Author: musicalitywrld

Christopher: Welcome to our Meet The Team interview with Mr. Andy Portas. I’m very excited to have you with us today, Andy, to share a bit about your musical journey and what brought you to Musical U and the work you do here. Welcome to the show!

Andy: Thank you very much.

Christopher: Let’s dive in. So, Andy, I feel like it’s become almost a running joke in the team now that I always start my interviews with the same question, but this is no exception.

And I’d love to start out with the question, what does musicality mean to you?

Andy: And to be honest, I was dreading being asked this question!

It’s something that I’ve been kind of throwing around in my mind for quite a while, trying to get to an answer, never mind a perfect answer.

And my initial thoughts are always along the lines of, well, musicality is the ability to be able to pull a tune out of your head and instantly play it, or to be able to hear a piece of music and play it back.

But then I kind of realised that I know plenty of great musicians who don’t necessarily have that skill, but they’re awfully creative. So they can kind of conjure up wonderful tunes and fantastic pieces of music, really inventive. And they’ve got great musicality as well.

So you can kind of see, I’m kind of stuck between this idea of being a fantastic musician that can play anything they hear or being this kind of real creative force that does wonderful music without understanding what they’re doing.

So I suppose musicality, in that case, is probably about communicating whatever it is you are feeling, whatever emotion it is, whatever idea it is, and doing that in a musical way. Does that work?

Christopher: That works! I’ll take it.

Yeah, I think, you know, I was laughing to myself the other day because, as you know, we’re working on this book, the musicality book. And if anyone doesn’t know what I’m talking about, go to musicalitybook.com, you can pre-register, get all the info.

But in this book, we start out with a chapter on musicality. You know, if it’s a book on musicality, initially, when I sat down to write it, like 18 months ago, I felt a lot of pressure, just like you described.

I was like, it’s such a big question. What is our definition going to be? And it’s funny, like, I was remembering back when we started, we started Easy Ear Training, and I had the same problem with the phrase “ear training”. What is ear training? Because in different contexts it can mean very different things.

And we came up with a very generic answer, like “ear training is anything a musician does to develop their ears”. And I was like, yeah, nailed it!

And with the book, I actually found a similar out, in that when I was looking back at all the amazing answers that I’ve heard to this question over the last five or six years doing the podcast, I realized that was the answer.

It wasn’t for me to dictate the one definition to rule them all. It was to let the chapter really explore it and expand it and share a lot of these quotes from amazing musicians and educators. And you do just get such a breadth of perspective. And somehow there is a common thread, like, we all instinctively know what that word means and it has associations for each of us.

But I found that putting a lot of different answers into that chapter let me feel like, okay, cool, we’ve answered the question well.

Andy: Brilliant, brilliant.

Christopher: So, Andy, explain a little bit… You’ve given a glimpse there into some of the ways you think about music and some of the perspectives you might have, but share a bit of your own musical backstory. Where did you come from as a musician?

Andy: I suppose playing in bands as a late teenage. I started playing an instrument quite late, I think, or relatively late.

I think I was about 18 when I started playing bass. So I started playing in bands and things like that in my hometown and then kind of really got bitten by the music bug and decided to leave my job as a bricklayer and go to a college in a town that was about an hour away from where I was when I was kind of brought up. And it turns out this college was the first college in the UK to actually do a pop music course.

So I thought this was going to be ideal. So I packed up all my kind of belongings and moved to the town and started studying pop music.
There was no qualification attached to it. So it was more about just kind of playing with other musicians. And it was quite strange because the other musicians were from all around the UK, just coming to this tiny kind of Midlands town.

And what was really good about that was kind of meeting other people, like minded people who were, who were kind of keen on improving and getting out and gigging and stuff like that.

And from there, it was weird, I got a Blues Brothers tribute together, which was…

Christopher: That’s amazing! You know, we had that question on the team call the other day, “what are your top three favorite movies?” And after the call I was like, number four would be Blues Brothers for me.

Andy: Absolutely.

Christopher: I love that I haven’t heard about this before! Tell us about your Blues Brothers tribute.

Andy: Yeah, and I believe. I mean, I don’t know how true this is, but we were told at the time we were the first tribute in the UK to the Blues Brothers.

Like I say, I’m not sure how true that was, but we started off just kind of in local bars around in the kind of East Midlands area, and then next thing you know, we’re kind of playing all around the UK, playing in universities and stuff like that, and even went out to the Middle East.

So it was a real kind of eye opener, for sure. We did a lot of clubs as well, kind of working men’s clubs, where you learn to kind of, I suppose, stare the audience out in a way, to kind of look at the audience as you’re playing, because it’s, you know, that was kind of part of the game, really. And being entertainers, I suppose, was the big thing.

But while I was doing that, I kind of had this real yearning to be kind of playing original music, really.

And so I was scouring the music press for bands that were looking for bass players, particularly bands that might have been signed, and then I kind of found, well, there’s a drummer mate of mine, they’ve got a couple of mates who’ve moved down to London, and they were signed with the management agency, who were looking after Rozalla, I don’t know if you remember her. They called her the “queen of rave” back in the nineties.

So they were kind of playing in her band and they actually did the Michael Jackson tour with her. So they were on the Bad tour doing that, which delayed us doing some recording.

So they got a record deal in Belgium so we ended up going over to Belgium to record an album there. That kind of went nowhere, unfortunately, and they got dropped by the label and I heard no more about them, to be fair, as well. So I don’t know what happened with those guys, but I’m sure they’re doing well.

But that was quite a nice little brush with near fame. And then from there, I joined another band that was a Celtic rock band, and we ended up doing a lot of touring with that around the UK and in Germany.

And that was the band that was, we were just about to sign to Cooking Vinyl, a record label. We’d actually recorded the album with the Levelers producer, Al Scott, a guy called Al Scott down at Swan Yard Studios, which was a studio down in London before it got bulldozed.

So Cooking Vinyl, we’re kind of signing us just on a licensing deal and rather annoyingly, the day before we signed the contract, our singer left the band! So that was one of those kind of tragic stories, tragic rock and roll stories that you hear. So that was another kind of near miss from there.

Sorry, I’ll speed up a little bit because this is perhaps going on a bit too long! From there I decided I really maybe teaching would be a thing I’d like to do.

So I ended up going to university and getting a degree in music and music technology and then got some work teaching and again happened to be at the college that I went to when I was in my early twenties that I talked about earlier and ended up working there, got a teaching qualification and then to my surprise, I ended up being the Head of Music there. So I ended up being the team leader for the music department that taught me as a youngster, which was quite crazy.

