Re: Excuse Me Sir It Appears That Someone Is Endeavour Girls Camaron Tunes
Sibyl Piccuillo
A quick note: I must apologise for my seemingly lackadaisical spelling of practice/practise. As an English person living in America, the auto-correct function on my computer is only ever one vowel away from a full-blown identity crisis, and there are times when I just can't face the red wiggly line of judgement. I know that's a lily-livered excuse if you ever heard one, but it's the best I can do.
Now, as we're about to get stuck into the serious (v serious) business of practice systems, you might be thinking that a musician's practice methods are too niche for your taste, or too many degrees of Kevin Bacon away from your work-related needs. But no! The same ideas work just as well for attacking any and all day-to-day tasks that seem a little daunting, or tedious. Or worst of all: daunting and tedious - the dreaded double-whammy that's Kryptonite to any to-do list.
You might have to get a touch more creative, but I promise - any systems for learning/practicing music can also be helpful for breaking big jobs into small, ultra-achievable mini-jobs; for measuring, observing and celebrating success; and for for dishing out an hour in 6-10 minute spoonfuls.
I thought I'd start with my favourite system: The Ten Coin Method.
I probably won't use capital letters every time, because - well, who am I kidding? But it felt fun that first time, so I hope you'll indulge me. This is the practice method I turn to when I need to go from feeling like a worm to feeling like a champ, pronto.
I don't mean to brag (yes I do, I totally just said that to be coy) but I wanted to share with you one of the nicest messages I've ever received:
Excuse Me Sir It Appears That Someone Is Endeavour girls camaron tunes
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One of the reasons I love using this system is that I'm a big fan of making my practice programs as mindless as possible - within reason. (This applies only to technical work/note-learning, before you all go bananas and burn me at the stake for practice heresy.) If I'm not constantly having to make decisions about what to do next, how many times to do it & so on, I find that it alleviates a huge amount of mental pressure, and efficient ways of learning can become automatic and easy-breezy.
As much as I love creating systems to help me generate some semblance of discipline, the flip side is that I'll sometimes wonder whether I'm just an unusually ineffective human for needing them in the first place. In an idle moment I'll assume that everybody else is just cracking through task after task - nothing but vim and vigour. Especially vim, whatever the hell that is.
So, when my friend Jamie asked me if he could include the ten coin system on his website, I was just thrilled. Perhaps I'm not so vim-less after all!
Jamie is a fantastic jazz guitarist, and has dedicated a section of his website to tips and tricks for musicians, which I think is the loveliest, coolest idea. I should have probably learnt from his much more succinct version before I wrote this newsletter. But .... I didn't, so there we are.
At the moment I am waking up at hours that make me want to weep because I am doing a kids show and children apparently like to watch theatre at ungodly hours. In a dream world I would wake up at 10am.
I bet my cheerful fish don't look so bad now, do they?
Though I must admit, this photo does not capture the mole's exquisitely detailed, expressive eyebrows. Not by a long shot.
When you're on the road, where do you do your writing?
Cry on my bicycle. Go down to the river Lea. But more likely just become wildly irate and fire off lots of admin emails to make up for the fact that I feel out of control and as if I am achieving almost nothing.
Go to bed very early.
Early mornings are just doom. I feel like seeing the sunrise is the little sop you are given to make up for the fact that you are just feeling grey. But I do love getting out of the house quickly in the morning, a bit like recreating the experience of camping - going fast from waking to the outdoors.
I love knitting and sewing. It is absolutely what I secretly want to be doing a lot of the time.
Katya: she's not kidding around here. By way of evidence, I submit this blanket that Sophie knitted for her newborn nephew.
That's right, she just nonchalantly knitted a blanket with a quote from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Bear that in mind next time you find yourself ducking into Toys'R'Us, hurriedly scavenging for any old tat.
How do you make time for them? Where do they fit into your day/week?
"We believe that nothing is more nourishing than a good story told brilliantly. Our rich theatre of little means means that we can ascend to the brightest heaven of invention with nothing but a rusty hat box, a cracked slide projector and a transvestite accompanist."
