yeah theres a term for this folks. very validated over time https://kagi.com/search?q=copywork

The Beatles spent YEARS only playing other people's music. Five/six hours a night performing covers. It seems self-evident that gaining such an intimate understanding of chord structures and melodies and harmonies from OTHERS helped them when they eventually created their own songs.

I think the same ideas can be applied to any hobby/job/industry. Picasso first learned how to paint a realistic apple... Wozniak spent years making calculators ... and I'm sure there are modern plumbing techniques created by someone who spent years learning the traditional techniques and decided to try something better. (Are there any famous, non-video game plumbers? There should be.)

Ignore the haters and copy other people's stuff.

It's unfortunate that the time we're most vulnerable to the scars of unreasonable criticism is also the age we're most likely to get it from our peers. Glad you kept going!

The best thing one can ever learn is to ignore the opinions of people who cannot do the thing you are doing better than you.

I've struggled to teach this to jazz students, I know when I was a kid I read the same kind of advice in guitar magazines, and while I don't think that the theory-first advocates are malevolent, I think most of them were not serious jazz players and were getting paid to deliver a monthly column.

The analogy I've tried to use in teaching is that learning to play jazz is like being a comedian; when your skills are at their peak you're going to be inventing jokes regularly, but in the decades before you get there, you're going to be delivering other people's jokes putting a little of your own spin on them. The delivery matters a lot, and like good jazz playing it's pretty much impossible to write a book called "How to be Funny" that wouldn't just be an academic analysis rather than an instructional guide.

I struggled with jazz for the reasons I've alluded to above, and it wasn't until I started studying with a teacher who just had me memorize hundreds of standards that I got my playing together. We definitely talked about the technical bits of what was happening in the tunes, but those were really just interesting observations; repeatedly playing them in a group setting after woodshedding them at home between lessons, then taking a lot of solos was really what made it happen.

It really makes me happy to see up-and-coming killer players like Patrick Bartley espousing this same approach. Yeah it means you're going to spend thousands of hours memorizing tunes, but if that's not fun then playing jazz isn't going to be fun either.

> Something you hear often in the jazz community, especially from experienced pros is "everything you need to know about theory is in the songs".

The advice of just listen/play music that I often read is imho a bad advice. You would not give people data about orbits and expect them to discover by themselves newton's law without never teaching the laws.

Of course music theory is not a scientific theory, and not only theory by itself is not enough (in both cases) but too much theory before practice is bad. And of course listening and practicing a lot of music is extremely important.

But who is going to progress faster: the student that knows what a chord is and how they are built or the student that is just listening to music ?

The same applies to learning languages.

You can learn a lot from textbooks... or you can use textbooks to give you the absolute bare minimum, and then just use the language itself repeatedly.

This is an interesting thought. I've been learning how to paint some things and there are a lot of youtube tutorials where someone paints a thing and tells you how to do each step, but my issue is always "what if I want to change something?".

I feel like if I don't know why they chose to do a specific thing, I won't know how to properly alter it.

I've played jazz for about 45 years, and admittedly I'm not steeped in theory. I do know a massive number of tunes.

The people I've known who have made practical use of theory, mainly used it to help them streamline composition and arrangement. This I appreciate because I enjoy playing original material. Of course theory isn't telling them what to write, but perhaps it helps them come up with more coherent ideas more quickly.

There are Jazz Standards which people have tried to incorporate into various books and lists of what songs you should know to effectively play in a group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jazz_standards

You do need some theory in there though, no? I mean guitarrists paying no attention to theory only to have eureka moments with sort of basic stuff is pretty much a meme at this point.

Your video is so pedagogically beautiful. The subtext of what you’re doing in those two minutes hints deeply at the cyclical, iterative process practiced by most engineers and many other creatives. Concise, illustrative, memorable. I’ll be showing this to students regularly. Well done.

What programming language is this?

nice job

try turning down the attack

It always amuses me when you look at what some bands were emulating and how far from it they ended up. A few notable cases include Yes (Simon & Garfunkel), Genesis (The Bee Gees) and Sheryl Crow (80s Genesis).

if you like coding and music, there are many many languages like strudel, tidal cycle, sonic pi, sardine, renardo or glicol that could interest you (and many even lower level)

There used to be a series of book called "Learn code the hard way". It was basically exactly this, you would have a bunch of code, and you were expected to retype it. The examples would progressively increase in complexity.

It helped me learn C 10 years ago when I was a student. Sadly, I doubt it's still relevant nowadays.

When I was tutoring freshman computer science, I used to do some live coding demos on their computer, but use swear words for pretty much every variable and string. They saw the code, they would have to attempt at least to understand the code, and then they would have to destroy the code so they wouldn't accidentally send the professor something laden with swear words. Good times

I've always wondered how much is gained through the act of re-typing (in a positive sense). For example, does the process itself help embed the concepts?

