Don’t Give Up.

I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but: Don’t Give Up. You can become the musician you’ve been dreaming of, even if right now, all the evidence seems to point to the contrary.

Now I’ve been there! If you’re feeling like that right now, if you’re close to giving up, just know I can relate. In fact, this episode is kind of like the message I would love to be able to send back in time to my past self and share the things I now know could help.

So please know if you’ve been thinking of giving up, if your motivation for music just seems to be totally depleted, that is normal to have happen, but it doesn’t have to.

So I actually had a completely different episode planned for today. So bear with me, I’m winging it a bit! But my intuition told me that somebody out there needed to hear this. Don’t give up.

And if you don’t feel that way right now, if you’re in good musical momentum, awesome. Maybe just stash this episode away for a future day. Because we all go through peaks and troughs in our enthusiasm and our motivation and our faith in ourselves along that musical journey.

I want to lend you my faith today. I want to let you borrow some of the certainty I have that you can succeed.

Now, I may not know you, I don’t know the details of your musical life, but I do know that every single day inside Musical U, we see people having a breakthrough, big or small, that flips them from “oh, I’ll never do this” to “wow, I can really do this after all!”

So the most important thing I want to tell you is that it’s never too late for things to click for you.

And to clue you into the fact that your biggest enemy actually isn’t the slow progress that might be frustrating you. The biggest problem, the biggest challenge, is those times where you walk away completely. And taking a few days off from music practice becomes a few weeks… a few months… Suddenly, your instrument is gathering dust in the corner, sometimes for years or even decades. That is the biggest obstacle to your success.

So I wanted to offer you a few concrete suggestions. If you’re feeling stuck or disheartened or frustrated right now, these are things that I know can really move the needle for you and help you get back into thriving in music.

So, first of all, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention your Big Picture Vision.

This is an exercise we encourage really firmly at Musical U. Because if you don’t know where you’re trying to get to. If you don’t know what success looks like for you in music, if you’ve been working away but you don’t really know where you’re trying to get to or what you’re trying to accomplish, you are really susceptible to that rollercoaster of motivation where you get a bit of enthusiasm, you get into some good momentum, you get into a good practice routine, and then it just kind of peters out.

When you are 100% crystal clear on your goal and where you’re trying to get to as a musician, the kind of musician you want to become, motivation becomes so much easier.

So I’ve done a whole episode on this quite recently. I’ll put a link in the shownotes that walks you through that exercise. But when you’re crystal clear on your Big Picture Vision in music, you’re much less susceptible to those motivation lows that can cause you to want to give up.

Then the two biggies I should mention are really the two things we specialize in at Musical U. Not coincidentally! Often, one or the other really is the missing piece for musicians. You might be working really diligently at learning your instrument, learning songs or pieces, putting in the daily practice, but if you’re not doing both of these two things, you are making a fraction of the progress you could be. And it’s kind of no wonder you might be getting disheartened with the results you’re getting.

So the first one is musicality training, and the second is superlearning. You can slave away with all of the books, courses, memberships, teachers, lessons you can imagine, but unless you’re doing those two things, you’re just not going to get the results you’ve probably been dreaming of.

Without superlearning, you are literally wasting 90% of your practice time, even when you’re trying really hard. And without musicality training, you’re kind of doomed to being a note reproducing robot, to put it bluntly. If you’ve felt like you lack that spark of musical instinct, musicality training is what puts that in place for you.

So let’s talk a little bit about each of those.

First of all, superlearning. If you haven’t heard about this concept before, the nutshell summary is the science of accelerated learning has come a really long way in the last 20-30 years, and the results of all of the academic research are really clear.

Everyone we think, is a “gifted virtuoso” actually just practices in a fundamentally different way. And still, almost all of mainstream music education is using the same techniques that date back hundreds of years. You know, playing the piece through again and again. If you have a tricky section, focus in on that bit and do it again and again.

It’s a lot of kind of brute-force repetition, and the research shows that that unfortunately flips your brain into really turning off most of the time, even if you think you’re concentrating.

