Author: musicalitywrld

Christopher: How does Elton John write such incredible chord progressions? What is it that made Lennon and McCartney songs so distinctive, so that they became the songwriting legends they’re now known for being? And what do Sting and Radiohead do differently in their songwriting that you can learn from?

These are just a few of the fascinating topics covered by Benny Romalis and Keppie Coutts on the popular YouTube channel “How To Write Songs”.

And today I’m joined by Benny for a mini-interview that I think you’re gonna love.

So songwriting is a funny topic sometimes at Musical U, because we cater to such a broad range of musicians, and it’s only obviously a subset of musicians who think of themselves as songwriters or have any aspirations to write songs.

And so for a long time at Musical U, we didn’t really do anything in the area of songwriting or composing. We just focused on teaching you the inner skills that make those easier.

But what we realised over the years was how integral creativity is to musicality.

And so even if you don’t aspire to write songs or to compose music, we realised we really had a duty to equip all of our members with creative skills. And of course, once you get into the habit of creating, whether it’s improvising or writing, you naturally want to turn it into something you can share with other people.

And so more and more, we’ve been talking about songwriting, teaching songwriting, you know, we’ve got Living Music modules and a whole section of The Fountain dedicated to songwriting. We have a standalone course, Songwriting Alchemy. So we’ve done more and more in this area.

At the same time, there are organisations and individuals who focus fully, wholeheartedly on the art and craft of writing songs. And one such organisation that has stood out over the last few years is howtowritesongs.org or the YouTube channel “How To Write Songs”, with Benny and Keppie, where they do a combination of teaching incredible stuff, but also analysing really remarkable songs and explaining what makes them tick.

It’s such a cool YouTube channel. I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out and we’ll have a link in the shownotes. But today I want to share with you our mini-interview.

We had the pleasure of having Benny come in as our Guest Expert at Musical U most recently, last month, and as well as coaching our Next Level clients and presenting a Masterclass, which I’ll share a little bit of tomorrow for you, we had the chance to sit down and chat for 15-20 minutes about his take on musicality, how his collaboration with Keppie came about in the first place, what makes their approach to teaching songwriting so different from a lot of the stuff that’s out there, and how “thinking like a car mechanic” can actually empower you to write incredible songs yourself.

So all that and more in this mini-interview, I hope you enjoy. Here we go!

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Christopher: Welcome back to the show! Today I’m joined by Benny Romalis of the popular YouTube channel and website “How To Write Songs”. Benny is himself a songwriter under various names and tours regularly with his alt-folk band, the Green Mohair Suits. And at How To Write Songs, Benny and his co-founder, Keppie Coutts help songwriters of all levels to get better and better at the craft of songwriting.

In one of the first videos of theirs I ever watched, one of the first things I heard Keppie say was, essentially, “you don’t need to be some magical, talented, gifted alien to write songs. Anyone can learn to do it step-by-step and get better and better”. So you can see why I knew I liked these guys right away!

You can also see why we’re so fortunate to have Benny with us as our Guest Expert here at Musical U this month. He’s going to be in coaching our Next Level members this coming week, and today he’s presenting our monthly Masterclass for all members entitled “Songwriting: Thinking Like A Car Mechanic”.

Benny, welcome to the show!

Benny: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Christopher: I always like to start these interviews with the same question because it draws out such different answers from the people I’m talking to.

And that question is: what does musicality mean to you?

Benny: It’s such an interesting question. For me, musicality is about going into the details of music. You know, it’s an intent rather than the way I think a lot of people think about it, which is more like athleticism.

You know, we look at sometimes this comparison between sport and art or sport and music. And when you look at someone who’s athletic, we say they’ve got natural athleticism, and that’s true in sport.

But anyone who has ever spoken to an athlete or heard them interviews also knows that they work so hard and that really, the talent and the athleticism is the beginning of all the work and the discipline and the training is really where it’s at.

So for me, musicality is kind of the same thing. It’s an intent to go into the details of music and to really understand what music is, the way it’s put together, the way it feels in all its different forms. It’s a deep sense of curiosity around music.

Christopher: Ooh, you threw a little curveball at the end there! I love that. That word “curiosity”, I think, is one we haven’t heard that often in answers to that question, and I love it. I love that you highlighted that.

