at least give a second look. Then you can make the necessary adjustments to your schedule, to your planning, to your preparedness in order to capture any opportunities.

For instance, the corporate-style calendar management of scheduling meetings and thinking in one-hour time slots is not the best way to work for us musicians. At least not for the actual creative work. For creative pursuits we need to be able to immerse ourselves. To literally lose ourselves and let go of time.

Often we need a warming-up period for the creative juices to start flowing. If there’s an appointment/meeting scheduled for two hours from now, it’s difficult to even get going with our creative project. We know of that upcoming appointment. It’s occupying our mind and hanging over our head like the sword of Damocles. (Ha, another Greek anecdote ftw.)

Let’s say we still manage to get into that elusive flow state. Quicker than we want, time’s up and we have to go to our appointment. It’s frustrating because we interrupt the creative process. And if we let this happen a few times, we even might develop a kind of subconscious block where we won’t get creative ideas anymore in case we don’t have enough time available to us. Not helpful.

So what can you do to avoid this?

Create Space in Your Calendar

As much as possible, let go of meaningless activities and busywork. I realize that’s not easy and some busywork can’t be avoided, but maybe you can at least minimize the damage by rescheduling it, so it doesn’t get in the way of your important creative work. If possible, schedule similar activities together – like putting appointments/meetings back-to-back on the same day. Or schedule them for the late afternoon when creative energy is lower anyways. Keep longer periods of time free for creative projects. And obviously, make creative work a priority and actually schedule it in your calendar with enough time to immerse yourself.

Batch admin tasks like e-mail processing, paperwork, file organization etc. together. Personally, I have trained myself to classify projects/tasks in my task manager. I label things as either creative or admin/maintenance. This way I can then easily filter and batch-process similar activities at the appropriate time.

Action step: go over your calendar and reschedule activities by type. In essence, you create blocks of time that are dedicated to specific activities. Therefore, this technique is often called “time-blocking” in productivity circles. Time-blocking helps you avoid the switching cost when you constantly change the type of actions you do. And when you have large blocks of time available for creative projects, you then can get into the important flow state to make the most out of that time.

Use Your Circadian Rhythm to Your Advantage

Another area where huge gains are possible with comparatively little effort is to use your own circadian rhythm to your advantage. Over the course of the day, your energy level changes. Observing your energy states for a few days/weeks is a good investment of your attention. Once you’ve identified some patterns, try to match your activities to your energy levels. Don’t “waste” your highest energy hours on mundane, low-level admin type work. Save that stuff for times when your energy is naturally low(er). If you feel freshest in the morning, that’s where your highest priority work should go. Obvious, right?

This is where the concept is so helpful. Just by knowing that there is a right time, you have a mental model and know what to look for. Matching your activities to your energy level then lets you accomplish more with less effort.

Experiment with directly launching into writing/producing right after waking up. Maybe you are at the freshest without any outside input disturbing and influencing your innermost creative force. It’s also possible that you are a slow(er) starter and need to ramp up. That’s fine, too. In this case, create a morning routine that starts with a brief meditation, a slow breakfast, playing some Bach pieces, a short work out etc. Whatever works for you. Develop a routine that helps you center yourself and get ready for the day. Then launch into your creative work.

Most of my teaching takes place in the afternoon. Younger students happen to be at school during mornings. This lets me use the mornings for creative stuff when my creative energy is the highest. I do a ca. 40 minutes long morning routine (meditation, QiGong, light exercise, journaling, followed by a short music-fundamentals practice routine using the apps I featured in this article) for priming purposes before I launch into track production, writing or similar creative stuff. I don’t check e-mail until at least 11:30, so I don’t occupy mental RAM with other people’s agendas.

Exploit Motivational Bursts

Let’s say I scheduled a music production session for the time between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm. However, my mind is bubbling over with ideas for a new article to write because I started to read a book that provided valuable insights.

I definitely would change my plan and start to work on the article even though my pre-planned calendar entry says music production. Why? Because I want to capture that initial burst of inspiration, those fresh ideas. When inspired, things just flow and you get more done. In a flow state you can accomplish higher quality in higher quantity with less effort – so you need to seize the opportunity when it presents itself.

If the music track production had a set deadline in place and involved a client, things would look a bit differently. Of course I’d then need to focus on the client work to deliver what I promised on time in the best possible quality. In this scenario I most likely would start a voice recorder app on my phone and do a quick brain dump where I’d capture the main points of my inspiration so that would be saved and I would have my mind/attention free to focus on the work at hand.

Caveat: this does not mean you easily let yourself off the hook. Feeling “inspired” to binge-watch a Netflix show does not count. Only allow yourself to switch to similar scope projects. Writing an article or book chapter vs. painting vs. producing music etc. Similarly, I have no qualms switching between various admin tasks and/or chores. Cleaning out the garage vs. scanning in and processing paperwork – both are non-creative tasks that do need to happen at some time, but in general it doesn’t matter so much when exactly.

Optimize Your Environments

Another thing you can do during chronos time in order to prepare for kairos is to optimize the various environments you operate in. The less friction, the better you can focus and make the most out of your time.

• Is your work desk clutter-free?
• Do you have a pen and paper or a shortcut to your notes app ready?
• Do you have the right tools (software, sound libraries etc.) available for the job at hand?
• Is all your software updated and configured?

Get rid of any other distractions, put your phone away or on silent with all notifications turned off and get to work.

Connect Chronos Activities to Kairos Results/Outcomes

I’ve found it also helpful and motivating to connect and map somewhat tedious/boring/mundane activities that are more chronos-related to kairos outcomes.

Remind yourself occasionally of the purpose and the bigger picture. Why are you even doing this? Keep those kairos moments/outcomes in mind and let them alter the way you experience “the suck”. With enough practice you can train yourself to enjoy even the moments of struggle because you know that they’ll lead to a positive outcome in the future.

Mementos

Finally, it helps to have little mementos (photos, journal entries, music tracks that trigger emotions and memories) ready that remind you of those special moments, to get back into that special state of feeling and timelessness. Let the feeling rub off and influence your experience of time. The more you remind yourself of those special times, the more you connect with the feeling, the easier it becomes to recognize. In a way you are honing your senses to tune and calibrate themselves.

Again, chronos and kairos both have their place and it is on us to then make the most out of the time given to us. Thanks for your time reading.

I’ve always liked the elegance and that nostalgic, yearning, melancholy quality in Chopin’s music. The funny thing is that I heard the “Fantaisie” for the first time either by Tony MacAlpine or some other neoclassical shredder. After reading the CD liner notes, I became intrigued and then researched the source. Similar to what happened with one of my other fav pieces, the Adagio by Albinoni (or not?), which I wrote an article about a few years ago: The Albinoni Adagio Mystery.

Anyways, the “Fantaisie” is a virtuosic piece. Arpeggios, runs and speed – all the necessary ingredients of a virtuoso showcase. But there are also extremely beautiful lyrical and flowing passages.

Chopin is such a master. Due to his deep understanding of the piano and the idiomatic writing many of the passages actually are not as difficult as they initially seem. Don’t get me wrong, they are still hard to play, especially when you bring them up to speed and try to maintain the required lightness and elegance.

The big hurdle however is the polyrhythm between the left and right hand. Triplets in the left hand accompaniment while the right hand plays 16th notes. It doesn’t look that difficult on paper, but when you haven’t played pieces using that polyrhythm before it’s a frustrating initial experience.

Just Hack It?

While researching lots of performance and tutorial videos to get a better understanding, I couldn’t help but notice lots of sloppy performances that emphasized speed over accuracy and were full of incorrect rhythms. All you need is a good reference by a true master pianist and that sloppiness sticks out and you can really hear/feel the difference quite easily.

I didn’t want to fall into the trap of “programming” my mind and fingers in wrong patterns and wanted to tackle the polyrhythm hurdle in a more methodical, step-by-step fashion. Especially since it’s a bucket piece, I was definitely willing to go the extra mile to ensure that I’d learn the piece correctly. In the end, what’s the point of taking the effort to learn a piece incorrectly?

Step-by-Step Approach

Definition of Polyrhythm

First, let’s define “polyrhythm” so we are on the same page. A polyrhythm is the simultaneous/parallel application of different rhythms and/or unrelated subdivisions. 8th notes vs. triplets, triplets vs. 16ths etc. There could be various tuplet combinations, but let’s focus on the 16ths-over-triplets rhythm as needed for the “Fantaisie”.

The right hand plays a stream of 16th notes, the left hand accompaniment consists of a steady flow of triplets. Easy peasy, right? No – at least not for me. When you have 16th notes over 8th notes the notes nicely land together. You can synchronize the right hand 16ths easily with the left hand 8th notes. The first 16th note of each beat falls together with the first 8th note and then you have the third 16th note nicely landing together with the second 8th note of the beat. Those synchronization points definitely do help to keep the hands together.

You don’t get that obvious synchronisation when playing 4 against 3. There’s more of a rhythmic tension, which is the effect the composer goes for. So, how to make sure we are applying/playing the correct polyrhythm? There are various approaches possible. Here are all that I have tried.

Mathematical Approach

I started with the mathematical approach. It appealed to the logical/analytical part of my mind. And surely, once you understand something intellectually, it will be easy to apply the theory to practice, right?

Let’s start with the good news. It is fairly easy to understand what’s happening. Triplets are dividing the beat into three equal parts, while 16th notes means that you divide a beat into four equal parts. Therefore, the individual subdivisions land on different places within the beat. In order to control and get a sense of measurement, we have to adjust the underlying grid so we can keep track of the notes.

For that, we need to take the common multiple of 3 and 4 which is 12. Imagine a beat subdivided into twelve parts and put the notes in their correct place:

• the right-hand 16ths fall on 1 – 4 – 7 – 10
• the left-hand triplets fall on 1 – 5 – 9

Hopefully, this makes sense. Now we can place those notes with confidence. We know exactly where the notes are supposed to fall during the beat. Practically, it’s a nightmare though.

It’s almost impossible to count and control whether the hands do perform at the right time. You have to slow down the tempo a lot and therefore lose any sense of beat and feel when you have to count out loud to 12 (for each beat) at such a slow tempo. Additionally, “seven” and “eleven” throw a curve-ball as two-syllable words. All in all, it feels like a math exercise and there’s almost no chance of increasing the tempo while maintaining the control via the counting.

Oh no, are we doomed? Fear not! There are other approaches.

Use of a Mnemonic Phrase

In one of the countless YouTube tutorials I watched I came across the idea of using a simple phrase as a rhythmic mantra of sorts.

“Pass the stinkin’ butter.”

Say that phrase and clap for every syllable! Congratulations, you’ve just played the 4-against-3 polyrhythm.

Yes, it’s a silly phrase. It’s great for memorization though. Easy to remember and surprisingly effective for slow to low-medium speeds. Consider the giggle-inducing silliness effect as a bonus. There are downsides though. It’s still difficult to go beyond a certain tempo. So you are limited by the tempo at which you can recite the phrase without losing the intended rhythm.

Polyrhythm Metronome via an App

In my updated Apps for Musicians/Creatives article, I’ve highlighted the Complete Rhythm Trainer app. Not only is this an awesome rhythmic training course, it also includes a polyrhythm metronome, which is perfect for working on pieces like the “Fantaisie”.

Simply choose two distinctly different drum sounds and a suitable tempo and you get the 4-against-3 pattern played by the metronome.

This helps you to memorize the rhythmic pattern and makes it much easier to then apply the polyrhythm to the piece. Once you start increasing the tempo, a polyrhythmic metronome is worth its megabytes in gold. Instead of splitting your attention on both counting and playing, you outsource the counting to the metronome. The increased focus on playing helps you break that speed barrier more easily and you still have the controlling factor in form of the metronome.

Course by Graham Fitch

I also discovered a YouTube video by Graham Fitch, who talked about how to tackle the “Fantaisie” polyrhythm parts.

I love the reductionist approach of focusing the left hand on the synchronization points where both hands fall together. This reduced version actually sounds surprisingly complete already and is quite pleasant to play. The better you feel those anchoring synchro points, the easier it is to feel (and correct) when you fall off adding the in-between notes.

And isn’t that bicycle analogy (starting at 4:21) great?

The video is part of a course that you can buy for 11.98€. If you are interested in the piece, I can definitely recommend it. It’s a good price for a course by a highly qualified teacher who also happens to be a great communicator. I don’t get paid for my recommendation. I bought the course myself and the only downside I can think of: not the whole piece is demonstrated and dissected. But what’s covered is insightful and extremely helpful.

Practice Recipe for the “Fantaisie Impromptu”

Here’s my practice “recipe”, the approach I am using to learn this piece. Of course, the traditional, standard approaches have their place. I definitely started with practicing hands separately.

I use “no-rhythm practice”. This means I ditch rhythms initially and focus on the notes exclusively. I identify and recite everything relevant to the note like name and finger used for playing out loud before actually playing the note. This helps me ingrain the process because I have to think first and the reciting, hearing and doing strengthens the connection for me.

Then I do the opposite: “no-pitch practice”, which means I ditch the pitches and only count and play the rhythms while staying exclusively on the same pitch.

I play phrases and parts using the Graham-Fitch approach (demonstrated in the embedded video above), where I focus on the synchronization points (no polyrhythm yet).

I practice the actual polyrhythm passages and either use the silly catch phrase or the polyrhythm metronome. With the goal to internalize the sound/feel of the 4-against-3 polyrhythm pattern.

I continuously repeat segments playing both hands together, so that finger memory can kick in due to the focused repetitions.

I alternate slow, consistent practice with speed bursts to challenge myself (bicycle analogy) which helps to tackle the especially difficult parts. There’s always that safety net of the more comfortable speed catching me in case I fall.

With adaptations you can use that recipe not only for the “Fantaisie”, but also for other pieces that use polyrhythms.

I still have quite a long way to go before I feel like I am competently playing the piece and mastery will take even longer, but I definitely feel closer to my goal with a clear roadmap of what to do. I hope this breakdown helps you tackle challenging pieces on your own bucket list.

Databases? Seriously? What is this all about and why would you need this? Let me ask you a few questions:

• If somebody finds out you play an instrument and asks you to play something for them and your mind goes blank … what do you play?
• Do you have a plan on how to improve on your instrument? Do you know what exercises/pieces to practice? In which order?
• Do you have quick access to all your relevant information? Can you quickly pull up the exercises, sheet music, repertoire pieces etc.?
• You know you have the perfect exercise/piece for a student somewhere – but don’t know where that elusive somewhere is?
• You’ve just purchased a plugin/VST because it was such a great deal, only to later realize that you’ve already purchased the same plugin two years ago and had totally forgotten about it.
• During some soul-searching moments you ask yourself why you keep getting analysis paralysis when looking at your 17 SSL console emulations and 12 EQ and 26 compressor plugins. Where are the times where you simply focused on the music?

Welcome to the club! I’m not making fun of you, although you have to admit it’s a somewhat hilarious situation. We have more choices and tools available than ever, yet it’s getting more difficult to simply focus on creating. Guess why?!

In this article I’ll share some general strategies as well as step-by-step breakdowns of how to set up resource databases without actually using clunky database applications. So no need to worry – we won’t have to put on jackets with elbow patches to channel our inner engineer.

We’ll stay in somewhat semi-nerdy territory and the concepts and tools to actually do that stuff are easy to use and accessible.

Tools and Use-Case Overview

• The most important tool is the right mindset.
• You’ll need a note-taking app. I use Evernote. (I’ll discuss some caveats later on).
• You’ll need to think about your storage system. Either set it up locally or in the cloud.
• Optional, but highly recommended, are a text-expander software and/or a StreamDeck USB device.

Let me present five use cases for a resource database (related to music) that I’ve implemented over the last few years.

• a repertoire-piece database
• VST-/sound-libraries database
• manuals database
• music-magazine database
• music-/teaching-resource database

Tools

The first step: realizing that there is a problem and we need to fix something. Again, don’t worry about technicalities – no major nerdiness or programming skills are required. Remember the comforting subtitle “Without Using a Clunky Database Program”!

It’s definitely possible to use something like Microsoft Access or create a SQL database of some sorts. The main issues I see with those specialized tools is that in most cases you need to “design” the database structure (which tables to use, what the relationships are etc.) in advance. And it’s somewhat difficult to make changes after a while. So there’s a high chance of messing something up and abandoning your work in progress.

Evernote

Instead, I propose using a notes app like Evernote and creating your own highly flexible “database” there that is tailored to your needs in a very practical way. Simply implement a modular approach where the individual items are granular notes and the centralized overview develops because of the way you structure and organize the individual data points.

That resulting clarity is a creativity-enhancing, liberating thing of beauty.

I’ve been using Evernote since 2009. As I mentioned in my apps article, the company did mess up the roll-out of their new version. Bugs, slow speed, missing/removed features compared to the existing version. I am still using the legacy version and am waiting for them to iron out the kinks. They’ve made progress already and are releasing updated versions, so over time, the new version should (hopefully) be stable and on par with the legacy version including all the required features.

But the use cases I’ll be describing here should work with lots of other notes apps as well. So, if you already use an app, try to adapt my suggestions to your existing program – no need for immediately jumping ship to another app.

In most cases, your notes app will automatically serve as a (cloud) storage solution. If you don’t trust the cloud or use a notes app with storage limits, you might have to think about either keeping everything local or getting some additional cloud storage (Sync, Drive, Dropbox etc.). Either way, make sure to have a solid back-up process in place.

FastKeys and StreamDeck

The last two (optional) tools I suggest are a text expander and StreamDeck. For text expansion I use a powerful, yet inexpensive (19$) tool called FastKeys. You can create macros, store snippets of text that get “triggered” when firing off a pre-defined key combination, launch programs etc.

A bit more expensive, but highly useful for many scenarios is Elgato’s StreamDeck. It’s a hardware USB device that has physical buttons you can press that then trigger actions. Best of all, the buttons can change according to what program/app you are in. They also show what they are doing thanks to the LED display.

Start a timer, launch a program or execute a complex macro command in your DAW consisting of multiple action steps by simply pressing a button. Best of all, you don’t need to remember those tedious key commands that are often different depending on what program you are in – all thanks to the programmable LED buttons.

I have two of them. One for my internet work PC and one for my audio/music PC. Elgato came out with a bigger model year featuring more buttons and I plan on getting the larger one for my music PC sometime in the future. I can still continue both of the smaller units by cascading them on my internet PC. They do work in tandem.

Affiliate disclaimer: the link to Amazon is an affiliate link. Should you choose to purchase via my link, Amazon pays a commission at no extra cost to you. This helps to off-set the costs to run this site and I highly appreciate your support.

Enough with the prerequisites. Let’s dive in. I’ll start with the easiest use case and we’ll slowly work our way up to the more elaborate and complex scenarios.

Repertoire Database

How many pieces of music are you actually able to play? You are put on the spot and someone “demands” that you play something for them, anything, what would you play? Or would your mind go blank? Wouldn’t it be great to quickly open a note on your phone of all the pieces you’ve mastered and simply make an appropriate selection?

Another benefit: instead of working hard on a piece to only let it slip through the cracks and forget it while chasing the next shiny piece, you regularly brush off the cobwebs and keep it in your repertoire. No more having to relearn a piece all over again. Avoid that sad activity by simply playing the pieces once in a while to keep them fresh and under your fingers.

Again, this is probably the easiest “problem” to solve. You could simply start a spreadsheet where you keep track of all the pieces.

Since I use Evernote as my keystone app, I’ve created three notes in my “musicianship” notebook. One for my acoustic guitar pieces, a second note for my electric guitar repertoire and finally a note for my piano pieces. I’ve separated the guitar repertoire into acoustic and electric simply due to space/better visibility reasons. This way I can also use additional fields for links to playbacks and other various resources.

Title and artist/composer column are quite self-explanatory. I use the resource/notes column to add links to inspiring YouTube renditions, tutorials or to other Evernote notes with the sheet music or playback files. I can also add notes to myself of what to improve, other ideas and commentary.

I regularly review the notes to add new pieces to my musical bucket list, move the pieces to the “working on” table once I start the piece for real, and finally to the mastered table when I feel I know the piece. Then I just make sure to regularly play through the repertoire pieces to avoid forgetting how to play the piece.

VST/Sample Library Database

If you produce music on your computer, I highly recommend you create something similar for yourself. There are many benefits to this:

• avoid unnecessary purchases
• learn to know your tools
• collect knowledge in a centralized location
• find inspiration

Before diving into creating this database for yourself, think about what information to track and design a template note. What’s important to you? Price? Download/purchase/installation date? How about a link to the manual? The company website sales/description page? Serial number? Relevant notes and keywords?

The template note doesn’t have to look pretty. You’ll spruce it up over time.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon I’ve spent 2-3 hours to feed my initial database. I simply started with my archive hard disk where I keep all the installers and went through each directory. I duplicated my basic template note for every VST/sample library and renamed it according to the following naming scheme: company name library name

• Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2
• UVI Falcon 2
• Orchestral Tools Modus
• VSL BBO Ganymede
• Spitfire Audio LABS Granular Whalesong

The result: a separate “sample libraries/vsts” notebook in Evernote that is filled with all the synths, fx plugins, sound sets, loops etc. that I own.

I’ve even added the Presonus Studio One and Reason 11 Suite stock plugins. The main thinking behind that is that I view each plugin as a separate tool and I want to capture my thoughts and workflow hacks that I discover over time in my personal centralized knowledge base. In case I haven’t used a plugin in a while, I simply take a look at my notes and get reminded of some killer feature or what makes the plugin special.

Links to YouTube tutorials can be especially helpful and inspiring. No more hunting through bookmarks or wasting time on searching for specific information only to get distracted and pulled into watching something completely different and irrelevant. Has this ever happened to you or am I the only one? This way, the information is right at my fingertips.

Initially, I planned on tagging the notes, but then decided against it. I simply add the relevant keywords right into the body of the note. I can still find the note using Evernote’s powerful search without having to create and maintain a complex tagging system that would clutter up the tags that I’d rather keep lean and focused for all my other notebooks.

The system I use is fairly simple: I only add the keywords that I’d like this note to show up for. Think of your future self: you have a serious deadline for a project and are desperately looking for the right sounds. What are the highlights of that particular plugin/library? Add those keywords (and only those) and future self will be grateful.

Obviously, your database will start as a thin skeleton, but if you consistently add to it and feed it information, it will turn into a powerful beast.

Save Money – Reduce GAS

Before you spend money on a no-brainer deal: check your database first! Do you already have that product? No sense buying the same product a second time, right?

Also check by doing a quick search for the relevant keyword or function that sound library/VST/fx would fulfill. If your “optical compressor” search returns seventeen results, you might reconsider your purchase. Would optical compressor #18 truly be that different and make your music sound so much better? Wouldn’t those 29/49/99$ be better invested into another area or maybe even just saved? (gasp) Blasphemy, I know.

Personally, my GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) has been quite reduced and I have noticed that I make more strategic purchases whenever I follow my own advice and check with my database first.

Master Your Tools and Get Inspired

You’ll also learn to better use the tools you already own. By working with what you have, collecting all the tips and workflow improvements, you’ll get more out of what you have and improve your skills as well. You won’t be that dependent on buying more stuff.

Whenever you are staring at a blank DAW screen and don’t know where to start, simply do a quick database search using the keyword for the mood you are after. Then pick a random VST/library off the list that you are presented with. Chances are it’s something you would not have had in mind initially – and probably would not have picked via your DAW plug-in browser or wading through your various hard disk sample folders.

This way, you’ll begin from a new starting point and keep your writing fresh and inspired. Just don’t forget to add any notes about workflow tips and discoveries to your database.

Music-Manuals Database

This nicely ties into the VST database and is easy to set up. Simply create a separate notebook for all your music manuals. Upload/port all your manuals to this centralized collection point.

I use the simple naming convention: product name – developer

• Omnisphere 2 – Spectrasonics
• Kontakt – Native Instruments

In some cases, there are multiple PDFs involved. I simply add a qualifier like “Installation Guide” or “Quick Tips” to the title. If a product becomes outdated, e.g. due to a new version, I add the tag “obsolete” to the old manual. Finally, interlink the manual and the workflow notes. This way, you can quickly navigate between those two notes.

Get into the habit of opening your resource database when working on a track. If you get stuck somewhere and don’t know how a specific feature works, open the manual. You’ll actually do that more often because the manual is readily available in your database. No more hunting for it through a maze of hard drives and nested folders.

Add any important workflow discoveries to your resource note and soon you’ll have a valuable personal knowledge base.

For more strategies on how to tackle lots of manuals, read my article about exactly that – Read the Manual!

Music-Magazine / Music-Resource Database

I’ve already written about creating an index for my (then) huge music magazine collection in an older article – Use Evernote to Quickly Find Anything in Your (Music) Magazine Collection. I scanned the cover and index pages of my guitar magazines to quickly get access to all the valuable resources like workshops, interviews, transcriptions, licks etc. All thanks to the OCR (optical character recognition technology) and Evernote’s awesome search abilities.

