The Scale That Keeps On Giving (Coaches Corner, Episode 11)

Christopher: Did you know there’s one scale which is even more important and powerful than the major scale? And the best part is it’s not more complex or more advanced, it’s actually simpler… Andy reveals all in this week’s episode of Coaches Corner!

So before I queue up the episode for us today, just a quick recap of the last couple of weeks. We’re doing three episodes a week now, so it’s been five episodes since I last did a recap.

We had parts three and four of my conversation with David Reed from Improvise For Real, which was inspired by these really punchy quotes they had put out on Instagram. And we got together and chatted for 80 or 90 minutes about these quotes, and then we’ve been publishing them in parts. So parts three and four, the final couple of parts went out over the last two weeks, and if you missed those, I highly recommend checking them out.

David dropped some such wisdom and insight about what it means to improvise, what it means to be creative, where the musical instinct comes from, and I love that conversation and from the feedback we’ve been getting, a lot of you really enjoyed it, too.

Then we had our mini-interview and masterclass excerpt from Jeremy Ryan Mossman, focusing on Body Based Voice. So he brings all of this experience of yoga and Feldenkrais and biotensegrity to learning to sing and really getting in touch with your voice and what your voice can do. And in that mini-interview and the clip I shared from his masterclass, you got a real taste of how his approach is so different, and it’s really added a lot, I think, to how we present singing here at Musical U, our members really got a lot out of that session.

So definitely two episodes to check out, if you do sing and you want to know more about how to explore your voice, or if you don’t sing because you think you have a bad voice or you think you sound bad when you sing. Definitely two episodes to check out.

And then our last episode was an “Inside The Book” one. I gave you a sneak peek into the audiation chapter. Audiation, meaning imagining music, hearing music in your mind.

We sometimes call it “the secret music practice skill” here at Musical U because it’s something you can do to develop your musicality, practice your music in a really powerful way when you’re not at your instrument and without even anyone knowing you’re doing it. So it’s a lot of fun when you get into the habit of using audiation. And in that little sneak peek from the new Musicality book, I shared the kind of benefits and implications of developing your how sophisticated, how versatile, how powerful your audiation ability is.

If you want to know more about the book, musicalitybook.com is the place to go. And I’ll have links to all those episodes in the shownotes alongside this one.

So on to today’s episode. It’s a Coaches Corner one, where I get together with our Next Level coaches and them to share tidbits and insights to help you in your musical life.

This time around, Zac explains how and why to take back your musical authority from the sheet music or notation, where you might not even realise you’re currently putting it.

Andy shares the experience of “pentatonic joy”. So coming back to my opening, the pentatonic scale is worth going deep, deep, deep on. And we do at Musical U, our members get a lot out of it, and Andy shares some really great examples of why it’s such a versatile, powerful, valuable scale to get intimately familiar with.

And then Camilo reveals a surprising way to become a better sight reader.

All that and more coming up in this week’s episode of Coaches Corner!

And I’ll just throw in a reminder, as I do, to try and grab on to one little tidbit, one comment or insight or idea or new way of looking at things. Take it away and apply it in your own musical life.

That’s it from me, I’ll see you on our next episode. And here we go with Coaches Corner!

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Christopher: Hey, hey! We are back with another round of Coaches Corner, where I get together with some of our Next Level coaches and ask them to share some kind of nugget, a tip or trick or insight or technique, something that can help you in your musical life.

Today, I’m joined by coaches Andy Portas, Zac Bailey, and Camilo Suárez. Welcome, guys, good to have you with me!

Let’s kick things off this time with mister ZSonic, Zac, what’s new in coaching lately? What can you share?

Zac: Hey, Christopher. Thank you, excited to be here.

Yeah, I have a really cool insight today, I think, and it’s about sheet music. We had a client who recently took back their musical authority from the sheet music.

They realised that they had been looking at sheet music as this thing, they put all their authority in the sheet music. The sheet music said “you have to play all these exact notes in this exact order at this exact tempo, this exact meter, and this exact key. And if you diverge from that even 1%, you’ve completely failed – and you’re fired!”

That’s how they’re, like, viewing the sheet music, as this authoritative dictator that was telling them exactly what to do. And if they didn’t do exactly that thing, then they somehow didn’t learn music, or, I don’t know!

But they realised that they’re the ones that make the music. The sheet music does not make the music. They make the music. The sheet music can give you a map of maybe sounds and options that you could possibly explore. But you don’t have to use it exactly the way it’s written. You can take things from it.

You can, instead of asking “what does this sheet music expect of me?” You can ask “well, what can I do with this?”

We’re all at different levels, and when you can look at sheet music and say “well, what can I do with this?” Then you can learn from it. No matter how advanced it is and no matter what level that you’re at, because you can extract something from there that you can play with it.

You know, it’s like if you go to your friend’s house and they have all these toys, you might not be able to play with all the toys, but you can choose a couple toys.

So maybe you just choose, like, the root notes of the chord from the left hand on the bass clef if you’re playing the piano, or you just focus on maybe the first note of every measure, or maybe you slow it down. Maybe if you’re, you know, you have some more musical understanding, you play it in different keys, you maybe just take the melody out and then make your own chord progression with it.

So they, my client, realised that, you know what? I don’t have to do exactly what this sheet music says. I make the music. I can make my own decisions. I’m an adult! So I don’t have to just do what people tell me all the time, you know?

So I think that was really awesome to take back that inner authority and that musical authority and say, you know what? The sheet music, no matter what is printed on that sheet music, it never makes any sounds.

I have to be the one that pushes buttons on an instrument or plucks strings or makes a vocal sound for there to be actual music. So the sheet music needs you. The sheet music, without you, there is no music.

