Mind Mapping for Musicians

Mind map­ping is an extremely pow­er­ful tool. It’s easy to quickly cap­ture your brain­storms and then orga­nize them.

The main idea and con­cept is to start from a cen­tral topic and branch out — group­ing together all your asso­ci­ated ideas and thoughts. This lets you see and explore what’s in your mind and dis­cover new ideas and relationships.

Basically all you need for cre­at­ing a mind map is pen and paper. However, there’s some excel­lent com­puter pro­grams avail­able to help you cre­ate dig­i­tal mind maps.

The dig­i­tal ver­sion has the fol­low­ing advantages:

My per­sonal rec­om­men­da­tion for a mind map­ping pro­gram is XMind, which you can down­load for free at: http://www.xmind.net

You can use mind map­ping for any area in your life. I’d like to make some sug­ges­tions on where mind map­ping can espe­cially come in handy for musicians.

1) Idea Collection

Did you stum­ble upon a new chord pro­gres­sion that you want to build a song around? Did you come up with a killer line of lyrics that you def­i­nitely have to remem­ber? What about the new project idea that you want to present to your band members?

Any time you have a music related thought or idea, track it in your mas­ter idea col­lec­tion mind map. It’s out of your head and stored, plus you might find con­nec­tions you maybe would NOT have thought of oth­er­wise, e.g. com­bin­ing the killer lyrics line with the newly dis­cov­ered chord progression.

2) Goal Setting

You can cap­ture and track your music related goals. What songs you want to learn, what tech­niques to mas­ter, what skills to develop, which help­ful resources are avail­able to you...

3) Practicing

A mind map can be extremely help­ful in devel­op­ing a mean­ing­ful per­sonal prac­tice plan. Take your musi­cal goal set­ting mind map and then branch out and brain­storm all your action steps that help you reach your goal. You’ll quickly have a visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of all the steps needed that you can tweak and adapt to your situation.

4) Teaching

Mind maps work great for teach­ing. First of all, you can cre­ate a some­what ideal teach­ing plan that reminds you of all the impor­tant tech­niques and con­cepts you def­i­nitely want to con­vey to every student.

I also cre­ate a mind map with a spe­cific teach­ing plan based on the goals of the indi­vid­ual stu­dent. This gives me a lot of flex­i­bil­ity in quickly decid­ing what to tackle next with my stu­dent and also ensures that noth­ing falls through the cracks.

5) Repertoire

How about cre­at­ing your reper­toire mind map? You can track the songs you’ve already mas­tered — develop set lists for your solo or band gigs — or write down song titles you want to learn in the future.

6) Wishlists

The fancy new syn­the­sizer, the vin­tage gui­tar, new soft­ware, use­ful and/or inter­est­ing books — store your wishes in a mind map. Spruce it up with col­or­ful pic­tures and all the rel­e­vant back­ground infor­ma­tion like links to arti­cles or the best deal on the net.

When you have some money to spend, a mind map with all your wishes in front of you can help you to assess and pri­or­i­tize your needs, so you don’t blow your money but rather make an invest­ment into truly needed equip­ment instead.

7) To Do Lists — Best Practice Checklists

Personally, I don’t use mind map­ping for my daily to do lists. There’s other, more spe­cial­ized tools for that. What I like to cre­ate though are “Best Practice Checklists.” Whenever you have a recur­ring task, why not doc­u­ment the needed steps you take? It’s a pain in the a$§ to do — once. It can save you lots of time over the long haul and helps you pre­vent mak­ing mistakes.

You could have a list with all the things you need to pre­pare and do for play­ing a suc­cess­ful gig — or, all the steps to back up your last record­ing session.

Again, a mind map works great because all the resources like notes, links, files, etc... can be right in front of you.

8) Equipment

Track ser­ial num­bers, pur­chase and insur­ance infor­ma­tion, war­ranties — all the equip­ment related information.

9) “Toolbox”

What do I mean by toolbox?

Create a mind map of all the tools of the trade. This could be a list of play­ing tech­niques on your instru­ment, it could be all the ways to voice a chord or a list of stan­dard arrang­ing techniques.

The main idea is to have some­thing to fall back to in case your mind draws a blank. You could be in a cre­ative rut dur­ing an impor­tant pro­duc­tion ses­sion with a seri­ous dead­line loom­ing over your shoul­der. Definitely not the best time for a cre­ative dry spell. In such a sit­u­a­tion a tool­box mind map could pro­vide you with some ideas to try out. Often that ini­tial spark is all that’s needed to jump start your cre­ativ­ity again.

Next Steps — Start Your Mind Maps

1) If you haven’t already done so, down­load XMind

2) Download the mind map (XMind for­mat) I cre­ated for this post with all the musi­cal uses: Mind Mapping for Musicians (24)

3) Implement the prac­tice of cre­at­ing mind maps into your daily rou­tine. You’ll be glad, you did.

Please leave a com­ment about your own mind map­ping expe­ri­ences. Do you find it use­ful? What kind of insights have you gained from mind map­ping? Any other spe­cial uses that you’d like to share?

Like this blog post? Buy me a cup of tea or leave a tip...

No related posts.

Tagged with: brainstorming • equipment • goal setting • Knowledge Management • mind map • Mind Mapping • organizing • repertoire • teaching • tracking • XMind

Filed under: Creativity • Productivity

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and never miss an update!