A Little Each Day

The past few weeks has been very rewarding for me musically as I’ve come to get into the habit of working on my piece just a little each day. I’ve been working between 20-30 minutes in the evening, usually listening or reviewing work and making small progress each time. At the end of each session I’ve been rendering to WAV/MP3 and listening during the following day while working or while out and about. I have to say that I haven’t been able to do this every day but more often than not, but doing just this bit of work and tapping into the creative musical work each time keeps it all very fresh and in the ear. Doing just this has made it easier to start working on the piece during each work session as the music is still on my mind. I’ve also gotten into the habit of writing much more descriptive log entries when committing my work to the Mercurial repository so that I can review where I left off from my last work session and very quickly get back to where I was (a habit of mine from end of day at work, writing down what I needed to do the next day so I could have it quick to recall the next day).

Finding a way to live where I could be working on music more is still on my mind, but this way of working and keeping notes has really been beneficial and I’m quite happy with how it is working out. There is certainly much more work to be done to strengthen my focus while working, but for now I am happy with the progress being made daily. My tai-chi teacher has a few times discussed the value of tapping into our tai-chi daily, sharing the wisdom of it being like adding a sheet of time to a stack and how each individual sheet is not much but over time stacks up to be quite a lot. (A story he was told by his teacher, and I believe by his teacher before him.) As true as it is for tai-chi, I am finding the truth of it now in my own musical and personal work.

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