Almost 3 months ago I finally bought a new PC system. I also got a bunch of new software like Komplete 8 and Omnisphere. So, there was lots of installing and configuring going on. Templates to build. New sounds to check out.

And I did write a 2000+ word article on how to choose your music PC components. So why isn’t at least that article online yet?

Good question.

I simply couldn’t justify an article about how to choose the best components for your DAW, when my own new system wasn’t working the way it should.

Audio Drop-Outs and System Crashes

See, after the first round of toying with the new system and building various Cubase templates I experienced audio drop-outs and system crashes. Not fun after putting down a quite large sum of cash with high expectations for a well-performing system.

A single Omnisphere instance sometimes caused crackling and drop-outs. Now Omnisphere is a comparatively resource-hungry beast – that’s part of the reason why I didn’t already buy it years ago. It simply would NOT have run on my old, measly single core Athlon PC with 2GB of RAM. But on a quad-core i7 with 16 GB of RAM and some SSD drives there shouldn’t be any issues at all.

At least not with a single instance.

Some googling for a solution led me to the free DPC Latency Checker – if you are running a Windows system I highly recommend you download this free program. You don’t even need to install it, just run the .exe file and it will show you the latency of your system in real-time.

Here’s what I was seeing on my system right after a fresh boot-up.

This should be all green bars only - yellow bars are a warning sign

While the status message says that the system should be able to handle real-time audio, yellow bars is definitely not what you want to see from the get-go.

Red Alert

And here’s some red spikes after changing presets in Omnisphere:

Red bars when there were drop-outs and crackles

So with a graphic confirmation of the problems  - what to do next?

• Don’t ever change sounds?
• Live with the clicks and drop-outs?

Absolutely NOT.

Install the Latency Monitor program.

This will dig deeper and actually show you the culprits causing the latency issues. In my case I could see that there was something weird going on with the driver of my graphics card.

My graphics driver as main culprit of latency

Fortunately, there was an update available at Nvidia’s website and after installation I suddenly had green bars only. Yippie!

Green is your favorite color when it comes to latency issues

Continued Audio Problems even after Updates

The Yippie feeling didn’t last long, though. Still red bars galore when changing presets:

Impressive looking red spikes - it definitely looks better than it sounds

Since the main system seemed to be stable and suitable for audio – it was time to tackle the next potential error source.

At that point I assumed that the bottleneck was my old Alesis io2 soundcard. Under Windows XP I was quite happy with it. I didn’t need anything fancier in terms of connections, the sound was more than decent and even the driver performed more than adequate.

Not so in Windows 7. No specific ASIO driver anymore from Alesis and I had to resort to the generic ASIO4All driver, which is almost never the optimum solution. You definitely need/want a dedicated ASIO driver written for your specific hardware sound card.

Shop Till You Drop – Time for a New Sound Card

With some hope re-gained after the first latency monitor software induced success I figured it doesn’t make sense to buy all that new hardware and software and then skimp around when it comes to the so important audio interface. So after 2 days of researching various options I ordered the NI Komplete Audio 6 interface with the gut feeling that this should solve my problem.

My fantasy was that when the sound card gets delivered I’d plug it in and it would simply work and I’d finally be able to just enjoy and use my new system.

Nice fantasy, huh?

Here’s what really happened.

I installed the dedicated NI ASIO driver, started Cubase and Omnisphere and was greeted by fat red spikes which even made a complete re-boot necessary.

USB port crash - things apparently need to get worse before they get better

You can imagine how frustrated I was. All the money invested into my new system with all the accumulated software waiting to be used. The time spent reading forum posts and experimenting with system settings, software settings, buffer sizes, etc…

Even trying various esoteric “solutions” like disabling the Windows Aero theme. All to no avail.

And not even the new audio-interface solved my issues.

The Happy End to my Audio Problems

Just for the sake of testing I borrowed a Firewire sound card from one of my guitar students. I didn’t really expect anything at this point, but fortunately it worked like a charm. No clicks, pops and drop-outs. Even when I changed sounds in the middle of playback with a 150+ track Cubase template open and close to 14 GB of RAM in use all the bars stayed consistently in the green.

I was ecstatic.

Does that mean that a Firewire card automatically is better than USB?

Not necessarily.

I have to confess – I was thinking about either asking my student to sell me his card (which ironically wouldn’t work on his system anymore due to his latest Mac OS update) or ordering another Firewire card after returning my NI Komplete Audio 6.

But I was still in testing mode and wanted to check into this some more. Now I had the thought that maybe there’s something wrong with the whole USB set-up, which the high latency values of the USBPORT.SYS indicated. Maybe it wasn’t just driver related but more of a global system-issue.

No joking – but when I unplugged my Akai MPD32 controller, suddenly the NI USB card also worked without a glitch. Apparently there wasn’t enough juice running through my USB ports to power all the USB devices sufficiently, causing the errors and drop-outs.

In the end simply using an external wall-wart power supply for my Akai controller solved my issues and I finally have a stable system that is a joy to work with. And I decided to keep the NI Komplete Audio 6 as well because it IS a great sounding audio card.

My First Full Track with my New System

Here’s a track I did last week for the stock music site AudioJungle. There’s some Omnisphere in addition to various patches from Evolve Mutations and Synergy X, Shreddage guitar, some EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Harp as well as Spitfire Albion.

On my old system I would have needed to resort to various work-arounds like freezing tracks and bouncing to audio but on my new system I was able to add various EQ and compression plug-ins and at a latency setting of 132 samples the CPU meter showed a comfortable 30-40% processor load. When I increased the latency setting to 1024 samples that load reading diminished to a low 10-20%.

