Author: musicalitywrld

As a musician you might have heard of “whole” and “half” steps. Also known as “major and minor seconds” or “tones and semitones”. These are the building blocks of melodies, chords and all the pitches you hear in music and getting to know them in detail yourself opens up all kinds of exciting musicality potential.

Links and Resources

• Jermaine Griggs interview
• Interval ear training
• Music Student 101
• daveconservatoire.org

Transcript

Today we’re going to be talking about whole steps and half steps.

And the first thing we need to discuss is terminology. Because these two things are super important – but they go by several names…

I learned music in the UK, and there musicians learn about tones and semitones – these are very specifically-defined musical elements. They’re building blocks for pitch, like crotchets or quavers are for rhythm.

That’s all fine. But then you talk to a guitarist and they’ll tell you about the killer tone they’ve just achieved – and they’re definitely not talking about whole steps!

And if you mention tones and semitones to an American they probably won’t know what you mean – and they’ll often use the word “tone” to just mean note, or pitch – for example “a C major chord has three tones”.

So that gets confusing.

There’s also another pair of names used for whole and half steps: you might have heard them called major seconds and minor seconds.

This is coming from the world of music theory and intervals. These are perhaps the most precise names.

The trouble is they’re a bit of a mouthful – and that major/minor naming can be pretty confusing when you’re first learning music and figuring out what major and minor scales and chords are – and those major and minor seconds don’t necessarily fit in the way you’d expect.

So although I started out with tones and semitones I’ve come to quite like the “whole and half step” naming. It’s simple and practical.

Let’s talk a bit about why it’s practical – where those names come from.

I decided to talk about this topic after my interview with Jermaine Griggs from HearAndPlay.com. He shared a handy mnemonic, a sentence to help you remember the pattern of whole and half steps in a major scale: Why won’t he wear white when hot. The first letters of those words give you W W H W W W H – corresponding to whole whole half, whole whole whole half.

If you’ve come across this idea of building scales using whole and half steps you probably thought “Aha! That’s a handy way to remember it!”
But if you haven’t thought about scales like that, or if you didn’t even know what whole and half steps were you probably though “Uh… what?”

The naming “whole and half steps” comes from this idea of scales. I’m not going to go into teaching music theory from the very beginning here. If you do want really in-depth theory teaching I have two recommendations for you:

• The first is Music Student 101, a terrific podcast all about the fundamentals of music, and they cover topics like scales, chords and rhythm in detail there.
• The second is daveconservatoire.org, a site like Khan Academy offering free explainer videos – but for music theory.

Those are both fantastic ways to go deep into music theory from the very beginning, and I’ll put links to those in the shownotes for this episode.

All I’m going to say on the theory front for now is that scales are generally built using whole steps. Each step of the scale from note to note is normally a whole step. Not all of them! That’s why we need this pattern and reminder sentence – and if you do build a scale just with whole steps it forms what’s called a whole tone scale and it sounds pretty odd to ears that are used to major and minor scales!

But if you were wondering why whole steps are called that even though our smallest building block is actually the half step – that’s why. They’re just more frequently used in music than the half steps.

So what about half steps?

As the name suggests, half steps are half the size of a whole step. It’s the smallest distance we use between notes – at least unless you dive into the wacky world of microtonal music! That’s maybe a topic for another day…

So the half step, or minor second, or semitone, is our smallest step in pitch. If you look at a piano keyboard, the distance between any two adjacent notes is a half step. If you look at a guitar fretboard, each fret up the string is a half step.

Most melodies in music move in what’s called “stepwise motion” a lot of the time – meaning each note is a half or a whole step away from the previous one. So these whole and half steps give you an insight into how melodies are put together.

Of course there are plenty of leaps in melodies too! But we can actually think of every other pitch distance in terms of how many half steps it is. If you’re familiar with intervals then a major third for example is four half-steps. An octave is twelve half-steps. This is really useful if you’re mathematically minded and want to understand how all the different pitches relate to one another and how different types of scales and chords are defined.

Even if you’re not particularly mathematical though, this concept is really handy. And that brings me back to Why Won’t He Wear White When Hot.

Many people learn scales just based on “sharps and flats”. They learn to play the C Major scale by knowing there are no sharps or flats, just play all the natural notes in sequence. Then they learn that G Major has one sharp, so do the same thing but from G to G and with an F♯. And so on.

The trouble with this is it doesn’t give you any understanding of what you’re doing. If someone asks you to play a scale you haven’t learned yet you literally have no way to do it! And it’s easy to forget a key signature or get in a muddle.

On this podcast we’re going to be talking a lot about musicality – and a large part of that is learning practical skills like recognising notes or rhythms by ear. But another huge part of it is simply understanding what you’re doing in music. And that’s why whole and half steps are useful.

Once you know that a major scale is defined as being a sequence of whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step, you can sit down with your instrument or some blank sheet music and step-by-step figure out literally any major scale. You can learn a couple of simple ways to leverage this same pattern to know any minor scale. It also gives you a window into thinking about how the chords in that key work, and a great foundation for understanding all the intervals present in music.

It’s like peeking under the hood of your car or inside the mechanics of a watch, and actually knowing what the pieces are there for and how they work together.

This kind of understanding is pivotal for:

• accelerating your learning of more complex ideas
• empowering you to feel more confident because you know how music works
• enabling much greater creativity because you’re not just blindly following rules – you know where those rules come from and which ones you can bend or even break.

We’re going to be talking a lot more about music theory in future, and always in this very practical way. Some people like to study theory just because it’s interesting to them, and others do it just because they’re told to by their teacher or exam board. I hope that as a listener to this podcast you’ll start to see how studying music theory is one of the most empowering and liberating things you can do as a musician – if you do it in the right way!

So that’s a brief introduction to whole and half steps and why they’re useful. Hopefully you can see that breaking music down into its building blocks like this can really help you to have confidence that you understand what you’re doing, whether that’s with practicing scales, playing chords by ear, improvising melodies or anything else.

Why not start exploring whole steps and half steps today? Try figuring out a scale just using the Why Won’t He Wear White When Hot pattern, or analysing some music you’ve been playing to see where there are whole steps between notes, and where there are half steps. You might be surprised how enlightening it is to start spotting these fundamental building blocks of music!

The post About Whole Steps and Half Steps appeared first on Musical U.

Back in 2009 there really wasn’t much information online about ear training and developing your musicality. But one site which stood out then, and which continues to be among the top sites online for playing by ear was HearAndPlay.com.

On today’s interview we’re talking with Jermaine Griggs, who started Hear And Play back in 2000 and has had phenomenal success helping musicians around the world to learn to play music by ear. His success has led to him being a highly-sought after teacher and mentor in the entrepreneurial world, as well as a beloved teacher in the world of Gospel music – and even led to him being invited to the White House to meet President Obama.

Jermaine is a passionate educator with incredible insights into how learning to play by ear can be made simple and methodical – for anyone.

This conversation covers his own musical development and how he came to codify his methodology and launch HearAndPlay.com.

He shares what makes Gospel music unique, while also allowing it to be an amazing way to learn skills for all genres.

And there’s an inspiring example of one Hear And Play student who found great success despite a seemingly-huge personal limitation.

Jermaine also shares some nifty tips and tricks which you can apply right now to help you start playing by ear – as well as a bit of software that can make it dramatically easier.

Links and Resources

• HearAndPlay.com
• SongTutor software
• Gospel Music Training Center
• vanBasco Karaoke

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Jermaine. Thank you for joining us today.

Jermaine: It is an honor to be here, Christopher. Thank you for having me.

Christopher: My pleasure. So I’d love to start at the beginning, if that’s alright, and here a bit about how you got started making music.

Jermaine: Absolutely. My grandma had this piano, right? And my grandma would play it. She has this gospel meets Ray Charles kind of style. Being a little six, seven year old, I got the pots and pans out because I thought I wanted to be a drummer. You know, a little boy banging on stuff. So I would accompany her and we had a little two piece band. She on the upright piano, me on the pots and pans, until one day around the age of eight, I hopped on the piano and I noticed my knack for hearing music.

You’re an instructor, Chris, and you know if you play every other white note with three fingers you’re gonna come up with some kinda diatonic chord. Something’s gonna sound good, you’re either gonna be playing major, what did you have? You had probably like a three in seven chance of playing a major chord. I’ve never thought of it like that way but yeah, you could play a C major, you could play an F major, or a G major as an eight year old if you just randomly played every other finger, and that’s what I did.

I could have hit a D minor, E minor, or A minor. I don’t know what I hit, but it sounded good. And I started mixing chords up. And sooner than later I was playing my first Disney song, I think it was called Under The Sea. And my sister would sing, she’s three years my junior, and we kind of started our own band. And that was my introduction to the piano, literally teaching myself. Because ’til this day my grandma can’t tell you the notes of the piano. She’ll be like, “This is an F flat,” I know she doesn’t mean it but it’s just her talking. ‘Til this day she doesn’t know the notes, I taught myself.

Christopher: That’s incredible. And was it literally just a matter of sitting down as an eight year old and hitting notes until you hit something that sounded good? Or did you have some kind of understanding of what you were aiming for? How did that work for you?

Jermaine: No, if I go back 30 years, without revealing my age, to that fateful day … I got the idea, my grandma was playing sort of every other finger or she skipped certain things. Visually, I could kind of tell that she was doing it. So I said, “Let me try it.” So that’s kind of how I approached it. That Disney song came on and I hit the major chord, I said, “Wow, that sounds like that.” So if anything, I probably had an acute ability to hear. I have a proclivity to that, but no, no traditional education. In fact, I would later join the school band and play clarinet but during breaks I would hop on the piano. Everybody would be amazed that I could play what our band just played by listening.

Christopher: Amazing. And how did things develop from there?

Jermaine: Right, so church, for me, was a really big catalyst, you know? You put a ten year old in a charismatic church, my church was one that it didn’t go by the program, it was like whatever ensued. So I got this ability to really, literally have to improvise. People go train for that, and practice for that, that was every Sunday for me. I would learn the songs that the choir director wanted me to learn on tape, I’d rewind the tap, I’d pick out the chords. But what I was able to do at any early age is understand the feeling that the chords gave me.

So it didn’t take a teacher for me to know that major was happy, and airy, and kinda gumpy, like the ice cream truck. (singing) Like I heard that. And then for me minor was solemn, and sad, and serious, and somber. And then later in church, you gotta play dominant chords in a charismatic church. And this was even before I realized I was playing them, but I knew if I took that C major and I add a B flat to it now we’re talking (singing), you know? We’re getting bluesy with it. And that’s what gospel is, it’s a lot of blues infused in there.

And so I learned that. I knew that that was the feeling. So if in church Sister Murphy got up and she sang a really sort of traditional, what we call a bluesy, church, what do they call it? A shuffle. To me, those were the bluesy chords, even before I knew what to call them. Worship music was the sadder, although it’s not as sad but it’s more serious. Those are the minor chords I was playing. So for me it was just feeling an emotion and I knew which chords to use, or at least try in my practice, to deliver that.

Christopher: That’s fascinating. And I know a lot of our listeners, and certainly a lot of our members of Musical U have felt very intimidated by that kind of situation, because they don’t know how to improvise, or they think they don’t know. So that idea of standing up on the church stage, or even just getting together with friends and jamming is super intimidating to them. For you it sounds like that just all came smoothly. Did you ever have any kind of performance anxiety, or did you feel bad if you were playing the wrong notes, or was it all easy because you were young and your church was welcoming?

Jermaine: Right. So for me looking back it was backwards, a lot of people practice, practice by themselves and then there’s this big reveal one day. You know, this big, what do you call them in your world? Recital, you know. For me, it was like I knew enough, I knew a little bit. “Hey, young man, come play for our youth choir.” And so first I learned what I needed to learn but then came the opportunity to play for the church service, which meant you could never really prepare. Because someone would stand up and sing Amazing Grace and then the next person might stand up and singing Leaning On the Everlasting Arms, and I just had to follow.

So for me at a young age, I also, so in addition to feeling, to me, let’s say that’s the first layer. Just certain things give you certain feelings and just learned to attach. I think people have a detachment to music when they practice and play it and learn it. There’s this detachment that I can’t fully describe. Sometimes I ask people I say, “Just throw the book away, right now. Just play this chord with me,” if I’m teaching my kid or my nephew.

What does that make you feel like? Forget about the major/minor intervals right now, perfect fits, what does that make you feel like? Okay now turn around, I’m gonna play either that chord or something else I need you to tell me whether you hear that or something else. I get serious but I also really want people to unlock that ability, because at a very basic level it’s not that hard. We can get really super advanced but hearing the difference between a major and a foreign chord, something that’s not major to me. Okay, we can do that. I can get an eight year to eventually be able to tell me that.

So I think it’s like what my mentor Tony Robbins says, “Where focus does energy flows.” So if I learn a piece and I never had that connection to feeling and what I really hear, then I think a part of me is gonna be trapped. That music blows away or something happens and I don’t know where I am. For me it was opposite. I learned that certain melody notes, if I start on the third tone of the scale that’s typically gonna be the major chord. The root of the key that I’m in is just gonna be inverted. I learned those kinds of things without knowing the technical aspect. I just knew that if I played that C major chord with E on top, well that would match the first melody note of Pass Me Not Oh Gentle Savior.

So I learned these little, if somebody sung a song that I didn’t know but the melody was familiar to me, I could still follow. And it was these little tricks that made me perfect to be the guy online, one of the first guys to say, “I can teach you how to listen to music” at the turn of the millennium. Because I had already sort of made all of my little tips and tricks and things as a kid to figure this out in live situations.

