I’ve always wanted to write my musical ideas down in standard notation but each time I tried it took way too long and never seemed quite right. I bought this book back in 2004 hoping to fix that.

After trying to go through the material with my old approach (wanting to dedicate hours of study and only moving forward when I thought I had mastered each and every subject) inertia kicked in. This became yet another book that sat on a shelf for a long time with the “some day” label assigned to it in my mind.

“Some day” came and I started going through this book as part of the “little bit every day” experiment that I’ve been doing the past few months and I’m about half way through it. I have to say that it is one of the denser music books that I’ve gone through but I’m glad that I’ve stuck with it. Between this book and ear training I’ve started being able to write simple melodies from memory.

Things like nursery rhymes, holiday melodies and early Beatles songs, etc.  I know it’s not the level of Quincy Jones taking a complete symphonic score and distilling it down to it’s core elements and then re-orchestrating it in all twelve keys without an instrument, just using his mind, pen & paper. But I’m happy to be moving in that direction.