Author: musicalitywrld

Dr. Greene has written eight books, two of which we discuss in this conversation, “Performance Success” and “College Prep for Musicians”. He also publishes articles covering all aspects of peak performance psychology for music, sports and all performing disciplines on his website, Winning on Stage.

You may be familiar with some of the ideas in this interview, such as visualisation and positive self-talk. However, If you’re like most music learners, you’ve probably come across these ideas in vague blog posts or conversation. You’re going to find it hugely valuable to hear from a performance psychologist who’s worked with world-class performers across several disciplines for many years.

We talk about:

• Why trying to feel relaxed is not actually the route to reliable performance under pressure
• The five areas you can assess yourself on, to know how best to improve your own performance abilities.
• The importance of a so-called “pre-shot routine” that can help you perform at your best even when your heart is pounding

This conversation is going to equip you with some valuable new insights and strategies to apply in your musical life and open your eyes to what might be possible for you!

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Links and Resources

• • Winning On Stage
  • Winning On Stage Articles
  • Dr. Don Greene’s Books
  • Performance Mastery Assessment
  • Centering Training

Transcript

Dr. Greene: Hi, I’m Dr. Don Greene. I’m the author of Audition Success, Performance Success, and College Prep for Musicians. Welcome to this broadcast.

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

Dr. Greene: Thank you so much. Nice to be here.

Christopher: So in the foreword to your book Performance Success, Julie Landsman of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra wrote, “It takes something more than talent to win auditions and perform consistently at the very peak of one’s powers. It takes what Don Greene has to offer.” I wonder if you could tell us in a nutshell what is that? What is that extra something?

Dr. Greene: The extra something is a different approach to performing under pressure. Rather than the alleged approach of a lot of music teachers of just relax, my approach is more that it’s a competition, just like sports, and you’re not supposed to be relaxed. You’re supposed to have your body physically relaxed, but the mind needs to be engaged. And it’s a competition, so I approach it more from an athletic point of view than a musical point of view. So we talk about things like focus, channeling energy, hanging in when it gets tough, go and become fearless. And that’s more of my approach. And it has been very successful in auditions.

Christopher: That was something that really jumped out to me in Performance Success was there was a line along the lines of, “If you feel relaxed right before a performance, something’s wrong.” Which I think runs contrary to a lot of the advice out there.

Dr. Greene: Well, that’s just it, you’re going to feel adrenaline, you’re going to feel it surging through your body. If it’s important at all, you’re going to be feeling that rather than trying to deny or wish it away to accept it and learn how to use it. Thing is, with performers, on stage they have good reason to be nervous or I would call it excited. First of all, they’re on stage, and you’ve got the spotlight effect. Everybody’s watching, everybody’s listening, and they’re probably the only one making any noise or sound. And everybody’s paying attention. And if they’re up on stage, they’re supposed to be good. So you have the expectation, the double whammy. And then if you’re also going with the attitude, “I just need to relax, or my teacher wants me to relax,” then you have the triple whammy. And that’s when it doesn’t tend to go well.

Christopher: So I definitely want to circle back in a moment and talk about that physical experience of stress or anxiety, and what you just said about nervous versus excited. But before we do, there’s something else from that same foreword that spoke out to me, which was Julie Landsman talked also about how she had already become quite competent in performing reliably. Like she was hitting the right notes at the right time, but felt all the joy had gone out of performing. And working with you brought a lot of that joy and sense of creativity back. I wonder if you could give the listener a glimpse into what it is about your process that lets performers not just execute well, but actually enjoy it and feel better about it.

Dr. Greene: Yeah, it’s wonderful if they can enjoy it. There’s a concept of flow, and people in flow tend to do better. There’s a word called “autotelic personality”. And that means that people enjoy it for the sake of doing it. And hopefully all your fans, listeners enjoy what they’re doing. That they do it even if they weren’t paid, and hopefully they can get paid. But autotelic personality is that enjoy doing what you’re doing. But that is based on the foundation of competence and proficiency. You have to have goods in order to enjoy it. So that’s the main key is you work on your skills.

Dr. Greene: But then you reach a certain level, not perfection, because perfection doesn’t exist as far I’m concerned with musical instruments, that you reach a certain level of competence and proficiency. And then you switch over from working music to playing music. And I think this is a real key, that too many people get caught up in trying to perfect it and work and work. And it takes an enormous amount of work, 10,000 hours if you want, to get to a level of competence and proficiency. But once you get that level, you need to switch over from working music to playing music and enjoying the process. Being with other musicians, making great music. Hopefully that’s what all the work is about, that you can go onstage and play like a kid just enjoying it, with the freedom to play, and share that with other people who can enjoy it. That to me is what music’s all about. In order to get there you’ve got to work to play. But that’s the essential thing.

Dr. Greene: There’s two kinds of practice. There’s practicing practice, which you need for competence and proficiency. Practicing practice is doing all the things you need with a metronome, with a tuner, stop and start it, record it, play it back, play it slowly. That’s what you need to do for work. But once you reach a level of proficiency, you need to switch over from practicing practice to practicing performing. And that’s where no tuner, no metronome, and you don’t get to stop and start. You have a tape recorder on but you play through it no matter what. And this is practicing performing. And this is the essential switch over from working to playing. And this is where you first start out with a recording, record yourself. And once you start, you don’t stop. And then you invite a friend over, and then three friends over, and then your teacher.

Dr. Greene: And you get used to performing with the adrenaline because you’re not going to feel that when you’re practicing practice. So you’re practicing at a level that you’re not going to do, and then you’re going to do something that you haven’t practiced. So I think it’s important that you practice performing under increasing pressure to get used to it. And the whole goal is to realize that you can perform better with the pressure than you can relaxed in a practice room. And that’s the main key to switch over, to take it to a stage on the way to enjoying it. By getting used to the adrenaline, in a safe environment, with a recorder, then one person, and learning how to channel that adrenaline, because it’s going to be there. And hear that you can sound better. The notes speak louder. You have more direction, more intensity.

Dr. Greene: The one thing you won’t have is comfort. That doesn’t go with the package. You either get high performance or comfort. If you want comfort, stay in a practice room. If you want to proceed for grass as a musician, you got to take it to the stage. And that involves getting used to the pressure, and accepting it, and channeling it.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, what I love about your work is how clearly you present people with frameworks and concepts and tools to actually dig into all of this stuff that can otherwise just feel a bit overwhelming. Like when you talked just now about it not being a comfortable thing, that doesn’t mean you have to have lots of chaos and stress going on in your head, and thoughts whirring all over the place, right?

Dr. Greene: No, not at all. You want to calm that down, chaos. But you’re still going to be feeling the adrenaline in your body, namely heart racing, blood pressure up, butterflies in your stomach, hands shaking, needing to go to the bathroom a lot, all of these things. And just realize that they go with the territory.

Dr. Greene: The only catch is if the heart races, it doesn’t need to affect your playing. The main thing that affects people’s playing under pressure is they get tight, physically tight. Their muscles don’t work the same when they’re tight. And that’s the difference between a practice room and a stage, is people tend to be physically loose in a practice room, and on stage they’re carrying a lot of attention. So it’s almost like practicing on one instrument and then going on stage with a different instrument. You’re working with a different mechanism if you’re working with tight muscles.

Dr. Greene: So I ask musicians under pressure to realize where they’re tight, where they tend to tighten up. And it tends to be in what I call key muscles. In other words, horn players tend to tighten up in their upper body. String players in their hands or arms. It goes with the territory. And so what each individual musician needs to do is look at where they tend to tighten up under pressure, and then under pressure not go to your heart racing. “Oh my god, my heart’s racing. Now I’m not going to play well.” But to relax in their key muscles so that they will play well. Because supple muscles work better than the tight muscles. That’s straightforward. It’s very mechanical. And this is not a head concept, this is a physical concept. It gets your body prepared to play.

Christopher: Interesting. And on this physical front you mentioned a moment ago there’s a difference between nervous versus excited. And I’m sure for some people in our audience, having just heard you talk through those symptoms, they can understand how those two might coexist, or there might be a choice between them. But maybe you could unpack a little bit more. What’s that about?

Dr. Greene: It’s a question of interpretation. And it’s in the middle of two things. It happens really fast, it’s perception, interpretation, and action. So you walk into a room, go on stage, and all of a sudden your heart starts racing. You perceive your heart racing. You feel your heart racing. At this point you can make an interpretation. The interpretation can go north or south. You can either say, “Oh my god, my heart’s racing. Now I’m not going to play well.” And then you’ll act in that way, defensively not play well, not play out. And yeah. Or you can make the correct interpretation which is, “My heart’s racing. Yeah, I’m up here on stage. It’s supposed to be racing. It’s racing. It’s okay, I’m going to play well.” That’s it. And that’s the correct interpretation.

Christopher: Terrific.

Dr. Greene: There’s what’s called “task irrelevant cues”. Task irrelevant. In other words, certain other things that happen under pressure can affect your playing, and they are relevant, and that’s muscle tension. Others are totally task irrelevant unless you make them relevant. This is where the interpretation comes in. So if you interpret the racing heart as a bad thing, “Oh my god, I’m not going to play well,” you’ll go south, you’ll prove that. Or you can just pay attention to task relevant, relax your muscles, and the rest of them are task irrelevant. Your perspiration, your hand shaking, dry mouth, butterflies in your stomach, shaky knees, feeling unstable. Irrelevant, doesn’t matter, unless you make it matter.

Christopher: Fascinating. Well, I want to talk a bit later on about your centering technique, or rather, the centering technique that you recommend, which I think factors in some of that physical relaxation. But let’s talk a little bit more, if we may, about the mental side. You made a distinction in your book about left brain versus right brain in this content that I hadn’t come across before. Can you explain a little bit about that?

Dr. Greene: Sure. We have two hemispheres of our cerebral cortex or our thinking mind, most advanced form of our brain. Left brain thinks in terms of words and numbers, analysis, thinking, self-talk, criticism, instructions, counter instructions, blaming, criticizing. This is the domain of mathematicians, attorneys, a lot of business folks. The right brain is where we perceive in images or pictures, sensations like bowing or embouchure, and sounds, like music. So this is the territory of musicians, creative artists, painters. No words, no analysis, creativity. So there’s a constant interplay between them.

Dr. Greene: But for musicians, here’s the thing. In order to learn musical skills, you’ve got to do it left brain. It’s got to be a portion. Somebody’s got to explain in words to how you to form embouchure or how to do correct bowing. It needs to be explained. And it’s preliminary learning. And you can also accompany that with right brain learning, which is watching the teacher, listening, asking what it what it feels like. But it’s more left brain at first, and then it shifts more to right brain as the learning increases. So for accomplished musicians, it’s mostly right brain. They don’t need the instructions anymore, it gets in the way. They don’t need the criticism, that gets in the way. What they need to do before they play is shift to right brain. Namely, hear the music, play the music. Or hear the music and watch your good bowing, or feel your fingering. No words. Words are what causes distractions.

Dr. Greene: And if you practice 10,000 hours so you have the right to start out in right brain. Hear the music, play the music. Not hear the music, think about how you need to play the music, and then play the music. That’s what screws it up. And this is the switch from amateur to professional. You don’t need to intermediate thought, that’s what the 10,000 hours of practice is about so you get the right to hear it and play it.

Dr. Greene: What centering is about, it’s a seven step process. It’s pretty involved. But what it’s about is getting people out of their left brain into their right before they play the first note.

Christopher: Gotcha. And maybe that addresses what I was about to ask which is that process of going from left brain to right brain and going from analytically learning and thinking to just being able to play, is that something that only happens on that 10,000 hour time scale across an artist’s career? Or is that something that happens-

Dr. Greene: I’m sorry, you can do that earlier on, and you need to after the preliminary learning is done.

Dr. Greene: So with easier pieces, once you master a piece, you can start applying this.

Christopher: And maybe we could give people a glimpse into that centering process and what’s going on to help them shift from left brain to right brain.

Dr. Greene: Yeah. It’s a very complicated seven step process. It takes about two weeks to learn. It comes from the martial art Aikido for focus and Western sport psychology. I have a course on my website, winningonstage.com, on the centering course for people to take a week or two or three to learn how to center properly. I could walk you through the seven steps right now, but ti would be like asking you to walk me through music theory. I understand a little bit. I understand one, three, five, and CEG, and the seventh and major seventh or a flat seventh. But beyond that, I don’t understand. But if you could explain solfege to me, go for it.

Christopher: Of course. Well, in that case, maybe we could talk instead about the before and after. So what would people typically be experiencing before a performance, and what might they experience otherwise if they had done the centering technique?

Dr. Greene: Well, before, if they’re not used to the adrenaline or if they fight the adrenaline, they don’t have a coping mechanism or a strategy, likelihood is that before they go on they’re going to get a shot of adrenaline. They can be relaxed before or think, “Yeah, relax, take it easy.” But most of the time it’s going to kick in. Not all the time, that’s the catch. Especially if exhaustion, you stayed up for a few nights, or you got a lot of other things going on. But even then I found with musicians that they started, and like 30 seconds into the piece it’s like, “Boom, there it is. Oh my gosh. I thought I was fine.”

Dr. Greene: So before an audition or a big performance and any pressure situation, it’s probably going to kick in. And once it kicks in, this whole sequence of things happen, a lot at the same time. Physically I’ve talked about it. The increase in heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension. But that’s only the physical part. You got two other parts, which is the mental and the emotional. The mental is people tend to get slammed into their left brain. They’re now trying to figure out how to get their heart rate down, and they’re not going to figure that out before they go on. People tend to get very negative, doubtful, self-critical, and imagine the worst. This will increase muscle tension. And the more you think about the worst, the more likely you’ll cause the worst. People go into blaming, find fault. They should have found a better teacher maybe. Very critical. And they get into avoidance thinking like, “I don’t want to be here. Get me out of here. Fight or flight. Run for your lives.”

Dr. Greene: And it goes into beta processing. It goes into high speed left brain, very high speed. Now there’s a committee meeting taking place in your head. And they’re starting to yell at each other. The faster it goes, the more you’re distracted. The faster it goes, the more you’re in your head, the less you can feel the instrument, the less you’re in right brain. So you can’t hear the music, you’re not feeling your body the right way, and you’re having trouble finding notes on the page. This can destroy a performance. But that’s just the mental.

Dr. Greene: Then we have the emotional, which is fear, anxiety, terror, which will continue to increase the heart rate and increase the muscle tension. So when all three of these things, the physical, mental, and emotional happen to a musician, it will definitely affect their sound. Like on the first phrase. They will hear that sound and it won’t be good. And then they’re going to shift into left brain and how to figure this out, because it doesn’t sound good. And that’s the beginning of the train wreck.

Christopher: And I really enjoyed your artist’s performance survey in the book, which is kind of a self-assessment with a lot of statements that you can rate yourself on how much you would agree with that on different situations, from the practicing privately right through to the performance. And just to give our listeners an idea, we’re talking about things like, “I have a strong will to succeed,” or, “I want to gain other’s recognition of my talent,” or, “I don’t focus very well.” And by going through this self-assessment you get a really vivid picture, I think, of, I don’t want to say your strengths and weaknesses, but your current situation when it comes to performing. And Dr. Greene, you break that down into seven different areas. I wonder if we could just briefly talk those through to give people an idea of not how complex, but how rich this topic is for them to explore and potentially improve in.

Dr. Greene: Okay. I wrote that assessment when I wrote the book, which is more than 20 years ago. And I’ve refined the assessment, refined my ideas. So I’ve got it from seven to five. I’ve got my website called the performance mastery assessment. It’s updated based upon my learning over the last 20 years working with musicians. So the performance mastery assessment is on my website. And you take it and immediately get it back. But you also, if you want, get a half our session with me to explain what it means and what to do about it. So I would encourage people to take the performance mastery assessment.

Dr. Greene: But here are the five categories on that. The first one is energy regulation, and this has to do with controlling and channeling that energy, because I’m going with the assumption it’s going to be high. I rarely get any clients coming to me saying, “My energy’s just too low. I’m falling asleep at auditions.” It doesn’t happen. So it’s about channeling that adrenaline that we’re talking about and using it with the right interpretation. You’re like, “Yeah, I can play better with the adrenaline than I can calm in practice.” And that’s the key switch. That’s where you want to get to, better under pressure than when you’re relaxed. Because you’re not supposed to be relaxed, other than your body. So that’s the energy regulation, and that is tied to centering, because the centering will help control that energy and channel it. That’s what it does.

