Originally posted at sandymaguire.me

I want to share a piece of ridiculously obvious advice today.

I've got a bad habit, which is being too smart for my own good. Which is to say, when I want to learn something new, too often I spend my time making tools to help me learn, rather than just learning the thing.

Take, for example, the first time I tried to learn how to play jazz music.

There's only one thing that I'm really good at, which is programming. The central tenet in programming is that "laziness is good," and if you're faced with doing something boring and repetitive, you should instead automate that thing away.

When all you have is a hammer...

According to The Book, the first thing to do to learn jazz is to learn your scales---in every mode for every key for several varieties of harmony. There are 12 notes, and seven modes, and at least four harmonies. That's what, like 336 different scales to learn?

"WHO HAS TIME FOR ALL THAT CRAP," I thought. "I'LL JUST WRITE A COMPUTER PROGRAM TO GENERATE THE SCALES FOR ME, AND THEN PLAY THOSE."

In retrospect, this was a terrible plan. Not only did it not get me closer to my goal of knowing how to play jazz music, I also didn't know enough about the domain to successfully model it. It's funny to read back through that blog post with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time I really thought I was onto something!

That's not to say it was wasted effort nor that it was useless, merely that it wasn't actually moving me closer to my stated goal of being able to play jazz music. It was scratching my itch for mental masturbation, and was a good exercise in attempting to model things I don't understand very well, but crucially, it wasn't helping.

Or take another example, a more recent foray into music for me---only a few weeks ago. This time I had more of a plan; I was taking piano lessons and getting advice on how to practice from my teacher. One of the things he suggested I do was to solo around in the minor pentatonic scale. And so I did, starting in C, and (tentatively) moving to G.

But doing it in Bb was hard! Rather than spend the two minutes that would be required to work out what notes I should play in the Bb minor pentatonic, I decided it would be better to write a computer program! This time it would connect to my keyboard and "listen" to the notes I played, and flash red whenever I played a note that wasn't in the Bb minor

...

isovector

isovector's Posts

isovector's Comments