And it’s no coincidence you’re coming from a songwriting, composing, creating perspective with that curiosity. Tell us a little bit about your own musical backstory, where you came from as a musician and how you came to have this view on musicality.

Benny: So I started music when I was pretty young, but untrained. I just learned guitar.

I always loved playing with language. I used to write a lot of poems in school, but never really thought about the two coming together. I never really understood that until much later on.

So, really, I just loved playing guitar and writing a lot of instrumental music through high school.

And then I went and studied music formally after high school because I really was unhappy with all the gaps in my knowledge. I was delighted to be playing music. I loved playing music, but I didn’t understand what I was doing.

You know, I felt very frustrated by the limitations of my own knowledge. And it’s not that knowing what you’re doing is necessarily required to make music, but I was frustrated by repeating the same things over and over and not feeling liberated to go other places.

So I studied music at college for three years. Had the most incredible experience. Met my future wife there, you know, met some of my best friends there. And then I came back and I just gigged a lot, and I played a lot of music, and I did lots of shows.

And really, I think doing, like, three or four shows for three or four shows a week for about four years, really kind of put all of those things from college into practice in such a tangible, visceral way, and taught me so much about how to put together songs, how to arrange them all the different ways you can perform them. Amazing feedback when you’re playing a song and you see people kind of just not paying attention any more – and you go “that’s interesting”, because that part of the song, that bridge, really isn’t working, you know. Or vice-versa, where you see people really engaged and you start to think “okay, why at this moment of the song? What is it about this song and this moment of the song that is capturing people?”

So that was huge for me. And then I went and studied film and TV as a postgraduate study. I just have always been in love with instrumental composition and film composition. So I did that.

And then from there, all of these projects started to come out of, well, not out of nowhere, but just through these relationships I’d been building. So it ended up with me essentially working a lot in this room and starting to really create a lot of music for film and TV and different kind of audio visual projects.

And at the same time, doing a lot of songwriting with the Green Mohair Suits, playing with them, and eventually what Keppie and I do now, which is to really double down on the art and craft of songwriting and how to teach that.

Christopher: Very cool. And when you were talking there about, you know, really noticing what makes the audience, like, perk up or tune out. Yeah, I think highlights one of the things I think is so remarkable about your YouTube channel in particular.

I may or may not have been binging a lot of your videos recently! And, you know, you guys have a great methodology around songwriting, but you also bring in all of these analyses of popular artists and popular tracks and ask that question of, you know, “what are they doing that’s interesting or different?”

Tell us a little bit more about that collaboration with Keppie, where it came from and what you guys are up to at How To Write Songs.

Benny: Well, Keppie and I have been friends for over 20 years, so that really helped when we decided to actually start a business together. So we’ve been friends for a long time, and we’ve played a lot of music together.

Keppie was actually, she was there with me when I went to Montreal when we were 21, I think, and I saw the Montreal Jazz Festival, and that was a huge moment. Literally 20 years ago.

That was a huge moment where I then came back to Australia and said, I’m going to study music. You know, I’m going to really study music, because I had just spent two weeks immersed in just some of the best musicians and music-makers I had ever seen or heard. So we’ve been together on this musical journey for 20 years.

About three years ago during COVID – a lot of things happened during COVID obviously – but, you know, it was one of those things where Keppie and I have both been lecturing for a long time. She’s been lecturing at various institutions. I’ve been teaching at various places as well.

We were both just getting a little frustrated with the rigidity of the system of teaching in that kind of education system. And they’re amazing places to actually work and so much fun interacting with the students. But it was just one of those things where the time had come for us to think about doing something else.

And together we started talking about this idea of what happens if we start taking all of this material that we’ve been collecting and building and creating over the last five to ten years as lecture material and start putting it on YouTube and just see what happens.

It really was a “let’s see what happens” kind of situation. So that’s how the whole YouTube thing got going, and as that became bigger and bigger, and as we got better at YouTube – we were terrible at the beginning! You know, we were just, it’s one of the steepest learning curves I think I’ve ever been on. But as that got going, it really then gave us permission to start thinking about what else we could do in terms of how else could we deliver content to people who are craving this kind of information.

How else could we then connect with people who want to talk about songwriting more, who want to talk about the realities of writing songs and making music and creative work, doing good creative work?

