Checklists: pathways to musical progress

By Darrin Koltow

Do you know what specific tasks you need to complete to turn your musical potential into musical ability? This article shows you how to build a list of those tasks in a straightforward way. By doing this, you'll be able to visualize everything you need to do to build the skill you want. This also helps you replace time wasted from not knowing what to play next with an energetic feeling that lets you accomplish more in less time.

Checklists

Checklists give you the precise actions you will take to convert your musical potential to musical ability. They tell you the daily tasks, or "chunks," needed to complete an objective whose achievement may span many, many weeks or even longer. For example, if your objective is to improvise melodically, you might break that down into daily tasks involving playing continuous arpeggios or scales over simple chord changes.

You may not have to make a complete checklist that includes all the chunks, at least not in one sitting; doing so might become arduous, especially if the objective is far-reaching or broad. But the key is to begin creating this list, and to begin to see all of the countable pieces that you can measure your progress with and make milestones from. You'll use this checklist to work from each time you practice.

Let's present one way of chunking an example objective. We decide to apply our love for the music of Art Tatum into a precise, measurable objective. Specifically, we want to create written transcriptions of the chords and melodies for five hypothetical Art Tatum tunes, (which we'll say comprise 50 phrases) without choruses or solos.

A worthy project. How do we break it down into a checklist of tasks that we can work from every day? Let's answer that question with another question: what are some countable components of these five songs? Let's use the phrases, where each phrase is a four bar musical statement.

Here are two sample checklists that we could create from these countable phrases:

We may decide that Art Tatum's tunes are complex enough to break the chunks down even further, into individual beats:

And so on. Notice that the left column lists the chunks, while the right is where you enter the date - and the time, if you'd like - when you completed the chunk.

You can see how detailed it's possible to get with creating checklists. While creating such a checklist might seem tedious or even too simplistic to be of use, picture this: you've just spent over an hour working on another exercise such as scales. You feel frustrated, sensing that you haven't been progressing as you ought to. But before this feeling gets a chance to grow, you quickly pull out your checklist for the Big Ears objective you already completed, and you gaze in pride at all of the tasks that you conquered in achieving that objective.

The time you take to create a checklist of each task needed to complete your objective will be repaid a thousand and more times over by the satisfaction you'll receive from looking at the checklist when all its items are checked off and completed.

Milestones

Be careful after completing a checklist, if you do write each and every step you'll take to complete an objective: you may have a checklist so long that just looking at it will discourage you. You may think, "I need to do all that?"

To prevent such discouragement, we introduce Milestones.

If checklists show each step you'll take on the road to your objective, then milestones are specific, selected steps -- made of gold. In other words, milestones are specific items from the checklist that give the most motivation to you. They are a summary of your checklist. How you summarize the checklist will have a big impact on your motivation to achieve your objective.

Let's look at one way of summarizing our Art Tatum transcription checklist into milestones.

Notice that the difference between successive milestones varies at different points in the list: after achieving the first milestone, you don't have far to go to reach the next one. But when you hit the second to last milestone, you're still many phrases away from completing the entire objective. That's the essence of a milestone list: it gives you the sense that you're never far from completing your objective no matter what step you're on.

Here are some key points to consider in creating your milestone listing to give yourself maximum motivation:

• You shouldn't be able to see more than about 10 milestones in the list. If you have a milestone list that's a page long, and you've currently achieved a milestone that's way up at the top of the page, what do you think that's going to do to your motivation?
• Using similar logic, you shouldn't have less than four milestones in the list: if completing your objective takes several months, then completing each individual milestone could take weeks. This could be demotivating. You'd rather be checking off a milestone at least every two weeks, at least for the first few weeks of working on your objective. After that, you'll have enough momentum to put you past the point of no return.
• Creating you milestone list is an ongoing, trial and error process. It may take you several weeks to create your first set of milestones that gives you the motivation you need. But once you've reached that point, you'll be more intuitive in designing the milestones for subsequent objectives.

There's no question that making checklists and milestone lists is work. But you will enjoy doing it when you see the surge of motivation they give you in completing your musical objectives.