Elliot

Tried it after a work explanation this afternoon. Stalled at exactly one sentence, went back and asked about that sentence only, and now I think I actually have it.

Giving each day one job is the difference between practice and attendance. I did scales for three years as attendance.

It is worth it and the technique is the whole thing. Start with water already hot in the base so the coffee is not sitting on a heating element for four minutes, keep the heat moderate, and pull it off when the flow turns pale and sputtery. Doing those three things is the difference between the pot people love and the bitter metallic reputation it has.

Mild disagreement with the anti-transcription crowd. Typing a lot is not automatically useless - it is useless if that is all you do. I type fast and near-verbatim, and then within 24 hours I turn each lecture into ten questions I cannot answer without looking. The transcript is raw material, not the product. What is killing you is not the typing, it is that the four hours afterwards are spent formatting rather than testing yourself.

Nine hours is the problem. No chair solves nine hours.

Two years is exactly when the self-taught ceiling shows up, because the things holding you back are now invisible from the inside. Pay for four lessons, not one. One tells you nothing, four tells you whether the person is any good.

Also nobody warns you that a good teacher will spend a whole lesson on four bars. I found that infuriating for about a month and then it was the most useful thing I had ever been taught.

Worth adding that dead foam is not a cliff edge. You notice your legs feeling beaten up the day after a long run well before you notice anything about the shoe itself.

And when that day comes, buy from someone who has had it tuned annually and has the technician's name. That single fact predicts the condition better than the badge on the fallboard.

Headphones on their own settle it for a flat. Being able to practise at 11pm without a thought is worth more to your actual playing hours than any difference in action, because the practice you do at a bad hour is practice you would otherwise not do.

Blocking the accompaniment also tells you instantly whether you actually know the harmony or have just memorised finger movements.

Record thirty seconds and listen back with the metronome still audible. Most people discover they are not accelerating continuously, they are jumping ahead at one specific moment, usually a bar line or a leap. Once you know the exact note, the practice becomes tiny and effective instead of vague.

There is a real distinction hiding in your question and it is worth naming. Notes taken during a lecture are capture; notes made afterwards are supposed to be processing. Rewriting is only processing if the second version is structurally different from the first, reorganised by concept rather than by lecture, with your own examples, with the gaps you could not fill marked. If the second version is the first version in nicer handwriting, you have done transcription twice.

That reframing is genuinely elegant and I am slightly annoyed nobody showed it to me at school.

Board game shops also tend to have the same staff every week, which is an underrated bonus. Two of my closest friends here are people who worked behind a counter I visited a lot.

Sitting too low and too close describes me exactly. Also I have never once taken a break inside an hour.

You are describing letter by letter reading, which works until the accidentals stack and then collapses. The fix is to change what you are reading rather than to read harder.

Three things, all of which are boring and all of which work.

Before you read anything, play the scale and the arpeggio of the key for sixty seconds. Your hand then already knows where the flats live and you stop making decisions about individual notes. This one change is worth more than everything else on the list.

Read intervals, not notes. Once you have found the first note, everything after it is a third up, a step down, a repeat. Distances are visual and immediate; letter names have to be decoded. Cover the page and quiz yourself on shapes for two minutes a day and it moves fast.

Read material that is far too easy, and never stop. Three grades below what you can play, hands together, and if you make a mistake you keep going. A wrong note in time is a sight reading success. Stopping to fix it is practising stopping.

Fifteen minutes a day of new easy material beats an hour a week of struggling with something hard, and it will look like nothing is happening for about six weeks.