Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:02
hey everyone welcome to rome sessions jason griffin here happy as always to have you with me and i'm really excited to jump in today's session i've got jason kleinberg here from fiddlehead on and jason is a fiddler he's toured the
00:00:14
world and composed music for film radio and tv he is also a youtuber and an online course creator at fiddlehead.com he's been a rome user since 2019 an active member of the rome book club and
00:00:27
he is here today to tell us all about how he uses rome to not only make himself into a better musician but also to further strengthen his teaching practice and his online business so really looking forward to jumping in
00:00:39
with you jason welcome hey thanks jason good to be here excited yeah let's let's go ahead and get started i think we've got uh a great session planned a bunch of folks here joining us live today as well so did
00:00:51
just want to mention that if you're with us live i'll be doing my best to keep an eye on the chat so if you have any comments questions uh maybe song requests for jason a little bit of foreshadowing there uh let us know drop
00:01:03
those into the chat and again i'll be doing my best to to keep an eye on those but like i said let's go ahead and jump right in and get started jason i wanted to kind of approach this conversation from the angle of different use cases
00:01:15
there i alluded to it in the intro you've got several different ways that you're using rome as it relates to music and i thought a good place to start would be talking about you as a musician and then we can get into you as a
00:01:27
teacher and your online business and those things but let's start with you as a musician and and let's pull up rome and talk to me a little bit about how you use rome uh to make you into a better musician and to strengthen your own personal
00:01:38
practice all right sounds good so okay so every day i try to practice it's just like fundamental thing and i have just developed a way in with using different templates
00:01:52
and things to make it as good of an experience as possible as fun and productive as possible so today before our session i did a little practice just to warm up so here
00:02:04
it is and i would if this is just a typical pretty typical practice and so i'll just kind of talk through it so and i'm going to try to keep in mind that maybe not everybody listening is a roamer so
00:02:18
anyhow what i'm going to do is i'm going to click here to sew it so it simplifies the view so you don't see all the other stuff that i did today you know making that call on this call and
00:02:31
and so basically when i start to practice before i write anything below this line i kind of see what i've done recently and so so today i didn't have any grand ideas of
00:02:43
anything new i wanted to do so i basically looked at what i did yesterday and and just copied stuff over and and really didn't have to think about it much so if we look at all these i pretty
00:02:55
much did the first three things on this list and so i'm gonna now hide that for a sec and then here's the first three things that i basically copied over and then i did
00:03:07
one other thing yeah so let's pause there for a second actually so you're sitting down for your daily practice you're you're getting ready to pick up the fiddle and start playing and it looks like kind of the first thing you're doing i can see you've got maybe a smart blocks
00:03:20
that you're using there so you've got kind of a dedicated smart block uh for for your practice session we don't need to get too into the weeds there but you're dropping that smart block in as kind of a template for people who may not be super familiar with rome that's
00:03:33
kind of just a template that's dropping into this daily notes page and then zooming into that review recent practice i really like that idea so it looks like you're using a query in there to basically go back and pull notes from your previous practice
00:03:46
sessions and just kind of remind you and maybe maintain continuity in your practice is that sort of the theory behind that yeah the basic idea is if if you review what you did yesterday you can go farther today like instead of just
00:03:58
sitting down and be like oh i don't i'm just going to play whatever comes to mind that you you start with like okay yeah that was hard for me yesterday that that that chordal scale that i did i it was
00:04:10
really in d major in the third position was really hard so i know i want to do that and so i'll make like a little list of things that i just pull from usually just the day before sometimes
00:04:22
i'll go further back in the stack like but you just just the day before and then start from there and then and then just let let ideas come you know and then on the right i keep like kind of a
00:04:33
master practice list of stuff and that i refer to and then as i practice i just drop in you know other things but generally trying to remain have continuity so i
00:04:45
can continuously build the skills yeah that makes sense okay cool so you've sat down and you've kind of looked at your previous practice notes you've reloaded that mental context a little bit you you've now anchored yourself and you
00:04:57
