arrange • compose • conduct
Knowing you’ve done something before is a great help when you want to do it again. I’ve been writing daily for years now. Long enough to start to notice a pattern or two. For example, there are some times – maybe a month or so a year – when I […]
You’re most likely to quit your practice regimen right after the day you break your streak. Streaks are a great motivational tool, but no streak is failsafe, and no streak lasts forever. But our brains can trick us into thinking that missing a day of practice is a sign that […]
“What’s a good backup plan if you’re studying music?” A student asked this today during a really frank and positive conversation about music careers. Pursuing a career in the arts is scary, isn’t it? But my answer seemed to surprise them: don’t have a backup plan. For three reasons. First, […]
The right amount of self-discipline is just enough. I have enough self-discipline to write here daily since 2014, to create new monthly compositions and arrangements for my Patreon, to plan weekly, monthly, yearly, and multi-year projects. I have enough discipline to write daily, but not enough discipline to consistently write […]
I love playing chess, and in particular I love playing chess with my kids: the strategy, the opportunity for growth, and on and on. (I’m not very good.) Recently, I’ve been using an app to play a chess variant called blitz chess, in which each player has only three minutes. […]
The brain processes while we sleep. It can lead to miraculous results, in the right circumstances. I watched the Michigan All-State Jazz Choir start every morning having moved forward as an ensemble from where they were the previous evening. They literally got better in their sleep! Part of this was […]
The only way to memorize anything is repetition. (I generally repeat this until my students memorize it.) So, as I said to my students today, get your reps in! If you know it’s going to take a certain amount of repetitions to get to memorized, there can be no good […]
My middle child was just sounding his way through the Mozart clarinet concerto in his bedroom. My eldest has been making progress on learning chords on the guitar he got for Christmas. My youngest has every word of Encanto memorized. “Gee, I wonder how you have such musical children,” I […]
Today was one of those days where the mundane crowded out the creative. In the midst of many important jobs that didn’t require my musical creativity, I found 4 minutes to be in front of my notation software. I pulled up my current project, hit the playback, and listened. I […]
Have you tried whisking left-handed recently? (For me, that’s whisking right-handed…what I mean is your non-dominant hand.) It feels weird. I’m pretty agile with kitchen tools, but in my “wrong” hand, I feel like a novice all over again. I sometimes do just that, to remind myself the way that […]