I think that’s a really cool insight that they had.

Christopher: I love that. That’s powerful.

Yeah, and it’s… I think it’s one of the reasons I got so excited about the Creative Superlearning approach we take in Next Level in particular. Because I think in both of those contexts, creativity and superlearning, we had kind of seen over the years that we really had to persuade people to get out of that black-and-white right-and-wrong mentality that the notation so often gets people into, where they just think about getting it right.

And, you know, when we taught Expansive Creativity and showed them how they could come up with their own musical ideas, they could bring that back to the pieces they were playing as written and play them a lot better. And similarly, in superlearning, like so much of the contextual interference stuff is about changing what you play compared to what’s written, but it turns out to be the route to playing what’s written at the highest level.

So I love that. I love that reframing, that the sheet music is not the boss of you, and it’s nothing without you.

You are the music maker. That’s awesome. Thank you, Zac.

Zac: Yes, thank you.

Christopher: How about you, Andy? What’s new in coaching?

Andy: Well, just over the last couple of weeks, one of my clients has been experiencing something I can only describe as “pentatonic joy”!

She’s been working through the Winter season [of Living Music] and as part of the Winter season, it starts off looking at how the pentatonic scale is actually related to the circle of fourths and fifths.

But then there’s one lesson in there where when you’re doing the lessons, you’re directed to look at the scale in a slightly different way. So you’re looking at the modes of the scale rather than just starting from the root of the scale all the time.

And this particular client absolutely fell in love with the second mode of the pentatonic scale. So we’re talking about the pentatonic scale, and just to kind of make this clear, we’ve got C, D, E, G, A. In this case, this was going to be rooted and resolving back to the D. So it was D, E, G, A, C, which gives it a completely different kind of sensation when you actually hear that.

And like I say, my client completely fell head-over-heels in love with this, with this sound. So I said to her, well, how about you write a piece of music using this? Which she duly did, and she came up with this wonderful, evocative kind of air that was just gorgeous sounding. It really was.

So the next step she’s going to do, she’s going to then, now she’s written the melody, she’s going to do the chords, she’s going to harmonise it, and she’s going to write some lyrics to it and then record it and hopefully share it with the world.

But it’s truly the scale that keeps on giving. I think it absolutely is.

I mean, the other thing is that you’re not forced to kind of stick within that, within that scale as well, because there’s no third within the scale. You can actually play around with the minor and major sound within that. When you come to harmonise, or if you’re improvising, you can kind of do various things in there.

So it’s, I can’t recommend playing about with the scale enough, really. I mean, the usual, like I say, is the major and minor pentatonic, but there’s so much more in there.

Christopher: Wonderful. 100%, yeah.

I think the two things that stand out to me there are, number one, you know, we always preach the pentatonic, and, you know, outside the world of Musical U people think about the major scale and the minor scale, and maybe if you’re a guitarist, you think about your minor pentatonic for soloing.

But we’ve just found how powerful that is as the skeleton of everything else, while also being so much simpler and so much more easy as a gateway to creating and improvising and recognizing notes by ear and all that good stuff.

So if you’re not already a pentatonic convert, spend some more time with the pentatonic scale.

And then the other thing is the modes. Yeah, it was a really surprising thing to me back when I was taking lessons with a Kodály instructor. We worked our way up to the solfa for the pentatonic, and I was expecting us to then continue to the full major scale.

But we spent like, six weeks just doing the modes of the pentatonic. And, you know, I was familiar with the theory of modes, but honestly, I hadn’t spent much time doing much with them. And I know a lot of people watching or listening to this probably feel a bit of intimidation around modes, and they maybe get the basic idea, but don’t spend a lot of time with them.

But the pentatonic modes, they all have such different characters and they’re all so simple and elegant. So, yeah, another really great thing to play around with.

Andy: Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, the other thing as well is you can build chords out of them, which is something a lot of people don’t kind of realise. So you’re kind of, you’re stuck in maybe fourths or fifths rather than thirds, which instantly starts sounding kind of more filmic, which, again, is a wonderful kind of way of, kind of getting into composing. The scale that keeps on giving!

Christopher: We might have to trademark that phrase! I love it, awesome.

Camilo, how about you? What’s new in coaching?

Camilo: Well, this week we had a question about sight-reading.

I have a client who is very interested, and one of his objectives is to become a better sight reader. He wants to be able to sit down in front of reading music and being able to play the music of Chopin with more ease.

And he felt he’s getting there, but it still takes a lot of effort to do that. And the question was about, how do I become a sight-reader that can do this with more ease? So we started using solfa, saying “let’s get away from the piano for a moment. Let’s take a phrase and sing that phrase using solfa”.

Take a break, come back, and the results start to happen. In a way, it feels conter-intuitive to walk away from your instrument to become a better sight-reader, but it actually saves us a ton of time to be able to do that.

Not only that, but it’s just quite enjoyable to sing and get that intuitive understanding of the music that we were playing.

Christopher: Perfect. Yeah. And it comes back a little to that Creative Superlearning thing, I think, in that with the pure sheet music mentality, you approach sight-reading as I must get better at obeying the instructions on the page, right? And so you wouldn’t dream of doing anything away from the sheet music and your instrument!

But really, you know, the heart of the learning is constructing that mental representation of the music. And there are so many different ways to do that.

So I love that. That’s a really ninja side way into sight-reading more easily. Fantastic.

Well, as always, you guys bring such a rich variety of ideas every session. I always look forward to these. Thank you for sharing these nuggets from recent coaching.

We will see you on the next round of Coaches Corner. Cheers!

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