know where you're at and you use that as sort of a stepping off point to now move forward into today's practice session so talk me through a little bit of that yeah cool cool this is so fun um
00:05:09
so so here's a few practice items there's four main things the way i see it is is that we're sort of like there's like a top-line practice or that's kind of an umbrella for other things
00:05:23
and so this is all the things i did related to this one uh scottish tune called or the more among the heather and by the way are you scottish uh i am irish and uh welsh yeah oh okay
00:05:37
i was close so anyhow um so these are all things that i've practiced that are related to this tune so that the tune starts i might just start with a simple version beautiful we're gonna we're
00:05:49
gonna get some live fiddle here i love it and then i know next that i'm doing some other stuff i could sometimes the threading of it is not sloppy it's a little sloppy and i'll
00:06:02
redo it another day but basically the next main thing i might be wanting to do what i'm doing now is this thing called the chordal scale which is playing two notes at once [Music]
00:06:16
and so after i do that on its own a little bit then i'll go and add it to the tune but and then but then it's still all connected now i know in the future that i have done this tune with
00:06:29
this scale and the quartal scale variation and i've done these other variations and so that's really it in a nutshell yeah you're just kind of constantly making connections between things and finding
00:06:41
new ways to put things together to keep it interesting and then also you know keep you know i can keep working on the scale uh all day if i just keep doing different things or i can keep working on this tune all day if i keep adding
00:06:54
different things got it yeah so talk me through this indentation structure just a little bit more you've got the song there obviously at the top and then nested underneath that you've got the key of d major and are you sort of putting that in
00:07:08
there just to kind of i don't know maybe track the different pieces that you're learning and the different keys that you're playing in so you can maybe see over time hey this is a scale that i struggle with or that i've done a lot of
00:07:19
songs in or again talk to me a little bit about how you're using this indentation structure from a functional perspective i'll say right i'll say first that i'd probably change it a little bit and that a lot of times when i'm practicing i'm
00:07:32
just throwing out things as they come and i might order it a little bit in the moment but i'll also kind of kind of clean it up a little bit the next day and just be and just like but a lot of times when i'm actually practicing i
00:07:45
don't want to get too into the weeds with rome because then i won't be practicing and that's kind of a danger with with rome i think in general is that you can just oh wow it's so cool i'm going to do a smart block and then
00:07:57
like that and it you can kind of lose sight of what you wanted to do but but basically my intent though is to see is to kind of create like a journey and that could then become a lesson
00:08:10
you know if i if i give a group i give group lessons like zoom and then i can see like oh i can make do like these kind of connections and take students basically through something like this
00:08:22
um in a group lesson or i might want to just see how have i done a particular tune you know for recording so i like do recordings and
00:08:34
and my own compositions and so i can then go to uh this hopefully this won't you know go to this page uh for for the tune where i have the sheet music i have some some other
00:08:47
external recordings sometimes my own recordings like little and and then basically i can go and just see like oh i've done it in e flat i've done improvisation with it what else have i done fingerprinting
00:08:59
with it which is a memory technique that i just a term i made up so anyway i it if i do want to go and make some kind of creative thing with the tune i i
00:09:12
can find out everything i've done with it yeah that's cool so the the indentation structure there then with the linked references is essentially giving you like a historical log almost of your interactions with
00:09:25
that piece of music that's really cool and i think these are generalizable ideas enough that if you're deliberately practicing any skill maybe it's public speaking or writing or playing an instrument or
00:09:36
learning a sport or whatever it is you can kind of get creative with these page references and indentation structures to create these sorts of historical records of of what has been done on a given piece i do this similar
00:09:49
thing i do in my productivity i use rome very heavily for personal productivity and weekly priority planning and then i can go back and look at a history of a given project and look at all the different dates that i worked on and i don't do it
00:10:00
often but sometimes in the future if i'm jumping into a new project that's maybe similar i can look back and see oh what did i struggle with on that other project and i could imagine having a historical record of learning a piece of
00:10:12