Summary and some Quick Tips

Recording music at home can be/is a fairly complex deal. There’s lots of things that can, and most likely will go wrong at some point. Keep that in the back of your mind and when something doesn’t work as expected, try to isolate the issue as much as possible and eliminate the potential points of failure one by one.

• Is it a software setting?
• Is it a hardware setting?
• Cables?
• Soundcard?
• Individual PC components?
• Driver issues?

Windows users: definitely use the free Latency Checker and Latency Monitor
Mac people: sorry, but I don’t know if there’s a comparable tool available – hopefully, you wouldn’t even need it in the first place.

“Dumb” your system down to the minimal amount of components – see if everything is working as expected then add the next thing. Once your system starts breaking down you have a much better chance of arriving at the correct solution faster with less frustration.

P.S.: I’ll post my lengthy PC components post in a few days. I just want to edit a few things and add what I learned the last couple of weeks. In case you haven’t already, subscribe to this blog so you don’t miss any (of my rather infrequent) posts.

If you haven’t read the first post, please do so now. It covers a general overview about functional ear training, where to download the software from, and your first steps with this method.

Your first milestone – the full major scale

Before we get to the 2 additional practice strategies to master chromatic notes, please make sure that you can deal with the basic major scale first.

The full major scale is the first MAJOR milestone in functional ear training - pun intended

The major scale is the most fundamental scale used in western music. You really need to nail that sucker before moving on to chromatics.

Fortunately, it’s not that difficult. You just need to learn to recognize the sounds that you have been exposed to pretty much your whole life. It’s not something completely strange or foreign to you.

The basic training program that’s built into the functional ear training software does a good job with breaking it up into manageable steps. It’s a good idea to focus on the lower half of the scale first, before tackling the upper part.

A fancy term for those 4 notes is: lower tetrachord

With only 4 notes it’s faster to tune into each note’s “personality” and get a feel for the sound. And don’t worry if you are somewhat guessing at first and you go by a sense of high- or lowness when answering the questions. That’s more than ok in the beginning.

It won’t take long until you’ll start to hear that “personality” sound I’ve been referring to.

You’ll start to notice the difference in sound between e.g. the 3rd degree and the 4th degree of the scale. It’s a certain characteristic that’s independent from the actual pitch – meaning, it doesn’t matter what key it’s in. You could be in the key of Eb and hear that 4th degree sound and therefore it has to be an Ab note – yet when you are in the key of C, that same 4th degree characteristic sound lets you know you’ve just heard an F.

Add 1 chromatic note to the major scale

Now for the fun part…

Instead of overloading your ears go for 1! chromatic note at a time. Here, in this screenshot you can see that I’ve added the minor 3rd to the major scale.

Single chromatic notes really do stick out

That minor 3rd will stick out. In the context of the major scale it will be the “weird” sounding note. At the same time, while you are on the look-out for the weird sounding note, you’ll re-enforce the characteristics of the basic major scale notes. Quite sneaky, huh?

I’d recommend you learn the notes in this sequence:

• minor 3rd
• minor 7th
• minor 6th
• diminished 5th
• minor 2nd

Focus on note pairs

Another strategy is to focus on note pairs. Compare the basic interval sound with its chromatic counterpart and focus on that exclusively.

Here’s an example of the major 7th/minor 7th combo.

Focus on the difference in sound/feel

Practice the following pairs individually:

• major/minor 2nd
• major/minor 3rd
• major/minor 6th
• major/minor 7th
• compare the tritone (Fi) to either the 4th or the 5th.

All those individual practice sessions will pay off big time when you go for the complete chromatic scale. It’ll give you a fighting chance and, when you get better and better results, will improve your motivation for even more practice sessions.

Bonus strategies for all your functional ear training

Here are 3 more practice approaches that really helped me a lot.

1) Think about each quiz. Use the repeat button as often as needed. Sing the note and work out the way up or down to the tonic. Only answer when you are 100% sure of the correct answer.

This approach is a great way to drill in perfection.

2) Again answer only when you are 100% sure of the answer – but this time DON’T use the repeat button. You are only allowed to replay and work out the question in your mind.

A great way to strengthen your aural recall abilities, your inner ear.

3) No replay and no thinking. Answer as fast as possible. If you are wrong, you are wrong. That’s part of the process, too.

This will prepare you for real life application. Let’s face it: there’s only limited amount of use if it takes you 3 minutes to figure out that you just heard a minor 7th. By that time the rest of the band already is playing the next song.

By going for speed (even if it means more mistakes) you’ll train yourself to analyze quicker and develop better musical gut instincts.

Combining these 3 approaches will help to develop a fast and laser-sharp ear.

Any questions?

If you have any additional questions or need help, please feel free to post them in the comment section below. And of course you can brag with some of your functional ear training success stories as well.

Falling snow - winter's own silent music

When it’s cold and dark outside, that’s the perfect time to get a nice fire going in the fire place, to enjoy your favorite beverage and to listen to some great music. Unwind from a stress-full day and chill. But not because of the temperatures.

After my article on how I re-learned to enjoy music with my own personal music ritual, I’ve received a few e-mails asking me about the music I listen to and if I could recommend some special winter music albums.

In the eastern part of Austria, where I live, there’s currently no snow to be seen and the temperatures are unusually mild. To compensate for that I want to present as my first selection albums I consider especially winter-y. They are predominantly acoustic, very atmospheric recordings with sparse instrumentation and a somewhat melancholy feel to them.