Dr. Greene: The second one has to do with mindset or confidence. Because people generally don’t play better than they have confidence in their playing. But confidence comes from three things. Self-confidence or self-belief comes from physical action, of doing the right things. This is where you practice, play for your teacher, set up concerts. You got to put in the time. The thing I love about sports and music is you can’t fake it. You got to put in the time. Yeah. So do the right thing.

Dr. Greene: Number two has to do with the left brain and self-talk. Are you talking to yourself in a positive way or negative? Either one is going to affect your confidence. You talk to yourself in a positive reinforcing way, it’s going to go up. You find fault with yourself, a lot of self-criticism, a lot of blaming, it’s going to go down. It’s as simple as that. Because most people are talking to themselves all the time, and most of them are believing everything they say to themselves, whether it’s right or wrong. So this programming goes into our subconscious mind, and it definitely affects your confidence level.

Dr. Greene: And the third is more right brain programming, which is what you’re imagining. Are you imagining it going well or imagining making mistakes? That will also affect your confidence. If you constantly go over and over the mistakes, you’ll cause those mistakes. Your confidence will drop, you’ll focus on it, and then you’ll manifest those mistakes. So the whole idea is because our confidence level is constantly moving, it’s never static. It’s going up or down based on your last practice, your last lesson. It’s always moving. The idea is to continually move it up by doing the right things, by developing positive self-talk, or mental quiet, even better. And by doing mental rehearsal of imagining it going well, imagining seeing yourself, hearing yourself, feeling yourself playing the piece that you’re struggling with. Rather than focus on it not going well, just imagine it going well. And even if you can’t play it yet, you can imagine, you got a great creative power to imagine … I can imagine myself playing the Brahms. I can’t, but I can imagine it. I’m very in my mind. I can play every instrument in the orchestra.

Dr. Greene: It’s very important that you reinforce the physical learning with mental rehearsal. Because any time you practice, even professionals, you can practice for any amount of time, you’re going to make mistakes. And those mistakes will register in your self-confidence. You’ll remember the mistakes. Christopher, I think you can imagine, remember a mistake you made in a performance two years ago.

Christopher: 2 years ago!

Dr. Greene: So that’s not the concept. The concept is to imagine things going well, and it will raise your confidence.

Christopher: And before we move on to the other areas, I wonder if we could just talk a little more about that one, because you had a fantastic story in the book. And I forget whether it was in Performance Success or College Prep For Musicians, but you were talking about an Olympic aspiring diver who, due to injury, could only practice mentally for a period leading up to a competition. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Greene: Oh sure. This was before the 1984 Olympic trials in platform diving. Platform diving is 10 meters. It’s three times higher than the high board at the swimming pool. It’s 33 feet up and 100 feet down. You’re going at the water at 35 miles an hour. It’s violent. I used to be a platform diver. When you try to hit the water you try to lock out your arms as hard as you can, and it’s an explosion. You can’t hold on to your hands. When I used to dive platform, it took me about 10 dives before I got a severe headache from pounding my head underwater.

Dr. Greene: So we were getting for the Olympic trials. There’s about two months before the Olympic trials, and we had the best team in the country. We had an Olympic champion, a world champion. We had seven women, two of which were likely to make it, four of which could. But this young 16-year-old didn’t have a chance. She was getting ready just for the experience. She was 16. She was very naïve, and we had a 23-year-old world champion on our team.

Dr. Greene: Anyway, so we’re at practice one day, and she’s on 10 meter, and she’s doing a back two and a half in pike. Back two and a half is where you turn around backwards on the platform, you get ready, and then you somersault backwards in pike, not in tuck, in pike, which is slower rotation. And you have to go aggressively off the platform to make the rotations. It’s two and a half somersaults. And instead of jumping real fast, she just kind of sat back into the somersault. And oh my god, the coach and I were sitting there. We just cringed because there’s no way. It’s a disaster about to happen.

Dr. Greene: So a lot of experienced divers would know that they’re way late and slow, and just curl up into the ball and hope for the best with minimal damage. But she was inexperienced and she stuck with her spots, where you’re supposed to see, and see, and then kick out. Well, normally she would kick out at three meters and have time to bring the somersault in. But she kicked out at one meter, and she just absolutely flat on her back. So much so that she bounced off the water. The water is hard. So that’s why they have stretchers next to the pool. Put the stretcher under her and pull her out of the water, convinced that her back was broken. Had to be.

Dr. Greene: Took her to the orthopedic surgeon, did the X-rays. And he came out and said, “Young lady, I don’t know why your back isn’t broken, but it’s not. But you’re going to be really sore, black and blue, for the next month.” And like any young Olympic hopeful, at 16 she said, “Yes, but can I dive at the trials?” Oh my god. You’re lucky to be standing up. He said, “Well, maybe, but you can’t practice for two months.”

Dr. Greene: So for two months she and I went to the coach’s office, and I laid her down and basically took her through a mental rehearsal. Not just that dive, but everything. Her warm ups, stretching, everything the other divers were doing for two months. So we went to Indianapolis for the trials. We got there two weeks early. She said, “Can I get used to the pool and dive?” And he said, “No.” So for two weeks we were in the trainer’s room. Same thing, we would walk up on the platform and check out the spots in the water and all, but no diving. Came to the trials, she said, “Can I do at least eight warm up dives?” He said, “No.”

Dr. Greene: So, platform diving is insane in the first place. It’s crazy to throw your body off there. And every day away from it it gets crazy. You’re convinced that it was stupid in the first place. Every day it gets worse and the fear builds. But, every other diver that was there had been missing dives and hitting dives for two months. Pam hadn’t missed a dive in two months. Every time she did it was great.

Dr. Greene: So the trials started, and she hit her first dive. And people went nuts because everybody knew the story. And it’s a small community. And she hits her second dive. The surgeon checks her out, she’s okay. The third dive. After the fifth dive she’s leading the competition. It’s the story of the games coming. This 16-year-old who hasn’t been on the platform in two months is beating the world champion, an Olympic champion, and two national champions. She hits her sixth dive. And only do eight dives. Seventh dive, the mondo, the surface of the platform gets wet after that many dives. And she slipped on it. Not her tough dive, but she went in at just enough of an angle that the surgeon looked at her and he said, “You’re out.” It blew my mind, because I was with her for two months. And I think she would have hit that back two and a half. She would have gone to the Olympics. It would have been the story. She wouldn’t have done well at the Olympics, I don’t think. She would have been on the team. And that’s the power of mental rehearsal.

Dr. Greene: And that’s why competent musicians need to spend less time physically practicing and spend some time mentally practicing by going through it, getting it correct so it builds your confidence. Not focus on the mistakes. Or playing mistakes which knock your confidence down.

Christopher: Incredible. Well, I think when I first came across the idea of mental practice, it seemed too good to be true. And when I heard people talk about rehearsing in your mind before the big performance, it just seemed like a kind of stress buster and nothing that would really have an impact. But when you talk in your book about in the College Prep for Musicians book, you split out mental practice and mental performance. And I wonder if we could just hammer that home for the audience. What’s the difference between those two, and how does each help you?

Dr. Greene: Well, like we were saying before about practicing practice or practicing performing, you should do mental practice for practice. In other words, going through it to make sure that you get all the pieces in your head right in a practice room, or working on things in a practice room to get better. But then you need to imagine yourself walking on stage nailing it, going to an audition nailing it. All the different things, what I call contingency planning. In other words, if they say, “No, don’t start with that, start with this solo,” well, what if the conductor asked you to do … Whatever, because things happen. It’s chaos. And rather than being caught off guard, this is the time to practice contingencies of anything that could possibly happen. Like in an audition, like having to wait half an hour to play. Or you get there and they say, “You’re on next.” Or, “Don’t start with the solo, start with the Mozart.” Okay. You need to go through every kind of contingency that could happen so it’s not a surprise and you’ve already worked it out. And this is easy to do just sitting at home going through this.

Christopher: Fantastic. I so enjoyed reading your work, specifically applied to that case of a high school musician preparing themselves for college auditions, because in a sense it’s the epitome of nerves and emotional insecurities and high stakes from the musician’s perspective. And you equip them not just with centering and that mental practice and mental rehearsal that we’ve talked about so far, but there a few other tools I wonder if we could share just briefly to give people and idea. One is the idea of a mental boundary to protect yourself from the judges or the chairs in the room.

Dr. Greene: Yeah. I believe that it’s a hostile environment, like people are shooting at you. Shooting nasty looks or asking to play ridiculous things. It’s a war zone. So what I believe is you put on armor around you. You put up a shield, a protective boundary to protect you from people’s thoughts or nasty looks and all. So things just bounce off of you, and you’re protected within this. And it can be a cone, an egg, a force field. One my horn players has tigers or lions facing out. The woman from the Met had a ring of fire. And the whole idea is that you have some sense of security within this boundary, and also to keep your focus in.

Dr. Greene: That’s the other part of it, because it’s easy to look out at the audience or the audition panel and get pulled out of your boundary. And this is to keep your focus in, because it’s all about what you do within your boundary and let your sound go out. Because you can’t control it after it goes out or whether people are going to like it. Maybe they don’t like your sound, maybe they don’t like your instrument. It doesn’t matter. You have to take care of what you do within your boundary and focus in there. That’s why I’m a big fan of it.

Christopher: Absolutely. And I think it’s one of those ideas where you hear it and it’s like, “Oh yeah, that will work. I will try that.” One of the others that jumped out at me was, I think, borrowed from the world of sports, which is the idea of a pre shot routine. Could you give the listeners an idea of how that works?

Dr. Greene: Oh sure, yeah. The last five or seven minutes before a big event, an audition or recital, in the last five minutes you can’t win it, but you can lose it. You can take yourself right out there. And by not having routine, a set or sequence of events that you do to get yourself ready, physically relaxed, mentally engaged in your right brain ready to play and handle what comes at you. So if it’s haphazard, you’re just going to be in left brain trying to figure things out, which is not going to happen. You won’t pay attention to your body. All the wrong things.

Dr. Greene: So a routine that you practice at home when you’re practicing practice and practicing performing, that you go through a sequence. And whether that’s focused on your breathing, doing a mental rehearsal, warming up your body, your embouchure, seeing it go well, all the things leading up to the first note. And it needs to do that because the first note or phrase is really critical. Because all the pressure leads up to the first note or phrase. And you can’t play it till you play it. And there’s no guarantees that it’s going to come out right. Nobody can guarantee. It’s always got an unknown factor in there, so the fear kicks in.

Dr. Greene: So you want to practice coming out of the silence, of breaking the silence. And again, when you’re practicing performing, I believe on working a lot on starts. If you’ve got 10 pieces in your repertoire, just practice the first two bars of every piece over and over. And then switching it from this piece, the first two bars, and first two bars, first two bars. Because my experience with musicians is if you get off to a get start, you can probably play the rest of the piece well. However, all the pressure builds up before the first note. It’s all right on that note. And if that doesn’t come out well, you’ve got the rest of the piece to think about it. So I’m a big fan of first notes, first notes.

Dr. Greene: So the last piece I do is called simulation training. And this is when you’re practicing performing, when you’ve got the piece or pieces up to speed, what you do is you turn a tape recorder on in a room and set up the room with your instrument and music, leave the room, get your heart rate up higher than it would be under the most pressure you’ve ever felt. And then start developing your routine. Maybe slow breathing, or shaking out your body, or hearing the music. Go into the room. The recorder’s already on. Pick up the instrument, take a deep breath, and go for it.

Dr. Greene: At first, play with reckless abandon. Just let it fly. Because it’s not going to be good. It’s just not going to be good for at least six or seven times. Don’t listen to the recording, it will sound like crap. But after you get used to starting with this extra energy, focused, you can watch your progression through those seven tapings. This is simulation training. This is how you get used to practicing performing with the assumption that you’re going to be nervous. You’re supposed to be nervous. People are watching you and listening to you. You’re the only one playing. You’re supposed to be good and there’s no guarantee it’s going to be perfect. That makes people nervous, or as I say, excited.

Dr. Greene: So if you can see that you can play better with this energy under control, then can when you’re, quote, relaxed. Then you become a fan of what I’m saying, that you can play better with the energy and adrenaline than you can when you’re relaxed. And when you hear that, it will make you a convert.

Christopher: And that little routine right before you dive into it, how important is it what goes into that routine versus just the mere fact of having a set routine that you’re going to do each time?

Dr. Greene: When I work with professional golfers, I spend the vast majority of time working on their pre shot routine. Their putting routine, their short game routine, and their driving routine. I don’t go on the course with them, I just, on the range, “Let’s get your routine down.” And they’ll go out and use the routine. So I spend a lot of time. It needs to be individualized, and that’s where some of the things from the assessments come in. Depending upon your scores, you should do that.

Dr. Greene: By the way, speaking about the assessments, we’re only up to number two, of confidence. The third one is courage. Fear, anxiety. And building courage, because that’s the solution to anxiety and fear is you build courage. And musicians have the ability to build courage. Opportunity every day in a practice room by going at something, or on a lesson, or on stage and set up a recital or a performance, and get used to performing. If you’re a performer, you need to perform and put yourself under increasing pressure until you see that the pressure is your friend. Your friend that can make you play better, sound better, with more focus.

Dr. Greene: Number four is focus. The ability to be in right brain, mental quiet, focused on a task at hand until it’s done. Otherwise, you cause mistakes. And the fifth one is resilience. The ability to hang tough, to be mentally tough. To persevere, to continue when they’re shooting at you, until it’s done. And this is something you build. Like courage, you build this. So, what you do in your daily life, and you practice. So those are the five parts of the performance mastery assessment. I found they’re more up to date, more helpful, more practical than the old.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, I want to be respectful of your time today, Dr. Greene. And I said to you by email we couldn’t hope to cover all of your work in a short interview, But I hope we’ve given people a taste. And if I’m not wrong, winningonstage.com is the place to go for more information about your books and your courses. Maybe you could share a little bit about the courses that we haven’t talked much about so far.

Dr. Greene: Well, winningonstage.com has the centering course, the performance mastery assessment, and the half hour one on one session with me. The centering course, which is a two month self-study course. We have more coming, like on power learning, but they’re not up yet. But those are the two I’d recommend.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading your books and taking on some of these ideas for my own music ideas and practice. And I’m sure our listeners will have got a lot from this conversation. Thank you so much, Dr. Greene.

Dr. Greene: Very welcome. It was a pleasure. All the best.

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The post The Keys to Performance Success, with Dr. Don Greene (Winning On Stage) appeared first on Musical U.

The mission of Me2/Orchestra is to erase the stigma surrounding mental illness, including addiction, through supportive classical music ensembles and inspiring performances.

As a society we are only just beginning to figure out how to talk sensibly and openly about mental illness. In this interview we wanted to be respectful and tactful while also addressing head-on some of the stigma that Me2/Orchestra is trying to mitigate, such as the assumptions people have about how an orchestra of people with mental illness can actually function.

We talk about:

• Caroline’s own story of music and mental health and how it led to her meeting the co-founder of Me2/, Ronald Braunstein.
• How after studying with the likes of Karajan and Bernstein, Ronald was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and encountered the stigma and discrimination which ultimately inspired the Me2/ project.
• And the specific ways Me2/ benefits its players and enlightens audiences – not in any kind of preachy way but simply by virtue of its existence and musical excellence.

One thing to clarify before we dive in – you might associate the phrase “Me Too” with the recent #MeToo movement about sexual assault but Me2/Orchestra was founded in 2011 and there’s no connection between the two. The name came from Ronald’s experience sharing his mental health diagnosis with other musicians and being surprised to hear them say “me too”.

Mental health is something we should talk more openly and honestly about. We are glad to have the opportunity to showcase this wonderful project. Whether this topic is of interest to you or not, there is a ton of insight packed into this conversation and we can all learn a lot from how Me2/ approaches running an orchestra.