Well, I have to say that things have progressed a bit further. I don’t have a (physical) music magazine collection anymore. I scanned all the magazines and digitized them. This was a huge help when moving house three years ago (not so much schlepping). It’s also nice to have more space.

All the content is now available in digitized form and quickly searchable via restricting the search using the tags for “cover” and/or “index”. Then I simply open up the note that contains the full PDF magazine. So it works great for the times when I know exactly what I want. Paganini’s 24th Caprice – sure.  A student wants to learn Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” – no problem.

But what about those situations where I want to work on a specific technique like string-skipping or hybrid picking? Sure I could do a search, but with such broad terms the results become almost unusable. Generic terms show up quite often in a full 80-100-page PDF and it’s rather tedious to flip through the digital pages to verify whether something could be useful to me. And restricting the search to my index pages alone would not uncover everything and lots of extremely helpful articles and workshops would stay invisible to me simply because the search term was not used in the short blurb on an index or cover page.

Over time I toyed with the idea of “separating” all the articles etc. from the magazine and saving them as individual entities. I imagined going through each magazine and saving the relevant bits (minus the ads) as individual PDF files.

This would add another layer of granularity. All interviews would end up in a separate notebook. So would the transcriptions, the workshops, the licks. I could then search in the relevant notebook and with a solid naming convention and tagging system in place I could have access to all my resources quickly and easily.

I’ve thought about it for a while and did some initial testing to see how the workflow would be and how much time and energy I’d need to invest. Let me tell you, it ain’t for the faint-hearted. The first few magazines took almost 20 minutes a piece to process. There are lots of decisions to make: should I keep this? What about that column – it’s only 2 paragraphs – too much hassle? What about the reader letters? They could be hilarious. CD reviews? Sometimes you get distracted and start to read an article about one of your guitar heroes. Or you struggle and are undecided about what the best naming convention should be. Once I settled on some “rules” things became easier.

Naming Convention

• for transcriptions: song name – artist/band name – transcriber
• for interviews: article name – interviewee
• for columns: article name – column name – author

It’s actually rather straightforward and the consistency helps when searching for stuff. I can easily find tracks from a specific artist or band simply by searching for the artist in my relevant notebook. If I want to choose a new Classical repertoire piece to work on I could for instance look for the excellent transcriptions Bridget Mermikides has been providing over the years.

Just through the naming system I’ve already built a good granularity into the system. I’ll talk about the use of tags a bit later. Tags kick the system up a few notches and it’s amazing what’s possible.

Now with the basic decisions (how to save, what to save, how to name it etc.) decided on, I still wanted to make the actual process of article extraction feasible. The thought of consistently slaving away for 20-30 minutes/day simply for processing a single magazine was somewhat demotivating.

745 guitar mags = 2 full years of processing one magazine/day. And then there’d still be 800+ magazines of various keyboard and recording magazines waiting for me to be processed.

I can get stubborn and pride myself on dedication to projects, thinking long-term etc. but even to me a minimum of 5 years of data-processing work looked rather mind-numbing and a tad too much.

What to do and how to speed up the process?

The most time-consuming aspect of the process is the actual page selection that needs to happen in order to save an article separately. Unfortunately, that’s something that can’t be automated. There are pages with ads in between longer transcriptions, columns get placed into various sidebars etc. Especially in older magazines from the 90s there were quite interesting layout decisions made by the publishers. Ok, nothing to be done about that. The selection process gets quicker with each magazine you work through, the individual quirks of each publication become familiar and you can get to the point where it’s no big deal to make snap judgements.

The biggest gains and time reductions are possible by semi-automating the titling of articles. Obviously, the actual main-item names will differ. However, certain elements will appear quite often. Take a column like “The One-Minute Lick” or “A-Z of Great Riffs”. Then there are transcribers and column authors who regularly contribute to a magazine. By semi-automating the typing of those recurring elements you can speed things up tremendously.

FastKeys Text-Expander Software

Again, I use a text-expander/macro software called FastKeys. It will make your life a lot easier once you realize its full potential. Basically, a text expander lets you program phrases, sentences, whatever, that get triggered by specified keys and shortcuts. For instance, you could simply type “#sig” (use combinations that are somewhat uncommon so you don’t accidentally trigger the phrase while typing regular words) and out comes your full e-mail signature.

What’s especially cool is that you can set up variables that you can fill with pre-programmed entries you can then choose from. Sounds complicated? It’s not.

For my magazine processing I’ve created a variable for “artist/band”, a variable for “article author” and another variable for “column name”. Whenever I process a magazine and come across an artist where I know there’ll be future entries (Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Carlos Santana etc.) or a regular column/article series and article author/transcriber, I simply add that name to my variables database. It’s a short procedure and only takes a few seconds, but it provides a great return because from now on I’ll never have to type that name again when naming my PDFs.

But the awesomeness is not done yet. Since I also have a StreamDeck, which is a useful USB device that lets you send commands by pressing a button, I’ve configured one button of the Stream Deck to send the trigger for the artist name, one button for the column name and one button for the author name/transcriber.

I don’t have to remember the trigger keys and don’t have to type some weird combination. I simply press the StreamDeck button, FastKeys catches the command and pops up the relevant variable selections. I click on what I want and can quickly breeze through the naming process.

For example: I have selected all the pages that belong to the transcription of “Mozart’s Romance Andante”. I click on “print to PDF” and the “save dialog box” appears. I type in “Romance Andante” because that’s the unique part, but then I press the button on my StreamDeck for “artist/band” and simply click on “W. A. Mozart”. The space and hyphen get inserted as well because I’ve set the variable output in FastKeys to prepend the space and hyphen before the actual output. I click the button for “author/transcriber” and select “Bridget Mermikides” and have my complete title where “ – W. A. Mozart – Bridget Mermikides” was inserted via the StreamDeck/FastKeys combination.

Using this semi-automation process I’m down to 7-8 minutes for processing a complete magazine. This means I can get four magazines done in ca. thirty minutes. It’s still a time investment, but instead of years, we are now talking only months of getting everything completed. Much more manageable and actually rather motivating.

For me personally, I know which magazines are the top priority, where I get the most out of. So, I simply focus on those to get immediate benefits and have something to work with. The rest I can process in batches and bursts over time. And it’s also not 100% necessary to get everything separated. With many magazines, a lot of content has become outdated and there’s no need for me to have gear reviews for some 90s or early 2000 guitar, keyboard or hardware fx unit as a separate article. That stuff I can quickly find anyways by simply searching for that specific brand/model in my scanned index notes. I will simply separate the few workshop articles that are relevant to me so the required effort won’t be as bad.

Just for the sake of completeness: once a magazine is processed I put the 9-15 separate PDF files into my automatic Evernote import folder and they get transferred to my Evernote inbox. I select them all, apply the tags for the month, year and magazine and move them to my “unprocessed” music resource notebook. Then I continue working on the next mag.

At a later stage or whenever I have a bit of downtime and am in the mood, I tackle my “unprocessed resource” notebook. I look at the note, apply relevant tags like, style, difficulty, techniques used, meter, key etc. and move it to the notebook it belongs to.

I separate transcriptions, interviews, articles, workshops and licks. Why is this important? Let’s say I want to improve my legato technique. I could go to my licks notebook and search for “tag:legato” and have all the relevant notes. If I’m in the mood for some Rock, I simply add the “tag:rock” qualifier and my results get filtered more. If I want to see how legato gets used in Jazz, I swap out the Rock tag for Jazz and I have a completely different selection to work on.

But maybe I want to dive deeper into a subject than simply working on some licks. Well, instead of looking at the licks notebook, let’s see what the workshop notebook has to offer. I could first check by using the “intitle:legato” search qualifier. If that doesn’t bring the desired results, I could again search for the tags. Sometimes, authors go for a clever article name, a word-play or pun and the actual technique might not show up in the title. That’s where the personal attention of tagging notes appropriately pays off.

One more use case: an advanced student has problems with a certain technique like string skipping. I can go to my “transcriptions” notebook, look for “tag:string skipping” and “tag:level 4 – advanced” and since I know that he’s into Rock, I can also narrow my results by using that tag as well. Out pop various selections and I then decide that “Colorado Bulldog” by “Mr. Big” might be a fun challenge to work on for my student. And for me, too.

I still have quite a bit of work to do to get all the individual articles separated and sorted. But just the separation step alone will make things a ton more discoverable – even in the basic form of quickly searching in focused notebooks for interviews, workshops, transcriptions etc. The additional tagging can and will happen over time as I use all the various resources.

Get Started!

Phew, what a long article. Hopefully, this has been helpful. Lots of other use cases are possible. But you don’t have to know all potential use cases in advance to get started. Starting is the important step. Once you benefit from your initial mini-database experiments, light bulbs will go on in your head and you’ll suddenly see tons of opportunities to capture and centralize information. Feel free to model my examples and just get going!

The post didn’t go viral (meaning millions of visitors) but pulled in a decent amount of traffic. I’ve received lots of comments and messages and subsequently wrote a follow-up featuring more apps.

Even today there are still people discovering AdvancingMusician via Google for the first time landing on those 2012 articles. I’m not complaining about that, but 9 years later – obviously a lot has changed and it’s high time for an update.

• some apps have been discontinued (I had to remove quite a few broken links in the original articles )
• some are outdated
• some don’t get maintained anymore
• there are better options available
• I’ve developed a more restrained use of my phone

Past Mistakes

With this article update I also don’t want to repeat some mistakes I initially made. Why so specific with the title? Why 12 apps in the URL? What was I thinking?

It’s really difficult to add or remove something from the list when you have such a specific title. Sure, one can always start another article. But in general, I don’t like that kind of fragmentation. It becomes harder to maintain and also somewhat confusing for readers when there are multiple (conflicting) articles covering the same stuff. (Which app do you really recommend now?!?)

Over the years, I’ve also refined and adapted my requirements. I’m less susceptible to gimmicks now.

Please have that in mind when checking out the following list. All the apps presented are my selections to help my personal workflow. I’m not paid to evangelize and don’t have that intention either. I’m simply sharing what works for me. If you’ve already found something different that works for you – great. No need to even try my recommendations.

If your fav app is not on the list, don’t be offended or take it personally. Hey, it’s just an app.

Also, I’m not interested in checking out tons of new apps. An unexpected downside of the old post was that I received a lot of requests from app creators to check out their apps and feature them in my list. I probably will receive another barrage with this new article. If you are an app creator, please know that I do respect your work and all the effort you put into your creation, but I simply don’t have the time, bandwidth and inclination to test apps all day to then rewrite a post in order to feature it.

For the more philosophical aspects of how I use my phone check out this companion article How to (Not) Use Your Phone as a Musician/Creative.

Now that’s out of the way and we can dive into the apps. There is no particular order of importance. All of them are important to me and serve a specific purpose. I’ll briefly describe the how and why for each app. Please keep in mind that I don’t have an iOs device. Many apps probably are available for Apple devices as well and should be fairly easy to find by a quick search in the Apple store.

I’ll start with the pre-installed Google apps. I’m just briefly mentioning them for the sake of completeness with a short blurb about why they are important. IOS users: simply use the Apple equivalent.

Then I’ll present some general apps – not as general as a personal finance app (YNAB is an excellent budgeting method and app – subscribe through my link and we both get a free month) or other life-area apps (meditation, step counter etc.). All of them still tie into the workflow of a musician/producer/music teacher and help make that role easier.

Finally, I’ll showcase the music apps I use all the time.

Pre-Installed Google Apps

Google Calendar

Events, appointments, deadlines etc. You need the overview of all your time & energy commitments. What gets scheduled, gets done.

YouTube

I only use the app for quickly checking or demonstrating a piece of music to a student as described in I Can’t Teach You Anything. For all other use cases (watching tutorials, checking out reviews etc.) I don’t use the mobile app, but rather use the YouTube site via my desktop PC.

Google Maps

For finding your way to a gig or a new student’s place.

GDrive

As a useful file repository (teaching material PDFs and hand-outs). It’s easy to quickly share those files via Gmail or a messenger app like WhatsApp.

Essential General Apps

Video-Chat Apps

For virtual teaching (especially during Covid times) you’ll need a wide variety of video-chat apps to accommodate the needs of your students.

For obvious data transfer reasons I connect my phone to my WLAN. With some of the apps I experience fairly regular drop-outs when my phone briefly dis- and then reconnects to the network. With WhatsApp for instance my students and I can bet on a disconnect every 10 minutes, almost true to the second. It’s no big deal though, we simply hook up again and continue the lesson.

Here’s the list of apps I use ordered by stability from my experience so far:

• Duo – (most likely pre-installed on your Android phone since it’s a Google app)
• Zoom
• Houseparty
• Jitsi Meet
• Skype
• Teams
• WhatsApp

Amazing Marvin

With all the projects and tasks you have to deal with, a project/task manager is essential. However, the quest for the holy grail of productivity can also be a major time-suck. New apps are coming out all the time and it’s possible to waste a lot of time switching from one app to the next, setting up your system over and over again.

There are lots of different productivity schools of thought and you should invest a bit of time tinkering and experimenting with the various systems to find something that clicks for you. Once you find something that works, stick with it.

I’ve settled on Amazing Marvin. It’s extremely flexible and due to a modular approach you can activate (or de-activate) complete concepts like the Eisenhower matrix, time tracking, project/task dependencies, gamification etc. Chances are high that you can set-up a productivity system that fits your workflow.

AmazingMarvin app

Evernote

Evernote is my 2nd digital brain and I use it for capturing ideas, collecting resources, access to student notes, teaching resources etc.

I consider myself an Evernote power user. I track my students’ progress, collect my ideas there, have tons of resources, even scanned in my complete music magazine collection. Evernote helps me run my life. It’s the keystone app and lots of processes revolve around it.

Unfortunately, the update to their latest version has been somewhat of a disaster. Basically, it was almost an alpha version with lots of important features missing. The company also miscommunicated the roll-out. After almost 2 years of building the new version from the ground up with behind-the-scenes update videos, I expected a more stable and up-to-par version. Instead, essential features were (and still are) missing. Hopefully they will be reintroducing those features back into the now unified code base over time.

Fortunately, there is a legacy version available. So I do have the stability that is a must for me. My data is backed-up on multiple PCs. So, after the initial scare nothing has changed for me so far. As long as I have access to the legacy version I’m fine. If Evernote manages to fix their unified code base version – great. If not, I’m safe as long as their legacy version continues to work – no problem.

The quest for alternatives is not that pressing. Worst case scenario: the new version doesn’t get all the core functionalities and the stability I depend on back and access to the legacy version (note sync especially) becomes unavailable. Then I’d have to store my stuff in a conventional data silo (hierarchical style) and think about some kind of meta database for locating my resources. This might be difficult since the native search inside the database has been the killer Evernote functionality for me.

Tedious? Yes, absolutely!
Devastating? – No!

With the knowledge that I’ll be able to cope, let’s cross this bridge once the scenario becomes more relevant and focus on more productive stuff that’s relevant for now.

Evernote app

Sidenote

Many of these apps were already presented in my initial post. I’ve used GCal, YouTube and Evernote way back in 2012. Chances are that the core functionalities, the needs that those apps fulfill, are timeless and will stay relevant in the foreseeable future as well.

Should Google go out of business and GCal or YouTube become unavailable for some reason, it should be quite easy to switch to a different provider/service. GCal for instance – it serves the purpose of a calendar, but if it gets shut down, I’ll simply switch and move on. Other options for calendars are on the market.

I don’t keep important data in GDrive alone. I have back-ups. And even Google with its history of killing off services/products (Reader, Wave etc.) won’t simply shut down and delete all the stuff without notice and the option to export. Right? Google?!?

In general: a bit of paranoia is a good thing when it comes to your data, so make sure to have back-ups of your truly important stuff.

Block Apps – Productivity & Digital Wellbeing

With Block Apps you can restrict access to your apps and there are multiple block options possible:

• completely block all apps for an internet-free/app-free day
• define your distractions and block only those – at specific, scheduled times
• set up a quick widget command with a block for your next pomodoro work session

If you have a tendency to procrastinate or let yourself get distracted easily, blocking yourself from temptations can help you focus.

Block Apps – Productivity & Digital Wellbeing app

Productivity Challenge Timer

This is a pomodoro timer/time-tracking combo with a themed twist. Set up projects (actual clients) or categories like practicing, producing, writing, learning etc. Whenever you do focused work in those pomodoro-style 25 or 30 min chunks of time, start the app timer!

This might sound silly, but it helps to focus and create a sense of urgency.

The app styling with the communist hero of the work design is hilarious and I love the sense of both dismissive and self-deprecating humor the programmer has put into the app.

Don’t you feel special when you initially rank as unrepentant slacker and slowly work your way up to persistent slacker, recovering slacker, depressed drone, demoralized drone and other similar levels of work ethic?

You also earn surprise achievements and might find yourself reading a message like:

• The Next Big Thing – You have worked for a total of ten hours on a project. That macaroni necklace was a work of art.
• Exemplary Conduct – Earned for avoiding a demotion for more than two weeks, either by working hard or, much more likely, by being consistently lazy.

An additional bonus is the stats section so you know how much time went into a project or a category.

Productivity Challenge Timer app

Music Apps

1,700+ words into the article. Time to start with the “real” music apps. Thanks for sticking with me.

I’ve been emphasizing the value of ear training quite a bit on this site. So let’s start with a selection of apps that will help you develop that critical area of your musical development.

Functional Ear Trainer

Lots of people contacted me over the last few years for support for the FET app assuming I’m the creator. However, I’m just a user myself – I only made some suggestions and provided feedback to Serhii Korchan (the developer) as well as text snippets for the documentation and he kindly credited me for that.

If you haven’t downloaded/installed FET yet – what are you waiting for? It’s an essential app for any musician. Just have a look at my articles with more information and strategies on functional ear training: Functional Ear Training, 2 Strategies to Master Chromatic Notes and Get the Functional Ear Training App.

Functional Ear Trainer app

Meludia

This is a recent discovery and an excellent complementary functional ear-training app. Highlights are the pleasing design and the many step-by-step exercises that gradually help you fine-tune your ears.

It’s often a good idea to approach the same topic from multiple angles – in case you get stuck in one app, simply switch to the 2nd app. You’ll basically work on the same stuff but the slightly different implementation and environment might help you get unstuck and keep the momentum going.

Meludia app

Complete Ear Trainer

This app focuses on the more traditional method of interval recognition. With all the emphasis on FET, why am I recommending something else? Look, I’m not into dogma and I don’t subscribe to the idea that there’s only one way to achieve something.

Functional ear training works and provides tremendous benefits. However, traditional interval based ear training works as well and also is extremely valuable. Many people simply shoot themselves in the foot by using shortcuts like “major 6th = My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” or some similar association. This might work in isolation, but you get into trouble later on. Depending on the place within the scale, the feel/effect of the interval also changes and then your mental association crumbles and. even worse, becomes an obstacle. But let’s not throw out the child with the bathwater. Interval recognition is both important and helpful.

This app is extremely well made and the exercise progression and drills are sound. The beginner level lays a solid foundation. The expert mode delves into more advanced areas and extends that foundation. The Arcade mode is for gamified training sessions. And finally, you can even create custom drills for yourself in case you want to focus on a particular interval or chord recognition skill.

The UI is pleasing and the price is ridiculously low. A big thumbs-up to the developer Binary Guilt Software.

Complete Ear Trainer app

Complete Rhythm Trainer

If you want to improve your rhythm you should also check out the Complete Rhythm Trainer. It features the same solid implementation of exercise selection and progression, UI and design as the Complete Ear Trainer. This app starts at the basics and leads you step-by-step to advanced rhythmic concepts. Best of all, it’s not just about theoretically understanding rhythms – you are “tapping” your way from simple to advanced. Simple rhythms, compound and asymmetric rhythms. There are even drills with 2-part rhythms for you to tap onto the screen.

You’ll have drills that “force” you to imitate or read a rhythm. Or “notate” a rhythm played by the app. Swing as well as various tuplet subdivisions are covered as well.

The free-practice mode can serve as a metronome with programmable rhythms, even including 2-part rhythms.

Another awesome bonus is the included polyrhythm metronome which has been extremely helpful to me for working on e.g. Chopin’s “Fantaisie Impromptu”. (A detailed article about how to master the 4-against-3 rhythm is in the works. I’ll include the link here once I publish the article.)

Complete Rhythm Trainer app

Complete Music Reading Trainer

The 3rd and final app in the “Complete Suite” will help you master reading music. You have lots of drills separated into the various clefs with a graduated step-by-step increase in difficulty.

Start out with the notes inside the staff. You then graduate up to 5 ledger lines above/below the staff. Accidentals get introduced one-by-one. You move on to reading key signatures, get confronted with key changes and finally clef changes as well.

Personally, I haven’t even gotten started on the drills with mezzo-soprano or baritone clef etc. – but it’s good to know it’s available in case I ever need to brush up on my alto clef reading.

Only a minor nitpick: sometimes I get slightly disoriented when a note gets lower and I have to move up on the virtual keyboard to hit the correct key/note name. That always disorients me for a moment. However, I don’t know how to better solve this issue. A wider range would make the keys/notes too small to hit and it would become frustrating due to this different issue.

Complete Music Reading Trainer app

Music Speed Changer

Here is an app that can serve as a basic music player. However, the killer functionality is the ability to change the playback speed without changing the pitch. This is great for playbacks that are too fast for students. Simply slow those tracks down by 10-20% and let your students jam to the slower version.

You can also set loop points to let you focus on a specific section.

• Track in a different key?
• Student forgot the capo at home?

Change the key of the audio track in half-step increments. The sound quality is surprisingly good. Audio artifacts at extreme settings are to be expected, but when staying in a “reasonable” range it’s definitely more than adequate.

Music Speed Changer app

Guitar Fretboard Note Trainer

How well do you know the notes on the neck of your guitar? Let’s say I point at the 9th fret of the B-string – how quickly can you name the note? Do you mentally go “Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye” to know what string you are on? And then you move up fret by fret C, C#, D, D# etc. only to start from scratch in case you goof up along the way?

The Guitar Fretboard Note Trainer (by Justin Sandercoe from justinguitar.com) is a good app that helps you resolve your lack of fretboard orientation. There are various exercises that quiz on note location. Dedicate a few minutes/day and you’ll quickly make progress.

Sometimes the sound gets cut off slightly, but that’s only a minor distraction and doesn’t diminish the usefulness.

Guitar Fretboard Note Trainer app

Shameless plug: in the Guitar Yoga series that I co-produced with my buddie Bernhard Beibl (former guitarist of the 7-time Grammy-nominated band Tangerine Dream) we focused a lot on learning the notes on the fretboard.

• a few initial pillar notes in level 1
• all natural notes in level 2
• all notes in level 3

Watch the 1st level of Guitar Yoga for free on YouTube, or get get the full bundle of all 3 levels – 8 hours+ of highly effective warm-up exercises, explanations, playbacks and video play-alongs!

Music Theory – Chords in Keys

Here’s another gem of an app. Quickly:

• What’s the III chord in Ab?
• How about the VI chord in Db melodic minor?
• What’s the IV chord in Eb harmonic minor?
• What are the notes of the chord?
• What are the notes of the scale?

The look of the app is somewhat dated and don’t expect a fancy UI and graphics. Instead, the app is fully focused on helping you drill in the relationships of chords (and the notes they contain) in their parent keys.

Music Theory – Chords in Keys app

Make sure to read the interview with guitarist Stuart Bahn, who is the developer of both “Music Theory – Chords in Keys” & the “Notation Trainer” apps about his epic and very inspiring 1,000 Hours of Practice project.

Notation Trainer

I don’t use the Notation Trainer app that often – I have enough sheet music to challenge myself. But occasionally it’s both fun and beneficial to use totally random notes so that phrase recognition/intuition does not kick in and save the day.

Again, no fancy graphics but an app that’s focused on a single skill and is highly effective for what it’s supposed to do.

Notation Trainer app

iReal Pro

I haven’t used the app during Covid times. At the moment, all my lessons are video-based. Jamming and duet playing does not work due to the latencies involved as well as the challenges of hearing each other via (phone) speakers.

For my own practice, I have access to all my playbacks via my PC/DAW and studio monitors, so there’s no need to use a phone app. However, once one-on-one lessons become feasible again, this app will play a bigger role in my teaching workflow.

Quickly enter in some chord changes for a custom exercise tailored to a student, apply a desired style and instantly have a relevant and custom backing track available.

iReal Pro app

Summary

Look for tools that you can plug into your workflow. Something you have a solid use case for and that helps improve your life by making things easier and more efficient. Avoid gimmicks that only suck your time and distract you from what’s important.

Once you have a working solution in place stick with it. Additional choices become distractions. Yes, maybe there might be apps that do something slightly better – but at what cost?

