Thanks Marko, I shall check out some of the resources you suggest over the weekend. I keep hearing how useful evernote is so I guess it’s worth taking the time to find out exactly what it can do.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

I had a slow start with Evernote. The only thing I initially used it for was for web clipping. Instead of having to bookmark a whole site/page, I could select the relevant snippet only. Totally searchable on top of that.

Just that aspect alone made Evernote super useful.

But when I finally started to use it for non-web related organizing, it became a game-changer.

You get the summary overview for each student, you can play around with the formatting, add relevant attachments like PDFs to the student notes, link to other resources on the web and carry all that with you via your phone.

Bloody brilliant, like you Brits are fond of saying.

The official Evernote blog is a useful resource to learn more about Evernote.

Also, check out a few of the posts that Michael Hyatt did like: How to Organize Evernote for Maximum Efficiency or How to Use Evernote as a Blogger.

I found those articles when I googled for tutorials on how to best use Evernote. So, there’s some really great resources available with people sharing their personal approaches, and this might be all you need to get you started on the right foot.

Evernote Essentials just saves some time as a great compact, all-in-one reference book to get you up on speed with the best practices fast.

Hope that helps.

Thank you for the compliments. I’m really glad that this is helping you out.

It’s a common mistake to take on too much at once and to overload your ears. Make sure to take your time and let your ears develop. But with the major scale mastered, you already have a great foundation to build on.

All the credit for the software belongs to Alain Benbassat. Thanks for the support – he deserves all the donations for creating such incredibly useful software and making it available for free.

Take care,
Marko

If we accept that our main mission as musicians is to transport, convey and elicit emotions in our audience, re-connecting to that sense of wonder, amazement and enjoyment is essential.

Fortunately, it’s one of the easier things to fix in life. You’d have to be quite grumpy to complain about having the permission to simply enjoy listening to your favorite music.

I always tell my students it’s important to spend time both practising and playing as the two are different things. Perhaps we should also make sure we spend time listening as musicians and then simply listening as human beings …

This is really interesting. I have had evernote on my iphone for a while as I keep reading how brilliant it is, but I haven’t really got my head around why and have only used it for simple things like to-do lists and the like.

I used to use daily/weekly trackers like the ones in the zip file but agree that the problem is that I’d often want to see data for just one student, not every student from a certain day or week.

Then I started to use a file with a individual section for every student. The problem with that is that the file gets full quite quickly so you end up throwing out the older entries and then you’re back at the problem of duplication of study material. This can happen a lot with jazz students when you are using the standard repertoire to teach different techniques.

The ebook you link to looks interesting, but it also seems a little pricey at $25 dollars – especially for an ebook. Do you think evernote is useful enough to make that investment worthwhile?

Ah, the real life benefits – and how to (finally) get them. I know exactly what you are talking about.

It’s very common to “work up” your score in programs like Functional Ear Trainer to the 95-100% range and still feel tone-deaf when listening to “real-world” music.

That used to drive me nuts.

I’ll write a detailed post about this phenomenon and how to deal with it in the near future.

In the meantime keep on doing what you are doing. Random melodies, functional ear training, iPhone apps for practicing on the go… sounds like you are already doing lots of different, beneficial activities.

Thanks for the comment and the link/recommendations for the additional ear training resources. Can’t have enough of those to keep the training interesting.

Take care,

Marko