Christopher: Absolutely and one thing I really love about the Hear and Play approach and that I’ve always admired in the way you teach is there’s quite a lot of people out there that can play by ear kind of naturally, without having given it a lot of thought. But you, even though it did come naturally or at least came smoothly to you, you’ve taken a very thoughtful approach to it. You may not have studied classical theory in order to understand it, you’ve understood it by ear, you still ended up with the same kind of rules and very methodical understanding of what makes playing by ear possible. And that really comes through in your teaching and the way you’re able to explain it to other people.

Jermaine: Well thank you, I did have to go backwards like I said okay, well if I’m gonna do this for real, this is the year 2000, okay let me go backwards and figure out what I’m doing. And there was like this one or two year period where I said, “Wow, that was dominant ninth chord? I’ve been doing that forever. I’ve been doing that for 12 years.” So there was this one, two year period around the time when I was about 18, 19 creating my book, The Secrets to Playing Piano By Ear, where I really did go in there. It wasn’t just, “play this chord, play that chord,” which a lot of play by ear sites will do.

Sometimes if I bring in a really advanced musician that’s not classically trained, they will honestly be like, “play this chord, play that” and I’ll be like what kind of chord? It’s got a major, a minor, it’s got everything it’s so dissonant. And we can’t even up with the title of it, it’s so advanced. So we still succumb to that but in this period I really wanted to understand why I was doing what I was doing, because with that understanding I then could go beyond myself.

I could have some crazy system in my head making it all work, but that’s not gonna be enough if now I gotta teach this person over here, my daughter, my uncle. So now I need to systematize it for them. For example teaching somebody how to find the key of a song, part of that is something you can’t explain. Like humming the tonic, humming that root note, but what I found out is that people, if you’re tone deaf that’s one thing. But if you’re in the ballpark like I say, most people will either be humming the root, the third of the root, because they’ll hear that melody note, or the fifth of the root because they’ll also hear that melody note. All related to the same, let’s say C major chord on the root, but they’re not able to hear what’s the real root, but they’re hearing the third.

So then I came up with the minor chord trick. And I was like okay, well if you’re humming the third just pick the chord that puts the third, that note on top, pick the minor chord in root position that puts that note on top. So say you should be humming C but instead you’re thinking the key is E and you’re trying to listen to this. Well, what minor chord puts E on top? Well, A minor. And I just had this reference chart. I said basically, “Okay, test those other notes of the A minor chord.” So if you’re humming E and you say, okay the other two notes to test are A and C, cause those are the other notes. Well the minute you test C, “Wow, that sounds like the root.” And then you test A and that wouldn’t work, but C would work.

So what it did was it gave them, if they were accidentally humming the third it delivered the root to them. And think about if E was the fifth, or they were humming G accidentally, right? And they did the minor chord trick that would deliver them to C as well because C minor would be the root chord to test again. So it sounds advanced but when I put it in the reference and I explain it people are like, “Whoa. I tried your minor chord trick and it helped to deliver the root on three of the seven examples that you gave.”

So I just came up with unorthodox things like that. Teaching people how to play the major scales a teacher could say, “whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step.” I say, “Why won’t he wear white when hot?” My wife told me, “It’s hot outside, why aren’t you wearing white?” And I said, “Why won’t he wear white when hot?” I said, “That’s how you remember the whole step, half step. And people 20 years later are coming up to me, “Man, why won’t he wear white when hot? That’s how I learned my major scales.”

Minor scales, I say you don’t need to learn your minor scales if you know your major and you know your minor. So you know your C major, just go to the sixth tone and play the same exact notes from the sixth to the sixth. So if you know C major is all white notes, go to the sixth, it’s A. Play A, play the C major scale from A to A, bam, you got an A minor scale. So it’s things that the classical world would be like, sometimes they might cringe and that’s why I keep the worlds separate. But I acknowledge and I really wished that I had learned sheet music at an early age. I think it’s too late for me now. But at the same time-

Christopher: I think you’ve found the perfect balance. I particularly wanted to ask you on this conversation how you had managed to take this skill that comes so smoothly to you and translate it into something that works so effectively for teaching other people. And what you just said, that you did methodically take the time to think through how you were doing it, and think through how to explain it to others before you put your product out there, your book, and then the HearandPlay.com site. It makes perfect sense and I think it’s such an elegant solution to still go ear first, but give people the actual intellectual understanding also, and the practical tips and tricks they need to actually improve quickly.

Jermaine: Absolutely, yep. That’s exactly what happened.

Christopher: So we raced through the story a little bit there and I’d love to just circle back and explain a little bit how you managed to go from playing in church, just yourself, through to creating your first product to explain it to other people, and eventually starting … I say eventually, it was super early days in the internet. The turn of the millennium to start a learn by ear site in 2000, 2002, it was very early days. Tell us what was it made you go so big.

Jermaine: Right. Well, so let’s go back to 1995. 1995, no, no, 1998. ’95 I’m playing in the church. By ’98 parents are asking me to teach their kids. So I’m developing sort of this local business. I’m 15 at the time. But my grandpa, I’m also a young minister in the church so I have a leadership role. You could tell I got the knack for talking, I could go all day with you, Chris.

So parents are asking me to teach their kids, I’m this business guy. I don’t know, that’s a whole other story from a whole other world of mine. I’m this guy business guy selling Avon products at 12, so it’s not related to music but it’s related to the entrepreneurial bug. So when you think about this young kid that’s just got this nagging, I grew up poor and there was reasons for wanting economic success. And then I got this religious background and this music, I think it all comes to the head when I could take this knack for selling stuff like Avon, and I could match that with my knack for playing music, and so I started Hear and Play music way before I discovered the internet. I

t was just called Hear and Play Music and I’d show up to your house, I’d teach your 10 year old son or daughter, 12 year old, I had about seven students at 15 and after school my grandma would just drop me off at their house. The launch of the tools I would eventually start selling started when I said, “Huh, I’m teaching them all the same thing. I should come up with my own little workbooks. And for me, I turned playing by ear, I simplified it into note create scales, scales create chords, chords create progressions or patterns, and patterns create songs. So I made this five part sort of series and each one of those things became a workbook.

So let me teach you your notes and how they work, let me teach you how to form them into scales, why won’t he wear white when hot. And then let me show you how to take those scales and pick out the chords you’ll need. And then let me show you how to put those chords into patterns. And so that’s what I began to teach kids. Then the songs that they would learn were obviously church hymns that I knew very well. And we’d all combine it, like Amazing Grace, you could play that with three chords out of the key.

So from there someone said, “Jermaine, you should put your stuff on the internet.” I said, “The internet?” I had AOL 2.0, I was just in chat rooms at that time, what did we do on AOL 2.0? Like message our buddies from class and chat rooms. I never thought to start a website. So about two years later, the year was 2000, August 6th I registered the domain name HearandPlay.com, it was available. And the rest was history. I had to learn how to create a website, I had to learn how to market it. I actually started selling those five books in the year 2000. I didn’t have the 300 page course, The Secrets to Playing Piano by Ear, that’s where you get the date 2002 from. This was just the same five books from two years back that I was teaching the kids with. And I probably sold some 300 copies of that before I, yeah probably 300 in that first year as a sort of 17 year old, even before I got serious with it.

Christopher: I think it’s incredible and as any of our listeners would know, websites come and go, and something that’s hot for a few years tends to not be after that. And I remember back when I started my company in 2009, Hear and Play was one of, if not the top site for playing by ear. I think it’s remarkable that that is still the case. If you go out there looking for info, particularly in the world of Gospel, your site is out there. It’s helping people, it’s helped millions of musicians now learn to play by ear. I’d love to talk a little bit about what you’re offering there and how you’re helping people follow this kind of methodology that we’ve talked about.

Jermaine: Absolutely. So around 2003 I came out with my first DVD and it was Gospel. I don’t know how I attracted Gospel people, because the first book never said really Gospel although it did have hymns at the end. But I didn’t market it as a Gospel course at all. I don’t know. The universe works in mysterious ways. So I had this Gospel following somehow. So my first video, the first time you could see me in video was Gospel Keys 101 and I was teaching people how to play hymns.

It was a three step process, determine the melody and I taught them about neighboring tones, upper, lower, passing tones, here’s how you know if it’s a chord tone or if it’s just passing. Step two was harmonizing melodies and then step three was adding the bass, like common bass and stuff like that. That was the process. And that would send us along the lines of creating a Gospel Keys 200 and a Gospel Keys 300 until I said why don’t we make a Gospel music training center? The Gospel Music Training Center. And we could release lessons every week, they wouldn’t be on DVD, you could log in and you could learn. We have a beginning version of the lesson and advanced version, and we’d give them the midi file. We’d even take the midi file, turn it into sheet music. But we put a disclaimer like I don’t know if this stuff is correct. It’d have all these accidentals in it and stuff ’cause we weren’t set in the key signature as I look back. But that was it.

And because it was a niche that’s underserved, see that’s the thing. If anybody’s looking for advice and they’re a music teacher and things like that and they want to fit into some mold, see I never said I had to fit into a mold. I never said, “Well I have to be classically trained or go to a conservatory or have a degree.” I just said, “Who’s out there that needs me like me? And who can I serve?” And what came to mind is my Gospel folks. To this day I don’t know, I would have to Google it, but I don’t know if you could go get a degree in worship music. Or like could you make that your study, your field of focus, or even just church music in general. I don’t know if that really exists.

But in our world you can come to the Gospel Music Training Center and we’ll take you down a path of traditional, hymns, worship, urban, neo soul, even Latin. The thing about church music is that the gospel is just it’s a message but the genre actually changes. Like Martha Munizzi would do Latin music and then this singer will come in and do neo soul. Where if you just listen to the music you’d be like that sounds like secular music. So Gospel actually lends itself to all the genres, depending on the artist and what they’re inspired to make. So it’s really not just a Gospel platform. I think it’s a music platform but it certainly has a Gospel message.

Christopher: That’s so interesting and that’s something I really wanted to ask you about because … There are so many different listening skills a musician can develop, and it can be a bit overwhelming. And I think people who come to a course like yours that says, “We will teach you how to play Gospel music by ear,” that’s very clear and they know that’s what they want to do.

I really wanted to ask you, is it framed like that because musicians need to learn these general listening skills and they love Gospel therefore you’ll teach them through Gospel? Or is it that Gospel music has particular listening skills that they need to develop and you need a particular course to explain that?

Jermaine: Right. I think Gospel is unique and then in another way it’s not unique, when you compare it to other genres. Like I said, Gospel borrows and influences everything. I could put a blues song from the ’50s against a Gospel song from the ’80s and they would follow the same. You know Ray Charles sings (singing) I’m not a singer, I hate when I sign and then I have to say I’m not a singer. Then there’s a song in the Gospel world by a group called Mary Mary and their song I think is called Yesterday or something. And it’s the same patterns, starts on a one then it goes to that bluesy three. The dominant on the three and then the six to the five to the four, the bluesy four, to the flat five or whatever.

So we just make that comparison. So I think you could take blues or some jazzy songs in our Gospel music training, there’s Latin. But to survive as a church musician there are some specific skills, and you have to listen to for it. So we just did a lesson and if you’re playing traditional praise Gospel it’d be dominant. You would never have a reason to ever play a major seventh chord in this subgenre. If I say traditional praise, it’s a hand clapper, you’re never gonna hear a major seven ever. So I tell the listener just eliminate that. Now I’m not saying fully, but if you want to save your time in picking out chords, just eliminate the major seven when you hear a hand clapping, foot stomping, traditional praise song in the church.

And I would slap them upside the head, I get really passionate, I say, “So what are your pool of chords that we’re pulling from here?” And if they say major seven, I say, “Well that’s not the feeling. The feeling is bluesy, dominant.” So you can definitely, there are certain sub genres in the church. Now if I say worship, worship wouldn’t exclude dominant chords because passing to the four, the dominant chord will sound nice and even pretty. You could take a root and you could lower it to the major seven and then you can lower it to the dominant seven, and that will prepare you to move to the four, to the fourth, upper four. And so I won’t seclude it but I’ll say most worship, though, will just have nice major chords, and triads, and you may add a nine to it. See a difference with adding the nine? But sometimes you just want it natural and raw and you’ll not add the nine.

I just try to get people to hear the differences between the emotions evoked, the subgenre that will lend themselves to certain chord classes, and then from there teach them the patterns that work. Like praise music, I broke that into five parts. I said here’s part one, here’s part two. Some songs have both parts, some songs don’t have both parts. I showed them the differences. Another example would be in church, hymns. Hymns to me are melody driven. They were originally written, from my understanding, to just be sung vocally like a choir. So they’re gonna be in basic three part harmony. So even if I knew the melody but I couldn’t hear the chords, I’ve never heard the chords before, and I hear that the soprano is going from E, D, C, well I can pretty much without ever hearing that song or the whole choir, I can pretty much come up with what I think the alto and probably what the tenor is doing by three part harmony. So that’s a whole other sort of technique I teach with hymns.

So Gospel, I think it answers your question both ways. I think because they like Gospel and their identity is a gospel musician, it helps to just have a fully focused training center for Gospel music. But I also think Gospel can just be a tool to teach anybody music. Because I think it lends itself to the same lessons, the same sort of theory and techniques that any other genre would.

Christopher: Fascinating. So would it be fair to say the majority of musicians who learn with Hear and Play are Gospel musicians?

Jermaine: I’d say it’s majority our share. The last time I surveyed I think we’re 60% Gospel. I think the name is a misnomer. It could be like Hear and Play Gospel. We’ve always had this desire to go outside of Gospel, like everybody.