1) Sting – If on a Winter’s Night

Initially, Sting was approached to record a Christmas album by his record company. Like we need another one, right? *rolling my eyes* He decided to broaden the topic and record a winter-themed album instead.

One of the best tracks is “The Snow it Melts the Soonest” – an old folk song from the region where Sting grew up. Here’s a magical live performance – as a guitarist you just have to be inspired by the immaculate performance Dominic Miller delivers.

2) Dominic Miller – First Touch

When he’s not on tour with Sting, Dominic Miller also records and releases various excellent solo recordings under his name. I especially like First Touch. It’s chock-full of tasty guitar playing without unnecessary flashy guitar stunts.

3) Jan Garbarek – Twelve Moons

“Twelve Moons” by Jan Garbarek is an atmospheric gem. It has a northern, Scandinavian kind of vibe to it, which makes it fit perfectly for winter evenings.

4) Eva Cassidy – Songbird

Eva Cassidy’s awesome voice accompanied by acoustic guitar just warms your heart. A real shame that she died of cancer in 1996 at the early age of 33.

5) Paul Winter & Oscar Castro-Nueves – Brazilian Days

Speaking of warming your heart – I just love Brazilian music. It’s such a neat mix of sophisticated harmonies, interesting rhythms and great melodies. I find it especially intriguing that the same music can warm you from the inside out due to associations to Rio and the Copacabana. And in summer the gentle, swaying rhythms of a Bossa Nova manage to keep you cool.

“Brazilian Days” has a light, pop-tinged feel to it and is very enjoyable to listen to.

6) Morelenbaum2/Sakamoto – Casa

Time-less songs played by great musicians paying their tribute to Antonia Carlos Jobim with every note they play.

7) Chopic – Nocturnes

It doesn’t get any more melancholy (but with still a glimpse of hope left) than with Chopin’s solo piano Nocturnes.

8) Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny – Beyond the Missoury Sky

I don’t know how often I’ve already listened to this album since it first came out in 1997. I just love Pat’s playing and together with Charlie Haden he creates an intimate, acoustic sound – a very personal record of growing (up).

9) Milos Karadaglic – Mediterraneo

One of my recent discoveries. The guy has classical chops to die for and plays with passion and musicality.

10) Sade – The Best of Sade

Funny, but I didn’t like Sade back in the 80s. I guess the music was too simple for me back then. Today I can appreciate that kind of well-produced Pop. Somewhat minimalistic, yet still with depth to it.

Get all the recommended winter music albums from Amazon

I didn’t want to plaster my winter music recommendations with individual Amazon links right next to them. Instead, I’ve put them into the following collection. Simply scroll through the carousel widget to make your selection.

Disclosure: when you buy through my amazon link I get a small affiliate commission. It’s not a lot, but helps offset the costs of running this site. Thanks for your support.

What are some of your winter music favorites?

Are there any music albums you really like listening to especially in winter? If so, please share them in the comments below.

No big deal, right? Or is it? You get old(er) and bad memory and dementia are inevitable, n’est-ce pas?

Absolutely not. It has nothing to do with bad memory. It’s simply a fact that mix-ups can and do happen when you teach more than a handful of students.

Part of the problem is that when at the end of a lesson you picture doing something with a student in the future, that vivid image might get stored similarly to an actual past experience in your mind. So you might think that you already covered something while actually you just recall an imagined future lesson.

Tracking assignments is a must!

Even though I scaled down my teaching this year in order to have more time for music productions and this blog, I still deal with a ton of students, though not the 50+/week anymore as just a few years ago. What my prior growth years have taught me though, and what it boils down to is: you need a system to track your students’ assignments and their progress.

Hey, just think back to your own school years. Chances are that if the teacher didn’t know what the homework assignment was, then tough luck for the teacher.

Keeping track is your responsibility.

Fortunately, a simple sheet where at the end of each lesson you quickly write down the assignment is all you need.

Feel free to download the form I use to quickly capture your student’s assignment. In the zip file you’ll find the form in European A4-size format, US letter size as well as a quick dummy sample with some additional, short instructions (all in PDF format). I hope it’ll be useful to you.

Student Assignment Tracking Form

But tracking is only the first piece of the puzzle. It’s important, but not enough. If all you do is track the assignments, the main problem will creep up on you over time.

What’s the main problem?

With lots of students at varying levels of ability and different topics covered already, it’s easy to lose the big picture. You definitely don’t want to wade through literally dozens of weekly assignment tracking sheets with all your student data on them, just to double-check if you’ve already covered a specific topic with a student. Trust me – it’s a huge time-suck and frustrating on top of that.

The solution is a centralized data collection point. How’s that for a techy buzzword?

The solution: Evernote to the rescue!

I’ve already briefly mentioned Evernote in my article about creating a teaching system with process flow charts.

Think of Evernote as your second, digital brain. Evernote is great for lots of things like collecting interesting snippets of information you find on the web, music and general data colletion, management of your collected data, even storage of files you need at your fingertips accessible from anywhere, like important PDFs.

Click here to sign up for your free Evernote account

I won’t go into all the possible uses. Let’s keep it focused on getting your teaching to a higher level of organization and setting up your system to get you going.

A simple spreadsheet for each student might look like a viable alternative at first. Unfortunately, putting my data in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet would not work for me. It doesn’t show up on my older SonyEricsson cell phone, which  is not a smart phone in the iPhone/Android sense. But my phone is smart enough to let me access my Evernote data over the internet. In case you do have an iPhone/Android device, even better for you due to the Evernote app with even more functionality.