And then what happened was that the local city college took over that college. So I was made redundant and at the time I was, I’d started doing an MPhil in music composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire and my, the head of music tech at the conservatoire, knowing that I’ve just been kind of made redundant, said, do you want to come do a few hours here?

So I think I started doing a couple of hours a week and from there that kind of, over the years ended up being, I think I was maybe doing two days a week there teaching one to one in on the music technology course.

So that was quite an exciting time. And I think I was there ten or eleven, maybe twelve years, which I was quite shocked to realize. I just retired though this year from that job.

So I’ve got a bit more free time now to be kind of creating my own music and stuff. I didn’t mention there I’ve been releasing my old, my own albums as well of Hammond organ instrumentals.

So that was something else.

Christopher: These interviews are fantastic. I feel, you know, we talk so much on the team, but these little gems come out!

I didn’t know you played Hammond organ and let alone published albums.

Andy: Well, I was teaching myself. As I was kind of doing that the first couple of albums I had this mate, he plays with Hammond player and he kind of did the Hammond parts for me.

But as I was kind of writing it and because he was busy as well, he’s a kind of pro player with, I think he plays with The Selecter at the moment, but he was busy so I thought, well, I may as well have a go at this myself. I would never call myself an organist by any stretch, but I could cobble together a tune in, like, a 15-take solo, which kind of worked. Yeah.

So that’s what I’ve been doing and that’s my story, I think, up to now, other than I then got work with Musical U, which has been absolutely wonderful.

Christopher: And before we move on to that, share a little bit about your work at the conservatory, because I remember when you applied for the position here, I was really fascinated to hear the kind of stuff you’ve been up to with the young musicians there.

Andy: Yeah, well, it was surprising, really, that I was probably the least technically-minded tutor in the music tech department, really.

But my thing was always getting students to kind of finish their work. How it worked was if you were a violin player or an oboe player or something like that, you would get through 30 hours a year tuition, I think, as a first study instrument.

So the music technology students, they would get 30 hours, one to one with a visiting tutor. So I kind of took it upon myself to be the tutor that looked at things like mindset and, kind of, finding ways of finishing music, because that was always the biggest issue. Still is, I think, with a lot of young producers and composers. They come up with great ideas and then spend the next three weeks trying to finish it. And it never happens.

And what they end up doing is getting to the point where they think they can’t do it and they’ll never be able to kind of finish any music or they’ll never be a decent producer.

And all that’s essentially happened is they’ve listened over and over and over again to this great idea, to the point where they’ve got bored with it. And though they don’t realize this, their understanding is “I’m rubbish. That bit of music I just did then is rubbish as well, and I just can’t do it”.

So my thing with the students was always to say “Hang on a minute. Well, how about you don’t listen to that idea so much? Listen to it enough to kind of then get an idea of what you might want to do next. That way you won’t get bored with it. That way you will not start thinking that you’re rubbish”.

Because, as I was kind of saying there, that the music’s not changed. It’s the perception of the music that’s changed.

The music’s still a great idea. You now think it’s a rubbish idea because you’re bored of it. So don’t over-listen to it. Listen to it, come up with the idea, then maybe leave it for a week, come back to it, have a listen to it, and then before you open your Logic or Live or whatever you use. Have a think about the music, have a think about what it wants to do.

Because the other issue is that we dive straight back into the DAW and think we can start kind of forcing ideas to come out.

Whereas if we take five minutes and say, okay, then, so this bit, this bit of music is doing this, how can I change it? Does it want to retain the same rhythm? Does it want to change the chords?

So if you think about it intelligently like that, rather than try and kind of wait for inspiration to sit on your shoulder and say, you should do this next, which is never going to happen, you can come up with the idea.

If it doesn’t work, scrap it. You’ve not ruined the track, you’ve just, that second idea just didn’t work with it.

So that was the kind of thing that I was doing with students and the other thing I was doing was insisting that they released their music. And you could see the look of horror on the face! And I’d be saying, no, your music is great. It really is good. It’s good quality music. And they made it. “Oh, I don’t think it is”. “Do it!”

And I kind of essentially forced them to release their music on Spotify and other platforms. And once they’d done it, there was kind of no stopping them because they kind of got over that perceived hurdle of releasing the music and being judged. And in reality, nobody’s really judging it, only whether they like it or not, which is fine.

But the argument I often use was, I would say, like, imagine your favourite artist. This is if they were saying “my music’s not good enough to be released”, imagine your favourite artist, how would you like to be able to go back to their back catalogue and hear the very first pieces of music they were writing?

How great would that be to be able to do that?

So I used to use that as a bit of a lever as well, that, as a fan, we’d all love to be able to hear those first pieces of music that our kind of heroes were releasing, if only to kind of understand what they were doing or to gauge ourselves against where they were, where they are now and where we are, you know? Does that sound right, then where they are now? Against where they were and where we are now?

Christopher: Yeah.

Andy: So, yes, so that was the kind of thing that I helped with, really, with the students.

Christopher: Fantastic, yeah. I got to go see my favorite band, the Mountain Goats this week. And John Darnielle was introducing one of the songs.

And what you just said now really reminded me of it because he is someone who has been prolific, like, has written, literally written and released hundreds of songs, back to the days where you could listen to those early tape recordings where he, by his own acknowledgement, could barely play the guitar.

And so he was introducing this song and saying, you know, I wrote this a few years ago and I used the little guitar riff I had written 20 years earlier, back when I couldn’t actually play the riff properly.

And, like, by contrast with Prince, I heard recently that there were literally hundreds of unreleased prince songs in his vault that no one has ever heard. And, you know, you can debate it either way, but there’s huge value in publishing your work in that way and getting it out there, isn’t there?

Andy: Stevie Wonder’s another one. I saw something the other day where he used to introduce himself as “I am Stevie, I write a song every day”.

And that was what he kind of did, that was his thing.

But yeah, but that’s the other thing as well, is taking too long over producing a piece of music. If you can, what I used to do was, was kind of write every day for half an hour and come up with a musical idea every day.

And the thing is, you write a lot of rubbish, but there’s also a few diamonds in there that you can use and expand into full pieces of music.

And the great thing about kind of writing every day like this is the fact that you become less attached to the music, which is another really important part of being successful as a producer or composer is the idea that it doesn’t matter if the music doesn’t sound great and the bulk of the music you will write will sound a bit rubbish.

And that’s fine as well. You know, it’s, the idea is to pull out the really nice sounding things.

So the percentage of good to bad is there’s probably heaps and heaps and heaps of rubbish music, but you’ve got these lovely, shining examples of authentic you that you can then release. So that’s the kind of philosophy around that as well.

