Your Daily Practice Routine
This last lesson gives you a ten-minute daily routine and an eight-week plan, so that everything you've learned becomes second nature in your DAW.
You've made it through the whole course: notes, rhythm, scales, chords, progressions, melody, bass and sound. This knowledge only becomes useful once it gets into your fingers and your ears, and that takes regular practice. The good news is that you don't need much, as long as you do it often. Memory holds on to short, repeated sessions much better than long, rare ones: ten minutes a day, kept up for weeks, will move you further than three hours one Sunday a month.
Ten minutes, three blocks
Split your ten minutes into three blocks, always the same ones, so you don't waste time choosing what to do. The next table gives you what goes in them. Do them before you open the day's project: your ears and your fingers will be warmed up.
| Block | Length | What you do | With what |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ear | 3 minutes | Recognize intervals, then chord types | The course's ear-training workshops |
| Chords | 4 minutes | Play the chords of the week's key, then a progression | MIDI keyboard or piano roll |
| Rhythm | 3 minutes | Program a pattern from memory, then a variation | Drum machine, metronome |
For ear training, start with just a few intervals, the second, the third, the fifth and the octave, and only add a new one when you recognize the others almost every time. The goal is consistency; perfection will come with it.
Choose which intervals to practice
Once intervals get easy, move on to chord types: major and minor first, then seventh chords. Between sessions, you can train your ear away from the screen too: hum the bass of a song on the radio, or try to guess whether it's in major or minor before you check.
For chords, pick one key per week. Every day, play its seven chords from bottom to top while saying their names out loud, then play one of the progressions you know. Here's the complete tour of G major.
After a week, you'll know without thinking that the fourth degree of G major carries a C major chord, and that the chord on the seventh is diminished. Then switch keys, alternating between major and minor.
For rhythm, take a pattern from a genre you like, program it from memory, then make a single variation of it each day: a moved kick, a ghost note, a short hi-hat roll. The next two bars show the idea.
Once a week, swap this block for a tempo exercise: tap the tempo of three songs you're listening to, and check it with a metronome.
Rebuilding loops
Once a week, take thirty minutes to rebuild the loop of a song you love, using the analysis method: tempo, key, chords, bass. Stop when the thirty minutes are up, even if not everything is right, because it's the effort of searching that trains your ear. Then change at least three things to turn it into an idea of your own: the key, a chord, the rhythm of the bass or the tempo. You'll keep what you liked about the original, and the music will become yours. Keep these transformed loops in a separate folder: after a few months, you'll have a stock of ideas that belongs to you, ready to become tracks.
Keeping a practice journal
Write down each session in two or three lines: what you worked on, what gave you trouble, and one thing you noticed. This journal has two uses. It shows you your progress on the days when you feel stuck, and it tells you what to work on next, since whatever gives you trouble keeps coming back from one week to the next. Reread it once a month.
An eight-week plan
To give your routine some direction, here's an eight-week plan. Each week revisits one part of the course and ends with a small project of a few minutes of music. The ten daily minutes stay the same; only the key of the chords and the genre of the pattern change.
| Week | Theme | Key for the chords | Small project |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Notes, the grid and rhythm | A minor | A 4-bar drum loop and a bass on a single note |
| 2 | Groove: syncopation, swing, velocities | A minor | The same loop in three groove versions |
| 3 | Scales, modes and pentatonics | D minor | An 8-bar melody in D Dorian over a single chord |
| 4 | Three-note chords and the chords of a key | G major | A 4-chord progression with its bass |
| 5 | Sevenths, inversions and voicings | F major | The week 4 progression in a lo-fi or house version |
| 6 | Progressions, tension and borrowed chords | E minor | An 8-bar build-up that ends on V |
| 7 | Bass, 808 and registers | C minor | A tuned 808 line under one of your loops |
| 8 | Arrangement and finishing | Your choice | A complete track drawn from one of your loops |
If a week feels too full, stretch it out. If you miss a few days, just pick up where you left off, without trying to make up for lost time. The plan is there to give you a direction, and one missed day doesn't change it.
Before you buy another plugin
Chord, scale and melody plugins are good tools, and this course doesn't ask you to go without them. Mostly, they do what you now know how to do: suggest notes from a scale, stack the chords of a key, generate an arpeggio. Before you buy a new one, check that you can already do by hand what it promises. If it saves you time, it'll be useful; if it makes the decisions for you, you still won't know why your track sounds good or bad.
- You can tell what key your track is in, and find the key of a sample.
- You can tune your 808 and your kick to that key.
- You can write a four-chord progression and color it with sevenths.
- You can program a groove with velocities, ghost notes and a little swing.
- You can build a bassline that follows the chords, and a melody that lands on their notes.
If you can check off all five, buy whatever you've got your eye on: you'll know exactly what the tool does for you, and you'll be able to correct its suggestions. If not, the routine in this lesson will give you more than a new plugin.
Plan your first week. In your journal, write down the key for the chords, the intervals you'll work on by ear, the starting drum pattern and the small end-of-week project. Then do the first ten-minute session right away. In your DAW: create a “routine” project with a piano track, a drum machine and a metronome already set up, so you don't lose a single minute each day.
This is the end of the course, but not the end of the work: come back to the lessons whenever a question comes up in a project, and above all, finish tracks. Enjoy making music.