Motivation and Discovery (with David Reed, Improvise For Real)

Christopher: When you play music, does it feel like the music is out there somewhere… or does it feel like it’s inside you?

In the next part of the conversation I’ve been sharing, with David Reed from Improvise For Real, we dive into two more of their inspiring and thought-provoking quotes, covering that question and more!

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David: Okay. The next one I see here is: “we need to get back to our original desire to what drew us to musical improvisation in the first place.”

Now that is nice because it’s quite neutral, and so it really invites us to decide for ourselves what that means to us.

So in other words, if you take away all the context and all of the, you know, particular views or attitudes I might have about it, if we just take that sentence on its own, I think it’s something that no one could disagree with.

I think we would all agree that we need to get back to our original desire to what drew us to musical improvisation in the first place.

I think we can all agree that we should never lose sight of what it is we’re actually wanting to do here. And just with that as as preamble, I would love to know what that means to you.

Christopher: To me, what it immediately brings to mind is, the centrality of motivation for adult music learners in particular. And I say adult for a couple of reasons, partly because younger music learners tend to be in some kind of structured system that kind of makes sure they have their lesson every week and they do it for a few years at school or whatever.

And partly because adults have particular psychological, I don’t wanna say “baggage”, but perspectives that they’ve gathered over the years. And we really find that almost more than anything else, what matters is keeping up that motivation and that enthusiasm and that passion for music learning.

And for us at Musical U, we are always bringing people back to this exercise we call the Big Picture Vision exercise. And it’s all about setting a very clear vision for the kind of musician you want to be five years from now.

And to us that puts in place a kind of “North Star” for people, without which they can wander around aimlessly. They can get stuck, they can get frustrated. They can lose their self-confidence or their self-esteem in music, and they can feel like it’s just not worth continuing.

And this is why, sadly, 95% of people who pick up an instrument as an adult have quit within a couple of years. When you have that North Star and it’s written in a way and created in a way that really deeply resonates with you, and as you put it here, ties to that original desire, the genuine desire. Not all of the you should learn this, or you should learn that, or that this YouTube tutorial said this last week, but really what got you excited about it in the first place and got you to go into the music shop or go online and buy your first instrument, which as an adult is quite an intimidating thing to do.

When it’s based on that, it just becomes such a powerful driving force that you can keep coming back to, to kind of reset your direction and reinvigorate your passion for the process of becoming that musician you want to be. Mm,

David: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All beautiful thoughts and very well, well articulated. Well explained.

Yeah. I mean, I think that it can be taken in a very innocent way as, as something that’s so self-evident that you know that it’s just common sense, right?

But it’s an invitation. It’s an invitation to honour whatever it is that you wanted to do, whatever it is that truly drew you.

In my case, I was talking about musical improvisation, but we could broaden it to practicing music in general.

But whatever it is that that meant to you, there’s some reason why you wanted to do. And all I’m saying is don’t lose sight of that reason. Don’t lose sight of that dream. Don’t get so caught up in what you should learn and what you shouldn’t do, and my teacher says, I need to get better at this and I don’t have good time and I gotta… whatever.

All that stuff is fine, but you are the ultimate and absolute power in your life. This is your life. You get to do what you wanna do and whatever it is that you were hungry for or that you dreamed of, you know, when you, when you first got that idea to go to the music shop and buy an instrument where you first wanted to learn to improvise.

You’re the only one that can keep all these activities on track, moving toward that goal in a real way, not an abstract way, but a real way. And it takes a lot of correction. There’s a lot of course correction, and the student is the only one who can do it. The teachers can’t do it for you.

You’re the one that has to honour yourself and honour whatever it is you dream of doing in music, and make sure that we’re all serving you in moving in that direction.

Christopher: Sure. Well, I feel like we could go on for days, if not weeks, but let’s do one more, shall we? What’s the next one?

David: Okay. So the next one that I’d like to talk about with you: Your real relationship with music is inside of you, and this is where your most profound discoveries will take place. And I can start, or you can start. What do you prefer?

Christopher: You go ahead.

David: Okay. So I think that because we make music with instruments and because some of the concepts that people want to teach us are written down, we often have our first experiences with music, kind of managing a lot of things that are outside of us. You’re playing this big clunky instrument. You’re looking at sheet music on a music stand. Maybe you’re listening to a backing track. Maybe you’re watching a video at a website somewhere.

But there’s all this stuff that’s outside of you. And you know, in a very deep and kind of unconscious way, there’s a story that’s being kind of etched into your mind there, which is that music takes place outside of you, the music that you wanna express is outside of you. It’s somewhere in that sheet music. It’s somewhere in that theory book. You know? It’s somewhere in this instrument.

And that’s not true at all. That’s not true at all. And so a lot of people have this idea. They feel very small, you know, because they don’t understand the relative importance of these things. They’ve got kind of the whole thing out of balance. They think that all the value is outside of them.

And this is like deep psychological stuff. You could say that this goes even to our identity. It’s not even just about music, but that there’s nothing inside me that is inherently perfect and beautiful and valuable and worthy, right?

That I have to somehow acquire those things. And none of that is true. So for, for example, people will often, beginning musicians will often see the world as “Well, when I listen to music, I feel this deep, intense pleasure. There is something in those sounds that just touches my soul, and I just wanna be a musician, I wanna play”, right?

But then on the other hand “I’m not a musician. I don’t know anything because I haven’t gone through the books yet and I don’t have the sheet music”, you know, whatever. All their skills, they don’t have together yet. All this stuff that’s outside of them, they see all the barriers and the difficulties there, and so they feel they don’t have anything.