Because we’re not just thinking about, you know, this very niche thing of songwriting. We’re also interested in people’s approach to creativity, their philosophical approach to creativity, but the very practical, tangible, day-to-day things they do to feel creative and feel inspired and proactive and all of those things.

So it’s really been an evolution over the last two years that began with YouTube and has now expanded into a much bigger business.

Christopher: Wonderful, yeah. And I believe you just wrapped up your Accelerator Program where you were really kind of in the trenches with budding songwriters, helping them day by day.

Benny: Right! It was amazing. We launched a six-week program called the Accelerator Program to, again, just give songwriters an opportunity to go deep into songwriting in a very condensed form.

You know, I mean, six weeks is kind of a long time, or it depends how you want to think about it. It’s not that long over the course of a year.

Christopher: It’s a long sprint! Sprinting for six weeks.

Benny: It’s a long sprint, that’s true. That’s a good way to put it.

It was a long sprint. So it was really immersive, very intense, you know, in terms of the condensed way we delivered the material. We had to kind of run masterclasses each week, and then there were pop-up tutorials, and then there were live song feedback sessions where every week the participants had to write a song, submit it, they got feedback, we re-worked it every week for six weeks.

It was incredible. And that just gave us more confidence to reach out to more people who really do love songwriting but feel like they’re not sure how to create a deliberate and consistent, I guess, process. They’re not sure how that works.

So that’s what we’re really trying to do with those kinds of programs, help people feel a sense of consistency and make deliberate choices around their songwriting and their music making. So it doesn’t just feel random.

Christopher: Wonderful. Yeah. We talk a lot at Musical U about the kind of… I love YouTube, but the “YouTube wilderness”. A lot of music learners find themselves jumping from video to video, trying to cobble something together and getting conflicting views.

Apart from that kind of clearly structured, holistic approach, is there anything else you would say distinguishes the approach you and Keppie take? What makes How To Write Songs so different and so popular, would you say?

Benny: I think all the time we spent lecturing in colleges really taught us the value of pulling apart an idea and trying to explain it in the simplest possible way. Because what you learn when you’re in the classroom and you’ve got 20 students who are eager to understand a concept, but really, there’s a distance, I think, that is created with terminology.

You know, if I start talking in music theory terminology, you learn very quickly – it’s almost like doing those gigs where you see the people leaning in or sort of falling asleep during a song. You see very quickly in a classroom of 20 students whether or not the concept is landing or not.

And I think the more we use, the more we use complex terminology to describe music making, sometimes the further away we get from understanding it creates a bigger gap.

So I think going through that process for ten years, Keppie and I, separately in our own institutions, but talking about it a lot, really gave us a desire to never shy away from breaking down a complex idea into its simplest possible construct or the simplest possible terms, with the desire to help anybody understand it, regardless of how good their music theory is or how much prior knowledge they have. And that really helped us on YouTube.

But the other thing we then decided to do was to make our brand known for describing the things that no one else really wants to describe.

So you know, melody is a classic example where so many videos you watch and so many courses you do, when it comes to melody… Everyone’s happy talking about chord progressions, and here’s a diatonic chord progression, and here’s a borrowed chord. And, you know, let’s talk about lyrics and the rhyme scheme, and you can sort, sort of put it up on screen and talk about it, and it’s, you know, everyone’s usually following along.

Then when it comes to melody writing, you hear so many artists talk about the fact that “it just came to them”, you know, the melody. “I don’t know where the melody came from, but there was the melody”, or you see people top-lining and it just, “it just happens”.

And we had to make the decision to actually say, we’re not going to just say the melody comes to you. That when you listen to artists talk about the melody, that did come to them and break it down, there are all of these instinctive things that they’re doing that they’re not necessarily articulating, because they’re really difficult to articulate.

And any artist who’s been doing it for a long time forgets, in a way, how they put it together, because you’re supposed to forget. You’re supposed to train so much, and you’re supposed to get so good at it that it becomes instinctive. And so The Beatles weren’t ever going to talk about how they constructed a melody because they just spent so many hours doing it. By the time they, you know, exploded onto the scene, that it was instinctive.

So that is our brand differentiator, I think. We give language to the things that are really difficult to describe, and we try and break down and articulate the things that a lot of people won’t articulate.

