Gamify your musical practice
Working your musical instrument in a playful way
INTRODUCTION
You need to make of your musical practice something pleasant. You need to work regularly, but you deserve some fun, and your practice to be playful. How can you do it?
I got my inspiration from tabletop RPGs (Role Playing Games, with paper, pencil and dices, like Dungeon & Dragons for exemple) and their random tables. A dice roll, chance, scoring points. There is certainly a way to take the process further, but I will only speak here of things that I experienced during the lockdown.
I borrowed the term Gamification to Fibretigre and Seth Godin. They both talk about using tools to motivate yourself to work by modifying some aspects of work into a game. So, the tool I decided to use here is polyhedral dices.
BASS PREP
I think it is very useful to set aside a moment in the week, let’s say half an hour or an hour per week, which I call preparation. At that point it will be interesting to think about what you want to work on, how you are going to do it, and prepare the equivalent of a lunchbox full of tasty snacks. Nothing is more frustrating than having rented your studio for 2 hours and then finding yourself spending 2 hours looking for interesting sounds or stuff to do, or worse still repeating the same things over and over and losing interest in the practice. It is therefore interesting to have these moments of preparation to concoct a program for the week to come. It is also an opportunity to learn from the previous week’s experience. I find it difficult to do this regularly. But when I do, I see the difference.
REPERTOIRE
To work on a répertoire of songs, it is tedious to take all the songs in alphabetical order and work on one per day. It may seem insurmountable and therefore an element of chance makes it more fun for my taste. For example you can use a playlist on random (shuffle) and play the generated song at random, so that it is a different one every day. To prevent this chance from giving us the same song several times during a week or during a month, join a list and check off each song that has already been done to find out where you are. It creates goals and it makes it more fun.
RANDOM TABLES
In role-playing games (RPG) there are a number of random generation tables. To generate names, places, objects, events and so on. So I was just inspired by that: I make a list of “objects” then roll the appropriate dice and let chance decide for me.
If you don’t have any RPG dice, you can use an app, for example Feudz Dice on iOS, RPG Simple Dice on Android, or type d20 in Google. (I haven’t compared any apps. There must be better ones, but at least these work)
For example, you can create a table of songs to play, roll the dice and then note the result in a file which will act as “menu of the week”.
It’s about making your tables. List what you want to work on. Then use the dice and let chance make the decision, save that decision time to spend more time playing. Throw the dice to spice up the practice, to make it more fun.
SOME EXAMPLES OF TABLES
Changing bass
I realized that I needed to play each of my instruments. So I made the choice to let chance decide. It can also sometimes lead to original instrument / exercise combinations. I remember that Jean-Luc Gastaldello on the subject of slap advised me to slap parts originally written for “finger playing” in order to progress in this direction. This approach applies here.
Technique
There are several topics I want to cover, but I cannot tackle them all at the same time. So I deal with a different one every week, then nobody gets jealous.
And obviously we can generate sub-tables for each “subject”
Jazz playlist
To work on the Jazz repertoire, I decided lately to work on a list of standards that Clovis Nicolas recommended to me when I was taking lessons with him. From the Real Book, these are well-known standards. One per day is not bad in my case. To avoid falling back on the same one several times, we can make a cross next to the title worked on each day. And thus see our evolution in the course of the repertoire.
Groove playlist
As for the groove, I decided to work on random songs, from one artist, every week. I decide on the artist with the table, and run the playlist on « random » or « shuffle » each day to play the series of songs drawn at random.
Rock playlist
Unlike groove, a style in which I have more experience, here in rock I take one album a week. I need to come back to the tracks for several days to add kilometers to my count in this field.
LOG BOOK
This is an idea borrowed from Heyn Van De Geyn. It will therefore suffice to draw a table on a sheet that you can hang on the wall in the room where you are working your instrument. On the x-axis we put the exercises and on the y-axis we put the days. Or the reverse according to your taste. Each day we fill in the boxes, and the table filling up we can follow its progress. It is encouraging, to be sure.
It’s also a way to “score points”
For my part, it is especially for the work of the modes that I find it interesting. It was Hubert Dupont who put me on this path. Indeed, to work on the major modes for example, in all tones, we can take a tonality and the degree of one mode per day. This is important but can seem tedious. However, with a table, it will seem more achievable, and above all it will allow you to keep track of what has already been done, to avoid going around in circles.
The tone on the ordinate and the mode on the abscissa. Or the other way around.
STRETCHING AND TIME MANAGEMENT
It is beneficial to take 5 minutes at the end of the session to stretch, especially if the instrument’s workout has been intense, uninterrupted … and in any case, it is better for muscle recovery. This will therefore make a session of (for example) 1h + 5 minutes.
Or consider that these 5 minutes are part of the working hour and in this case each subject will last 14 minutes instead of 15. We can also consider that the installation at the beginning of the session and the storage at the end of the session are to take into account into the working time and therefore reduce the duration of each subject accordingly.
Count coffee too? If that brings a little “cool time” to a busy day, why not. It happened to me too often to want to pack thousands of different things in an hour, and to come out disappointed because, of course, I had only had time to do 2 or 3. The feeling of achievement is important, so setting a lower goal will ultimately lead to better progress.
Examples
One hour session
05m coffee
03m install
15m material 1
15m material 2
15m material 3
05m stretch
02m uninstall
Two hour session
05m coffee
03m install
15m material 1
30m material 2
30m material 3
30m material 4
05m stretch
02m uninstall
CONCLUSION
All of this is just a series of ideas to fuel your personal practice, absolutely not an “ultimate guide” to follow exactly. Being rigorous and methodical or breaking the rules and being creative…. There are many approaches! There are certainly many areas for improvement so I look forward to your comments on how you are doing it your way.