Now, what I’m trying to say is you already have almost everything that intense pleasure that you feel when you’re listening to the music. That’s your genius right there. And that’s everything. That is everything.

What you need to learn in order to be able to channel that through your music and give that same gift to other people is so easy to learn because you don’t need to master our entire musical system! A couple of chords and a few notes and you can connect to exactly that pleasure that you feel in the music.

And so that’s, that was, that was what I was trying to talk about there.

Christopher: Oh, I love that. I, I almost don’t want to add anything cause you put that so well!

I think the interesting part is how easy that makes it to see how things go so wrong, right?

Because as we’ve talked about, this inner understanding, this ability to audiate or hear in your mind, to feel what the notes are gonna sound like before you play them is just missing from how people learn music 99% of the time.

And so if you imagine that happening and you’re there with your instrument, no one’s ever shown you how to feel the notes or hear the notes or imagine in your head what it’s gonna sound like. All you’re left with is “I’ll press the buttons and then I’ll find out how it sounds”.

And so it’s immediately that external thing. You know, I press the buttons, it creates the music out there. I can enjoy it or not. I can be happy that I got it right or not. But there’s no sense that the music is coming from inside you in a really deep and meaningful way.

And I should, you know, add a footnote there that okay, there is a level of expression and intonation and playing with feeling that can come out in interpreting written music for sure, absolutely.

And that’s the one spot where a lot of musicians do find some fulfillment and some sense of self-expression.

But what we are talking about is, you know, if you are truly trying to bring out your own music from inside you, you’ve gotta have that inner piece in place to have any chance.

And I love that this quote really puts the spotlight on that and says that relationship is inside you and your role as a music learner is to figure out how to bring that out into the world.

David: Yeah. And thank you for expanding the conversation to include people who play from written sheet music, because I think the same thing applies.

That even if you’re playing the notes on the page, you know, from the beautiful and brilliant and and deeply sensitive people who have dedicated their entire lives to playing classical music, it is not the same thing to hear one of them play those notes on the page or to hear me stumble through those notes on a page.

And it’s not just about playing the notes correctly. It’s about the human emotion that’s transmitted through the playing of those notes, right?

And so that’s another place where, even if that’s your art form, I would still argue that your greatest asset in that art form is still your own ability to feel all those subtle sensations and to enjoy them.

Even if you’re interpreting Mozart, you’re not gonna be able to do it just following the advice of your coach. When a coach says “play this note louder”, I’m sorry, but that’s just not gonna cut it. You have to be able to hear and feel in your own body exactly how much louder you wanna play that note.

And that’s just to pick one simple example, but you just can’t… Imagine playing a classical music concert and you’ve got those ear protectors on that they use in the airports on the runway, so you can’t hear a thing. It doesn’t matter how much, how great your coaching is and how much you know, you’re not gonna be able to play that music and make it really sing, and touch people’s hearts.

And so that’s another example of what we’re talking about, that your greatest resource as a musician, whether you’re improvising or whether you’re playing written notes on a page, really your greatest asset is this love of music that you have inside of you.

And so, if you’ve been at, if you’ve been drawn to music learning, if you are at this point in your life, you know, taking real steps and making an effort to have a music practice in your life, I’m just trying to say that that’s the magic right there. And that what we need to do in the music learning is to, is to help you tap into that. It’s not to replace that with a bunch of other rules and ideas about what you should play. It’s to enable you to connect that place of deep joy and pleasure and intuitive understanding of music, that you follow music and you feel the emotions. And to connect that to your instruments, so that you’re able to also express all of that on your instrument, to allow other people to feel all those same things.

Christopher: Absolutely. Perfect!

Well, David, I regretfully, I think need to draw things to a close there. We’ve only covered half of the quotes and that’s exciting ‘cause it means I’m gonna try and tempt you back for a part two conversation and we can look at the others someday soon.

Tell our audience where can they go if they want to know more about Improvise For Real and the things we’ve talked about today.

David: Yeah, improviseforreal.com. You know, that’s the single place. We have tried to create a complete learning system based on the philosophy that we’re talking about, which is to lay out the raw materials of music in an organised way with the activities, every step of the way that allow you to really get into these things and get to know them and gain mastery and learn to express your own music with them and find your voice.

But that journey is quite a long one, and so you can actually go from this very simplistic kind of practicing or environment that I’m describing now to you. You can get all the way up to playing over those jazz standards. It’s just a matter of having somebody lay out the journey for you. But also kind of getting, you know, a method that aligns with your values and that gives you the opportunity to really get to know all these sounds for yourself, learn to recognise them by ear while you’re going through that path, integrating that with your ability to express these sounds, connecting that with your own creativity and the music that you choose to express with these sounds.

That’s what we’re trying to do and people can learn all about it at improviseforreal.com.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, it’s always such a pleasure to get the chance to talk with you, David. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today.

David: Thank you very much, Christopher. It’s always a pleasure, truly, with you.

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Christopher: That was such a fun conversation!

We published it in four parts, so if you missed any of the previous episodes, I’ll put links in the shownotes, and you can go back and catch up.

As you will have gathered, that was the final part of that conversation that David and I had a little while ago, but we actually only covered half of their quotes from Instagram! So if you’d like us to get together again and dive into the others, do leave a comment on this episode or send an email to us at hello@musicalitynow.com, and let us know.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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