Christopher: You also have a pretty fully fledged jazz curriculum, right?

Jermaine: We do, we do. And that’d be like another 20% of people will get into our jazz with my good friend James Ruble, and so we’ll have 20% there. But if someone said you could only pick one genre and you had to ditch everything else, well, it’d probably be Gospel. But just in in movies, certain people might start in one genre and then they want to cross over. Or music, music you may start in R&B but you get this feeling, “Is that R&B singer trying to crossover into pop? Like mainstream mainstream?” And that’s the sense that I feel like we battle with. Do we want to be just Learn Music By Ear, Learn Anything By Ear, and some of our courses lend themselves to that, but it’s definitely not the dominant. I think a lot of people see us as Gospel.

And rightfully so. Maybe that’s why we’ve been here so long because we stuck with what we’ve known and we have a core base. And when you have a core base of anything … I heard somebody say if you have 1,000 people that love you for anything, you’ll do okay. 10,000? Oh, you’ll do really okay. 100,000? That’s why a star like these celebrities from the ’80s are still touring, because they have their base. And they never need to go take another job or something like that because, I mean it may not be Beyonce kind of money but if you’ve got your base from the ’80s … I have a client in my other business from Chicago, they still tour. They tour several, several years later, decades later, because of that base. And I think that’s similar with us. We have our base and we know who they are. Pursuits of trying to go beyond that base have worked, but it still brings us back to that base.

Christopher: That’s interesting. And fascinating how that Gospel base, for the musicians who study it, it becomes a vehicle for almost any other genre and the skills they’ve developed at Hear and Play can be developed in any direction they want to go after that.

Jermaine: Absolutely. Chris have you seen a Gospel player at NAMM or something or seen a video on YouTube and just see how crazy they are?

Christopher: Mm.

Jermaine: It’s the same way with singers like Beyonce, or just anything, Aretha Franklin, they all have their base, a lot of them, more often than not, in church. It’s something about church and even on the musician side because you have to develop so many things that then when you put us into the real world, we may have to unlearn some things, but you put us into the outside world, people tend to be amazed. More amazed than the other way around, from what I’ve seen.

Christopher: There’s a remarkable number of incredible musicians who have that church background.

Jermaine: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s crazy.

Christopher: You know one of my favorites, Wyclef, grew up in church music and all of his music is influence by that Gospel beginning.

Jermaine: Wow.

Christopher: And over the years you’ve certainly helped a lot more than 1,000 true fans. You’ve helped hundreds of thousands, millions of people, over the … Where are we now? Nearly two decades Hear and Play has been running. Are there any that stand out to you as a student you’re particularly proud of or a learning experience where you looked at it and you were like, “Yes, that is what we’re trying to do with Hear and Play?”

Jermaine: Right. I mean there’s been so many over the years and one particular guy that I remember him coming to us in 2003 when I was picking up the phone myself like, “HearandPlay.com, how can I help you? This is Jay.” “Oh knock it off, this is Jermaine.” “Well Jay is my nickname, I’m trying to avoid my cover being blown,” because I know they’ll want to talk to me for a long time so I used to say, “This is Jay,” which is my nickname.

And Adrian called one day and he said, “I’m legally blind, I’m blind, visually impaired and so I can’t really do your book, it’s not in braille or anything like that either.” I said, “Well, I have a DVD coming out and this is gonna be perfect for you.” And then I’ve always been one that did it slow, I even tell my advanced musicians that come in, I say, “Don’t just point to the key, I need you to say the key three times, say what it is, say the interval, say any harmonic equivalents.”

So I’ve always been that where if you turn off the DVD you could still listen. And it served me well with this particular student, Adrian Stewart. Who took a liking to my DVDs and over time bought everything that we had. I mean rabid fan, customer, and friend. Years later, this guy he sent a YouTube video to us. I mean he’s playing in rhythm, playing in time, soloing, and it just did my heart very well when I saw that. And he continues to update us over the years. Anything new, I even tell him, I call him, “Adrian, you don’t even need our stuff now.” He says, “But Hear and Play was my start and anything you guys release, I buy it on principle. I give it to my nephews and my nieces.”

And so Adrian comes to mind. And if you think about it, I don’t know who else could have served Adrian in that way. He had his Gospel affinity, he didn’t read sheet music or sight reading, and God knows, I don’t know how it works in that world, you can educate me on that. So I think Hear and Play came at a time that, if I could epitomize the student, well yeah it’s somebody who … Well he’s an outlier but he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t see and play it, it was no see and play, it had to be hear and play. And so yeah, Hear and Play for Adrian worked out and Hear and Play for like, you said, thousands of others, worked out because either sheet music didn’t work for them in the church or they didn’t go down that path. Or some people they just wake up and they just want to play a couple chords and you say well, we gotcha there as well.

It’s this thing and some people say well you should always be classically trained. And I say if you have the opportunity, you’re my kids, sure take them down that path. Your 50 years old? I’m telling you that’s why they come to me. You’re 50 years old, you just want to play. So yeah, that’s probably who would come to mind.

Christopher: That’s such an inspiring example, I love that. So I’d like to be a little bit selfish for a moment and ask you, if I may, about your own children. I have an 18 month old daughter and I’m starting to think about how to raise her musically, and how to make sure she grows up loving music, and feeling natural with music. I know you and your wife, Sarah, have three children, Jadyn, Layla, and Brendan. I’d love to know how have you approached their music education?

Jermaine: Absolutely. So my youngest, Brendan, I just I would say it now, he’s gotta be doing something in music, he’s six now, when he’s our age. I mean he loves music. When he was two years old, he also has an affinity to write letters, like recognize letters and stuff so I see a good memory which helps for music. I see a good left brain. People think music is right brain but it’s left brain pattern recognition type of stuff. Chess players, musicians, I think there’s some correlation, pattern recognition.

And so he would type out names of songs in the iPad notes and I’d see a note, I’m like there’s 200 songs here. And that’s how he taught himself how to read. He taught himself how to read by writing out words from songs, album covers and stuff. So he absolutely loves music and his favorite song right now on the piano is Lean On Me. I took the same approach with him as I did my older daughter Jadyn.

I start off by teaching them the notes and I say, “Hey, can you point to the two black keys?” And they point to them. And I say, “Can you point to any other two black keys?” And they point to them. And I say, “Well the white key to the left of the two black keys, just right to the left is always gonna be C. Can you point to another C?” and I make it into a game. And then when they do it I do something, “You did it! Point to another C!” And I get them recognizing, “Okay so if that’s C,” then I teach them F.

And then I teach them how to do a C scale and I teach them the proper fingering and we stayed there for a little bit. And then I teach them how to number the scale. And then what I’ll do is I’ll play games with them, “Okay, point to the fourth tone of C” because I think people skip this part of it. I think if you have an intimate knowledge of the number system … Because when you’re playing by ear it’s not just this airy fairy telly thing. We still have a roadmap too. And if you want to communicate with other ear players you gotta be like, “Go to the four.” And if that’s not internalized you’re gonna have a hard time. It can’t be like, “Go to the bump bump chord.” It’s not the bump bump chord, it’s the four. So I want to teach them the numbers so now we can communicate because we don’t have sheet music, we don’t have that ramp, at least right now. I’m teaching them by ear.

So they get the numbers in their system then I teach them how to do the chords. Once we do the every other finger of the scale thing I think this unlocks it for them because then I can put on a Disney song or a Nickelodeon song. If the song happens to be in C, I’ll find a song that happens to be in C because even if it’s in F or A flat they’re not gonna make the relative connection to it. It has to be in C. If I find something that goes from C major, to G major, to A minor, to F major, which is what? 70% of pop songs that they’re listening to. Then I hook them because I don’t hook them on something they can’t relate to, which is a lot of kids if we’re honest, kids can’t often times relate. So you do have to hook them with something that they really listen to. So whatever it is.

I remember Justin Bieber had a song, “Baby, baby, baby.” And when I taught her that chord progression and she could play it and sing it, now we have her hooked. And I think that’s how you hook a kid. And it goes back to what I learned 20 years ago, notes create scales, scales create chords, chords create patterns, patterns create songs. And then if I find another song in C that has the same exact pattern and then all we have to do is change the lyrics, now they’re getting how Hear and Play really works. It’s the patterns, baby, it’s not the lyrics. They change the lyrics and the rhythms but they use the same underlying chords. And when they get that, now I have an ear player in the making.

Christopher: Amazing. I think that you probably just described the Hear and Play philosophy for any age of student as much as your own children. It’s really enlightening to hear you talk that through, thank you. So one thing I’ve always really admired about Hear and Play is that you are constantly innovating. I think you and I could have a whole set for an hour long discussion about the business of running a music education company.

But from a customer perspective or a musician’s perspective you guys are always coming out with exciting new courses or new products or new innovations about the way you serve musicians. One thing that really stood out to me in your new Song Tutor software. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Jermaine: Absolutely. And I must say, I admire you too. I remember from our conversation, but you’re a programmer, right?

Christopher: Right.

Jermaine: Or either-

Christopher: I was a programmer by background.

Jermaine: Yeah, by background which makes sense to me. I’ve always told people that musicians, particularly ear musicians, and programming, I think it goes hand, I have proclivities to programming too. I can follow a little PHP and Java because I work with programmers but I’m like you know what, if I wasn’t a musician I could do this. You know? And you happen to have both of them which makes sense to me.

I’ve always said I want to be in software and I wanted to develop tools so I said what if we had a calculator to help people take things to other keys? So you could punch in your chord, you could say up one, that’s called instant transposing so we created that like years ago. But the latest invention that you’re talking about is Song Tutor and literally has a browser built in and the students can go search for any MIDI file, you could type like, “jazz solo MIDI” and you’ll come across thousands of pages of regular people that have put up their MIDI files. But you click it and it literally, a world opens up for you to pretty much manipulate that MIDI file. Slow it down to what I call turtle speed, you can highlight the notes, you can do split layers, you can loop certain parts of it. And then one thing that I noticed even other tools that existed didn’t have was the walkthrough feature.

Even I found if I wanted to really learn a solo from somebody and I had a MIDI file, even if I looped it and slowed it down it was still in motion. So the step feature just breaks up every little note. You can even arpeggiate it and have every little note of the chord broken up or you can group it by timing. To me that was a great skill, and I use it myself. Sometimes JP, in my company, he’s a way better musician than me. His musicality, like me I’m a business man split musician so my time is split. But he’s full on musician, like on tour with people. So I’ll sometimes ask JP, “Hey, can you through in some of your sweet chords here?” And all he has to do is make it a MIDI file, I open it in Song Tutor, and now I can have the mind of JP without having to bother him.

Same thing, we’ll have a musician from out of town, a famous musician come. “Hey, just play us something. But we’re recording MIDI, disclaimer.” We’ll record two hours of MIDI because all of us want inside of their mind but sitting behind them and things like that is not the best use of time. We got it in MIDI, we can unlock that in Song Tutor, go through every little chord. So Song Tutor is sort of like a, I think it’s the perfect thing, a classical musician wouldn’t get that excited about it because that’s what sheet music is. You literally do have access to the mind of Beethoven, the mind of Bach. And ear musician is only listening so when you bring that to a program like Song Tutor where it’s the equivalent of sheet music but it’s lit up and it just literal, and you can slow it down. It’s those worlds sort of colliding in a very little way.

Christopher: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And I love that because often what people struggle with with playing by ear is they know in theory how to do it and with very simple, slow examples they do fine. But then they hear a song and it moves so quickly they can’t get a handle on it. And I love that Song Tutor lets you kind of get a hold on it and dig in and kind of explore the song in that way. I also think it’s really impressive that you’ve designed something that isn’t just interactivity within say your Gospel Music Training Center, or just on HearandPlay.com. This is a tool where you can take any MIDI file, anything that inspires you, any genre, and you can do the same process to figure it out by ear.

Jermaine: Absolutely. I actually, it probably came because released MIDI files and then we would say go to vanBasco Karaoke which is a very, it’s been out for 20 years, but it’s very basic and the notes were really small. And I said if I could do that on steroids with all my extra looping and step features, it’d be awesome. So then we just eliminated having to tell people to go over there and we added four or five features to our idea and we released Song Tutor. And then we said well why don’t we just let the world in on this? Exactly like you said. It actually, no it was Hear and Play Song Learner in 2007 and then we re-did it from scratch because it didn’t work on Mac, only PC, we re-did as Song Tutor in the last two, three years and that’s what you’re seeing.

Christopher: Amazing. And that’s definitely something I’d encourage listeners to go check out if you’ve ever had that feeling that you could probably figure out a song by ear if it just didn’t move so quickly, definitely check out Song Tutor and see if that can help you decipher it.

Jermaine: Yes, sir.

Christopher: So you’ve been on an incredible journey developing one of the leading sites out there for playing by ear and you continue to innovate. I have to ask, what’s next for Hear and Play? Where do you take it from here?

Jermaine: Yeah so Hear and Play, interesting you mention that because I just had a conversation with one of my marketing guys. He works for me virtually, he’s in Silicon Valley and he’s always telling me of some of his colleagues. So-and-so just got investment capital to take things to the next level or start a business. I’ve always, since I’ve been grassroots I’ve been, what do you call it? Bootstrapped. I started with $70 as a 17 year old. I never wanted to share the company or this idea of an outsider or to have to answer to an investor.

But, lately, and I’m just talking out loud, I’ve been open to this idea of what if we really did bring that world to Hear and Play? And we didn’t just operate on our cashflow basis like we did but we actually had this investment pool to really make this thing, maybe it meant Song Tutor for every instrument, you know? It gave us the funding to do something like that. Maybe it meant Hear and Play TV, 24/7 programming. You could go to this online channel and there’d be a saxophone teacher on it 1:00 AM, there’d be an oboe teacher on or something.

