I have been working on my thoughts regarding both coding and musical practice using GitBook as a way to both get my ideas down and get them online.

Gitbook on musical practice: So far I have just outlined a number of aspects of musical practice as I have done in a number of different posts on this blog. The advantage here is that I have my thoughts in a central place rather than scattered across multiple blog posts. I’ve found it very helpful to blog about musical practice, but there is a lot of redundancy and a general lack of organization. The GitBook ought to help me to keep things organized and central.

GitBook on coding and web development: I’ve put a lot of effort into this GitBook so far, but it is still very general in nature. What I really need to do is to plug in some of my notes from the Udemy, Codecademy, FreeCodeCamp, and EdX courses I have done in order to flesh it out. So far, though, I have just outlined my understanding of the various aspects of web design and development and added a bunch of links to various articles and web pages.

These GitBooks should be very helpful, although they are not necessarily publicly discoverable - I have to pay for that feature. While these GitBooks may be helpful for organizing my thoughts, I probably should think of publishing separate web pages if I really want this information to be publicly discoverable.

I’m having trouble pumping out the words today. Yesterday I was easily able to write two posts of more than 500 words, but today I am struggling to keep myself focused. With this sentence I have only been able to break the 300 word mark.

Let me use the rest of this post to brainstorm a bit on the musical practice GitBook. Again, this may be redundant, but it does help me to think things through.

  • Guitar: I really need to focus on repertoire with the guitar, though I have also outlined two other aspects of guitar playing I need to pay attention to:
    • Harmonic knowledge: Here I want to work more with Van Eps’s Harmonic Mechanisms, but also I need to work on my comping and jazz voicings. I also definitely need to work on memorizing chord changes to tunes.
    • Melodic knowledge: Here I am referring to both jazz heads and transcriptions as well as scales, patterns, etc.
  • Composition: With composition, I really need to work on both compositional technique as well as creating a performance repertoire for gigs. In addition, I need to hone my electronic/MIDI skills in order to do better mockups of my tunes.
  • Musicianship: Ear training and piano. That’s about it. Oh, and score reading. While in the past I have listed reading as an aspect of musicianship, really it is better expressed as reading for the guitar, reading for the piano, and score reading. I don’t need to put a shitload of effort into reading for the piano because I want to use it primarily as a compositional tool, but I should be able to read at the piano with some degree of proficiency.