So that’s the killer feature right there, because now I simply can pull out my phone during a lesson and show my student what we’ve already covered and what therefore the next logical topic to study is. It always seems to impress the heck out of them and at the same time also shows them that I’m on top of things, organized and do have a plan for them. More on the having-a-plan part later in this article.

If you don’t have Evernote yet, simply sign up for a free Evernote account.

On to the practical steps…

I’ve created a “Student Progress” note book. For every student there’s an individual note with the student’s name as title. And in that note I record all the relevant information from each lesson. You don’t need to get too fancy with your formatting, but a simple table does help in keeping your data tidy. I track the date, topic covered, notes and what I need to prepare or want to cover with my student in the near future.

Remember the “having a plan” from earlier on?

It’s also a good idea to write a couple of short-term goals at the very top, so you can always see at first glance what the current top-priority items are. To give you a better idea, have a look at this sample dummy student note I’ve prepared for you.

A simple Evernote sample dummy template

You can see the goals on top and the entries chronologically (in blog-style format) from the latest information on top, back to the very first lesson at the bottom. Additionally, it’s a good idea to add some tags to your individual Evernote notes. No need to go crazy with tons of tags, just a select few to help you sort your main groups.

Tags are easy to add in Evernote and help keep things organized

The tags I use are: student, ex-student, acoustic, electric, guitar and keyboard.

Sometimes a student quits. There’s many reasons for that, it could be that he lost interest, doesn’t want to practice anymore, has discovered other hobbies to pursue, has to focus on something else like college, a job, etc.

Whatever it is: don’t delete the data! Keep it in Evernote, that’s what Evernote is here for. Change the status tag from student to ex-student. This way the student note won’t show up in your search results when you simply want to sift through your current students in your list view.

And in case your student’s circumstances change or he misses you badly and wants to resume his studies, you simply change the note from ex-student back to student. You have all the data, know what you already covered, have an overview and can create a new plan of action based on solid data instead of hazy memories.

The instrument specific tags are pretty self-explanatory, I think. They’re here simply for the sake of additional options when filtering.

A few minutes to port your data into Evernote is all you need

The downside and the price you have to pay is a few minutes at the end of the day where you need to port your data from the homework assignment tracker over into Evernote. A small inconvenience and well worth the effort considering all the benefits you get:

• centralized general overview
• safe data storage
• access anywhere via local application, web browser or cell phone
• sorting and filtering of data
• peace of mind and tons of saved time preparing material for your students
• perception of being on top and in control by your students

The last point alone is priceless, best of all, it’s not just a fake perception, you really are on top of things and in control.

Recommended Evernote resource

A great resource to learn the in and outs of Evernote is Evernote Essentials.

The best resource to learn Evernote

Disclosure for transparency: the link to Evernote Essentials is an affiliate link. If you purchase through my link, I get a commission. These affiliate commissions help to off-set the costs of running this site and I really appreciate your support.

However, it’s not necessary to buy this e-book, you definitely can figure Evernote out on your own and hopefully my explanations were helpful as well. But, if you are new to Evernote and want to speed up your learning process, I highly recommend Evernote Essentials.

Any other ideas for keeping track?

I hope this gives you some food for thought and makes your teaching life easier. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Maybe you have a different method of staying on top of things or would like to add some additional twist on how to use Evernote to keep your teaching organized? Please share them by leaving a comment below.

• practice (you know it doesn’t work without it)
• train your ears – if you haven’t already, definitely try
  the functional ear training method
• repeatedly listen to great music
• transcribe as much as possible
• imitate and absorb the greats
• increase your musical vocabulary

and eventually as a result you’ll start to spit out original music.

Excellent advice – I totally support it and urge my students all the time to do the same.

• So you dilligently train yourself for years to listen analytically to every piece of music you hear.
• You check the chord progressions that are used in the current hit songs.
• You listen to and identify all the intervals in popular melodies.
• You study the structure of arrangements, the counterpoint and the orchestration/instrumentation.
• You even go for identifying the individual frequency ranges to increase the quality of your mix-downs and productions.

Kudos for that.

Don’t starve your ability to simply enjoy music!

These are definitely valuable activities to do but they also can suck the life out of music and kill your enjoyment if you aren’t careful and take counter-measures.

Last year, after realizing how little time I actually spent simply listening to music without some sort of agenda going on, I decided to enjoy a complete album/day as a part of my musical challenge for that month.

I know, I know… “challenge” sounds somewhat stupid in this context. Let’s face it, if listening to music was a challenge, it really would be necessary to seriously re-think your relationship with music.

So “challenge” in the sense of not getting distracted (by over-analysis) and not to give in to temptations like mindlessly surfing the web or other time-wasting activities instead of taking the time to enjoy high quality music.

Ask yourself: how often do I really enjoy music?

So no putting on an album in the background while surfing the web, no iPod/mp3 player and “listening” while simultaneously doing household chores. Forget productivity or multi-tasking for a moment – this is not about relegating music to the role of muzak, it’s about realizing the value of music, enjoying music as the gift that it is and giving it the credit and respect it deserves.

After the first few days I was hooked. I absolutely had no problems at all to follow through that 1 month. All day long I was already looking forward to my music hour in the evening.

For the exception of just 3 evenings (24th to 26th) due to Christmas celebrations with family and relatives I actually continued last year way past December into late March until evenings got warmer again. So challenge more than completed.

