Building a Music Practice Journal

Off the Wall
1

Hello all. I am a jazz piano player who practices for a few hours daily. I am trying to build my skills and repertoire. The existing music practice journals I have seen are too limited and specific. So I am hoping for some general advice on the design of a music practice journal.

The main tasks:

  1. track specific skills (a skills attribute) that I am working on, e.g. voicings, scales, etc.
  2. track specific tunes that I am, have, or want to work on (tunes). e.g. “Blue Monk.”
  3. track specific performances of those tunes on albums. e.g. Thelonius Monk, “Alone in San Francisco”
  4. link to those performances in either my Plex or Spotify.
  5. piano players and other musicians with links to wikipedia page and other useful info, including a fields to link with tunes and/or performances
  6. A transcription field for tunes I am transcribing
  7. a progress metric for skills and tunes and transcriptions Can be a numeric, e.g. 1-5
  8. a diary structure for daily practice to track progress on skills and tunes. So I could have a Monday entry, practiced Bbm Eb in thirds, Blue Monk,
  9. a field to track classes I am taking/have taken with ability to link skills to classes.

The goal would be to have all of this in one place (of course) but to be able to track progress on skills and tunes over time.

My TBX skills, low-intermediate, despite a user since the days of the Squirrel!! Have worked with @satikusala on skills during Zettlkasten discussions and since.

I realize there is undoubtedly some analogue to this example somewhere but I’m not finding it. Any help greatly appreciated.

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To help other help you, it might be useful to restate the overarching goal. The journal part is recording and reviewing activities/tasks done whilst the subject matter is music. That doesn’t de-value the latter but free you up to use general notions of tracking things be they in you subject or someone else’s. There is no ‘one right method’ for this but plenty of Tinderbox users monitor practice or performance and the moving parts of that process are likely easily drawn upon for your task.

With that in mind, items 1, 2, 3, 5, and 9 are all types of things you want to track. So, you need to think how many discrete things there are and how they differ. To track something, there needs to be something to track, so you need to think, for each of these, which information you will capture and why so that you can query (track!) it in a meaningful way.

Once you have a fell for the discrete things to track, it helps inform you as to where prototypes and user attributes will help. The are no magic queries so what you track needs to be trackable. So, think of the data to take in before digging too deep into the reporting. However, generally the choice isn’t fully correct first time so as you start to have enough data to ‘track’ actually present in your TBX file you can do some progressive formalisation to both the structure of the data and the way you report it. For instance, it may become apparent that a report you wish to have either lacks the target data or that it is stored in a manner that makes it difficult to report.

Item 2, 3, 4, 5 likely involve you getting familiar with links. You can link to the Web via URL-type links (which you can reveal in Displayed Attributes table) or even just use web links in note $Text: which is best needs to reflect your data, interest and style of work

Item 6. It is not clear what ‘transcription’ implies here. Note about transcription work can be in note $Text. However, if you mean actual mulical score, I’m not sure if that is practically possible.

Items 7 and 8 depend on the work put into the proceeding aspects: you can’t report what isn’t there.

The next Tinderbox meet-up is tomorrow (Sunday 23rd) so if free, you might want to swing by.

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How do you “track specific skills”? What is the metric? What is its range? This is a subjective personal assessment, ranked 1-5?

Likewise for “specific tunes.”

How does “track specific performances” differ from track specific tunes? Again, what is the metric and its range?

What would a “transcription field” document?

Could you describe the workflow you envision for such a document? Do you want the document to create a new day container every day? And a new generic practice entry within every day? Are there regular “off” days when you don’t practice?

What do existing practice journals offer, and how are they deficient? Are these apps, or database files, spreadsheets?

How do you envision the workflow?

Need a better idea of what the document should do.

Conceivably, you could record specific practice sessions, link to the recording from that journal entry, then listen to your sessions comparing performance over time. i.e. When you start a new piece of music, record that performance, do so for some number of sessions and then compare the first with the latest and perhaps identify areas that have improved and areas that require additional practice.

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Paging @WAKAMATSU, who might have some interesting perspectives!

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Mark, thanks so much for the helpful reply. That does summarize the set of problems well.

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Dave, the metric is just my own and it’s subjective. Just a way of tracking whether I have mastered a skill or not.

The tunes thing is, I hope self-evident. It is a song, a “jazz standard” one of maybe a thousand songs in the American songbook that get played regularly. Every jazz musician simply has “tunes” they play from this tradition.

So if a song or tune is “How High the Moon” there are dozens of performances by different musicians. Each of these has some additional data: from a specific album, by a specific musician.

Transcription is a musical term. It just means that you can replicate a solo from memory. It is just another internal skill metric for me, also say 1-5 where one is barely know it to 5 is mastery (again, my judgment).

The workflow is: I sit down at the start of the week. I decide I am working on one or at most two tunes for the week. I need to learn, say, 5 scales to play them and those are in the list of things to work on for the week. I may be transcribing a solo for one of them, do ditto, on the list. Then day by day, I want to track my progress.

On Monday I worked on How High the Moon, key of Bb, certain skill sets (scale patterns, voicings). IF I am doing a transcription, I want to see for that week and each of its days that is the version of How High the Moon by Barry Harris on his Breakin It Up album. I went through it X times and give myself a progress score.