Watch the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• • Me2/Orchestra Online
  • Orchestrating Change – Documentary Film about Me2/Orchestra
  • NY Times Article – Fighting the Stigma of Mental Illness Through Music
  • Al Jazeera news report on Me2/Orchestra

Transcript

Caroline: Hi, this is Caroline Whiddon from Me2/Orchestra and this is musicality now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Caroline, thank you for joining us today.

Caroline: Oh, it’s my pleasure.

Christopher: So I have been really admiring your project, Me2/Orchestra from afar and I’m excited to have the chance to actually talk to you live about it. But before we dig into that, I’d love to understand a bit about your own musical backstory and where you came from as a musician.

Caroline: Sure. I grew up in a very musical family. My parents were professional musicians. They both are actually graduates of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. And some of my earliest memories come from hearing them recitalize as a really young girl. That was when I realized that music was going to be a part of my life forever. I would watch them perform and just felt so moved by it. And even though it would be several years before I would end up taking up my own instrument, which is French horn, I think it was those early years of just being exposed to music that really lit a fire in me.

Christopher: Terrific. And what was that process of learning French horn like for you, was it something you took to like conductor water? Was it a struggle? Was it the kind of classic childhood story of fighting with the parents over practice? What did it look like?

Caroline: I think it was sadly me deciding to play the French horn was kind of my rebellious stage as a youngster because my father was a pianist. My mother was a violinist. And so me deciding to be brass player was, no, that was my rebellious stage. Didn’t get much to work for me. It’s tough. I mean, I remember early on in middle school, sitting in my band director’s office after school and him working so hard with me struggling to play C in the staff and it was just so, so hard to do. But it was also so much fun. I had played piano for many years before that and it’s such a wonderful, but a very solitary practice to play piano. And so for me to be introduced to the joy of band playing and be on the horn and the band was really, it was very cool.

Christopher: Fantastic. And you went on to study music primarily after high school, is that right?

Caroline: I did. I ended up also going to the Eastman School of Music and receiving my bachelor’s degree in performance there. And I had such a tremendous experience at that school. I mean the opportunity to play with other great, great musicians, to tour internationally, to work with incredible staff, incredible faculty and staff there was really life changing. And then I had planned to go on actually and get my grad degree in performance but that was about the time that I was experiencing a lot of changes personally and would go on to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety. And I was actually having pretty serious panic attacks at that point. So it didn’t position me well to be a performing musician. I had to kind of rethink that plan. And at that point, my focus moved over to orchestral administration.

Caroline: I got a job working part time at my local symphony down in Columbus, Georgia and I was doing music library work and a little bit of marketing and communications and education work. And I absolutely fell in love with it. And so for the next 20 some odd years, that’s where my focus would be and where it continues to be really.

Christopher: I see. And I am curious to dig in a little more just because I think it’s pertinent to our overall conversation, but if we could go back to that stage where you made that change from, I’m a professional French horn player to moving into the more administrative side. You’ve made a comment to me in advance with the interview about French horn being a particularly challenging instrument or having a reputation. Could you talk a little bit about that? What was it about the life that maybe factored into you struggling on the mental health side?

Caroline: Oh gosh. I mean I think I was probably predisposed to some degree of anxiety and depression regardless of what instrument I played. My mother also during her lifetime suffered with symptoms of depression and anxiety. So I think to some degree that’s where I was headed regardless. But it is kind of funny to me that I chose to play what is such a difficult instrument. And particularly an instrument where you need to be able to breathe and anyone who’s struggled with any level of even just performance anxiety knows that you tend to sort of close yourself off and not take deep breaths. So here I was playing this beautiful brass instrument that’s such a beast to try to play and hit all the right notes and there’s so much pressure on you, it’s so exposed. And yet I was kind of closing in on myself because of the anxiety and the panic disorders.

Caroline: So the two really didn’t mix that well at the time and it just got to a point where I didn’t enjoy playing. So for me, when I made that decision to make a break from performing and teaching to go purely administrative within the orchestral world it actually, I remember I sold my horn to one of my students at that time and I had about a day full of tears. And then I never looked back for 18 years after that. I just loved being one of the people behind the scenes making the music possible.

Christopher: That’s tremendous that you were able to make that shift in such a positive way because I was about to ask a follow up question which was, how did you cope with making that choice? Because part of why I was drawn to your project is the fact that you were working to remove a lot of the stigma and misunderstandings around mental health and mental illness. And I know that a lot of what we’ve talked about on the show before in terms of the emotions and psychology of performing and learning music to a high level, becoming a professional musician, a lot of those issues can be so wrapped up with people’s identity and their sense of self and their sense of self-worth. I would have imagined making a major shift like that would’ve been really hard as a life transition, but it sounds like you moved on to something even better in a sense that you managed to put an entirely positive framing on it.

Caroline: I do feel like I found my place, the right place for me in the performing world. And I still very much love, the stuff that so many people are frightened of. The marketing, the fundraising, the production aspects, I really thrive on that part of it. And then it was just very interesting to me the way playing the horn kind of introduced itself back into my life after a very extended break because of my work with Me2. And with this very unique setting of making music with this social mission goal to erase the stigma around mental illness. I didn’t see that coming for myself. I never got back into this, into playing because I thought, well, I’m going to create an orchestra where even I will feel comfortable playing. It just happened.

Christopher: So tell us that story a little bit. Why did Me2 come into the picture?

Caroline: Me2/Orchestra came about because I met Ronald Braunstein, a brilliant conductor, a wonderful man who is living with bipolar disorder. And in the interest of full disclosure, he is now my husband. So yes, I am very biased. He is absolutely brilliant whether I am his wife or not. He’s a great musician. And Ronald had reached a point in his career where he was no longer employed and in fact was worried because of the discrimination that he had experienced. Discrimination and just really misunderstanding that he had experienced in the professional world. He was worried he’d never get back on the podium again. And it was clear to me that was the most important thing to him. So he came to me with the idea that in order for him to keep practicing music, he wanted to launch an orchestra of people like him.

Caroline: And in fact, his first statement was, “Caroline I have a great idea. We should start an orchestra for people with bipolar disorder.” And I said, “Well, you know we’re in Vermont and there’s probably more cows than there are people living with this specific bipolar diagnosis. So let’s talk about this idea. Let’s kind of massage it a little bit and see where it goes.” And what it came down to was that he wanted to be at a stigma free environment. He wanted to be in a supportive rehearsal area. And that meant that he wanted to bring in people who are also living with various challenges, especially mental health issues. And the more we talked about it, it was very important to both of us knowing Ronald’s history of workplace discrimination.

Caroline: We wanted to bring people with and without a diagnosis together to really show the world that it is entirely possible to work professionally right next, literally side by side with people who have bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, addiction, schizophrenia. And so that was the dream. Could we create a group of people who would work side by side and then utilize our performances to erase the stigma, to actually share our stories and change people’s minds about maybe what they thought it meant to live with a mental health challenge.

Christopher: I see. And I heard Ronald say something really interesting in an interview which was in the early years, maybe around the time he was first diagnosed. It maybe wasn’t obvious to people that he had a disorder of any kind because we have this image, this kind of romantic image of the Maestro conductor who has these intense mood swings and ups and downs. And I think part of what you were saying there about the workplace discrimination, part of the challenge I think is that we don’t always know where to draw the line and when is something a disorder and when is it part of normal kind of workplace stresses or mood swings. And I think probably a lot of people in our audience would be confused on that point. And I’d be really interested to know what your perspective is on that. Like how anxious should we be about whether someone has the label or doesn’t have the label?

Caroline: Yeah. I think you have to just pay really close attention to what a behavior is. Of course I didn’t know Ronald back in the earlier days of his career when he was very misunderstood. He was studying with Carianne, he was studying with Bernstein, with Seiji Ozawa and these, with people who are larger than life. And I think when you’re kind of in that place, in that zone, especially as a conductor, you can be somewhat flamboyant or even egotistical and larger than life, and people just say, “Oh, he’s just being a stereotypical Maestro type.” But for Ronald, there were times when he would just do things in rehearsal that were very odd. Rehearsing the same measure over and over and over again for like an interminable amount of time. And, the orchestra manager would come to him and say, “You’re not well. We can’t bring you back.”

Caroline: So there were people who were able to kind of pick apart what was maybe the stereotypical kind of Maestro behavior and what was really an indication of an illness. But back then people were not comfortable talking about it. So he has stories of people saying, “You’re not well, I think you’re sick.” And he was very confused by that because he would say, “Well, I feel fine. I don’t have a cold. What do you mean I need to go see a doctor?” And they wouldn’t take it from, you need to go see a doctor to I think you need to see a psychiatrist. And there were certain places you didn’t go in that time in terms of the language and in terms of just what you suggested to people. So he definitely had a big personality I think when he was manic and sometimes that was self-destructive in a professional sense in there.

Caroline: Ronald somehow has been very lucky in his career not to have ever really endangered himself in any way. I mean, you do hear some stories of people with unchecked mania that can take on some very risky behavior and Ronald’s actually never been hospitalized and he’s been able to sort of keep things within a certain reign of safety. It’s been better, the last probably 10 years I’d say. I feel like society is turning a little bit and people are becoming more comfortable with addressing what they think might be beyond just a little bit odd behavior, but to something that is actually an illness. And yet I was with Ronald when he was dismissed from a position 10 years ago and he ended up pursuing a lawsuit against our former employer because it was really clear that there was discriminatory practice happening. It’s hard to be too positive about the changes in society because discriminization and stigma it’s still real.

Christopher: Absolutely. And I really, I applaud the work you’re doing on that front to remove some of the stigma because there’s so much misconception and misunderstanding. A moment ago you threw out a bunch of diagnoses that people who joined Me2/Orchestra might have. And I think any one of those, our listeners and audience would have kind of mental image of what that means and like the extreme case of the behavior or how manageable or unmanageable it might be to work with someone who has that label. And I think it’s really valuable. Thank you for sharing a bit of that kind of backstory and behind the scenes of what it looked like for Ronald to have bipolar disorder and to have it in an industry where to some extent that behavior is tolerated or expected.

Christopher: But at some point, obviously it was helpful because I’m going to step in and question whether it was a healthy way for him to continue. I feel like we jumped a bit of this story from when you first met Ronald to this project coming about, how did your relationship with him develop and did you learn from him along the way? You’ve talked about how wonderful he is as a conductor and a musician and I’d be curious to know how things developed.

Caroline: I remember the very first time I sat and listened to him in rehearsal with a group. It was with a youth orchestra and there were about a hundred kids, mostly very advanced high school musicians on the stage. And I was immediately struck, they rehearsed a few measures and then he stopped and he got off the podium which first of all was … I mean that was just kind of different. You don’t see the conductor leave the podium that often. But he really got down into the front group of strings and got them listening to each other and got them playing. He said, “This is chamber music. I don’t care if you’re looking at me, look at each other. Look across the orchestra at each other. You’ve got to connect with them. You got to connect with her.” And I’ve never seen anyone on the podium do that.

Caroline: And then he just left and he said, “You’re on your own. You’ve got to communicate because no matter what I’m doing, if you’re not communicating with each other, we’re not going to make great music.” And the change in the sound of that orchestra over the course of 10 minutes was huge. And so right from the beginning, I feel like I’ve been watching him and getting this huge lesson on tackling orchestral music as if it is chamber music. And there’s just something about the way you listen across an orchestra. I think it’s very easy for so many of us if we’re one of 80 or 100 players to feel like we’re just one of a huger number of players and to sort of forget that we’re part of this huge moving living music-making organism and that it really does have to be kind of like a string quartet or a wind octet, and to really be paying attention and listening to the people around us as they breathe. And Ronald just has a beautiful way of bringing that out in people.

Christopher: Fascinating. And was that a contributor to you picking up the horn again, or did that come naturally out of starting Me2/Orchestra or?

Caroline: It didn’t occur to me that I would start playing the horn again until we were, I believe probably in the second season of Me2 in Burlington, Vermont, and I was listening to rehearsal one night and there were a couple of horn players in the room. And suddenly I just found myself thinking, I think I could help them a little bit. Which was pretty gutsy since I hadn’t even picked up a horn. I hadn’t owned a horn in 18 years at that point, but it was the first time that I had even contemplated wanting to play again. And I give Ronald that credit. I mean, he really, he created this atmosphere, this orchestra of complete support. So if you miss a note, if you kept something here or just forget to come in, it’s okay. And I thought, okay, now that’s an atmosphere I could make music in again.

Caroline: And besides that, he just really ignited my love of music again. It had kind of been muted in some way for many years. And yet as soon as I started listening to him rehearse, I found myself wanting to go out and buy scores for everything that he was rehearsing so I could just sit in the room and hear what he was doing and learn from it. And I hadn’t experienced that kind of hunger for music education in so many years, but he lit this dormant thing inside me. And so yeah, we got on eBay one night after this rehearsal where I kind of had this epiphany that I might want to play again and found a con 60 really beaten up listed for a couple of a hundred bucks. I mean, it looked like it had been rolled over by a truck and then they backed over and rolled over it again. And I said, “That’s my horn.” So I got it. I got a little duct tape on a little place where it probably should have a little bit of work done on it. But it’s so much fun to be playing again. And I just, I didn’t see it coming. But Me2 gave me that gift again.

Christopher: Awesome. And you commented on something there that’s distinctive about Me2/Orchestra which is the atmosphere and the attitude of the musicians and Ronald himself. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the starting of the orchestra. I mean, obviously now it’s a very established project with multiple orchestras and it’s growing and growing. But if we go back to the early days, you and Ronald had this idea together or he had the idea and you jumped on board immediately, what did it look like to start that orchestra?

Caroline: We had very meager beginnings. I think there were probably between eight and 10 musicians at our first rehearsal and it didn’t grow a lot after that for several months. And it really, what we found is that it takes two or three years to have one of these orchestral programs really start to gain momentum. So it’s small in the beginning and for Ronald that was a challenge just in terms of finding music that would make sense for kind of a hodgepodge of different instruments and people of different ability levels. We were-

Christopher: Sorry, forgive the interruption. I wonder, is it a stupid question to ask, but how do you advertise for an orchestra where the defining trait is it’s accessible for people with mental illness? Do you just go out and brazenly say, look, this is what we’re doing. Come along.

Caroline: You just say it. Yeah. I mean we literally in the beginning wrote press releases and did press interviews that said, we’re starting an orchestra for people with and without mental illness and nobody has to tell us what they may or may not be living with. They’re welcome to. But we want everyone to know it’s a safe and stigma free zone. There will be no auditions, there are no fees. We want to remove all the barriers to participation. And then we kind of held our breath and waited to see what that would turn into, who would be interested. And it was so interesting to me from the very beginning that people would write me emails and say, hi, my name is such and such and I’m interested in joining the orchestra. Then they would tell me their diagnosis and in some cases would write like a complete medical history.

Caroline: And I thought, wow, I think there are so many people living with mental illness who are so hungry to be able to be open and talk about it. So when you say you’re in a safe place often you get an awful lot of information, which is really helpful. It lets us know, I mean, honestly it plays into where they’re seated and what kind of stand partner they might have because we want everybody to have the most supportive and warm and comforting experience they can have. So having as much information upfront is great. But then we’ve also had people join who, last year we had a violinist who came to several rehearsals, and I never knew her last name. Never knew a thing about her and it was kind of a fun mystery for me, but she would just come and sit in the back of the second violin section.

Caroline: She seemed to enjoy the rehearsals and then she would always get up and leave about five minutes before the rehearsal ended. So it was very clear she wasn’t looking to be quizzed or really to even make connections. She just needed to be, she needed a place to go once a week and be in a group setting but she wasn’t ready to connect with us on a personal level. And one of the things we’ve learned is to just kind of accept people where they are and so that was fine. We’ve had another violinist who played with us, played rehearsals for probably two years and never played one of the performances because they felt like that they weren’t ready for that. That was too nerve racking. And we said, “Great, you’re rehearsals only, that’s fine.” So it’s a very different expectation that we have of our musicians.

Christopher: Sorry, I interrupted you there. Please do continue. So you got started in your first season and musicians started to find you. You said it seemed to take a couple of years before the word really spread and people knew to come along.

