What’s our most precious resource and something you can only spend once?
If you didn’t guess already, the answer is time. It’s rather ironic, that given its fleeting nature, we still tend to spend our time quite casually…
A lack-of-time, however, is the #1 reason people give for abandoning their dreams of learning or mastering an instrument. And yet time is the one thing guaranteed it will take to get there!
In reality though, life is filled with plenty of high-priority things — so in our quest for finding that perfect balance, we say that even 5 minutes of music every now and again is better than never at all.
So in the spirit of prime numbers, here’s 7 things the time impaired can do in Melodics that’ll fit in and around just about any other life commitments, ready any time you find yourself with a spare moment or three.
1. Do a quick session with one of our Daily Warmups or workout exercises.
The point of these isn’t about learning anything specific, or playing the notes right as you’re not playing a whole lesson or course. The main thing here is that you’re using your brain differently than you do at other points of your daily life.
You’re limbering up, building your muscle memory and dexterity. You’re just passively getting used to being confident on your instrument, and importantly: you can stop doing a warmup just as easily as it is to start one: whenever you feel like it.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but playing a lesson a few grades too hard for you means that your expectations really aren’t going to have you beating yourself up about the inevitable score! Even for seemingly impossibly fast songs, you can slow the track down using Practice Mode to a point where it’s playable.
So what’s the point of this then?
It’s amazing how much simply getting the lay of the land helps set a benchmark for future attempts and how you improve with time. You don’t even have to complete a lesson to benefit from this.
Use the filter settings to search by lesson grade, and pick something a couple of grades higher than where you’d comfortably sit. Give it a quick crack!
3. Jam over a track on a lesson you’ve nearly or recently completed.
Look for the unlocked Playground Mode icon on any lesson’s completion screen.
Heaps of musicians record themselves jamming, or free-playing over their compositions to get creative, listen back and evaluate their playing, or to find some sweet-sounding gems they might save for a rainy day.
So mix it up! Don’t feel that using Melodics is all about practise, learning or getting feedback on your ability. It’s really important to just be playing music for the sheer joy of it — and prove to yourself and no-one else that you’ve got a couple of tricks in the bag.
Playground Mode is the perfect way to remove all script, structure and rules and just play whatever you feel like. And the cool thing is you can record and listen back to your last attempt.
You unlock this mode on any lesson you’ve already passed (i.e. getting 1-star or more on it), so check it out!
It’s easy to get caught up in doing something new — but what about those lessons you probably did ages ago and passed? We’re not A+ passed — we mean the stuff you might’ve just scraped by on… But we bet you’d totally smash them out of the park if you tried them again now.
Go on, let’s put a bow on some of those 1- or 2-star lessons with a 3-star performance (or… more?), and show us all that progress you’ve made!
Use the search filter to browse by 1- or 2- stars to find a good lesson.
Remember when you’d spend hours agonising over creating that perfect compilation? Choosing songs to fit on 23-minutes a side, whilst perfectly capturing every nuance of your personality, every agonizing detail of your teenage complexity?
Yeah, na, me neither. These days it’s done in a heartbeat on Spotify anyway. And you can do this in Melodics too: just think of the favourites button as a hot-key for your personal Top 25 (PRO TIP: it doesn’t have to be at your normal workstation, you could even download the Melodics iPad app and make a playlist from anywhere you feel like!)
So one of the best ways you can make your practices faster and more productive is removing the obstacles and being prepared!
Do yourself a favour, and pick some favourites now for practising another time!
Lessons and courses are all divided up into component steps.
Not only is it not required for you to complete the lot in one sitting, rather, it’s often better to just stop after the first step, and come back to continue or redo the rest at a later date. Think of it less like a marathon, and more of an enjoyable hike — you’ll still end up going the same distance either way. And hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day…
That’s right, we’re telling you not to finish a lesson — just do the first step.