I've always liked the idea that familiarity doesn't breed repetition, rather repetition breeds familiarity (I think this is a quote but can't find the source now) and it's always made me wonder how much is gained from some of the repetitive parts of re-typing, such as does this help embed concepts?

I was wondering about this because there is a part in the blogpost that specifically says his developer friend would not even do real-time copying from the other screen. Personally, I think that makes more sense to try to learn because I think if I am good enough at typing, I can get into a flow state where I’m just typing code that I’m not really making much sense of. There are moments where I realize that I don’t understand what I’m typing and that’s when I have to decide to keep transcribing or to slow down and read documentation.

It is also just a little bit tricky to do this if you are working with an LLM that is able to add additional code or do some other kind of refactoring.

That was what we had to do back in the day: Most computer magazines would have pages of code listings that you were expected to type into your computer to get the software to work. When SoftTalk came out in the mid-80s, it was revolutionary in that it only talked about software, it didn’t include program listings.

100% - mixed with intellisense you get to explore a lib a lot more than just pasting a whole section

I grew up in the Amiga era when we would type code from magazines to write games. I learned a ton debugging those programs.

As an example of this in the wild a few years ago I attended an online course teaching HTML, CSS and a sprinkle of JS where most attendees had their first encounter with a source code editor there. One person used to retype over and over work they've already done in a previous session, sort of like karate katas in a way. At the time it felt a bit silly to me but in hindsight it totally made sense.

For something in a similar vein but more short form there's HackerType:

https://www.hackertype.dev/

I'm really happy to see that there is something actually valid to this repetitive practice!

It's a real two-edged sword. On the one hand we claim to value originality. On the other, people will eschew originality if it hasn't been validated by some kind of gatekeeper.

Conventional wisdom among musicians is that the best way to attract an audience and make money is to play covers or familiar works. It's hard to get an audience to show up for "originals," whether it's in Classical or contemporary music.

It's hard to get people to visit a restaurant that's not part of a chain.

Disclosure: Musician in an "originals" band. ;-)

I'm a longtime fan of Nicholson Baker's work since I first read The Mezzanine. His close attention to detail and his careful choice of words really impressed me.

Non-referral link:

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1984881396/

> You spend a lot of time memorizing note sequences, a good amount of time nailing the exact timing of lines to make them sound right and usually some time working out the challenging technical aspects of a song you're not at the level to play yet.

> it's much faster to do a combination of scale/chord/arpeggio and technical challenge drills.

Classical musicians that wasted their time training on existing note sequences learning pieces intentionally picked to be at the edge of their current skill level are going to _hate_ when they hear about this one weird trick ;)

It depends on your objective. The process you describe is excellent for achieving technical mastery. Less so for compositional mastery, but it can still be educational to see written parts up close.

What it wont prepare you for at all is impovisational mastery and just jamming over some chord changes.

Also, I don’t know many musicians who would completely ignore technical exercises like scales, chord voicings, and arpeggios.

So, it depends on what kind of musician you’re trying to be.

Also Hunter S. Thompson:

> If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me - so yea I wanted to learn from the best I guess.

Yup, though he was also intentional about not copying word-for-word, but rather trying to predict the next token (or phrase).

https://muldoon.cloud/2025/05/17/frankin-llm.html

> Recreating it 1:1 taught me more than all of the learning I've done.

Which nicely fits into the idea that repetition leads to familiarity, and that the act of re-creating those examples is a form of study and source of learning. I'm not sure what the name for the 3D modelling equivalent of a musical etude is but perhaps this seems like that.

Incidentally, I've also been trying to learn some amount of 3D modelling (with Blender) and in some cases have got to, say, half way through some structured courses before having to pause for a bit. After finding some more time to get back to it it seemed easier to just start over instead of pick up where I left off, and not only did the process seem a bit easier the second time around, being able to refresh and reinforce general concepts and specific techniques felt very valuable.

Incidentally, Mike Acton's talk 'Solving the Right Problems for Engine Programmers' [1] includes a part on deliberate practice with small focused examples.

Wax on, wax off...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B00hV3wmMY

Drawing too. ...take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters. [...] take care to select the best one [...] If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted you any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gather flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns. --Cennino Cennini, about 1400.

Musicians are still trained this way. The tunes in the Suzuki violin books are the ultimate covers. You can go to a beginning violin recital anywhere in the world and hear exactly the same tunes.

Musicians still use transcriptions of past recordings for their own performances.

Jazz musicians learn "standards." Even jazz improvisation, which you'd think should be 100% original, is taught using virtually the same short list of tunes, such as "Autumn Leaves."

Many musicians don't bother with original material at all, until they're absolutely sick of the standards.

If no one is telling you you suck, you're not doing anything interesting.

This turned out to be Comcast marking the site as malware. I reported to the co-working space to get it unblocked.

On Dwitter (JS codegolfing/demoscene site) the philosophy is to make it as accessible as possible to remix someone's demo and post it. Even if not directly editing, one could reverse engineer the code to gain new understanding which can then be incorporated into the next effort