Caroline: Yeah. And I think it’s been very interesting. Probably our most successful recruitment tool is word of mouth. It’s people coming in, they love working with Ronald. They form such great partnerships and friendships within the orchestra. And I think largely for the people who join us who don’t have a diagnosis, it’s so very interesting for them to be able to play in some of these nontraditional venues. Because while we do play in city halls and recital halls we also place a lot of emphasis on reaching places where people might be self-stigmatizing. In other words, mental health hospitals, recovery centers, correctional systems, prisons, so we try to split our time kind of 50/50 in terms of the audience. Whether we’re reaching a kind of a broad general audience with these stigma erasing messages, or reaching kind of our people, people who are living with a diagnosis and need to have a positive example in front of them.

Christopher: And I’m going to be totally honest, I’m sitting here trying to be very careful and respectful and tactful about what I say in this interview because as I said to you before we started, like this is a topic that’s really important to me personally and I want to make sure we present it in the most effective and impactful way. But for a moment I want to play the part of the baffled audience member and I’m sure there’s at least one who hearing that this project is a bit unsure how that could possibly work. If you have a room full of people all with their own mental health challenges, how can that possibly result in a concert ready performance?

Caroline: Right. And I think a lot of people come to their first performance and they expect much less from us. And for now that’s okay. I mean, that’s addressing the stigma. People expect less when they hear there’s an orchestra where at least half of the people are living with a mental illness. And so I think the first real aha moment for people is when they come in and they’re seated and I’ll do an introduction of the orchestra and explain that half of us are living with trauma and anxiety and addiction et cetera, et cetera. And you almost, you kind of see the light bulbs going off in people’s heads, like they’re scanning the orchestra. And we’ve even had somebody say to us, “Really, because I can’t tell who they are.” And I said, “Exactly. That’s the whole point.” And I don’t feel angry about that. I feel like that’s what we’re here to do.

Caroline: Because frankly, if they were watching Law and Order or any number of television programs last night or reading the newspaper, all you hear are the negative stories. You don’t hear about the gentleman with the bipolar disorder who is a successful attorney and goes home at night and cooks dinner for his kids and has won awards and has a wonderful family life. We don’t hear the good stories so it’s up to us to put those out there. So yeah it can be very shocking for people to be in our audience and to hear our stories and even just as I say, have that visual of this group of people where they can’t tell. They think they know what schizophrenia looks like and it turns out they don’t because it doesn’t have a look.

Christopher: Wonderful. And at the same time I wonder are there any practical considerations? I love the way you talked about the permissiveness of if you don’t want to do the performances that’s fine. Obviously that has to be balanced somehow with Ronald trying to organize a program, as you said, for a hodgepodge of players of different ability levels and who might have different desires or behaviors in terms of rehearsals or performance. How does that work on a practical level?

Caroline: Yeah, absolutely. There are sometimes accommodations that we make to help people be comfortable in this setting. And it’s really no different than the kind of accommodations that are required by law if you have someone with a mental health condition in your workplace. If someone says that they’re not comfortable with something, then we just find a workaround. So that may mean that they don’t perform. Maybe in every setting there may be someone who has some kind of trauma and does not want to go into a correctional facility with us. That’s fine. It’s a little bit trickier if that’s your principal flute player as opposed to one of a sea of violas or something like that. But we’ve yet to find a challenge that we can’t work around.

Caroline: Sometimes we will be in a rehearsal or in a concert setting and someone is just having a bad day. And that anxiety or even some type of hallucination can come to the forefront. And probably the most important thing that this orchestra and the people in it have taught me and that we’ve taught each other that we’ve all learned together is that when someone is not having a good day or if they are currently in a reality that is not the one that the majority of us are experiencing to put it in one way, the best thing you can do is just join people where they are. You just got to meet them where they are and meet them with compassion and friendship. I had someone early on ask me what kind of security we had at rehearsals. And I said, “Excuse me, what do you mean?” “Well, you’ve got all these people with mental illness, you must have security.” And I said, “No, we don’t have security. We are in no greater danger at our rehearsals than you are when you go into your place of business every day.”

Caroline: Again, it just feeds into the misconceptions that people have about what it means to work with people who have mental illness. And sadly, most of the people in our lives that we know are surrounded by people who are living with some type of diagnosis. And the only difference there is that they’re not talking about it because they live in fear of the ramifications if they were to be public in their place of work or their place of worship or their school. So we provide a place where people can talk about it. And honestly, I think that’s a much safer and healthier environment for all of us.

Christopher: That was something that really jumped out at me reading descriptions of the meet to rehearsals and the environment, the atmosphere, the attitude is, it’s not black and white. This is how the normal world does it. And this is how this weird orchestra does it. In so many ways you’re exemplifying what should be the attitude anyway. Like this is how we should treat human beings regardless of a label or disorder or classification.

Caroline: Yeah, I mean people say, “Well, if you don’t have auditions, how does that work?” If you’re not kind of feeding the competitive nature that is so natural. Even in community music organizations, I think a lot of amateurs go into community orchestras or choruses and you still experience a bit of that diva quality of people kind of looking around like, why is he sitting there and why did she get that solo? And we work really hard to just cut that off right at the beginning. We rotate people around a lot. And every once in a while we’ll have someone walk through the door and I’m not sure what they were expecting when they arrived, but if they were expecting a more competitive environment and some people really want that, they thrive on that in some kind of probably unhealthy way.

Caroline: Usually within a few weeks, they find their way back out the door because we just, we can’t accommodate that. We can’t have somebody always playing the cellos or always leading the section. It’s not in the DNA of the organization where we’re just, we’re there to support each other. We’re there to learn from each other. And that’s another interesting thing to me is that there’s so much learning and this addressing of stigma that happens not only when we get in front of an orchestra and we’re performing and we’re sharing our stories, but also every week when we’re, there’s kind of the interior work that we’re doing with this group of 50 or 60 musicians getting to know each other. And if you walk into one of our rehearsals, any week, it’s going to look like a community orchestra rehearsal. That’s all it appears to be.

Caroline: But then I think if you listen closely during the break, you hear some of the discussions about medication and doctor recommendations and heart-to-heart, how was your day kind of thing. Where the automatic reply isn’t just, “Oh, I’m fine.” That’s where it gets a little more serious and more supportive and helpful. So it’s just been a wonderful kind of experiment to launch this thing and to figure it out as we’re going along. Unfortunately, when you set good intentions out front, I think you automatically attract people who also have good intentions and are interested in going along on this ride and figuring things out. And it’s for both Ronald and I. I would say it’s our life’s work now. I mean, we’ve found what we were supposed to be doing.

Christopher: Fantastic. And I want to pick up in a moment on what you just said about setting the intention, but first you highlighted there how there’s a function of the orchestra beyond the music that it’s giving people that social environment and that opportunity to connect with other people. And obviously you’re also having this impact on audiences and the general public in terms of removing stigma and putting a new message out there about mental illness. But I wonder, can you talk at all about the particular benefits of music for doing those two things? You’re not organizing a stigma free soccer team, you’re doing an orchestra and obviously Ronald and you have that in your background. But do you see any ways in which music is unique for having that kind of effect on the audience and on the members of your orchestra?

Caroline: Well, I have to say that Ronald and I upfront wanted to make it clear to people, we are not psychologists, we are not researchers. We are professionally trained musicians. And so that’s what we have to offer this. So I can’t get, kind of too lofty in talking about, scientifically the benefits of music. Although I know there are a lot of wonderful people who are studying that right now. But what we really see on a weekly basis is that it’s so wonderful for people to have a place to go that gets them out of the house that has some communicating with other people. And quite frankly, when you’re playing Beethoven, you can’t think about anything else. You can’t be worried about the stressors of the week or the latest medication change you’ve gone through or how things are going at work.

Caroline: So there’s this wonderful quality of music just being completely immersive, I think. That’s what people say to me is that it really is an escape to play in this orchestra. That it’s a time during the week when they don’t have to think about being mentally ill. I would point out one of the other things that’s different about us is that we could have launched an orchestra that was completely for people living with a diagnosis, but by bringing together people who don’t have a diagnosis and really designing this fully integrated community, we become something else. Because so many people living with an illness already have a support group and support groups play important role. They can be very helpful for people.

Caroline: But what a lot of people don’t have is this way of kind of integrating back into society, especially if they’ve been sidelined, if they’ve been agoraphobic and unable to leave their home, if they’ve been hospitalized or even imprisoned for a certain amount of time. That reentry and that learning to trust people in their community again, can be so difficult. And this orchestra can serve as a way for people to make that reentry more comfortably. And I think, I’m going to say something sappy, but music is the universal language and there’s a lot that goes unsaid in rehearsals, I think around mental wellness. But when we can play Beethoven and Brahms and Dvorak together that’s just healing. And I’ll leave it to the scientists to tell you exactly why. But for Ronald and I, we just know that in our hearts.

Christopher: That makes a lot of sense. You mentioned a few minutes ago the importance of setting an intention and how when you have that intention of inclusivity and access, you attract people with the same kind of attitude and that goes a long way. I was particularly keen to ask you about the fact that Me2/Orchestra is not one orchestra in Vermont at this stage. You’ve got several orchestras and you’ve got resources and support for people who want to spin up their own Me2/Orchestra projects like this in music. And I’d love to understand what do you tell them? What did you tell the people who were going to take on orchestra number two? What do you tell people who say, “I want to set up Me2 chamber group in my local community?” In terms of the practicalities you mentioned rotating people around, so there are some that competitive diva vibe, but are there practical things that help set that tone in the community?

Caroline: Right. Well, I mean, isn’t it interesting? We started out with literally just a handful of people in Vermont and Ronald and I never knew from week to week, month to month, whether or not this thing was going to actually get any traction. And not far into it we got some good PR and started hearing from people around the country saying, “Oh my gosh, this sounds so perfect. Is there anything like this in Indianapolis? My mom would love to do this.” “Or in Miami, my uncle would be perfect for this.” And so we started thinking, well, could we empower other people to do this? And at the time we were just based in Burlington, Vermont, and we thought, okay, well Burlington is a quirky, quirky, hippy town. The weirder the better for any project we launch. So maybe we should try this in a different kind of atmosphere.

Caroline: So we decided that we could drive to Boston every week and then we would try it in Boston in a bigger population and just see what challenges or opportunities presented themselves there so that we’d be better prepared before we set out to try to duplicate the model. And the orchestra in Boston now has finished five seasons. It’s been hugely successful. And we actually have our first, what we’re calling an affiliate program that has been active in Portland, Oregon for gosh, a few years now. They started not long after we launched in Boston. And that’s kind of a, it’s a chamber music type group up to like eight or 10 players and they get together every week. And we have a small, kind of easy legal agreement that they’ve signed with us that lays out what they can and can’t do but also provides them with a certain amount of resources coming from us kind of coming from the mothership, which means every once in a while Ronald will Skype and coach them in a session.

Caroline: And, I was on the phone with them last week and I’m constantly making suggestions for performance spaces they might want to try or Ronald recommends repertoire and that sort of thing. So it’s giving them kind of the support that they need even from a distance to be able to mimic the kind of stigma reduction that we’re doing through music here on the East coast. And actually this fall we are launching a new orchestra in Manchester, New Hampshire, and hiring our first conductor on our staff to take over the Burlington, Vermont orchestra, which is a really huge thing. They have had Ronald at the helm with that orchestra for eight years. And one of the members said to me, “Wow, well we could look at this as a big loss, but I’m going to look at this as a graduation.”

Caroline: We’re graduating with the first Me2/Orchestra to now move on to help another conductor, kind of learn our culture and assume the stigma reducing roles. I just thought that was so beautiful and I think the group in Burlington is so well prepared. The musicians there are so well prepared to help nurture their next conductor and in the ways of Me2, which is such a beautiful thing. And I should also mention that we had such a long wait list of flutists in the Boston area who wanted to join the orchestra. And of course there’s only so many flutes you can incorporate into an orchestra. So we are now launching the Me2 Boston flute choir next month and have hired a wonderful director there. And we’re probably the only orchestra who’s ever posted a job listing with the words at the end of the job requirements saying, while lived experience with mental illnesses is not a requirement it will be viewed as an asset. And it’s meant that we receive some very interesting and revealing and wonderful job applicants for these positions. We’re growing and we continue to learn and we’re having a great time.

Christopher: Wonderful. And you have a new documentary coming out about Me2/Orchestra and the project and how it’s growing. Talk a little bit about that.

Caroline: We do. About five years ago, very early on in the work of Me2, I happened to run across a filmmaker online who had produced a beautiful documentary about a men’s prison chorus in Kansas. And of course with all the work that we’ve been doing in correctional facilities, I was very eager to see this little documentary that she’d done. And when I got in touch with her, she went to the Me2 website and said, “Can we talk? Has anyone told your story?” And I said, “Well, there’s not much to tell yet. We’re still very young.” But fast forward and still another co-producer, a friend of hers have spent three years flying in and out from LA over to Burlington, Vermont and Boston, Massachusetts and filming the growth of Me2 and that’s been in post production for some time now, but they are now finished with the film and there’s going to be some screenings in and around the Greater Boston area in October and November. And they are searching for hopefully a major distributor.

Caroline: We’ll see what comes with that. But we’re very glad to have the film project on and I hope a lot of people will be able to see it.

Christopher: Fantastic. And that documentary has its own website at orchestratingchangethefilm.com is that right?

Caroline: Correct.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, we’ll have link to that directly and the Me2/Orchestra website in the show notes for this episode. Caroline it’s probably clear, but I am such an admirer of the work you’re doing and I hope it will reach more people, both musicians and audiences. So just wanted to say a big thank you for joining us on the show today.

Caroline: Well, it’s such a pleasure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about the work. We really genuinely love what we’re doing and the opportunity to share it with people is really appreciated.

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The post Side By Side In Music, with Caroline Whiddon (Me2/Orchestra) appeared first on Musical U.

Joseph’s own backstory is a really interesting one and reveals some great insights about learning effectively in the modern era, whether self-taught or with a teacher. Fundamental Changes has been leveraging the dramatically changing landscape in the world of book publishing to provide exciting new opportunities for students – and potential authors!

In this conversation we talk about:

• The three factors that helped Joseph go from struggling in learning music to really enjoying and improving consistently.
• The specific advantages a modern indie publisher has over traditional book publishers and how that helps authors and students alike.
• What their publishing process looks like when they work with a musician or music educator who has something interesting to say – and how different that is from the status quo in the publishing industry.

If you’ve ever wondered how a music book comes to be, or whether learning from a print book or ebook can really match up against in-person lessons or YouTube videos – you won’t want to miss this one.

Fundamental Changes is currently seeking new authors – if you’re a musician or music educator with something interesting to share, be sure to get in touch via the contact form on the Fundamental Changes website!

Watch the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• • Fundamental Changes
  • Musicality Now – From Mechanics to Organics, with Bradley Sowash
  • Musicality Now – Nature, Nurture, and your Duvet of Music, with Robert Emery
  • Musicality Now – A Simple Tip for Indecision and Analysis-Paralysis

Transcript

Joseph: Hi, this is Joseph Alexander from Fundamental Changes, and this is Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Joseph, thank you for joining us today.

Joseph: Hey, thanks for having me on. It’s a real honor to be here and to be asked to do something like this.

Christopher: I’ve really been enjoying your book The Practical Guide to Modern Music Theory for Guitarists. It made me really curious to know where you came from, in terms of your own background in guitar, in theory, in music in general. Could you tell us the back story to who you are as a musician?

Joseph: Yeah, I’ll try to keep it fairly brief. If started playing electric guitar, I think, when I was about 11, after having played classical for a while. Went through to my A levels, and then went to London College of Music, you know, guitar institute. There was a real emphasis on the technical side and theory and some playing. But what I found there was there were just so many influences on me all the time, and I was constantly trying to chase the next thing. Even at that age, I did really have an awareness that Miles Davis was move different from someone like Allan Holdsworth.