Tame your musical monkey mind

Although, I must confess that I needed a few sessions before my musical monkey mind was quiet. Initially, I did catch myself going, “That was a nice chord change. I like that maj7#11 chord. Is that a Rhodes Mark I or II in the background? I wonder what outboard gear the producer used to get that great sound?”

But pretty soon I’ve been able to re-claim the ability to simply sit and listen with a sense of enjoyment and gratitude – without a thought of analysis crossing my mind.

Does a cozy fire place on a cold winter evening help to enjoy music?

Helpful Ideas

• Create a little ritual around your music hour.
• Maybe get a nice fire started in the fire place.
• Get yourself a big cup of tea or coffee.
• Dim the lights, or even better, turn them off and light some candles instead.
• If you like, burn some incense

…and then just let the music take over.

Make the time

Don’t say that you don’t have time for it because that’s simply not true. Make the time for it. Ditch the TV channel surfing or reduce your online activities. This might sound weird, but I’d go as far as saying that this could be more important than a practice session.

Blasphemy? Maybe, but consider this… when you re-discover your passion for music, you’ll actually practice more and with a different (better) energy afterwards.

When you have family, bring them on board for the music hour. There has to be some music in your collection that appeals to the rest as well – might be worth the small compromises in musical taste at first. You can “graduate” them to your favorite atonal album later on.

Something else I noticed last year…

Towards the end of my challenge when I already had listened to my top albums that I felt were appropriate for my winter evening sessions, it got harder to choose what to listen to. I didn’t want to repeat my selection and started to run out of albums that I really liked in their entirety. I was left with records where there’s a few really great tracks, but there’s also lots of mediocre tracks that you don’t like or where you feel they just got put in to fill up the track count.

When you keep your personal listening challenge to a single month, this shouldn’t become a problem at all. Also, feel free to change the rules from listening to a complete album to a playlist of selected songs in album length.

Another positive side note: this also makes you appreciate the awesome cohesive albums even more.

Your action steps

1) Decide on your rules (how long to listen, full album or playlist, hybrid, etc…)

2) Think about your ritual

3) Collect your menu of top music albums to listen to in advance – use a spreadsheet, or create shortcuts in a separate folder. Or, should you decide to loosen the rules and go for a playlist type of listening experience, actually create the (themed) playlists in advance.

Do it in advance, so you don’t have an excuse on Wednesday evening after a tiring work day to skip your listening session for some easy TV channel hopping instead.

Give yourself the gift to enjoy music without an agenda

Slow down and decrease the speed of life with your music hour. It’ll become the highlight of your day.

Please share your favorite albums or any great new music you’ve discovered as a result of your listening sessions in the comment section below.

Surprisingly complex, isn’t it?

When I initially created my first version a couple of years ago I was quite surprised about the degree of complexity involved. It truly was an eye opener. I never had realized how many steps and small actions actually were necessary before the teaching even started. I also discovered some actions that were NOT necessary at all – and I’ve been able to trim the fat, so to speak, and therefore make the whole process a lot easier.

See, when you’ve been playing an instrument for some time, there’s lots of aspects that have become automatic for you. The common chord progressions are no problem. You’ve played your blues licks a gazillion times. It’s not necessary to think about what you are doing anymore.

Even with teaching it works the same way. Showing someone how to rip with Pentatonic licks, how to play blazingly fast alternate picking runs, how to… is easy. Right? You know your stuff. That’s what you do all the time and with some presentational experience you are able to share and convey your knowledge.

So after a while teaching students, showing them cool, new material is no problem, because you do it often. As your teaching business grows to 10, 20, 30, or even 50+ students/week you have lots of interactions with your students.

Pretty soon you’ve seen it all. All the left hand mistakes, right hand mistakes, lack of focus, lack of concentration, lack of attention, rhythmic problems.

You get good at trouble shooting, recognizing the errors and (hopefully) you are able to show the solutions.

Sometimes it’s a quick and easy fix. Like handing out a good sounding playback for jamming along to a student in order to motivate him to practice more. Sometimes it can turn into quite a long-term project that requires a strategic selection of exercises and careful monitoring from you.

On the positive side you’ve also seen the successes and noticed what worked for your students.

A Process Flow Chart is like a Checklist and Guides You Along

Other aspects of teaching don’t happen that often – but are still essential – either for your financial success (after all, teaching is a business) or simply necessary for your personal well being saving you some nerves.

“Back to School” time is a perfect example. It only happens once a year. But it sets the tone with new students and their parents and could turn into a stressful time if you don’t have a system in place to ease everyone into a smooth term.

Usually, when a new school year starts all those small actions like phone calls, updating contact information, etc… are floating around in the back of your mind. No wonder you feel stressed and have the constant nagging feeling that there’s something that’s missing, that there’s something you should be doing – you just don’t know exactly what.

And when you do find out that your nagging feeling was right, it’s probably too late and the damage has been done already. You forgot to call the parent, check about the room, etc…

Not cool – and really makes you look unprofessional.

Granted, you could manage without such a process flow chart. I did, too – for quite a few years longer than I’d like to admit. So I know it’s possible to stumble your way through.

But trust me, to confidently walk into the meeting room where new students and/or their parents are waiting for you with the feeling that you’ve covered all your bases regarding rooms and time slots and have relevant, up-to-date hand-outs prepared is the better way to do it.

You come across more professional this way for sure. First impressions do count, even in the music teaching business.