Christopher: Love it. And I know there’s going to be a lot of people watching or listening who, at this point, are itching to go check out your stuff. We’ll, of course, have links to howtowritesongs.org and your YouTube channel in the shownotes. Give people an idea of what they’ll find there, what they can dive into when they want to know more about you guys.

Benny: So the YouTube channel is obviously where you can find a lot of our content.

And really, the YouTube channel, our only intent with the YouTube channel is to give as much value as we can on a topic in ten to twelve minutes. It’s sort of one of these games we now play with – how much can we pack into a script and then deliver?

So that’s a lot of fun. What it allows us to do is give people access to this kind of information so that we have a shared language around songwriting and around music making. And then if you go to the website, what we’ve started to do is really create a lot of different ways that people can engage with us with songwriting.

We run eight-week songwriting groups where people are just there for eight weeks, getting a prompt every two weeks. And it’s more around accountability and writing together with other people, seeing how they respond to prompts. So we’ve got our songwriting groups, we have our accelerator programs, we have our workshops. Really, the website is probably the best place to find all the different products, but the products are simply there in different forms because everyone likes learning in different ways.

So some people love dipping into 90-minute workshops because they just want a small taste of something. Other people like a six-week program. It’s really there to suit your taste.

Christopher: Fantastic. Thank you. And I can see people are lining up in the waiting room, ready to join the Masterclass.

Give people a little taste of what you’ll be sharing in that Masterclass today. It might be my favorite masterclass title yet!

Benny: Yeah, that’s a result of playing with titles all the time on YouTube, I think Keppie and I think in titles now, 50% of our days.

“How to deconstruct songs and think like a mechanic” is really around this idea of coming back to the thing you asked before about, what’s a differentiator for our brand?

We believe very strongly in not just blowing off creativity and saying “it either happens or it doesn’t”. Or “You either have it or you don’t”.

We believe that it’s like anything, you can develop processes, you can develop habits, you can get better through repeated exercises and intent.

So deconstructing songs, thinking like a mechanic is this idea that whenever you meet a mechanic, whenever you go and you take your car in to get serviced, they really understand cars because they’ve pulled them apart. That’s how they got to know them.

My dad’s one of these amazing people who can strip a car engine and lay it all out on the floor in pieces and then put it back together. And I just find that amazing. But he knows how to do that because he just started doing it when he was young. He just started pulling apart motorbike engines and laying out all the pieces.

So when we take the same approach to music, when we sort of deconstruct it, instead of thinking of it and listening to it as this just one beautiful collective whole, we can see all the pieces laid out and we start to understand how they then fit back together.

So I encourage people to start deconstructing songs, thinking like a mechanic, and laying out the pieces on the floor so that we can then look at them and see how they fit back together. And that’s what the Masterclass is going to be all about.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, I absolutely can’t wait, so I’m going to wrap things up there. Thank you so much, Benny, for joining me for this mini pre-masterclass interview, and I look forward to having you back on the show again soon!

Benny: Thank you so much. It was lovely.

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Christopher: Awesome. I hope you enjoyed that little intro to Benny and the great stuff he and Keppie are up to.

I highly encourage you to go binge-watch their YouTube channel! And I guarantee you will find it a delight whether you’re interested in writing songs yourself or not, just because those analysis videos they do are so expertly done and they’re so revealing on topics that you never normally hear covered.

I’m going to be back next time with a section from Benny’s masterclass to share with you. It was a masterclass our members absolutely loved.

It really tied in with our approach to Active Listening here at Musical U, where you’re dissecting music by ear in your mind. And as you will have gathered by the way he talked about it, that process of deconstructing music can be truly fascinating for any music lover, whether or not you want to write a song yourself.

So I’m really looking forward to sharing that with you on the next one. Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

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Today, I want to share with you the cover design for our new Musicality book! This book has been in the works for a couple of years now. It’s brewed up to be something pretty epic and I’m so excited to get it into your hands.

Today I want to give you a sneak peek of the cover design and tell you also how to get some exclusive bonuses we’re doing to celebrate the launch. A quick note, this one is definitely a visual episode, so if you’re tuned into the audio podcast, please do go look up this episode on YouTube so that you can see what I’m showing you.

Otherwise, if you go to musicalitybook.com now, you can see what I’m referring to in this episode.

So if you’ve been following along with our book launch journey in these recent “Inside The Book” episodes, you’ll know we held a cover design contest for the book.