Joseph: I was trying to play all their stuff at the same time at 200 beats per minute over giant steps. Now surprisingly, I sounded pretty terrible, and I couldn’t really figure out why. It led me to be really disillusioned with music, and I ended up having a bit of a break down. I was only 19. I went home for a year, and decided to go to Leeds College of Music. Leeds was just this completely different story for me, where I’d have these amazing one-on-one lessons with a guitarist called Yiannis Pavlavis. What he taught me was that, with all these influences coming at me like that, I really needed to focus on one thing.

Joseph: I just remember there was this one crystallizing moment for me where he said, “Who do you want to sound like? Who are you listening to?” At the moment, I was kind of listening to Pat Martino. He goes, “Well, Pat Martino’s here, and you’re down here. What you’re trying to do is this massive jump all at once. You’re trying to do that with theory and learning the concept but, actually, what you need to be doing is more playing. Instead of doing this jump, you need to do this jump, and you need to do it a thousand times or a hundred times.” He said, “If you’ll trust me, I’d like to show you that. But I want you to stop thinking about everything else. I’ll give you this little task, go away, you’ll learn that, you do your homework, you come back and then we’ll look at it, and we’ll move on.”

Joseph: The conversation massively changed my perspective on music. I realized, instead of trying to incorporate all the theory and everything like that, it was a case of just: keep it simple and have this little tiny seed that gradually grew organically, obviously with a bit of help from a teacher, and stay focused on the thing that you love. I think some musicians, myself in particular, there’s always that “the grass is greener”, kind of thing. If I was playing jazz, I’d be like, “Oh, man. That guy’s got great country chops,” or whatever, and start doing that.

Joseph: You have to find what you love and keep it simple and keep plugging away at that, kind of thing.

Christopher: That’s so interesting. We had a recent guest on the show, Robert Emery, who was talking about the funny things we do as adult learners and the way we sometimes trip ourselves up. He made that point that we often want to know everything all at once, and we want to dive straight into the advanced stuff. We consider we should be able to understand everything. Actually, the trick of it is to just take a more childlike view, trust the teacher, look at the thing that’s put in front of you and not jump ahead and not worry that you don’t yet know what steps two, three, four, five and six are; just focus on step one. It sounds like your teacher gave you that insight that it’s one step at a time, and you don’t need to know the whole entire roadmap of your future to be able to take the next step.

Joseph: Exactly. It was sort of freeing in a way to let somebody else take responsibility for that. That is difficult as an adult because we’re taught that you have to take responsibility for every part of your life. In most respects, that’s true. But that idea of being a child learner and just going, “Okay, man. What’s the next lesson?” Being hungry to learn and enjoying the process, rather than worrying about you don’t sound good because you’re not there yet, yet slowing down and crystallizing the stuff you’re doing. I think that makes you a better player overall anyway because as your skills develop in one area, they actually… it brings up everything else as well. I think there’s a lot of truth in that.

Christopher: I’m curious to know, was it the nature of London versus Leeds as music schools? Or was it the luck of finding a good teacher? Were your contemporaries in London struggling with the same thing? Why was there that difference?

Joseph: I don’t want to say anything bad about London. The teachers there are absolutely astonishingly brilliant. I was having lessons with guy like Shaun Baxter and Ian Scott and these amazing London musicians. Loads of people down there were fantastic. But I think I might not have been good enough to be there at that time. I could see everyone else around me being better than me. I guess I wasn’t really a natural at music. I’d always had to reverse engineer what everybody else was doing. I had to break it down and explain it and figure out why it worked in my own. That’s the only way I could learn it.

Joseph: It’s a terrible analogy, but you know those terrible American movies where it’s like a dance school or something: there’s one guy who’s not quite good enough and there’s all the pressure? That was kind of me. Maybe that’s just part of my personality, or it was at the time, but I felt it was such a competitive environment and, again, all these guys were so far ahead of me and just seemed to get this stuff, they just seemed to have it before they… not before they got there, but they just had a better concept of learning music than I did, or a better map. I think that pressure was detrimental to me.

Joseph: Some people thrive in that environment, but I guess I don’t. It’s partly that, and I think the school isn’t set up to make it a competitive environment, but I think there’s just something where you put 30 guitarists in a room, and it just becomes, as you would say, a measuring competition; who can play the fastest or whatever. So, yeah, I kind of just got caught up in all that, all of that. I was seeing how fast I could run scales or what theory I knew ,or what I knew about playing the guitar, or what I could technically perform, but not actually what I could play.

Joseph: I think that was the thing that was missing for me. We did play quite a lot but we weren’t really… I wasn’t really learning enough songs and music and complete things that… I was very guilty of that somebody says, “Play something.” And I’d just run super-locrian at 300 beats a minute, that kind of thing. I could probably not quite sit down and play Wonderwall all the way through at that time. I think that stuff makes a disconnect with your audience.

Joseph: That’s the way I found myself thinking at London. I wouldn’t say it was necessarily the guitar institute’s fault, but it seems to foster that environment for me. Whereas Leeds was… it just seemed more musical. I had private study instruments, like I said, each week. I had this massive support network. And the first thing they did when you got to Leeds, they put you in a band. You had to go and play. Like, “Right. You’re in this band. You’re in this band.” You’re like, “Oh, my God. I don’t know how to do this stuff.” And sort of hacking your way through it, but everyone’s very patient.

Joseph: I went in not as a competitive person, but assuming it was going to be that environment. But, actually, everyone was really supportive. If you made a mistake, no one scowled at you, it was just like… like I say, everyone was totally there for each other. Being in Leeds, there was other little things. Living in Leeds as opposed to London, I could afford to go out and see music and surround myself in that. I just had a much better time. I was just happier. It just seemed a more musical environment. I think just having those two things to compare when I left – and I started doing a lot of teaching myself – that, hopefully, I try to take the best bits of London, which was just I had a very good theoretical and technical knowledge, but I also had, hopefully, I was still young the wisdom to let my students get access to that at the right times.

Joseph: One of the reasons why the first books happened was that I could see students coming to me at that time, and they had the same issues I was having in London. Instead of being in that environment, they were in their bedroom, and it was YouTube or whatever that was giving them the short attention span of trying to master all these different things at the same time. Then it was my turn to be like, “Listen, man. What do you want to do? Where do you want to go?” And things. I love teaching. I love that. I love being able to, sounds stupid but, give music to people; let them play, let them find their own voice.

Joseph: I was never a teacher that would say, “Right. This week we’re doing this.” First lesson is like, “Well, what do you want to learn? What do you want to play? Let’s design your next 12 lessons, or whatever you’ve signed up for, around you. Where do you want to be?” That simplification of… not saying that the theory couldn’t get complicated or anything, but just focusing on where they were at the time and then giving them that progression on their terms seems to just really work. I almost always really connected with my students and got results out of them.

Joseph: When they came in the room, and they would be… they were better… some of them were better than me before they came in. There was always the annoying 13 year old kid that can just shred you off the planet. But you’d show them something else and try and bring in a new little area into their playing, that’s… some of it’s just making them aware of this stuff, and they’ll go and do their own work; they’re always the greatest students for me. Just trying to give them what they needed when they needed it, and actually listen to their playing and give feedback rather than trying to stamp my personality on it.

Christopher: Interesting. It sounds like it was a real combination effect. There was definitely some kind of community change from London to Leeds and that supporting vibe, rather than competitive, or need to prove yourself. It was also, by the sounds of it, a little bit about technique versus playing real music, as it were, and not getting overwhelmed and scattered across a whole bunch of stuff. It sounds like those three things together transformed how you were thinking about music learning for yourself and then for your students. Is that right?

Joseph: Yeah, that’s absolutely spot on. Yeah.

Christopher: So talk a little bit more about that technique versus repertoire, or playing notes versus playing real music, idea. What did that look like in practice for you?

Joseph: I don’t want to make any enemies, but it does seem to be almost a uniquely guitarist-y thing. You don’t necessarily get jazz clarinet players or orchestral clarinet players trying to absorb as much theory and know as much as possible but not be able to play it, kind of thing. The classical world, and I think to an extent, the jazz world, should really be learning by playing music and things. I think London definitely got my technique together. I was probably sitting in room on bed messing my back up and playing scales and things for eight hours a day. Then, when we started learning jazz, I think… see, this was kind of a big mistake as well for me, that I put on Band-in-a-Box, put on at 251 and then try and find how to solo over it, how to play the right arpeggio over the right chord at the right time.

Joseph: Of course, your playing goes, “Okay, here’s a minor chord: here’s my minor chord stuff. Here’s my dominant chord stuff, here’s my major chord stuff,” and so on; It plays really blocky. If I’d actually bothered to listen to any jazz at the time, I’d have just instantly heard that the musical reality of that is not what’s going on there at all. There is to an extent, but it’s actually… I’m very lucky I get to hang out with guys like Martin Taylor and watch him play. There’s a bit of that but, actually, it’s more about the melodic line.

Joseph: Trying to keep that to a short point, I was obsessed with the idea of that, conceptually, you could play this over the five chord – you could play this, this, this – and there was all these different options to play. But, actually, what you need to go and do is learn the melody of what’s happening over there in the head of the tune and decorate that and explore that and use the tune of the piece to make that more musical. That kind of thinking was completely not on my radar at London.

Joseph: It was just like, “Right, okay. I can use the altered scale or lydian dominant here. Here’s a Lydian-dominant scale thing, and now hrs a major seventh scale thing.” It just didn’t sound jazzy, and I couldn’t figure out why. It was just sort of a case of lots of listening and, again, that more musical approach. So, again, when I went to Leeds, the practice was much more about using the melody of the tune to inform the solo, kind of thing. Yeah, I should point out, I was more of a rock guitarist anyway, so it was always relevant to be playing high scales quite fast and things.

Joseph: It was that lack of melody thing, I think, that was the biggest problem.

Christopher: That’s really fascinating. I think that comes through a lot in your theory book, is that there’s definitely a danger – and as you say, guitarists are maybe particularly prone to it – in general of improv by numbers. “I know the theory, so I know what notes are allowed. And I’ll just play my patterns up and down and hope it sounds okay.” As you say, that misses the whole point, in terms of the musicality of it and making it sound compelling. I think that’s a really perfect example. One this I loved about your theory book was how it’s always bringing the reader back to practical application and to, “Listen to this. Listen to this example.” Not just the abstract, “Listen to the scale being played,” but, “Here are five songs that use the lydian mode for a solo. Go listen to those.”

Joseph: I think that’s something that, as you say, is often really missing from the way people approach theory and approach improv.

Joseph: Yeah. Definitely.

Christopher: You mentioned there you went on to teach in-person. I think people listening or watching can probably understand how you were taking these lessons and using them to help individuals have a better outlook on how to approach their learning. It would be easy, I think, to assume that the solution here is to work one-on-one with people and to give them that step and to be the trusted guide that we’ve just said you need. Like we just said, you need someone to make sure you stay focused and step by step. But, clearly, you went into publishing books for people to teach themselves. Maybe work with a teacher, but I’m sure a lot of people use the books by themselves. So, clearly, it’s not that simple.

Joseph: Could you talk a little bit about how your books help people to get that same benefit without the teacher to hold them by the hand each step of the way?

Joseph: Yeah, I will say that I think you will always progress more quickly with a good teacher, one-on-one. You get more instant feedback, and they’re going to pick you up on the things that you don’t know you’re doing wrong. That’s kind of the problem really with any self-learning, is you don’t know what you don’t know. However, the way I’ve written my books, we’ve got a couple of complete beginners books which are written in a slightly different way. What we try to do is have a very incremental – this, this, this again – kind of approach that can be followed. The problem with… of the challenge with a book, I should say, is that it’s a linear process. You can dive in, but most people are going to go from page one to page 100.

Joseph: If a student comes to me in a guitar lesson, and they have a question for me, that could be a legit digression for weeks to completely different stuff. It’s all really interesting, and it’s fun, and you can do that. But when you’re not there, what you have to provide is: Get this exercise done… here’s the background to the exercise, here’s how you play it, here’s the notation, and then another paragraph. Each exercise really needs to build on the previous ones. You’ve got books like my… So my fingerstyle guitar book, I think is always quite a good example about grabbing your guitar.

Joseph: The first exercise is that, is literally just your thumb playing the sixth string on the guitar; getting that baseline. Then the second exercise is getting the thumb and the ring finger to play the top string. Then, the thumb keeps playing quarter notes and the ring finger starts playing eighth notes. That’s the first three examples because if you’ve not incrementally built up that right hand independence when you’re picking, you’ve got no chance when it comes to doing all the other things.

Joseph: It has to be very guided. Because of that, our books tend to be about 100, 110 pages long, but they will have about 150 examples in standard notation and tab, explanation of every single example, example solos. I think the really important thing is we provide the audio of every single example. When people don’t download the audio, it completely confuses me because you’re learning music, you need to hear what this sounds like, you need some sort of reference to know if you’re doing it right. That’s the responsibility of self-teaching.

Joseph: I think it’s trying to be… to really break it down. The way I write them is I imagine a student who’s got enough technical ability, facility on the instrument, to do what I’m asking them to do, but then they’ve come into my lessons, and they’ve said, “Okay, I want to play fingerstyle blues guitar,” or, “I want to play jazz blues or whatever it happens to be.” I go, “Okay, all right. Well, you’re here. How are we going to… what are going the be the next 10, 20 lesson that incrementally we can do that?” It’s really breaking it down into the smallest possible steps we can.

Christopher: Terrific. I’m always curious to know when I talk to someone like yourself who’s gone through this process of developing real teaching insight, and then doesn’t just continue being a teacher and delivering it one-on-one to students, but creates an enormous project out of nowhere to have a bigger impact out there. You guys dominate the Amazon charts for quitar books at this stage. I think you’ve got over 100 books, is that right?

Joseph: Yeah.

Christopher: I’m sure our listeners are curious to know, how did that happen? What was it in you that made you decide, “I’m not just going to continue teaching, I’m going to do this whole big project?”

Joseph: Complete accident. I literally gave more thought to my Halloween costume than my career. I think I said in the preamble that I was teaching a lot of students, and I was really… I was writing down the notes that I was giving them, just so instead of me writing it down every lesson, I could print if off for them and give it to them, then they’ve got better value. They’ve got more time talking with me scribbling.

Joseph: I was thinking about the stuff I’d really struggled with. I’d got a student at that time who was really struggling with the same stuff; It was jazz soloing. I think my first book was Fundamental Changes in Jazz Guitar, which is a bit of a mouthful. I wrote that, and it had like three DVDs worth of audio on it, 160-odd examples at two speeds. I sent it to a publishing company in London. They were like, “We like the book. It’s good. But it’s completely non-viable commercially because we can’t put three DVDs on a book. So we’re going to say no.”

Joseph: It’s like, “Okay. Cool. No worries.” I thought about it, and two things happened. First of all, one of my other students said, “You know Amazon do this self-publishing thing?” I was like, “Oh, okay. I’ll throw that up there and try it.” Terrible front cover, probably full of typos, those kind of things and thought, well, what about the audio? Well, it’s the 21st century maybe I can put a WordPress website together and let people download the audio once they’ve got the book via a link. That worked really well.

Joseph: For some reason, that book started selling despite the terrible covers and everything. I thought, well, I’ll write another one because I had so much material from my time at London, my time at Leeds, stuff I was figuring out on my own and the stuff I was working on with my students. I think having a lot of students really helped because the problems that they were coming to me with was… and I was trying to solve for them, was what I was using to inspire these books because I reasoned, “If they’ve got these problems, then a lot of people have.” You’d see the same thing come in over and over again.

Joseph: So I wrote that, and it was selling okay. Then I wrote another one and another one. I ended up… just because I had so much material, and I was really enjoying writing it. I thought, well, I’m not going to be teaching guitar forever, it would be great to have some other things going on. I ended up writing, I think, 14 books in the first year. The first one took eight months, I should say, and then the year after that I wrote another, I think, 13 books.

Joseph: What happened then was I, kind of accidentally, established a brand on Amazon. You recognize the Fundamental Changes… well, not product placing or anything, but one of our books. Not that I ran out of things to write about at that time, I’m like the world’s worst death metal guitar player, right? But my friend’s really good do you know what I mean? I was like, “Well, I’ve got these brand. We’ve got like 15 books, mailing list. I’ve got people I can email about your book when it comes out. Do you want to write it? I’ll edit it, put front covers on, we’ll just split the royalties on it.” He was like, “Yeah.”