And I’ve really been considering that because when you get to 17 years you’re like well what else? You don’t want to be like the child actor who did it so early that now they’re a little tired of it. So we have been looking at things like that. And even if we didn’t take investment money like that, still approaching things with that start-up mentality. They’re still pages that I haven’t updated from 2003. There’s a lot of complications from being the first at something as well. Because new players can come in an innovate and have a fresh look at what you haven’t been able to keep up with.

So there’s that aspect of it but I see us having something like 24/7 programming, I see us catering to different instruments. I see us having software capability for guitar, although it’s hard to figure out MIDI and guitar. There’s so many places to play the same darn chord. The piano’s just 1-C-3 or 1-C-7. But I see us getting into that. I see us one day I used to say having physical Hear and Play centers and they’d be in communities where I think it would apt to this style of learning and genre. So what about a Hear and Play center like the Yamaha, I think they have their own Suzuki centers or something like that. But it’d be all non-traditional, so it’d be like, “You could learn how to be a choir director here.” Or you could learn, it’d be like that.

So the sky’s the limit. And honestly we’ve done nothing with apps like you have, we’ve done nothing with iPad so bringing Song Tutor over there. There’s so much more that we can do. So while I’m so grateful that people applaud me for being out 17 years, I still got some reinvention as well that is necessary.

Christopher: I think it’s incredibly inspiring. There aren’t that many people who would play by ear and then take the next step and want to help other people play by ear. And there aren’t that many people who are helping other people play by ear and want to take the next step and turn it into a product and reach thousands or hundreds of thousands of people online. There certainty aren’t many people who do that and manage to sustain it online for 17 years and be leading the market for that long. And I think it’s awesome that after this time, and having had so much success, you are clearly still looking ten times the size and how can you be even better for the next 17 or 30 years. It’s incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much, Jermaine, for joining us today.

Jermaine: Hey, the pleasure has been mine. Thank you for having me.

The post How to Hear And Play, with Jermaine Griggs appeared first on Musical U.

You’ve probably seen a chord chart or lead sheet: a simplified version of sheet music which provides just the minimal essentials to play the song. How do you go from that to a great-sounding arrangement? There are a few things to know…

Links and Resources

• Musicality Means… Playing from a Lead Sheet
• Interview with Natalie Weber from Music Matters Blog
• Music Matters Blog
• MelodyPayne.com

Example lead sheets:

Transcript

Today we’re going to be talking about lead sheets. This is one of those things in music that can seem complex and intimidating when you first encounter it – but once you understand the concepts and spend a bit of time practicing can really empower you as a musician.

Lead sheets came up in our interview with Natalie Weber from Music Matters Blog. She said she was totally confused when she first saw a lead sheet! But with practice she came to really enjoy them and now teaches her students how to think in terms of chords and creating their own arrangements. Our upcoming interview with Dr. Melody Payne of MelodyPayne.com will also be talking about how she helps her piano students make sense of lead sheets.

So what is a “lead sheet”?

A lead sheet is a simplified version of a music score, providing just the melody, lyrics and chord names. It lets you fit a whole song on a sheet of paper or two, and strips away all the detail of the arrangement, leaving just the essence of the music. Being able to play the song well from just the lead sheet, possibly without having even heard the song before, is an important part of being musical.

We’ll have a couple of examples of lead sheets in the shownotes for this episode so you can see what we’re talking about.

You might have heard of “chord charts”. A chord chart is similar to a lead sheet but a bit simpler – they consist of just the lyrics and chord symbols. Handy for songs you already know, but not enough to play a new song from scratch if you’re responsible for singing or playing the melody. Lead sheets provide you with the melody too so you have all the essentials to play the song.

Lead sheets are often collected into a thick volume called a “fake book”, so-called because it allows you to “fake your way” through a piece you haven’t learned before. The most famous jazz fake books are ironically called the “Real books”.

If you’re used to reading from detailed score notation this can seem impressive, even mysterious. When you’ve learned the skills required however, it’s easy to glance at a lead sheet and then play the melody, chords or bassline on your instrument straight away.

So that’s what a lead sheet is. Why do they matter?

Fifty years ago lead sheets were only really used in jazz music. Because jazz musicians would often “sit in” with a group they’d never played with before, and jazz was so heavily centred around playing “standards”, a jazz musician was expected to either know hundreds of these tunes from memory – or be able to fake their way through them. Over the years it became normal for jazzers to carry a fat collection of photocopied lead sheets, so that if they were sitting in with a group and called on to play a standard they didn’t know, they could flick through their stack of sheets, find the one required, and then join in as if they’d been playing it for years.

These days you can find lead sheets for all genres, including pop and rock – and even classical! It means you can buy just a single cheap volume of sheet music and have hundreds of tunes at your fingertips. Of course now you can even get the equivalent digital versions to display on a tablet, or glance at on your phone in the middle of a gig.

Being able to play from a lead sheet is important in two major ways. The first is the obvious one: it gives you instant access to an enormous range of songs without needing to carefully learn them note-by-note for hours before you ever perform them. This gives you much greater versatility as a performer and collaborator. Not to mention it’s just fun for your own enjoyment of exploring new music quickly.

The second major benefit of learning to play from lead sheets is that it is a perfect vehicle for developing your musicality in various ways.

Learning a piece from full score notation requires careful sight-reading and an admirable attention to detail. Playing from a lead sheet on the other hand requires inner musicianship: an ability to look “beyond the dots” and understand the underlying music.

It relies on you to turn a simple melody into an expressive rendition, or take a collection of chord symbols and bring forth a full and effective musical arrangement. If you’re a singer it pushes your sight-reading skills to the limit, and if you’re a bass or percussion player it truly challenges your skill in creating a suitable groove from scratch for a variety of situations.

Okay, so that’s why playing from a lead sheet matters – you’re probably wondering now, how do you learn to do it?

There are two parts to learning to play from a lead sheet. Many musicians make the mistake of only focusing on the first, but you’ll get far better results if you do both together.

The first part is simply to practice playing from lead sheets. Get yourself a fake book. In jazz the “Real Books” are king. In other genres search for “fake books”, books which offer “lyrics, lead and chords” or which boast hundreds of songs in a single volume.

Then, set yourself a daily task of playing from the lead sheet. If you play a lead instrument such as lead guitar, trumpet, or sax, you’ll focus on playing the melody. If you play a chordal instrument such as piano or rhythm guitar, play through the chord symbols. If you play bass, naturally you’ll create a bassline based on the chords. And if you sing… well, you know what to do!

Begin by trying to sight-read the song straight off. Then, find a recording. You may or may not know the song already, but either way listen to a recording and then try your performance again, imitating the style you just heard. If possible, find a different recording and try adapting your performance to reflect how that one was played. A big part of playing from a lead sheet is creating the musical style from scratch in the way you interpret the skeleton score.

The important part of practicing lead sheets is to move on quickly. You aren’t aiming to master each song, but rather to get better at quickly reaching a “good enough” version of a song you’re seeing for the first time. So tomorrow, try a new one. Do feel free to return to previous ones in due course, it can be fun to build up your repertoire in this way, but the key thing is to keep practicing new lead sheets.

The second part of learning to play from lead sheets is what will accelerate your progress. That is to practice the core listening skills which enable you to go from the barebones notation of a lead sheet into a full and expressive musical performance. This is what we specialise in at Musical U where we have training modules to help you learn all those core listening skills.

Again, the details will depend on your instrument, but here are a few examples to give you the idea:

• Developing your relative pitch and improvisation skills to let you interpret the melody and play a solo.
• Learning about chord progressions so you can glance at a lead sheet and understand the chord symbols.
• As a singer, learning solfa so that you can easily sight-read from the melody score of a lead sheet.
• Doing rhythm ear training to understand how to interpret rhythm notation and create a swinging groove.

By working on each of the component skills that go into playing from a lead sheet, you can rapidly develop your musical instinct so that playing from a lead sheet seems easy and natural.

Being able to play from a lead sheet lets you easily play a song you’ve never heard before, or confidently join a group for a performance even if they’re playing tunes you don’t know.

That can be really handy, but it’s not actually the biggest benefit of learning to play from lead sheets.

Playing from a lead sheet truly matters because it’s the perfect test-bed for your musicality: Learning to play well from a lead sheet offers you the ideal opportunity to develop the “inner skills of music” you need to be a confident, capable, expressive musician.

You’ll learn to break free from note-by-note score reading and bring the music in your head out into the world.

You’ll learn to be versatile across genres and styles of music.

You’ll learn to be fearless when confronted with unfamiliar repertoire because you know you can spin your own great renditions, practically out of nowhere.

Whether or not you ever literally get handed a lead sheet and need to perform from it, learning to play from lead sheets is a superb way to develop your musicality. So grab yourself a “fake book” and get started!

The post About Playing From a Lead Sheet appeared first on Musical U.

Have you felt limited in music, or intimidated by creative tasks like playing by ear and improvisation? Have you wondered if the musicians who can do those things could always do them – or if they somehow learned? You might be surprised by the answer! In today’s episode we discover how a positive attitude and the right “toolkit” can equip you to find your own creative freedom in music.

Today we’re joined by Natalie Weber, founder of the popular MusicMattersBlog.com, a site devoted to inspiring creativity in music education. Natalie has studied music since the age of 7 but it was only later on that she broke free of the sheet music and found the kind of creative freedom which she now shares with students of all ages and levels in her independent piano studio and with music teachers worldwide on Music Matters Blog.

Natalie writes regularly to share lessons from her own piano studio and also keeps right up to date with all the interesting developments from other websites and music educators. Topics on the site range from highly practical guides and suggestions for covering topics like rhythm or ear training in lessons, through to app reviews and conference reports to share the latest goings-on in the world of music education.

We interviewed Natalie for our site back in 2011 so it was high time we caught up again!

In this episode we talk about Natalie’s own journey from being a note-reading pianist to finally breaking free of the sheet music. How that took a combination of practical techniques and a big mindset shift about what it means to make music.

She shares two pivotal experiences that totally transformed how comfortable she felt making music out of nothing and now inspires the creative approach she takes in her own teaching and leadership of other music teachers around the world.

You’re going to hear how important it was that she had a positive attitude in her own music learning – really inspiring if you want to expand your own musicality.

Also: would you guess that Natalie’s new course on music theory and reading sheet music was actually created in partnership with two people who struggled with that the most…

Links and Resources

• Music Matters Blog
• 2011 Interview with Natalie
• Pattern Play books for piano by Akiko and Forrest Kinney
• For the Love of Music course – Special Offer! Save $10 with discount code MUSICALU

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Natalie! Thank you for joining us today.

Natalie: You bet. Thanks for having me.

Christopher: Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us about how you got started making music yourself?

Natalie: I can. I was one of those seven-year-olds who was forced into it by my parents. I don’t really remember having any compelling desire myself to start into piano lessons but it was just assumed that that was something that my sisters and I would do. We did and dutifully attended our lessons every week and not so dutifully did our practicing during the week.

Christopher: What was it like for you? You described it there as doing it because you were told to rather than because you had a burning desire inside you. How did those first few years of piano leaning go for you? Did it feel like you had a natural inclination for music? Did it all come easily or was it a matter of working hard for each bit of progress you got?

Natalie: Honestly, thinking back, the first number of years are, I don’t know, not very clear for me. I know that I’ve taken piano for a long time but I don’t have a lot of memories of those early years. I just remember going to lessons and that I was required to practice during the week. I never had a really good ear for music. It wasn’t something that I thought, “This is great. I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.” It was just part of our expectation growing up in our family. It was that we would take piano lessons. So yeah, it’s strange now being in the world of music and looking back. I don’t have a lot of fond memories or memories at all really of those early years.

Christopher: That’s really interesting and I’m sure quite reassuring to our listeners to find out that someone even as accomplished as you didn’t necessarily take to it one morning and find they were a natural prodigy.

Natalie: Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, it’s interesting because probably the thing that I hear people say the most when I tell them I’m a piano teacher is, “I wish that I had stuck with piano lessons.” Even though I am one of those that stuck with piano lessons, I would say a lot of my love for music and development in music didn’t come until quite a bit later in my studies.

Christopher: There must have been some kind of spark or connection because years on, you are 100% immersed in the world of music. You run one of the most popular, if not the most popular blog for music teachers and piano teachers in particular. How did that happen? How did the next ten years of learning piano go? Where did that desire to do it for your life come from?

Natalie: That’s a very good question. There’s a proverb that says, “A man plans his way but the Lord directs his steps.” I feel like that’s the story of my life is that God has really directed my steps. I never set out and said, “Hey, this is going to be my life focus. I’m going to invest myself in music.” But it was one thing after another, it just kept leading me down that path. I can remember getting to a point probably mid teens where being a regular piano student, and a number of my friends were also involved in music. Some of them were incredible musicians. They could do this strange thing called play by ear where they would sit down at a piano with no sheet of music in front of them. They would just play this beautiful music.

One of my friends in particular, I remember doing this little game with her where I would write down several letters from the music alphabet on a piece of paper and give it to her. Then she would just take that and play this gorgeous piece of music based off of that. I was so in awe of that ability being someone trained exclusively through a, “Here’s your method. Here’s the notes on the page. Play these notes and count the rhythm.” That launched me I guess into more of a quest to figure out how do you do that? How do you go beyond just what’s written on a page and really make music?