Christopher: Yeah, yeah. I’m a big believer in that idea, that you can only get to the good ideas by going through a lot of bad ideas, right?

And I also think of that quote, I think it’s often attributed to da Vinci, but I don’t think it was, that “Art is never finished, only abandoned”.

You kind of have to accept that and learn when to draw the line.

Andy: Yeah, I always like the idea of once you’ve finished a piece of music and it’s released, it’s no longer yours. I really like that idea. It’s then it’s just out in the wild.

So, yeah, it’s good. It’s kind of quite freeing to know that it’s not yours anymore, it’s theirs. I like that.

Christopher: So I think probably from what you’ve said about musicality and your work with young musicians on mindset and creativity, people probably have a good sense now of why when you showed up, we were like “oh, he does look like a Next Level coach!”

Talk a little bit about coming to Musical U and your work on the team here.

Andy: Yeah, it’s been fantastic. It’s been really eye-opening from a learning how to coach standpoint and learning how to teach, but also it’s been wonderful. In my own education, I’d always believed my ears were rubbish, but it turns out it was the way I was being, it was the way I was taught that wasn’t great.

So like many people, I was taught to use the “recognise intervals by using songs” and things like that. And I think it back to university. I used to get, I used to get 100% – but I couldn’t play by ear. So it was kind of a technique that wasn’t really useful in a musical situation.

But going through the Living Music modules has completely kind of opened my ear up and made me realize that my ears are fine. My ears are absolutely fine, they’re not perfect, but they’re absolutely fine. Still a lot of work to do there, but I now know that I can do that.

So it’s been a real wonderful experience personally for kind of my own musical growth and for my growth as a coach and being surrounded by such wonderful people as well from all around the world. It’s quite a crazy thing.

Christopher: That’s really exciting, awesome. And you’ve been such a, I hesitate to say, such a popular coach because it makes it sound like a popularity contest or disparaging our other coaches!

But you’ve been such a hit with your clients, and I’m sure people can get a sense of your personality and the kind of mindset you bring to it and the way you nurture people you work with.

What would be your favourite thing to do at Musical U?

Andy: One of my favourite things is getting people to realize that their ears are fine.

The very same story I was just telling about myself. And I think that what I find most joyful about that is I understand how they feel when they say that they can’t hear things, kind of demonstrating to a client how to find where “do” is or the home note of a piece of music, and then letting them discover that they can actually do that themselves. And from there, they can then start to transcribe melodies by ear using solfa.

It’s a slow process, but the fact that they’re able to do that and just kind of seeing the look in their eyes when they do it, it’s fantastic. It’s, that can kind of feed me for a week, almost!

That kind of that wonderful thing when you get the realisation, you’re like, hang on, I’ve just done that!

And you’re like “yeah, I told you. I told you you’d be able to do it”. Yeah.

So I think that’s my biggest.

And the other one is when they’re kind of, when they can play something that they were really struggling with and that kind of wide-open-eyed thing, when they kind of go “oh! I did it”.

You’re like, yep, there you go. We sorted that little problem out for you as well.

Christopher: That’s fantastic. You’ve covered our two strands there. The musicality side and the superlearning side.

Andy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, the superlearning is kind of. It’s like, yeah. It’s like, how does this work? It just does.

Christopher: It just does. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, what you said about playing by ear, it’s probably my favourite thing about the way we’ve come to teach it over the years.

Like, we’ve done a lot in that area, but I forget when… I think probably in Ear Training For Beginners, we first codified the Play By Ear Process, and we really took that stance, that playing by ear is a really sped up, instinctive version of figuring it out by ear.

And once you have that perspective, then, like you say, you know, that first experience of figuring something out by ear, you’re like “oh! I can do it. Cool. From here, it’s just a matter of getting more accurate and getting quicker with it”. And you’re away.

Andy: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.

And it’s genuinely a wonderful sensation. When you first it was for me, you know, and I thought, what? I just did that.

Christopher: Awesome.

So, Andy, I love to wrap up these Meet The Team interviews with a question, which is, what is a weird or unusual or slightly out of mainstream technique for developing your musicality? That you found just really works.

Andy: I’m not really sure how unusual this is, but visualisation seems to be something that works really well. I found certainly more recently, there’ve been a few clients that have been struggling to kind of do things.

One example was a lady who plays saxophone. And then typically guitarists who struggle with power chords and things like that have found that by getting them to visualize where their fingers are going first, that has been quite remarkable, to be fair. And then playing what it is they were struggling with. And while I know that’s not necessarily a kind of strict musicality thing, it’s more of a technique thing, but it still kind of comes under that kind of, I suppose it does come under musicality, doesn’t it, really?

Christopher: I would definitely put it in the superlearning category, if not musicality. Yeah. So Dr. Molly Gebrian, who did our masterclass, recently touched on that in her masterclass, that power of visualisation and the astounding brain science of how similar the effect is of visualising it to actually doing it.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher: And it can just, it can fix problems that just doing it again and again never will, right?

Andy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And especially with something that’s quite physical. So I suppose guitar is a great example because often people will try and use too much force in the fretting hand to try and get the barre chord to work. So that can be quite tiring, and it can be damaging as well, I suppose, if you’re kind of spending too much time doing that. So the visualisation kind of allows you to be, you know, not as not strain your hand, I suppose, is what I’m trying to say there.

Christopher: Awesome, I love that tip. And, yeah, it’s like the first question, it brings out such a range of answers from people, it’s always a good one.

Thank you so much, Andy.

It’s been a real pleasure to get to share a little bit of your background with our audience, with our members. I know a lot of them have been curious to know more about this Andy guy that’s supporting them in the discussion boards. So it’s fantastic to have the chance to jump on.

Any parting words of wisdom for our audience today?

Andy: Yes. Sing more and practice your rhythm more. They are the two main things that I have, I think, many people in Musical U are aware of. The team, certainly.

But there’s something that’s become more and more obvious to me as I’ve been here at Musical U: use your voice and practice rhythm.

Andy: Very good advice. Advice to live by, and a beautiful tie-in, yesterday’s episode was all about why you should sing and get past that hurdle of thinking you can’t.

Awesome, thank you so much, Andy.

Christopher: Coming up tomorrow, we have our next Coaches Corner episode, which I’m very excited about.

Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

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Did you know there’s one foundational skill which makes everything in musicality easier?

I’m talking about everything from ear training to playing by ear, improvising, writing music, improving your rhythm, jamming with other people… Everything that makes you feel truly musical inside and out, benefits from this one foundational skill.

And yet the vast majority of musicians would say they cannot do it, and a lot are afraid to even try.

