Learning Flute is Hard

Learning an instrument, in my case flute, properly is hard.

I never managed to carve out a stable practice routine through either the 4 years I formally studied it in high school, or anytime since.

This is maddening because a large part of me would love to get better so as to be a more capable musician and have more fun with it. The skeptically minded might say you just need to knuckle down and do it, but I have always found this advice to be unhelpful in the extreme. What do you do when different parts of yourself seem to be at war?

This is my attempt to come up with an answer to that.

My partial solution to staying on task and getting things done are to use what I call Sandboxes. They are simplified environments often with simple rules for operating them.

I have two musical ones I have been using with my flute:

• Putting on Nirvana’s Nevermind Album and jamming to it.
• I have a very simple app which plays a backing track in a random major key and I try my best to figure out the key or at least some of the notes in that key by ear.

The above is heading in the right direction but is not the same as a proper practice routine.

So I had a bit of a think about it and and I think such a routine is a lot like a few sandboxes chained together. Calling them micro-sandboxes is, I think, helpful.

So, for example, playing the A major scale might be one.

It might not be the case for most people but a collection of sandboxes like this is intimidating. Wrangling the ADHD mind to focus is hard work.

Even the shift from say practicing the A Major scale to something else can lead to me getting distracted onto tangents. My brain also does a certain kind of maths where it tries to calculate whether I’m going to repeat whatever I’m practicing in the near future and if it thinks not I get a dose of demotivation.

To counteract my challenges the system I create needs to be really simple — because something simple to use has way more chance that I’ll continue to use it, and it needs to be gently encouraging without tipping over towards shaming.

Things I know about myself to take into account

• I struggle to do tasks that have to be done every day
• I struggle even more to do tasks every second day
• Doing a task every third day consistently is basically impossible for me

From this it seems that I need a system that shoots for daily but doesn’t shame me if I fail.

I also have enough computer based loggers in my life, so something which works with just pencil and paper sounds about right.

I did my first practice using the system. Here is a copy of my written log:

6 Aug 2026

Jammed to Nirvana’s Nevermind album

Tomorrow probable: 1

Jammed to random Major backing tracks

Tomorrow probable: 1

Played the A Major scale

Tomorrow probable: 0

Note that if “Tomorrow probable” has a 1 next to it that means I think I will manage to do this activity again tomorrow and if a 0 not. It’s a cheeky digital nod to binary used by computers which I find amusing to use on a paper book, and just somehow felt more evocative than a tick or something. 1 could be representative of a switch turned to on or just current flowing, which works perfectly as a metaphor…

Important points:

• If tomorrow’s prediction is 0 that is not shameful! Activities are able to wink in and out of existence as needed — and it’s most natural for them to do so.
• If tomorrow’s prediction is a 1 for a particular practice element and tomorrow arrives and it doesn’t occur that is not shameful either!

Elsewhere on my website I have talked of my tools needing to be a gentle witness — and this simple system is that. The idea is to gradually tend towards a sustainable practice routine.

Here is to lots more fun musical adventures…