Christopher: Did you have that confidence that it was possible? Because when I think back, I had a very similar experience to you in being trained to read notes and that was that, and being just overwhelmed by the people who could play by ear and improvise because it was so far beyond me. For me, I guess I didn’t believe it was possible. I thought those guys could do it and they could always do it. I didn’t know how to do it. Therefore, I couldn’t. It sounds like maybe you had a bit more insight that actually maybe that stuff was learnable.

Natalie: In some ways, it’s probably more a sense of wishful thinking. I remember asking my friends, saying, “How did you do that? Show me how to do that.” She would say, “You just do it like this.” Then she would play the same thing again. I’m like, “Yeah, but I don’t know what you just did.” Then I would seek out other people, looking at various teachers. Any time I heard of a teacher or anybody who could improvise or play by ear, I would say, “Can I come have a few lessons with you?” I guess there was an element of persistence, right. I was like, “Surely somebody could teach me how to do this because I want to be able to do it.” I would go. I remember taking lessons from a teacher in our town who was a very good improviser.

It was similar where she would play something for me and say, “You just do it like this.” Then she would play it. I’m like, “But I don’t know what you’re doing. It doesn’t make any sense. I can’t just sit down and play what you played.” It was a long process of looking for teachers, looking for different books. Any time I saw a book or resource on improvising, it was like a magnetic attraction like, “Oh, maybe this will be the missing link. Maybe I’ll actually learn if I use this resource.”

Christopher: Got you. I love your persistence. I encountered that same thing where the people that would inspire me because they could do it typically didn’t really understand how they did it. Even if they’d worked at it and got better at it intentionally, they didn’t necessarily know how or they didn’t have enough of an understanding to explain it to me. I love that you encountered that same thing and had the hope and the positivity to persist because I have to confess, I did not. I had to come to it another way later on. We know each other a little bit. I’ve always admired that positive spirit you bring to everything you do. You are a very hopeful person and a very determined person in a gentle and friendly way. So I guess it doesn’t surprise me to hear that when you were faced with that challenge, you just said, “I’m going to keep trying. I’m going to find the way that someone will be able to teach me this.”

Natalie: Well, thank you. That’s encouraging because there are certainly, yeah, still more things that I need to do that with.

Christopher: There’s always more to learn in music. Tell me, how did that develop for you as you found more teachers and more resources? Was there a point where you’re like, “Oh, okay. I can do this now,” or how did you get better and better to the point where now, I think it’s fair to say at Music Matters and at your own piano studio, creativity in music learning is a huge focus for you?

Natalie: Well, certainly teaching has been a huge part of that because as I work with students who have similar desires, I have to work with them in a more systematic way and help them understand how to take the pieces and put them together to form the whole. A huge part of that has been having a deeper understanding of music theory and technical skills at the piano whether it’s scales or chords, arpeggios and all of those things pieced together and seeing practical uses for them. That’s all contributed to it. But I would say probably one of the most … I guess one of the biggest turning points for me came in 2012 where again, in my quest for finding out how do you do this improvising thing, I had attended a short, yeah, a three-day intensive out in Seattle that was led by another teacher and someone who had published some resources on improvising.

I had been to a few of his workshops at our National Music Teacher’s Conference and felt like there, I was finally connecting with how do you sit down at the piano and play something when you have no printed music in front of you. I went to that course and left there feeling like the cliché, having drank from a fire hydrant. Like, “What do you do with all of this information? How do you put it all to use?” From there, I went to a retreat in Colorado Springs. It was a Creative Life conference. This is probably the biggest turning point for me. It was a bunch of musicians from all walks of life and all different instruments. They converged on this retreat center.

The whole focus was on using music both as a means of worshiping God but also just as something to freely share with other people. It wasn’t about learning a piece perfectly and then giving this polished performance. These people got up and even the conference artist at one point, got up for the concert one night. He started into a piece and got, I don’t know, 15, 20 seconds in. Then just put his hands up and laughed at himself and said, “Ugh, I started that all wrong. Let me start again.”

For someone who’s much more familiar with the whole classical music scene, I mean, my chin dropped. I was like, “You can’t do that. You’re on stage.” But it was so refreshing just to see people who loves the music. They love sharing it. They didn’t feel like it had to be perfect in order to share it. They had a time at the end of the conference where anybody who wanted to could just get in a line and just share something. At first, I was like, “There’s no way I could do that. I don’t have anything ready to play.”

But I just started feeling this prompting toward the end like, “No, you need to play something. You need to play something.” It’s just these trembling hands and my heart beating out my chest. I went to the front, sat down at the piano. This is the first time in my life that I had ever done anything like this. I didn’t have a single piece of printed music or anything in front of me. I just sat down. I played this simple melody by ear and added these reluctant broken chords in my left hand. Then got up. It was very short, very simple, very just nothing exceptional. The whole room just erupted and applause and was so receptive.

I was just like, “This is amazing.” I think that really broke through a barrier for me where I was able to come home from that and have a lot more freedom in playing, in sharing, even in the way that I taught my students to share their music with others where it wasn’t about perfect performances. It was about exploring and discovering and trying new things, and being free to be creative at the piano.

Christopher: Amazing. That sounds like such a wonderful experience. I’m sure for many in our audience, it would be a dream come true. It sounds like you were in their shoes too beforehand in that it felt totally out of reach because you were trained in such a different mode. I can certainly relate to that. I’d love to understand, clearly that was the culmination of this conference or this camp you were at. How much of what happened in the few days before that was about practical, how do you improvise and how does music work? How much was it more about mindset or why you’re making music maybe is the way to put it?

Natalie: That’s good question thinking back on that. Probably the session that stands out the most clearly in my mind was one. I think the guy who led it was a percussionist. It was just a handful of us gathered in a room. He said, “Okay. We’re going to create a track.” He was teaching us something about technology and looping music in that. We’re like, “Okay, great. We’ll create a track.” He goes, “Find something in the room to make music with.” I was just like, “What?” There is no piano.

Christopher: Where’s my piano though?

Natalie: Exactly, yeah. Within a few minutes, there are people who picked up, like somebody picked up a whiteboard marker and used it on the whiteboard and created this interesting sound there, somebody else used a chair, somebody else found a piece of trash that they crumpled in their hands. It sounds a little bit weird like, “Oh, that’s not really music.” Just the way that he had people take those items and use them in a musical way to create certain rhythmic patterns and different pitches, he took all those and recorded them one track at a time. Then mixed them all together to create this pretty cool sounding recording. I think that was back to your original question, it was somewhat more of a mindset change where, again, it wasn’t like, “Oh you got to have the write note at the right time and do everything exactly the right way.”

It was about, “How can we create music or how can we use what we have to make something musical?” It wasn’t like this clashy dissonant horrible sound. It actually came out in a musical way. That was definitely mind blowing for me to think of music in that way. Then that coupled with some of the things that I had learned at this other intensive where you find different patterns that work, whether it’s a chord progression or it’s a pentatonic scale at the keyboard. You take just that framework. Then you explore within that. You have a little bit of a safety net because you know that those things sound good together. Then from there, you’ve got the whole keyboard to work with and try something different or new. I mean, it’s weird. It’s a mixture of practical. It wasn’t like they had us drilling scales or all of that. It was more about the music and creating sounds.

Christopher: That’s fascinating. It sounds like the first conference equipped you with a toolkit you could use. Then it was the second experience that let you see that you didn’t have to have the same expectations of yourself as you maybe did in your classical piano work when it came to improvising. Is that right?

Natalie: Yeah. Absolutely. The first conference, the guy who led that has produced a whole series of books called, “Pattern Play,” that can be used at the piano. There are both duet and ensemble and solo ideas that you can use from there. It’s highly practical. It gives you right there the scale or the chord progression to use at the piano. Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. It was having some of that to work from but then being free to do it and not feeling like I had to know it was going to sound right before I played everything.

Christopher: That sounds like a breakthrough moment for you. But I’m sure it wasn’t an instant change to every aspect of your musical life. I’d love to understand how did the next months and years go in terms of exploring that new way to approach the piano?

Natalie: Well, there were a number of things from that that I feel like grew from that. I was able to take some of my favorite songs and create an original arrangement for them. I had done quite a bit of music writing before or song writing before. But I was so in essence, married to the printed note that as soon as I came up with something that sounded good, I would have to get it put on paper. I just knew I would forget it. After that conference, when I came home to my studio, I sat down at the piano. I started writing an arrangement for one of my favorite songs. It was a challenge to myself to say, “Can you do this without putting anything on paper? Can you do it and just let it become just part of your own music where you could sit down at the piano and you can play it from memory?”

For somebody who struggled equally with memorizing music growing up, I don’t know, it was a huge challenge for me. As I did that and would just add to it day after day, working at the piano and remembering what I had already written and then adding to it until I had the whole arrangement finished was a really big milestone for me. Then that Christmas, I played it. I’d always do a big studio recital. I played that arrangement completely from memory which I know this sounds ridiculous for somebody who’s a really good musician who has no trouble memorizing, but to be able to sit down and play that and just share that piece of music was huge for me, and again, helped me overcome some of my fears of performing, some of my fears of playing without printed music in front of me, memorizing and all that.

It was a process and just trying new things and again, pushing myself and challenging myself to take what I was learning and apply it in actual ways. Another really big moment came. My brother is a cellist. He and I were asked to play for a wedding. We were playing the processional. There was a delay. The wedding party wasn’t coming as we anticipated. Together, we ended up just improvising on a chord progression and looking at each other about having no idea what we’re doing other than continuing to play the chords of the piece of pop music that we were supposed to be playing.

Again, that was a defining moment for me, just to be free to keep the music going. Even when I was out of notes, you know that there could still be music coming. I don’t know. Those are a few that stand out in my mind. Then certainly as I worked with students and would sit down and try to accompany them using this pattern play concept, I would provide a chord accompaniment. Then they would improvise a melody. Then we would switch roles. Just constantly exploring and trying new things and not being afraid to see what it sounded like it.

Christopher: I love what you identified there because I think it’s often glossed over which is even once you have that mindset breakthrough that, okay, maybe you could improvise or play by ear or be a bit freer in music, you’ve got to do that next step of letting go of the crutch of the sheet music, right. You described it beautifully that you do. I don’t know. It’s intimidating and a bit scary if you’re used to always having a page, the stuff in front of you with the notes to play. It sounds like you gradually, over time, got more and more comfortable with not having that crutch or not rushing to write down what you just created and relying more on your musical memory and your ability actually to recreate it if needed.

Natalie: Yeah. Yeah. It is. It’s terrifying at first. A lot of people have said that the brain is like a muscle. Using it, and the only way you can really grow as a musician is to try something that you haven’t done before and push yourself to a new place.

Christopher: How much have you found that scary emotional side of it fade over time? As you got better and better, did it get easier or did it always feel alien to you?

Natalie: No. It’s definitely gotten easier. The more that I have pushed myself and in essence, made myself be in an uncomfortable position in order to test the waters so to speak, it’s gotten easier and easier, like moving a little bit further out and seeing what I can actually be successful trying. Even if it’s not this huge wonderful success like, “Oh wow. I played this Rachmaninoff-sounding piece completely improvised.” It’s not like that. It’s just I guess in real world scenarios whether it’s playing for a wedding or some other special event, and knowing that if my music blows off of the fall board or the music holder on the piano, I’m not going to be sunk. I could do something to keep it going and finish out.

Christopher: I really admire how you dived in at the deep end, to go from the sheet music world to sitting down with nothing in front of you, particularly in front of an audience. That’s brave. It’s wonderful to hear that for you, it was the start of a really rewarding journey. Had you ever done anything looser, like playing from a lead sheet or doing something where you didn’t have every note in front of you?

Natalie: I had never done any of that growing up. Again, it was just classical method, whatever. Play from the book. The first time I remember coming across a lead sheet, I was working at a summer camp for an urban ministry out in California. On my application, I had put that I was a pianist. That immediately landed me a role as the keyboardist for the worship team there. I had been involved in church music for a while back home. It was still more of a traditional music setting where I was playing hymns. I thought I was doing good, just to improvise a little bit from there, add a few chords or runs or such.

When I got to our first practice for this worship team, they put a piece of paper in front of me. It had words with these capital letters above it. I thought it was a joke at first because I was like, “I’m a pianist. Where’s my music?” They’re like, “What? That is your music. That’s what we have. That’s where we’re going from.” That was a pretty rude awakening for me to suddenly be thrown into that and have to really fumble my way through this very cryptic piece of paper and starting out super super simple. Thankfully, I had had enough theory that I knew what a chord was, which I can’t say the same for some of other students that I have sometimes gotten as transfer students.

Christopher: You were able to cobble together what to do with those arcane chord symbols above the lyrics.

Natalie: Right. Yeah. But it was just essentially blocking a chord like, “Okay. Here’s your C Major chord, all right. Now, we’re moving to the G Major chord.” So stumbling through it very immaturitially for a while. Really through most of that experience, it was somewhat on the humiliating side because I have these great musicians who are used to that kind of thing. They’re playing guitars or whatever, or singing. I’m here supposedly at the top of the studio, in like a teacher’s studio and I can’t play this simple song. That gave me a lot more motivation to try to figure out how do you work with something like this. How do you take these chords and actually make them musical and …

Christopher: How do you feel about lead sheets now?

Natalie: Fit in with the group and with the style that they’re playing? I’m still not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. But I feel a lot more comfortable looking at them and understanding what’s going on, and being able to play something and beat, with [crosstalk 00:28:04]

Christopher: One of the things I’ve always admired about Music Matters and the way you approach music education is how practical you are in developing the listening skills. I mentioned earlier, I had to come through it a different way. That was very much through ear training and doing ear training exercises. Then I after that, figured out how to apply that to do things like playing by ear and improvising. But I love that with your students, as I understand it, you’re very much practical first. You give them creative games and exercises to let them explore this world of creating from scratch without the drilling of interval recognition or whatever it may be. I imagine that lead sheet exercise of can you come up with your own arrangement is the kind of thing you do with your students. Would that be right?