music might give you similar insights yeah for sure for sure yeah talk to me a little bit about uh what some of these ideas are in here so nested under d major you've got these ideas like riff on part of the melody
00:10:27
and chordal scales are these sort of generalizable practices that you that you apply to different pieces of music that you're learning or talk to me about what those are yeah so
00:10:40
okay well the chordal skill i just kind of showed you which is just um at it's playing two notes at once and playing little chords as you move up the scale
00:10:51
so that that was this thing and then this lower octave upper octave is basically kind of having it's kind of a larger thing called conversational practice where you you have different things talking to each
00:11:06
other so i can play it in a low octave or low sounding and then play it up high and then i'll use that to work through the tune but this is also an improvisational technique and so i
00:11:24
would categorize that both as a practice strategy and an im improvisation strategy and it's it really the lines become blurred you know and same thing with riff on a part of the melody like oh this little
00:11:37
part of the melody i i'm not good at so i'm gonna keep playing it and practicing it but then it might end up turning into something that oh that's like a melody in its own right and or maybe it could
00:11:51
spawn off into a new melody so really that like the high level term for a lot of what i do is improv practice because it's almost like creating something but you're actually
00:12:04
working on something it's really hard to separate them if that's right it does it does i play a little bit of piano and i that resonates with me because sometimes i'm i'm trying to learn a piece to sort of keep myself focused and just challenge
00:12:18
myself to learn something new but then maybe also sometimes i'm sitting down and i'll play the piece sort of but i'm also kind of riffing on it and just making up my own sorts of arrangements and versions of it
00:12:30
because i also like just the creative part of that it just makes it more fun for me to just not only be learning in the piece as it was written but also use it as sort of a jumping-off point to to learn other things as well
00:12:43
i think that's really a great thing i think that you know you have to infuse joy in it and kind of what happens with a lot of students is that they they're really sincere they really want to do it and they
00:12:55
really want to do it right and do it and but then they they kind of get into a corner where they're not having as much fun and and what you're just describing is is a great way to just yeah it's just we're doing this for enjoyment like
00:13:07
don't forget that right right cool so let's zoom back out we sort of skipped over at the top there you've got review recent practice and underneath that there's practice prompts could you expand that out and talk to me
00:13:21
a little about what that section is so this is something that is just like a whole bunch of random things that are pulled from different pages that are just ideas to
00:13:34
spark like oh you know it's just all random things have been pulled using the smart block stuff that i might want to try you know so like one idea is actually in stuff i'm practicing already you know
00:13:48
less bow you know whatever it's just just like and then at the end i kind of like we'll put a few original pieces i don't know why so many of these ended up not pulling but you know
00:13:59
um i'm still learning how to use rome i'll just say that yeah no worries so these are these are as the name implies these are prompts that you want to send your future self when you set this
00:14:10
up you say hey send me these prompts and it sounds like these are general best practices or things that you want to just continue improving in your practice and again i could see this being generalized to
00:14:23
really any skill that you're trying to get better at is you have these core ideas and things nested within that skill that you need to work on and it sounds like this prompt section is a way
00:14:34
of keeping those things in your awareness yeah exactly exactly a way of thinking about it is it's like a deck of cards and and you're kind of like tarot cards
00:14:46
and that this is like the tarot card section and uh i just want to like see if anything resonates i actually don't even a lot of times i'll just glance at it but i don't use it that much you know i
00:14:59
have not really using it a ton because i'm usually once i get going on a certain thread just the ideas start coming in and i see new places to take stuff right
00:15:11
right but it might be just enough to remind you like oh i haven't focused on my syncopated beats recently maybe that's something i should pick back up right so again it's it's giving
00:15:23
you that that little gentle reminder i think it's also just a creative you know like way to add something creative to a melody like a lot of a lot of what i do is i like
00:15:35
take a melody and and play a drone track so let's see sorry um so so i have actual uh audio embedded that's like play along tracks and so
00:15:48
you hear that okay yeah tell me tell me how the volume is a bit loud we're getting some live music here looks like the uh there you go yep okay
00:16:06