Don’t underestimate the switching/opportunity costs involved. The time used for installation, comparing of features, as well as getting to know the user interface and functionalities could be better used to actually improve your skills instead.

Again, once you have found something that works, stick with it – avoid distractions.

In the unfortunate case that something breaks, you hit a limit or reach a plateau you can then look for alternatives at that time. However, you’ll have a better, more grounded foundation to make comparisons due to your experience. Your next step will be more educated and therefore with a higher chance for success.

Final Note

I don’t think I’ll change my approach for the near (or even mid-term) future. My current music-related app needs seem to be satisfied and I have more than enough tools to work with.

So, don’t expect a lot of additions/changes to this page. In case something ground-breaking comes up that fundamentally changes my music-app paradigm or improves aspects of my music approach, I’ll update this page, or write a separate article.

We can install apps that can help us:

• run our finances
• manage our tasks
• stay on track to reach our goals
• keep databases of valuable knowledge
• video chat around the globe

Basically, we could improve our effectiveness, productivity, our workflow, manage our responsibilities and learn valuable skills from anywhere – anytime.

But instead we often get suckered into:

• watching silly cat videos (meow, kittie, kittie!)
• low-quality content that is nothing more than an infomercial selling us on something
• attention-robbing apps that “steal” our time, focus and energy with nothing much to show for in return

FOMO

We musicians/creatives seem to be especially susceptible to that. We are curious creatures and we often like (or need) to be on the edge of technology. Just think of our complex DAW set-ups integrating hardware, various controllers, scripts, plugins etc.

We freelance and need to self-market. We run our own website(s) and are constantly looking for ways to promote our art, our services and reach to our audience and/or clients.

So there is a lot of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) involved. What if this new shiny thing will make the difference? What if that next app will make everything come together and (magically) work?

This can have some serious side effects. Our looking into anything and everything leads to a fragmentation of our attention since we constantly get pulled into different directions. And we seriously underestimate or even altogether neglect the switching costs involved.

Filling our time to the brim by constantly hustling might make us feel busy and important, but in the process we are losing time for reflection and the gift to experience downtime and boredom. Yes, boredom. Boredom is a prerequisite and fertile ground to creativity. It lets our subconscious mind mull things over. We digest and marinate the inputs we’ve collected, process them and – once the time is right – create something new.

Loss of Presence

Another reason why it’s important not to constantly look at your phone’s screen: you are missing out on the “real” world around you. The environment, the people …

Instead of deeply connecting and interacting with the real-life people that are around you, the “communication” with some internet entity takes over. Fishing for likes from strangers and the dopamine hit this produces, colors and changes the perception and motivation of everything you do.

For more research into this topic check into the work of Tristan Harris and Cal Newport.

I don’t want to focus on the doom and “dark” aspects too much. Instead, let’s get into some actionable strategies that can help you stay focused on what’s important to you. And I’m not talking about getting rid of your phone altogether or switching to a dumb phone.

There’s no sense or need to go Luddite. Sure, one could then snicker at all the people who get pulled into the vortex of technology and are in the fangs of the corporate tech giants – but how helpful is that when you also lose out on all the advantages a modern smartphone provides?

Let’s set-up our mobile devices so they serve us instead.

Your Digital Philosophy

First, take a hard look at yourself and assess your needs. Define your digital philosophy, ethos and your mission!

• What are your plans with the phone?
• What do you intend to get out of using your phone?
• What are your goals and values?
• Your core philosophy?

Since this is an article on AdvancingMusician, I assume you are a musician/artist/creative. In this context, let me suggest some additional questions to ask yourself:

• What art/works of art do you want to create?
• What artistic legacy do you want to leave behind?
• How can your digital devices help you in your creative pursuits?
• What apps/activities do you need to avoid or replace?

Overall, it boils down to: what’s important to you?

Phone as Tool Instead of Status Symbol

Don’t fall into the trap of viewing a phone as a status symbol. I know, there are the bezels, the high-gloss finish, the huge screen size etc. However, take a serious look at the cost/benefit ratio. Do those features truly warrant 200, 400, 600€ (or more) of additional cost to you? That’s money that you could put aside for a “rainy day” emergency buffer.

Or you could invest into a tool like Omnisphere 2, UVI Falcon 2, the Pro Version of your DAW, a nice hardware controller, a course on a specific skill that will elevate your level. Stuff that you can actually use to create higher-quality art.

You can do (almost) anything with a smartphone in the 200-300€ range. Heck, you can do almost anything with a phone that cost 230€ a few years ago.

I manage my production workflow, access to my resource database as well as my teaching on a Moto G5+ that cost 230€ back in 2017. I’ll continue to do so for as long as the phone stays as reliable as it is. Hopefully, I’ll get at least 1-2 more years out of it. I plan to replace it with a then current phone in the same ca. 250€ price range.

Bonus tip: stash 10€/month away and you have the money for a phone replacement saved in 2 years. Worst case: the phone dies right after the 2 year warranty is up – you can immediately get a replacement because you have budgeted for it. Great peace of mind to know that such a business essential is handled and you don’t need to scramble for all the pennies under the couch.

Listen, I don’t want to prescribe how everybody should use a phone or what is allowed to buy. In no way am I assuming to know the answer for everything or everybody’s situation. If you are a visual artist and truly need the best built-in camera – then absolutely, go for the high-end phone. This article is intended to serve as a reminder (or nudge) for making intentional choices.

Practical Tips

Uninstall Distracting Apps

Remove temptations (social media apps, games – whatever you notice yourself losing time on). If something is not installed in the first place, you can’t waste time – simple as that.

For each other major area/workflow try to settle for one app – the best option. Master the app and learn to use all the features. You’ll get more out of it. By removing choices you also remove mental friction and avoid decision fatigue. No clutter also means that you need less storage and RAM and your device runs faster with less maintenance needed.

If multiple apps are needed for various reasons, that’s ok, too. Due to the Covid pandemic I currently have seven video-calling apps installed. I need them all in order to accommodate my students. Those apps are tools and I don’t waste time on them. I only use them when teaching my students.

Again, what I present are guidelines and suggestions. It’s not my mission to get you to as few apps as possible on your phones. My goal with this article is to help you make intentional choices that let you focus on your music (or other creative pursuits).

Turn Off Notifications

Don’t let your focus get hijacked by some notification. Before you know it you’ve lost your flow and wasted time on some activity that you didn’t intentionally choose.

But what if I miss out on something important? 

If you truly fear that you are missing out on some important message or notification, schedule check-ins at predetermined times. Once you are done working on your most-important projects/tasks for the day, those notifications will still be there waiting for you. You can still deal with them. The difference is that you’ve already accomplished progress on your priorities without getting thrown curve balls changing your trajectory and interrupting you in your creative pursuits.

Block Access

Block yourself from apps that you use compulsively. There are apps that help you do exactly that. Oh, the irony!

I noticed how I tended to mindlessly open Gmail first thing in the morning or whenever I had a short break. So, I’ve blocked myself. No access to Gmail until 11 am. This way, I focus on what’s important to me in the morning instead of getting distracted by other people’s agenda. Another block between noon and 6 p.m to unlearn the compulsive mail-checking during teaching breaks.

I started to make a lot of progress on projects that used to drag on forever, because I had more mental bandwidth and there were no distractions during my most productive time in the morning.

After approximately one month the block became unnecessary – I had trained myself not to check my mail multiple times throughout the day. Instead, I batch-process my inbox twice/day at scheduled times.

I still have a widget/command ready to easily block Gmail and other potentially distracting apps for 30 minutes. This is really helpful for those times when motivation might not be at the highest level and you’d easily let yourself get distracted in order to procrastinate.

Here’s the app I use for blocking access: Block Apps – Productivity & Digital Wellbeing

Choose Supportive Background Image(s)

Another easy quick win is to set up a wallpaper that reminds you to stay focused. This could be a minimalist, calming picture symbolizing order and focus. It could be a photo of your loved ones. Now, do you really want to waste time on some mindless activity or would your time be better spent with them instead? Or at least doing something on your device that helps create a better future for all of you?

How about a wallpaper that literally shows you questions like:

• Is this the best use of my time?
• Do I really want/need to do this?

Or a short mantra/affirmation like:

• Stay focused!
• Keep your goals in mind!

Whenever you unlock your phone, your wallpaper is there to remind you of what’s truly important to you.

Add Intentional Friction

On my device I keep the home screen empty. I rotate various pictures with affirmations, photos and calming landscapes as described above.

One screen to the right is my Google calendar widget with my appointments and scheduled lessons. On the other side is my “productivity” screen. There I have folders with shortcuts to my music-practice apps and the video-chat apps I need for teaching online. There’s also my task-manager-input widget and a folder with shortcuts to my most important Evernote notes like my morning-routine checklist, my daily-review checklist and my student-progress notes.

For all other apps I have to open the app drawer and search for them. This adds enough friction that I don’t just mindlessly open an app. I intentionally have to jump through some hoops and search for it.

Put the Phone Away

When you need time to focus, put the phone in another room. Newsflash: you don’t have to be reachable all the time. Nothing wrong with treating your own priorities with the respect they deserve.

If something is truly important, people will call again or leave a message. You can return the calls later during scheduled breaks.

In case that there are certain people (your boss, husband/wife/kids etc). that you want or need  to be available for at all times – program your phone so that only those calls are allowed and everything else is blocked. Basically, it’s all about creating the distraction-free environment and the procedures that help you focus on what’s important to you.

Schedule Time for Entertainment

Again, I’m not anti-fun, anti-downtime or even anti-cat videos. I’m against missing out on what truly matters in exchange for superfluous trifles.

A strategy that helped me enormously was to schedule the time for intentional “time-suck” activities. This helps to limit the damage due to the fixed amount you allow yourself. Also, when you know there’s time to watch silly cat videos, browse a meme site for giggles, peruse social media etc. later on, you’ll be able to focus better during your “serious” work time.

Give yourself thirty minutes of scheduled “fun” time (YouTube etc.) at the end of a productive day. Initially, this might be something to look forward to and that you use as a reward. Eventually you might get to a point that once the scheduled time arrives, you want to continue working instead.

Don’t do it!

This might seem counterintuitive – but stop working. You made the promise to yourself to recharge and have time for fun. Don’t break that promise. Otherwise a part of your subconscious mind won’t trust you anymore next time you truly need to focus.

Stop working, producing, practicing etc. and enjoy your entertainment time. Maybe over time you’ll upgrade from mindless consumption of whatever internet silliness you gravitate towards to a higher-quality source like watching TED talks instead – or how about going analog and reading a book? (Gasp!)

There are also non-digital activities to choose from like gardening, Yoga, baking etc.

Finally, you could even do: nothing. Be alone with your thoughts. Reflect. Let ideas grow naturally, giving them time to evolve. Don’t drown them by constant input. This is a tough idea to accept in our modern, hyper-productive society, but again, boredom can be the necessary fertilizer for great breakthroughs.

Final Words

There’s life beyond screens. Especially for us “modern” musicians with lots of DAW-production time involving multiple screens and highly-demanding focused work for hours on end – it’s more important than ever to disconnect and not to fill every available minute with even more screen time.

Instead, make sure to experience life, live beyond “digitalism” to fuel your creativity and have something valuable to share through your art. And don’t let a phone (however fancy it may seem) distract you from your higher calling. Put it in the right place and let it be the tool it is supposed to be.

For the apps I use and recommend, check out the article: Android Apps for Musicians/Creatives!

​January has this special feeling of freshness, of new beginnings. A new year with new opportunities lies ahead of you. It’s natural to get caught up in this spirit and make grandiose resolutions.

This year you’ll make your life epic, right?

• You’ll get fit and have a six-pack.​
• You’ll learn Spanish, Italian and French.
• You’ll start a profitable business and make more money.
• You’ll spend meaningful time with your loved ones.
• You’ll conquer your mile-long task list and tick off all the accumulated stale tasks.
• You’ll reach that elusive inbox zero.
• You’ll travel to x countries.
• You’ll write your book that’s been hiding inside you for so long
• You’ll compose more tracks.​​​​​
• You’ll practice your instrument more.

​The questions is: What will be different this year? Compared to all the preceding years when you made similar resolutions?

Sorry, I don’t mean to come off as sarcastic and I’m definitely not mocking you. I also don’t want to discourage you from making grandiose and epic resolutions. Nothing wrong with dreaming big and shooting for the stars – as long as you are acting on it.

Resolutions without consistent action​ supporting those resolutions are meaningless.

The sobering facts are that for most people their resolutions are ​abandoned by late January. So nothing changes and even worse, th​is abandoning is damaging to their self-esteem and self-image. Because anytime you make a resolution and don’t follow through it’s a blow to your self. There’s a part of your psyche keeping track of those broken promises and commitments – and if you can’t trust yourself your inner self knows it.

So why aren’t we doing it then? What is holding us back?

You won’t find the answer in this article. I’m no psychologist – and the (at least to me) more relevant reason – I don’t even care anymore at this phase of my life.

Over the years of observing my own failures I’ve connected some dots in my personal situation that made a difference to me and that I’m going to share with you. If whatever you are doing is already working for you, great. Don’t even bother too much with what I’m writing here. Continue on your path, or maybe take some of the ideas/concepts presented here and tweak your personal system more.

If what you are doing is not working for you, you won’t risk a lot trying this process – just a bit of time (maybe an afternoon on a lazy weekend) You can always go back to the previous method and continue not getting results your old way.

One more thing before we start for real …

Give yourself permission to start at any time. Listen, you don’t have to wait for January to show up in order to make changes. Maybe you are reading this in June. You could still start this process. It’ll work even in June.

​​Take Stock of ​Your Impact Areas

​We live in times of almost limitless opportunities. Yes, there are people who are unfortunate, live in poverty, had to flee their war-torn country, etc. They probably are not reading this article and are not the intended audience.

Most people reading this have access to:

• unlimited food choices
• unlimited entertainment
• access to the internet with unlimited information and knowledge

With great choices/opportunities, comes great responsibility. How are you dealing with those choices? Do the options/opportunities available to you serve you?

​What’s the Status Quo?

List all your personal life and impact areas and go through ​them taking stock of your current reality. Be honest with yourself, you’ll get more out of it this way. Here are some life area examples and questions you could ask yourself:

​Health – fitness level, sleep, nutrition
What’s good, what’s bad, what habits/assets are in place, what’s missing?

Social – family/friends/relationships
What’s the status of your key relationships? How close are you? How many real friends do you have? What’s working? What are the friction points?

Career
Are you on the right path/trajectory? What’s your level of engagement? Is the work you are doing meaningful to you?

Music​
What equipment/resources do you have already? This could be equipment, software, books, courses, bandmates, music teachers, etc.

​Feel Gratitude

You might notice a ton of good things – spouse/partner/family, stable career, nice home, great friends. People and things you might have taken for granted and even forgotten. Acknowledge and value the good stuff. ​Appreciate your re-discovered treasures.

​Specifically for our field of music: realize that people made/make great art with less. Anyone remember 4-track tape machines as state-of-the-art home recording solutions? Today’s bedroom studio is more powerful than anything available 20 years ago.

Next define the intended outcome for each life area:

• W​hat do you actually want to achieve?
• How would this look like if it were easy?
• What would need to happen consistently?
• What can you do to facilitate this? What systems/processes could you set-up?

​Elimination is the Key

Now comes the important step that most people miss. Many do take stock and know what they have or what they miss – but the natural tendency seems to be to add things. Get another tool, try to squeeze in another habit/project, simply do more.

No wonder people feel the time crunch. With all the stuff going on, it’s natural to feel stressed about life in general.

TV/advertising also does not help. You are bombarded with false images of how everybody else does everything effortlessly – hey, they use product xyz and all problems are solved magically. Out comes the credit card, because of course you want the same result.

Here’s what to do instead:

For the next 30 days set yourself a reminder for the morning and ask yourself:

• ​W​hat can I eliminate from my life?
• What can I eliminate (safely) in order to create more space/time/energy?
• What can I simplify so that I still get the same, or better, results with less effort and maintenance costs attached to the process?
• What distracts me from doing what is most important to me?
• Which habits could I change to make life more rewarding when I think long-term?
• What mental beliefs that don’t serve me should I ditch? (I’m not creative enough – I don’t have talent – I’m too young for x – I’m too old.)
• What products didn’t deliver on their promise and every time I use them I get frustrated/angry because of the hassles involved.

​Take a good hard look at things – is this of value to you? Does this help you? Try to discard social conditioning as much as possible.

An example from my personal life:

After a long day of teaching – and as much as I love to teach and work with my students – I’d be tired and have low energy. I’d end up on YouTube watching videos. Yeah, I’d feel nostalgic when watching songs/performances of music from my youth, I might even learn a thing or two watching tutorials. But, going to bed past midnight totally screwed up my sleep and the next morning. I’d wake up late in the morning and due to the late start there would be no time for me left to make progress on my own projects before my next teaching round would start.

Of course, that cycle would then repeat the next day.

​Go ColdTurkey

Here’s what I did to fix this. I installed a software called ColdTurkey and set it up to completely block my PC at 21:45. No more access to the internet. Without the temptations now I read, drink some light tea, and get to bed at 22:30 or 23:00 at the latest. I then wake up rested at 7 and have the morning to work on what’s important to me.

Some other quick wins might include …

• Getting rid of clutter that fills your environment without adding actual value – it’s just occupying physical and indirectly mental space.
• Cancelling subscriptions to services that you don’t even use actively – this is money down the drain that could be used differently.
• ​Reducing/eliminating social media and/or media consumption – TV/Netflix, Facebook, mindless media consumption is NOT the best use of your time. You have music/art to create instead.
• Unsubscribing from retail newsletters that just bombard you with sales offers. If you don’t buy into everything that gets pushed upon you by a multi-billion marketing/advertising machinery, but are strategic about your purchases instead, you’ll have more money left over. This means less stress and more time because then you don’t have to say yes to every project or client just because you have bills to pay. You can use that time and energy for your own work.

​I can think, I can wait, I can fast.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

​To take the next step and bring it to an even higher level look for better alternatives and default choices. What do I mean?

​Set Better Default Choices

​You already have your default choices. We humans are creatures of habits. There are so many inputs bombarding us we’d go insane. Our subconscious is here to protect us and therefore a lot of processes and choices happen automatically – without us thinking.

Get clear on your current defaults – then think about optimizing those. Ask yourself if you could find healthier/saner alternatives?

For example: you are thirsty – what do you grab automatically? Is your default coffee the best choice? Not saying it isn’t. While I’m not a coffee drinker, there are benefits to drinking coffee – just don’t destroy your adaptivity levels by drinking too much and at the wrong times. Use coffee strategically.

​If you always grab a sugary drink as a default – what are you thinking?!? How about switching to a healthier alternative? Drink water or tea instead.

​Suggestions for Music Default Choices

Here are some suggested musical areas to think about.

Radio station
What are you listening to in your car during your commute? Is this particular radio station the best choice? Could you listen to some educational podcasts instead? Would a pre-selected music playlist (music from other cultures, classical music, music you’d like to learn, an artist you want to emulate) be a better default choice?

Background music
How about eliminating music as background filler? Have pockets of silence throughout your day which makes intentional music listening even more powerful.

Plug-ins​
You could focus on 1 or 2 compressor plugins and truly master them instead of dabbling with your current 17.

Instead of appeasing yourself with 15 average purchases, you could save up to that dream software like Omnisphere 2 or Native Instrument’s Komplete that you’ve been drooling over for ages. Overcome your mindset of scarcity. The 15 ho-hum purchases cost you way more in money and dissatisfaction.​

Warm-up exercises
What exercises do you use for warming-up? Are they the best for what your intended goals are?

Shameless self-plug: if you play guitar, check out the Guitar Yoga Complete video course I co-produced with my friend Bernhard Beibl (former Tangerine Dream guitarist).

Scale choices
Is it really the best idea to work on the dominant diminished scale when you haven’t mastered the pentatonic and/or major modes yet?

​Again, I don’t know what the best choices are for you. You have to determine that yourself. The main point is to become more aware of all the opportunities around you for tweaking and improving your life and becoming more intentional with those choices.

Optimalism is the Goal

​Elimination is only the first step. And keep in mind that it’s not about self-flaggelation, depriving yourself or minimalism for minimalism’s sake. I view it more as optimalism – shooting for the best. The goal is to achieve a state where you have all the resources/tools/energy/processes/habits and mindset in place to achieve optimum results. Elimination does not mean that you end up with nothing. It’s about stopping to make (sometimes stupid) choices that don’t help you fulfill your potential.

Consolidate the Mindset of Simplicity

Finally, resist the temptation to fill up the empty space. You’ve gained more energy/space/money – awesome. Keep it that way for a period of time. It’s easy to give in to the temptation to buy more synths/sounds/plug-ins because you now have the money. Don’t immediately take on any new project just because you have the time.

If you abandon the elimination too quickly and fill up your plate immediately after the first successes, you might get to a higher level, but you also might just have shifted the initial problem as well. Give yourself some time and breathing room for consolidation. Embrace the boredom that might show up due to more time. It’s an important prerequisite to the creative process.

A helpful re-frame could be to think of this phase as refueling or rejuvenating. Fill up energy first to be ready for the next wave.

In the future I’ll go more in-depth and share personal use cases like how I’ve set-up my phone for minimum distractions, how I’ve hit my personal sweet spot of technology usage and found balance between working and re-charging. Initially, this might not seem related to music, but I’ve noticed a huge impact because changes in those areas allow the process of music creation to happen better as well as more frequently.

You were at the mercy of the TV-programming stations. You depended on them broadcasting cool stuff and you had to watch it whenever they broadcasted it. If you were busy at that time, then tough luck.

This changed in the early 80’s when VCRs became the hot consumer technology. Finally you could:

• record the program
• watch it repeatedly
• watch it anytime you wanted at your own schedule and convenience
• skip (and later block) commercials
• rent movies which added yet another dimension to your freedom of program selection

So no wonder VCRs were such a success despite the limitations of degrading tapes.

The “00:00” Blinking Display Epidemic

One more quick side anecdote before we finally get to the main topic …

It was like a cultural joke to have that modern wonder of technology in your living room happily blinking “00:00” at you.​ All it needed was one power outage and this scenario took its course. And almost nobody was brave enough to fix this.

A mini LCD plus a non-intuitive UI and a horrible manual meant you were stuck with that “00:00” display mocking you. I’m serious, programming a VCR was a daunting task beyond the skills of mere mortals. So most of the time people were stuck at the “manually pressing ‘Play + Record'” level, which at least got them the core functionality.

Those manuals were a crime against humanity.

Step into a timemachine, copy-paste a text into an early alpha-version of Google translator, switch a couple of times between some of the more obscure languages and the end result of this machine translation would still be lightyears ahead of those 1980’s manuals.

End of history lesson …

Back in the 21st Century​

You just plunked down a decent amount of cash for the latest DAW upgrade or a powerful VST like Omnisphere 2.​ You install the software and then you just use it.

Of course, you’ll be able to get something out of your purchase if you have experience. There are lots of common features across many sample libraries and simple VSTs. However, any extensive synth like Omnisphere, Diva, Kontakt, FM8, Falcon 2 etc. deserves a reading of the manual. And especially your main workhorse like Cubase, Studio One, Logic requires a deep understanding of all the available features.

Listen, I get it. It’s not sexy to read manuals. It’s not fun and with some of those multi-hundreds of pages for a deep software like Cubase, reading a manual requires a serious investment of time.​

But, if you want to make the most and best out of your purchase and actually use all the awesome features and functionalities, then you’d better be prepared to dive into the manuals and do some studying.​ Hey, you paid for all those features. Why not get some use out of them? Again, you’d be crazy not to.

And yes, I hear you. You might be a visual learner. There’s nothing wrong with hunting down YouTube tutorials and “steal” as many cool techniques as some kind, fellow soul is willing to share.​ But considering the depth of all those flagship products, you’ll be truly hard-pressed to get all the knowledge presented to you via some video tutorials.

Your Manual-Reading Action Plan

Set A Realistic Time-Limit For Yourself

In my personal experience I’ve found that getting a motivation push and telling yourself, “I’ve had it. Now I’ll master my software by slaving away for 2 hours/day reading manuals. Then I’ll produce awesome tracks,” sounds heroic, but is doomed to failure.​ Your motivation simply will fizzle out.

Instead, do the smart thing and schedule a more realistic timeframe.​ Shoot for something sensible like 15 minutes/day and get a habit going. This does not mean that you are only allowed to read 15 minutes or can’t continue tinkering when you’ve just discovered a cool new feature. No, if you have the time and energy, go for it. But otherwise feel free to immediately stop after your 15-minute-countdown timer has signaled you that time’s up.

Remember, you’re in for the long haul and the process of developing the habit is more important than burning yourself out in a short-sighted push that’s too ambitious, especially when you haven’t built the foundation yet.​

1) Tips for a Newbie

You just discovered your love for music producing and are just getting started.​ Awesome. Make sure to develop smart habits right from the start.