Copy Me – Then Adapt

Feel free to model my process flow chart. Naturally there’ll be steps that don’t relate to your own situation. If you teach strictly at home, there’s no need to check with some school administration about room availability. You might create different forms and checklists, use different tools. That’s more than o.k.

The main purpose of this post is to get you to think about YOUR processes as they apply to YOUR own situation and then DO something to improve and optimize them.

Make Your Processes Work For You

My advice to you:

• Think about all the different actions you have to do.
• Organize them into groups and themes, like teaching materials, marketing, scheduling, finances, etc…
• Monitor your own way of handling things.
• Document all the steps.

Re-evaluate your steps:

• Are they necessary?
• Can you eliminate a step?
• Can you improve upon a process?
• Do you use tools that do their job?

Don’t feel like you need to have all your processes identified and documented via neat process flow charts by tomorrow. Take your time with this. But, please, do get started.

Here are some recommended resources to help you get started:

Framework behind Process Flow Charts

Recommended reading

Work the System by Sam Carpenter

The story of a business owner at the verge of financial and nervous break down and how he turned his business and life around creating systems for his processes. It’s a good read, it’s not too technical or specific to his particular situation.

All I can say is that after reading this book, I actually DID something and started my first process flow charts.

Buy Work the System from Amazon

Disclosure: when you buy through my amazon link I get a small affiliate commission. It’s not a lot, but helps offset the costs of running this site. Thanks for your support.

Software for creating Process Flow Charts:

While Xmind (as featured in my mind mapping for musicians article) would work, it unfortunately does have some limitations when it comes to flow charts. You’d need to manually nudge the alignment of free-floating nodes, which would get quite tedious.

Looking for an alternative I checked into SmartDraw. The demo version worked great and I did like it. However, the price tag was too much for me, at least for the limited use I’d really need it for.

On my hunt I finally stumbled upon yEd.
YEd is a really cool and easy to use software for creating process flow charts and diagrams. Best of all, it’s absolutely free to use for both, personal as well as commercial use. My process flow chart (and the PDF) was entirely created with yEd and after watching this short tutorial video you should be up and running in no time at all.

Gmail account for Contact and Time Management

All my student contact data goes into Gmail. I’ve created 3 groups: “students,” “ex-students” and “music teaching” (for related contacts like the school principals) for easy sorting. Even though I don’t have an iPhone/Android device (yet) my SonyEricsson mobile is smart enough to access my contact manager via the internets.

Scheduling goes onto my teaching Google Calendar.

Evernote - The Digital Brain

Evernote is great and I couldn’t imagine my digital life without it. In case you aren’t using it yet, quickly head on over to Evernote and sign up for their free service.

I’ll show how I specifically use Evernote for student progress tracking and how I organize the tags in a future post. Make sure to subscribe, so you don’t miss out once I publish. Still valid.

Get Started with Your Process Flow Charts

Create a system for yourself. It might take some up-front investment of time – but it’ll help you avoid lots of stress for many years to come. Apart from the occasional minor tweak you’ll have something to fall back upon to. And instead of trying to think about all the little things you should be doing, you’ll be able to focus on the actual teaching instead.

Are you using process flow charts for your teaching business? Or for some other music related actions? Feel free to share your ideas and experiences in the comments below.

Skills like:

• good technique on your instrument
• a great rhythmic feel
• knowledge of stylistic interpretation
• improvising
• reading music, chord charts, tab
• the know-how to arrange music
• an understanding of basic recording technology
• “working” your equipment [synth(s), effects, software]
• promoting your music
• people skills (band members, managers, at venues)

But your most prized possession as a musician is:

Your ears!

Ludwig van Beethoven contemplating functional ear training

First of all it is essential to protect your hearing at all cost. I hate to break the news to you, but no, you won’t automatically have Beethoven’s musical skills by becoming deaf like him. Use ear plugs in loud locations (concerts, gigs, rehearsals) – it’s the smart thing to do.

However, there’s more to hearing than registering sound waves via your eardrums.

You need the ability to analyze and interpret the incoming sound. That’s what ear training is for. It helps you develop the skill of understanding what your ears are hearing.

Functional Ear Training

One of the best ear training methods I’ve come across is functional ear training. Instead of learning to recognize the sound of individual intervals, with functional ear training you focus on learning the specific sound of a note in the context of tonality.

What do I mean by specific sound?

Let’s listen to a C chord followed by a C note. Notice how stable and resting the C note sounds. The identical C note is then played after a B chord.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen to audio]

How come the same C note can sound so different?

Simply put, the C note plays a different role in the key of B major than in the key of C major. And with the different function goes a different sound quality as well. It’s your job to learn to recognize that difference in tonal character.

Now the big question is: how do you do that? Do you just listen to music and hope that those characteristics jump out at you? Should you just sit down at the piano and play individual keys over and over again trying to memorize their sound?

No, because fortunately there’s a better way.

Step 1

Head on over to Alain Benbassat’s site, then download and install the free Functional Ear Training software.

Step 2

Unlike the previous versions this new V2 software is a cross-platform Adobe Air application and there’s no additional set-up required. No MIDI sound card settings and initial options to deal with.

You can get started immediately and the built-in tutorial section explains the functional ear training method step by step. It’s interactive with concise explanations and corresponding sound examples.

For example, here’s screen #11 of the method explanation.

Functional Ear Training step by step

Step 3

Don’t just rush through the initial explanation screens. Spend some time with the preliminary exercises. Let them sink in. Repeat them often. Especially if this is your first time practicing functional ear training exercises. Trust me, it’s an investment of your practice time that really will pay off big time.