okay yeah that's better so so basically it's a it's modeled after indian raga music but you can do it with anything and it works really well for folk music and i'll just
00:16:18
play [Music] i'm playing a tune and maybe practicing things but this may like looking at the at this list of prompts may give me an
00:16:32
idea for a way to do something creative with the tune right so like maybe it's kind of a syncopated slurs idea yeah is a really simple one you know
00:16:48
sometimes you know just just super quiet you know just changing your though you know it's a very simple variation so um very cool yeah so a lot of a lot of these things are are just
00:17:03
uh yeah they just kind of like to prompt and keep things moving with the practice i think this is a really neat example of the flexibility of rome so you've got an instance here where you've got these
00:17:16
drone tracks that you know are handy to have in your practice and rome is such a flexible tool that it's very easy to go ahead and drop those onto in this case you've got them on your music zl casting page and you can have them right there at your
00:17:29
fingertips and i think this is one of the beautiful things about rome you alluded to it a little bit earlier rome can be a little bit overwhelming and it can be the type of thing where you really get pulled down the rabbit hole and spend way too much time optimizing
00:17:41
rome instead of using it as a tool to facilitate other things that you're trying to get better at but that flexibility also has a ton of upside which is that you can do really creative simple things like this so again with any skill
00:17:54
that you're trying to get better at there could be resources or assets that you want to put in place and rome makes it very easy to have those things at your fingertips so if we jump back down to below the line i think we've covered this section
00:18:08
but talk to me a little more about it is there anything down here are these additional you had or the more that we and among the heather that we talked about but below that you've got the recall tune from memory index cards
00:18:20
examples so are these top level headings below the line these are just the things that you ended up practicing today i presume yeah so exactly and and sometimes some days it
00:18:33
might just be one thing with stuff you know there's just one thing that really is an umbrella for everything but some days it makes more sense to parcel it differently but today like i wanted to kind of relate
00:18:46
what how this works here to to people who maybe don't use rome and and i've actually you know the original zettel castings cards and so i've actually worked with doing a similar thing with
00:18:59
index cards so i had this example of like a practice chunk where which is this so we could zoom in on it and and we could take a look at it and then and then i'll show you like how you
00:19:11
could do the same thing with into index cards so we have this scale um a minor pentatonic syncopated slurs and and so i'm just gonna go to
00:19:23
um i have i have this pulled up just give me a sec so here's the same idea with indexed cards so just for people who might be overwhelmed right now like
00:19:36
i don't know what he's talking about you know this is just the basic thing you know you have every single idea you possibly could do you put on an index card and this could work for a lot of
00:19:47
other skills as well and or you know or like knowledge work you know and so it's it was really cool to kind of as an exercise to go through and i mean i maybe made like 30 index cards
00:19:59
and and then just played with kind of placing them you know and as like indentation so the pentatonic scales the top line practice i did it with slurs alternating between
00:20:10
a tune and scale and transposing and then the alternating between the two and scale i have a particular tune i did and like i even put a little sheet music snippet in so very cool yeah i i just think it's it's
00:20:24
kind of useful to to try this you know i i agree i it makes me think of um productivity podcast i can't remember which one it was a while ago i heard
00:20:35
them talking about often when people want to get into finding a productivity system or creating a productivity system the very first thing that we naturally want to do is jump in and start experimenting with
00:20:47
different apps and on that podcast they actually recommended just start with a pen and paper just start out with a pen and paper and start tracking everything you're trying to do for the week and writing it down and experimenting every day with
00:20:59
different structures and outline formats and those sorts of things and use that to gain some clarity on what it is that you're actually trying to track and then you can map those over as you start using different apps and i think
00:21:12
it's it's worth noting here that you have kind of done that in reverse in this case you're using rome and talking about it from the perspective of hey i started in rome but i can also make them in index cards but it's worth noting
00:21:24
that that works either way right and i think it's valuable to sometimes take a step back and think about what you're doing with technology from a more analog perspective to bring clarity
00:21:37