Spreading lessons out over time helps build habits better — it reinforces repeated behaviour with multi-session structure, rather than 1-offs, doesn’t overload your brain or drain you of energy, and above all bite-sized pieces makes the prospect of success easier to achieve and less labourious.
Hands up if when you think about practising, you tend to focus on the effort of setting up instead: clearing off your desk, opening up the app, plugging your instrument in and turning it on, thinking about what genre you want to play, scrolling through and previewing endless lessons? It’s a motivation killer! Remember what we said about 5 minutes every now and then is better than never at all? Let’s make sure then that it’s time well spent: fun, simple and effective.
So here’s something different: you can still play in Melodics without even plugging an instrument in! Regardless of whether you play keys, pads or drums, or what your favourite genre is: rhythm, timing, and dexterity are universal traits foundational to musical confidence (so it’s not just ‘ok’ to try play a different instrument or genre when you’re practising — it’s great for you!)
1) Open up the Melodics app;
2) Choose any simple and easy lesson (tip: browse by low grade), and;
3) Use your laptop’s keyboard or the onscreen UI if you’re on iPad.
Here’s some handpicked lessons you can do on a computer keyboard or iPad UI:
Playing any of the instrument-parts from one of your own musical compositions;
Recording tracks in a realistic, less robotic fashion than you would from “drawing” the notes in a DAW’s piano roll;
Be a confident player in performances or live shows;
Be able to sit down at a keyboard, pads or drum kit and play a beat or progression like you hear in your head;
Learn a new instrument, and play it good simply for the sheer joy of it!
Do any of these resonate with you personally?
Learning anything, especially an instrument, requires plenty of dedication. Not everyone is prepared for this, and can at times find themselves overwhelmed. If this sounds like you, we’re here to say: don’t give up! This article is here to show a path that can help you progress towards any goals you have. How? By rewiring your habits.
Habits present a way to demystify how some people are seemingly on an effortless trajectory for success. Though there is always a degree of effort required (regardless of how apparent it may seem), luck certainly doesn’t factor much, if at all.
There is a lot of info in this article, but if you take the time to think on what you’ll learn in these 5 steps from time to time, you’ll be able to translate any aspirations you might have into habits: the actionable, bite-sized steps you can use to achieve success.
Think of your own personal goals as you read this too. It’d be interesting to note if how you define them changes!
Having a broad aspiration is great! After all, you can’t improve without challenge. But it’s at each step within the process of reaching that ultimate outcome where you should define multiple successes.
Why? Aspirations as goals are inherently lofty — they’re not dreams, because there is a real chance of you achieving them. But depending on how complex or ambitious your goals are, it can be difficult to see a potential path towards actually achieving them — so instead, the route you do end up taking is often met with frustration, feeling overwhelmed, or simply not making the progress you want. Treating aspirations as dreams is not a path to success.
Define success by your habits, not by your goals.
Defining your concept of “success” solely by an end goal isn’t necessarily an effective way to make good progress. It may even set you up for avoidable disappointment. To summarise Tony Robbins (love him or hate him), “that’s trying to eat the whale whole, without taking smaller bites”.
Instead, consider your system of habits: the required process as a whole of how to actually get to your end goal.
As an example, your end goal might be focusing on buying your dream instrument — so one chunk of that system of habits might be setting aside some of every pay cheque to start saving. A second habit in the system might be ensuring you don’t spend those savings elsewhere in the meantime!
“You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems”
— James Clear
STEP 2: How are Habits Formed?
This step is aimed at deepening your background understanding of habits and what makes them a recurring system: how they work, form or are broken. Let’s drill down.
“You are what you repeatedly do”
— James Clear
As animals we’re sort of wired in a constant pursuit of feeling rewarded. This behaviour not only satisfies us and satiates cravings; it evaluates which actions best satiate these cravings, so we can learn and repeat them. This is a 4-step perpetual cycle of learning we call the Habit Loop.