So what we call “superlearning”, it’s this whole suite of tools and techniques you can use during music practice to keep your brain in that ultra-fast learning mode and make sure you’re really getting every ounce of possible progress out of every minute you spend practicing.

So this is something we’ve come to specialize in at Musical U, really, because it makes the difference between feeling talented on your instrument and feeling like you’re always struggling for every tiny inch of progress.

If you want to study it with us, I’ll put links in the shownotes. We’ve got a few great options, but otherwise, I just really encourage you to dive into this wherever you want to.

So other really notable people would be Gregg Goodhart. He’s the guy we collaborated with originally for our first super learning course, and he really pioneered a lot of the techniques. Dr. Molly Gebrian is another great option. Sarah Niblack of SPARK practice. I’ll put links in the shownotes to those. Whoever you choose to learn it from.

Don’t go another day without adopting super learning as part of your practice methodology, because you’re cheating yourself out of 90% of the results you could be getting. There really is no better use of your time than truly learning how to learn.

Then the second area, musicality training.

Instrument skills are great. They’re essential. You know, if you want to express anything musically on an instrument, you’re going to need the technique, and superlearning is fantastic for that.

But the risk is you end up still trapped on the sheet music, always having to look up the chord charts or tab or get the big book of music out to learn something new.

And it leads a lot of musicians, even if they succeed on their instrument, to feeling still quite unmusical. Because they don’t have the instinct, they can’t bring the music out from inside them. They feel like they’re just kind of “operating their instrument” rather than truly expressing their own musicality.

So “musicality training” is what we call anything you do to develop that natural musicality.

If you’re not already doing it, start today. And I do want to make clear, this is not just “ear training”. So ear training is one small piece of the whole range of musicality training you can do.

And if you just go off and search for “ear training” or grab an “ear training” app or something. It’s good. It’s better than nothing. But the traditional ear training methods are really like the traditional practice methods. They leave a lot to be desired. And if you make slow progress with them, it’s not your fault. It’s just that those methods are not that effective. It’s a lot of brute-force repetition, and it’s not very musical.

So I’ve had the chance to ask dozens, if not hundreds, of incredible musicians and music educators “What is musicality? What does musicality mean to you?” And the range of answers is incredible.

I’ll put a link in the shownotes to some of the episodes we’ve done on that topic, because it is a really broad term and it’s a very personal thing. What “you becoming more musical” might mean is really dependent on that Big Picture Vision I mentioned, and what you naturally are inclined to dream of in music.

One way to describe it is in terms of all the things it enables. So, for example, playing by ear, improvising, jamming, having great rhythm, singing in tune, performing with confidence. All of those things people associate with having a gift or a talent in music, we would put under that umbrella of “musicality”.

Another way to describe it would be in terms of the model we use at Musical U for teaching it, which is the H4 model of: Head, Hands, Hearing, and Heart.

So Head is about your intellectual understanding of musical concepts. Hands is operating an instrument, including your singing voice. Heart is the emotional and psychological aspects of music-making. And then Hearing is the ability to instinctively recognise and understand all the musical sounds you hear.

And so, in a very rough sense, instrument practice is “just Hands”, and traditional ear training is “just Hearing”.

We really teach an integrated, holistic approach that has all four of those H’s included at all times.

So if you think at the moment about what your music practice session looks like, I’m willing to bet it’s very Hands-heavy. Maybe there’s a little bit of music theory taking the Head into account, maybe there’s a little bit of ear training taking the Hearing into account.

But what musicality looks like at its best is really a lot of activities that integrate all four of those and develop all four of them in tandem, which is really true to the spirit of what music is. And that’s why it’s so powerful for letting you develop that instinct for music, develop your natural ability to express your own musical ideas and really feel connected to the music you’re making.

If you are already doing some form of musicality training, awesome! Fantastic. And I just want to say, you might still be in that spot of being disheartened or frustrated.

