The Volume 1 Placemat: A New Year’s attempt to improve my practice routine.

[Tom Wilkins]

Thanks, Richie for all the effort that you put into this great course!
I love this course and have been working on it very slowly for one year.

I am sharing this for anyone else who is re-thinking their practice plan at the start of the new year.
Hopefully there is a Windows Excel file attached to this post.

In my year-end musing, I realized that my slow pace had a few side effects:
I didn’t have a firm grasp of where I was at in the big picture.
I wasn’t quickly locating past concepts that I wanted to review.
It was hard to pick up again in the inevitable cases where I had to set things aside for a few days.
At times I tended to keep practicing the same assignment because it required less effort than moving on.
I wanted to mark off progress in smaller increments.

Thinking about this, I recalled a training session where the instructor had put together a “placemat”.
The placemat was a big picture drawing that you kept right in front of you to help keep track of where you were.

Over the past couple of days, I put together a placemat for myself for volume one.
It is basically a more detailed re-interpretation of both the Module Assignments, and the Assignment checklist.

Notes:

It is organized by the Videos.
Videos are organized into “tracks”, one column for each track: Lessons, Patterns, Rhythm Lab, Calisthenics, Etudes, and Rhythm Templates.
After each track name, in parenthesis, is the name or abbreviation for the book in which the material is found.
After each video is a colon followed by the page number to look at in book listed at the top of that column.

An important aspect for me is that there is a checkbox by every video.
I think that recording progress on small increments that are directly tied to each video will help me.

Attachments:

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[MR J C GURR]

Great idea Tom. Thanks for sharing. Julian

[mdhakr]

Wow, Tom, that’s lots of work.

I’m now 2 years and change into Volume 1 but I upgraded to Arpeggio Frameworks in the summer and am working on these together. My hangup was super locrian and it took me months to hear this sound and transmit it to my fingers and this is still going on. I think it takes as long as it takes. Every time I come back to some of the calisthenics, they are played better.

Life gets in the way. I play regularly with others with my old style, but slowly but surely, Richie’s course has changed my playing when I least expected it.
Phrases and licks happen especially when one is not thinking specifically and the reflexive aspect of playing comes to bear.

I may spend another year before I go into Volume 2 but this is the time it takes. Richie has said in the beginning that some players take years, not 15 months to finish a module. If this is the case, so be it, and enjoy the ride. This is a spectacular course but requires long term commitment to bring it to fruition.

Jack.

[Richie]

Thanks Tom for sharing this with everyone! It’s very well organized.
I have placed a checklist which has all the assignments in order with all the pages they are found in, within the 3 books. However, if this works better for some, so be it! 🙂

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