to why it is you're trying to track what you're trying to track so i love this example i like the tie into the original zeddle cast in which as you mentioned was all card based and i think it's great to illuminate especially for
00:21:49
people on the call who may not be as familiar or proficient in rome as you are yeah yeah um i i just think that the the ultimate goal to keep in mind is that you want to have a good practice
00:22:04
experience you want to be fun productive and you know if you walk away you feel like you really accomplished something and you had a good time you know that's the ultimate goal so whatever system you come up with
00:22:15
you just kind of keep that you know even above everything else that you actually practice like you know like and and that's something i actually don't do a lot of that would be kind of cool
00:22:28
just kind of evaluating like oh like this went well today or this didn't you know it's with other things that i do i kind of journal as i go but with practice it's just sort of i
00:22:40
think it's just sort of apparent from the flow what it was but is that something you do like do you are you kind of commenting on on how it felt how you you
00:22:51
know different parts of your day you know do you do that yeah i do i um i keep basically a i do a weekly plan so every week on monday morning the first thing i do is sit down and i spend about
00:23:02
an hour just planning out my week and it's all kind of broken down by projects and then underneath each project there are tasks and underneath each task i keep a little log and i write down
00:23:15
what did i do on this project or this task i should say today and i also like to leave little notes so notes to my future self what are my next steps on on this on this task or this project and
00:23:27
ultimately i find similar there seem to be some overlaps here going back to the idea of yours that we talked about earlier where the initial thing that you're doing when you sit down to practice is running that query and you're looking back at your
00:23:39
previous practices same thing for me when i sit down on monday morning to plan out my week what i'm doing is looking at the previous week's planner and i'm looking at all the notes of everything that i did for all the important projects that i'm working on
00:23:52
and and then i'm sort of transposing those into a new plan for the week so i think this idea of using rome as a almost a tool to convey information to your future self
00:24:04
it's really interesting because it's a theme that seems to come up over and over in conversations that i have with rome almost no matter what the use case is people seem to find their way back to this core idea
00:24:16
yeah the the conversation with your future self yeah yeah yeah exactly so let's shift gears a little bit maybe jump back to rome for me and let's talk about we we've probably covered a number of these
00:24:29
topics already at least indirectly but let's shift gears and talk to me now about how you map all of this over to helping other people learn how to become better
00:24:40
fiddle players helping your students how has rome helped you organize that practice and become a better teacher well basically the same process is goes
00:24:52
into creating lessons like like if i'm i like a practice journey is what i call it and and you you have one high level thing and then you i'll take people
00:25:05
through a journey of different things and they integrate all their skill you can have one song and it'll integrate all your skills with it or a lot of your skills you know you can you can take one
00:25:17
song and work on your memory of it you can work on your tuning your you know and it's all the same kind of process that i do when i practice and so and a lot of the ideas like
00:25:29
another thing i want to say is that the last two years i've really gotten especially with rome gotten deep into not only practicing but starting to ask like what i do all these things that i don't
00:25:41
even know what i'm doing and so i've started a little makeup language to describe it you know like uh i'll give an example like practice journeys is a certain is a personal
00:25:52
language personal term which describes this process and but it's also the process of composing you know the and so there's tons of these terms that are started to evolve just by playing a lot taking a quick
00:26:06
note being like what do i call that and some of them weren't good but but then because you can change the the name so easily in rome like for the for those of you aren't familiar with rome if i change this to something else
00:26:18
um on this main page then everywhere it appears in rome changes so um so anyway yeah so uh a lot of a lot of the teaching evolves
00:26:31
from this and it's very similar to what i do it i just try to be empathetic to what where you know students are learning and but it's basically the same process yeah there's a lot of again similarities
00:26:44
there i'll go to the productivity model again because i think that's where there's the most overlap between how you're using rome and how i am and there's this idea of developing language that you mentioned that really
00:26:56
