by Christopher Sutton | Aug 8, 2011 | Music
The startup world loves “bootstrapping”: the idea that you get a business off the ground not by seeking investment and outside funding, but by starting to sell products or services and then gradually growing the business using your own income. It comes from the expression “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and just means that you’re using whatever resources you have to hand to get yourself going. I’m a bootstrapping fan myself; it’s how I’m running Easy Ear Training so far.
Lately I’ve been thinking about bootstrapping in music learning, and specifically ear training.
There may not be an obvious connection to you, but if you’re a musician you’re probably doing this to some extent already – just without realising it!
There’s a huge wealth of history to music tuition, and no shortage of teachers to tell you “this is how you learn X”, “this is how you practise Y”. And I wouldn’t for a second want to dismiss the value there.
But there’s another way too. This is the attitude of bootstrapping. Of “do whatever works”.
Bootstrapping your music education
If you want to be a concert pianist or reach the top of the profession in your chosen instrument or talent, you need to be careful. You don’t want to learn the wrong fingering for a scale, or develop poor embouchure early on – because the more you practise the wrong method, the more ingrained it becomes, and the harder you have to work later on to fix it. As a saying I recently came across puts it: “Practise makes permanent”.
That suggests that a “do whatever works” mentality is wrong-headed, and will only cause you pain later on.
But I think that attitude is far too motivated by fear. (more…)
by Christopher Sutton | Oct 4, 2010 | Ear Training, Music Theory, Technology
Being an Apple App Store developer is really a mixed bag. While it is streets ahead of other mobile platforms’ app stores in terms of platform consistency (which developers love), the market size, and audience for your apps, there are some deeply frustrating issues as well.
I want to briefly discuss one: the lack of two-way communication with users.
I’ll also look at some particular issues one user had with the RelativePitch app my company developed, around learning relative pitch with or without a harmonic context.
The App Store Review System
Users are free to write reviews of apps they download – and in my experience user reviews make an enormous difference to app sales. The App Store interface shows the most recent reviews of an app prominently, and having a negative review visible there can really impact sales.
A recent 1-star review can strongly influence App Store shoppers
What’s truly frustrating though is that developers have no way to respond to reviews, either publically or privately. We can’t email the users, and we can’t post a reply to their review. Some developers will respond within the app description text, but this isn’t scalable or particularly beneficial.
Sometimes a user will have misunderstood something, or somehow missed out on a large part of the app’s functionality. In a lot of cases this can be useful information: you can improve the app to aid the user’s understanding more in future. In other cases you just have to throw up your hands in the air and wonder what went wrong and whether the user spent even a couple of minutes trying to resolve their issue or looking at the help screens!
Once in a while there will be a review which puts me in a bad mood. Normally this is because they’re flaming the app without real justification – this inevitably affects the impression other potential customers get of the app, despite lacking substance.
And sometimes the reviewer raises interesting points which I disagree with, and I’m simply frustrated not to be able to respond.
Harmonic Context in Interval Training
One such reviewer appeared this week. They were kind enough to review both of our paid apps, leaving a 1-star rating and a strongly worded negative review for each. They raised some interesting points though, which I’d like to respond to here.
I’ve included the whole review below, and then again with my comments in-line.
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My name's Christopher Sutton and this is my personal blog. You can learn more about me