And the book, if you haven’t been following along, is our forthcoming book entitled Musicality, and it’s our all-in-one manual for everything having to do with increasing your natural musicality.

So playing by ear, improvising, jamming, performing with confidence, having good rhythm, singing in tune, accelerated learning, all the stuff we specialise in here at Musical U, we’ve distilled down 15 years of experience helping adult learners online, as well as decades and decades, probably over a couple of hundred years of experience on the Musical U team, all into this thick hardback book that we’re putting out into the world this coming September. I couldn’t be more excited to get this into your hands.

And sadly, despite the saying that “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”, I think we can all agree, we often do. And so it was particularly important to try and get the cover right for this book, especially because it’s been designed not just for our keen Musical U members who’ve been with us for years and want this companion guide sitting on their shelf, but because we hope it will help us reach even more people who haven’t come across us before, have no idea of what musicality training is all about, but are excited by the prospect of becoming more naturally musical.

So the cover is critical, and so we did what we’ve done a few times in the past. For example, for the Musical U logo, for the Living Music logo, for our Pillar Belief icons. Any time we’ve got something visual that I really want to make sure we nail, we tend to do a design contest because that means you get ideas and concepts from a whole range of designers before whittling it down to the winning concept, and with this book cover, that concept was gonna be really critical.

So if you saw our episode, I guess maybe six weeks ago, I invited you guys into the process. We had over 120 people vote on the cover of designs when we’d narrowed it down to just four.

Thank you so much if you were one of those who voted and gave feedback, we got such helpful feedback, both from all of you in the audience and the Musical U team. We factored that in, we weighed up the various criteria, and actually, the design we ended up going with was your favourite! Among those 120 people who voted, this was the top-rated design.

It also happened to be my favourite, which was great, and the team loved it, too. So I’m really excited to finally share that with you today, as well as a peek at the new musicalitybook.com site where we’ve got all the info now about the book. Well, not all the info, but a lot more info about the book.

So I’m going to give you a peek at that in a moment. And also just to say there’s a couple of other things to share with you, including pre-order bonuses and something really exciting we have coming up in September.

So without further ado, we need a bit of a drum roll, but I think my mic noise cancellation is going to cancel it out if I do one. But I would otherwise grab a drumstick and give you a little drum roll!

Here we go, the cover design for the new Musicality book!

So this is the design we ended up going for. And again, if you were one of those who voted, you may have strong feelings about this design, but it was definitely the popular favourite and I love it for a few different reasons.

I think number one is just the spirit of it. I hope you’ll agree that at a glance, this dancing figure surrounded by music, colourful, vibrant energy, it’s absolutely the spirit we’re aiming for with this book. And of course, there’s a risk that when you publish a, like, 500-page manual on music learning, it could be very dry and very textbook-like.

And we were really going for the opposite with this book. The way it’s written, if you’ve followed any of the sneak peek episodes I’ve done where we’ve shared bits from the book, it’s written in quite an informal and quite a friendly, inclusive, encouraging style, much the way we do everything at Musical U.

And so I wanted to make sure the cover conveyed that rather than just being like… some of the design candidates were a bit more textbook-y.

And so I love the spirit of it and the energy. And I think maybe most of all, it just conveys the sense of freedom we want with this book.

You know, everything about musicality training is really about increasing your freedom in music. Escaping from the sheet music, getting out from your bedroom where you practice alone and playing with other musicians, feeling confident you can do all of the incredible things you’ve been dreaming of. It’s really that spirit of freedom. And hopefully you agree, I think this cover really encapsulates that.

At the same time, we wanted to make sure it wasn’t too light. And I love that this cover also has a bit of authority to it. I think if you saw this on a shelf, it would make an impression that it is a serious book.

And that’s very much the vibe of the book. It’s that attitude of inclusivity and encouragement and excitement and energy, coupled with some very down-to-earth, practical, proven frameworks, techniques, methodologies, information, explanations, exercises to help you improve in a really concrete way.

So I’m really happy with how the cover came out. And the tagline there, I think it might be a bit too small for you to read, but we did a previous episode about why this is the tagline for the book, and it’s: how you too can learn music like a gifted prodigy, unlock your instinct for music and unleash your inner natural.

And I won’t go into that further. I’ll put a link in the shownotes to that previous episode where I kind of unpacked that and explained why those are the three elements we wanted in the tagline for the book.

