5 Projects To Improve Your Musicianship

So the first thing is that you should take a full-length piece, preferably one that's written for just one staff, and transcribe the entire piece on manuscript paper by hand into other clefs that are less familiar, or maybe not even familiar at all.

Now, transpose at the octave as needed, especially if you're going to or from treble and bass clef.

Transcribing literally what you have on one clef to the other is probably going to result in ledger lines, and you don't need to do that.

You can go down an octave for bass clef or up an octave for treble clef.

But let me go over some of these points.

I want to make sure that it's clear.

So why by hand? Because we know that there's something very powerful with learning something when you do it by hand, as opposed to just entering it into a computer, entering into a notation program.

And of course, a lot of what I'm having you do is something that a notation program will do for you instantly.

Now, if your thought thus far is, well, if that will do that for me, if I could write something out in treble clef and have it instantly be transcribed or transposed to alto clef, why do I even need to bother learning alto clef? Well, I'm going to say, honestly, I'm surprised you're here if that is your attitude towards learning a skill.

But I'm willing to try to convince you.

If you want to be a well-rounded musician, you need to learn how to do all the things without being aided by technology.

That's not to say that you should refuse the help that technology offers, especially if you're a professional on a deadline.

But you'll never learn anything like that.

I'm coming up on being a music director for a certain church for two years.

If you were to ask me right now, what is the phone number for that church? I could not tell you.

Now, I can still tell you the number of my previous church.

I can tell you the phone number of the studio where I teach.

I can tell you previous phone numbers.

So what is the big difference? Well, the difference is, with the exception of the current church that I'm at, I had to actually manually type those numbers on several occasions.

And when someone wanted to know what the number was, I had to actually tell them what it was.

So I also wrote these down in an address book where I keep information.

And that writing down, that using manually, they helped me remember.

For the church where I'm currently employed, the first time I had to call them, I went to Google Maps, tapped on the business listing, tapped on their phone number, said yes when it asked, do I want to call now? And then after I was done, I went to the call record, hit the little information button, and saved it as a contact in my phone.

And when I want to call, I just see the name of the church.

I don't even see the number.