The 4-Step Habit Loop:
The cue
Which emotion, bit of information or sense triggers you to go on to engage in a behaviour which will resolve the cue and make you feel rewarded?
This could be something primal such as thirst, hunger, cleanliness; or more psychologically complex like dissatisfaction or boredom
The craving
Cravings are the motivational impetus behind habits. They impart a desire to change whatever has triggered you: How do you wish to feel or be rewarded?
A classic example is looking at the motivation behind cleaning your teeth: you’re likely motivated by craving fresh breath and oral hygiene; not the act of cleaning your teeth itself!
The response
The response is your action — your habit itself per se. How do you respond to a craving?
During this stage you might consider several different potential actions, evaluate the pros & cons; the friction involved in doing each option, and your ability to ultimately execute them. What is your motivation to respond?
An example might be when you’re cued by boredom, your craving is entertainment, and your chosen response is to browse social media.
The reward
Reward is satiating your prior feeling of craving, but also your subconscious moment of reflection. Every time you’re rewarded, your brain reviews and evaluates how effective your response was at addressing your craving and feeds back into the habit loop for next time.
Continuing on from the previous example, the entertainment of checking social media can start to become associated with a means to resolve boredom, depending on how effective the reward was — but do you start to become bored with it as a means of entertainment after a while?
How are habits broken?
Habits break just as they are formed! Successfully-formed habits have an obvious cue, an attractive craving, an easy-to-do response, and a sufficiently fulfilling reward.
Your brain is constantly weighing up the benefit at each stage: evaluating friction and motivation, urgency or ability to respond against the ultimate reward.
If a habit loop can only occur if all 4-stages of the criteria are successful, then breaking the cycle and preventing habits could be done in theory as simply as removing or reducing one or more stages:
Remove the cue if possible (the habit will never be triggered);
Minimise the craving or make it unattractive (you’ll be less inclined to respond);
Make the response itself problematic or arduous (there’s too much friction or you won’t be able to do it);
Make the end reward dissatisfying (engaging in the habit wasn’t worth the effort).
Creatures of habit
This episode of Hidden Brain is a fun little podcast that might give you some good tips on behaviour! Here, guest psychologist Wendy Wood shares some of her research into habits; how to build good ones (and break the bad ones.) As an anecdote, she would actually sleep in her running clothes to reduce the friction of going for a run. Go figure…
“So there was a study that is quite amazing, I think – but it has been replicated a couple of times – on how far people travel to the gym. If people travel about 3 1/2 miles, then they are likely to go to the gym five times a month on average. If people travel 5 miles, then they’re likely to go only once a month on average…
The 5 miles presents friction. The 3.5 miles is much less friction and makes the behaviour more likely.”
— Wendy Wood
STEP 3: Tips for Hacking the Habit Loop.
So now you know about the habit loop, why you have certain habits, and how they’re broken — you might be considering your current goals, and how you could begin to harness knowledge of habits to create a different version of yourself.
Whilst the urge to enact sweeping, profound life-changes is natural, often it’s far more effective to alter existing habits incrementally, than it is remove or form completely new ones. Use the 4-stage loop of your current habits to your advantage!
“Small adjustments make a massive difference to your life”
— James Clear
If you use habits to make tiny 1% improvements to one small thing on a daily or recurring basis — over the course of weeks, months and years, you end up being multiple times better than where you started. No matter how small, every 1% change is a success, and something to acknowledge or celebrate.
Habits also present a small chunk of changeable behaviour — but beware the temptation to “over chunk” and become overwhelmed by the minutiae of steps involved in enacting change.
Here’s some easy tips on slightly altering an existing habit’s cue, craving, response or reward, to make change and progress easy and achievable. You don’t have to do all of them, you can start as small as just picking one:
TIP #1: Make the cue obvious
“Habit Stack” by attaching a new habit to an existing habit or routine you already have. Find yourself an obvious cue.
e.g. Your daily after-dinner dishes: stack a small 10 minute practice session as part of your post-dinner cue or routine.