Joseph: He comes back a few months later with the book. I did the editing on it. That was the start of the proper publishing side of the company. I thought right, I’ve got to get professional now. Founded a company blah, blah, blah, that kind of stuff. That was it. Then we just tried to keep the quality really, really high. It’s just sort of grown really organically. While I’ve been writing books, we’ve had plenty of other people with great things to say. Like I say, we’re working with guys like Martin Taylor, Mark Lettieri. We’ve got Levi Clay, Chris Brooks, Chris Zoupa, Kristof Neyens one.

Joseph: We’re working with guys who are Instagram influences, or people with 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. They get to published. We’ll talk about royalties and things in a bit because a really big part of our ethos is to pay really well. But, yeah, so they’ve got an audience that helps us reach new people. We can create products for them that are really reflective of them as musicians and the things that their audience love about them, and they get paid for it. There’s something… a book has got authority, I think. And I think that’s who we’re aiming at with… there’s lots of great stuff on YouTube, but you don’t really know where to go next half the time. Stuff isn’t necessarily structure particularly well.

Joseph: With a book, you go, “All right. I want to play… I want to develop my own melodic phrasing,” or whatever. We’ve got a tangible thing that will take you from A to Z on that. So, yeah, I think we sell… sold about 150, 160 thousand books last year. It’s been pretty disruptive, I think, for a lot of people in the music publishing industry as well. We’ve tried to do that with absolute integrity; Make great books, and pay the writers really, really well. Now we’re spreading out with… we’ve got drum books, we’ve got some keyboard books on the way, we’ve got a few bass books. Then we’ve got a singing book coming out with Claire Martin who’s one of the top jazz singers in the world.

Joseph: We’ve done things with Hollywood composers. We’re got some guys I can’t actually name yet as well, coming on board. Pretty big musicians. It’s crazy because now… I’ve gone from this thing where I was writing down what I was teaching my students to actually people approaching us. Our doors are open, you know what I mean? If you’re out there, and you think you’ve got an idea for a book, get in touch because we can help each other. It’d be brilliant.

Christopher: It’s amazing. And congratulations and well done on having such a big impact. I think, as you say, it’s potentially the best of both worlds, or kind of a sweet spot; We’ve got this incredible opportunity ahead of us in terms of online education, but everyone’s still scrambling to figure out the best ways to do it. As you say, the traditional form of a book has an awful lot going for it, and especially if it can be an ebook or if it can have online downloads to bring it all to life. I think there’s such value in, as you say, “I want to learn melodic phrasing. Here’s my book that’s going to take me step by step and lead me through that,” rather than, “Every day I’ll search YouTube for melodic phrasing and hope to find a new five-minute, quick-fix solution.”

Joseph: Yeah.

Christopher: I’m sure people would be curious to get a insight into that publishing process because part of what you’re doing, I think, is disrupting by acting really quickly. You don’t have a lot of the baggage and assumptions that maybe some of the bigger publishers… With all love and respect for people like Hal Leonard or Wiley or whoever it may be, they are still, for the most part, following the same process they have for decades. Can you give us an idea of what it looks like if you work with one of these other authors, like Marin Taylor of example? What does that look like from beginning to end?

Joseph: I love working with Martin. He’s such a giving guy. We’ve worked in a few ways. The first way we worked was he’d actually got a little online video course that he sent to people who go on his guitar retreats up in Scotland. He’s doing one right now in New York. He said, “Well, I’ve got this course. Do you want to turn it into a book?” I was like, “Yeah. Absolutely brilliant.” I had him on the end of the phone every now and again, or Skype. But I worked through his course, and we turned that into… where are we? That book right there, that’s Beyond Chord Melody, which is his polyphonic approach to playing the guitar. That came out like that.

Joseph: The most recent one we did was loads of fun because we just… me and my business partner, Tim, who’s the co-writer and editor and cover designer, that sort of thing, we literally drove up to Martin’s house near Stirling. We got in his studio, and we just recorded six hours of content. We came back, and we wrote the book from that. It was great. It was just us in a studio just firing questions at him like, “Play. Play that. No, no, like that. What you’re doing.” Kind of thing. That’s sort of the process there.

Joseph: Then there was technical challenges of getting audio off video and things like that. But, basically, from there we… I wrote the book, and Tim edited it. We sent it back to Martin. He made a few changes. I think that will hopefully be out in two, maybe three, weeks. That’s that one. However, most of the time, what we do is we coach writers, because I think musicians… we don’t expect musicians to be great writers. You’re great musicians, and we’re interested in helping share the ideas and music that you have in your head.

Joseph: That process for us looks like, you’ll probably come approach us for a book, or we’ll come and talk to you if we think you’ve got something that we want to share. We’ve tried everything. We’ve got templates in Sibelius or Guitar Pro, all the software. We’ve got writing templates in Word. We’ve got sheets that will help you get your book outline together. We work really closely with the writer, not in a, “We’re-the-big-publishing-house-boss kind of way,” but it’s like, “This is a team.” We’re helping each other. We’ll get the outline done, which is simply chapter headings and maybe a couple of sentences of what’s going to go in each chapter. Of course it’s all flexible, subject to change; We’re not monsters.

Joseph: We’ll say, “Okay. Well, don’t write your intro, because that’s probably the last thing you’ll write, but go and write you’re teaching… the first three or four pages of your first teaching chapter.” At that point, we’ll do a really hard edit; friendly, but hard, where we’re saying, “What about phrasing that like that? We can shorten this by doing this. That notation’s not quite right.” By doing that and working with the author at that really early stage, then they kind of get it. Then we’ll say, “Right. Do the first chapter.” Then that will come back in, and we’ll have a much easier job of doing that first chapter, but there’ll still be changes.

Joseph: By the time we’ve done that, we’re like, “Okay, well, go and write a few more, and then check in with us later.” There’s definitely a collaborative part of that. The hardest thing for us, really, is when somebody’s got a good idea for a book, and they’ve gone and written like 20, 30 thousand words on it and sent it in, and it’s just not quite right, do you know what I mean? That’s a really big editing job. We want musicians to write more than one book for us, together. We feel like investing helping you write from day one, it just makes life a lot easier, so we’ve got a house style thing.

Joseph: After doing 100 books, we figured out the easiest way to do it. That’s really part of the value of what we offer. We do that. Then once we’ve edited the book, and we’re happy with everything, we’ll say, “Go and start recording the audio for it,” because I think audio’s so important. A lot of books don’t have that, and it’s a problem, I think, for students. Then at that point, we’ll be doing the cover designs, we’ll be getting just all the sales pages, all the Amazon stuff together. We’ve got worldwide distribution now, so we’ll be sorting that out, doing all that kind of thing in the background.

Joseph: We’ve start, as a matter of course, now translating all our new titles into German and Portuguese and Spanish. That’s something that coming online now. We’re doing the back catalog at the moment, but that’s coming. We’re doing all this kind of stuff for the author, and making sure that that book’s really hitting every corner of the world. We do a lot. As far as the author is, we’ll help you get that idea out there, and then we’ll pay you for it. I don’t want to do a massive advert or anything but, essentially, if you go to a traditional publishing house, and they sell your book for, say, I don’t know, $20, then the author will normally get about 10% of net. That will probably be around 60 to 90 cents because big publishing houses have got a lot of overhead; However, we’re really small, quick, maneuverable.

Joseph: We’ve got me and Tim that do most of the work. We’ve got a small team of freelancers around the world. We pay 30 to 40 percent of royalty, and we’ve got like no overhead, so you’ll end up getting five or six dollars, or four or five dollars, I guess, for that, for every book we sell. We’ve got an audience of 60,000 people on our mailing listening. Pretty much every, well, certainly guitar book that we release now will go to number one of the Amazon chart and start to get a following, which we back up with social media things as well. The whole thing is we try to remit as much money back to the author as possible. Yeah, we’re trying to do a good thing.

Joseph: Book publishing royalties are tough and song royalties are tough, so we’re trying to do what we do in a cool way, with integrity, and help musicians out as well.

Christopher: Awesome. Yeah. It’s been said to me more than once over the years that nobody goes into music education for the money, but it seems like you guys are in it for the right reasons. I just want to underscore, part of why I wanted to have you share some of this behind the scenes stuff is that I’m sure some people listening heard all that, and they were like, “That sounds sensible. That’s how it should work.” But I know, from befriending various people in the publishing industry over the last however many years, that’s not how it normally works. You might assume that if you go to one of the big publishers, who will not be named, they would hold your hand through it, and they’ve got all their processes, and they make it easy for you to just share your expertise, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Christopher: I’ve heard these horror stories of authors who were brought onboard and given almost zero support and then end up in this royalty situation that means they barely make a dime from it anyway.

Joseph: It’s pretty standard. There’s a couple of points to make on that. I think the industry’s changed. Print-on-demand’s changes all that. This idea that publishers are the arbiter of quality, I think is false. You look back over the years, and publishers are simply the people who’ve got the money together to own a printing press, and then they get to decide. Of course there’s great quality there, but also a lot… The Girl With The Pearl Earrings was released with a typo on the front cover, things like that.

Joseph: Traditional publishing’s going to be right for some people. Here’s a story about someone we’re working with right now, who I absolutely won’t name, for a big music book publishing company, that I also won’t name. He wrote the book, took him a year to write it. They sat on it for a year, and then published it. Then he didn’t get any royalties for, I think it was, nearly 12 months, or at least another 6 months. I think it was two and half years between putting pen to paper and getting paid for that. Whereas, as soon as you submit me your book, depending on our schedule as well, your book will probably be out in a month, and we pay royalties every two months because we can.

Joseph: We don’t have this massive staff of hundreds of people. When I went to a meeting with Hal Leonard talking about distribution, I was almost… I was a bit, “Oh, right.” It was a bit of a wake up moment for me there because they were running these beautiful offices in Central London. It’s like, “That must be costing a fortune.” This is my spare room. We published 36 books last year. We sold 160,000 books. We’re super happy with that. Everyone’s getting paid, we’re giving loads of money back to authors. We can do that. We’re nimble. If we see someone we want to work with, there isn’t this massive hierarchical chain of management, it’s just like, “Yeah, let’s get an email to that person. Let’s go and talk to them.”

Joseph: We can do that because we don’t have that level of accountability to ourselves, to the company. That’s it. It’s just all about doing the best thing that we can. We find that actually, like I was describing, working with the author, it actually makes the books come out more quickly because not only do they write a better product to start with, it reduces our editing time. It reduces so much stuff. We can do an edit of that book in a week or so, and that’s it. It’s out. We can push that really quickly. Within, what, 12 hours, that book can be on sale in every Amazon territory. Then, a week later, through our expanded distribution, that can be ordered in every single book shop in the world.

Joseph: That’s pretty cool. That’s not us, that’s using what’s there. That’s the world we live in. It’s interesting to see how the older publishers are going to cope with that. I think Hal Leonard will be fine because they seem to own every single copyright for every single song in the universe, don’t they? I think they make a lot on licensing. In terms of book publishing, I think more and more people will be doing what we’re doing in different niches and things. It’s interesting time, certainly, for the industry.

Christopher: Absolutely. Tell me, what coming up next for Fundamental Changes because you clearly have this strong brand and real ethos behind it. Is it more book publishing? Is it going into other formats, other instruments? What’s next?

Joseph: Yeah, the translation thing’s pretty big at the moment. Germany is this really up-and…. Germany’s up-and-coming, that’s not what I mean. The German ebook market is really up-and-coming. Of course we sell paperbacks too. So that’s really coming online, so we’re having a lot of translations done. In terms of books that were coming out, we’ve got loads of… we’re trying to do a few Christmas themes books. We’ve got a Martin Taylor Christmas books; There’s going to be arrangements of Christmas songs, which is going to be great

Joseph: The book we’re working on right now is Martin Taylor’s single note jazz guitar solo one. It’s his lead guitar book, which is awesome. It is good. Very happy with the way that’s turned out. We’ve got another book with Chris Zoupa coming out in a couple of weeks, which is like proper shred guitar creativity. We tend to… how can we say? The more mainstream, play-as-fast-as-you-can stuff, we try and stay away from. When there are authors like Chris Brooks and Chris Zoupa who’ve got real insight, real skill and really something to say with that, we have to do that.

Joseph: Chris has done this book about how to actually be creative and improvise and get away from all those set patterns that guitarists play. Other instruments, we’ve got some more drum books coming out, we’ve got the book with Claire Martin, who I mentioned. She’s a world renowned singer, jazz singer. Trying to think… got a meeting with Remi Harris this week, maybe get some gypsy stuff happening as well, a few other people, again, I can’t mention. I think we’ve probably got about 20 books maybe, 10 to 20 books ready to go before Christmas. Just watch this space.

Joseph: You can sign up on our website, which is fundamental-changes.com and get updates and things and go and have a little look around what we’re doing. In terms of bigger direction, I think we are going to start looking more at video. I think the hardest part of the video course is almost the supporting material, getting the notation and things done for it. Well, we’ve already got that, so we’re kind of thinking, let’s get some cameras, let’s send them out, let’s get them in front of our artist and turn everything into video as well.

Joseph: I’m having a think about audio books. That’s going to be tough because, obviously, you need to see the notation so there’d have to be some sort of download. We’re kicking the tires on that at the moment. We’re busy.

Christopher: Clearly.

Joseph: It’s kind of just me and Tim in a way, so…

Christopher: Tremendous. I really applaud what you’re up to. I think your insights into education and your attitude towards the authors and the students really comes through in everything you do. I think it would be easy, with the success you’ve had, to just cover everything with blindness to what mattered and what didn’t, or what you wanted to focus on; that’s clearly not what you’re doing. You’re building a really clear brand with an ethos behind it. I love that.

Joseph: Thanks. I think the really important thing to say is that, I think the best marketing is to keep doing good stuff. I think you can see that, when company’s become bigger, that they kind of lose sight. They’re like, “We need another X. We need another Y.” And it’s actually, “No, we’ll take each book, and that will be a valuable, meaningful thing for the student. That’s the ethos.” And you think, well, actually, if we can write a good book, then people will buy another one and they’ll tell their friends. I guess it’s old-fashioned, but I like it.

Christopher: Fantastic. Any parting pieces of advice for those in the audience, maybe those who do or don’t play guitar?

Joseph: Yeah, musically, I really think that just go with what resonates with you. Like I say, it’s easy to have that “grass is greener” type thing and go, “I should be doing that. I should be doing that. I should be doing that.” Actually, you know what? Find what it is that you love and be honest about that. For me, I spend all this time doing jazz, man, AC/DC every time. That’s the thing that just gets my heart pounding. I’m like, “You know what? I’m only going to spend by life learning something that I struggle with, or I’m going to really enjoy playing what I’m naturally… I have more natural ability at and be happy about what I’m learning.” Then, once you find that thing, keep it simple.

Joseph: Of course, that can grow into whatever, complicated theory and technique that you like, but it’s going to come from an organic place. It’s not going to be, “Oh, I need that new bit of theory to make me a good player.” Try and have that organic thing. Then, I think, broadly, in terms of what we’re doing, we’re looking for people to work with. Authors, if you’ve got something to say on your instrument, that we’re interested in hearing from you because, yes, while we’re working with some of the greatest musicians, we’re open for working with anyone. So if you’ve got something to say, we’d love to talk to you because what people are finding, apart from making money from the royalties of their books, that actually having the books out does create opportunities. It’s a real thing of authority.

Joseph: Opportunities are coming from… I don’t mean that, “Hey, man. Come play for free and maybe you’ll be able to sell a CD at the gig,” kind of thing. It’s very tangible. People are like, “I bought your book. I really like it. Let’s do this together.” We’re seeing that. I think we’re publishing about 25 or 30 authors at the moment, and almost all of them are getting opportunities because they’re in print. It works really well for the author, and it works really well for the students that you’re trying to get in touch with. So, yeah, if you’ve got something, let’s have a conversation. You can get in touch through the website, and we’d love to hear from you.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, that’s fundamental-changes.com. We’ll have a direct link in the show notes for this episode. It is such an exciting time, I think, for teachers and students alike to explore what’s possible in music education now. I just want to say a big thank you to you for coming and sharing some of this insight into how the book publishing industry, in particular, is changing at this point. Thank you.

