I started my practice journal today. Wrote myself a practice journal manifesto on the first page, outlining it for myself, what I needed it to be.
In so doing, I paraphrased a quote from a great book on songwriting by Jimmy Webb called Tunesmith. It came out longer ago than I'd care to remember... cough, cough, 1998. I bought it close to that time, read some of it, and understood even less, but I loved it, and I've always had it in the back of my mind that, as a grown up, I'd like to go back to it, read it cover to cover, and see if the theoretical aspects of it make more sense to me at, say, 32, than they did at 18. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. The point I wanted to make is this:
Early on in that book, Webb tells a story about a time when he was a staff songwriter in New York. They gave him a room with a piano that he could go to every day and write, and the man in charge informed him that, "in this room you can never make a mistake." That has stuck with me all these years, and when I have a room dedicated solely to music, I will put that sentence on a wall somewhere inside it. The point is this: I want/need this practice notebook to be someplace where I can be completely honest with myself and my progress. I'm not going to feel badly about struggling with things I feel I should have mastered years ago, I'm going to embrace where I am and keep a record of my progress. It will be an extension of what gets written in this space every day, and will be the other part of my reaching my long term musical goals.
It's also something I've been meaning to start for three years. Oftentimes the hardest steps are the first ones. My dad has a sign in his office. "Begin," it says, "the rest is easy."
In so doing, I paraphrased a quote from a great book on songwriting by Jimmy Webb called Tunesmith. It came out longer ago than I'd care to remember... cough, cough, 1998. I bought it close to that time, read some of it, and understood even less, but I loved it, and I've always had it in the back of my mind that, as a grown up, I'd like to go back to it, read it cover to cover, and see if the theoretical aspects of it make more sense to me at, say, 32, than they did at 18. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. The point I wanted to make is this:
Early on in that book, Webb tells a story about a time when he was a staff songwriter in New York. They gave him a room with a piano that he could go to every day and write, and the man in charge informed him that, "in this room you can never make a mistake." That has stuck with me all these years, and when I have a room dedicated solely to music, I will put that sentence on a wall somewhere inside it. The point is this: I want/need this practice notebook to be someplace where I can be completely honest with myself and my progress. I'm not going to feel badly about struggling with things I feel I should have mastered years ago, I'm going to embrace where I am and keep a record of my progress. It will be an extension of what gets written in this space every day, and will be the other part of my reaching my long term musical goals.
It's also something I've been meaning to start for three years. Oftentimes the hardest steps are the first ones. My dad has a sign in his office. "Begin," it says, "the rest is easy."
Comments
Post a Comment