Step 4

When you feel like you have mastered Part I, it’s time to get into a practice routine using the Practice Lab.

The Functional Ear Trainer - Practice Lab main screen

Here’s where you can fine-tune and develop your ears.

Choose what you want to focus on and tweak the settings:

• which key
• major, minor or random
• how often (if at all) the cadence gets played to help you establish the tonality
• how many questions
• which notes and chromatics to include
• the labeling of the notes – letters, numbers or solfege
• small or large tone range

Note names, numbers or solfege? Your choice.

Fine-tune your functional ear training exercises

As you can see lots of options to customize your practice sessions.

Tune Your Ears with Functional Ear Training!

I highly recommend you get started with your own ear tune-up through functional ear training. It has made a tremendous difference in how I hear music. Treat it like a game where you shoot for a result in the 90-100% range. When you score consistently in that range for a few days in a row it’s time to move on to more difficult settings.

Just make sure that you don’t tire your ears – keep your functional ear training sessions short. 10 minutes is all you need.

Before you head on over to Mr. Benbassat’s site and download the Functional Ear Trainer software, make sure to subscribe to this blog. I plan on writing a follow-up post about the strategies and settings I’ve used to train my ears and I don’t want you to miss out on it.

If you’ve found this post helpful please share it on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Also, stop by again to leave a comment and let me know how your practicing with the functional ear training software is working for you.

I'd love to have an Omstrument

Photo credit: Jack Haas (Omstrument inventor) – Thanks for the kind permission

What do you get when you combine a harp, a tanpura, a dulcimer, a guitar and a strumstick? The Omstrument, of course.

This is one of the most creative as well as beautiful instruments I’ve seen. But before I focus on all the good stuff, let’s get the negativity out of the way, first.

Hell – What’s Bad about the Omstrument:

46 strings!

Imagine preparing for an important performance or recording session – where you really need/want to sound your best. I dislike, no, scratch that, hate changing strings on my guitar. I always procrastinate when it comes to changing strings. The mere thought of having to change 46 strings gives me nightmares.

Tuning/Intonation

String instruments get out of tune. Period. Nothing you can do about it.

The more strings you have to deal with, the more you need to fiddle with keeping them in tune.

Transportation

Looks like a beast to carry around. I guess it’s time to exchange my Ferrari for a Minivan. (Did you see the smiley? That means that I was just joking – just to be clear, I don’t have a Ferrari.)

Enough of the whining already – onwards to the good stuff!

Heaven – This is OM!

Coolness Factor

I don’t know about you, but to me the Omstrument just scores big time in coolness. It’s original, unusual, exotic, and there’s enough guitar shaped instruments assembled to get my fingers itching just from looking at the thing.

46 Strings!

Huh, wasn’t that part of the bad already?
Yes, it was. Thank you for your attentive reading. But besides the negative aspects already mentioned, there’s the sound and the possibilities you get with 46 strings. A symphony of resonance, vibration and tonal colors.

The Omstrument in Action

Check out the inventor Jack Haas playing one of his compositions on his Omstrument:

The Final Score

Big thumbs up from me for the creative fusion of string instruments. The beautiful sound alone would be worth any inconvenience.

• Changing 46 strings? No problem when you focus on the great sounding end result.
• Tuning and intonation? Develop your ears and use a quality tuner for some help.
• Transportation problems? Who needs to transport the beast? I know I wouldn’t. I’d be too busy sitting at home playing my Omstrument.

Maybe you have a few unused, old instruments collecting dust in your attic. Why not build your own version of an Omstrument?

Have you seen any similar or other unusual instruments? If so, please, feel free to share your findings.

But what do you put on your practice plan?

Here’s the challenge: you list the important basics, the cool playing techniques, all the styles you’d like to get into, the tunes to master…

Feeling lost in a maze of exercises?

You put everything on your plan and you end up with a gargantuan practice schedule that’s totally impractical and even counterproductive.

Why?

Because it’s not sustainable.

You have a life to live. There’s family, friends, social activities, work (best case scenario in music), other hobbies. There’s “stuff” – obligations and commitments that prevent you from practicing 24/7.

So basically there’s a limited amount of time available and a seemingly unlimited amount of material to practice.

No wonder you feel overwhelmed and frustrated.

The Solution

Here’s a concept that can help you overcome that feeling.

I call it “The Challenge of the Month Concept”

To make this clear right away, I don’t claim ownership of this technique. It’s a popular concept covered on numerous self-help and personal development websites and blogs. In general, it’s either called the “30 Day Challenge” or “30 Day Trial.” What you are reading here is my adapted version.

Here’s how it works.

Step 1

You pick 1 single thing you’d like to focus on.

This could be a Jazz standard like “Giant Steps” or a Rock classic like “Sweet Home Alabama.” It could be a concept like chord substitutions or upper structure chords. You could focus on a specific playing technique for your instrument – economy picking for guitar, pedaling on the piano, pizzicato for string instruments. It could be a musical style like Flamenco or Blues.

Whatever tickles your fancy. You get the idea.

Step 2

Decide how much time you want to dedicate per practice session.

Find the right balance. No need to go berserk – too much time and it becomes an unrealistic chore. Don’t underestimate the effect that focusing on something for 1 full month can have. Even if you start out slowly with only a couple of minutes, the consistency really does add up.

Step 3

Follow through on your plan. Keep the commitment you made and muster up all your discipline and work ethic.