For every new software you purchase, collect the manuals into a central repository. A physical folder for printed manuals and a virtual folder on your PC or an Evernote notebook for PDF-manuals.​

Then commit to regular study by scheduling reading sessions into your calendar.​ I’m serious, you need to schedule it in. Treat it like an appointment. Read a chapter while simultaneously following along the examples and explanations and trying out the features.

The investment of time will be worth it.​

2) Tips for a Seasoned Pro​

If you’ve been involved in this crazy music business thingie for a while, here are the steps for you.​

a) Collect all your manuals​

Create a manuals folder on your computer and/or upload them to Evernote. This way, you have a backup and access from all your devices.​ Put printed manuals on a bookshelf close to hand. If they are in another room and you’d have to interrupt your session and go get them, you simply won’t do it.​

b) Analyze your “weaknesses” and prioritize!​

This is an essential step.​ You need to structure and organize your reading. Where are your weaknesses? What are your most used/most important apps?

• Your DAW?
• Your main synths?
• Your notation software?
• Your essential FX plugins?

Get a list going of which manuals you’ll work through first!​ Where will you be getting the most value out of?

Let me suggest a 2-tiered approach. Pick one manual for intensive study (like your main DAW) and one secondary manual for a more casual approach (like a softsynth).​ Systematically work through your main selection and skim and playfully experiment with your secondary selection.

Create A Personal Knowledgebase

For serious results summarize what you learned in each session.​ Write cliff notes in an Evernote note, create a personal Wiki or knowledgebase or add new information you want to internalize/memorize into a spaced-repetition software like Anki.

It may sound weird, but soon you’ll start enjoying to read manuals.​ They are not as dry as they used to be. Fortunately, those horrible 1980’s manuals are a thing of the past.

You’ll develop that expectation of learning something and being able to use your software better, which helps you create better music, have a more efficient workflow and, dare I say, have more fun in the process.​ Link those positive feelings to reading manuals for creating an upward spiral.​

Now get started on digging into those manuals. They are better than their reputation and all the knowledge and skills you’ll build will make it worth it.​ Have fun.​

And to set the record straight …

• It’s not the total solution to all your problems.
• It will not magically make a master improviser out of you.
• It will not get you a multi-million recording deal.
• It will not guarantee you a stream of successive top-10 releases.

No such thing – but I do want to share this simple, fun way that helped me personally improve. I’m talking about juggling.

Sorry for the low resolution example. That clip is quite old, but the juggling in it is just insane.

Juggling? What’s juggling got to do with improving on your instrument? That’s not a music related activity – so what’s the point?

Well, think about it …

1) Rhythm

In order to keep the balls/clubs/rings in the air you have to keep a steady rhythm, or everything falls apart. Kind of like in music, you know.

2) Coordination

You need to coordinate your left and right hand action. So unless you are a singer (when this might not be as important to you, as for most other instrumentalists), I think you are interested in improving your sense of coordination.

3) Improved Peripheral Vision

Juggling can increase your peripheral sense of vision. This can come in handy for chart reading or, the way I noticed on myself, when (finally) seeing a piano spread voicing as a unit instead of a mental split-image of left and right hand parts.

​I can’t emphasize the benefits of this enough. If your field of vision is good already, then that’s great. If not, you should definitely give juggling a try. In case this fun activity adds a few degrees to your field of vision it’d be totally worth it.

4) Focus

You need to stay focused. You can’t look somewhere else or forget to move your hands in order to catch the next ball. Therefore it helps you develop concentration.

However, and that’s a biggie …

5) The Flow State

It’s not a tiring kind of focus and concentration. Rather, it’s relaxing and fosters that sought-after Flow state that has been described in Cszikszentmihalyi’s seminal work on Flow.

Juggling, in my experience, is one of the easiest activities to experience that elusive flow state.

• There’s a defined, clear objective – keep the balls in the air.
• You know what you are supposed to do – use your hands in the recommended manner and pattern.
• You know when you are winning – the balls stay in the air.
• You can easily see and measure progress – even if you can’t perfectly do the cascade (yet), you know quickly whether what you are doing is a step in the right direction or not.
• There’s enough variety to put yourself in that flow-inducing window of difficulty.

See, if the challenge is too overwhelming, it’s easy to get frustrated and as a result, you give up and quit. If something is too easy and there’s not enough challenge involved, things get boring rather quickly and you quit as well.​

However, dangle the carrot in front of you at the right distance, so you have the feeling it’s in your reach and that within the next few tries you’ll get it, and you’ll continue.​

This model of flow and the realization of how to tweak it (let’s say during your practice sessions) for optimal results, is a topic for itself – one that I do intend to cover in more depth in the future.​

For now, I hopefully convinced you enough to at least give juggling a try.​

What Are The Next Steps?

Get some juggling balls. You could start with tennisballs, however it gets tiring rather quickly to spend your time chasing the balls after you’ve dropped them. And drop them at first you will, young Padawan.

Again, the transparency disclaimer: if you purchase via my links, Amazon will pay me a commission at no extra cost to you. You’ll get juggling balls that I can recommend with a clear conscience. And the few cents I’ll receive in affiliate payouts help off-set the hosting costs of this site. So, thanks in advance for your support.

Learn The Cascade And Other Common Patterns

Here’s a great tutorial that explains all the steps to master the basic cascade pattern. Just as juggling can extend your field of vision, software setup routines often benefit from activation resources like www for efficient licensing.

And once you have the basic cascade down, you can learn some extra patterns and add to your juggling repertoire.

Warning – Don’t Confuse Your Priorities!

Don’t juggle all the time, you still need to practice on your instrument. But do create those little pockets of juggling time. Simply use your downtime or breaks. For instance, when I boot up my PC, I juggle a bit. Even if it’s only 30 seconds. After a practice/teaching/production unit I juggle some more. It helps to relax and get my mind clear for the next session.​

Give it a try!

If I had a nickel for every time I heard the phrase “music is a language” I’d be able to get a 2nd Lamborghini. Ok, I’m exaggerating. It probably would have to be a Benjamin instead of a nickel. And it wouldn’t be my 2nd Lamborghini. Actually, it wouldn’t be a Lamborghini, but something more like a stroller bike.

Now that I’ve managed to destroy my trustworthiness and credibility in the opening paragraph already, let’s get serious for a moment.

Music As A Language Video By Victor Wooten

Music as a language is a cliche, but there’s a lot of truth to it.

Take 5 minutes to watch this awesome, inspiring and enlightening video by master musician Victor Wooten. If you haven’t seen this video yet, it’ll be well worth your time. And if you have seen it already (good on you), watch it again to re-enforce its message.

Let’s examine some of the points Victor expressed so eloquently in the video.

1) Don’t Fear Mistakes

The more mistakes you make, the faster you learn.

Victor Wooten

We adults have this idea that mistakes are a bad thing. And in many situations they are. When you are a doctor operating on a patient, a pilot landing a plane, a construction worker maneuvering heavy machinery you don’t want to make a mistake.

But as adults we should be able to put things into perspective and choose the appropriate mental toolset for the job at hand. When learning an instrument and nurturing our creative side, there’s no need to cling to this pragmatic mistake-avoidance state of mind. Because it’s ok to make mistakes when practicing – nobody will die or will get hurt.

I sometimes tell my students that they can make mistakes without worries. After all, they (or their parents) have paid for the lessons and the tuition fee is my compensation money for suffering.  Most of the time they chuckle and lighten up.

But even if you don’t take lessons where you pay somebody else to endure your beginner mistakes, lighten up as well.

Become more child-like.

Which leads me to another point that Victor expressed…

2) Model The Way A Baby Learns A Language

A baby is totally immersed and allowed to constantly “jam with professionals”. You, assuming you are a musical baby or child, most likely don’t have the opportunity to play with professionals. At least not often or for long.

Or do you? Actually, when you consider the availability of jam tracks you do have the opportunity.

Invest Into Well-Recorded Play-Alongs!

Let me add a shameless plug of self-promotion. When you invest into the Lessonz GuitarYoga series that I co-produced with my good friend Bernhard Beibl you get a proven warm-up/technique routine. However, there are also a lot of professionally recorded play-alongs included that are very musical and sound great. You don’t have to use them just for the intended exercises, you could simply jam along for fun, too.

Just a suggestion…

Regardless of which jam tracks you go for, they share many advantages:

• ​improve your timing while playing along to well-recorded tracks
• subconsciously copy the phrasing/feel/groove/attitude of top musicians
• no need to feel intimidated – like in real life scenario where you (understandably) might get the shakes
• get comfortable playing without having to fear embarassing mistakes because the play-along won’t mind those mistakes

Like Victor said – don’t just speak to other babies.

3) More Playing Than Practicing

This is a biggie and a point I needed to hear myself and reconsider seriously.

If you are busy, and who isn’t nowadays, your available time is incredibly limited.​ You need to focus and get the most out of your scarce practice time. So, the tendency is to go for highly-effectice exercises and routines in order to maximize your practice sessions.​

This is smart.​ However, there’s the danger that you also lose the fun and playfulness that keeps you motivated in the long run.​

Just think about it for a second.​

What Attracted You To Music In The First Place?​

Was it the joy of expression and the sheer creativity some master musician emanated or did you go, “I want to fill my schedule with exercises that I dread, that are not fun and where I don’t even know why I’m doing them anymore just to wear that badge of a practicing, serious musician?”​

Sounds ridiculous when you put it this way, right?​

Unfortunately, it’s what many musicians endure – simply because they’ve forgotten the power of fun and play.​ Should you just ditch your exercises? Of course, not.​ You simply need to find a balance.

“Play Your Exercises” And/Or “Exercise Playing”

What do I mean?​ Practice your exercises in a way that (again) makes them fun and musical.

• Use high-quality jam tracks or always tie those exercises into musical situations as quickly as possible.​
• Schedule a jamming/improvisation/playing part as the last section of your practice schedule – something like the reward after practicing your more regimented exercises.​

This will actually make your practicing more effective because you’ll have something to look forward to and with the exercises still in mind they might even sneak into your fun/jam session in a playful way.​

Whatever works for you, just make sure you have that playfulness/fun factor included. Because it is important.​

4) Have Something To Say Instead Of Saying What You Are Supposed To Say

A scary thought, I know.

Our own ideas seem bland and unexciting initially. However, they are more authentic and come across as our truth if we embrace our current level and focus on our message and on expressing ourself instead of trying to impress our audience with licks that simply are not us.

In my experience, the playfulness and fun as covered in 3) does help with developing that personal authority.​ Having fun somehow lets you forget that tendency of pretending to be someone else just to sound serious or legit.

After a while, you simply don’t care anymore what you are “supposed” to sound like. You simply play what feels good to you.​ And of course that’s helpful in being authentic and real.​

Express Yourself

Now let’s have some fun and express ourselves with the universal language of music.​

So, your hand doesn’t work anymore the way it used to. What are your options?​

• Curse your fate and complain about the unfairness of life?
• Resign and give up your instrument?
• Hope for a miracle?

Nobody could blame you for reacting this way.

There are also these options:​

• You could turn towards composing music.
• You could start writing books about music.
• You could take your experiences and start a publishing company – or anything that’s at least related to the field of music.

You could also say, “What the hell, I’ll press forward and do the best I can with what I have left.” And what you have left could still be enough to let you become one of the greatest, most admired players of all time.​

Jean “Django” Reinhardt

That’s how it worked out for Django Reinhardt​.

In 1928, when he was only 18 and already considered to be a promising and talented musician, his left-hand ring finger and pinky became debilitated in a freak fire accident. Devastating and a tragedy for sure. But it didn’t stop Django from becoming one of the greatest guitar players of all time.

He had an enormous influence not only on guitarists but also on generations of Jazz musicians. Many of his compositions have become standards (Nuages, Minor Swing) and are played to this day.

Even “remote” styles like Psychedelic Rock and Heavy Metal owe a lot to Mr. Reinhardt. Icons like Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath and The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, who both lost parts of their finger(s) as well, cited Django as an inspiration and role model.

Personally, I find Django’s story incredibly inspiring and motivating, too. It makes me feel more responsibility towards the craft of playing.

I can’t change the amount of talent I’ve started with, but it surely is under my control what I do with the talent I’ve been given and how much I improve and make progress.​

If you have that “calling” you do whatever it takes. If you only have 2 working fingers left, then that’s what you use to express yourself. You don’t stop, you move on and make the best with what you’ve got.​

Get Rid Of Psychological Baggage​

Many players (and I don’t exclude myself) carry a lot of psychological baggage.​

• We think we are not good enough.
• We feel like we have little or no talent.
• It’s no use practicing, we won’t get better anyways (so let’s continue flipping the TV channels.)
• Our hands are not big/strong/flexible enough – so we can’t play this.
• We need better equipment – this new amp promises to make us sound better – let’s put it on the credit card.

See, you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to make music. Yes, it’s fun and it can help, but don’t let the lack of (expensive) equipment be an excuse for not making music with what you’ve already got.

Don’t Wait – Don’t Procrastinate!

We seem to have that tendency to put things off.​

“I can’t wait for the day when I’ll be a better player. Then I’ll (finally) be able to practice this exercise in all 12 keys.​”

Uhm, no. You get better by practicing this exercise in all 12 keys while your playing still sucks.

No need to beat yourself up. Just continue while making the necessary adjustments.​

And you don’t have to practice everything at once, which is a major contributing factor to procrastination. Simply because you feel overwhelmed and want to avoid that feeling at all cost.​

Avoid Overwhelm​ Like The Plague!

I see this with my students all the time. They are impatient and try too many things at once and then become quickly frustrated because things don’t work the way they wish they worked.

The solution is to set limits and focus on specific areas exclusively. Even at the expense of other areas.

What do I mean?​

If you focus on counting your rhythms and making sure they are correct, then it’s “ok” if you mess up the fingering of a passage – or if a wrong note sneaks in. Because your main focus was on the rhythm and you know that you’ll get to the notes/fingerings in your next round.​

You can take that concept even further and pro-actively set yourself some limits within your concepts and exercises.​ You could limit yourself to using a specific technique, a scale, a rhythmic phrase or a region of your instrument.

Why would you play up and down one string with only one finger? Because you’d learn things that can’t be learned any other way.

Mick GoodrickThe Advancing Guitarist p.11

Mick Goodrick (read my review of the Advancing Guitarist book) calls such deliberate limitations “disadvantage exercises“.

Change Your Perspective With Disadvantage Exercises

Fortunately, there’s no need to wait for an accident to create permanent disadvantages for you – it’s much better to voluntarily choose temporary limitations.

The purpose of the disadvantages is to change your perspective. To get a different viewpoint and to experience new situations.​ In this way you gain new perspectives and discover things that would have stayed hidden to you.​ Then you can still decide if those new insights are useful to you or not. If they are, implement and integrate them into your playing.​

Check out this short video of monster guitarist Guthrie Govan!

Makes you want to kill that guy, right?

Is it the ultimate goal to be able to play with 1 hand only, so you can simultaneously drink some coffee? Of course not.

But I think it’s easy to see that even a small percentage of Guthrie’s left hand dexterity, strength and flexibility would prove useful and beneficial in your playing, right?

Create Art Out Of Limitations

You could still create beautiful works of art despite, and sometimes even because of, such limitations.

Have a look at this incredible piece by Felix Blumenfeld. Pianist James Rhodes not only does a great job with the performance, he also has an engaging way of telling a story about Simon Barere performing this piece in a small New York salon with a blind pianist in the audience.

Another (more) famous example out of the Romantic piano repertoire. Chopin’s Etude Op. 10 No. 5 – the so-called “Black Key” etude, because the right hand only plays black keys.

Not too shabby, right?

Read Or Download “The Power Of Setting Limits” – 15 Disadvantage Exercises To Help You Reach The Next Level

• Limits can be empowering.
• Limits can “positively force” you into a direction you would not have thought of – and something beautiful can be the result of it.
• Embrace limits and make them work for you.

Here’s a free content upgrade for you. No hoops to jump through, no e-mail address to give away. Read the short e-book online or download the PDF. Consider this a small gift that hopefully will give you some ideas and help you out. If you want to occassionally hear from me with updates and valuable resources, use the sign-up form below this article.

Are You Already Using Disadvantage Exercises?

• How are you using limits to your advantage?
• What little psychological tricks have you found useful?
• What “hacks” have proven most valuable and transformative in your own experience?

What You Will Learn In This Post

• Where to download an excellent Android ear training app for free.
• What the functional ear training method is about.
• How the Functional Ear Trainer app works.
• The advantages of the “Movable Do” solfege style.
• How to create your personalized ear training exercises.

I’m a huge functional ear training fan. If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time you already know that.

This method added a lot of “depth” to my hearing – and I say that with extensive conventional ear training under my belt. 8 semesters during my time at the American Institute of Music in Vienna and an additional 6 levels at MI in Los Angeles.

I don’t want to miss the traditional interval-based sight-singing method I had to go through. It has been extremely valuable, although somewhat (ok, more thruthfully “very”) frustrating at times.

The functional ear training method however improved my listening skills significantly. And I want you to experience the same. That’s why I wrote about it and featured the wonderful Functional Ear Trainer desktop version by Alain Benbassat.

Not only is the Functional Ear Trainer easy to work with and a functional (pun intended) piece of software, it is free. So, there are absolutely no entry barriers to getting your ears wet with the functional ear training method. However, that desktop software does not actively get developed/maintained anymore. It still runs on my Windows 10 PC in 2021. So definitely do install it.

This article is about the mobile app created by Kaizen9 Apps aka Serhii Korchan.

This is an app I can get 100% behind. I’ll get into more details, but I can tell you in advance that the app is simply awesome. It’s like having the desktop version with you – so now you can get some functional ear training on the go, in some small pocket of downtime or simply when you don’t want to boot up your computer.

Enough of the chit-chat… Let’s get you hooked up with the app.

Download and install the app from the Google Play store or iTunes!

Clear App Structure

Start the app and you are greeted with an uncluttered menu on the home screen.

On the about page there’s a short article about the method and you also learn that Serhii initially developed the app for his own use so he could practice functional ear training on the go.

In the settings you can change the button labels globally from letters to numbers to “Movable Do” which is the setting I would recommend to use.

Movable Do vs. Fixed Do

“Movable Do” means that you assign syllables to the notes as in “ Do, Re, Mi, Fa,” etc.. and that the syllables truly do represent the function of a note – not the note itself.

“Do” is always the tonic. “So” is always the perfect 5th. “La” is always the major 6th. Regardless of the key.

In contrast, in the “Fixed Do” system, “Do” would always be the C note, “So” would always be the G note and “La” would always be the A note. This would still be more practical for singing purposes, especially when chromatic notes are included. After all, it’s definitely easier (and more musical) to sing “Fi” instead of “F sharp,” right?

But for ear training purposes it wouldn’t do us any good. Because we want to learn the feel and the function of each note. And we can internalize this feeling much easier and quicker with the “Movable Do” system.

You can also switch the resolution to the nearest tonic at the end of each example on or off. Keep it on initially. You’ll know when to switch it off – it’s when you have a basic level of security and the constant resolutions start to get on your nerves.

Read the “Learn the Method” page for some method explanations, like how the notes resolve as well as some best practice tips.

And then you are ready to dig into the Basic Levels.

If you’ve worked with the desktop version already and are a more advanced functional ear trainer, you could choose the Practice tab right from the start in order to customize the program.

However, it doesn’t hurt to check out the basic levels first to get a refresher as well as to get accustomed to the app.

4 Sections for the Basic Levels

The Basic Levels area is divided into 4 sections:

• Major scale
• Major scale + chromatics
• Minor scale
• Minor scale + chromatics

Choose the field you want to work on and inside of each section you are presented with more choices.

I truly like the step-by-step functionality of how the app organises the exercises. You could be a complete functional ear training newbie and as long as you follow the way the exercises are presented, you are good to go.

Here are the exercise choices for the major scale chromatics:

• C major lower tetrachord chromatics within 1 octave
• C major upper tetrachord chromatics within 1 octave
• Full 1 octave C major scale chromatics
• Multi-octave C major scale chromatics
• Random 1 octave major scale chromatics
• Random multi-octave major scale chromatics

A logical and structured approach, which is great.

You get the same organisation and granular detail for all 4 basic sections. This alone is plenty already. And if there was nothing more included it would be more than sufficient to build your ear training chops up to a very high level.

Practice Mode for Customized Exercises

If you go into Practice mode you can design your own exercises.

Maybe you are having troubles distinguishing a major 6 from the minor 6th?
Or the #4 sounds like a major 7 to you?

In practice mode you can focus on that. Create an exercise that only presents you those 2 notes. Do a couple of rounds with those 2 notes only and your ears will hone in on the difference in sound.

Quick Tip:

A personal strategy that also helped me quite a bit was to choose a bunch of very easy notes that I had no troubles with to recognize, like the root and the 5th and then add that “special” note – the troublemaker.

To stay with one of the previous examples, let’s say the minor 6th.

Add that to the root and the fifth and you have those easy notes that you recognize in your sleep and that troublemaker note that sticks out like a sore thumb, but that you therefore also recognize because it sticks out.

You get that “success” feeling of answering correctly and your subconscious mind builds up the connection between the sound you hear and the name of the interval that you correctly tap as an answer.

Sneaky, huh?

Additional topics that you could work on in practice mode are modes and/or exotic scales. You have lots of customization options to get creative in your practicing.

Designing Your Own Exercises

When designing your exercises you can:

• select the amount of questions you get asked in multiples of 10s
• set the cadence to be in a major or minor key
• choose the tonic note of C, not-C or random
• switch the range to 1 octave or multi-octave
• customize the enabled tones where you can stay diatonic or chromatic if you should choose so

As you can see, there are lots of customization options available, all from a single, cleanly designed page. I really like the minimalistic, no-thrills design.

The only gripe I have is that the enabled tones are close together and therefore somewhat difficult to tap.

Before I forget…

You also get statistics that show you the percentage of correct answers, which is great for tracking your progress. And the app also reminds you on the help screen (e.g. before a new level) that you should work on a level as long as it takes in order to consistently accomplish a 90-100% range.

You can even share your score via Facebook and Twitter. Don’t annoy your fans and followers with every exercise result – but nothing wrong with sharing one of your triumphs. Just make sure, it truly is a triumph.

Rating for the Functional Ear Trainer App

I Like:

• the method works
• step-by-step structure
• tons of customization options to create personalized exercises
• ability to practice ear training on-the-go

I Don’t Like:

• only piano sounds available for training with the app

So in summary…

This is an essential app for any musician. Not only is it functional (ugh, I think I’ve used that pun already), it’s well designed and one can tell that a lot of thought and effort must have been applied.

At the usual $1-5 that you might have to shell out for a premium app, this would be a wise investment to make into your general musicianship. Thanks to Serhii’s generosity you won’t have to pay anything. The basic app (with all the essential features) is 100% free.

If you are a musician (regardless of the instrument you play, or what styles you are into) and you have an Android phone or tablet – then you absolutely need this app. Period. It’s like having your personal ear training coach in your pocket, ready to work with you on a quick, valuable and effective ear training session wherever you are.

Active Developer Continues Improving the App

Not only is the app free – the developer is also actively improving the app and keeps adding new functionalities and fixing little bugs.

Here are a few suggestions I made when I wrote this review for an earlier version.​

Cadence Choice – Has Been Added

I wanted to see the option to choose between a single tonic triad or a single-note root-tone instead of the full cadence. Why?​ Because this would increase the difficulty forcing you to create the tonic sound more actively.

Still on my wishlist: It would be great, if one could also set a repetition frame, meaning that the root chord would only play every 5 questions if you’ve chosen to stay in 1 key of course. This would test you on your ability to retain the sound of the tonic and gently “force” you to develop that skill.

Cadence Speed – Has Been Added

I wished for a feature that would allow to set the speed of the cadence. Why?​

This could be a challenge in itself – how little time do I need to translate the cadence into the sound and feel of the tonic – and the time saved for finishing the cadence could be put into additional questions instead.

Sound Selection – Not Added (Yet)

Finally, the icing on the cake would be to set different sounds. Don’t get me wrong. The piano sound is the most logical choice and makes the most sense for the method.

Still on my wishlist: If it is technically possible, e.g. if the sounds are triggered via MIDI instead of being samples then it would be cool to be able to switch instruments.

While a major 3rd always sounds like a major 3rd, sometimes that functional quality gets obscured by the sound of the instrument. This is often experienced by people who consistently score high percentages when practicing the method, yet get frustrated because they can’t seem to transfer the skills into “real” musical applications.

They’ve learned the method well enough, yet are still dependent on that particular sound they had trained with.

In my experience there seems to be a transitional period of stabilizing for almost anybody. A period where you need to get deeper into the skills so that you don’t get thrown off by another sound.