Today, I want to share with you what that skill is and why you absolutely must start learning to make use of it in your musical development.

Welcome back to another episode of “Inside the Book”, where I’m going to be diving into our forthcoming Musicality book and share some of the juicy goodness from the chapters inside.

If you haven’t heard about this book yet, I’ll put a link in the show notes to the previous episode where I explained all about it. But suffice to say, this is going to be like the “missing manual” that every music learner should have been handed on day one to fill in all of the material that’s normally missing for people in terms of how to become more naturally musical and how to start doing the things that most people think take talent.

You can go to musicalitybook.com to pre-register your interest, and that will make sure you get all the latest updates and freebies and good bonus material as we gear up to release the book.

But with these episodes, I want to just share a little peek inside and something valuable from inside the book for you today.

Let me start by asking you a simple question: Can you sing?

If you’re a musician of any kind, and your answer to that is “no”, or “not really”, or even “I’m tone deaf”, then you need to know what I’m going to be sharing today. Because until you can use your singing voice as a tool in music, learning, everything else related to musicality is going to be way harder than it needs to be.

So today I want to share the start of the chapter on “Singing and Musicality”, where we lay out exactly why every person involved in music making absolutely must be using their singing voice, even if that seems uncomfortable right now, and even if you have no desire to ever become a singer.

So let’s dive into the book.

I want to start with a little bit of context, so just to run through the table of contents, if you missed the past episode, just to explain where this chapter fits in the book.

So the book split into three parts. In part one, we cover some foundational skills that everything else depends on. So, mindset, what is musicality, audiation (being able to vividly hear music and understand it in your mind), Singing and Musicality (that’s where we’ll be diving in today), active listening and then practice and super learning skills (to accelerate your learning).

In part two, we introduce the building blocks of relative pitch and rhythm that help you understand and recognize notes and rhythms instinctively in music.

And then in part three, we move on to applying all of that good stuff to concrete skills like improvising, playing by ear, writing songs, playing expressively, which is what we dived into in the last episode, and performing in a really spellbinding way.

So that’s the structure of the book. Just to explain that this singing chapter comes not as a, you know, random side tangent or an appendix or something, or “just for the singers”.

This is, to us at Musical U, a foundational skill that you absolutely want to put in place and then use throughout everything else you do in your musical training.

And what I wanted to share with you today, I’m just going to read through the beginning of this chapter because it kind of sets the scene and explains why this is such a key topic and something that you might be missing out on. I do just want to say, if you already sing happily, if you’re using it day in, day out as part of your musicality training, your ear training, your musical development, fantastic. I love you, I’m happy for you, keep it up!

We find that even among our keenest members at Musical U, even those who’ve heard our reasoning and heard the benefits and understand and have even experienced the benefits, often it kind of falls by the wayside.

And that particularly happens if you’re someone who didn’t grow up singing, or you’ve been told in the past you’re not a good singer. So if you’re in that camp who’s kind of convinced but isn’t doing it a lot, I hope this will kind of restoke that fire for you and remind you why this is such a valuable tool in your toolkit.

So chapter, I think, four, on Singing and Musicality.

Our singing voice is every human being’s natural first instrument.

Yet even among those who devote countless hours to musical development, many still shy away from singing. In fact, I’ve found that the majority of instrumentalists are reluctant to sing – generally because they think they can’t sing or they sound bad when they try. And yet your singing voice is the most direct way to bring music out from inside you, and it has an unparalleled power for developing your musicality.

You deserve to have this unique tool in your musical toolkit.

The goal of this chapter is not to turn you into a stage singer who grabs the mic and fronts a rock band, joins a choir, or auditions for the next Pop Idol contest. It is far more modest, but at the same time far more important: to get you feeling comfortable and confident using your singing voice as a tool for musicality training.

If you would currently classify yourself in that group of musicians who “can’t sing”, there are two big lessons I want to share with you, which come from working with tens of thousands of musicians of all kinds here at Musical U.

1. Any past experiences which have given you the idea that you can’t sing or that you don’t have a good voice can be safely ignored. A lot of people have had negative or critical comments about their singing from teachers, from friends, family members, other musicians, and I know it can be hard to shake those off.

But as we’ll be discussing more below, those are not actually any indication of whether you can sing or not.

I won’t pretend those comments were just nonsense or tell you that you actually do sound amazing right now when you sing, but I am going to tell you it is 100% possible for you to learn the singing skills you need to start sounding good. So begin right now by changing that “I can’t sing” to “I can’t sing yet”.

2. Once you put a couple of simple skills in place (which can be done quickly) you will be surprised how much you start to enjoy singing and how indispensable it becomes in your music learning and your musicality training.

In particular, two frequent comments we hear from members going through our singing material are that:

A. They actually really enjoy singing now, and

B. they wish they had learned this skill much sooner.

We won’t go in-depth teaching you singing in this chapter. Singing is an instrument in its own right, and although we have extensive training for it inside Musical U, this book is not the place to try teaching you an instrument through words alone.

What we are going to do is show you how to get started using your singing voice confidently, accurately, and reliably to express yourself musically and develop your musicality. If you find that you enjoy singing enough to want to explore it further as an instrument, that is a wonderful bonus, and you’ll find some pointers in this chapter for how to take the next steps.

So why do you think you can’t sing?

If you think you can’t sing, there are probably four contributing factors in play. Not coincidentally, these map to the four H’s of musicality.

1. You don’t understand how singing actually works or what it takes to sing well. That’s the “Head”.

2. You have difficulty judging pitch, and so you can’t reliably hear when a sung note is too high or too low. That’s “Hearing”.

3. You have poor vocal pitch control, so you can’t adjust your sung note quickly and easily to reach the target note. That’s “Hands”, even though in this case it’s not literally in your hands the way the other instrument skills are.

4. You have emotional or psychological hang ups about singing, so you don’t sing or you do so timidly, which actually makes it harder to control your pitch and sound good. That’s the “Heart” piece.

The balance of these four will vary from person to person, but it’s always some combination of them which causes a person to believe they can’t sing.

In this chapter, we’ll tackle number one (Head) by helping you to understand the mechanics of singing in tune, known as matching pitch.

For number two (Hearing), meaning difficulty judging pitch: if you’ve been learning music for a while, this is probably not your limiting factor, but there may still be some work to be done to improve and refine your pitch discernment. This will be covered in this chapter as part of learning the two core skills of Matching Pitch and Vocal Control.

And then we have a little insert box.

This is going to be an aside in the book, so we’ll just take a brief tangent as I read it, and we’ll come back to the four things. So:

A quick word about tone deafness.

