You looked at the title of: “How To Learn Music Fast: Treat It Like A Video Game” and probably said to yourself that treating the wonderful, magical art of composing and creating music as a mere game to be bullshit, right? Well, I’m here to show you why having that point of view with music isn’t a bad thing. Below are some reasons as to why I believe treating music creation like a video game is beneficial to anyone in any field of music

It Helps To Retain Knowledge

One of the first benefits of treating music creation as a game is the fact that it helps to retain knowledge. The reason I say this is because information and knowledge are stored in the brain much more easily when you figure out a way to make it relatable to something you’ll remember.

Have you ever been in class before and absorbed absolutely nothing the teacher said because it wasn’t done in a way which connected with you mentally? Or have you ever read a book and failed to stored the information it possessed because of the fact there was no way to make it applicable to your daily life? These two examples I feel represent a disconnect that comes when we are unable to feel compelled to retain the information we consume because it can’t be applied or remember in a way that we feel connected to it.

Therefore, in the instance of treating music as a video game, it’s easier to retain that knowledge because most of us, even if we don’t play video games, find entertainment in playing games. And if you treat the process of consuming knowledge as gaining more experience points, it makes sitting down through multiple videos, blog posts, books and so on more enjoyable as you’ll feel like a character in their own story leveling up with each new training zone they go through. Thus, it makes you more immersed as you feel like the work you are putting in makes you grow more powerful with each step that you are taking and you are more motivated to retain that knowledge and seek out more information as it’s easy to get immersed in a game.

Hence, why you should treat music like a video game comes down to the simple fact that it changes your perception of the knowledge you consume. If you are treating every bit of information you consume from the world as potential experience points to level up your character, you’ll become addicted to it and it won’t seem tedious or boring to go through hours of content and you’ll ultimately keep the information than if you were just treating it like going to school and listening to some boring hack explain things to you in the dullest way possible.

It Forces You To Create Goals

Treating music creation like a video game causes you to create goals because of the fact that each week there is a new skill to learn and focus on. And, through this habit of trying to spread your character sheet for as wide as you can, it forces you to plan out how you have to tackle each of these obstacles that you face. In my case, it helped because I outlined an action plan of how I was going to learn the different parts of the music production process. So my outline would look something like this:

“Frost’s Outline

Goal: Learn percussion

How To Achieve Goal:

– Research videos on youtube and read blog posts on google
– Retain that knowledge and store it in your muscle memory by immediately practicing yourself in FL Studio to keep it in your head
– Get feedback from others and repeat until you get decent at it
– Level up your character sheet and move to the next goal”

It’s a basic version of my outline, but the point is that it causes me to go into a frame of mind where I have to create a constant series of small goals to win or achieve in order to move on to the next level and level up my character. And, through doing this, you feel more motivated to continue the art of music creation because it creates internal momentum with your motivation as you always feel like you are progressing as a character and person. Since if you had the goal of “I’M GOING TO MASTER EVERYTHING IN ROCK MUSIC” at once….you wouldn’t make it because you’d have no smaller wins to help carry you when you feel stressed out or stressed that you aren’t making progress.

It’s the same line of thinking that helped me go from 335 pounds to about 185 as of writing this. I celebrated the small wins and that motivated me to keep up the habit of keeping my body fit and watching what I ate so I could sustain myself long enough to lose the weight and stop being fat because I hated that reality I was in and I treated it like a game with goals.

It Forces You To Stay Focused

There are many times where you reach a level in a game and there comes a point where you have all the knowledge of how to deal with that level stored in your head. Now comes the part where you actually have to get the muscle memory required to execute that knowledge into reality.

This is where the repetitive nature of treating things like a game comes in handy. I say this because if you get stuck in the music creation process, you’ll have more motivation from the previous experiences acquired to push through it. As, more than anything else, it will just seem as if you are stuck on a hard level and you just need to repeat until you get it right.

And when it comes to music? Getting things to go correctly can take many, many, many, many times when trying to get a sound to come out just right, to get that note just right or to pull that melody out of your head and hear it just as you desired.

So, when you re-frame your mind to treat it like a hard level in a game, you’ll be more prone to stay focused and endured as you know that once you eventually overcome that obnoxiously hard level that the benefits of enduring it will be far more worth it then quitting it because you’ll have invested in so much time by this point that quitting just seems silly.

So, to conclude, treating music creation like a video game has the probability of giving you more motivation, better memory and a guided sense of focus if these lessons are applied correctly. Use them as you see fit.