Being able to practice that with this well-coded app would be incredibly useful. Structuring practice with a repetition frame closely resembles spaced recall strategies, which are also applied to player decision patterns on the best online pokies Australia platforms.

Spread the Word About the Functional Ear Trainer App

I hope you get as much out of the Functional Ear Trainer app as I have. Don’t forget to thank the developer Serhii for all his efforts and his generosity of making the app available for free.

Here’s the download link one final time:​

Please share this post in your favorite social network, so that more musicians can find out about this awesome app.

I am not 100% sure but I think the first time I heard Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor was in the late 70’s or early 80’s when I was a child watching TV commercials. Back then it was especially popular to use classical music as backdrop for TV ads, at least here in Austria.

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons for a coffee brand, some local insurance company (ab)used Mozart for their life insurance package  – what the Adagio was supposed to peddle, I don’t remember.

I do remember though, that this haunting piece somehow grabbed me and I couldn’t get it out of my head and would constantly whistle and hum the melody anytime I had seen the TV spot.

Over time, after the ad got canceled  I forgot about the piece, until…

The Swedish Virtuoso

A few years later – enter Yngwie Malmsteen.

Both hailed as a guitar god and condemned as an egomanical, repetitive shredder – the swedish guitar virtuoso is a controversial figure. In his “Icarus Dream Suite Op. 4” I experienced a flashback when I heard the beloved TV commercial melody again. (00:53 minutes into the video clip)

Thanks to the liner notes, I learned that the melody was a quote and came from the Adagio in G Minor by Italian Baroque composer Tomaso Albinoni.

Tomaso Albinoni? Who’s that? How come I had never heard of Albinoni before?

Why are other Baroque composers like Bach, Vivaldi and Händel known and famous and Albinoni, the creator of such a great melody, (relatively) unknown and obscure? It seemed unfair to me, but I found solace in the thought that at the least this great melody had survived and got played.

And isn’t the music what matters, anyways?

What About the Mystery?

Initially, this article was supposed to end here. My original intention was to feature the Adagio and maybe muse about why a certain piece just speaks to you for a paragraph or two.

Imagine my surprise when I came across this during my research:

The Adagio in G minor for violin, strings and organ continuo, is a neo-Baroque composition popularly attributed to the 18th-century Venetian master Tomaso Albinoni, but composed by the 20th-century musicologist and Albinoni biographer Remo Giazotto and based on the purported discovery of a manuscript fragment from Albinoni.

Source: Wikipedia

Not by Albinoni?

How can Albinoni’s Adagio NOT be by Albinoni?
What’s going on here?

The ascription to Albinoni rests upon Giazotto’s purported discovery of a tiny manuscript fragment (consisting of a few opening measures of the melody line and basso continuo portion) from a slow second movement of an otherwise unknown Albinoni trio sonata. According to Giazotto, he obtained the document shortly after the end of World War II from the Saxon State Library in Dresden, which − though its buildings were destroyed in the bombing raids of February and March 1945 by the British and American Air Forces − had evacuated and preserved most of its collection.

Source: Wikipedia

Adding New Layers to the Albinoni Adagio

To me this adds a whole new layer to the piece. Now there’s all those additional questions like:

• Why didn’t Giazotto claim the composition from the start?
• Why was he originally only listed as the arranger?
• What was going through Giazotto’s mind when people referred to his composition as Albinoni’s?
• What about the mysterious Saxon State Library second-movement fragment?
• Why is it only a fragment?
• What happened to the rest?
• How long will the piece live on as Albinoni’s Adagio before it becomes Giazotto’s Adagio?

Irrelevant questions?

Maybe…

You don’t need to know the answers to enjoy the Adagio and in case you don’t like the Adagio to start with, you definitely couldn’t care less about those questions. And that’s ok, too.

However, I’d like to propose that you take one of YOUR favorite pieces and ask some background questions about it.

Questions like:

• What sparked the composer’s creativity?
• Any unusual background stories behind the piece?
• How was the initial public reaction?
• Did the public reaction change over time?
• If yes, why?

Imagine that you are a detective hunting for some information, only that it’s NOT about some crime but for your own enjoyment. When you learn something about the composer, the time period, the place and culture of the piece – you are creating a web of related and inter-connected facts and ideas that will create a richer, more colorful listening experience for you.

Also, ask yourself why a piece grabs you?

• Is it the harmonies?
• A particular chord change?
• Maybe a tone color combination in the orchestration?
  In a more “modern” context this could very well be a certain sound, eg: a semi-distorted guitar lead sound with a touch of delay and phaser. Or some playing techniques and phrasing ideas like bendings or fluid legato articulations…

Who knows, not only will you learn a thing (or two) about music history, theory, arranging, etc… you actually might learn something about yourself and what pushes your musical buttons.

And that’s a good thing.

P.S.: If you are a guitarist, make sure to check out Per-Olov Kindgren’s version. His transcription is very accesible and quite easy to learn.

December 2005 – the Winter Olympics are approaching and the Austrian broadcasting corporation ORF wants to have some fresh tracks produced.

The 3 of us (my 2 co-producers and me) go to work. I do my teaching and then spend the remaining hours of my days producing tracks to meet the ridiculous deadline so that our material would end up in the roster for the broadcasting.

We get great feedback on our tracks, but when we watch the Olympics we don’t hear any of them.

Apparently something didn’t work as expected with the new upload/online access system the broadcasting corporation was testing and the reporting crews in the field ended up using tracks they already had on their local drives or on CDs.

What’s a setback like this when you are young, having fun, learning a lot and now your foot’s in the TV door?

Nothing, so we continue.

We produce more tracks, actually, a ton of tracks. The feedback gets more enthusiastic with each release as well.

We catch our tracks on TV. You turn on the telly and there’s a slow motion summary of the Kitzbühel ski race (arguably the biggest skiing event after an Olympic or World Championship race) and in the background there’s your music providing the sound track for the winner jumping down the Mausefalle.

Awesome.

So, we’ll be rolling in the dough come royalty payment time, right?

My 1st Royalty Cheque

Uhm, no.

The highly anticipated 1st royalty cheque finally arrives in the middle of June 2007. A whopping 52,58€ for the entire previous year.

Of course we gulp and we are disappointed, but we are young, having fun, learning a lot with our feet in the TV door…. I think this sounds familiar, sorry for the déjà-vu.

Over time I did earn significantly more money and even though I eventually stopped producing for the ORF, I still receive royalty cheques. Years later. That’s the power of licensing your tracks.

But… Ask Yourself

• Is it really necessary to make all the costly mistakes yourself?
• Isn’t there a quicker way to have your tracks generating money for you?
• Without months or even years of trial and error?

It seems to be part of a musical rite of passage to get scammed and exploited. How else do you account for the public image of the starving musician?

When I told my mother I’d become a guitarist many moons ago, she envisioned me ending up busking in some underground station in Vienna. As a result of this “vision” she always put some coins in whenever she was in Vienna and walked by a street musician. After all, it could have been me. Bless my mum.

Enough chit-chat.

Now it’s time to introduce you to Emmett Cooke, a full-time composer for film, TV and video games from Ireland.

I’ve seen Emmett enter music licensing platforms and become a top seller. I’ve heard him develop as a musician, composer, producer. I’ve observed him launch a couple of sites, be active on social media, increase his online presence – to the point where you ask yourself: does this guy ever sleep?

And fortunately for us, Emmett wrote an e-book to share his music licensing knowledge and expertise.

He is qualified to write about the topic, because it comes from real-life experience – no ivory tower music business theory about how things could or should be on paper, but rather practical stuff that any modern composer/producer is faced with daily.

The Business of Music Licensing

Onwards.

The Business of Music Licensing is a 73 page e-book. No fluff-pictures that take up space in order to mask and puff-up thin content, but no intimidating blocks of text either. Instead, it’s a well-formatted e-book that’s aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eyes.

Have a look at the table of contents to see what’s covered in the e-book:

Emmett writes in a personal, friendly and engaging style. Unlike lots of other music business books he avoids legal jargon. First, he defines all the basic licensing terms in order to get you up to speed quickly.

Then, over the next few pages Emmett answers most of the questions you’ll come across when entering the arena of music licensing as a business. What kind of tracks to write, where to publish, how to approach a publisher…

He even includes a great template letter for music library submission. I’d recommend that you probably should not use it verbatim, but rather modify it a bit to suit your own style and personality. Nevertheless, it’s great to have a template as a starting place.

Sprinkled throughout the e-book are lots of valuable resources:

• links providing additional supporting information to Emmett’s explanations
• a link to a calculator that can be used by freelancers to figure out what their hourly rate should be
• the list of libraries on 42-43 alone will save you hours of your precious time
• even more music libraries on pages 62-72
• a bonus example spreadsheet showing you how to keep track of your music library submissions

3-Year Business Plan

I definitely need to mention the 3-year plan. This is probably the highlight of the book. On 2 pages you have a music licensing business in a box. It’s simply brilliant.

Personally, I’ve been so busy with teaching and creating video course material that I neglected music licensing. I have to confess that I let it slide somewhat, but reading this book (especially this concise 3-year plan) has given me an injection to re-consider and re-shuffle my priorities to start producing music for licensing purposes again.

Any Negatives?

In the 2nd batch of music library resources, the websites are presented in a table format where you’ll have to go through the trouble of copy-pasting those addresses. In the 1st batch you simply could click on the link directly from the e-book.

And…

I came across 2 typos – at least that’s what I noticed. I didn’t actively look, so if you are OCD-inclined and carry a grammar/spelling-police membership card, you might find more.

High-level whining, right?

How Much Is It?

The Business of Music Licensing costs 24.99€, which is between 27 and 30 USD, depending on the exchange rate. That’s a deal.

Actually, for all the real-life information and expertise that’s a heck of a deal.

There’s enough actionable advice included, it doesn’t matter whether you are a bedroom producer newbie, or a busy musician trapped in non-residual activities – this book will get you going and then some.

Beginners will appreciate the digestible definitions of terms and learning about the most common pitfalls to look out for and avoid. Like music licensing opportunities where you are required to pay to be played and other similar shady scams.

Even long-time music licensing veterans will be able to learn something new, or at least it will make them re-consider their approach and organisation and therefore improve workflow and increase profitability.

[ezreview]

The First 5-Star Review

Wohoo, the first 5 star review on my site.

Well, there aren’t that many reviews to begin with. I don’t want to just feature reviews and turn this into a review blog – there’s too many other interesting topics to write about. And the other products that I featured so far are highly rated too because I don’t want to present crap to begin with. What’s the point of that? A product has to be at least decent and useful to earn some pixels on this site.

And Emmett’s book deserves those coveted 5 stars.

I urge you get the e-book and follow Emmett’s advice and with a bit of talent, lots of work, dedication and perseverance you too will be able to make music licensing work for you.

Back in the good ol’ days when I was a kid and had to walk endless miles, fighting wolves and snow storms just to get to school, it was easy to find the sound you needed for your music project.

You put your microphone in front of the guitar amp or the piano going the acoustic route, or auditioned the whopping 32 presets of your sound module. Then you hit record on your 4-track tape recorder. After your first take you quickly fiddled with a couple of knobs and buttons to shape the sound the way you needed.

There were limited options and this “forced” you quickly back to making music.

Today, you have multiple hard drives filled with terabytes of exquisite samples – the finest instruments played by the best musicians in awesome locations, recorded on incredible gear by talented engineers. All that awesomeness right at your fingertips.

So, what’s there to complain about?

• Analysis paralysis where you don’t even know where to begin
• Not finding what you need quickly enough to capture your inspiration

To be honest, I never had to fight with wolves on my way to school. However, there was this one huge Dachshund (or maybe it was a Beagle, I don’t remember) I needed to pass on the way that seemed like a wolf to me when I was 6. That counts, right?

Since it’s confession time: in winter it did snow quite a lot, but not in Arctic dimensions, and the way to school wasn’t measured in multiples of miles either. And by the time I really got into music the digital revolution was well on its way with preset banks and increasing ROM and RAM. Megabytes only, but nevertheless.

Just saying… feels good to come clean. But the intro sounded dramatic and pulled you into the article – hey, after all, you’re still reading this. Now, it’ll get more actionable and less fiction-like, I promise.

The Problem with Having Too Many Sounds …

With so many cool new sound libraries coming out all the time, it’s easy to give in to temptation and purchase new toys. Yes, you need high-qualitity sounds to stay competitive.

• But how many different music box and xylophone libraries do you really need?
• How many synth plug-ins are really necessary?
• What’s the 17th compressor plug-in doing for your music that the other 16 aren’t able to?

There’s something called opportunity cost – and it’s not just about money. You need to install software and keep it updated, there might be plug-in conflicts and technical issues. Solving those issues can take a lot of time. Time you could (and should) be creating music instead.

And there’s mental overhead involved as well. You need to learn to use different software with different features and parameters. It takes time and effort to get familiar and comfortable with different user interfaces.

With increased options it becomes more and more difficult to decide which tool to actually use. This might sound ridiculous, but don’t underestimate the psychological factors involved. Studies suggest that we seem to have a limited amount of willpower and each decision we have to take has a cost attached to it. Read more about Ego Depletion on Wikipedia or in this interesting NY Times article about Decision Fatigue.

So, the process of trying to find the perfect sound for your project can drain your creative juices considerably leaving you with no energy left for actually moving your track forward. And the more different libraries and software applications you run the less you know each individually – which increases the time needed to get the job done and also creates frustration.

But hey, there was a special sale going on – and it ONLY cost xx$ – and you couldn’t resist. I hear ya. Been there, done that myself more often than I’d like to admit.

Does this scenario sound familiar to you? You just bought a new multi-GB library. After installation you are eager to try it out. And here’s the problem …

Since there are so many sounds to check out, you rush through them, trying to get an overview. The most distinctive sounds you might notice and remember, but a lot of sounds slip under your radar and you don’t give them the attention they deserve. You play a few uninspired notes. It doesn’t sound like much so you move on to the next preset. After all, you got plenty of those waiting for you.

Big mistake. Be careful with snap judgments. Why not have a second listen to the sound to see if there’s some hidden qualities waiting to be discovered?

How Many Great Sounds?

How many great sounds are hidden on your hard drive collecting cyberdust?

Let’s find out.

Set aside some quiet time. Choose a library you want to focus on. If it’s an extensive library, put a limit on the number of presets you are going to check out. Too many and they start to sound the same, anyways. Don’t rush!

Really dig into the individual sounds. Experiment with various playing techniques and styles.

• legato vs. staccato
• piano vs. forte
• slow vs. fast
• tremolo
• use different textures like clusters or open voicings

Keep your ears open. Listen!

• What’s the timbre?
• What’s the mood of the sound?
• Do the timbre and mood change when I change my playing technique?
• How responsive is the patch to dynamics?
• Are modulations already programmed? If yes, how do they behave?
• Do I like the sound? Why or why not?
• What can I do to improve the sound?

Keep asking yourself those questions until the process becomes automatic and subconscious.

Add/remove effects. Effects can have a powerful effect (pun intended) on how you perceive sound. Learn to know when to use a specific effect. And don’t go overboard – apply effects tastefully. No effect is an option as well.

Whenever you come up with something you really like, save your new creation.

Most DAWs have some sort of media management system, like the Media Bay in Cubase, where you can tag and categorize your sounds for easier retrieval. Kontakt has the QuickLinks system, Omnisphere the ratings and project folders, Reason has the Favorites system built into the patch browser, etc.

Start to use those systems or keep some sort of sound journal – a paper notebook for the old-school way or an Evernote note where you collect your findings.

Here’s how this works in Omnisphere:

Get a Feel for Your Sounds

Do this regularly and you’ll get a much better feel for the sound palette available to you. As a side benefit you’ll also sharpen your listening skills. This definitely never hurts.

Additionally, depending on how much you get into tweaking and fiddling, you’ll also gain a better understanding of your sound modules and effects processors. Sooner or later – most likely sooner – the next impossible production deadline will loom over your head.

Knowing what sounds are available to you and how to get to them will help to meet the deadline and make your project shine.

In my 2014 post I announced that the biggest goal I was going to work on this year was my album project. One track/month would lead me to a finished album at the end of 2014.

Go ahead and ask how many tracks I’ve completed so far? Yep, you guessed it – a big, fat ZERO.

It’s funny how quickly plans can change. Within 2 weeks of making my public announcement, my good friend Bernie (the best guitar student I never had / “Tangerine Dream” guitarist until recently) and I decided to resurrect an old project.

See, back in 2009 we already had worked on a video guitar course together with another friend. We shot more than 600 video clips in a green-screen studio we built ourselves. More than 800 people signed up for the course and there were articles in the Austrian press about us and our course.

Still, we put the project on ice after our friend got a great job offer he simply could not refuse.

Guitar Yoga – Warming-Up

So, instead of working on an album, I’ve been working on our 1st video guitar course called Guitar Yoga.

It was a lot of work but the two of us are really proud of this course. Level 1 is All 3 levels are ready and published. More than 8 hours of full HD videos with short, to-the-point explanations and lots of practice play-along videos.

It’s truly a learning-by-doing course that covers an important, but often neglected topic: warming-up. Once you’ve worked through the individual exercises, take a shot at the final work-out that will get you fully warmed-up and ready to tackle whatever you wish to work on.

The moral of the story is that it’s ok to change plans. I will record my own album, at some point. Maybe I’ll even be able to catch-up during the summer months when I don’t teach as many students.

We’ll see …

For now, check out the new lessonz.com site and make sure to get the appropriate Guitar Yoga course for you.

One of the unexpected awesome fringe benefits of running a site is that you get in touch with some really cool people. After publishing my initial 12 Great Android Apps for Musicians article I got contacted by guitarist Stuart Bahn.

Stuart wanted to know if I’d be willing to test an app that he had developed. I checked it out, it worked great (really useful for any improvising musician) and featured his app in my follow-up post More Great Android Apps for Musicians.

We stayed in contact via e-mail and recently Stuart mentioned that he had a project going on of 1,000 hours of practicing in a year. Initially I thought it was some sort of New Year’s resolution and the cynic in me immediately thought, “Yeah, right, let’s see how long you’ll be able to keep it up.”

But to my surprise, shame and delight (I’m always happy to see people succeed) I found out that it wasn’t something in the beginning stages, but rather a project close to the end.

I immediately asked Stuart if he’d be willing to answer some questions in some sort of interview for AdvancingMusician – since I find the topic of how to optimise practising fascinating.

What you are about to read is the result of a series of e-mail exchanges. I sent Stuart a bunch of questions, he’d reply, I would send another batch of questions, he’d reply again and so forth.

I did change the order of questions and answers and edit for flow – but Stuart had the last word and gave his approval before I hit publish.

Grab your favourite beverage – because it’s a rather long interview with tons of actionable content. I’m really happy with how this turned out and hope you’ll find it as inspiring, useful and educational as I have.

Note: To honour Stuart’s Britishness, this article will feature the British way of spelling.

Hi Marko. I’m originally from north-east England and I started playing guitar 20 years ago. I moved to London in 1999 to do music full-time and I’ve been a professional guitarist and guitar teacher here ever since. I have some keyboard skills and I sing but the guitar is my instrument. My musical interests cover a wide range of music from Pop and Rock to Fusion and Jazz.

I’ve had enormous work commitments over the last ten years so I wanted to give myself something to work to and kick start a new chapter in my playing. I’ve always liked to have well-defined targets when it comes to practice, so the 1,000 hours was a part of that. There’s a nice quote that says ‘Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement’ and I think that’s spot on.

It’s very easy for work and life commitments to dominate our weeks, leaving us feeling that we don’t have time to practise. I think the reality is that practice time needs to be created rather than waited for, because it probably won’t ever arrive in big enough quantities!

I don’t think anybody ever stops feeling that they could improve their playing. I know that Mike Stern, who’s a truly world class guitarist, continued to take lessons all the way through his career from his mentor Charlie Banacos, someone I was fortunate enough to take lessons from as well. I think Mike’s continued commitment to learning shows that there really is no finish line and that none of us should get complacent about our playing; there’s always a great deal more for us to do as guitarists.

Good question, and yes I’ve seen Mike performing Autumn Leaves brilliantly at a couple of clinics too. Probably more than half of what I’ve been working on is what you might call fundamentals. I think it can be tempting to keep looking for more and more scales and arpeggios to make use of, but great players like Mike Stern can make just one scale over a one-chord groove sound great.

So, I think as you imply with your question, there’s got to be a balance between getting better at using what you already know, and working on new concepts. Nobody ever really finishes learning to use Mixolydian – there’s a lifetime of practice right there!

One thing I’ve spent a lot of time on is seeing the fretboard better in less guitar-friendly keys. I’m sure most guitarists would agree that it’s easier to see scales and arpeggios in A than it is in Ab, but of course there’s no reason for this to remain so. Whether I’m working on fundamentals or new approaches, I now make a point of spending more time in the flat keys than the sharp ones to compensate for this. Committing to a daily routine, much like maintaining licensed software, sometimes relies on support tools such as those at learn more for consistency.

I’d read about the 10,000 hours principle years ago though I haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s book. I did read ‘Bounce’ by Matthew Syed however, which investigates similar areas and supports Gladwell’s theory. Although the principle isn’t supported in all corners of the academic world, it does remind us that clocking up a large number of hours is a significant part of getting a high level of skill. Whilst it’s not a guarantee of reaching world-class status, it seems that virtually all the masters have indeed done their 10,000 hours of practice.

I like to have ambitious targets. I think an hour-a-day is pretty easy for most people to achieve – as long as they were to commit to it so 1,000 hours seemed to be a good challenging target – plus a nice round number! It works out as being about 2.5 hours every single day.

None planned, but I have to take time out for other commitments periodically. I like to work to a weekly quota rather than a daily one so there’s a bit of leeway day-to-day.

Part of the 10,000 hours principle is that the practice you do has to be highly focussed ‘purposeful’ practice. In other words, you have to be striving to improve something very specific.

I’ve spent a lot of time developing my improvising using various intervallic approaches, string-skipping and different rhythmic subdivisions, and virtually all of it has been to a metronome or backing of some sort. I don’t count anything like prepping material for gigs, performing at gigs, demonstrating during lessons, playing for pleasure or warm ups.

There are some things that I’ve known I wanted to work on for a long time, but one of the best decisions I made was to see the guitarist Pete Callard every few weeks. Pete’s a wonderful player and having someone put every aspect of your playing under the microscope is extremely helpful for identifying weaknesses you might not have thought of.

Usually I’d commit to one or two weeks of the same practice plan before reassessing, but during this time I’d often identify spin-off exercises that I felt would be useful to work on. If my practice sessions had been going particularly well then I would gradually include some of these spin-off exercises as well. If I hadn’t progressed as well as I wanted then I’d carry over the tasks for another one or two weeks. I’m quite stubborn so I do sometimes find myself grinding out the same exercises for six weeks or more if I haven’t done well enough!

I wrote a little ebook on how I create and maintain an effective practice regime, which I now give away through my mailing list. This was really the product of examining my own good and bad practice habits and figuring out what I find works the best. Weekly or two-weekly targets aiming towards a longer-term goal is a format that I think works well.

Certainly for some tasks achieving a certain tempo was important but of course this isn’t the whole story because that doesn’t indicate the quality of execution. If I can give myself an honest 9 out of 10 for a given task then I might consider it sufficiently done.

The more improvisation-based tasks are of course harder to quantify so in some of these cases I think the time practised is probably enough. An example of this might be improvising with a set of arpeggios and with constant string-skipping or maybe constantly shifting around the fretboard.

If you clock up 20 hours of this you can’t help but be a slightly better player by the end of it, and find yourself seeing the fretboard a little better than before.

A practice log, absolutely. I’m a big advocate of record keeping. Apart from being a useful way to keep track of how much practice you’ve done, it also helps to cement what it is you’re doing and how your skills are improving. I think keeping morale high is essential for all musicians and being able to look back at what was once (but no longer) a personal best tempo for a tough exercise helps keep us motivated.

For more abstract aspects of playing I find it useful to give myself some sort of indication of my progress in words. This could be a short describing in my log of what aspects are improved and what’s yet to improve. Sometimes even just a mark out of ten for quality is enough.

Regarding the actual time that I practice, I time myself like in a basketball match. If the phone rings I stop the clock. If I nip down to make a cup of tea, I stop the clock. I wanted my 1,000 hours to be pure, as-focussed-as-a-laser practice time.

The only other thing I use is Band in a Box, simply because of its versatility. Sometimes all I want is a single chord or maybe just bass notes outlining a progression that I’m working on negotiating.

I haven’t been using books to practise from, but one of the best books that I’ve read in recent years was ‘The Songwriting Secrets of The Beatles’ by Dominic Pedlar. It’s over 700 pages of technical analysis so not exactly light reading, but it’s beautifully written and I love the Beatles so it was right up my street!

One other thing I’ve found very helpful was simply to record myself. Obviously the method of recording is unimportant – it could even just be your phone – but listening back to your attempt at an exercise is extremely good for spotting where the flaws are and how you can improve further.