Have you ever been called or called yourself “tone deaf”? This is a serious blocker for a lot of musicians when it comes to singing.

Culturally, there’s a strange blurring together of that term “tone deaf” and the skill of singing – when they’re actually completely separate things.

Back in around 2014, I got a real bee in my bonnet about this. I kept talking to musicians who were using our ear training materials, and when I would suggest using singing to help them improve their ears, all too often they’d make a comment about being tone deaf.

Tone deafness is a real phenomenon. The precise scientific name for it is amusia. It is extremely rare. It means you literally can’t distinguish higher notes from lower ones at all.

I knew that the musicians using our ear training resources were not tone deaf. How could I know? Because if they truly suffered from amusia, they would not enjoy listening to music. Can you imagine how bizarre or boring music would sound to you if all note pictures sounded the same?

If you want to be certain about it, I actually ended up creating a simple test. You can take, at tonedeftest.com, based on the scientific measures of amusia, which will tell you in five minutes or so whether you are actually tone deaf or not.

Our findings from over 2.3 million people taking that test over the past nine years confirm the scientific estimates.

We’ve found that less than 1.5% of people are truly tone deaf. And it’s likely even less than that because we know some people who take the test just answer randomly on purpose!

For every single one of the 98.5% of people who passed the test, and almost certainly you too, it is absolutely possible to to learn to sing in tune, sound good, and benefit from singing in your musical development.

So that’s the end of our tangent into tone deafness. I hope that clarified a few things for some of you!

Back to number three, “Hands”, poor vocal control. The cause here is simply that you have not yet learned this skill.

It’s the unfortunate flip-side of singing being everyone’s natural first instrument that we assume you’ve got it or you don’t. And so if your pitching is all over the place when you sing, oh, that must be because you have a bad voice.

But that’s nonsense. We don’t expect ourselves to be able to operate a motor vehicle or a computer keyboard or a guitar or piano, for that matter, without spending the time learning the physical motions. Why should our singing voice be any different? In this chapter, you’ll learn the basics of vocal control.

Then, number four, “Heart”, the emotional or psychological hang-ups that might be holding you back. This is often the biggest blocker to people learning to sing.

Sadly, for many of us, it started young. If you’re otherwise a good musician, this barrier can be particularly powerful because you might feel guilty for not being as good as you think you should be. As a result, many musicians simply refuse to sing so they can avoid confronting this painful issue.

Rather than try to undo that past conditioning directly, the most effective solution is actually to prove to yourself in a safe and unintimidating way that you actually can sing.

By following the suggestions in this chapter, you’ll be able to see those past experiences in a whole new light. They will gently fade away and no longer be a blocker or an anchor holding you down.

So the good news is you already have everything you need to sing.

Why? If you’re reading this book, it’s safe to assume you love music, and that means your ears work. If you can speak, then we know your voice works. So the Hearing and Hand components are ready for development. And as you go through this chapter, we’ll address the Head and the Heart components, too.

So our aim in this chapter: We we are not expecting you to develop an incredible, versatile, knock-your-socks off ability to sing. We are not expecting you to declare yourself a singer, volunteer to front a band, go off and join a choir, or even sing at the next karaoke night.

Our aim is simply to reach the point where if you want to sing a certain note or a sequence of notes, they come out clearly and accurately on the intended pitches.

If you’ve never sung, or you’ve been told that you can’t sing, or you feel too nervous to even try, then the best thing I can do is to encourage you to step back from that intimidating idea of “being a singer”.

It might even help you to pretend, at least for now, that there are actually two types of singing.

There’s the professional, up-on-stage, artistic mastery, impressive kind of singing.

And then there’s the everyday kind. Like when you hum a tune to yourself or you sing your kids a lullaby, you sing to yourself in the shower, or maybe even do take part in the occasional alcohol-assisted night at the karaoke bar.

You can also think of it as the difference between becoming a public speaker or a Hollywood actor… versus just learning how to talk.

Or the difference between being an Olympic medal winning speed cyclist… versus just being able to ride your bike down to the shops.

Or the difference between becoming a famous portrait painter… versus just being able to paint the living room walls.

In all those examples, we understand that there’s a kind of basic competence we can reasonably expect to achieve, and the fact that some people make it an art or build a career around it, that doesn’t hold the rest of us back from learning to do the useful, everyday level of that same skill.

Think “functional”, “serviceable”, “fit for purpose”, “gets the job done”. That’s what we’re looking for. You feel comfortable using your voice, and you can basically sing the notes you mean to.

Now don’t get me wrong! As always, I do want you to aim high and dream big, and I hope you will connect with your voice and want to cultivate that part of your musicality further and make being a singer part of your musical identity.

But if right now you’re in that spot of thinking you can’t or don’t want to sing, then start with just aiming for the basics that “good enough, basically works” level of singing.

That alone is enough to make singing a powerful tool for you. And it doesn’t need to take long.

To give you some idea with the way we teach it at Musical U that you’ll learn in this chapter. You’re looking at maybe a few weeks of practice to get to that level.

Cool. So then we have a call-out for our “good voice” opt-in. We have a really great guide to “16 keys to sounding good as a singer”. I think I’ll put a link in the show notes to where you can grab that so you’re not kept waiting. But that’s a really cool thing to check out if you want to understand really why you don’t sound good at the moment.

And actually the next section… I think I’m going to stop this episode here, but the next section we’ll come back to in the next episode, I think. Because in the next bit we go into real concrete benefits of learning to sing at this basic, everyday level. And I think that’s really valuable just to hammer home what this can do for you in terms of playing by ear, recognizing notes and chords, expressing musical ideas, having a better instinct for rhythm.

So we’ll come back to that in the next “Inside the Book” episode. We’ll read the next bit of this chapter, I think, and I’ll share that with you too.

So hopefully that landed with you. I’d be really curious to know. Post a comment and let me know whether you’re watching on YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or you’re listening to the podcast. You can also email me at hello@musicalitynow.com

I would love to hear how this landed with you, where you’re at in terms of singing, and whether this gave you a little boost of motivation to explore whether actually singing might be a real possibility for you, especially if it’s something that in the past you’ve shied away from and assumed you couldn’t do.

That’s it for this one! Coming up next, we have “Meet the Team” with Mr. Andy Portas, and our next episode of Coaches Corner.

Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

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There are five BIG mistakes that adult music learners make. And if you’re an adult working on your music, I can pretty much guarantee you’re making one of these mistakes – if not all five! Today I’m going to share with you what those five mistakes are and how to fix them.