Joseph: Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on. It’s a real privilege.

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The post Making Music Books More Musical, with Joseph Alexander (Fundamental Changes) appeared first on Musical U.

Adam sat down with Christopher and asked him two important questions:

1. One that many musicians think they know the answer to: “What is ear training?”
2. And one that is a sticking point for most music learners: “Why isn’t ear training working?”

If you’re watching or listening to this show, you know the benefits of a great musical ear. But how do you get there? If you, like many others, find ear training hard or frustrating, you won’t want to miss this conversation.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Ear Training for Beginners
• Musicality Now – About the Ear Training Trap
• Musicality Now – About Perfect Pitch
• Musicality Now – What Is Musicality? (Revisited)
• Tim Topham’s Creative Piano Teaching Podcast – Forrest Kinney On The 4 Arts Of Music

Transcript

Adam: Well, welcome to being a guest on your own show, Christopher, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to host today. I’m really looking forward to our conversation about ear training. And if you’ve been following the show for a while it may seem off that we’ve never had an episode simply titled, “What is Ear Training,” especially since that’s at the core of what we do at Musical U. So I’d like to start off by just simply asking what’s going on at Musical U that prompted this episode, Christopher?

Christopher: Yeah. This is going to be fun. I’m normally the interviewer and people might not guess but I think it’s a lot more pressure being the interviewer than the interviewee. I get to just show up now and chat about something that I love, ear training, for a while. So all the pressure is on you, Adam. Don’t freak out.

Christopher: So, yeah, it is a bit bizarre. That’s kind of why we’re doing this episode. We were talking about it in the team recently because we were about to release this course, Ear Training for Beginners. And we were talking about how it’s a bit weird that it’s taken us so long to offer ear training for beginners given the roots of the company, and I’m sure we’ll be talking more about that. But in the course of that conversation, Andrew from the team, Andrew Bishko our product manager, he’s been working with me on this new course, was commenting that we have tons of material on ear training. We’ve been publishing on this topic for a decade, developing all of these resources and training systems and so on.

Christopher: But actually very little of it was tackling the question he wanted to tackle in the first lesson of this new course, which is what is ear training? And we had covered it. Like I wrote an article. One of the first articles on easyeartraining.com was about what is ear training. And we’ve tackled it in a few places since for sure. But it really hit home with me that so much of our material is on the nitty-gritty of ear training. We kind of take for granted at this stage that people know what it is, and doubly so over the last few years.

Christopher: And it just made me feel a bit stupid in a way that it’s taken us this long to address on the show, because obviously the podcast, the video series, has a different audience in a way than our website has for the last nine or 10 years. I suddenly felt really guilty that we’ve never really answered that for people. So if you’ve been a long-time listener of the show you will have heard us talk about ear training kind of all the time, but almost never saying the words “ear training.”

Christopher: It’s a bit tricky with podcast episodes. Adam, I know you’re a podcast listener too, so you’ll relate as everyone in our audience can. But we never know as the host of the show how much we can take for granted in terms of how much someone has watched or listened to past episodes. And I think I kind of hit the ground running a little bit assuming that all of our podcast audience would be our existing audience who already knew us as Easy Ear Training up until recently. They’d know about ear training and we could kind of just dive into this core musicality stuff. In retrospect, I didn’t factor in the fact that a lot of people are diving into this show Musicality Now at any given episode and they might have no idea what ear training is.

Christopher: There’s also another really big reason we wanted to talk about this on the show, which is there’s kind of a big elephant in the room when it comes to ear training. It’s that it’s really hard and boring and frustrating for a lot of people. And I’m sure we’re going to be talking more about that, but obviously with this new course we’re already tackling that question of how can we make this the best it can be.

Christopher: I just realized there are some really fundamental things everyone should know about ear training you’ve tried it before or not. And so I wanted to jump on and thank you for giving me the chance to chit-chat about it, and just make sure everyone in our Musicality Now audience at least knows 100% how to approach this the right way.

Adam: Yeah. There is certainly that elephant in the room about ear training. It’s hard. It’s difficult. It’s boring. And I know no matter where you’ve been on your musical journey if you’ve ever tried it you probably have these preconceptions that you’re walking into this with. Now I’ve been with the company for a while and I’ve heard your story. I know how we came to this place, but I’d really love to share that with the audience. So if we could go back to your origin story. What prompted you to begin this journey into ear training?

Christopher: Yeah. I think one thing to say upfront is if you know this show our interviews often do start with the guest’s backstory. And this is not just kind of fireside chat with Christopher, let’s hear about the company. When we were planning this episode, Adam, you and I were talking about how in a way it’s hard for us to really explain what is ear training and how to approach it without telling a bit of that backstory, and where we came from, and how we know what we know. So I’ll share a bit of backstory for sure, and I hope it will become very clear that I’m doing so to help people understand ear training better rather than just out of curiosity about where we came from.

Christopher: So I got into ear training around 2007, 2008. I won’t tell the whole backstory here for sure, but just to set the scene. Around that time there were really only two options for ear training as far as people were concerned. One was the kind of traditional establishment and what they were providing for ear training, which to me in the UK and for a lot of people around the world, meant “I’m learning an instrument. I’m going to do some kind of graded exam system for that instrument. I encounter this thing called aural skills, or listening tests, in that context. And I’m gonna typically going to have one opportunity with my teacher a week before the exam to run through some drills and try and understand what the examiner is going to be asking me.”

Christopher: I can’t stress strongly enough how frustrating that was for me back in the day. And for me it was “aural skills”, like that’s what it was called in the exam grades I did. And I literally never heard of ear training. So from the age of whatever I would have been, like seven or eight, through to 20s, mid-20s even, taking instrument exams, learning music, I heard about aural skills all the time. But nobody used that phrase “ear training.”

Christopher: That may not seem important but it really is – because without that phrase I saw it as an assessment of my skills, what could I do. And because there was never really much training provided or talked about, I just saw it as an indictment of my ability. Like I could either pass that exam or I couldn’t, and hopefully I’ll be a bit better next year somehow. By osmosis I will have absorbed a bit.

Christopher: Of course hopefully anyone watching this show, listening to this show, understands aural skills are what ear training gives you. It should be presented as “here is a whole lot of area of music that you can study and learn in order to be able to pass the exam”. No disrespect to instrument teachers. There is a lot to cram into instrument lessons and for whatever reason that was never a big priority for them. So I went through a lot of years encountering aural skills, trying, failing, struggling, and going into my early 20s, mid-20s even, feeling like I just wasn’t very good at having a musical ear. Like I didn’t have it naturally. I was never going to be good at that stuff, and that was that.

Christopher: And then there was a big turning point around 2007, 2008 I guess, when I was working for a company that, long story short, I was doing a particular kind of ear training to help assess audio quality at that company. And I got this book that was like all these drills and exercises for recognizing frequency bands and has this gone up 3dB or down by 3dB. All of this really dirty stuff, like can you listen to a cymbal a thousand times and tell which one was different?

Christopher: Anyway that was really dry and boring, and it was actually super cool because what I found was that the more I did those exercises, the more I could just put on a piece of music and hear in rich, vivid detail what was going on. That was kind of my first glimpse of ear training. I think I shared some of this story recently when we were launching The Musician’s Ear and talking about active listening, which is kind of a sister subject to ear training in a lot of ways.

Christopher: But anyway it opened my eyes to this thing called ear training. I was seeing it in this audio context, audio quality and audio effects and that kind of thing, and audio frequencies. I stumbled upon that fact that actually that phrase is used in music, too. And for the first time, literally the first time after 15 years plus, 20 years?, not quite 20 years 15 years at least, I was clued into the fact that there was this whole body of knowledge around how do you learn aural skills. How do you learn to recognize notes by ear? Chords by ear? How do you learn to have better rhythm? All of this stuff that I had just assumed was beyond me. And there was this whole body of work called ear training that I could get involved with.

Christopher: So that was the other place where people were getting exposed to it. There were the folks who just saw it in the aural skills context because they were learning an instrument. And there were these intrepid explorers, one of which I became, seeking out could I do this for myself? Could I learn these skills? And back then in 2009 there wasn’t a great deal available for you, but it was possible. And that’s kind of the path I headed down.

Adam: Wow. Yeah. We’re dating ourselves. Like 2009 we didn’t have all these devices and all these interactive features that we have now so it’s definitely been a changing landscape. I know me personally it was aural skills and it was completely separate from instrument learning. Making that connection, it didn’t happen till much later for me either because it was just this other subject you had to take. So let’s pause the story and just really talk about what exactly ear training is. What did you discover through your exploration, reading books I’m sure, listening to different CDs, and all these different exercises you were going through?

Christopher: Yeah. I mentioned a few things there, like recognizing notes by ear, or intervals, or chords. What people think ear training is for the most part is doing drills and exercises so that you can identify particular things in music by ear. And that’s kind of true. That’s mostly true, but it’s also quite a limiting way to think about it. I’m sure we’ll be talking more about this. For example, back in 2009 you could get a book on ear training that would come with an accompanying CD. I wouldn’t name names, but you could get an expensive CD course for relative pitch that would purport to teach you all kinds of amazing things. And what it looked like was here’s an example, can you name it or not? And the more you practiced that the more you were able to go, oh that was a perfect fifth. Or, oh, that was a major chord. Or, ah, that’s a 1-4-5.

Christopher: You were able to figure stuff out by ear, which was super exciting to me because after dabbling with this for a bit I found I could start to play by ear and improvise. I wasn’t blowing the world away but it was literally the first time I felt like I could hear something and know what was going on. That was super cool. So that is kind of what people see ear training is and what they think it means.

Christopher: We in, I think 2009, when we launched easyeartraining.com, I believe we defined it as “anything someone does to improve their ear for music”. And even back then I could see it needed to be that broad because I had seen it from the audio perspective as well as the musical perspective. I had also started to experiment with our own ways, or my own ways, of developing these skills, which didn’t necessarily look like “listen to an example, can you name it, yes or no? Hopefully you’ll get better tomorrow”. So I could see that there were these ear training exercises which were definitely part of the picture, but ear training should be something bigger and grander and more impactful than that. So that was how we defined it.

Christopher: I think our new definition in this new course is a bit more thoughtful. It’s something like “developing your ear for better awareness and understanding and sensitivity to musical elements”, and maybe even “musical elements you hear in real life”. I think that captured it well. We’re not just talking about can you hear this and name it? We’re also talking about things like, can you tell if that note’s slightly out of tune? Or can you even tell that there are five instruments present, not just four? That’s where the active listening comes into the picture a little bit, it’s kind of a form of ear training or a subset perhaps.

Christopher: What’s important to understand is that ear training, whatever baggage you might have come to that term with, and for me there was all of this heavy baggage around instrument exams and passing tests. And then there was this new baggage around it’s doing drills and exercises. Whatever it means to you right now, all it literally is is the process is getting a good ear for music. And that’s going to look different for every musician. It’s going to be important to different people for different reasons. The end goal is going to look exciting in all different ways depending on what it is you want to do in music.

Christopher: But the process that gets you there is what we call ear training. This may seem like a really long answer to “what is ear training”. But it’s worth unpacking because a big part of the reason we’re doing this new course is, as I said, there’s a bit of an elephant in the room, which is… we did a survey recently and the statistics really kind of made me want to cry. Not least because, all humility aside, I’ve been literally trying to improve this area for 10 years now and it’s clearly not done. There is a long way to go. But our survey showed that literally 4% of the people who replied to me, out of the 500 people who replied from all different walks of life, 4% said they had a good experience with ear training in some way, shape, or form. Like they were happy with it, or they’d learned something, or it went well, or they enjoyed it. 96% of people who responded either hadn’t heard of it, had heard of it but not tried it, or had tried it and had a really bad experience.

Christopher: I don’t know what you think, Adam. It might just be worth unpacking each of those kind of different reasons for each of those. I’m pretty sure everyone watching this or listening to this finds themselves in one of those three camps. There’s 4% of you, four out of 100 of you, love ear training and you’re really winning with it. I’d like to think that has a high overlap with the members of Musical U who watch this. But regardless 96 of you out of every 100 I know are in one of those three camps.

Adam: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s really worth taking the time to talk about the different camps people find themselves in with ear training, and just unpacking that and trying to find solutions for it.

Christopher: Yeah. Well I think one other thing that was surprising in that survey that we did was the balance with those three categories. So it’s like: never heard of it, heard of it and never tried it, or tried it and had a bad experience. And then those lucky four in the 100 who got it. I was really surprised actually to find those three categories are quite equal, at least in our audience. We had a lot of respondents and the numbers came out roughly equal.

Christopher: That was another big part of why I wanted to make sure we did this episode, was for us, a company that was once called Easy Ear Training, for a third of our audience to say they’ve never heard of ear training, that hit me hard. That made me realize how far we’d moved away from this. We’ll talk more about that shortly. But those are the three camps. I’m sure if you’re watching or listening, you can relate to one or more of those.

Christopher: The first category, “never heard of it,” it kind of comes back to what I said before about my early experiences. I think everyone understands it’s possible to have a good ear for music, and obviously on this show we talk a lot about the talent myth and this idea that you’ve got to be born gifted or just naturally be able to do it. We won’t go down that tangent, but just to say I think a lot of people are in that camp of “if I don’t have a good ear, that’s just it. I’ll work on my fingering, and I’ll work on my sight reading and my theory, and I’ll get better as a musician. But the ear stuff, I just don’t have it.” So I think, unfortunately for kind of historical reasons, a lot of the music education people encounter these days is super instrument focused.

Christopher: I’ve talked to a lot of people on this show at this point from all around the world, all different kind of backgrounds in music education. It’s almost unanimous that, yeah, there is this issue that we focus so much on the instrument technique and on replicating the repertoire of the past that in a sense we’re training people to be very accurate note players but not really musicians. And in particular not really develop their musical ear. So that’s why I think there’s such a big category of people who have literally never heard of this idea of ear training and the fact that they could develop their ear for music.

Christopher: Then there’s this whole camp who’ve heard of it, come across it in some way, shape, or form, but haven’t tried it. Again, it’s kind of surprising that category is so big given that you can search the App Store, you can search Google, you can to go your library. You’ll find books, CDs, courses, MP3s, apps, you name it. There’s all kinds of ear training solutions at this stage but people haven’t tried it. And a lot of them are free. To be clear, we’ve tons on free material on our website including this show that covers some of the how if not the nitty-gritty of it. There’s tons of free stuff.

Christopher: So when we asked people is there a particular reason you haven’t tried ear training, I think the most interesting thing I can share is that pretty much all the reasons boiled down to, “I don’t have what it takes.” So some people said, “Ear training is something advanced,” like that’s something professional musicians do, or jazz musicians do. Or it’s something you get to later in learning music and I’ve just been learning for a year or two so I’m not ready for that. Some people said, “I’m not really strong on theory.” So clearly in their minds they were kind of lumping ear training and theory together, and they weren’t really interested in studying music theory so they hadn’t broached the ear training. Some people said, “It must be expensive,” like I guess they heard such good things about it they were like, “That must be really pricey.”

Christopher: A lot of people also, Adam you would know in our audience we’re predominantly adult music learners that we speak to and serve. And a lot of them were saying something along the lines of, “I didn’t do it when I was young.” So you can infer what they’re thinking is, “I can’t do it now. It’s too late for me.” And this was another kind of heart-breaking point from the survey, was just all of these people who’d come across the idea and probably got quite excited about it for a moment, but something they’d inherited culturally, some kind of baggage or misconception about ear training had them feeling like that’s not for me. So that’s the second category.

Christopher: I hope I presented that clearly enough that if you’re in that category you can relate to it. I think we won’t unpack every one of those points I just said are holding people back. But I’ll just summarize I think… they are all wrong. If you’re thinking you’re too old, or you’re thinking it needs to be expensive, or you’re thinking it’s advanced, or you’re thinking it’s too hard, or you’re thinking it’s just music theory, none of that is true. Again, I come back to that thing of ear training is not a fixed series of drills and exercises handed down from on high. It is a process of getting a good ear for music and whatever that looks like for you it is possible at whatever stage you’re at. So that’s the second camp.