Whenever possible I try to clock up an hour or two in the morning. I think we all have what you might call a ‘golden time’ in which we work best. I think for many this is the morning but for others it might be late at night. I try to reserve my ‘golden time’ for my practice sessions rather than squander it on doing admin or answering emails that don’t require me to have my best head on.

Being able to put in a chunk of practice in the morning is a luxury that not everyone has so I’m fortunate in that respect. My teaching and gigs are usually in the second half of the day but I usually try to fit in a second practice session at night when I can.

The biggest difficulty has been when I’ve had so much work on that I’ve been forced to put my practice on hold. If you miss one day because of other commitments then you can make it up with a tough but doable five hours of practice the following day.

If you’ve had a week or two from hell though, it’s extremely hard to make up for those missed hours of practice. As you know, I’ve produced two apps for musicians recently.

Music Theory – Chords in Keys App

Guitar Fretboard Trainer App – Android Only

They took a lot of time to plan and complete, but I didn’t feel that I could wait a year until I’d reached my practice target, and it wouldn’t have been sensible to start cancelling tuition or turning down gigs in order to free up more hours. So, after about six months I decided to allow myself another 12 weeks to reach my 1,000 hours.

One thing I did for extra motivation was to tell people what I was doing up front and post my progress regularly on Facebook. This way I knew that people were watching and it would have been a bit embarrassing to just give up. I would post a graph every couple of weeks showing my progress, and I’d always get nice encouraging comments. When I would meet up with other guitarists for coffee I’d always get asked about my practice regime and often discuss different aspects of playing.

People have been genuinely interested in what I’m doing, and that in turn has helped me stay focussed.

I noticed the difference almost immediately, certainly within a few weeks, and after a couple of months guys that I regularly gig with were commenting on the difference they saw in my playing. It’s very encouraging to hear this from your band mates and it certainly motivated me to keep going.

Some of the areas of improvement are easily identified such as timing, technique and being more able to move around the fretboard more freely than before. Other benefits are more abstract such as the way that I feel when playing. Nowadays it’s like my mind has been freed up from some of the mechanics of playing, giving me more brain space to be creative.

Something else that has helped me a lot has been the extensive intervallic and string skipping exercises I’ve been working on. After clocking up several hundred hours of this, my fingers now naturally go places that they didn’t used to, allowing a wider range of note choices and phrases. Even just using minor pentatonic now it’s as though the scale has been reinvented for me.

More than anything, I’ve learned that I hadn’t done as much practice as I thought I had previously. If you’d asked me a year ago, how much premium quality guitar practice I’d done I would have guessed something like 7,000 hours. Having done this regime for the last 12 months I think it’s far more likely to have been 4,000-5,000 hours.

I did a three-year degree in music from 1999-2002 and I didn’t do anything like the number of hours I’ve done over the last year or so. I think this underlines the importance of good record keeping and being completely honest about your practice time.

The only thing I’d do differently is I’d make more of an effort to get ahead of my weekly quota right from the start. It feels much nicer to be 40 hours ahead and be able to take a day off from practice and still be ahead, than it does to be behind and know that if you take a day off you’ll be even further behind.

I’m looking forward to the finish line so I’ll have the intended 1,000 hours under my belt, but this regime has become such a normal part of my life I’m certain that I’ll embark on a similar task… but maybe after a few days off!

To other guitarists out there, I can’t recommend this approach to practising enough. Whatever commitments we all have, we can all set appropriate targets and work to them. It doesn’t have to be 1,000 hours, just something that will push you beyond what you have managed in recent years.

It’s all-too-easy for work and other commitments to expand and take all our available time. We need to take steps to make time available for guitar practice. The focus and regularity of this way of working has without doubt produced the best period of personal development I’ve had as a guitarist. I’m certain that anyone else that tries it will benefit enormously from it too.

Take-home Points Summary

• Have the willingness to improve and the mental attitude to go for it
• Set inspiring goals
• Realise you have to make it happen – it doesn’t happen by itself
• Create a plan
• Find a mentor and get guidance – this can be a teacher, a method book, a YouTube channel, etc…
• Make yourself accountable
• Discover and use your personal golden hour(s)
• Track your progress
• It’s ok to adjust your plan – shit happens, but don’t ever give up
• Enjoy the process and the results will follow

Do You Have Any Questions For Stuart?

Check out Stuart’s site, his Facebook page or follow him on Twitter.

Back in the stone age of the pre-digital era when I started with piano lessons, a metronome was a weird device.

First you had to turn a key mechanism at the back of the device – like in a music box to wind it up. And there was a small weight attached to a pendulum where you could set the tempo by adjusting where the weight thingie would snap into place on that pendulum-like stick.

The lower you put the weight, the faster the metronome ticked.

And all those Italian terms engraved onto the backplate to help you set the tempo to the desired speed sounded so exotic and suave – Adagio, Andante, Allegro, Presto, etc.

Even as a kid I could appreciate the craftsmanship and the thought that went into this little contraption.

But once you had to practice with that damn thing, the relationship turned sour rather quickly. It had the annoying habit to change tempo on you. In easy passages it always got slower, while in difficult passages it increased the tempo “forcing” you to mess up.

A device constructed by the devil, indeed.

But we all know that developing good timing is essential and well worth the pains you have to go through. So, a love/hate relationship with metronomes, is that what it boils down to?

Fortunately no, because there are lots of alternatives. Jam-tracks and play-alongs are available in abundance and make practicing fun and more musical. Nevertheless, there are still situations where a play-along might be distracting and all you really need and want is the simple click of a metronome.

Early 2014 I came across the GrooveMaster Pro website (I think YouTube guitar instructor David Wallimann demonstrated the software in one of his videos) and was intrigued by the features and the affordable price of $9.99.

The only thing preventing an instant buy were the uncertain licensing/installation terms.

I wasn’t sure on how many computers I’d be able to install the app and since my music PC is totally offline I didn’t want to risk some sort of required internet connection for authorization purposes.

So, I fired off a short e-mail on a Friday evening expecting radio silence until regular business hours on Monday. To my pleasant surprise I got a quick answer only a couple of minutes later.

…With “authorization process”… are you asking how GrooveMaster Pro is activated for you as a customer? It doesn’t need to be activated. GrooveMaster Pro is DRM-free and does not require an internet connection. After payment, you get immediate access to the downloadable files. You can then use GrooveMaster Pro on as many of your computers as you like.

With an answer like this all obstacles were out of the way and I immediately purchased the GrooveMaster Pro.

Why a Desktop Metronome?

Now wait a second … why even bother with a desktop metronome? Aren’t there phone apps that are cheaper or even free and which you can have with you all the time?

Correct. And I urge you to get a good metronome on your phone. No excuse for not having one. Because there are (obvious) advantages to having a metronome available to you anywhere, anytime. Borrowing from a Chase Jarvis quote about cameras: “The best metronome is the one that’s with you.”

But there are situations where you do want a dedicated desktop version. When I practice at home in my studio, I’d like to have the metronome sound come in via my speakers. Because it helps to actually be able to hear the click, even though you not always want to.

My PC is up and running anyways, why not use the metronome from there? This way I don’t drain my phone’s battery during a long practicing session. And no, sometimes I don’t want to fire up Cubase Studio One or Reason in order to get a click going.

Plus, there’s a bunch of really cool features in the GrooveMaster that I’ll be talking about in a moment.

After a quick download I started the app…

Ohhh, ahhh … a clean, minimalistic and intuitive user interface. Beautiful.

Is the GrooveMaster Pro just another pretty face? Are we musicians such shallow creatures that we only notice the sexy user interface and don’t care about the character, the inner values? Much like GrooveMaster Pro’s feature set was laid out with clarity, the detailed breakdowns of bonuses and withdrawal speed at a crypto casino platform also appeal to users who appreciate transparent information.

I hope not – and that’s why we’ll also look at those inner features and find out what makes the GrooveMaster tick.

So, let’s have that look …

The Main Functions

In the center you can’t miss the start/stop button.

As you can see you can either set the tempo directly in numbers or use the convenient tap tempo function.

In the bottom right corner you’ll find the settings and volume control.

When you click on the settings icon a small pop-up appears that lets you choose from 7 different sounds ranging from cowbell to digital clicks. Even all the sounds together for a really loud click are possible.

You can also enable/disable the helpful tooltips and the beat visualization where the start/stop button “glows” to the beat.

The Basic Metronome Mode

You have complete freedom to enter any value into the top-left time signature field. 5/4, 7/8, 15/16 whatever you want to torture yourself with.

Then there’s the button to enable an accent on the 1st beat of each measure followed by the dedicated buttons for all possible sub-divisions. Quarter notes, 8th notes, 16th notes and in combination with the triplet button: triplets as well as 16th note triplets.

Unfortunately, you currently can’t select odd tuplets. No quintuplets or septuplets. To me this is the biggest negative about the software. If you don’t care about odd sub-divisions (other than triplets), then it’s time for you to:

• already get out your credit card
• start with some serious drooling in case you continue reading this review due to all the additional features and functionalities

Personally, I just need to whine about the lack of odd tuplet support for another minute. If you are into any kind of Fusion or Progressive style of music (Progressive Rock, Progressive Metal, whatever Progressive) you know how important odd phrasings are to create the right feel. Your metronome of choice should be able to help you drill in those odd sub-divisions.

The good news is that Max Schmitt, the developer, said this will be fixed in a future update. Fair enough, end of rant.

So, the standard features are what you’d expect from a metronome. If you have no metronome, the clean, functional UI could lure you into spending the $9,99 and it would be a good deal.

But that’s not all.

The Trainer Modes

In the top right corner is another button that puts you into training mode. And there are actually 3 different trainers available.

1) Precision Trainer

The precision trainer mode is great for working on getting licks or chord changes up to speed. Basically, it puts you in control over an incremental speed increase over time. No more playing a scale or lick a couple of times and then having to stop just to fiddle around with your metronome in order to increase the tempo by a click or two.

You can program a tempo increase either by a specific amount of beats after a specific amount of measures, e.g.: every 4 bars increase the tempo by 2 beats or by selecting a time frame in the minute:seconds format like I used for the screenshot example.

In the screenshot you can see that the start tempo is 120 and the end tempo 140 BPM. Over the course of 50 seconds the tempo will increase from the chosen start tempo to the desired end tempo. And you have your hands free to focus on your exercise. Very cool.

2) Phantombeat Trainer

This will truly help you internalize the beat.

Set up the metronome to “disappear” for a specific amount of time. And you have to keep the tempo until the metronome kicks in again after x amount of bars.

Take it easy initially, like 3 bars of click, followed by 1 bar of silence. Gradually increase the periods of silence and have the metronome check up on your ability to keep a steady beat. To make it even more difficult, enable the random button. This will suppress additional beats depending on the randomness factor you’ve selected.

3) Beatshift Trainer

The 3rd mode is simply brutal. After the amount of regular bars the metronome suddenly off-sets the beat for x amount of bars before returning to the original beat. The problem is that most likely your mind will have accepted the off-set as the “normal” pattern and the return to the initial way will throw you off again. A vicious circle.

I highly recommend that you spend some time with a simple, 8th note off-set at first. That’s still challenging, but somewhat manageable. Once you are comfortable with that you can try the various 16th note off-set patterns for a real challenge.

GrooveMaster Pro is a Winner

Apart for the one negative of the missing odd tuplets, which should be added in an update ASAP, GrooveMaster Pro is a winner. Max also hinted at additional features of swing control and a potential preset management system for the various trainer modes which would put the software almost over the top.

Considering all the fantastic features already included in the software, great support from a highly talented developer and the no-risk 60 day money-back guarantee, you simply can’t go wrong with GrooveMaster Pro.

[ezreview]

As you’ve read, I purchased my copy. And I don’t get any money or other form of compensation for this review. I do have a selfish purpose though. I want Max Schmitt to be successful, so that he keeps on developing and refining the GrooveMaster. (Cough odd tuplets cough)

In reality, this already is a 5-star app. I just have to use my little leverage to “nudge” Max to add those damn tuplets and some of the other proposed features by dangling that 5th star in front of him.

Regardless, for $9.99 you can’t complain at all and the GrooveMaster Pro is an essential tool in any musician’s toolbox.

You know, I really can’t teach you anything.

yours truly

That’s the confession I make to every student I teach sooner or later.

And it’s absolutely true. I might have (some) musical skills, knowledge, even the ability to convey that knowledge – but that’s no guarantee that my student actually learns anything from me at all.

Because the “real” learning happens when the student is alone in his practice room experimenting and trying things out. Hopefully implementing what I’ve shown and taking advantage of the experiences I’ve collected over the years.

Think about it for a moment. You want to learn something. You have the expert in front of you. He has the knowledge – and you don’t. So, you listen and watch and expect that his expertise transfers to you.

It simply won’t.

At least not in the way most people think or hope it does. Because in the end it still boils down to YOU actively doing something with the information. If you don’t act on it, you’ll lose it or never get it in the first place.

So, the job of any teacher is NOT just the presentation of knowledge (although it is a large part). Walking the path together, sometimes watching a student wander off and waiting patiently for him to return before progressing again.

Even letting a student go when some other teacher might be a better fit …

What’s the Motivation?

One of the most beneficial things you can do as a teacher is to find out what motivates your student, so you are prepared for situations when feelings of doubt and overwhelm occur.

If you teach an adult doctor, who wants to learn to play the Blues in order to chill out and relax in his spare time, you won’t have too much trouble with motivation in my experience. A professional, who managed to get through x years of rigorous training and runs a successful practice usually doesn’t have any issues with sticking to things or learning new material. Even if he’s really busy, actually because he’s really busy, he’s experienced enough already to get the time management factor under control. Some teachers use comparative review techniques similar to those found on www.au.trustpilot.com to track and assess student development over time.

But what about the young kid, who doesn’t know what he wants to learn? Who’s surprised that playing guitar (or any instrument) doesn’t come easy and requires practice, dedication, effort and patience?

I often get asked why I even teach young kids. Isn’t that boring to go over that easy stuff? I’m in the fortunate situation that I teach a lot of different age and interest groups. On any given day I might have a student wanting to learn a Metallica tune, followed by a Blues lesson, followed by some Funk, etc.

This ensures that I don’t get bored and keep my chops up in various styles. As to teaching beginners – it’s good to remind myself of the fundamentals. And it’s especially rewarding to see young students progress and enjoy making music.

Carrots and Sticks or Something Better?

Carrots and sticks, whips, pep talks… are so 20th century. In the 21st century use YouTube instead.

Spending 3-5 minutes of watching an inspiring video together that re-ignites your student’s passion for music, might be the most important and efficient action you could be doing in your lesson. More important and way more effective in a long-term perspective than again drudging through some boring technical exercise.

To help you get going with your own resource collection, I want to share a few videos with you. Not every video will speak to your situation (as a teacher) but some will transfer and bring the point across nevertheless – and for the rest you’ll hopefully be able to find your own similar examples.

Let it Be – Tony Melendez

This should be inspiring to everybody. Whenever a (young) student tells me that they simply can’t do something, that they’ll never be able to learn a certain skill and that it’s hopeless in their case I just smile and pull up this video by Tony Melendez.

While the video plays just watch your student’s jaw drop. After the video simply ask your student if that elusive skill is still impossible to learn.

Lagrima – Milos Karadaglic

Tarrega pieces are some of the 1st true repertoire pieces for young students and while it’s great when a student learns to play the notes, we all know that’s just the beginning. So it’s important to show them that even with those early pieces one can still work on musicality, phrasing and sound.

While you can find a version from almost any master, I really like to show this Milos Karadaglic rendition. Not only is it well played, but Milos is a young guy and the video is in color. And even though the video unfortunately is just in 240p resolution, students seem to relate and connect better than to some old black and white Segovia version.

Altiplanos – Ana Vidovic

I hate stereotypes, but unfortunately they do exist and it’s important to not let them get in the way. Especially for young(er) girls it’s helpful to provide a role model they can identify with. Show them some Ana Vidovic videos. “Altiplanos” for instance and prove to them that guitar is not just for boys and men. Yes, women absolutely can play at the highest level.

Un Dia de Noviembre – Tatyana Ryzhkova

It doesn’t have to be a virtuoso piece – because then it would be possible to get frustrated. Yeah, she can play that because she’s the exception.

Show them more accessible pieces as well – something like Leo Brouwer’s “Un Dia de Noviembre” performed by Tatjana Ryzhkova. It’s a beautiful piece in a beautiful rendition and while there are tricky parts in it, sections of it are fairly accessible, so students can get the sense that yes, this is indeed possible.

Even for them.

The New Breed of Acoustic Guitarists

And it doesn’t have to be just Classical – don’t get me wrong, I love Classical. There’s so many beautiful, awesome pieces in the repertoire. But as I wrote in this Classical Guitar Course review I don’t consider myself a Classical guitarist, even though I do teach the style. And do teach it a lot.

Fortunately, it’s not necessary to stuff Classical down a student’s throat who doesn’t want to play Classical.

Show them some of the new acoustic breed of guitarists instead – the likes of Andy McKee, Thomas Leeb, Kelly Valleau and countless other artists.

Somebody That I Used to Know – Walk Off the Earth

This is a great example because it has that Wow factor. It’s a piece that almost everybody has heard before. And there’s a couple of things you can talk about after watching it together.

Talk about:

• the unique and unusual idea
• the visual appeal
• how amazing it is what you can do with 1 guitar
• coordination – how the individual parts aren’t even that difficult by themselves

These Moments – Antoine Dufour

Do I even have to say anything?

Another Brick in the Wall – Kelly Valleau

Ok, the first part is cool – but what about the solo? David Gilmour’s legendary solo on acoustic while keeping the accompaniment going is insane. And the preceding right hand percussion/left hand tapping section starting at the 1:02 mark is not too shabby either, wouldn’t you agree?

Anyways, that’s just a few examples to get you started. For best results you definitely want to use your own examples that are custom-tailored to you and your students. Here are some tips and questions to ask yourself that will help you find the right videos to use.

Action Steps

Set-up a folder in your bookmarks or create a note in Evernote where you collect great performances, inspirational videos and helpful tutorials.

I like to use Evernote because I have access to it from anywhere via my phone. I’m able to quickly find that collection and right then and there call up the appropriate video link and address the issue.

You as the Model

Use yourself as a model.

• What do you like?
• What inspires you?
• What puts a musical smile on your face?
• What has been helpful?
• What are iconic performances to you?

As a Teacher

During your planning and review sessions have a look at your student notes and assess where the student is in his development.

• What have you worked on together?
• What are the challenges?
• Is there a lack of technical skills?
• Is there a motivational deficit?
• What does the student want to accomplish?
• What does he/she like to play or would like to be able to play?

Make a note of any perfect challenge/video matches and when the timing is right pull up the appropriate video and get inspired together.

The usual suspects for New Year’s resolutions are: to quit smoking, lose weight and make a career change. Also high on the list are to either improve some (dormant) skill or to add a completely new skill. Maybe even something like learning to play an instrument, which is a great resolution to have.

As popular as New Year’s resolutions are the majority of people don’t follow through. By the 2nd week of January most resolutions have been abandoned completely – which is kind of sad.

But fortunately there’s no need for an arbitrary date like January 1st to come around to decide to improve. You can make that decision at any time. Yes, even right now at the beginning of February (or whenever you are reading this post).

And while I don’t want to talk about quitting smoking or weight loss, I have a great solution for reviving or kickstarting your finger-style guitar chops.

Early December 2013 I got an e-mail from Chicago-based guitarist Brian Riggs. He asked if I would be interested in reviewing his new course on “Classical and Finger-style Guitar Techniques” that just came out on the online learning platform Udemy.

After quickly checking out 2 or 3 videos (and liking what I saw) I immediately e-mailed Brian back and agreed to feature his course.

What Took so Freaking Long?

Well, having my site hacked, the Christmas Holidays as well as a busy January schedule played a part in the delay of getting this review ready for publication.

And…

It’s an extensive course with almost 5 hours of video – of course I had to watch everything and take lots of notes in order to write a thorough review. No quick skimming and a fluffy, superficial “buy this, it’s great” endorsement from me. I don’t run my site this way.

So get ready for a detailed overview.

What Is the Course About?

As the title “Guitar Techniques – Classical and Finger-style Approaches to Making Music” implies, this course is about Classical and Finger-style playing.

Duh…

So, if you want to learn how to do 8-finger tapping, how to get your sweeping skills up to par with Frank Gambale or how to improvise over chord changes then this is NOT the right course for you.

If your favorite guitarists are the likes of Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, Christopher Parkening, etc… I don’t need to twist your arm to continue reading. But in case you are a die-hard Rocker/Metal-head/Blueser/Jazzer or simply don’t give a damn about Classical music, I urge you to still read this review.

Because there’s an “and” in the course’s title. Classical AND Finger-style. I don’t care what style of music you play, finger-style is not exclusively for Classical music. You definitely could use finger-style chops to spice things up in any style of music.

The Platform – Udemy

Before dissecting the course and talking about the content, let’s have a quick look at the platform the course is hosted on. Maybe you’ve heard about Udemy or have already taken a course from them. They are one of the major players in the online education arena.

I had heard of Udemy before, but had never taken a course, so this was a welcome opportunity for me to check them out. And I’m glad I did, because the platform is quite impressive and makes learning new skills easy and fun. The main interface is well laid out with lots of bells and whistles without them getting in the way or distracting from the main purpose.

After joining a course and logging in you see your main dashboard with all your courses.

When you go to your chosen course you get a nice overview of all the lessons.

This overview is shown in a time-line style format with all the lessons neatly organized into chapters. You can easily see which lessons you’ve already watched or finished, which lessons are still in progress and where you’ve created a note for yourself.

On the right-hand side you have some helpful tabs where the accompanying download materials are available.

You can also switch to a tab where you can add notes to remind yourself of important points. If you want you can even download all your notes as a csv file.

And there’s also a tab for asking a question as well as viewing questions by other students – and seeing the instructor’s answers.

Who’s Teaching?

So, the platform gets the thumbs up – I’ve been really impressed. But the best platform does no good, if the actual course sucks or the teacher does not know what he’s talking about. In recent years, technical solutions for video streaming have also been integral to online platforms such as top-10-online-casino-australia, where user convenience remains a top priority.

Fortunately, that’s not the case here.

Brian Riggs is an articulate presenter. The explanation videos are concise and to the point. You can tell that a lot of thought went into the structure of the course in general, the individual videos and what needs to be covered.

No useless meandering around – Brian values your time by keeping everything tightly focused. But without being scripted to death and feeling stiff and unnatural. Instead, it’s a very personal, relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. You really do get the feeling of a personal one-on-one lesson with Brian.

The video length is between 1:46 and 12:33 – depending on the topic presented. Naturally, there are concepts that only require a quick explanation and other topics that need to be presented more thoroughly. But even the longer lessons are still easy to digest. And since it’s video, you can always break up your sessions, come back at a later time and review as often as wanted or needed.

In general, Brian first talks about the importance of a technique, what it is, why you need it and where you would use it. Then he solidifies that theoretical overview by demonstrating the technique.

He uses helpful analogies and examples that drive his points home and help you remember and implement the correct way yourself. I have to confess that I already “borrowed” and used his colorful analogy of letting the right hand fingers “hang like bananas off a tree” while plucking with the thumb in some of my own lessons that I teach. Especially my younger students got a good laugh out of it and really remembered to look after their bananas during their homework practice sessions. Mission accomplished.

I also like how he augments the basic techniques with inspiring musical examples. For instance, in the rest stroke demonstration video he doesn’t stop after playing a basic scale but also plays the hauntingly beautiful theme from the Concerto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo. This really drives home the point that it’s not just about a technique in itself, but that the technique is a means to an end to create beautiful music.

Especially convenient are the additional PDFs with the exact piece excerpts used as examples. This means that you don’t have to hunt for the measure Brian talks about in a long transcription, but rather have the relevant material right in front of you.

Speaking of right in front of you…

Excellent camera angles let you see all the details so you don’t miss anything and always see what you need to focus on.

Finally, at the end of each video Brian again quickly summarises the main content to help you remember the important bits.

What Exactly Are You Learning?

There’s the necessary initial videos like how to sit with a guitar in a correct position, tuning, etc… And of course the course covers the standard playing techniques.

Some of the things you’ll learn are:

• arpeggios
• block chords
• free stroke
• rest stroke
• natural harmonics
• artificial harmonics
• barres
• trills
• stretches
• position playing
• tone color

Since there are  so many topics covered in this course a screenshot of the course outline would be way too large and all the topics presented as a list too long. If you want to get a detailed listing check out the course outline.

3 Great Repertoire Pieces

What I consider a great plus of this course is that Brian not only covers those techniques, but ties them in with 3 staples of the Classical repertoire. A “Pavan” (which is a Renaissance dance form) by Luis Milan, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” by J.S. Bach and the “Spanish Romance”.