So this wasn’t the episode I was planning to do today, but I was inspired by something that came up last night. I was doing a coach’s corner recording session with our coaching team, and Andrew mentioned something that had been going on with one of his clients, which is just a real bugbear we see all the time at Musical U.

And if you’re new to us, if you don’t know, we specialise in helping adult music learners online. It’s what we’ve done since the beginning. We don’t do any stuff with kids. Our focus is helping adults improve their musicality and learn music faster and more easily.

And so we’ve really had the chance over 15 years to figure out how to help adults in particular, learn more effectively.

And I just want to say right up front, you may be suffering under a misconception that most adult music learners are, which is “it’s easier to learn music if you’re a kid”. I just want to get that right out the way, right up front, and we’ll be unpacking some of that a bit as we go on.

But we worry that if we didn’t do it by age twelve, we’ll never be able to do it, or that we envy the kids who seem to just be able to soak things up like a sponge. And in fact, if you look at the science of it, the research into neuroplasticity shows adults can learn just as much as kids. And actually, if you take advantage of the superlearning stuff we talk about here at Musical U, you can learn just as fast, if not faster.

And what I wanted to suggest is that actually maybe one big reason that kids do tend to learn faster than adults is because they don’t make these five mistakes we’re going to talk about today!

Before we dive in, I do want to say, as I cover these, please don’t feel bad or embarrassed or defensive if you are doing these, the whole point of the episode is to help you get past them.

They are all things I’ve gone through myself, and like I said at the outset, almost every adult learning music, learning an instrument, improving their musicality, is suffering from one or more of these. So definitely don’t feel bad if you can relate, it’s a good thing. Now you know about it, you can do something about it.

And the most successful musicians I know, and I’ve had the chance to interview so many amazing musicians, music educators, had the chance to work with so many amazing members here at Musical U. The most successful ones have all conquered these, but none of them did so without first struggling with them.

So whether they learned music as a kid or an adult, these mistakes, these misconceptions, these things we’re going to talk about today, they all bite us all at one point or another. The trick is just to know how to fix each one.

So here are the five big mistakes that adult music learners make and the solutions that you can apply right away.

Mistake number one: worrying it’s too late.

I touched on this already, but I’ll always remember this email I got back in the early days of Easy Ear Training, like 2009-2010 kind of time. We didn’t have a membership site at that point, so I was doing a lot of back and forth by email with our customers who were using our ear training materials.

And I’ll always remember this one email I got from this guy who was like, blah, blah, blah, a bit about me, what I’m doing, “I’m worried that it’s too late. I’m worried it’s too late for me to ever get good at music. I’m 19 now” and blah, blah, blah.

And when I read the email, I just cracked up. I was like “He’s 19! And he’s worried it’s too late.”

And I can, you know, I don’t mean for a second to make fun of the guy. I can relate. And even now, there are moments where I’m like, oh, I really wish I’d just, you know, gone harder at it faster in the early years.

And it’s fine to daydream in that way, but the vital thing to know is that it doesn’t matter.

We have so many examples of musicians at Musical U who have literally started from scratch in their eighties and nineties and become very competent, very capable, very confident, very creative. It’s absolutely possible.

I often think, actually, of Albert Frantz over at Key Notes. One of my favorite people in music education.

He’s a great example of someone who has reached the very top of the classical piano world. He’s a concert pianist at the top level, and he started in earnest as an adult. He started learning as a kid, and then got discouraged by his teacher, who told him he wasn’t talented, gave it up, came back as an adult, and reached that level.

So that’s just one example. And there’s so many from, you know, music history and famous musicians who just emerged out of nowhere as an adult, too.

So many adult music learners will trip themselves up with that doubt that, you know, “I’ll never make it. I’ll never be the musician I want to be. Because I started learning late. I missed the opportunity. It’s too late for me”.

And if you’re always worrying about that, you’re going to have one foot on the brakes. You’re never going to really be leaning forwards with full force into your music learning.

And let’s think about it. Kids don’t do that, right?

And with good reason, if you’re seven years old, it would be even more crazy to worry that it was too late. But, you know, my kids never worry that it’s too late for them to get good at French or too late to learn an instrument. And they lean fully forwards into everything as a result.

And the solution then, for us as adults is, is to really simply just smash that false belief.

It is not true. And as long as you entertain that thought, as long as you allow yourself to worry that it’s too late, you’ll never be able to make the progress you could.

So if you need concrete proof to be able to smash that limiting belief, I’ll put a link in the shownotes to our Reviews page. Not to pump up Musical U, but just to say, like, there’s dozens and dozens of videos on that page of adult learners having incredible breakthroughs. So if you have any doubt of what’s possible for you, that should really inspire and encourage you.

So that’s mistake number one.

Mistake number two, somewhat related, is just: To doubt your potential.

And this is, you know, a bit regardless of age, it’s that thing of, do I have talent? Do I have what it takes? Am I any good at music? Am I inherently a good musician?

And this is the one that held me back personally the most of these five.

For years, I thought I wasn’t talented in music, I’d never be a good musician. And I was so devoted to music. I loved music so much, I kept at it, I kept slogging away.

I was doing the stuff to learn music, but it really was like I had one foot on the brakes. When I look back now, it’s because there was a part of my brain that was always like “This is kind of pointless. Like, what, am I fooling myself? Like, what am I doing? Clearly those guys are talented. I’m not. Why would I bother?”

And that part of my brain was constantly sabotaging me, and it was killing my motivation from time to time, and it was just discouraging me at the smallest things.

This is what we talk about as the “talent myth” at Musical U.

And if that idea is new to you, I’ll just very short nutshell-summary: all of the research has proven pretty conclusively that there is no such thing as talent for music – or in general, in fact.

Everything we associate with talent can be explained by the particular learning process the person went through.

Kids don’t worry if they’re talented! Kids will dive into anything they’re enthusiastic about and interested in. They’ll try learning anything. They’ll try doing anything.

They don’t stop and think “oh, should I play sports? Because I’m not sure I’m talented”. They don’t stop and think “should I, you know, bang on that drum? I’m not sure I’m talented enough to”. And so they charge fully forwards into everything.

The solution to this one is a concept from the world of psychology research. A researcher called Carol Dweck coined the terms “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset”.

And this is one of those things where once you hear about it, it can become a touchpoint you keep coming back to to keep yourself on track.

And again, very nutshell summary: “fixed mindset” says “I was born with certain abilities and certain potential. All I can possibly do is try and live up to that potential. There are going to be some things that are out of reach. That’s just the way it is. Mistakes really should discourage me because it means I’m not good enough”.

