Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Build a repertoire, practice it and build on it.

Learning is building a set of skills, and continuously adding to it.

A musician's goal is to be entertaining. He does this by playing songs. Whole songs. You have to start by learning one song. When you have that one down, learn another. Slowly you will build a repertoire. You will build a set. You will build what the old school big bands used to call a book. You'll have enough to be entertaining for an evening.

That is your goal. Everyone knows lots of people that can play first 25 seconds of the intro to stairway to heaven, or the opening riff to smoke on the water. That is not skill. You need more than that. That is a start. Many never get past that point.

Learning is the same. Build a worthy skill, then add to it. You will eventually have an orchestra of skills you can use.

A band must often revisit, and practice the old songs. They use the skill they learned from the old songs to conquer the new ones. This is a great example of spiral learning. Humans can't be expected to retain new knowledge if it's not reviewed.

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