Discipline

It’s at the core of things we wish to master. (Or things that master us.)

I’ve taken to using PatternMusic (a tool of my own devising) every evening to create a new song. I’ve found that a regime of regular practice in PatternMusic has lead to developing my skills and ear for creating tunes. It’s like having a personal trainer in music composition. Well, maybe not quite. It’s more like having a training machine. You have to supply your own personal training. (What I did was simply set up an alarm reminder on my iPhone.)

(Of course, there’s little scientific evidence of the efficacy of such behavior. The success of the Nintendo games such as Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Age and the Big Brain Academy has underwritten a lot of well publicized neurology studies where they look at the various brain centers involved with various puzzle and game activities. But I can’t cite any studies that have looked at the effects of music composition practice on brain mass.)

Here’s how you can set up your own regime with PatternMusic:

• Get some headphones or earbuds and pick a time in your day when you won’t be interrupted for at least 20 minutes. It doesn’t have to be at night. It can be on your commute (if you aren’t driving) or after lunch or dinner or right before bed.
• Each day you can either choose to continue the project from yesterday or start a new project. That will keep you from getting stuck. You’re not writing a symphony. In fact, you should expect to throw most of what you create away.
• Start by picking your song settings — time signature, tempo and a scale. These are a great tool in PatternMusic for establishing a framework to work within. It’s also a great way to experiment with different modes and meters with which your aren’t familiar. You can vary your song structure depending on how far from your comfort zone you want to push yourself today.
• Force yourself to work within your chosen song framework for the session. Tomorrow you can mix it up again or go back to something more familiar.
• Try to keep working on the song for at least 20 minutes or until you have something that’s at least interesting for you to listen to in the moment. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. The whole point is that you are practicing and refining skills that you want to develop, or that your are experimenting with new ideas and new idioms.

Give it a try, and let me know how it works for you.

Image credit: From the book The Human Body and Health Revised by Alvin Davison, published in 1908 by Alvin Davison copyright of 1908 by Alvin Davison and 1924 by American Book Company. Copyright never renewed.