“Growth mindset”, by contrast, is the attitude that “anything is possible for you. Anything is learnable for you. No matter what experiences in the past or what kind of innate abilities you might have been born with. You can learn to do whatever you want to do. And when you encounter mistakes or setbacks, you see them as learning opportunities”.

And so once you have those two models in mind, the really exciting thing is that it’s just a choice.

Growth mindset is itself learnable. And so if you find yourself struggling with mistake number two, doubting your own potential in music, the solution is really to commit to that growth mindset and say, I can’t do it YET, I’m not good enough YET, and really take that forward looking perspective on everything and set aside the talent myth and anything that tells you that you might innately not have what it takes.

Mistake number three: needing all of the intellectual understanding before you even start.

This was the one that came up on Coaches Corner yesterday. Andrew was talking about one of his Next Level clients who was really feeling the need to understand every step of the way before getting started.

And, you know, there’s nothing wrong with having a good plan. Plans are great. There’s nothing wrong with intellectually understanding the process of learning that you’re going to be going through.

But the trouble with it is that learning never happens in a straight line. And our musical journeys take all kinds of twists and turns, and that’s part of what makes it wonderful.

But as adults in particular, we are so trained by the educational system to think logically and plan everything out, and everything should be step-by-step, and that’s the correct way to do things. It’s really hard for us to engage with that more childlike model of learning, which is exploration.

You know, kids don’t worry about knowing every step of the Lego project they’re building before they begin. They just kind of dive in there and put blocks in place, right?

And the biggest danger, I think, for adult learners, beyond even that thing of “until I know steps one through 30, I’m not even going to take step one”, it’s also that it makes us particularly vulnerable to so-called Shiny Object Syndrome, where, you know, we leap about from this to that, and maybe THAT’s the solution.

And often when people talk about Shiny Object Syndrome, it’s seen kind of as a focus and discipline problem. And you know, it’s something where if you’re not, if you’re not diligent enough, you’ll be susceptible to Shiny Object Syndrome.

But what I’ve seen a lot in adult music learners is that actually they jump from thing to thing feeling very diligent and rigorous because they are seeking that full map of everything.

And so they’ll jump from thing to thing, not because they’re unfocused or easily distracted, but because something else comes up and they can’t quite see the path ahead on the route they’re on, and so they jump to that other thing, hoping it will be a clear path forwards.

And so that’s, you know, in the age of the internet and YouTube, it’s such a danger for adult learners.

So even if you’re being quite careful and diligent, if you’ve got this mistake going on of feeling like you need to know the whole plan before you get started, those shiny objects are going to come thick and fast!

The solution to this one is to eat the elephant one bite at a time.

You know that old saying, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

You really have to understand that even if you want your music journey to be as direct and straight line like as possible, you’re not going to see it all on step one. You can’t possibly. Even if you’re using the best resources, even if you have the best teacher or the best course to follow, it’s not going to go as you expect it to.

And if you’re expecting it to, you’re going to trip yourself up again and again when it doesn’t quite go how you expected or you can’t quite get started because you don’t understand step 17.

An analogy I like to come back to is an airplane. When the pilot puts an airplane on autopilot or when they launch a rocket into space, they have a clear destination in mind. They point at that destination, more or less, and then there’s constant course correction all along.

I heard a stat the other day that a rocket going into space makes thousands upon thousands of course corrections along the way. And so what really matters here is having that clear destination and then being ready for those course corrections and being okay with the fact that you can’t see every step ahead.

So I did an episode recently about the Big Picture Vision, your “north star” in music. That’s a great way to think about the “destination”.

And what’s awesome is that can be where you’re pointed and then you can allow the journey to flex and twist and turn along the way.

Another big part of the solution here is to find a trusted guide. Whether it’s a teacher or a coach or an organization you trust, put yourself in their hands, and then accept that you won’t see the full path ahead. Just get going.

I often think of that Steve Jobs quote. He gave a really good commencement speech that went viral online, and he said “you can’t connect the dots looking forwards. You can only connect them looking back.”

And I find that really deeply reassuring from someone as successful as him. He accepted that he would have to just kind of trust and follow and take the next step. And then looking back, it would be like “well, of course, that’s how it worked!”

So that’s how it could be in your musical life. If you have the clear destination and you allow yourself to twist and turn a bit, not expecting yourself to have all the intellectual understanding of the process before you even start.

Mistake number four that comes up a lot: Being too modest in your ambitions.

Being unambitious in your musical journey.

So recently we did that “Discover Your Musical Core” training, yourmusicalcore.com, and one of the big, impactful bits of that was going through the Big Picture Vision exercise. And again, we did a recent episode. I’ll put a link in the shownotes if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

We went through that exercise together, and from the comments during the session and the feedback afterwards, what really stood out was how many people were realising just how modest their aspirations had been.

So some of them had done what I just described as a good thing of, you know, getting involved, taking the next step, seeing how it goes, adjusting course along the way. But they hadn’t really sat down to think about, what do I want in my musical life? What is my ideal musical future? What is the version of me as a musician that I’m actually aiming for and inspired by and excited about?

And it made them realize that they had kind of, by default, been really unambitious. Like, they’ve been like, oh, maybe I’ll get a bit better at guitar, or, I’d quite like to write a song one day.

Compared to what they truly wanted. And when they took a bit of time to really think about that, it made them realise their vision was way up here and what they had been subconsciously, quietly aiming for was way down here again.

Kids don’t do this. You ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. They say pop star. They say, you know, a fireman. They say a university professor, whatever it may be. They don’t say “I’d quite like a job that pays me okay and covers my bills and I don’t hate it too much”, which, realistically, is what a lot of adults settle for, right?

And it’s not just about life vocation, obviously. It’s like anything kids want to do. They’re like “I’m going to be the best footballer in the world!”

And we really could do with channeling some of that ambition and some of that enthusiasm and allowing ourselves to dream a little bit more.

So the big solution here to this one, it’s quite simple, in fact.

It’s to separate out your “vision” from your “goals”. And this was another big impactful point from that training, was a lot of people, if they think about their musical aspirations, they get immediately caught up in goal-setting.

And goals are great, planning is great, don’t get me wrong. Essential.

But it is separate from your vision. And actually, again, on Coaches Corner last night, Andrew talked really eloquently about this, that, you know “vision”, that word, it’s about dreaming, it’s about daydreaming, it’s about imagining.

And when you allow yourself to give those two different boxes: “these over here are my concrete goals. They’re what I’m going to work on.I’m going to figure out the plan. I’m going to move towards them. And over here, that’s my vision. That drives everything. And there are no limits on that, and there’s no reality on that. And there’s no being realistic, and there’s no being, you know, sensible. It’s just, what do I truly, deeply want in my wildest dreams?”

