Personal Music Tips

June 20, 2025 at 07:45 PM EST

Fragments of personal notes on music

music

Heads up

Starting with juggling tips, I’ve decided to continue the tradition and post more personal tips/advice for the disciplines I like. I’ve started to enjoy the challenge of modifying personal notes to make them understandable for the public. During that process, I can navigate ways of finding better words to express certain ideas, correct sentences that read awkwardly, and all in all, revamp my writing style.

Mindset

What role does music play in your life? For my part, the idea of learning an instrument was always tucked somewhere in the folds of my brain. I never capitalized on it until I met good friends who were musicians ^1. . At that time, I already knew how to juggle and dance, and since I enjoy combining my skills, music fit perfectly with the other two. There’s no deep emotional charge that draws me to music, it doesn’t feel like an escape or anything of the sort. I do genuinely enjoy it, that’s the only reason that matters.

General tips

• Watch your posture and stretch the relevant parts of the body you’re using for your instrument.

• Practice your scales at different tempos with a metronome.

• Feel the music, reframe what the metronome is doing.

• Record your sessions for yourself. The invisible pressure oozing out your camera lens keeps you in check.

• Try starting the song you’re learning at any measure. You lose nothing by raising the stakes.

• Get better at sightreading. I recommend the app Notevision on iOS. It’s well designed.

• Be comfortable at slower tempos before turning to Speedy Gonzalez. Conversely, you can purposely go much faster than you play.

• Encourage yourself. Hey Joe, you know what? I’m actually practicing, I’m actually trying to get better.

• Make it fun. Playing simple chord progressions and freestyling lyrics is incredibly fun.

Ear training

When it comes to ear training, all I know is that recognizing the interval between the notes is a valuable skill. For example, if you heard a C followed by a G, you can recognize it as perfect 5th. Even more valuable is being able to anticipate what a note is going to sound like. If you hear a note, what would a (insert interval) above or below sound like? You can take it further: what would that chord sound like when played over this scale? I’m not at this stage yet.

Harmonica

Charlie McCoy and James Cotton are insane!

Harmonica tips

• Breathing exercises. Have a peek at Tomlin Leckie’s video.
• Use your hands without moving your head.
• Memorize licks you can use for improvisation.
• Know your scales for each position.
• Sing the lick you want to copy and play it on the harp. I really like this one.
• An unwanted habit I developed was looking at my harp too much.
• Try to break your usual patterns. If you’re playing a streak of blow notes, you don’t have to finish with a draw note.

Cleaning

Don’t forget to clean your harmonica from time to time. You can either run water through the holes (if it’s not made of wood) or take it apart for a thorough cleaning. It helps to brush your teeth before you play. That’s strange, there’s a piece of chicken on my reed.

Recommended Youtubers

I learned a lot from those amazing players. There’s many more, but I’ll keep the list short.

Jonah Fox

Tomlin Leckie

Leeds Harmonica

Jonah Fox mentions the idea of skill-based improvisation. The idea is to laser focus on a technique you want to practice and improvise with it. If you’re practicing bends, improvise over a backing track for a fixed duration, but try to incorporate more bends in your play. You can use this for all sorts of techniques like vibratos, slaps, lifts etc. I like to refer to it as technical musicality.

For improvisation and blues, you can check ou this document from Leeds Harmonica. I like his style of writing.

Guitar

I only truly felt comfortable with the fretboard and the dreaded CAGED system once I built one with python using tkinter. If you’re lost on where to start, a fantastic resource I used to support my guitar journey ^3. is Justin Guitar. In his videos, he introduces two concepts that are great for practicing chords: ‘1 minute changes’ and ‘anchor fingers’.

For the former, he suggests counting the maximum number of chord changes you can make in a minute without worrying about how it sounds. A variation of that exercise is perfect chord changes where you try to make it sound good. For the latter, an anchor finger is one that doesn’t change positions even when switching chords.

Guitar tips

• Play without strain — what’s the most comfortable position I can get into to play this?
• What’s the minimal amount of pressure you can apply to play the chord?
• Try to anticipate the movement of your fingers. What finger moves first when you’re changing chords? Can you change the order?
• Practice your transitions.
• Focusing on one aspect of your play will affect the others. If you’re trying to nail down a strumming pattern, you might forget to apply enough pressure with your fretting hand.
• Can you drop your hand and place it back where it was?

Strumming

• Memorize strumming patterns and apply techniques such as skipping or muting the strings.
• Relax the wrist
• Make it sound rhythmic, varying the intensity of the strums is a good way to go about it too (accents).
• Keep hand moving.
• Strum the chords of the songs you learn.

Piano

I never had any formal training in harmonica and guitar, but I really wanted to for piano. When I was living in Japan, I took 30-minute lessons every Thursday for less than a year. I had forgotten how great it was to have a teacher ^4. point out your mistakes and tell you what to focus on. I improved quite fast thanks to her and because of how much I loved the instrument.

Piano tips

• Look at your fingers, how do they feel?
• Make sure the notes you play don’t overlap with each other. This means properly lift your finger up when you’re done playing a note.
• Try playing a measure with your eyes closed.
• Practice the parts you’re least comfortable with. This is my personal bottleneck ^2.

MuseScore

MuseScore is a great tool for practice. You can write out your sheet to the program, loop the part you want to practice and adjust the speed.  

Practice Sessions

My ideal practice session (1 hour):

• Technical practice. That consists of playing scales with a metronome, ear training or anything I want to polish.
• Practice less complex songs than your skill level. ^5.
• Record the parts or whole of the main tune you’re practicing.
• Review.

Song Review

Here’s what some of my notes look like for a song on guitar I was learning. The song is Kakariko Village . They’re much messier, I’m showing you my good side.

• Don’t push the neck forwards with your left hand to see your notes, it just creates an awkward position for your neck.
• Don’t look too much at the fretboard.
• Your ring finger needs more speed
• Fadd9 to G7: Move the ring and middle finger before the index.
• Fingers have to feel relaxed, they are gentle with the strings. Strum them gently. The index position affects sound quality.
• From G7 to the second part of the song, you can already start the C shape at the last strum because you don’t need to press anything.
• Don’t bar and then place your fingers — aim to do it in one shot.
• The change from G7 to C buzzes.
• Metronome 40-50bpm, switch to appropriate chord mid-air.

The irony is that you internalize and forget about all the notes you’ve done. Humans. Anyways, keep recording and metronoming.

Footnotes

1. Everything I undertake undoubtedly begins with: “Huh, what if I did that?”.

2. Bottleneck in this context means the action that’s preventing us the most from becoming better. Not tackling our weakest links in a skill stagnates our progress. In what ways are you self-handicapping?

3. The word journey is pretty cringy.

4. If I was stinking rich, I’d get a private teacher for everything.

5. I was stuck trying to progress in one song I was learning for guitar. When I was practicing easier songs during my piano lessons, I realized I didn’t have enough basics in guitar. You can always review the basics. It’s ok to take detours and come back later to tackle the problems you had. This is relevant for any skill acquisition.

Share your wisdom