TIP #2: Make the craving attractive
“Temptation bundling” associate the action of a new habit to a craving of a reward you know you love, so to prevent it feeling like punishment.
e.g. You might love a daily wind-down beverage. You can bundle the temptation of a relaxing drink with completing your 10 minute practice session goal.
TIP #3: Make the response easy
Remove as much friction as possible, to make your new habit as easy as possible to do.
e.g. leave your practice gear out and ready to go, so you don’t have to spend time setting up right before hand.
Pre-plan your practices before so you hit the ground running when you start.
Don’t set your goals too high (remember the “1% change” or “2 minute” rule)
If you do better than your target, that’s awesome, but the main path to success is getting the obstacle low enough for you to easily climb over and change without struggling with motivation.
e.g. “Instead of practising for an hour, I’ll just practice for 5 minutes.”
TIP #4: Make the reward satisfying
You’ve already bundled your temptations, so you best make sure you reward yourself!
Another effective technique is to tie your reward back to your cue. Use reinforcements that also help remind you to act, motivate to continue, and provide immediate satisfaction for keeping up your new habit.
A common tool is maintaining a habit trackeror checklist, a blog, post or video diary, or using your Melodics Daily Streaks as a reminder. e.g. When you visually see your accomplishments, you’ll be motivated to continue acting in the same manner.
TIP #5: What to do when you fall off!
“Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.”
— James Clear
No-one is too big to recover. Musician and Melodics user Gretchen King perhaps describes it best from her own experience in falling off the wagon after having practiced for 300 consecutive days:
“One night at midnight, I realised that I had forgotten to practice that day. I was so bummed that I didn’t practice for a month! Then I realised that while a streak is amazing, it’s more about putting in the work and enjoying the process. I quickly got back on track again.”
— Gretchen King, musician
Habits aren’t all-or-nothing: habits certainly change, evolve or lapse with time, so don’t stress it too much if you can’t keep it up consistently. You can absolutely recover if and when a routine breaks down; if you can’t get back on the horse and continue from where you left off, re-evaluate your purpose and set new 1% goals to get back to where you want to be.
STEP 4: Start tracking your habits!
Ready to transform your own musical habits? Here’s a handy exercise to go through of everything covered in this article:
What’s your “big” goal?
What smaller successes build up to the big picture?
What frequent habits do you need to reach each success?
For each habit, what is your obvious cue, attractive craving, simple response and satisfying reward?
If you’re dedicated to updating your habits and working towards meaningful, personal success, consider what your responses to this exercise would be, and use your answers to set yourself daily or weekly goals in an obvious way.
STEP 5: Doing something with your Habits.
By changing your habits to be what you actively want them to be, you’ll find your own identity starting to evolve as well.
It’s a subtle distinction that might even sound obvious. But realising that clear personal identity helps you identify as part of a select community or a tribe; where you have the mandate to do all that other stuff you’d be expected to do. Stuff which also helps you on your way to reaching your goals. Is your goal to run a marathon? Great! You’re part of a tribe of “runners.” Is your goal to “be able to play the keyboard part all yourself from one of your own musical compositions?” Then your identity could be “I’m a keyboardist.”
Why join the tribe?
Nothing fosters motivation like belonging to the tribe does. Having fun together helps, but social reinforcement and obligations doubly so! If your personal goal is transformed into one shared by a group, your identity becomes linked to those around you, and you all work together to support and sustain each other’s identity. Development and progress is no longer your individual pursuit. Now it’s: We are musicians. We are a band.
“Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy an old fucking drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they’ll suck, too. And then they’ll fucking start playing and they’ll have the best time they’ve ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they’ll become Nirvana. Because that’s exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some shitty old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-ass shit, and they became the biggest band in the world.”
— Dave Grohl, putting it sincerely.
There’s a tribe waiting for you:
You like playing music live? Join a local band, association or attend open mic nights or just support the community and watch their live shows.