And when you separate them like that, it really frees you from this trap of being too modest in your aspirations, because the adult, critical, analytical part of your brain can be like “here are my goals, I’m working on my goals”. But then the deeper part of us can be like “I’m inspired by my vision. This is why I’m doing everything. This is where I’m going to get to one day”.

And the last thing I’ll say is just, you know, the inspiring quote I often think of on this one is “Shoot for the moon. Even if you fail, you’ll land among the stars”.

And I think, was it W. Clement Stone who said that originally? Have to check the reference. But that quote always sticks in my head because (astronomy aside, I’m not sure it’s quite technically true, moon and stars!) the bottom line is, when you have that vision mind, it automatically drags your goals upwards.

It automatically pulls you forwards more. But it can’t do that if you keep it anchored to the ground. So you really have to shoot for the moon with the vision and then allow the goals to lead you more and more towards it.

Mistake number five, big mistake number five, without which all the others can, can still totally sabotage you, I think.

Mistake number five is to not ask for help.

And this is definitely one I can relate to. I am someone who, by nature is very independent, very independent minded, very keen to just do my own thing and sort it out myself. And it took me a long time to get better and better at asking for help when I needed it.

And you know what’s maybe the clearest example of this to me is over the years at Musical U, we have cultivated such a supportive and friendly environment in our community. And we say so often “just ask for help! If you have a question, just post! If you need us, reach out to the team!”

We really communicate that throughout the site, throughout everything we do, and we try and really encourage people.

And yet still today, we’ll occasionally get a member who cancels their membership after a few months and they’ll say, you know, I haven’t been making any progress. And we look and they literally haven’t posted a single comment or sent a single message or email. They haven’t once asked for help.

And, you know, I feel defensive enough to say, you know, our training is really good for DIY! A lot of people have a lot of success without asking for help. But sometimes someone needed a bit of help and they got stuck and they didn’t reach out for help. And that kills me.

And again, I can relate.

You know, that the image I always have in my mind is that bedroom musician who is slogging away, and they’re looking at the YouTube tutorials and they’re reading the music theory textbook and they’re just really trying. But they’re doing it in such isolation.

There’s no hope, in a way, because once in a while you need someone to reach down and give you a hand. And, you know, a single sentence can make all the difference. If you post a question, suddenly a block is removed for you. But that can’t happen if nobody knows you’re struggling.

So again, this is one that I feel has really gotten worse and worse in this incredible age of the internet with all of the abundant information online, that bedroom musician slogging it out alone can feel like “I have all the information. I should be able to learn this”.

But there’s just no substitute from being able to ask a question or get clarification or get a bit of guidance and have someone who knows what they’re talking about and has had the experience and has probably helped thousands of people like you just kind of reach down and remove that big barrier that’s otherwise holding you back.

So I’ve touched on the solution there. The solution, just like finding a trusted guide, can help with one of the others: find a trusted community.

And I know for a lot of people, if they have musical friends or family members or they’re working with a teacher, that can be the person to reach out to. In other cases, those aren’t people you want to admit any flaws with, or it’s not people you feel comfortable admitting you don’t understand with or asking too many questions.

So, you know, that’s really where the community at Musical U steps in for a lot of our members, is to fill that void and give them a safe space where they can ask as many questions as they like and get the answers. So whether it’s family and friends or an online community like we’ve created or like, we see it even more so inside Next Level, if you have a trusted coach and other people in that tight-knit community, it just makes all the difference in the world.

The more willing you can be to ask for help, the more success you’ll have.

And again, kids don’t do this, right? When my six year old needs help with something, she will ask for help with something!

And it gradually gets beaten out of us as adults. I think partly because we, you know, get told not to ask too many questions.

But more because our ego develops over the years and starts to make us embarrassed to admit when we don’t know something or can’t do something.

But we’re a student! We’re learning! We’re trying to get better! It’s total nonsense to not ask for help. And the more you can do it, the more success you’ll have.

All you need to do is find that trusted, safe space where you can ask all the questions you want.

So that’s the fifth mistake, is to not ask for help along the way. And the solution, figure out where you can ask for help with no hesitation and get good answers.

So, to recap then.

Mistake number one is worrying it’s too late. And the solution here is just to smash that limiting belief.

If you need examples, I’ll put a link in the shownotes. But there is absolutely no reason to believe you can’t learn everything you want to in music as an adult, even if you just started yesterday. We literally, again, have people in their eighties and nineties who improve faster than kids do and achieve more than most children ever do in music. So it is not too late.

Mistake number two is to doubt your own potential, to get caught up in that Talent Myth and worried that you don’t have what it takes. The solution is to know about this idea of “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset” and know that you can choose growth mindset.

You can choose to believe that everything is learnable for you. You have no limits on your potential. You have no innate ceiling you’re going to hit. Everything you want to learn can be learned.

Mistake number three is needing all of the intellectual understanding of every step of the way before you even get started. The solution is just to eat the elephant one bite at a time. Learn to accept that the path is going to be dark and dingy ahead of you, and it’ll become clearer as you move forwards.

Mistake number four, being too modest in your ambitions and particularly confusing “vision” and “goals”. So the solution is to separate those two. Let your goals be very concrete, very realistic – you know, SMART is the acronym a lot of people use, and one of those letters stands for Realistic.

Goals can be realistic. Fantastic. Your vision should be your wildest dreams and you should keep that vision burning bright to guide you forwards, help with the goal-setting and help gradually drag those goals to be more and more ambitious.

And mistake number five is to not ask for help. The solution is just to find a trusted community, whether it’s friends and family, a teacher, an online community, or whatever it is, somewhere you can ask the questions you need to ask and get the help you need to keep moving forwards fast.

I really held up kids there, as you know, not falling into these traps. And I just think it’s so clear cut.

Kids move fast because they don’t trip themselves up in these five ways, right?

And we need to remember, too, the benefits of being an adult.

As an adult, we’re more organized. We probably have more control over our time. We definitely have a better attention span and ability to maintain focus.

We’ve got years not only of intellectual understanding and ability to learn things quickly, but also years of musical vocabulary and instinct for music that’s in there just waiting to be brought out.

So there are vast benefits to being an adult, as long as you don’t fall into these five traps and have the brakes on with one foot.

So, to wrap things up, there is absolutely nothing you can’t accomplish in music if you stop making these five big mistakes.

We see it every day inside Musical U. The more you can get yourself out of these five traps, the more you can become aware of them, the more you can learn the solutions and really put them into practice, the faster and more enjoyably you will move forwards in your musical life.

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

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