resonates with me and i'm constantly kind of thinking in the background of what what i'm doing and when i find that there's a particular practice that i'm doing maybe something that i'm doing with my writing process that seems to be working well i'll i'll
00:27:09
naturally ask myself that question like is this something that could be identified as a distinct sort of process that i might be able to help others to teach others and help them become better writers so i i really like that
00:27:23
idea and it sounds like on this music zeddle casting page maybe we can just talk about the overall structure of the page and go top to bottom and drill into a couple of these specifically let's let's make this a bit more concrete
00:27:35
and talk to me about what what a couple of these are and how give me some examples of how you use how you've used those to help your students become better players yeah so
00:27:47
a lot of what i teach has i i basically put into this um subheading the core practice principles and so these are these things are just very high level things
00:28:01
that almost anybody could do you know like conversational practice is is just kind of like calling response or it's it's a call and response between two types of practice playing a scale
00:28:13
playing a tune singing singing something playing it and so the the these are things that i actually teach and then i know where to find them and so it actually is very useful in a lot of other aspects of teaching
00:28:27
and running the course like you know people email me they have a question and they're like well you should try try this and i'll just kind of look here and quickly you know copy and paste like different teachings so
00:28:40
in terms of teaching that's a really um key thing there um another another another idea i'm related working on now which is related to the index card
00:28:52
kind of thing part of why i was getting into it is is an idea for uh a a future thing to make which would be sorry um let me just go to the page
00:29:05
um which is uh practice cards so so basically the same idea is that i'm doing with those prompts you know i could just have a have a card trying to i have the cards listed somewhere um
00:29:18
but here we go so the they'll be these are basically like the tarot cards for practice and and and it's the same idea and you just kind of have like a single prompt that
00:29:30
that pulls you into a much bigger realm and and like have like a book or a course or something that explains each thing so anyhow but those are couple couple things that
00:29:44
that are used for teaching and then a lot a lot you know let's see what else and then like there's also composing i don't know if we want to talk about that but yeah let's do that i was actually i was
00:29:56
actually going to ask you to go there next we've talked about improving your own practice we've talked about using rome to improve your teaching practice as well but you're also a composer i know you mentioned to me a couple of times that you're working on
00:30:09
at least one album right now so tell us a little about how you use rome to track your own compositions yeah so so basically i have i right now i'm just calling fiddle stories and i
00:30:22
just have a huge list of like you know a lot of this again it just arises from the practice i might be doing something and just like you were describing you play piano and you you come up with some little idea and and
00:30:35
that you're you're kind of practicing a hard part or something and and then it leads to like well this is a an idea i think i want to develop and i'll just write a tune on
00:30:46
the spot and i'll record it on the spot i mean it's like a hard and fast rule to always record everything it just does just assume i won't remember it so just record it record it come up with some title and
00:31:00
knowing that i could make a new title yeah whatever whatever title comes to mind and then just just uh like one one one is hey grady remember how we used to walk through san francisco talking about crazy and
00:31:12
uh so um yeah and and you know maybe that'll be the final title maybe not but basically just have this uh list of of tunes and like and i'll never
00:31:24
never like release them all i don't think i mean there because new ones keep coming and um i i haven't i'm putting out an album which has uh
00:31:35
it only has six tracks on it because a lot of them are longer they're longer form like they use it kind of the drone i call them fiddle ragas and it's just basically uh you know normal fiddle tune is short and they just do the same thing
00:31:49
like you know 10 times and these are like they're the journey you know there's and so i had an example i'm just going to go back to the um pay my practice for today
00:32:02
and so there's this song called road to liz inverno which is a fiddle tune uh i'll just play teeny bitto it's it it's called the jig is the phone is the form [Music]
00:32:18
so jolly kind of and so but basically the we this is the journey you know that happens in song it's actually already recorded but it starts with
00:32:31
this one kind of thing called single finger and these are all just variations or practice styles [Music]
00:32:45
and then octave double stop skills [Music] and you know just down the list but you know these things are all developed
00:32:59