The theme of this week's playlist is letters & correspondence. Partly just for fun, but also because it allows me to indulge my fantasy that this email newsletter is actually a handwritten missive. And I didn't smudge the ink even one time.
Then again, it's undeniably trickier to include a Spotify playlist in a handwritten letter. I mean, who has the time to be writing out all those URLs by hand?
Luckily, as this is a decidedly unglamorous email newsletter, you can listen to the playlist on Spotify here.
For those of you thinking \u2018When the #*$% is Katya going to write a newsletter about her favourite practice methods?!\u2019 \u2013 you can now relax.
Having admitted (both to myself and to you all) that I have the natural self-discipline of a sea cucumber, I was surprised and delighted when a number of people reached out to ask if I'd put some of the practice techniques and self-discipline tricks that I've been thinking and writing about over the years into my lil newsletter. I'm an amenable person, sure, but I'm also very susceptible to flattery, so I said yes straightaway.
Now, as we're about to get stuck into the serious (v serious) business of practice systems, you might be thinking that a musician's practice methods are too niche for your taste, or too many degrees of Kevin Bacon away from your work-related needs. But no! The same ideas work just as well for attacking any and all day-to-day tasks that seem a little daunting, or tedious. Or worst of all: daunting and tedious - the dreaded double-whammy that's Kryptonite to any to-do list.
You might have to get a touch more creative, but I promise - any systems for learning/practicing music can also be helpful for breaking big jobs into small, ultra-achievable mini-jobs; for measuring, observing and celebrating success; and for for dishing out an hour in 6-10 minute spoonfuls.
I thought I'd start with my favourite system: The Ten Coin Method.
I probably won't use capital letters every time, because - well, who am I kidding? But it felt fun that first time, so I hope you'll indulge me. This is the practice method I turn to when I need to go from feeling like a worm to feeling like a champ, pronto.
I don't mean to brag (yes I do, I totally just said that to be coy) but I wanted to share with you one of the nicest messages I've ever received:
So you see, through diligent use of my Ten Coin Method soon we can all be singing Mozart and Rachmaninov to our hearts' content!*
*Disclaimer: results may vary, depending on whether you were - like this gentleman - a phenomenal opera singer to begin with. Apologies for any wilful deception on my part.
Anyway, here it is! The Ten Coin Method!
[The crowd goes wild]
So, um, after all that hullabaloo, it turns out that the ten coin method is relatively self-explanatory. But that would be an embarrassingly short and boring newsletter (even by my standards) if I left it there, so I\u2019ll just power on and talk you through it.
Step one: put 10 coins on a chair (or, say, a table) in your practice/work area. In my case, that means a tall stool, within easy reaching distance from my harp. Easy reachability is crucial, and I\u2019ll come back to the experiments that led me to this conclusion.
Repeat until all 10 coins have done the victory slide. For the hardcore (i.e. me \u2026 sometimes) if the thing you\u2019re working on goes wrong, even as far along in the game as coin #7, #8 (or even #9!!!) slide em all back and start over. Frustrating though this can be, I find it helps me to be more careful, and to take things at the pace where I can really do my best. Sometimes, when I'm finding a supposedly straightforward thing fist-shakingly difficult, it makes a world of difference to go gingerly and break things down to a manageable size rather than trying to jump ahead and impress myself. (Genuinely, that\u2019s a thing, embarrassing though it may be.)
Far away, so that I have to do some kind of physical exercise in between each go, either something to amuse myself like a hop, or something beneficial, like a stretch, star jump or a tiny little jog = Less good. It tickled me at first, but it made everything that much more laborious. And in terms of motivation and effective time-management, labour intensity is NOT the name of the game. The name of the game is the Ten Coin Method \u2013 in case you have suffered a boredom induced stroke and lost track of what we\u2019re talking about. And apparently it's a Motivation and Effective Time-Management Game. (I mean, what other kind is there?)
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