Natalie: Yeah. Absolutely. From early on, I’m trying to combine the concepts and the skills of music theory and technical skills with actual application. That’s one of the things. For a while, I was really frustrated as a teacher looking back and thinking, “Man, there’s so much that I missed in my own music education.” I remember at one point, coming across a whole stack of books that I had gone through as a student. Mixed in the bunch, there were multiple levels of theory books that I had actually completed. I thought, “This is strange. I don’t ever remember any of this.” I think it’s because we did theory as a completely disjointed, separate subject where it was like, “Okay, count these sharps. Figure out a key signature. Write the name of this chord.”

Then there was never any connection to the music that I was playing. From early on as a teacher, I basically said, “I’m not going to use theory books. I’m just going to have my students learn theory as the core of the music that they’re playing.” Whether we start out with little C Major pentascale and then they learn there are three primary triads for that. Then I have them go home for that week. See if they can pick out the melody for Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Then once they come back with that, then I’d show them how they can use those primary triads in their other hand to harmonize just really simply with a melody. Little things like that where my desire, my hope for my students is that we’re approaching it systematically and they’re learning these skills without any of the pain associated with it that I had where it just seems normal to them like, “Oh, I heard a cool song. I’m going to see if I can sit down and play that.”

“Oh, I’m in this key. So I’m going to add these chords.” It’s much more of a natural approach for them not just to read a piece of music but to be able to pick something out by ear or to take that same chord progression that sounded like so cool and then add their on melody above it. Whatever it might, just that I guess there’s not that same sense of fear or even just the big unknown, like there’s this whole unknown part of music that they’ve never touched them. I want them to be aware of all the possible ways.

Christopher: I love that. I wish you could be my piano teacher because that was definitely an unknown world for me for far too long.

Natalie: Hurrah.

Christopher: Like you say, the traditional teaching of music theory is so dry and divorced from what brings us to music in the first place. It’s the rare and lucky individual who eventually finds a way to tie it back together and make sense of it. I think more instrument teachers like yourself actually showing the value of music theory from day one and the practical use and the benefits of it would be so transformative for the way people learn music.

Natalie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, it’s been huge for me. It’s easy to look back and think, “I wish this or I wish that.” But it really is I think in some ways, the blessing in disguise because the lack of, or at least, perception of what I lacked in my music education, now, I’m a lot more conscientious as a teacher. I might not be. Who knows? Maybe my students, maybe they won’t know. They won’t value it to the same degree. I don’t know. But just trying to be faithful and keep learning and then use whatever is in my past or my mistakes or the great things too from my own music education and pass those on to the next generation.

Christopher: We’re I think in a really interesting age for music education in the sense that with the Internet at our fingertips and a YouTube tutorial on the song you want to play always available to you, I think it’s increasingly tempting for music students, whether they’re young or adult to try and shortcut the process of learning music and go for the quick and easy solution rather than taking the time to work on technique or learn about the music theory and that kind of thing. What’s your opinion on that? What advice would you have for a student in this day and age where it can be so tempting to leap to a quick fix?

Natalie: Yeah. I completely agree. It is a challenge. I mean, our whole society I think is conditioned to want results quickly. It’s hard. It’s hard to stick with something and to do the drills or exercises that are less fun, whether it’s working through a scale or an arpeggio or counting out a rhythm that’s really tricky, we just want to skip by it and have the easy way out. If we do that, we miss out on those layers of foundation that really become a part of us as a musician.

I think you can get by. You can fake it for a lot of different scenarios. You can do okay. But you’re cheating yourself if you don’t really take the time and invest in the parts that are going to eventually, contribute to the whole. I remember quite a few years ago, I read a book called The Piano Shop on the Left Bank. There was one particular little anecdote from there that has stuck with me ever since. It was a teacher who was giving a master class to a student. He referenced Leonardo, the great artist. He said, “Leonardo spent years developing a codex of body parts. He drew ears. He drew elbows. He drew hands. He drew all part of the body in as many different aspects as he could. Then he forgot about it and painted what he saw. You must do the same.”

That’s just stuck with me anytime there’s a temptation or this feeling like, “I just want to get right to the piece. I just want to play this music and sound good.” Well, I mean, Leonardo could’ve done that. He could’ve just said, “I’m going to draw this.” But he would’ve never become recognized as the great artist that he is because he would’ve not had the same quality to his work. There is a lot of value in the small pieces and say, “I’m going to drill this scale. I’m going to drill this fingering. I’m going to count that rhythm until I can’t get it wrong.” You take piece by piece by piece. Then you put it together. That becomes the whole.

Then you can look at a new piece of music or hear a new piece of music. Then that’s where you get this sensation like, “Oh man. That person, it looks effortless for them.” Well, that’s why, because they just have spent hundreds of hours drilling the parts so that they could sit down and play that piece of music and it essentially feel effortless.

Christopher: Wonderful advice. I think a really beautiful analogy for the right way to learn music. As I said before, I’ve long been an admirer of the way you do things in particular. Part of what’s beautiful about your approach is you find that middle ground. It’s not just, “I will develop my codex of body parts as it were and I will get totally lost in the weeds of music theory. I’ll do my ear training exercise. I’ll get perfect on my hand and then my scales. Then one day, I’ll learn the repertoire.”

It’s also not, “I’ll just dabble about with this improvisation stuff and I won’t bother will all of understanding or studying or perfecting my fingering technique.” You find that middle ground in a very practical way, to combine the two in an enjoyable and creative form of music learning. I really applaud you for that. I think it’s far too rare. I’m sure your students thoroughly enjoy the process of learning in a way that the traditional method just does not provide.

Natalie: Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you. I think even like you mentioned about the you learning through drilling, that you’re training exercises and that, there’s such a place for that kind of thing. I think the tendency is maybe somebody wants to use a new app or use some new resource. They use it for a short period of time and then just move onto the next thing and say, “Op, that didn’t work. I’m going to try something else.”

I think there’s a lot of value in just … I remember somebody once calling it just-stick-tuitiveness. You find something and then stick to it. Keep working at that for an extended period of time and give yourself time to let the results come. Whether it’s practicing a new piece of music or drilling some intervals by ear and working that over and over along with maybe figuring out another piece of music by ear. If we can learn to be diligent and faithful in the little things, then it does, over the long haul, we will see results.

Christopher: That’s true. You have a new course out recently that I found fascinating both from where it had come from and what it could do for people. I believe it’s called For the Love of Music, I would love for you to tell us a bit more about that course.

Natalie: Yeah. This was something that a couple of my older students and I worked on together. I had these two teenage boys who love music and were planning to pursue a future in music. They love to sit down and play. They were on the opposite end of the spectrum from me, which I’ve always said I feel like God has a sense of humor because I think everyone he brings to my studio plays by ear. Then I have to teach them how to read music. But that’s the boat these guys were in is they could play well. They could improvise pretty freely at the piano but they just struggled with being able to read music.

Even after a number of years of lessons, it was like they would still gravitate constantly to playing by ear. If at all possible, avoid having to read music. We got to talking and basically said, “This isn’t going to work. You can’t get as far as you want to in music if you don’t develop this skill of being able to read fluently.” We decided to spend a week together, an intensive week where we would work together, putting together this course, For the Love of Music, where it would walk people through the process of how do you get from I love music and I love to sit down and play, and I’ve got these relatively advanced skills playing wise but I’m struggling to even read an elementary piece of music.

That was the impetus behind this course. We recorded 20-some different videos of them just explaining each part of the music. We looked at the heartbeat of music, understanding rhythm not just as sound but what does it look like on a page. How do you translate what you’re hearing to what you’re seeing? We looked at the intricacies of music, understanding the harmonic structure in music. How do you take this really cool sounding chord and identify it on a page? How do you take a melody that you’re hearing and learn how to recognize that in notation or put it into notation? Somebody who can maybe write something that sounds really cool, play something that sounds cool and they want to put it on paper but have no idea how to do that.

Just in some sense, it’s working backwards from instead of, “Here’s the piece of music. Let’s learn to play it.” It’s taking the sounds and what you’re hearing, what you already love, and then translating that back to printed music. That was our goal. We did a lot of different audio recordings, the video recordings, the workbook that would be available then to other people in that same boat who are saying, “I love music. I love the way this sounds. I can sit down and play at the piano but I’ve no idea what I’m reading in front of me or I don’t know what to do this piece of music in front of me.”

We did that together. Then throughout the course of that time, they had a contest going with each other where they were seeing who could sight read the most measures of music every night. We would track it to see who would win by the end. We thought this would be a really fun course that somebody could either go through on their own, just watching the video clips and doing the audio dictations and working through it at their own pace or they could get a couple friends together and challenge each other and say, “Hey, let’s study this together and see who can sight read the most,” or whatever. Just doing it in a group setting for that camaraderie and accountability or a teacher to use with some students. It’s got a lot of different applications but just again, tapping into that love for music that so many have and then wanting to develop that further and to really use in school then.

Christopher: Very cool. You mentioned there that these two students of yours were quite accomplished on the playing by ear side. We have a lot of people that come to us at Musical U who are kind of beginners at everything as it were. They might be taking up piano for the first time in retirement, for example. I explain to them, “We can certainly help you with the inner skills and the understanding of what you’re hearing and starting to improvise and play by ear. But you’re probably also going to want to learn the note by note traditional piano or whatever the instrument is technique as well.” It sounds like in fact, this course could be a really great alternative to that in that it I believe starts from the basics and it helps them connect to what they hear with the dots on the page.

Natalie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Exactly, yeah. I mean, it starts with what’s the music staff. Learning from that point on and then how a note on the staff relates to the pitch on an instrument, and then putting that together. Certainly someone could start from scratch, not knowing anything about the printed page of music. Then work through it at their own pace. Then those who do have some background, they could work through it more rapidly. Those who maybe struggle at a certain point like, “Okay. Wait a minute. What are these different kinds of chords you’re talking about?” Then they could spend a little more time on that and do some supplemental work with other things in the areas that they want to develop routinely.

Christopher: Wonderful. That sounds like it’s really taking your practical approach to music teaching and applying it to fundamentals of music theory from the ground up and sight reading even. That’s a fantastic resource.

Natalie: Yeah. Absolutely. Because that’s the goal is eventually, we want to be able to play music and play it well, whether it’s to play it from a printed piece that somebody else has written or whether it’s to create our own piece or whether it’s to play something by ear that you’ve heard. Any of those, the end goal is always, “I want to play my instrument well so that it sounds good and so that other people enjoy hearing it so that I enjoy sharing it as I love.”

Christopher: Amazing. Well, that’s certainly something I will be directing people to in the future when they ask me, “How can I learn the sheet music side of things too?” That’s presumably all available online? Is it? Okay.

Natalie: Yes, it sure is. MusicMattersBlog.com and I do have for any of your listeners, I have a special discount code that I set up for that. Anybody who is interested can get it for $10 off. The code is just MusicalU so that might give a little, I don’t know, helpful incentive for those who are considering but not sure if that’s what they’re looking for in that.

Christopher: Fantastic. That’s very generous of you. Thank you for setting that up. Definitely if you’ve been listening to this interview, and you’re inspired by this different approach to thinking about music learning and if you’ve been inspired by Natalie’s story of how she’s learned and how she’s adapted her own approach to music, definitely do check this out this course, For the Love of Music. You can use the discount code, MusicalU to get $10 off. Terrific. Thank you again, Natalie for joining us today to share your story and your insights on musicality and how to find this freedom even if you’ve been coached in just note by note reading in the past or if you’re starting from scratch. Before we say goodbye, where can listeners find out more about you and your other projects?

Natalie: Probably the best place is just MusicMattersBlog.com that can get you a lot places. I do have a lot of different all sorts of music-related resources and worksheets and references on there. So that would be a great place for anybody to go and get connected to other, lots and lots of other resources in the music world.

Christopher: Perfect. Thank you. Well, we’ll make sure the link to your blog and also the Love of Music Course are in the show notes for this episode. Thank you again for joining us, Natalie.

The post A Mindset for Musicality, with Natalie Weber appeared first on Musical U.

In this first episode of the new Musicality Podcast, Musical U founder Christopher Sutton introduces the show and shares what you can expect. Learn how we define “Musicality” and how this podcast can help you to gain a natural freedom and confidence in music.

Links and Resources

• What is Musicality?
• Get extra bonuses and behind-the-scenes exclusives with Podcast Insiders
• If you enjoy the show please rate and review it!
• Join Musical U with the Special offer for podcast listeners
• Let us know what you think! Email: hello at musicalitypodcast.com

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of The Musicality Podcast!

My name’s Christopher Sutton and I’m the founder and Director of Musical U: A website where we help passionate musicians to develop their inner musicality so that they can feel free, confident and creative in music.

Before we begin the full episodes of the show I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce myself and the podcast, so you know what’s coming up.

I am a 33-year old Londoner with a wife and young daughter, and I’ve been a lifelong music lover and amateur musician. For the first 15 years or so of learning music I felt like a bit of a fraud though – because although I was practicing hard and getting good at playing instruments, I’d see musicians who could play by ear, improvise, create their own music on the fly and be confident sitting in with other musicians at a jam session or gig – and those things just all seemed way beyond me. I felt like they must have some natural talent that I didn’t.

And so I persevered with learning music but really felt limited, frustrated, and a bit disappointed in myself, however hard I worked.