through the practice the daily practice but then once once they've been developed then i can just plug them into songs and and create so that's just i'm really excited about this form like the fiddle wrong is because
00:33:13
it's just endless you know it could just take any tune and do this with it and and put out music forever yeah that's great i love it you're you're making me want to learn the fiddle here jason so you're doing your job this is uh this is really fun you could
00:33:26
do you could do all this stuff on piano you know that's the thing like like all the the basic i mean you know all the basic principles could be translated like a great one that any
00:33:37
musician could do a couple that come to mind one is just looping do you ever do that like you take it i don't i know i'm aware yeah familiar with the concept but yeah talk about it a little for for people who aren't yeah
00:33:50
it's it's one of those powerful things that any musician can do like take this song [Music] and you could basically cut out little loops from that so maybe maybe do a
00:34:02
smaller piece and maybe maybe you realize oh the hardest part of that is this [Music] and then you just start to play with the loops you know changing the length
00:34:18
moving them around like okay now that i know this is hard [Music] i'll do it on another string [Music]
00:34:31
and then then the cycle starts over again and you might end up having a new tune when you start to practice that way when you start to take out bits and then melodies it's it's like a plant you pull off like a bud as this weird little
00:34:43
thing but then it grows it grows again once you once you pull the little piece off yeah and i love that i love the idea of using rome to track this i had not previous it hadn't really occurred to me to
00:34:55
get more in depth with rome i do some personal journaling in rome so i've got records of getting back into the piano the piano i bought just maybe a year ago after decades off i
00:35:08
played when i was a kid so i've journaled about a little bit about getting back into it but it hadn't occurred to me until i started digging into your stuff that i could be much more deliberate because you're right when it comes to music like they're any
00:35:21
i'm emphasizing this not because it's specific to music but more just for people who might be more interested in rome than the music side of the conversation this idea of really deliberate practice and of thinking
00:35:33
critically about breaking things down so when you're learning a piece of music you might start trying to learn the first eight bars but maybe you're really stuck on the first two so you take a step back and
00:35:45
you say i'm just going to really focus i just want to get these first two bars down and you zoom in and then maybe within those first two bars there's just this one little interval or one little jump that you can't do and so you break
00:35:56
it down and it's a beautiful metaphor i think actually for many problems in life is the more you can decompose and break things down oftentimes the better equipped you are to move forward and i
00:36:09
really like what you've done here in rome because you've basically taken the process of learning and teaching the fiddle and really decomposed it down into a bunch of constituent parts that you're now tracking in your in your daily notes
00:36:22
and i think it's a really it's a very cool application of rome yeah thanks and uh i i'll say that i'm pretty good with deliberate practice
00:36:33
in music and i'm trying to have that carry forth in other areas and you know like i'd love to find a way to do that with something like productivity you know or other
00:36:45
aspects of life like even like meditation or relationships or something i don't know if it's even possible but i feel like i wish like i could take like this kind of thinking and apply it to
00:36:58
everything yeah it's an interesting challenge and i i think i think you probably could if you tried hard enough right like so it's just where do you want to apply yourself and really put those those processes
00:37:09
into place but i think as a general takeaway again for people who are watching this and might not be musicians but are just looking to get creative ideas with their rome graph a lot of these ideas i believe are very generalizable across
00:37:22
a broader spectrum of rome and one of the other things that we haven't touched on explicitly but you've mentioned a couple of times that that i want to point out here and i always go out of my way to point this out when i see this
00:37:33
is this idea of building as you go so you've mentioned a few times that like hey the indentation structure that i'm showing you on the screen it kind of looks this way but there are other times when i'm practicing and maybe i do it a little bit differently and i don't want
00:37:47
to get too bogged down so i don't overthink it i just kind of sketch it out and let it flow and i think there's a really important idea nested in there because rome is as you and i have both mentioned really a blank canvas and it
00:37:59
can be very easy to get overwhelmed when you're using rome and i think this idea of building as you go and not trying to be overly structured and overly perfect with the way things are laid out in rome
00:38:11