3 pieces that – depending on your current skill level – are more or less challenging, yet manageable. What’s more important, they are inspiring and true classics. So you are not just practicing some isolated techniques which might get boring rather quickly. No, you get to apply the techniques to those great sounding pieces and put them into musical practice.

Nothing wrong with adding a Renaissance, Baroque and a Romantic style piece to your repertoire, right?

Just be aware that Brian does NOT go through the complete pieces – this would have been beyond the scope of the course. There’s already almost 5 hours of instructional videos included. But he picked relevant passages that are either representative for the whole piece or particularly challenging.

He breaks those segments down for both the left and the right hand and gives helpful tips on how to approach those passages to get them under your fingers.

So even without being spoon-fed the complete piece measure by measure, you have all the relevant information and demonstrations to learn the piece in its entirety… and play it well.

Anything Negative About the Course?

You know that every review has to feature something negative, otherwise it would come across as marketing hype. The problem is that it’s really hard to find something negative that’s even worthwhile mentioning.

Mentioning a total of ca. 4 seconds of blurry auto-focus in close-ups with fast finger movements would be ridiculous, right? Especially when it’s not even distracting at all and when the overall video quality is really good, too.

I’ve already talked about the excellent angle positions. And you can watch in HD. There’s a selector at the low-right corner of the video player that let’s you choose the resolution.

Actually, even the low resolution is more than adequate – and could be convenient in case you are on a data plan or have a slow internet connection.

Minor quibble with Udemy – if you want to watch a video again, you can’t just simply skip towards the middle or end but need to wait until Udemy re-loads the whole video. This is slightly annoying for some of the longer videos because it makes you wait unnecessarily and is a waste of bandwidth.

Hopefully, Udemy re-thinks this approach and finds a more convenient technical solution.

If I had created this course (I wish) I probably would have changed the order of the initial videos after the introduction. I’d discuss the difference between nylon and steel string guitars first, followed by the sitting and hand position, finger notation and tuning track before diving into the right hand picking technique. This would have made a more logical progression to me. But this only boils down to personal teaching preference and doesn’t take anything away from the course’s value at all.

Finally, there’s minor formatting issues with some of the accompanying PDFs. In the tablature the right and left hand fingering information overlap slightly which makes it hard to read. But Brian is already aware of this issue and is going to fix this.

Who Is this Course for?

Video courses, especially when they are well produced like this one, have a lot of advantages. There’s the convenience factor. You don’t have to go somewhere for your lesson, which saves both time and money.

You can repeatedly watch the lesson until you really get it. You can review the material as often as needed.

Then there’s the cost savings factor. Depending on the teacher and location guitar lessons can cost you anything from $30-100+ per hour.

Thoroughly going through everything this course covers with a teacher would cost you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars if you factor in the necessary repetitions to truly master the material.

Brian himself states that this course is not geared towards beginners. And I agree that the intricacies of Classical and Finger-style guitar require special attention, especially in the crucial beginning stages. You don’t want to ingrain bad habits and technical flaws into your playing, which could still happen if you just practice by yourself. Videos simply can’t correct you when (for whatever reason) you don’t implement what you are supposed to do – that’s what teachers are here for.

However, this course combined with the guidance of a qualified teacher to check up on you would provide tremendous amounts of long-term value. Especially during the time when you transition from beginner to intermediate guitarist this course would reveal lots of “wisdom nuggets” helping you to progress faster.

If you are an intermediate player then this course is perfect for you. You’ll be able to jump in and immediately benefit from the included information. Add those right hand arpeggio techniques, learn to separate individual voices via your right hand and implement some counterpoint-like material into your playing. You’ll have more tools in your guitaristic toolbox and with some experimentation you’ll be able to play with additional colors and depth – regardless of what you consider to be your preferred style.

If you are a truly advanced Classical or Finger-style guitarist you probably won’t learn anything new in this course. Still, you might value the re-assurance that you’ve learned your techniques correctly already and you could use the videos as helpful reference material.

Maybe there are technical flaws in your playing that have created some stumbling blocks for you. Working through this course and brushing up on the standard techniques could help you fine-tune your technique and push through. And in case you don’t know them already, you’d add up to 3 great pieces to your repertoire.

Final Verdict

[ezreview]

Personally, I don’t consider myself a Classical guitarist, even though I do teach this style. I’ve always liked to listen to Classical music, but as a guitarist I got started on electric playing Rock, before venturing more into Fusion and Jazz territory. However, during my time at GIT in the late 90’s I was fortunate enough to study with the great David Oakes ( a student of Segovia) who got me interested in playing Classical style.

In a way that’s kind of funny, considering that I went from Austria (lots of music students from all around the world move here to study Classical) to LA to improve my Fusion and Jazz skills and there started to get my feet wet in playing Classical.

Anyways, I’m really glad that Brian contacted me back in December, so that I got a chance to check out this excellent course and am able to recommend it to you.

With the Udemy 30-day money-back guarantee, there’s absolutely no risk on your part. So don’t delay and take advantage of this great deal.

The winters here in the eastern parts of Austria hardly ever include lots of snow. It’s not like in the Alps at all. But it can get cold and in general it’s the time of the year where I miss my stay in California the most. When I long for the California sun, the nice temperatures, the beaches, etc.

Still, I love December.

Especially the transitional period between the Christmas holidays and the new year. When it’s time to reflect and analyze what worked and what didn’t work. It’s exciting to create new plans with the new year like a blank canvas to fill before you.

The Recipe for Failure

Lots of people find new year’s resolutions lame or set themselves up for failure. They create unrealistic resolutions or goals that they think they should set without enough emotional investment to help push through the inevitable obstacles.

And when those resolutions are (naturally) broken as early as on the 2nd or 3rd of January they then diminish self-esteem and self-respect.

I used to make this mistake in the past myself. And it’s tough to beat this all-or-nothing syndrome where you feel like a failure and abandon your resolution completely just because you fell off and slipped.

I’m no goal-setting guru at all but slowly I’ve learned to view my resolutions not as yes/no or true/false propositions but rather as a series of experiments, where it’s ok to fail.

Because fail you will, initially. However, as long as you continue, observe and learn the initial failure turns into success (for lack of a better word).

Here are a couple of such experiments or challenges (check out the Challenge of the Month concept) in regards to AdvancingMusician for 2014.

1) Valuable Content

Initially I wanted to announce that I’ll create more content – similar to other bloggers who have a fixed weekly or daily posting schedule. And while such a fixed publishing schedule would be nice, I don’t want to set my self up for failure right from the start.

There’ll be busy weeks with various free-lance projects on top of my regular teaching, so I know it won’t be possible for me to post daily. Sure, a few paragraphs with a quick observation here or some other blurb there should always be manageable. But I don’t want to just hit publish for the sake of getting an article out.

I will write as often as possible (maybe even daily) to improve my writing chops – but I’ll spare you a daily dose of bla bla from me if there’s nothing of real value in it. So rest assured that I’ll only push the publishing button when I think that the article is ready and has something of value to offer to you.

2) Deeper Content

I want to implement more varied types of content with supplemental media.

What do I mean? So far, I’ve published reviews, how-to articles, etc… and I definitely want to continue with those.

But with some new tools in my arsenal, I look forward to enhancing my articles and tutorials with music scores, guitar tabs and chord diagrams. I hope this will make the content more useful to you.

3) Video

A biggie for 2014 will be video. I have a couple of video projects (unrelated to AdvancingMusician) in the pipeline. I’ll let you know about those at a later time, but some of it might find its way to this site as well.

So, there might be the occasional video tutorial coming along – which I’m really excited about.

4) One Track per Month

I’ll accomplish this by composing/producing 1 track a month.

And if you accept my invitation and follow along, I’ll let you in on the behind the scenes production. I’ll write about my inspiration, my challenges, share project details, sound design and production techniques, song analysis and of course, let you listen to the finished tracks.

I won’t be too hard on myself in regards to the deadline(s) and consider the project or myself a failure if the song is not completely finished on the last of the month. Hey, you can’t or shouldn’t force your creativity and there will be certain times that I might have an increased workload due to income-generating free-lance projects.

So the 1 song/month is a guideline – I’ll definitely make it a top priority and work towards completion, but if I finish a song a week later or postpone production in order to bring in some of my musician friends for recording, then that’s the way it is, ok?

I’m excited about this project – and I’ve actually already begun planning.

My next couple of posts will deal with some of the those preparations, and don’t worry, this will not be some ego-centered project that’s only about me, my compositions or my personal workflow. Hopefully, you’ll be able to gain some insights that will help you in your own projects. Or you’ll be able to avoid some mistakes or at the very least, it’ll be a somewhat entertaining read throughout all of 2014.

Edit: Change of plan due to a big project that “got in the way” instead. Maybe I’ll still be able to get a “proper” album done during 2014. But not in the way initially intended. Hey, that’s still ok. I totally love the other project. Read about Guitar Yoga!

Anyways, I wish you all the best for 2014.

Uhm, no. Of course not.

Forget that dramatic way of thinking. Because it’s false thinking. Sure, certain sites get specifically targeted for political or economic reasons – or for prestige like a hacking rite of passage – but AdvancingMusician does not fall into this category.

In general, hackers go for the low hanging fruit instead. They target smaller sites. The idea is to get them infected and divert resources towards sending SPAM mails, getting link juice for improved Google rankings or for installing malware like phishing scripts.

On December 11th, I got an e-mail from my hosting company. They had to take my site offline because their security mechanisms caught some malware script getting activated from one of my sub-folders.

So, despite running the latest versions of everything (WordPress, framework, theme and all plug-ins) my site was unreachable. No reason to panic. Just a quick install of a fresh WordPress instance followed by porting the database and everything is alright again.

Yes, in general that’s the procedure. But not in my case. And no, don’t think that I didn’t back-up my site.

My hosting company (who were really supportive throughout this incident – thank you) informed me that those malicious files had been injected way back in early October and had been dormant so far.

Therefore, back-ups were out of the equation. No sense installing a clean slate and then re-introducing malicious code via an infected back-up file. And going back almost 4 months to an old copy didn’t make much sense to me. So I decided to take the extra precautionary steps of going manually into my current (offline) database and pulling the content piece by piece, making sure it was safe and re-adding it to the fresh installation.

The crazy thing is that I knew about this infection from quite early on. I do have a security plug-in installed and also monitor Google Webmaster tools, where I first noticed a significant increase in Google-indexed pages.

From one day to another the numbers shot up to over 3000 pages indexed. Definitely a warning sign.

And the Wordfence security plugin also registered some changed files. It didn’t take too long to find a huge Viagra/Cialis site hidden in one of my server folders. Of course I deleted that sucker, checked to make sure my other folders were clean and considered this case closed.

To All the Hopeful Viagra/Cialis Shoppers
If you came to this site in the hopes of getting your “pharmaceutical” needs fixed and all you found is music-related articles – my apologies.

Subsequent scans returned clean results – I didn’t mind the 3000+ fake Google indexed pages and thought that Google would find out rather quickly about those pages being irrelevant and gone.

And indeed… every couple of days a bunch of those pages were removed from the index – it was only a matter of a few more days to return to the status as before.

But then the hosting company e-mail arrived. Looks like I didn’t remove everything and some bad code must have survived my initial purge.

Most likely my site got hacked via a plugin that had a security vulnerability that wasn’t patched fast enough. And the short time frame of vulnerability unfortunately was enough to get the malicious code injected.

Rethinking Security

My security practices were not bad at all. But in the process of recreating my site I re-evaluated and adapted a few things.

For instance: I upped my automatic back-up schedule from twice/week to daily. All back-ups are sent to Dropbox automatically as well. Each month during my weekly review session I’ll quickly go through last month’s folder and delete all back-up files, keeping 1 for each week. After 6 months I might prune that down so that I have only bi-weekly back-ups left. This should be enough – more seems like overkill to me.

Everytime I hit publish – I’ll copy the text/code field from my WordPress editor and paste it into a Google doc. Also, any additional source files like graphics or PDF downloadable files go into a special assets Sync folder. Worst case scenario: if the database back-up is corrupted, I can still re-compile the site because all the information is easily accessible. A quick 1 minute job leading to increased peace of mind.

Security Suggestions

If you have your own site – and as a performer/musician/teacher you really should – here are a few easy to implement suggestions:

• make your hosting/FTP/website admin username/password as strong as possible
• don’t use the same passwords
• install a security plugin a la Wordfence – if you are using WordPress
• use the Sucuri SiteCheck scanner on a regular basis
• use a back-up solution like BackWPup and have an automated job set-up
• do a weekly/monthly/quarterly/semi-yearly back-up review/purge
• keep everything up-to date – your CMS, framework, theme, plug-ins, etc…
• find the balance of necessary functionality and bloat – do you really need that plugin/script?
• putting the final text/code version of each page/post into Evernote/Google Docs and adding any source files right after you publish is a great desaster prevention policy

Remember even the best precautionary procedures are no guarantee that your site won’t be hacked. But instead of a debilitating, soul-crushing experience (because of no back-ups) it’ll be a minor nuisance that you can deal with quickly.

The Positive

Like they say, in any challenging situation there’s hidden opportunities to turn things into positives.

While I liked the old site design – I decided to get rid of the background image. It was close to 120Kb, even in compressed format. And since I also replaced the graphical site logo and tagline (and other small graphic icons) with a font generated one, this shaves off a combined 200Kb from the page load which is quite a lot. It doesn’t really matter for broadband users but for mobile this should make browsing a lot more enjoyable.

Another side effect is a more open feel, since the content area is not boxed in like in the old design.

In general, I tried to make the site even more mobile responsive. It’s far from perfect and I still have some things to fix. Especially regarding images which at the moment “break out” and don’t re-size as intended.

My apologies for that, I considered other things as a higher priority for the moment – but it’s definitely something I will fix as soon as possible.

What’s Left?

Immediate steps:

• getting images responsive
• going through existing articles and adding the remaining download attachments
• fixing the remaining broken links
• fine-tuning the aesthetics – making sure the content is easy on the eyes with appropriate spacing and padding

I also held off from re-posting some articles that either have become obsolete or where I felt like I can improve upon them.

Minimalism

In 2013 I’ve been influenced a lot by minimalism, especially Leo Babauta’s writing.

As a consequence I sold off more than 500 of my books over the last few months. I still have ca. 200-300 left and plan on getting rid of them during 2014.

I didn’t purchase as many new sound/sample libraries as in the past. No more “shiny new thing syndrome” – who hasn’t fallen for that? Instead of chasing the latest, newest, holy grail – how about using what I already have? Getting to know it in detail and squeezing the maximum out of it. What a concept, huh?

I don’t want to waste my time tinkering around on the surface level. I want to create and produce on a deeper level with added value and substance. That’s my motto for 2014.

Before this hacking incident, I already set-up a lot of things in preparation to make this happen. Things have even escalated despite this diversion. I’d go as far as saying because of this diversion. My motto became even more important to me.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Finally, a merry Christmas – have great holidays and celebrations with your families and loved-ones. And let’s make 2014 an awesome year.

According to my statistics my 12 Great Android Apps for Musicians article has been my most popular post so far.

Obviously, I can’t know every app that’s out there. But fortunately I have you. I’ve received lots of e-mails as well as suggestions in the comment section of the initial post letting me know about additional useful and cool apps.

First of all, thanks for that. I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know about an app that you’ve found useful – and for the nice compliments about my site in general or a specific post.

Anyways, here are more useful, cool Android apps for musicians.

Generative Music Box

This app has a lot of potential for ear training purposes. You could start simple and select a few notes and a narrow range. As your skills progress, add complexity and some crazy randomization via the “wild” setting.

Check out the video to see the app in action!

Notation Trainer

An awesome app that’s extremely useful by London-based guitarist Stuart Bahn. Check out the insightful interview with Stuart about his 1,000 Hours of Practice project.

(You’ll also find another one of his apps later in this list as well.)

So for the moment I’d like to leave you with this YouTube video about the Notation Trainer and the link to the app store.

Arpio

Play around with the engaging Arpio to create cool-sounding, arpeggiated phrases. The user-interface is intuitive and makes it fun. No need for long explanations – just watch the video below.

But here’s a bonus tip on how else to use Arpio to improve your musicianship. Use the app for ear training.

How? Simply play the different diatonic arpeggios of the scale and listen to the sound of each scale degree. You’ll quickly get a feel for the diferrence between e.g. a 1st, 4th or 5th degree of the major scale, even though they all are major chords.

Scale Logic – Gone to Data Heaven

When I was a kid starting out on piano I had this little device that looked like a ruler, that I could stick behind the keys and that would show me which keys to press for each scale.

It really helped me learn my scales.

With Scale Logic you can have such a device with you all the time in form of an app. Best of all, it doesn’t matter what instrument you play since it’s not geared towards a specific instrument.

It helps you to visualize the whole step/half step scale sequence in every key. You can set it up to display the scale in a “number line” fashion or on top of a piano keyboard. Also, you can choose between major, natural minor and harmonic minor scales.

Are you tired of schlepping a collection of Fakebooks to your gigs? Then the following 2 apps are for you …

Pickin’ and Grinnin’ Songbook

Unfortunately, this app is incompatible with my old(er) Sony Android device. Fortunately I’ve been able to “comandeer” my girlfriend’s phone to test it out for a short time.

For gigging musicians, especially when they use a tablet, an app like this is a god-send. To have access to your complete song collection with easy access, control over the text size, the ability to transpose the chords on demand, and many more useful features – is priceless.

Best of all, the main functionalities of the app are free.

In-app purchases allow you to add more options like setlists and auto-scroll.

Fakebook

So, for €1.99 you get more than a thousand songs and chord progressions. And again, like with the “Pickin’ and Grinnin'” app you can search, zoom, and transpose to your heart’s content.

Want (or need) to learn an unfamiliar tune?

There’s a Spotify or YouTube link available for you right there leading to a rendition of the song. A great and educational feature, especially for beginners of the style.

By now you’re probably already sick of me mentioning my older phone with limited internal memory … but what I also value about the Fakebook is the low size of only 2.5 MB.

Considering what you get and what’s included in the app that’s quite astonishing. And the local storage, meaning that there’s no internet connection necessary to access all your songs, is also worth mentioning.

TrackID – RIP

TrackID came pre-installed on my Sony device and I have to say that it’s really useful.

You hear a song on the radio, at a restaurant, in a club and would like to know the title or artist. Simply fire up TrackID and let the app do its magic.

Occassionally you won’t get a result (or TrackID will tell you that it doesn’t recognize the input) but given the myriad of songs out there I’m constantly amazed what’s already possible.

TuneIn Radio

Got a new gig with a band playing West African music? Awesome.

But what if you don’t have a background in the style? Which CDs to listen to? And what if you don’t have the budget to order a bunch of CDs for your preparations?

Just search for some West African radio stations with the TuneIn app and listen to some authentic music to get the right feel. Of course, you aren’t limited to West African stations. Target your desired location or find and listen to stations by genre. Think Salsa, Celtic, Flamenco, 70’s, etc…

Use it for Podcasts, or for brushing up on long-forgotten language skills. And I’m sure you’ll find other uses for the app as well.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is one of the major players (if not the biggest) in the field of social music platforms. Most likely you’ve already come across the typical SoundCloud player that is used around the web for embedding music tracks.

Heck, I’ve been aware of SoundCloud for years – but have mostly used it on my desktop and never thought about searching for an app version.

Of course there’s one – so if you are a SoundCloud junkie and also like to check out music on the go then make sure to download the app:

BandFriend

Stefan from BandFriend left a comment on the original post letting me know about their new app BandFriend.

I checked it out and think that it is a very slick app. It is well designed with attention to detail. For instance, when you create your own profile you can add the styles you are into and there are lots of pre-populated selections already in the system so it’s quick and easy to get a rich, detailed profile up.

Now, I’m not looking for new band members or people to jam with at the moment. But if I did BandFriend would be a good choice.

However, there’s one problem – the value of the app does currently also depend on your own location. When I searched for potential band members, there were only 3 people listed in my region – and those were almost 50 miles away.

But that is not the app’s fault at all. It just shows that as with any social network it needs a certain number of users to be really useful. So, if you like the idea and the future potential then make sure to download the app and create your account. Hey, it’s free and the more people join the better it gets.

Maple MP3 Player – Another One Bites the Dust

Almost every Android device comes with a native music player. It’s one of the core functionalities.

• But is your player able to change the playback speed without changing the pitch of the track?
• Can your player transpose the track up or down without affecting the speed of the playback?
• What if you want to loop a certain section of the song like just the chorus or the guitar solo?

I’m really excited about this app. This will be extremely useful for teaching.

All those songs where the guitars are tuned to Eb – I can easily transpose them up a semi-tone right in the player. Slow down a difficult section for easier transcribing or for helping a beginner student play-along with a certain section. Loop a song part for continuous practice and refinement.

Best of all, you can even combine all those options. Transpose an Eb tuned Hendrix song, slow down the track by 25% and have it repeat the solo so you can practice playing to it on your standard-tuning guitar and have a fighting chance.

Music Theory – Chords in Keys

How well do you know your chords? If I asked you, “What’s the vi chord in the key of F#?” how long would it take you to find the answer?

Knowing all the chords in all the keys is an essential skill to have. And let’s be honest, if you haven’t focused on developing this skill, most likely you are ok with the chords in the keys you usually play.

But in those more “exotic” keys …

How to fix this? Install the Music Theory – Chords in Keys app.

In essence it’s a flashcard quizz. The app asks you a question like: Name the IV chord in D. Then you answer it in your mind or outloud and click the show answer button. Compare the result then repeat with the next question.

Spend a few minutes per day with it and you’ll know your chord/key relationships inside out in no time.

I’m not even sure if adding any kind of tracking or statistics would improve the app or just add unnecessary bloat. Right now, it’s a simple app – but it is a simple app that works and delivers exactly what it is supposed to do.

This is one of those apps where you think why didn’t I come up with this idea?

Disclosure: I received a review app from the developer Stuart Bahn, a London-based guitarist. I did NOT get any kind of monetary compensation for the mini review or inclusion in this list. I highly recommend this app because I tested it and continue to use it – I like to stay on top of my chords, too.

Chord

Remember those chord encyclopedia books? You know, “12,875 Chords You Need to Know for Guitar”  or something similar? The ones with endless chord diagrams that just left you numb.

Forget them and use the Chord app instead.

Build your own chord symbols and let the app display the possible voicings. You can even listen to the voicing by strumming over the diagram.

The free version will keep you busy for a long time.

The paid version adds more scales, altered tunings and a reverse search where you enter the notes and the app displays the possible chord/scale names.

Smart Chords

This app is similar to the Chord! app right above it. It was recommended in the comment section. My apologies to everyone who is easily overwhelmed by having to make decisions. Since my main music PC runs Windows and relies on licensed software, having straightforward KMS method activation in the workflow can really simplify those unpredictable setup moments, too.

But I think it’s great that there are developers out there who put in a lot of work and effort so that we have those choices.

My advice: test them and then decide which app serves your personal situation better.

Chords Player

Useful and intuitive chord sequencer. Create your chord progressions and song arrangements and let the app play them back.

You can use it for ear training – to learn to recognize standard chord progressions as well as for practicing your improvisations.

Groove Metronome

I’m still happy with my Slick Metronome that I already showcased, but I’ve received multiple recommendations to check out the Groove Metronome and after looking into it, I totally understand why.

My phone is still running Android 2.3 but I was able to “confiscate” my girlfriend’s compatible Samsung for a test.

The stand-out feature of the Groove Metronome is that you can add a variable swing factor. This can really change the feel of a groove a lot, make it more human and musical as well as enjoyable while practicing.

I’ve put this app on my to-install list for when the time comes to upgrade my phone.

The paid version adds the option to add pre-loaded grooves to any time signature or shuffle feels. The free version only has one groove enabled.

LoopStack – No More

If you’ve used any kind of looping device, you won’t have any troubles working with LoopStack. And if you haven’t, then LoopStack is a great place to start because it’s such an easy and intuitive app.

Record up to 4 tracks in 44KHz 16bit quality. If 4 tracks are not enough you can simply combine your tracks to make room for new recordings. You can control volume and reverb for each track individually.

The Clave

The Clave is a cool niche-oriented app that could have a tremendous impact if you are into Latin styles.

Select the type of Clave (2-3 or 3-2) the tempo and the style (Son, Rumba, Afro (6/8) and Bossa Nova) and listen to the correct clave rhythm. Clap or play along, or just keep it running in the background while doing other tasks for a kind of subliminal programming and watch your rhythmic accuracy skyrocket due to your mastery of this essential (Latin) feel.

Ensemble Composer

A notation software for your phone? Are you kidding? Those were my 1st thoughts.

Ensemble Composer definitely has potential. I just know that for me personally the screen real estate on my phone is way too small to input a longer stream of notes comfortably. So I’d reach for a piece of paper or maybe record myself whistling a melody or talking through my idea.

