Keeping Playlists Long Term
Found in: Practicing & Playlists
Crystal H.
While this may be a silly question… I’ve not given any instructions to my students as to how long to keep their playlists since I started 3 yrs ago. Is there really much need, beyond a month or two back, to keep old playlists? Yes, I could see it would be proof of how advanced, or not, a person is in their playing…but doesn’t that also just appear, or not, on the keyboard itself?
Gordon Harvey, Australia
I often describe the Playlist as like a photo album that shows you snapshots of how your repertoire looked at certain points in time. It can be fascinating to look back at old photos of yourself and be amazed at how you’ve grown. In the same way, it’s very rewarding to look at your old Playlists and see how much you’ve grown musically. I might say to a student “you think it’s amazing that you have 12 songs (and it is!), but when you have 40, 50, 60 songs, you’ll look back and laugh at how humble your Playlist was back then, just as you’ll laugh at some of the struggles you used to have with pieces that now seem like baby stuff”. It’s a nice experience, and it can also be a way of backing up the Relationship conversation, pointing out that the graph may have ups and downs, but over the long term, the trend is clearly up.
To that end, I wouldn’t ever throw away the Playlist, although there’s rarely a need to bring old Playlists to class.
Kerry V., Australia
I am a student and have been on and off since May 1999. I have not only kept my playlist but I have “contacted’ my books together so they are always handy for me to look back on. I look back because I like to see how it looked the months I could practice and the once I couldn’t and then I try to work out what was different then and possibly why things worked then to help me in the months I haven’t been able to put in the practice. I like to see my growth and when I added new songs. I also use it for the Assessment numbers to see when I actually got a song to 5 and how long it took. As Gordon says, it is like a snap shot of how my past to now has been. I am not checking it all the time, just like photos, I visit it occasionally and I really enjoy seeing the changes and growth.