2nd week of Tiny Experiments

Sarah Lyngra
Mar 31, 2025
2 min read

It's the second week of running Tiny Experiments and this is what's happening so far.

My first Tiny Experiment is to write 2-4 bars of music every day for 15 days. I still have 3 days to go. I had a lesson with Elliot Deutsch, my band arranging teacher, last Friday. This was the first lesson in a while where I had something completed to work on.

When an experiment is done, you're supposed to evaluate its success with a Plus-Minus-Next chart. Even though I'm not quite finished with the 15 days, here's a summary.

Plus- consistently arranged or wrote music every day and had something to show for the work.

Minus- I need better guidelines on what specific output I want to produce. 2-4 bars isn't really enough. Elliot suggested 4-8 bars, because they are more likely to be a complete phrase. The 4-8 bars could either be writing music or orchestrating it. I didn't create space to evaluate what I wrote, or make corrections. Should that count or not as part of the output?

Next- when this tiny experiment is done I think I am going to continue, but change it to "I will write or orchestrate 4-8 bars of music daily for 14 days." I haven't figured out when I will be correcting and editing the output.

In the meantime, several of my students are participating in Tiny Experiments as well.

Here are some examples:

I will use the metronome for practice daily for 14 days.
I will play around the circle on the 2-5-1-4 jazz progressions daily for 14 days.
I will listen to jazz standards daily for 7 days. (This student is going on vacation.
I will play 3 note scales around the circle for 7 days.

I've committed to running experiments and writing about it weekly for 3 months.

Each week my students are running Tiny Experiments, and when they come to their following lessons we are checking what's working with a Plus-Minus-Next analysis.

When I asked the woman with the metronome experiment how it was going, she said she wasn't using it. It turns out that she's a student, and she wasn't using it because she wasn't getting to the instrument at all. That's a reflection of time, and doesn't negate using a metronome.

Here's a first pass at tracking sheets you can use with your students:

Comments are always welcome and of course, I would love to hear about the Tiny Experiments you are running with your students.