Eventually, around 2008 I discovered this thing called “Ear Training”. And a whole world opened up to me – because I finally saw that all those skills which had seemed magical – were actually learnable! It took time and effort to develop them for myself, but I gradually realised that the amazing musicians I’d admired weren’t necessarily gifted or talented – they’d just learned to do these wonderful, creative, empowering skills which for so many years I hadn’t even known you could learn!

So although I’m not a born businessman and hadn’t really planned to do it, I started a company in 2009 to help other people learn these incredible skills and tap into their inner “natural” musician.

That company is Musical U, and we’ve sinced helped millions of musicians to develop these inner skills of musicality. I don’t say that to brag – just to hopefully inspire you that you too can become more musical – and hopefully that’s why you’re listening to this podcast right now 🙂

This podcast is going to be all about musicality.

That’s a word which doesn’t have a single precise definition. At Musical U we define it like this:

Musicality is a set of “inner skills” which let you freely and confidently express yourself in music.

And we have a whole set of skills that we think are part of musicality. We’ll be covering these all in more detail in future episodes, but to give you a taste, we’re talking about things like:

• Playing by ear
• Singing in tune
• Jamming with other musicians
• Having good rhythm
• Writing music
• Writing notation
• Improvising a solo
• Talking intelligently about music
• Understanding Music Theory
• Clapping in time
• Knowing your instrument inside and out
• Tuning your instrument by ear
• Reading notation
• Sight-reading music
• Playing from a lead sheet
• Performing live
• and Playing multiple instruments

I’m sure as I listed those out there were a few where you thought “Oh cool, I can do that” – and probably several others where you thought “Wow, definitely can’t do that – but I’d love to be able to!”

If so, you are in the right place.

This podcast is going to be a mix of interviews and teaching. I’m going to be talking with some of the most inspiring and innovative music educators and musicians, and asking them about how they developed their own musicality – as well as asking for their top tips and techniques to help you improve. We’ll also be doing teaching episodes where I’ll share some of the insights and explanations which have helped members of Musical U to develop their own musicality.

My goal is that this podcast is going to be super useful for you just by itself. But I should definitely mention that we also have a membership program at Musical U which provides world-leading in-depth musicality training and an unparalleled level of personal support and guidance. So if you find yourself enjoying the podcast please do consider joining Musical U.

Now one thing to mention is that some of the podcast episodes are going to be long. I know we all like short bite-sized learning these days – but when you hear some of the people I’m going to be talking with, you’ll see that it would have been a crime to cut them short!

So if you think an hour-long podcast episode is just way too long, I’d encourage you to think about listening to it in two or three parts. That’s one of the great things about podcasts, you’re free to fit it into your free time in whatever way you like! And I’ll be providing a recap at the end of each episode to remind you of all the most important points.

So that’s what the Musicality Podcast is all about. We’ve been preparing episodes in advance so I already know we have some amazing stuff lined up and I’m seriously excited to finally share it with you!

Okay, so the last three things to mention are:

• Number One: How to subscribe: if you want to be sure to get every episode of the podcast as it comes out please subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts from.
• Number Two: How to get even more. If you visit musicalitypodcast.com, that’s where we’ll have the shownotes for each episode including links to any resources mentioned, so that you can follow up on anything that caught your attention. And if you want even more, you can sign up for Podcast Insiders where we’ll be sharing extra bonus material and behind-the-scenes exclusives.
• And Number Three: How to support the show. If you enjoy The Musicality Podcast please take a moment to rate and review it in your podcast store. We’ll have instructions at musicalitypodcast.com to make this easy for you, and I would so appreciate it – it helps more people to discover the show. And as I said before, this podcast is brought to you by Musical U, and it’s members of Musical U that provide the funds we need to record and produce this podcast. So if you want to support the show and develop your own musicality, please consider becoming a member of Musical U. We’d love to have you join us!

So that’s it for this first ever episode. We’re launching with several episodes on day one so that means you can immediately dive in to our first interview. Just remember to subscribe so you don’t miss out.

Thanks for listening and giving our new show a try. I truly appreciate it, and I’ll see you on the next episode of the Musicality Podcast!

The post Welcome to the Musicality Podcast! appeared first on Musical U.

This week Musical U pays homage to this musical wonder of the world with a simple guitar/voice cover of a high-production Father John Misty song, a revolutionary guitar learning method, and a complete guide to how – and why – to tune your guitar by ear.

So you’re not a guitar player (even though you wish you were!)? Let’s begin with something for everyone who wants to become more free and natural in their musical expression – a new giveaway.

That’s right,

Musical U is giving away free stuff

… to help you grow in your musicality. Why?

In his quest to help more musicians acquire the freedom and naturalness of expression they desire, Musical U founder Christopher Sutton has been reaching out to the greatest minds in modern musicality education. Into their methods, and also into their backstories to learn more about their own musical journeys.

In addition, Christopher has been inspired to produce his own series of teaching podcasts on the musicality questions you care about most.

The results are in and we have a fantastic lineup of podcasts scheduled to launch next week.

If you’ve been hanging around Musical U at all the past month, you can tell that we’ve been pretty pumped about this new Musicality Podcast series. You may even have grabbed a free subscription to the Podcast Insiders to stay on top of all the podcast news and promotions.

So, in celebration of the launch, we’re giving away an amazing array of memberships, apps, software, worksheets – from Musical U and many other musicality educators.

So head over to The Musicality Podcast Launch: Prize Giveaway! to find out how you can fill your musical toolbox in one fell swoop – for free!

From a Big Band to a Single Guitar

In our Before and After posts, we’ve been learning so much by examining the process of transforming an original tune into a cover. This week, we witnessed the power of a

single guitar.

Kendra McKinley breaks down all Father John Misty’s entire band into a jazzy arrangement on her gold top and soars over the whole thing with passionate, heartfelt vocals. See how she does it with a look at Before and After: Covering Father John Misty.

“When You’re Smiling and Astride Me” doesn’t follow the standard pop music arrangement, but it works precisely due to the way that the song builds. Learn more about creating interesting arrangements from Sound Shock.

Father John Misty frequently starts songwriting with just his guitar and voice, which leads to the chords and melody being the main driving factor behind the song. This strategy of starting very simply is how many of the greatest songs that you may know of had their beginnings. Start your songwriting journey (on any instrument!), with Guitar Adventures.

To create this cover song, Kendra had to change the key to fit within her vocal range. This is a very common practice for many musicians. Key changes can also have the additional impact of changing the color of a song! To do this, you need to become comfortable with the art of transposition. From the Top lays out four easy steps to master transposition.

A common practice for guitar players is to use a capo to quickly change the key of a song. This has the added benefit of not needing to change chord voicings “on the fly” and keep open strings available to your harmonies. To get started using a capo, with Eric Blackmon Music:

Tune Up

With all the gizmos and gadgets available, what’s the point of tuning your guitar by ear?

Musicality means that you are connected with your instrument, that you really hear what you’re doing. Sure, you can learn to press the “right” buttons in the “right” order, but are you really making music?

Connecting with your instrument is a deeply satisfying step to bringing out and expressing the music that is within you. And tuning your guitar by ear – apart from being a very learnable and fun skill – can actually become a foundational step to your ear training.

Learn more about the art of tuning – including all those cool alternate tunings – as you learn How To Tune A Guitar By Ear.

Sometimes it seems as though every guitar player has their unique way to tune their instrument. It can almost become a habit, your own private ritual before beginning the practice session. Another secret trick is to use harmonics when tuning – with these high pitches, it can be easier to hear the waves that are present when strings are not in tune. Justin Guitar has this great lesson to get you started tuning your guitar with harmonics.

How are interval ear training and tuning a guitar related? And can interval ear training supercharge your ability to quickly tune your guitar? Absolutely! David Dimuzio has some super tips on tuning using intervals:

You did it! Your guitar is perfectly in tune (by ear) and you’re ready to start playing. Only to come back the next day and it sounds just as bad as before your careful tuning. Why don’t guitar strings simply stay in tune after all your meticulous work? And what about those other tuning problems? Roadie Tuner knows all about why guitars go out of tune – and what to do about it.

We talk a lot about learning to play by ear, tune by ear, and developing your musical ear. How will this change as you get older and (inevitable) need some sort of hearing aid? Does this mean that your days of enjoying music are over? Not at all! Hearing Aids For Music details one musician’s journey through hearing loss, and how he overcame it!

B4 G4 – and after

With all massive throngs picking up the guitar, you may be surprised to learn that the most popular method book was published over 40 years ago, and was never tested on real students!

What’s more, most method books ever since have blindly followed the same model. And the centuries-old one-to-one private lesson model still pervades.

David Hart loved teaching guitar. But he was frustrated with both the inefficiency of the old model for the student’s learning, as well was the near-impossibility of making a decent living as a guitar teacher. He tried starting his own music school, but it was still not enough.

Enter the G4 guitar method.

David methodically tried and tested more efficient ways to learn what matters most to guitar students and came up a system that his students and his teachers absolutely love. We spoke with him at length about this Guitar Method that Works – for Teachers and Students.

David started the conversation by talking about the 80/20 principle, and how that applies to music. Wait a minute… what is the 80/20 principle? While we cannot do it justice here, Mark Samples talks all about how this fascinating 80/20 principle can be applied to fight against perfectionism with productivity deep-hacks for musicians.

Learning music has benefits that far exceed just the act of playing your instrument. The connections between neuroscience and music education have been long established and continue to be a way to strengthen your brain. For more information about the benefits of music education and how to memorize music faster, this fascinating podcast from Becoming Superhuman is a great listen!

Many want to learn music or improve their learning, but don’t know how to get past their obstacles. Having a system in place, that guides you through the process of learning a new skill, is highly valuable and will keep you on the right path. Here is a wonderful guide on how to learn the art of music production as fast as possible. These principles can be applied to almost anything that you are trying to accomplish!

The internet has changed how we learn and interact with the world. The amount of information available is seemingly unlimited, and this increases our ability to learn more about topics we are passionate about. In addition to the resources at Musical U, there are many other great educators that can be found in the online space. For a list of online games that can help you in your quest to become a better musician, check out TpT Music Crew.

Guitar and Beyond

With all the info out there, and our exposure to so much astounding musical creativity, musicians of the 21st century are finding out that there are better ways to learn.

The post Musicality Podcast Giveaway, Tune Your Guitar, G4 Guitar Method, and a Misty Cover appeared first on Musical U.

Guitars go out of tune for all sorts of different reasons, and you won’t always have an electronic tuner around to help you out. For quick, on-the-fly tuning, tuning by ear reigns supreme.

By the end of this guide on how to tune a guitar for beginners, you’ll know how to tune your guitar with just your hands and ears, popular alternate tunings, and how to check that you’ve tuned correctly by using a piano.

Why You Should Tune Your Guitar By Ear (Instead of Relying on an Electronic Tuner)

Learning how to tune a guitar with a tuner is easy. You’ve probably got one of the thousand-and-one guitar tuner phone apps or software that can pick up your guitar sound, analyse the frequencies and tell you how you should turn your tuning pegs. You can find electronic tuner boxes all around any guitar shop. Maybe there’s even one built into your acoustic guitar.

So why am I encouraging you to practice tuning by ear?

It’s because it lays the foundation of pitch ear training. If you can understand the pitch relationships between notes and become sensitive to details of tuning just by consistently tuning your guitar every day, you’ll have built a solid foundation of pitch skills.

After a month’s practice, you’ll be able to strum once and instantly tell whether the guitar is in tune or not, and a little after that you will even be able to tell straight-off which string sounds different than it should. So tuning by ear lays the basic foundation for understanding notes just by listening. Some guitarists even use it as the basis for developing perfect pitch.

Step By Step Instructions For Tuning A Guitar By Ear

Here is our guide to how to standard tune your guitar by ear. But before we dive into the nitty-gritty of tuning, it’s important to understand the basics of your guitar.

Prepare: Check Your Pegs

If you haven’t tuned your guitar before, take a moment to familiarise yourself with your tuning pegs. Depending on whether your pegs are all on one side (electric style) or three on each side (acoustic style) and whether the guitar has been strung in the normal way, the directionality of each peg might vary.

You want to find out: does turning the peg clockwise make the string tighter (and its pitch higher) or looser (and its pitch lower)?

Once you get familiar with this setup on your guitar it will become instinctive and you won’t need to think about it again.

Prepare: Understand How Guitar Strings Work

When you’re looking down at the six strings of your guitar, you’ll notice that the strings go from thickest to thinnest. The topmost thickest one is your low E string, also called the sixth string. Following that, the next thickest is A, or the fifth string, and so on, all the way to your first string (the high E). The pitch order of strings in standard tuning, from sixth string to first string, and therefore from lowest to highest, is EADGBE. We always tune in “reverse” order, starting with the sixth string, or low E, and continuing in order all the way to the first string, or high E.

You can help yourself remember this pitch sequence with a mnemonic, such as “Every Apple Does Go Bad Eventually”. For for something more ominous, you can use “Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie”.

Now that you know how pegs and strings work, you are ready to begin. Lowest string first…

Sixth String: Low E

Listen to any example of a “correct” E note as your reference pitch. For example you can use a recording of a standard E note like the one below and play it in your speakers, or use a pitch pipe. Listen, and play the E string of your guitar.

If you use a guitar sound, pitch pipe or other simple “tone” it is comparatively easy to tune by ear. If you have to use another instrument such as a nearby piano, you might find the difference in timbre makes it harder to compare the notes’ pitches.