Sometimes a small addition or tweak is all it takes, and that can be really encouraging and inspiring to keep in mind.

We see this all the time in the membership where, you know, for example, someone’s been working away at interval recognition because they want to play by ear, and then they switch to solfa and it just clicks. And now they can suddenly recognise notes and they can play by ear, and it really transforms what they realise they’re capable of in music.

Another example would be when someone comes to us and they’ve been diligently developing their ear and trying to integrate these musicality ideas, but they’ve never used their singing voice. And we introduce this idea of using singing as a tool and expressing yourself musically with your singing voice even before your instrument, or as part of how you develop your instrument skills. And that is such a massive amplifier. Again, it can just be a kind of night-and-day difference in the results you get.

A third example would be creativity, where a lot of musicians aren’t really thinking about wanting to be creative, or they don’t consider themselves creative. But we really take an approach of creativity being the vehicle, not the destination. So even if you don’t want to “be creative”, actually incorporating creative exercises and developing your musical creativity again provides this massive amplifier or accelerator to your musical development.

And so, again, that can just be the difference-maker, where this one little ingredient suddenly empowers the person to feel musical and be musical and really accelerate their journey forwards.

So in both of those cases, superlearning and musicality, we see musicians transform almost in an instant. Yes, the skills take time to learn and the results come over time.

But again and again, we see these lightbulb moments where there’s kind of a fundamental belief shift that happens, and they go from, again, feeling like “oh, I’ll never crack this, I’ll never do it, I don’t have what it takes. I’m not talented, I’m not gifted, I’m wasting my time. Why do I bother doing the practice every day? I’m never going to be like my musical heroes”.

And then this little thing shifts for them, this little extra ingredient, or they add in musicality where it wasn’t there before, or add in superlearning, and suddenly you can just see, like, their whole identity has changed as a result. And they have that belief now that they can achieve what they’ve been dreaming of in music.

This is nowhere clearer than in our Next Level program, I think. Some people come into it in great musical momentum, but many others are in that spot of feeling stuck and frustrated, maybe close to giving up, but they decide to give it one last big swing. And in that program, they just, you know, they blast forwards. It’s so exciting to see.

And in other cases, they actually did give up. We’ve had so many people join Next Level that gave up music decades ago and are now kind of circling back and wishing they’d never stopped and wanting to make up for lost time by finally moving forwards as fast as possible.

And when you put those two pieces in place, the musicality and the superlearning, it’s actually not hard to keep up motivation and enthusiasm. I know it might be hard to imagine right now if you’re in that spot of feeling low, feeling like you want to give up.

But when you know that every time you sit down to practice, you’re going to see results and you’re going to make progress and you’re going to improve and you’re going to feel naturally musical… it’s not that hard to be motivated to show up for practice each day!

And knowing deep down with certainty that you will achieve your musical dreams, it makes all the difference. I have that certainty for you. So even if you’ve been teetering on the edge of giving up, even if you woke up this morning and you’re like “what am I doing with this music stuff? I’ll never get there”. Just know, please borrow a bit of my faith in you. I know it is possible for you.

Try something new, even if it’s just a new book or a course or a YouTube video or something that sparks excitement and joy again and gets you back into some momentum.

Ideally, though, add in these two ingredients, they’re almost magical. If you’re not doing one or both, you will be astonished by how adding musicality training and/or superlearning just completely transforms the results you get to the point where your musical life can be a thing of continual joy and fulfillment.

So if you’d like our help, I’ll put some options in the shownotes along with this episode. We would be honored and delighted to take you by the hand and get you back into momentum and help you stay there.

But even if not, keep moving forwards, keep trying new things. Keep the faith that your musical life, the thing you’ve been dreaming of, the thing that motivated you to pick up an instrument in the first place, will be possible for you.

You’re not alone. I’m cheering for you. I hope you can tell! I’m enthusiastic for your success.

The whole Musical U team and community are rooting for you.

So let your love of music drive you forwards. You can do this.

Just… don’t give up.

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