Guilty pleasure: Quincy Jones – “The Dude.”

Awesome chorus, dumb verse.  Really.

The chorus needs to be liberated from the song.

Has it been sampled yet?  A la Kanye West or someone like that?  Please tell me if this already exists because I would love to hear it.

The bit to sample would be either 3:01 or anything after 4:48. The intro’s pretty great, too.

And check out Michael Jackson’s background vocals!

(click here if you can’t see this video)

3 weeks after I started this blog, I posted a short list of some other musicians (mostly just friends of mine) with blogs.

Now, 6 months later, here’s my follow-up to that post.

I decided to narrow it down to Canadian musicians, but I’m still interested in checking out musician blogs from anywhere in the world, so send me links!

So here it is, in no particular order…

• Mike Evin – Evin On Earth – Check out how he’s raising funds for his current recording project.  Smart.

• Stacey McLeod – Hooks & Ladders - I’ve known and played with Stacey for a while (we sometimes play with Ronley Teper together), but only recently discovered that she has the best blog ever.

• Aaron Dawson – Dirty Inputs – You might know him from his band Off The International Radar, but did you know that Aaron and I used to be part of a Secret Millionaire Brunch Club? We met every Sunday (there were about 5 of us) and played the most geeky financial/investing board game you’ve never heard of.  Those were the days.  And now we’re millionaires!

• Alex Hickey – alexsings – Her tagline sums it up: “A blog about singing, songwriting, creativity and community.” Man, I need a tagline for my blog.

• David Newland -davidnewland.com – I can’t even believe how much David gets done.  He runs the Corktown Ukulele Jam, writes  for The Canoe Dossier and Roots Music Canada, and that’s not even the half of it.

• Emma-Lee  – Adventures In Dreamland – I played lap steel on her newest album and have since discovered that she’s not only a singer-songwriter, but a photographer, too!

• Hobson’s Choice – as long as there are birds - Not sure if everyone in the band contributes to the blog, but I’ve read some posts from Michael Davidson, Felicity Williams, and Rebecca Hennessy.  Wait – that just leaves Harley Card.  Harley – do you write any of these posts?

• Shawn Clarke -Birds Too Tired To Fly - If you’re looking for good music to check out in Toronto, you should subscribe to his blog.

• David Myles – davidmyles.com - I kinda know David through Josh Van Tassel (see below).

• Josh Van Tassel – joshuavt.com - I wouldn’t be doing this if Josh didn’t do it first.

• Chris Butcher – chrisbutchermusic.com -  Trombonist, Composer, Educator.

• Shannon Butcher – Shannon Butcher Sings - Jazz vocalist.

• Kori Pop – koripop.com - Ted Buck sent me this link to Kori’s site.  She’s a songwriter from Hamilton, ON.

• Ray Cammaert – Pink Moth – My friend Ray.  I love his blog almost as much as his music.

• Matt McKechnie – The Thaw Before The Spring – Matt does a bit of everything.  He makes music, writes about music, and he also does The Matt Show.

• Valery Gore – Catching Tigers In Red Weather – Everything Val touches turns to art.

• Tim Posgate – Canadian “jazz life” blog - Since 2002!

• Ali Berkok – Integrity Of Being - Ali doesn’t have any idea how many times I’ve almost accidentally sent him very personal emails. (My girlfriend’s name is Ali.)

• Doug Friessen – Creative-ed – The music teacher you wish you had in high school.

• David Ryshpan – Settled In Shipping – I met David a few years ago when we played together with Ronley Teper.

• Chuck Elrichman – Chuck’s Wide Web - Chuck rules.

I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of great blogs here, so if you know of any more, let me know.

Every time January roles around I get the reading bug.  If I could, I’d read all day and never get any work done.  This is my reading season, and I feel an urgency to read as much as I can during the next few months because I know that this season will pass.  In the spring I tend to read a little less, by the summer -  hardly at all.

Being a huge geek, I like to think of this period of reading/studying as my time in The Fortress Of Solitude. You know what that is, right?  Remember in the first Superman movie, when Clark finds that glowing, green crystal in the barn and brings it with him to the Arctic?   He throws the crystal into the snow and the fortress builds itself.

Here’s what happens next…

(watch video)

Clark was 18 here, and he stayed in the fortress for 12 years (!)  learning everything he needed to know.

I consider three or four months a year of intense reading and study to be good enough for a human. So I consume two books/week – one physical book and one audiobook.

I want Marlon Brando to narrate my audiobooks

If you ever listen to audiobooks, you know that a crappy narrator can ruin the whole thing.  The other day, I was listening to a particularly boring narrator, when my brain conjured up Marlon Brando as Jor-El.  It got me through the boring delivery.