Now, after playing the reference E note, let the sixth string of your guitar ring, and if you find the two sound perfectly the same, then your sixth string is in tune. More likely you will hear a slight clash (discord) which means your guitar string is slightly out of tune.

As you practice tuning and do pitch ear training you’ll find you can directly hear whether your guitar string is too high or too low. At first it might take a bit of experimentation.

Slowly rotate the tuning peg of your sixth string, gradually adjusting in one direction to see if the two notes come into agreement. If they don’t, and you hear that the pitches are becoming further apart, simply reverse your direction and adjust pitch until the two notes match.

Note: The tension of the string shouldn’t become too high (i.e. tight) or too low (i.e. loose). This means you are trying to tune the string into either a higher octave, where the note would match but the string would become so tight it might snap, or a lower octave, where the string would become unplayably loose.

Fifth string: A

Once the E string is in tune, you can put your reference note aside – from here you can tune the other strings based on your (now nicely-tuned) sixth string.

On the E string, playing the 5th fret should produce the same note as the open A string. So, place your finger on the 5th fret and play both the E string and the A string one by one. If the A string sounds higher, rotate its tuning peg to lower its pitch. If it sounds lower, rotate it the other way. Until and unless you feel that the notes sound exactly the same when played in unison, you should adjust the tuning peg accordingly.

Fourth string: D

The note on the 5th fret of the A string you just tuned will be same as the open note of the D string you’ll tune next. Play the two strings in unison, by placing your finger of 5th fret of the fifth string and ringing the open note of the fourth string. Listen for whether the two notes are the same, in close discord, or have a noticeable gap in pitch. Adjust your tuning peg until you hear they are perfectly tuned.

Third string: G

Timbre problems may arise when you try to tune your third string (which represents the G note) to the fourth string. This is because on both acoustic and electric guitars there is typically a change in string type: either from nylon to steel or from single strings to wound strings. This affects the timbre of the note and can make it harder to directly compare pitches. Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of this soon enough!

Now you should be getting the hang of the process as you tune your third string, which should be a G note. On the 5th fret of your fourth string is a G, so you can use this to tune your third string’s open note. Once again, listen to it and check if they sound similar. If not, turn the tuning peg for higher or lower pitch until they match.

Second string: B

Nearly finished!

Place your finger on the 4th fret of the third string, which will produce a B, the same as the open note of your second string. Or at least, it will be once you tune up that second string! Adjust your B string, until the two notes sound alike.

Pro Tip: It’s the 4th fret we use this time, not the 5th!

First string: High E

Finally the last one, your high E string. You can tune this in two ways:

1. Since your low E string is already tuned, you can tune your high E by referring to this one. However, note that they are actually two octaves apart, so you may find this gap makes it difficult to compare the two pitches.
2. If you are new to tuning you might want to avoid that, and instead continue with the method we have been using: place your finger on the 5th fret of the second (B) string, and you will play an E which exactly matches your open first string. Again, rotate counter-clockwise for higher pitch and clockwise for lower pitch.

You’re Done!

Finish up the tuning process by checking each of those note pairs in turn, from your low E and A string on up. Check the low E against your source note again. If any don’t sound quite correct, adjust the peg to make them match, but make sure you follow the low-to-high sequence again. This means that if the pair of notes don’t match, adjust the tuning of the higher string to match the lower one. This way your tuning is always rooted on your low E string. If you have access to a reference note for the high E string you can also check that one directly.

Finally, strum a few chords and play a riff or two. Does anything sound strange or wrong with the tuning? If so, listen carefully and try to identify which string is to blame. Then return to your note pair comparisons to make the required fix.

Pro Tip: The above method also works for the 12-string guitar, with some tweaks. Also, because its four strings follow the same tuning as the lowest four strings of the guitar (EADG), this method can be used to tune the bass.

How Do I Know If I’ve Tuned Correctly?

When you’re just starting to tune your guitar by ear, you’ll want to check that you’ve done it right. This can be achieved in several ways. You’ll feel tempted to simply tune with these methods to begin with, but we encourage you to resist the temptation! Use these methods to double-check that your tuning by ear was done correctly.

Check with a Tuner

Broadly speaking, there are three types of tuners out there that you can use, with each suited to different scenarios.

A standard tuner is a rectangular, “box-shape” tuner that tells you if and by how much your note is off-pitch from standard tuning. It can be used with both electric and acoustic guitars; the built-in microphone picks up on the pitch you are playing, or you can use the tuner’s input jack for a more precise reading for electric or electroacoustic guitars.

A pedal tuner is simply a guitar pedal that simply checks the pitch of your strings instead of laying fuzz or distortion over your sound. They are incredibly precise, but unfortunately only work with electric or electroacoustic guitars.

A headstock tuner will clip onto your guitar, sensing the pitch of a string through the vibrations created when you pluck a string, and telling you whether your note is flattened, sharpened, or just right. If you’re wondering how to most accurately tune a classical guitar, this is it.

Also, if you were wondering whether you can tune a ukulele with a guitar tuner, the answer is absolutely yes: many headstock tuners have a “ukulele” setting.

Pick one that works with your guitar, and see how accurate your tuning by ear is!

Check with a Piano

As well as being an easy and reliable way to check your tuning, this is a good ear training exercise for recognizing the same pitch on two different instruments. Simply compare the pitch of each string to the pitch of the corresponding key on the piano.

The best part is, you don’t even have to worry about an octave difference. Here’s a cheat sheet for which keys correspond to each pitch for guitar standard tuning; the numbers designate the note’s position from the left on a standard piano keyboard. For example, D3 is the third-lowest D key on the piano. Middle C is shown in orange:

Alternate Tunings

The tuning EADGBE is known as standard tuning, and is the most popular.

However, it is far from being your only option. You can alter the tuning of a string or two to open up a whole new way of playing, with chords that would be impossible in standard tuning! The best part: you can do this with just your hands and ears, no tuner necessary. Electronic tuners often don’t have settings for these alternate tunings, so it’s incredibly useful to be able to do this by ear!

If you want to push limits of your guitar playing and songwriting, try one of the following alternate tunings. With each one, you’ll want to start in standard EADGBE tuning, and tweak accordingly.

How to Tune a Guitar a Half-Step Down

You may see some guitar tabs asking that you tune each string a half-step down. Fear not – this isn’t nearly as much of a pain as you may think.

1. Fret the fifth (A) string at the sixth fret. This will produce an Eb, which you will use as a reference note to tune your sixth string.
2. Fret the newly Eb-tuned sixth string at the fifth fret. This will produce an Ab, which you will use as a reference note to tune your fifth string.
3. Fret the newly Ab-tuned fifth string at the fifth fret. This will produce a Db, which you will use as a reference note to tune your fourth string.
4. Fret the newly Db-tuned fourth string at the fifth fret. This will produce a Gb, which you will use as a reference note to tune your third string.
5. Fret the newly Gb-tuned third string at the fourth fret. This will produce a Bb, which you will use as a reference note to tune your second string.
6. Fret the newly Bb-tuned second string at the fifth fret. This will produce an Eb, which you will use as a reference note to tune your first (top) string.

How to Tune a Guitar to Drop D

Drop D tuning differs from standard tuning in only one way: the sixth string is tuned down one tone, from E to D, resulting in DADGBE tuning.

To drop D tune a guitar, simply lower your sixth string by a whole tone by comparing it to the open fourth D string:

This is one of the simplest tunings, and is popular in blues, country, and folk.

How to Tune a Guitar to Open G

In this tuning, strumming your guitar without putting any fingers on the fretboard will result in a G chord. The pitch pattern will be DGDGBD.

Start by lowering your sixth and first strings from E to D by comparing them to the open fourth string. Then, lower your fifth string by a whole tone by comparing it to the third string. This may take a bit of practice because of the octave difference, but will soon become second nature!

In this tuning, you can play any major chord simply by barring your finger across different frets – no need for complicated chord shapes!

Open G tuning is popular in blues and rock, most notably because of Keith Richards, who wrote the riffs for many of the Rolling Stones’ most popular songs with this tuning. If you want to cover “Brown Sugar” or “Gimme Shelter”, do it in open G!

How to Tune a Guitar to Drop C

Drop C tuning, or CGCFAD, creates a heavier, lower sound on your guitar. This tuning is more advanced than the previous ones, as it requires you to change the pitch of every string. As always, start in standard tuning. Then:

1.  Fret the fifth (A) string at the third fret. This is your reference for what the sixth string should sound like, although the sixth string should be one octave lower.
2. Fret the newly C-tuned sixth string at the seventh fret. This will produce a G, which you will use as a reference note to tune your fifth string.
3. Fret the newly G-tuned fifth string at the fifth fret. This will produce a C, which you will use as a reference note to tune your fourth string.
4. Fret the newly C-tuned fourth string at the fifth fret. This will produce an F, which you will use as a reference note to tune your third string.
5. Fret the newly F-tuned third string at the fourth fret. This will produce an A, which you will use as a reference note to tune your second string.
6. Fret the newly A-tuned second string at the fifth fret. This will produce a D, which you will use as a reference note to tune your second string.

Tuning By Ear While Training Your Ear

The first few times you tune a guitar by ear, it can be frustrating – sometimes you just can’t track down that strange-sounding string. It may be tempting to reach for that electronic tuner, but don’t give up! Your ear will steadily get better and better at recognizing those “off” notes, and tweaking them to the right pitch.

The post How To Tune Your Guitar By Ear appeared first on Musical U.

This Monday we are launching The Musicality Podcast: a new show dedicated to helping you level-up your musicality and gain new freedom and confidence in your musical life. To celebrate the launch we’re running a big giveaway contest with an amazing array of prizes to be won!

Over the last couple of months we’ve been planning and preparing for this new podcast and I’ve been interviewing some of the music educators I admire most, to pick their brains and share their top tips and strategies that can help you feel more like a “natural” musician. I’ve also dug deep into their own backstories so that you can see that even some of the most impressive musicians weren’t born “gifted” but actually learned their core skills of musicality step-by-step.

I’ve been really honoured to be joined on the show by an amazing lineup of inspiring experts and I can’t wait to share these episodes with you.

Upcoming guests include:

• Natalie Weber from Music Matters Blog
• Jermaine Griggs from HearAndPlay.com
• Steve Myers from Theta Music Trainer
• Gerald Klickstein, author of The Musician’s Way
• Dr. Melody Payne from MelodyPayne.com
• Scott Sharp from Fretboard Toolbox

… and a whole bunch more which I would love to announce – but we have to keep some surprises in store! 😉

We’ll also be offering shorter episodes where I cover a particular topic, such as:

• Playing from a lead sheet
• Whole and Half Steps
• Solfa 101
• Perfect Pitch vs. Relative Pitch
• Starting to sing in tune
• Recovering from mistakes and overcoming stage fright
• Mindfulness and self-talk

I’m so excited for the episodes we have lined up and really wanted to make a big splash with the launch on Monday. Our guests have shared such interesting and valuable insights I want to make sure their episodes reach as many musicians as possible…

So what better way to make a splash than with a huge prize giveaway!

A big thank you to our podcast guests who’ve contributed prizes for this giveaway. It’s a seriously powerful bundle of goodies to upgrade your musicality…

Big Prize Giveaway!

First Prize (worth over $500!)

• 1 Year “Instrument Pack” Membership of Musical U (worth $399)
• 1 Year Subscription of Theta Music Trainer (worth $49)
• SongTutor Software from HearAndPlay.com (worth $47)
• For The Love of Music course from Music Matters Blog (worth $25)
• A Toolbox eBook of your choice from Fretboard Toolbox (worth up to $21.95)
• 175 Music Worksheets Bundle from MelodyPayne.com (worth $16)

4 Runner-up Prizes (each worth over $300!)

We also have a powerful combo for four lucky runners-up! As Steve Myers, founder of Theta Music, explains in his upcoming episode: Theta Music Trainer games work best with a bit of explanation and that’s why we feel they’re a perfect companion to Musical U membership.

Four runners-up will win:

• 1 Year Regular Membership of Musical U (worth $299)
• 1 Year Subscription of Theta Music Trainer (worth $49)

How to Enter…

The giveaway contest officially launches on Monday 11th September and you’ll be able to enter on this page. We’ll be picking the winners at midnight Central Time on Sunday 1st October and announcing them on Monday 2nd October.

To make sure you don’t miss it you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Oh, and there’s one other way…

Podcast Insiders

A few weeks ago we opened our Podcast Insiders program. It’s a free email signup to get behind-the-scenes info and exclusive bonuses related to the new podcast. So far over 400 people have joined Podcast Insiders and they’ve been hearing about the exciting/challenging/crazy process of launching the new podcast.

They’re also getting bonus entries in the contest as our way of saying thanks for being part of this new project with us. And they get early access to our special “podcast listeners” offer for Musical U (more info below).

Want to be a Podcast Insider? Sign up free right here:

→ Sign up for Podcast Insiders

Special Offer for Podcast Listeners

The new Musicality Podcast is going to provide a really intimate way to get to know Musical U and the way we teach so we think podcast listeners are going to naturally be people who are a great fit for MU membership.

That’s why we’re setting up a special offer for podcast listeners to join Musical U. But not only that, we’re going big for the launch. During the month of September that offer is going to be wackily-good.

Want to know more? We’re giving Podcast Insiders early access to this special offer. Sign up to get all the details.

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Finally the launch day is coming and we’re delighted to be able to celebrate it with a big giveaway like this. Thanks again to our amazing guests who’ve contributed these exciting prizes. Go ahead and opt in for Podcast Insiders to make sure you don’t miss the instructions for entering the contest on Monday – and good luck!

The post The Musicality Podcast Launch: Prize Giveaway! appeared first on Musical U.