And just to give you a peek, you can go to musicalitybook.com now and check it out for yourself, but there’s a bit of information here about the book. What’s it for, who is behind it, the team there, and then a breakdown of what’s inside.

So I go through chapter by chapter explaining all the topics that are covered. So, musicality, musical mindset, audiation, singing, active listening, superlearning. And then in part two, the kind of core ear training stuff. So ear training, relative pitch, solfa, intervals, chord progressions, we’ve got a typo there, I’m going to go back and fix that after this episode, the beat, rhythm, and then in part three, the more applied side of things. So bringing all of those core skills to improvisation, to playing by ear, to songwriting, to expression and to performance.

So that’s the breakdown of the book. And then you’ve got here what you’re watching now or listening to now, these “Inside The Book” episodes we’ve been doing. And you might notice we’ve revamped those thumbnails now to match the cover design and the overall styling of the book. So we’ll be adding to those as we do more episodes leading up to the launch.

And if you blinked, you missed it, but there is a little bit at the top here mentioning it’s not ready yet, it is coming soon, but we now have an official release date of the 23 September, which at the time of recording is just a couple of months away. Super exciting!

So I’m really chuffed that we are entering that endgame now. And this will very soon be in your hands, on your shelf and empowering you to greater musicality yourself.

So if you want to go to musicalitybook.com now, you can click here to get notified. Just put in your name and email and that’s going to put you on our early interest list. So very simple, just put in your name and email, it’ll take you to a confirmation page and that’ll make sure you’re on our early interest list for the book.

Why would you want to do that? It’s not just about remembering come September that the book is out, but I wanted to share with you a couple of other things.

So number one is we are doing exclusive pre-order bonuses with the book. So in due course, you can just, you know, buy the book off the shelf. But as part of the launch, we’re doing a special pre-order bundle where you get a couple of extra things. And if you get yourself onto that list, you’ll be the first to hear about it.

So you definitely want to be on that early interest list and lined up to pre-order it in the next couple of weeks. We’ll be opening that, I think, within a week for a select group behind the scenes, including that early interest list. So they are going to be the first to hear about it.

And then we’ll gradually be opening up pre-orders. Because part of what we’re including is limited spots. So get on that early interest list, get your name on that list and you’ll be the first to hear when we open for pre-orders very soon.

And I also wanted to let you know we, as part of the launch, we are doing something very special in September/October time, and I can’t share details just yet.

We did share full info with our most devoted, most keen, most longstanding members here at Musical U a couple of weeks ago, and they went nuts for it. I’m excited to tell you all about it, but just to say for now we’re doing a special live thing in September/October to celebrate the launch of the book and to really bring it to life. Super exciting.

All I can say for now is that tickets for that are going to be limited and the only way to get access to it will be through buying the book. So that’s another big reason to register your interest now and make sure you’re on that list and you can be first in line to nab your ticket for that coming up in September/October.

So I’m really happy to share this cover with you, share the page with you. Musicalitybook.com, you can check it out for yourself. Get your name on that list.

I have been loving hearing all of the excitement in our audience, in our membership for this book. So please do keep the comments coming, the questions, the suggestions.

And that reminds me, a reminder for you, I do want your suggestions for who I should interview.

I really want to do a special interview series in conjunction with the launch of the book because this book is like our “missing manual” that we think every music learner should have been handed on day one.

But as you can imagine, with all of the topics covered, there are so many incredible people doing great work in the world on all of those topics. And in the spirit of Better Together, one of our Pillar Beliefs, I would love to bring in some of those other thought-leaders, some of those other innovators and interview them on your behalf, to get their take on all of these topics.

And so we definitely have a whole list of people we’ll be going to. But I want to hear from you. Who would be your dream come true guest to hear me interview on the show, to bring onto musicality now and pick their brains on any one of those topics?

So anything from superlearning to ear training to improvisation to performance, audiation, singing, rhythm, you know, anything covered in the book, anything you find on musicalitybook.com. Who would be the top name for any of those topics? Let me know in the comments on this episode or send an email to hello@musicalitynow.com and let me know. We’ll do our best to line them up and bring them to you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher: I love that. That’s powerful.

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

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

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

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

Zac: Yes, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher: Wonderful. 100%, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy: Absolutely. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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