Melodics derives a lot of inspiration from the teachings of James Clear, both in how we’ve developed our music education app and the design of our curriculum, but also in how we conduct our every day lives as musicians — and hence the advice written in this article (it’s littered with his quotes!). We’d say that if you’re serious, his book ‘Atomic Habits’ is a must-read; and his blog provides some fabulous insights into the science of habit, motivation and productivity, decision-making and creativity.
It’s been a busy and productive 12-or-so months for Melodics. In addition to some major milestone product feature launches, we’ve also really expanded our curriculum at all skill levels: producing and releasing over 200 new lessons (there’s over 1300 total in the full version of the app now), expanded to include 8 more genres (52 total and counting, from ‘Afro Cuban’ to ‘Vapourwave’), and have significantly bulked up our Guided Paths for aspiring musicians in each of our 3 instrument types.
Beyond producing and releasing more musical content, the last year’s product developments were grounded on the following points:
It’s important for growing musicians to feel their burgeoning sense of musical ability as they progress.
They will also need the tools to define, measure and track their musical progress throughout their journey on their own, and in a way that makes sense to them and others.
Remove barriers to reaching a state of euphoric musical “flow”, make sure students are getting good feedback, rewarded, feel motivated when they succeed, and give them the tools they need to build up to perfection with greater autonomy.
Getting the full experience — whenever, wherever inspiration strikes. (Re)Introducing Melodics for iPad.
Our first major release of the year: In April 2021, Melodics went Mobile (again)!
We know how useful a spontaneous, ergonomic, portable (yet powerful) device like the iPad is for musicians wanting to play or practice with as little hassle as possible. Going mobile is a great way of breaking down barriers that might otherwise prevent you from getting into and enjoying making music ASAP.
We actually have had an early-access iPad app since early 2020. And yet, we were prevented from updating it with all the new features available in the Desktop versions of Melodics since May 2020(!) — that is, until we could incorporate In-App Purchases (IAP).
We want Melodics users to have the same experience anywhere: from their desktop, laptop to iPad — so IAP was developed to appease the powers-that-be and get our iPad up and running once again.
We’re proud to say, that day has come: all Melodics customers can use their existing credentials and subscription to get the full Melodics experience on their iPad for a smoother music workflow and to play music whenever the mood strikes.
This is no real wonder — zooming in with focus, chunking, and starting slow before building up are highly effective Deliberate Practice techniques musicians have used to master difficult passages, error free, for 300,000 years long before 1993 (when the term was coined).
Upgrading Practice Mode was broken up into 3 projects:
“Slow it Down” (time stretching ability whilst maintaining the pitch of the original track);
“Zoom in with Focus” (snapped loops, and ensuring a minimum 1-bar duration);
“Review and Repeat” (presenting users with ‘listen back’, ‘practice’ or ‘perform again’ options; encouraging active listening and critique of performances, and with only 1-click, users can return back to redo sections without having to find or reset loops).
Over 25% of our users now use Practice Mode multiple-times every single session — and it’s in this group of methodically-minded musicians where we see the greatest rate of skill improvement and musical progress.
Feel and measure your musical progress. Introducing Step- and Course-end Commentaries.
We thought it might be nice if we better expressed key “learning outcomes” for all our musical content. So we did: course end-screen summaries are now updated with an explanation of what it is exactly you’ve learned.
We also tweaked our step-end commentaries based on the previous performance. Whether it was just “Nice improvement”, “You’re getting ahead of the beat. Take it easy” musicians using Melodics receive more dynamic messaging and feedback tailored to how they’re performing, as they’re learning; and what they could do to improve for the next try.
Learning-by-doing is grand and all… but it’s nice to have a commentary on what-on-earth I’ve just done…
Don’t just play it til you get it right. Play it til you can’t get it wrong. Introducing Memory Mode.