Stick with it at all cost. Remember, it’s called a challenge.

Step 4

Observe and analyze.

Keep note of your findings. It’s amazing what’s to discover when you stay with something instead of jumping around. Don’t worry, all the other things to practice will still be waiting for you anyways.

At the end of the challenge set aside some time to reflect on your experience.

• What has changed?
• Any new insights?
• What are your conclusions?
• Any spin-off ideas for your next challenge?

Why does the Challenge of the Month Concept Work?

First of all, it forces you to make a decision. You need to assess your current playing situation and abilities and decide where you want to improve.

That in itself is worth a lot.

But since that focus will be valid for 1 month only, it takes away all the pressure at the same time. You are NOT making a huge commitment, this is NOT a decision you are stuck with for life. It’s only for 31 days at the most.

After the challenge is over you are free to completely ditch whatever it was you practiced should you choose to do so.

Guilt free.

Also, there’s this competitive element involved.  Are you going to make it? Are you tough enough? You value your self-respect, you better make it through the challenge.

My Personal Challenge

I know this stuff works. I’ve used the technique in the past. I will continue to use it.

Occasionally I’ll share my results here on this site. It could be some spectacular result after a completed challenge. It could also be some really poor result. But guess what? Even the really poor results will teach you valuable lessons and provide you with something to take away with. You’ll know what doesn’t deliver and can tick something off your gargantuan practice schedule for good.

Or at least until you want to try that topic again…

Most importantly, have fun. A playful attitude – in my experience – is the best way to tackle the challenge. Practicing is something to be enjoyed. It helps you to develop as a musician and therefore should be something to look forward to instead of a dreaded or feared activity.

Share Your Challenge of the Month Projects

Hopefully this post does inspire you to start your own monthly musical challenge.

Feel free to share your projects, experiences and results.

While you click through various folders and sub-folders there’s an e-mail notification calling for your attention. 5 e-mails later you want to continue your playback hunt but decide to quickly visit Facebook to check what your friends are up to.

Before you know it 2 hours have gone by – you still haven’t played. And let’s be honest, you won’t play anymore because at this point your energy is zapped.

Don’t let this happen to you.

While it’s great to have lots of digital practice tools in the form of software, PDFs, videos and mp3s, it’s important to stay focused and to not let anything tempt you into procrastination.

Unfortunately there’s lots of temptation gremlins lurking around to keep you from practicing.
Fortunately you can keep those gremlins in check.

Follow this easy recipe:

Remove obstacles/friction from stuff that’s good for you.
Pile on more obstacles/make it harder to do stuff that’s bad for you.

Or condensed even more:
Put obstacles to work for you instead of against you.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Here’s a couple of quick and easy to implement hacks to help you stay on track. They only take a few short minutes to implement, but have a huge positive long-term effect. I don’t claim that it’s a perfect system but it works for me. Check it out and see if it works for you, too.

1) Turn off all notification services

Seriously, there’s no need to have some audio bling go off every time a new e-mail arrives. You don’t need to immediately jump onto Twitter or Facebook anytime a new tweet or status update happens. All that stuff will still be there – after your practice session!

2) Install a browser blocking extension

In case your mouse clicking finger is stronger than your mind is set on practicing…. install and activate a browser blocking extension to cut you off from time sucking websites or if necessary the whole internet.

I use StayFocusd for Google Chrome and like how easy it is to fine-tune your settings to allow or restrict access only at specific times.

Click here and install the StayFocusd Chrome Extension

3) Create a “Practicing” folder with shortcuts

This is a biggie. If you are anything like me and have hoarded tons of digital music related stuff over the years, this will (finally) help you to utilize your assets.

Create a “Practicing” folder either on your desktop or as close to the top-level of your hierarchy as possible. Personally, I try to keep my desktop as clean as possible, so I stuck my “Practicing” folder on the top-level of my D partition.

Into this folder put shortcuts to all the e-books, mp3s, videos, etc… that you’ll need for your current practice routine. So come practice time, it’s the shortest amount of mouse clicks necessary to have access to the stuff you need.

No more wasted time clicking through endless sub-folders trying to remember where that specific mp3 is hiding again.

And even if you know exactly where a file is, does it really make sense to go: Music – Guitar Magazines – Guitar Techniques – 2004 – 9 – September 04 – file-xyz – when you can go Practicing – file xyz instead?

Make it quick and easy to get to your files!

This way you can still keep a regular folder structure, e.g. yearly/monthly folders for your ripped music magazines playbacks, or separate piano and guitar method book folders. And the shortcuts provide the well, shortcuts to what you need for your current practice routine.

Set up a "Practicing" folder for easy access

Once you outgrow a playback or resource, instead of deleting the shortcuts move them into an “Archive” or “History” (or whatever you want to call it) folder that you create inside the “Practicing” folder. This way you can quickly find files/playbacks you’ve used in the past to revisit and use again.

It also shows you your accomplishments and the progress you’ve made which is important, too.

And because it’s just shortcuts, it’s not filling up your hard drive with duplicate files (no issue with small e-books/mp3s but if you have lots of huge guitar video files, this could add up.)

Get into the habit of spending a few minutes on Sunday evening evaluating your last week’s progress and planning your next week’s practice goals. In the process quickly add new shortcuts to your “Practicing” folder and remove and port old ones over to your “Archive” folder.

Any other hacks for better practicing?

Let me know how these tips work for you. If there’s any other trick that you’ve implemented that really boosted your practicing productivity, please leave a comment and share it.