the hope with learning an instrument is that it's always an ascent in skill. the thought is every day you play you're better than you were the day before. each time you learn a new song, rhythm, technique, etc., you have increased your net skill by a certain amount. the hope is that it is accumulative. once you've learned a thing you can pack it away and move on to bigger and better things. well...

the sad reality is much like sit-ups music is a use-it-or-lose-it situation. you can spend weeks or months on a particular thing, some songs, a technique, rhythm and inner pulse, etc., but the instant you stop working on them they atrophy. fast. that's a total bummer. it's certainly one reason i personally don't feel like i'm ever progressing.

the problem is the more stuff we learn the more stuff we have to stay on top of in practice. a single practice session could be spent just doing maintenance and whatever you already have learned and you'd likely not even be able to get to it all. this sort of thing has been popping up a lot lately in my own routine and it's becoming painfully clear i have to steam line my practice sessions if i want to maintain, let alone progress. 

over the past few months i've been hammering away at arpeggios... all of the arpeggios. well, all the major and minor, at least. i mean all arpeggios... so that's all keys in all positions. that adds up to a lot of material i've been working on and just like everything else it needs constant maintenance. 

i've spend between 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes every day for the past few months to get this stuff under my fingers and i've done little else. i know i should work on other stuff but i really wanted to get this stuff to a level i felt comfortable with and unfortunately, it has been time consuming. now that i have a really solid handle on them i'll need to maintain that skill but i can't afford to put an hour in every day just keeping the shine on arpeggios.

so i got to thinking about where to put my efforts. i realized that i really only play in  a handful of keys on a daily basis. most of the songs in my repertoir stay within a fairly narrow range of keys and i usually write in one of two keys. i remembered seeing an article a few years ago where someone over at spotify ran an algorithm on pretty much their entire database of music to determine the most common keys used in songs. not surprisingly it's pretty much what you'd expect. 

the top 50% are made up of, in order, G, C, D, A, C#m, Am, F. so i decided i'd use this list as a launching point for focusing my practice since it pretty much lines up with what i already know. i plotted out each key with their respective major and minor arpeggios to see where there is overlap. the the for the vii chords i just listed them as minor because... well, i just don't play diminished, so i don't want to hear it.


i think you can figure it out, but pizzas are major and broccolis are minor. the left are the popular keys descending and along the top are the diatonic chords found in each key listed. already you can see that there is quite a bit less material to work with than trying to cover every key all the time. more importantly, it shows which  arpeggios are in my best interest to get real comfy with. Bm, F#m, A, C, Em, D, and G come up a lot. they appear in at least half of the keys so that's a lot of mileage for one arpeggio. most of the music i write ends up in G or C... it just does, i dunno. those two keys share most of the same chords so there is little work i have to do on top to keep each key fresh. now that's efficient.

arranging the keys in this way really gave me a lot of clarity on what is important and what would be a reasonable amount of material to work on in an average practice session. now, these are the top 6 keys but there are plenty of others, which i'll likely take a look at every now and again but i'm not going to invest too much time on a key which contains arpeggios i realistically may never play ever. ever. 

now, if i can figure out how to streamline the rest of my practice material i'll be in good shape.