Not being able to feel one’s progress is a major systemic reason why people have tended to quit learning their instrument within their first year of trying in traditional education models.
Launched in 2020, Memory Mode is at its core a feature designed to help musicians truly feel a sense of their own progress: could you play it blindfolded?
Memory Mode can only be unlocked if a user first gets three platinum stars — a flawless delivery in the final step of a lesson (which in itself is a great way to feel progress). When playing through the lesson once again but with the feature enabled, the screen progressively dims to darkness until it remains blacked-out completely (so long as you keep playing the notes perfectly without error).
“I think there is a narrative that Memory Mode pushes you towards your learning edge, encouraging you to internalise the lesson rather than rely on reactions.
Like a rehearsal, you might have the chord chart in front of you, but the need to check it becomes less and less as you start to truly learn the song. As a musician, you might instead begin to start thinking more about what’s coming up much further ahead in a song, or about how you’re playing. I think Memory Mode helps to emulate this scenario.”
– Benjamin Locke (Head of Music @ Melodics)
Perfecting a lesson in Memory Mode earns the user three black-out stars, and currently sits as the highest achievement — a “holy grail” of musical ability — in the Melodics award tiers. Most importantly, this feature challenges musicians to progress outside the comfort of the normal live-feedback, visual mechanics of Melodics, and instead showcase their true independent mastery in playing a song by ear. It’s no easy feat, but all the more worth it for when you do get there.
Give your practice purpose: track and measure your progress. Introducing Record collections.
All too often, we learn to place an inflated importance on musical theory; using words, definitions, logic and reasoning as some missing “key” to “unlocking” music. In the process perhaps we forget that for like 95% of human history, making music is, at its core, a kinaesthetic endeavour; a combination of physical and aural skill, memory and sensations. Theory as a science is the relatively new kid in town..
It does have an important place in music, but it shouldn’t be a barrier to you becoming a confident musician in your own right. If it did, we wouldn’t have The Beatles, M.I.A or J Dilla (to name a few) around to enjoy.
So anyway, in December 2020 Melodics unveiled its latest major release: Record collections. Records document a new bit of musical information you’ve learned by passing a particular lesson (e.g. technique, theory, method etc) — and summarises the concept through video and an explanation in the app.
On one hand, these reinforce our chicken-egg approach that theory (probably) stems from music, not visa-versa; but also acts to supplement Melodics’ unabashedly self-guided, learning-by-doing approach to learning music or an instrument.
Your collection showcases that you are, indeed, learning real-life, important musical things as you work your way through Melodics; it helps you track and measure your progress in accepted musical terminology, whilst also alleviating any feeling of intimidation or perceived elitism which can sometimes prevent one from learning musical theory. When collecting Records, you still have an active relationship with music, but now you can better define what it is you’ve learned, as you learn.
As an aside, a byproduct from Records’ development is that users can watch embedded Melodics produced videocontent basically anywherein the app itself — a cool platform to mull over future possibilities. Stay posted!
We at Melodics are continuing our efforts towards helping musicians consciously and easily reaching a state of “flow”, and helping them get more out of each practice session. Whether this is building on Records’ videos more; releasing more content and helping Melodics users find the right lesson at the right time; or doubling down on improving the plug & play platform we’ve built — you’ll just have to wait…
Melodics also would like to increase its commitment outside of strictly “the App” — that is to help support inclusion and equity in our diverse community, our industry (both music & technology), and our workplace both locally in Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad. More on that, as well, coming real soon.
But with this year in hindsight, we’re humbled by our incredible privilege to be where we are. We do hope Melodics users aren’t just having more fun playing music they really enjoy, but have a higher sense of achievement, feel increasingly empowered to take control of their own skill development, musical progress, and goals, and to go out and contribute positively to the world. What we’ve all done to date really is just the tip of the iceberg!
Get free access to 60 free lessons for 5 performance minutes a day to start building your rhythm, timing, and muscle memory immediately.
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