You know how you can program your GPS to speak as Arnold Schwarzenegger or Yoda?  I want someone to come up with that technology for audiobooks. Wouldn’t it be great if you could select your own narrator?  Marlon Brando would be in my top 3.

Speaking of awesome narrators…

Here are 3 of my favourite:

1. Sean Penn – Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One.  When one of the best actors on earth reads an audiobook, you know it’s going to be good.  He kinda sounds like Dylan, too.  I highly recommend this one.

2. Barack Obama – Dreams From My Father.  I don’t think I have to tell you that Obama is a fantastic speaker.  My favourite part of this book is when he swears his head off, recounting his teenage conversations with his best friend.  Awesome.

3. Carrie Fisher – Wishful Drinking.  Usually, but not always, audiobooks are best read by the author.  This is definitely the case with Fisher.  I can’t imagine anyone else delivering her words. The funniest audiobook I’ve ever listened to.  (David Sedaris would be my 2nd runner up.)

Currently listening to Eating The Dinosaur (Chuck Klosterman) and reading Drive (Daniel H. Pink)

p.s. my fortress is only figurative, but this guy’s is for real!

(photo by Ali Eisner)

Two weeks ago I wrote this piece about practicing, specifically about deliberate practice.  A couple of reader’s comments got me thinking more about the role of fun in practice.

“The only point I might disagree with is that practice should be “hard” in the sense of being unenjoyable. Lately I’ve been thinking about how when you really love something and get a lot of joy out of it, that is when your mind really fully turns on. I still think practicing should be “hard” in the sense of “challenging”, but I think it is important to enjoy that challenge.” (Matt Roberts)

“I think you’re absolutely right that practice has to be deliberate, or mindful, or whichever word best describes that optimal mix of intention, concentration and persistence. But all these big words do miss one important thing that I think Matt’s comment got at, which is that some portion of it should be just fun.” (James)

THEN…

Cal Newport of Study Hacks wrote a follow-up piece to his original post about deliberate practice (the blog post that inspired my blog post) introducing a simplified version of dp that he calls freestyle deliberate practice.  The gist of it…

1. Build an obsession with a clear goal.
2. Work backwards from the goal to plan your attack.
3. Expend hard focus toward this goal every day.
4. Ruthlessly evaluate and modify your approach to remove what doesn’t work and improve what does.

And so I took the opportunity to share with him this discussion about fun in practice.

I wrote:

“I really enjoyed reading your Grandmaster article. Last week, I wrote a blog post about it and it generated some interesting readers comments. A couple of readers commented that the one thing missing from these 6 traits is fun.

Where’s the fun?

I like that the freestyle approach addresses this issue. The “fun” is not the quick dose of instant gratification, but rather the deeper enjoyment that comes from mastering a craft.”

Cal replied:

“I appreciate the thoughtful post you wrote. I agree with your response to your readers comments. As far as I can tell, there’s not much “fun” in deliberate practice, but there is an ever-deepening sense of real satisfaction. You can get fun from other sources in your life, but that satisfaction of mastery is hard to find anywhere else.”

So maybe “where’s the fun in deliberate practice” isn’t the right question.

Maybe the right question to ask is this:

What activity/skill is so important to you that you’ll invest the time it takes to become exceptional at it, even when it’s (sometimes) not so fun?

And why do you want to do that?

I got my driver’s license today!

[Imagines wild applause]

And now I understand why driving analogies are often used in describing learning models.  Having just finished Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated, this model is fresh in my mind…

To learn any new skill, you have to practice.  What and how you practice will determine how good you get at that new skill.

Practicing within your Comfort Zone won’t get you very far.

Practicing in the Panic Zone, where you’re trying to do things far beyond your current capabilities, won’t do you any better.

The sweet spot for learning is in between those two zones. The Learning Zone is where you’re pushing yourself just beyond what you already know. And you have to build on what you already know.

I read somewhere that the best way to improve is to practice what you almost know. This morning, it occurred to me that this “almost knowing” thing fits in well with the learning model above…

• Comfort Zone – Practicing what you know.  It’s too easy and it doesn’t lead to much improvement.

• Panic Zone – Practicing what you don’t know.  Too hard and unfamiliar.  It won’t stick.

• Learning Zone - Practicing what you almost know.  The way to make things stick.  Starting from what you know, moving just an inch further.

The only way I could learn to drive was to build upon the skills I already possessed, by practicing within the Learning Zone.

When I look at my music practicing habits, I see that I’m rarely working in this zone.  I’ll often work on stuff that’s too easy, or too difficult.

Time to figure out what I almost know, musically, and get practicing!

“…practice is about pushing ourselves just beyond what we can currently do”

-Geoff Colvin