Tuesday, same thing etc.

Over time, I want to query the TBX to see which tunes I am/have worked out, how far I’ve come, and since this work is cyclical, which ones I need to refresh.
Your last paragraph pretty well captures what I hope to do. I would like a kind of dashboard for the week and then one that captures progress over time.

Hope that makes sense.

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I think there are two parts of this project:

  1. the daily note, which might be as simple as a prototype set up with useful Displayed Attributes and some boilerplate text
  2. the dashboard, which displays summary information

I expect #1 will probably change over time, and #2 will be constantly evolving.

What might be fun to do here is to just mock up a nice example of what #1 might look like — either in Tinderbox or just pen and ink.

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Somewhat better. So by “track,” you mean to assign your metric to that aspect of your practice where its change over time indicates progress or lack thereof.

But what does “track” mean in the context of item 3? Do you mean you want to link to those performances, or something else?

So, in a week’s practice outline, or plan, you’d have some number of scales and a song or piece of music you’re trying to learn and memorize. I gather “transcription” is an assessment of your ability to play it from memory, while item 2 is an assessment of your performance in some dimension other than memory? The “physical” part of they keyboard work.

How does tracking scales differ from tracking tunes? Would the same attribute/metric serve to record the relevant degree of proficiency? Something like “Facility (1-5)”

It’s simple to create a TBX file to create daily journal containers. Perhaps within a weekly parent container? No further chronological structure or organization is necessary?

Each daily journal “entry” might consist of separate notes:

One for the piece of music you’re working on that week, with attributes to link to performances you’re trying to measure yourself against.

That note would be created manually, and then it could automatically create the child notes that track scales, facility and transcription. In the Piece container, you’d have to enter the number of scales so that the right number of scale tracking notes would be created, one for each scale, with only the tracking attribute.

And one for the practice sessions of the actual piece, with tracking attributes for transcription and your assessment of your facility with the piece.

It seems to me that item 5 might exist outside of the chronological “journal” structure, in separate container within the same document, which contains the other data about composers and musicians whose music you wish to learn, but may or may not be part of the current week’s practice.

So, something like:

Journal (parent)
—>Music of interest container
---->Music note prototype
---->Artist note prototype
–>Practice Log
—>Week Number
---->Specific piece (links to outside performances, number of scales)
----->Scales x/day
----->Piece 1/day

Not a great format, but something like that?

10

Dear Dr.Mark Bernstein,
Thank you for mentioning my name as a candidate to consult with.
Dear Mr.Lew Friedland,
In this forum, all participants are trying to find various ways to help the inquirer move in the right direction. I would be happy to help in any way I can.

First of all, I have a few questions.
About classical and jazz music terminology,
I think they have different meanings.

01 : transcription

Does “transcription” mean that the original music is changed in key?
I think that is the meaning of the term “transcription”.
Does it mean what you are using “transcription”?
You are trying to transpose it and practice in a Tune that fits your mood that day.

#02 : tune
Do you mean something else when you say “tune”?
#02-1: Is it a work of art called a piece of music?
#02-2 : Or is it “a state of harmony or congeniality among people, animals, or the environment”?
or “a state in which people, animals, or the environment are in harmony or harmony with one another”?

#03 : Blue Monk
#03-1 Why in B♭m, not B♭7
(I honestly don’t know what the correct chord is at the beginning of the original song.)

List of compositions by Thelonious Monk - Wikipedia

List of compositions by Thelonious Monk

Blue Monk : A blues in B♭ written in the studio and first recorded on September 22, 1954

The tune was the opening track on the 1959 album Thelonious Alone in San Francisco, his third solo album, recorded in 1959.

Don’t be too hard on yourself
Yours, WAKAMATSU

P.S
What I learned in Europe.(from Maitre Marcel MOYSE)
The original key of the piece chosen by the composer
should be treated with the utmost care.
Try to change the tonality to deeply understand the “connotation” of the original key,
To feel and master the difference in the atmosphere created.
Blend into the world of the original key.

11

I too confused myself on this. I believe “transposition” is the term for changing the key. “Transcription” refers here, if I follow Lew Friedland, to writing down a composition from a recorded performance.

12

Thank you, yes I think something like this structure would work. I’m striving for simplicity within the parameters I need to track. I think I’ll do what Mark mentioned and mock it up.

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Yes, Mark B they are two different things altogether. “Transcribe” is (mostly) a jazz term and confusing to outsiders since people think it means to write down a solo (which I guess it literally does). But in jazz one “transcribes” to one’s memory/hands before writing it down.

14

Wakamatsu San, thank you for your careful response.
As I replied to Mark B, transcription means memorizing a line or solo. Not transposition which is of course different. (usually jazz musicians transpose the lines that they transcribe, ideally to all keys).

In jazz “tune” is synonymous with the more formal song, or piece. It’s simply a name for a song. Bb minor was just a mistake. It is in Bb. And yes, in jazz too we take the original key very seriously, but since we often play with other musicians, or singers especially, we need to be able to transpose easily.

16

Lew, this has been an egaging thread.

Also, I’d recommend we look into using some javascript visulaize for you, e.g, vexflow can help you visualize music in TBX.

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