But on a tablet I could see this work and Ensemble Composer could develop into a viable alternative to other established (and much more expensive) notation software.

Check it out and see if it works for you.

SoundMeter

In an online course about music production techniques the instructor (Loudon Stearns from the Berklee College of Music) recommended to have an SPL app installed on your phone. Just so you can develop a feel for those rather abstract dB levels you come across everywhere.

Simply measure the noise level of your environment – wherever you are and observe the reading. You’ll also be surprised how loud (in dB) your environment is. At least I was, initially.

Depending on your phone the margin of error could be up to 5%. This probably is too much for professional situations where it really counts. But for getting a quick calibration going without having to schlepp a dedicated sound meter device with you, this is as good as it gets. And it’s a nice-looking app, too.

Caustic 3 (Was Caustic 2 at Time of Publication)

If you are familiar with Reason by Propellerheads/Reason Studios then you’ll immediately feel at home when using this app. You’ll find a subtractive synthesizer, a PCM-based synth, a bass synth and a drum machine in a rack-style format with an FX rack, a mixer and a sequencer. You can even import your own .wav files.

This is an impressive app that’s lot of fun to play and experiment with.

For song saving and export you need to purchase the Unlock Key:

TouchDAW

My music PC doesn’t have w-lan connection, so I haven’t tested this app myself.

I guess that I would still prefer the “real” faders of my MIDI controller box for a haptic, tactile mixing feel, but for some unpredictable, crazy effects that motion sensor controlling might come in handy.

So, check it out and let me know how it goes for you.

Download the free version:

Or the full version (no locked features):

Finally, I want to feature a variety of ear training apps. If you’ve read my posts about functional ear training and strategies to master chromatic notes then you already know how much value I place on developing your ears.

Edit: don’t get your hopes up. Ear training apps seem to be volatile creatures. But read on to see a strike-out (3 apps out of 3) in the following section.

So even though none of the showcased apps follows the functional ear training method, they all do have their place.

Remember, there’s not just one single working method to train your ears and in my opinion it’s good to develop your ears coming from multiple angles.

Also, don’t think that you have to install them all and practice with each app a ridiculous amount of time/day. That’s NOT a smart thing to do. If you practice with the functional ear training software at home, then simply supplement and augment your practice with the occasional session on the go with one of the following apps.

Perfect Ear – Nope, not Anymore

Perfect Ear has many different exercises included. You can focus on interval training, scales, chord qualities, chord inversions and progressions.

The free version limits the amount of levels you get in each section. You can still get a feel for how things work and once you have mastered the initial levels you can then decide to upgrade to the full version for €0,99.

Ear Tuner – A Moment of Silence, Please

With Ear Tuner you can learn to recognize common diatonic chord progressions. The app will play a progression for you and you are supposed to click on the corresponding roman numeral for each chord of the progression.

Keep it simple by starting out with just the I, IV and V chords in root position. Or challenge yourself by including the other diatonic chords as well as inversions.

Currently there are only 4 levels to choose from, but according to the developer there are more to come.

Audio Guitar Chord Quiz – Strike-Out

This last featured ear training app is especially useful for guitar players. It uses the common open position chord voicings.

Not only are you training to hear the difference between a major and minor chord, you’ll also develop a feel for recognizing those specific voicings. So when you listen to someone playing the guitar who is happily strumming away those standard open position chords you’ll be able to recognize a G chord or a D chord because of their different sonic signature.

I’m sticking with the G and D chord example. Both chords are major chords and share that common major sound. However, based on the way they are played on the guitar there is a difference. The G chord has a fuller, more resonant sound because the chord uses all 6 strings. The D chord is played on the top 4 strings only and therefore has a thinner sound.

Once you hone in on these qualities you’ll quickly be able to differentiate between the various chords and impress people with your new “fake” perfect pitch abilities.

Any More Android Apps for Musicians?

That’s it for this round of Android apps for musicians. I’m sure you’ll let me know about any other useful apps that I missed so far by sharing your great finds in the comment section below.

When I returned to Austria after finishing my degree at GIT in Los Angeles a friend introduced me to Bernhard. He wanted to take some lessons from me but somehow our schedules always conflicted so it never worked out.

We stayed in touch, became friends – and ended up working on various projects together.

I have to confess that sometimes I’d like to tease him about how he could be a global guitar god by now.

If he just would have taken those lessons from me…

Instead he’s only the guitar player in the 7-time Grammy-nominated band Tangerine Dream and has performed with the likes of Brian May of legendary Queen.

Loser.

There’s only one reason why I don’t do this. The reason’s name is Martin Weninger.

That guy did take some guitar lessons from me. Way back in the early 90’s. And now he is a drummer. Need I say more? So much for my global guitar god argument. *sigh*

Years later Martin and I shared an appartement in Hollywood. Most of the time he was driving me nuts with his constant practice pad drumming. Those things are annoyingly loud. But it’s great to see/hear that all that practicing paid off. those guitar lessons transferred over to the drums.

No wonder that Martin is one of the busiest, in-demand drummers thanks to his great chops and killer groove.

But enough of the old stories, let’s move on to the music.

Have a Listen to the 2012 EP

A Quick Description of the 5 Tracks

In the opening track Solar Storm you get an interesting mixture of crunchy power chords, angular melodies, Mike Portnoy-style grooves and propelling synth elements in Tangerine Dream fashion.

Civil Disorder raises the tension by featuring dissonant 2nd intervals and using heavy, complex rhythm figures as backdrop for some serious shredding.

War continues where Civil Disorder left off, and after these 2 high-intensity songs comes my personal favorite track of the whole project: The Escape.

I love the groove and the atmospheric mood. Listen to the great interaction between the various guitar textures and the supporting synth sounds, for instance when the acoustic guitar plays arpeggiated figures and the synth arpeggiator surrounds and embellishes them.

The nylon guitar solo is extremely melodic and nicely follows the changes.

The final track is called A New Planet and features a melancholic, yet hopeful piano figure with a beautiful guitar harmonics melody on top of it. Elements from previous tracks get re-introduced that tie everything together and make this EP a cohesive unit.

2012 – Rating

[ezreview]

There’s not a lot to critize. The only thing that I can find fault with is that in places you can strongly hear the musical influences. Granted, it’s extremely difficult NOT to sound like Dream Theater or similar Prog-Rock icons when playing in this style.

Also, with the limited scope of an EP it’s actually harder to get a lot of variety in. If the songs are too different, you lose the focus and the cohesiveness. If the songs retain a similar style, you inevitably lose the variety as a result.

Hopefully, Bernhard and Martin will continue their joint venture by producing a proper, full album that gives them more room to showcase their stylistic diversity.

Disclosure: I don’t get any money or other kind of compensation for my endorsement. As you’ve read, I’m friends with Bernhard and Martin and I admit that I might be somewhat biased. In my opinion those 2 guys deserve a lot more attention and spotlight. But listen and decide for yourself.

Buy 2012 from Bandcamp.com

If you liked what you heard, buy the full EP. It’s only €5. You get a great Progressive-Rock album that you can listen to from your iPod, mp3 player, phone or computer. And you are supporting the 2 talented musicians behind this project.

P.S.: Final moral of the story: don’t take any guitar lessons from me and in case you do, switch over to drums.

My phone contract expired and as a part of renewing the contract with a 2GB/month data plan, I got a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact (link removed) Android device. It might not be the top of the line smart phone, but I’m really happy with it so far.

I’ve spent some time in the Google Play market, installing and checking out a ton of Android apps and want to present some of my favorites so far.

From helping you:

• to organize your time
• to staying on track with your musical goals
• to having more fun practicing
• to inspiring your students (and yourself)

Hopefully, there’ll be some useful Android apps for you included in this list.

Get the Largest, Fastest SD Card for Your Phone

But before we get into the apps, here’s one of the most important additions you need in order to enhance your smart phone experience.

Max out your storage by getting the biggest, fastest SD card for your device.

My Sony phone supports up to 32 GB, so that’s what I ordered. I got a Transcend 32 GB Class 10 SDHC Flash Memory Card (link removed – item is not available anymore) from Amazon. You might be able to find a cheaper 32GB card but the speed increase by using a class10 card is worth the few extra bucks.

A card with lots of storage allows you to add tons of mp3 or PDF files to your phone. You can have all your essential playbacks and jam-alongs as well as important reference materials with you all the time. No more, “I have the perfect piece for you to demonstrate this concept. I’ll bring it to the next lesson next week.” Now it’s, “You want to learn xyz, sure, let’s get started with it immediately.”

Onwards to the apps …

The Standard Google Android Apps – Gmail/Calendar/Contacts

Don’t overlook these standard apps just because they come pre-installed. Even though the Calendar and Contacts functionality don’t have that sexy, exotic app feel to them, they are extremely useful.

It’s so convenient to have all the relevant information at your fingertips when e.g. some student has to cancel or re-schedule a lesson last minute. With all the relevant information right at your fingertips you can get things settled and re-arranged immediately even when you are on the go and away from your desktop PC.

YouTube

Watch all the great performances, tutorials (and those funny cat videos) wherever you are.

For teaching, the YouTube app is great, too. Check out songs a student wants to learn that you don’t know. Watch them, compare different versions and analyze them together. Guide your students to the good stuff that’s available.

Also, don’t underestimate the motivation factor. Especially with younger students it’s great to show them inspiring performances so that they get exposed to new music and see what’s possible.

The app most likely is pre-installed, but just in case it’s not:

Evernote

I love Evernote. Most likely I will continue to rave about Evernote in future articles. Now that I have access to the full app (not just some skimmed down mobile site version like on my previous phone) it has become even more valuable to me.

This semester I won’t have to physically write down the homework assignments on paper first, followed by my evening session of transferring that information into Evernote on my PC. I’ll simply type in the lesson summary/homework into the Evernote app right at the end of the lesson while my student is packing up.

One step less in administrative overhead, no paper involved and 5-10 minutes of time saved at the end of the day. Have I already mentioned that I love Evernote?

Dropbox

I’ve been using Dropbox for years as a kind of back-up service. Now, with the Dropbox app I (finally) make use of that extremely convenient ubiquitous easy access. With the Android app I have access to all my files in my Dropbox folder from anywhere.

You get 2 GB free. Sign up through my Dropbox link and both of us get an additional 500 Mb amount of storage for free.

Then download the Dropbox app from the app store:

RTM – Remember the Milk

There are tons of task list apps out there. Remember the Milk has been around long enough already and is well established so I don’t have to fear losing my system due to some start-up company going belly up. Another thing I like is that you can start simple and over time build your own productivity system using tags, context, reminders, all sorts of filtering, etc.

Create lists for your teaching tasks, recording projects, gigs, marketing, etc. and let Remember the Milk help you stay on track and move your projects forward.

You can use the free system which has all the functionality except unlimited synchronization between devices. I definitely want to have the latest tasks and information available to me, so that’s why I chose to upgrade to the Pro version that allows for unlimited synchronization. It’s 25$/year (price increased to ca. 40$/year), which i think is a more than fair price for the functionality you get.

Trello

Another really useful project/task managing app. Why a 2nd one? Why not RTM exclusively?

I’m using Trello as an enhancement to RTM, specifically for projects that are not so much date and deadline oriented but open-ended instead. The Trello concept of boards that hold your tasks lets you break down projects into stages and you can get a great overview of where you are in terms of more complex projects with nested tasks and dependencies.

Best of all, Trello is completely free, so definitely try it out and see if that board-style organization makes sense to your work-flow.

Edit: while there is still a free level available, you need to upgrade to Business Class in order to utilize more of the power-ups.

1. Sign-up for your Trello account!
2. Then get the app in the Google app store:

AirDroid

You can be the most organized, tidy person in the world, there’ll be times when you don’t find that USB cable to connect your phone with your computer. A real bummer when you are in  a hurry and quickly need to port some important files to carry with you on your phone.

Enter AirDroid.

On your computer go to http://web.airdroid.com/, start the app on your phone, use the camera as QR code reader for log-in purposes and then port the files via the web interface. Fast, easy and convenient. No USB cable needed and a great time-saver.

Keep Track

Various productivity gurus recommend to track the things you want to improve. The theory is that when you start to measure something it increases your awareness in that particular area which in turn influences your behavior and choices.

What’s so great about the Keep Track app is that you can define your own measurement units. It can be a simple yes/no choice or a numerical value, you can add text or with the ca. 2$ Pro version combine multiple trackers into groups.

Besides tracking non-musical stuff like weight and workout routines you can use it to track all your various music related topics.

• How often did you practice?
• How long did you practice?
• At what bpm where you able to play your scales?
• What was the percentage score you got for your functional ear training session?

gstrings – Guitar Tuner

This app retired my old tuner. One item less to carry around in my teaching bag.

Slick Metronome

And joining the tuner in retirement is my old metronome. My teaching bag is getting lighter and lighter.

• Odd meters
• Tap tempo functionality
• subdivision accents

It’s all there.

Sight Read – Music Quizz

Apart from doing the occasional brush-up on my own note recognition, this is a great app to add some elements of gamification into your lessons.

When most students simply gulp and whine a little when you test their note recognition skills the old-fashioned way, they actually like it when you present it in the form of a challenge – as a game.

With this app you can do that. Simply tell your student something like, “Let’s see how many notes you can recognize during the one minute countdown.” Do this 2 or 3 times in a row for a nice note reading work out that’s fun. Make a note of the result in your Evernote student tracker and at the next lesson challenge your student to beat their best result.

A killer feature would be to be able to limit the notes used during the quizz. Then I’d be able to use the app even with early beginners, who only learned 3 or 4 notes so far.

WaveRecorder – Not Available Anymore

I use this app to quickly record ideas that I want to remember. When you don’t have pen and paper with you and are too lazy to type the idea into your phone, use WaveRecorder instead.

Additionally, it’s useful to record a student and then play the recording back to him and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of his performance together. Let your student hear what you are talking about when you critique him/her.

Also, what about that killer melody that just popped into your head? Don’t risk forgetting it, start the app and do a quick and dirty recording instead. Nothing worse than agonizing about some genius idea that you can’t remember anymore.

iRealb

Once in a while, a student has to cancel a lesson on short notice. On days when I’m teaching from home that’s no problem, I have my studio with all the equipment, sheet music, jam tracks right there. But when I’m teaching in a music school such a last-minute cancellation often resulted in semi-dead time because often I didn’t have the material for an effective high-quality practice session with me. Since most of my administrative work now lives in digital notes, activation tools like www can simplify setup for anyone managing Microsoft software on their PC.

Now I can use that 30 minute time slot to get some nice improvisation practice in. I have my backing band with me. I choose one of the standards to work on, set the style and tempo and jam away. It does sound somewhat MIDI-ish, but the quality is more than acceptable for a quick practice session.

Program your own chord progressions or download hundreds of pre-programmed songs from the iRealb forum that you can access from inside the app.

Conclusion

It’s amazing what technology can do today. And while there’s definitely the danger to get lost in unnecessary gimmicks you can find some real gems to make your life as a musician easier, more productive and more fun. So take advantage of what the Google Play store has to offer.

Also, check out the follow-up post: More Great Android Apps for Musicians

Today, things look way better. For a fraction of the cost you can get equipment that’s powerful and lets you record in more than decent sounding quality. There’s a ton of options available to you. Maybe too many and it’s easy to get confused in the sea of options.

Probably the most important tool is your computer system. Well, you still need musical knowledge, creativity and musicality, but a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is where it’s happening today.

In February I finally got me a new system and now I’d like to share some ideas. This probably will end up a long post – so, my apologies in advance. But hopefully it’ll guide you along and help you avoid some common pitfalls when plunking down your hard-earned cash for a computer system.

Warning: I’m not a computer guru – and I won’t make this all about specific processors, brands, models, etc… Hey, it’s computer related stuff – the minute I hit publish, there’s newer, more powerful stuff coming out. So a post arguing why you need to get a xyz cpu, would be outdated real fast. I try to keep it more principle-centered, filtered through my selection process. And as an added personal benefit: in 4-5 years when it’s time to upgrade MY system again, I’ll have some guidance to follow.

Status Quo Assessment

Before anything else, take some time to do an honest assessment of your current situation and some educated guesses about your future usage.

• Why do you need a new DAW?
• Is the old one really beyond repair or totally broken? If not, could you work your old machine a little longer?
• Has technology advanced so much that you can’t use the latest programs due to hardware limitations?
• What’s the primary focus of your workstation?
• Do you want to create simple background music for your family vacation videos, record your album or compose on spec for paying clients?
• In what field and style?
• What’s your workflow?
• Do you record lots of your own audio, will you keep it more VST-based, or do you use a loop-based approach?
• Will you be playing stuff in live or draw the notes with your mouse?
• How intensive are your requirements?
• Recordings of a full band or group of singers simultaneously or is it a 1 man/woman operation – you in your little home-project studio?
• What did you like about your old system?
• What drove you nuts?
• Is there stuff you can keep and port over?
  Mouse and keyboard, maybe you are happy with your MIDI interface, soundcard. Also, it might be possible to re-use components like DVD writers, network cards, graphics card, etc… to keep costs down
• Think about the software you’ll be able to keep!
• Any changes necessary due to a new operating system e.g.: like 32bit vs 64bit compatibility issues?
• Check for component drivers!
  The old soundcard you’ve grown to love and would like to keep for your new system might not have drivers available anymore. Find out in your planning stage to help you create a realistic budget.

Be Honest With Your Budget

• What amount of money are you able to invest?
• How much are you willing to “bleed”?
• What’s a realistic time frame to make the money back?

When you know that there’s a lucrative assignment on your horizon it might make sense to get the model with the better specs to let you handle your big project. On the other hand, if you know you won’t be able to use it the next few weeks (eg tour, work, etc…) – delay your purchase. Prices most likely will go down and you’ll get the same stuff cheaper.

Is it possible to add certain components later to keep costs manageable – without sacrificing important key functionality? For example, “only” 16GB of RAM now with the option to upgrade to 32 GB RAM a couple of months down the road.

Find the Right Timing to Buy

As early as 3 years ago I already wanted to buy a new system. Fortunately, I was able to talk myself out of it. I figured that by spending my money on the system first, I would have close to no money left over for getting new (better) software and sounds. And by the time I’d have more money to spend, my PC system would be “old” again. So, the better strategy for me was to invest into the software first. I got Cubase, Native Instruments Komplete 5, EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Gold and Goliath in a bundle deal and various other Kontakt based libraries over time.

All that stuff was usable, even on my old system. Sure, there were moments I was cursing because my old system couldn’t handle another instance of my software. I had to use workarounds like freezing tracks and bouncing to audio to get the resources freed up again. But retrospectively I am amazed how much mileage I got out of my old single core, 2GB RAM system. I’ve produced library music that’s in use at various European TV stations – heck, even some multi-media projects that I won awards for were possible. Just as audio production relies on the right hardware controllers and peripherals, digital platforms like casinoscdn.com depend on specialized tools for their interactive experiences.

Meanwhile, little by little, I did put some money away. I’ve been drooling for Omnisphere by Spectrasonics. It’s an incredible softsynth. No chance to run on my old system, though. But knowing that the day for a new computer would come, I put money away and once I had decided to finally order my new system in January, I bought Omnisphere as a Christmas present for myself with the money I had saved up.

Also, almost all the software I’ve bought is still relevant for my new system. Cubase, Omnisphere, Komplete (updated to version 8), Spitfire Albion and Solo Strings, Heavyocity Evolve and Evolve Mutations, Tonehammer (RIP), 8Dio, Soundiron, Zero-G, etc…

Bleeding Edge of Technology

Pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their back. Sure, it might feel good to boast with your latest trophy. Impress the Joneses in your circle with the specs of your system. Question is: how long will that work? 2 – 6 months down the road they’ll be laughing about you instead. Because you sucker paid such a high price for features you are now getting for next to nothing.

Get the most out of the price/value curve. No need to be the high paying lab rat, dealing with all the bugs and incompatibility issues. Get a reliable workhorse system instead.

Take Your Time With Doing Research

Except for some serious emergency like your system dying on you out of the blue in the middle of an important project, take your time and check your options. Because it is such an important issue, don’t just walk into the next electronics store and have some 19-year-old sales kid on his summer job talk you into getting a system from the shelf.

Subscribe to some industry IT/computer hardware portal RSS feed and occasionally scan the headlines and click-through to articles that catch your eyes. No need to stay informed about each new model coming out – but at least stay in the loop about the big waves or breakthroughs. Especially, when you know that you’ll be in the market soon, it does help to know what the current spec standards are.

Get Friendly With Some Computer Gurus

When I was buying my Internet PC I shopped around at multiple local stores. I bought from a local store where I got great advice/service and I also kept in touch with not only the owner but some employees as well. I’ve recommended and referred customers to them and because of that, they really take care of me and my needs. Now for my customized music system I got exceptional service with a customized system built around my needs and a great price on top of that.

Sidenote: Factor that personal level of service into your cost calculation. It’s NOT just about getting the cheapest price. Don’t get me wrong, getting a good price is important, but it’s not the complete equation. It’s totally worth it to pay a bit more for your system when you know there’s personal service added as a security blanket for when something goes wrong.

Onwards to the specifics.

Here’s a list of the essential necessities:

CPU – Central Processing Unit

The brains of your PC. Unfortunately, you can’t just go with the number of cores and the processing speed numbers alone. While it’s true that in general the more cores and the higher the GHz number, the better – there’s differences between models and brands. So you need to check some benchmarks to see how “your” model performs in comparison. Caveat: there’s more to it than just some numbers. The components need to co-operate.

Mainboard/Motherboard

Equally as important as the processor. Make sure that your mainboard and cpu work well together and that the chipsets are compatible. It also should have enough USB ports, SATA ports, Firewire ports and RAM slots according to your needs.

RAM

The memory your computer uses. The more the better, especially considering today’s multi-gigabyte sample libraries.

With 64bit systems NOT having that limit of only using up tp 3 GB, you can really go to town now. I wanted to have 32 GB of RAM installed in my system. Unfortunately, the price of 8GB RAM sticks is still way too high, so I decided to stick to the affordable 4 GB sticks and max out my system at 16GB. In a year or two, when prices most likely will have gone down significantly, I will still have the option to upgrade to 32 GB.

Compared to the measly 2GB (total!!!) I had in my old system I don’t have a reason to complain – at least for now. Just to give you an idea, my biggest current Cubase template for hybrid orchestral projects (still a work in progress though as I fine-tune my system) uses approximately 10 GB of RAM so far. It’s ca. 110 MIDI tracks connected to 6 fully loaded multi-channel instances of Kontakt 5, 4 instances of EWQL Play, Omnisphere, Absynth 5, Battery 3, Alchemy Player, Massive, FM8

System Drive

Go for a SSD drive in the 120GB range. 80GB would also work, but the price difference isn’t that huge and the ca. 40 GB extra will give you peace of mind, knowing that there’s enough room to easily install all the relevant programs you’d ever need.

Data Drive

It’s important for performance to separate your data from the system files. Especially, with audio projects which are quite taxing and data intensive, you don’t want to overload your disk. An SSD might be too expensive, and while it would be nice, it’s not essential. But do go for a 7200 rpm (revolutions/minute) drive, though. A 5400rpm drive, as used in notebooks, is NOT fast enough and might lead to read/write errors.

Sound Drive(s)

SSD(s) for your most important, resource intensive sound libraries. I’ve split my main libraries onto 2 SSDs – a 256 GB drive and a 128GB drive. Less often used sounds, patch presets, REX format files, etc… go onto an extra conventional 1TB Western Digital drive.

Graphics Card

We are not playing graphics intensive 3D games here – so no need for the fastest card. You get good quality in the 100$ range already with 1GB of separate!!! RAM and dual-monitor support.

Power Supply and a Case

That’s stuff I let my friendly guys in the computer store handle for me. I just told them that I need enough juice and it needs to be as quiet as possible.

Operating System

I’ve always been a Windows guy. I’ve found my old system stable enough and the new one running Windows 7 in 64 bit performs like a champion. No need for me to change. Especially after I was able to trace my initial troubles back to my under-powered USB port. You can read about my despair in the “Audio Drop-Out Nightmares… and a Happy End” post I wrote a while ago. Don’t have any Mac experience, so don’t know what’s going on there and how the latest Mountain Lion OS update performs.

Peripherals

Last, but definitely not least are the peripherals like keyboard, mouse, a monitor or 2 (for a highly recommended dual-monitor set-up), sound card, MIDI interface, monitor boxes for listening to your masterworks, hardware controllers like MIDI keyboard, faderboxes etc…

Maybe I’ll go into some of the peripherals in more detail in a future article.

Conclusion

The most important thing is not to feel intimidated. Don’t get discouraged by all the tech-babble. With a bit of research and comparison you can get an awesome music PC system that enables you to do things in a spare bedroom that you would have killed for not too long ago.