Plan of Action
I’m a creative at heart, but my brain is an organisation freak. I’m also an Agile Delivery Manager by day. I look at the world and see a matrix of goals to break down into milestones and tasks. I see dependencies and risks to manage. Measurable objectives give me purpose. To-do lists appease my anxiety. Trello boards give me the courage to tackle tedious projects.
I couldn’t start learning this song without a plan.
Get ready for some (not so) serious delivery management and a myriad of diagrams, maps and Kanban boards…
Instead of immediately running up the hill like a crazy puppy, I took a moment to consider the size of my endeavour and from which angle to attack it.
Even though I‘m already very familiar with the song, I still started by listening to it on repeat half a dozen times to understand its structure. I ended up with the following break down into recognisable sections:
- The intro, or 23 bars of madness
- Verses: there are 2 of them, slightly different but based on similar patterns
- Chorus which comes around 3 times
- Something I’ll expertly call the wind-down: a section that ends the chorus and leads into the next verse
- A magnificent solo
- and an outro, the intro’s crazy little brother
The tempo in the sections varies and is ad-lib in the intro. My goal is of course to eventually match it throughout the song, but I figured that instead of working on a single section for a long time until it is at target speed, I’d rather get each of them to, say, a minimum of 30% speed, neatly put the whole song together at that tempo, and then speed it up, perhaps again section by section. It will enable me to play the whole song (slower) from start to finish earlier, give me more variety along the journey… Instead of repeating the same thing again and again and again forever until my fingers are lightning fast. More fun, lower risk of boredom or discouragement. And I suspect it’ll seal my learnings better too to practice at a lower tempo before speeding up.
So this is my roadmap for now (I warned you, here comes Trello):
I broke down the intro a bit further, bars 1 to 7, 8 to 11, and 12 to 16. More manageable to practice.
And then it was time to get to work!
COMING SOON — Check out my progress after my first week of practice