letting it be just a little bit messy i think is a great thing and i think the more people can sort of speak publicly about it because as a rome user i remember as i was a new rome user i felt like i was the only one
00:38:23
who had this really messy graph that wasn't perfectly structured because a lot of times when you watch courses or things like that people are putting their most organized best foot forward and that's not a bad thing i think when you're teaching a course it's
00:38:36
good to keep things clean and structured because you need to remove the noise and let people focus on certain principles but i think in reality pretty much everyone out there has some messiness in their graph and that's okay like that's
00:38:48
that's perfectly fine yeah um one thing that arises when you say that is a lot of it as a teacher is being a little vulnerable
00:39:00
you know like um being like when you just being saying like oh this didn't work out when i tried this like for a while i was doing like these little performances of these things and
00:39:13
and then i would do i did it was just like a little a few did a few times and it had liner notes and it was it was really kind of cool to just see like yeah that that part didn't really work out there that transition you know and i
00:39:25
i think that you know it's kind of cool to see that you know it's kind of cool to be let let into that yeah i totally agree totally agree so as we're we're starting to run up on our time here i did want to
00:39:38
we've got a nice segue here to zoom out and talk about rome specifically but from a very high level you're pretty experienced with rome you've done some of their own book clubs you've been using rome i think you said
00:39:50
since 2019 if somebody is watching out there and they're maybe just getting into rome or they're considering it what's one piece of high level advice that you would give to somebody who's trying to get more
00:40:02
traction and you use rome to greater effect yeah i mean beside what you said the build as you go which i love that idea is to find your own way with it you know like
00:40:15
like this what what i'm doing is just this weird thing that that just kind of fell into doing like i was starting to do it with evernote but it was kind of limited and then once i got into rome it
00:40:27
just sort of exploded into this thing so um yeah i would say just just find what works for you you know like and and like
00:40:39
don't get hung up on how you should do it um you know or don't get hung up on what it should be don't should yourself with it another another thing is to just have fun with it you know
00:40:52
like just try to make this whole process kind of fun you know it's it's it's nerdy but it can be super fun to sort of make these set up these things and and make them work you know yeah absolutely yeah i
00:41:05
couldn't couldn't agree more so we're gonna we're gonna move to um closing here in just a second but before we do that i'm going to uh grab the screen share back and just remind folks that if you're here for the first time
00:41:16
and you want to follow along with rome sessions in the future there's a few different ways that you can connect to do that head over to subscribe.roamsessions.com that'll get you signed up for the email newsletter so if you're wanting
00:41:29
updates on future sessions or follow-ups and additional emails and content be sure to sign up for that newsletter if you haven't already also on twitter at rome sessions if you want to get involved in the conversation over there
00:41:41
and finally my email is jason roamsessions.com so i'd love to hear from you if you have any comments questions or feedback or maybe you want to appear on a future session i would love to hear from you so with that out
00:41:53
of the way jason i want to close with you and if anybody out there is watching or listening and they want to connect with you maybe ask a follow-up question or learn more about your work tell us a little bit about your online
00:42:05
uh profile here and and what are some of the places that you would direct people who are interested in learning more about your work yeah i mean either fiddlehead.com and you can find me there and get my email from there or
00:42:18
or twitter i'm trying to do more twitter and uh that would be just at j kleinberg and those would be the main ways or you could write me a letter if you feel like it and uh
00:42:30
sign up for my newsletter and then you'll see my address at the bottom and you could write me a letter there you go and write him a letter while people do that stuff who would love to receive uh more letters that would be great yes a student just sent me some honey in
00:42:43
the mail so that was pretty nice beautiful huh that's awesome well jason this has been a ton of fun and a first ever by the way first time we've ever had live music here on rome sessions so i really appreciate that
00:42:55
really appreciate you sharing what you're doing there in rome and being willing to uh entertain us with some music as well thanks to everybody who showed up live really appreciate you joining us in the chat today and with that we'll go ahead and wrap up and we'll look forward to seeing you on the
00:43:07
next one jason thanks again yeah thank you jason all right take care guys
End of transcript