Christopher: The third camp is “I tried it and had a bad experience”. And that’s really where I feel there’s this elephant in the room. There’s this topic that people aren’t really confronting I think very well, and I will take partial blame for that. As I said, I’ve been working in this area for about a decade and clearly the problem is not solved as it were. So a lot of people, the majority of people, the vast majority of people, who tried ear training have a really bad experience with it. And in our survey this came out with people saying it was difficult. It was frustrating. It was boring. Some people just swore a lot. I won’t repeat what they said. But some people had a real kind of visceral hatred of ear training.

Christopher: I literally went through answer by answer and tried to categorize, like did they have a good experience? Did they get results? Or was it a pretty bad time? Unfortunately the vast majority had a pretty bad time. That’s the other big reason I wanted to make sure we did this episode, and sooner rather than later. I feel like we’ve dropped the ball a bit in the sense that if a third of our audience are feeling that way about ear training something needs to be done because it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s quite a simple reason why it goes that way for people. I don’t know if we want to dig into that now or …

Adam: Yeah. I think it’s a great time. In doing some research we talked about all that’s out there, all that’s available, and what causes some of these perceptions. One of the things I keep coming up on is ear training equals perfect pitch, for example. That’s what you see a lot of the times. It’s not really that clear of a line between ear training and perfect pitch. I think that’s helping to cause that perception, well, I don’t have perfect pitch. I can’t develop perfect pitch, so why bother?

Adam: But here’s this whole other thing. There’s all this stuff you can still learn without even worrying about perfect pitch. If you’re thinking that out there listening, I don’t have perfect pitch. That’s okay. You actually might not even want perfect pitch. It can be just as much of a curse as a blessing.

Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a great case in point. I think, I hope, cross fingers. I think that’s one where we have done a podcast episode about that, and if we have we’ll link it in the show notes. I’m pretty sure we did. That’s a perfect case in point, where I’m not even certain we did because I take it so much for granted that we’ve told people this. Do you know what I mean? Like we talked about that a lot in the first few years of the company. I feel like the engineer in me is like, right, that problem’s solved let’s move on. And, of course, if you’re tuning in today for the first time you might not have even heard that idea, that perfect pitch is not the be-all and end-all. Actually there’s this whole thing called relative pitch. It can deliver all the same results, like naming chords and notes by ear, and playing by ear, and improvising. And I might have just blown someone’s mind right now by saying that. That is crazy to me, and that’s really why we need to … Anyway we’ll talk more about it, but why we kind of need to return to our roots a little bit.

Christopher: So that third category then, let’s talk about why it goes so badly for people. It is, as you say, it’s partly the misconceptions that people come in with. And a lot of that, I could rant and rail against society and our inherited ideas about music education. But the reality is everyone comes from a different background. We aren’t necessarily going to understand perfectly what ear training is, nor should we expect to. But the trouble is we’ve kind of gone more and more down this path and I say in society, in any Western society, UK, Australia, America. The Western world of music making over the last few hundred years has gone further and further down this path and it was a great interview actually, I’ll track down the details but I’m pretty sure Forrest Kinney on Tim Topham’s podcast did a really good job of explaining this historically and how we came to be at the stage we are.

Christopher: Long story short. If you look back right to Beethoven, Mozart, classical era there was this whole turning point that took music from being this creative, expressive art form where anyone could come up with their own ideas, to being something where we revered these great musicians and composers, and we saw music as something to be performed from sheet music. And your goal was to replicate the works of the masters as perfectly as possible. I’m sure anyone watching or listening to this who studied music for any length of time in almost any context today will have been handed that expectation. Like we’re going to learn to play the music that’s been written before and maybe there’ll be a little bit of improvising in there if you’re lucky and you’re doing jazz of blues, and you’ll be given a little thing to play around with.

Christopher: But generally speaking music is presented as perform what’s been written before art form. And you know the other person who talks really eloquently about this is Bradley Sowash. He talks about the insanity of an art form being handed to people in this way, as just your only goal, imagine doing it with visual art. Your only goal is to reproduce the great masterworks of the past. It would boggle our minds.

Christopher: Anyway that’s what’s happened with music. And the upshot for ear training is we’ve kind of forgotten that everyone can and should have a good musical ear. As I’ve described with my own experience, it’s become this kind of you might have it, you might not. If you do, great. If you don’t, no worries, you’ll still learn to play it like a perfect robot. I don’t want to go down into a pit of despair here, but that’s the world we find ourselves in. Because there’s so much to be hopeful for. I’ve just named a couple of the amazing music educators out there these days who are changing that and giving people the resources to turn it back into an expressive, creative art form.

Christopher: But just to put a point on that – we’ve gone down and down this path and it’s meant ear training has become a fraction of what it once was. It is this process of getting a good ear for music, something that everyone is capable of. And instead what people encounter it as is, do these exercises, take this test. You might do it. You might not. What a lot of it boils down to, and Adam, you used this word earlier which was spot on. It’s isolation. It’s the idea that even if you do ear training you’re doing it separate from your musical life. That’s really what we’ll be talking a lot about when presenting this course Ear Training for Beginners. Because this is the root cause of pretty much all those frustration messages we got in the survey. I spent a good several years talking one on one with people by email about ear training and I can guarantee the reason they’re frustrated, or bored, or they didn’t enjoy it, or they didn’t see the point, it’s because they were doing it in an isolated way.

Christopher: They were probably doing it because they felt they should, or they just wanted to give it a try. And what they got were these exercises and drills, and what they wanted to be doing was playing their instrument, and playing by ear and improvising. And this complete disconnect between those two things, it’s something we call the ear training trap. We did a short podcast episode on this in the past, specifically talking about the disconnection from your instrument. That’s kind of half of the answer, half of the puzzle.

Christopher: What it looks like is, I’ve got an ear training app and I’m going through the exercises. I’m getting pretty good at the exercises. Oh, I’ve completed the app. And now I pick up my instrument. I can’t play by ear. I can’t improvise. I don’t know to write music myself, and somehow all of that time and effort I’ve spent on ear training kind of got me nothing. I shouldn’t be too rude about apps. We have apps. We got started with apps, but that’s the reality people find themselves in whether it’s apps, or books, or CDs, or courses. It’s this isolation of ear training that’s really at the heart of the problem.

Adam: Yeah, you mentioned we started with apps. We still have apps at Musical U that get downloaded every single day. So along the way you had a pivot where you took all the stuff that was in the apps, which is where you started, to Easy Ear Training and then ended up creating courses, and memberships, and all of this great material. All of this stuff to pull people through their journey, to show them how not only can they learn these skills, but then they can apply into their musical life, on to their instrument. I’d like to unpack that a little bit, that part of the journey.

Christopher: Yeah. Well, this is maybe, apart from my own personal backstory, this is maybe why it’s relevant and useful to share that kind of Easy Ear Training / Musical U story. Because that big pivot you referred to came out of exactly what I just described, this ear training trap. If we pick up in like 2015, I had spent 2009-2015 building Easy Ear Training. I had kind of dabbled in ear training enough to know it was incredibly useful and had this enormous potential. But everything I found out there for it was really boring and it just didn’t seem like it should be.

Christopher: You know music is fun, and it’s exciting, and it’s creative. And then I would do these ear training exercises, and they’d give me some results but the process was so unmusical. I was just like, “There has to be a better way.” I’m geeky so I started making iPhone apps because the iPhone was just coming out. Anyway, I won’t tell the whole story. I’ve told it elsewhere, but this app thing kind of snowballed. I had this clear vision of what ear training could be and what it could deliver for musicians. I just kind of plowed back every penny we made into building this company and publishing free stuff on our website. I can’t tell you how much it blew my mind that we could become the leading website for ear training online with easyeartraining.com.

Christopher: I did it because it baffled me that there wasn’t that website. Like here was that thing that could transform the musical life of any musician on the planet. How is there not a website for that? There was web stuff. You could Google and find a page on a website or a chapter in a music theory book. But I was like, how is there not a home of ear training online? So anyway I just kind of heavily reinvested, built the company. I won’t go into the tumultuous journey of trying to be an entrepreneur when that’s not necessarily your natural inclination. But we kind of made some progress and I think it’s fair to say we became the market leader in ear training, at least for adult musicians, like people who were coming to music over the age of 16 wanting to learn music or coming back to music.

Christopher: We really specialized in that. We had apps. We had ear training albums which were quite innovative at the time. We had eBooks with audio in them. That was also just trying to push the boundary of where technology could help make this fun and easy. I kind of found myself in 2015 in this position where we were kind of the market leader. We had these products that were super popular among the people who bought them and used them. We had this free material that people loved. We were doing some good, but every time I’d have a conversation with someone I was encountering this ear training trap. I was encountering this thing where they loved the product and they were doing well with the training. But it just didn’t seem to be hitting in their musical life. They didn’t seem to be really getting the payoff.

Christopher: I could see from my own experience that’s because it was being done in isolation. There’s only so much you can do about that in a product, or in an app, or a course, or a book. Those are great for providing that kind of practice phase where you’re doing exercises and drills. But it was really hard to imagine how can we solve this problem in that form. So I kind of made a couple of moves in 2015 that were a bit risky in retrospect, while I knew at the time I just kind of went for it.

Christopher: One was to, as you say, move away from here is a product that will teach you this thing, ear training, to can we provide an all inclusive solution? Can we give people an environment and the resources so they can actually get that payoff, that impact from all the ear training effort? That came down to a couple of things. One was making it really flexible. So letting people mix and match different skills, different areas, depending on their interests, move flexibly through the training depending on their progress. And the other huge part was doing it in a community context, somewhere where they could see other people training and discuss it. They could get expert help, like our team could be there. Instead of just me answering a question by email and then never how that goes, actually be able to help support people day-in, day-out moving through this. I think a moment ago you put it as “pulling” people though it. Sometimes it feels like that. I like to think we’re supporting people through it.

Christopher: But, as you say, it’s about actually getting them through that journey. I say that was risky because it was a huge product to change for us. We had the successful suite of individual products of various kinds, and it was kind of taking all of that and saying, it’s all or nothing. And, by the way, it’s a subscription, which I’m sure a lot of people watching and listening can relate to. Not everyone loves signing up for Netflix month after month however much they love Netflix and all it does for them. That subscription thing is often a sticking point. But that was the only realistic way we could provide this kind of solution.

Christopher: And the other big risky move which is really what brings us here today even more than that, is I could see that part of the problem was all of the baggage around ear training. So I used to tell people when I would discuss marketing over that period, like 2009-2015 and I guess a little bit after that too. We were still called Easy Ear Training. I’d discuss marketing with experts, or with other entrepreneurs, and talk to them about how we were getting on. I would say to them, you know we’ve kind of got this problem where most musicians have never heard of ear training and those who have had a really bad experience with it. I wrestled with that for several years, and we did the best we could. We kind of tried to present how it was different, and better, and people should try it.

Christopher: And the upshot was in 2015, I was just, if we’re going to do a whole new thing, maybe let’s step away from that term and let’s talk about what people actually care about. It’ll come as no surprise to people who are watching or listening to this, but the word we moved to was “musicality”, which to me it captures much better. I won’t go long on this because in episode 200 recently we had our members share what the word means to them and they did a much better job of it than I could. But, in short, it captures that end payoff. If captures the kind of musician you want to be, who’s just kind of easily, naturally expressing themselves in music, playing whatever they hear on the radio, of being able to pick up their instrument and play what they hear in their heads. Being able to improvise, or go to the local jam session or orchestra or band, or start a band, and just feel comfortable doing whatever you want to in music. Because it is inside you in some sense.

Christopher: That was obviously from a business, marketing perspective, a huge change to step away from ear training, stop referring to the company, the brand as Easy Ear Training. Change our domain and all of the web stuff from easyeartraining.com to musical-u.com, and really grow into this brand of Musical U and this idea of musicality. I really wasn’t sure it would work. To some extent the jury is still out, but over the last few years, I’m sure you feel the same way, Adam, having kind of seen a bit of both worlds when you first joined the team. Musicality just feels like so much more a natural fit for what we are all about at our company. And ear training is totally at the heart of it. It’s still the crux of all the training we do, like 80% of the modules at Musical U are ear training in some sense. But what people come for is the musicality and the ear training is just kind of the means to that end.

Adam: Yeah. I have to confess when I first joined the team, I was, “Musicality? What is that?” It definitely spurred a journey of my own to rediscover that in my life. We’re adults and sometimes you have to take time away from music and then come back to it. It’s this great circular journey that I know I’ve been on. And I’ve talked to so many of our members that are on a similar path where coming back to it is just so invigorating. And when you do it through this integrated approach, through this process, it makes it so much more exciting, so much more fun. Because you’re using it every single day. You mentioned something in there about when the company became Musical U and it was really self-guided. People could mix and match what skills they wanted to learn when. It was really this guided exploration is what I would call it.

Adam: But while we’re talking about this particular course, Ear Training for Beginners, we’re talking about a very guided, step-by-step methodology which we haven’t really done at Musical U much until very recently. I’d just like to explore that pivot back to a more core structure.

Christopher: Yeah. So I guess the question that might be on people’s minds is “that all sounds nice. Great. Good job. What’s the problem?” You know, we made this shift to musicality. We’ve got this environment where people could be supported through. Ear training is put in a musical context. We do what we call Integrated Ear Training, meaning it’s actually a part of all the music you listen to and play and understand the theory of. It works really well.

Christopher: But, as you say, what we’re launching this week is Ear Training for Beginners. I guess it comes back to me feeling a bit stupid in our recent conversations when we were talking about having moved away from the phrase ear training, and those survey results that made me realize it might have been a smart business, marketing move at the time but in a sense we really dropped the ball. I feel like we’ve been letting down a segment of the music learning population who know they want ear training. The people who’ve heard of it but not yet tried it, or the people who’ve heard of it, tried it, and not yet succeeded with it. Maybe, hopefully, they find their way to musicality training and realize that ear training’s at the heart of that.

Christopher: But frankly we’ve been doing such a bad job of explaining that. In retrospect we just moved too firmly away from ear training is one way to look at it. You know I was so clear that this was the way to talk about it, and this was the way to serve people, I forgot that we might need to explain what ear training is, and how it’s the means to the end, and why it so important, and how to do it right. So I kind of feel like we dropped the ball in the sense of probably in 2015 we should have moved away from ear training and rebranded and so on. But we probably should have kept talking about ear training a lot more than we did, and it probably shouldn’t have taken us 200 episodes to talk about “what is ear training” here on the show.

Christopher: So that’s kind of the reason we decided to do something different. Part of that obviously is this episode, is just trying to get that message back into what we put out there for free and to make sure that at least anyone who follows this show, or follows Musical U, understands how we see ear training, and the biggest problem with it and what to do about it. We can talk a little bit more about that in a moment to make sure everyone goes away with that clear in their minds.

Christopher: But the other things is, for all the benefits of that all-inclusive solution and the membership at Musical U, there are particular circumstances where a course is valuable, is the short way to put it. You can literally go back to past episodes of this show and you’ll hear me railing against courses and talking about how there can be no one size fits all course for musicality. We totally stand by that. That is true. And if you look at the kind of journey our members have from zero in some cases through to a whole fully fledged set of skills, there can be no one-size-fits-all linear course for that transition.

Christopher: That being said, over the last year we’ve been exploring are there ways to get the benefits of courses without pretending all of its stuff can be sensibly fit into a single straight line course? There are, as anyone who’s taken a course can attest, there are benefits to a course. You understand what you’re getting into. It often has a fixed time scale. There’s a clear start point and end point, and you understand “I will do this step and then I will do that step”. There’s a lot that’s appealing about that when it’s a good fit for the material. So we tried this for the first time last year with Foundations of a Musical Mind, which if you’re a long-time listener or viewer you’ll have seen that launch and how we explained at the time that it’s just not part of Musical U membership. So in that case we had an outside instructor. It was this particular Kodaly methodology. We were building a new foundation from scratch and taking nothing for granted.

Christopher: We followed that up more recently with The Musician’s Ear. I alluded to that earlier. It’s all about active listening. In that case we were teaching one specific skill, something that’s normally missed out on. People don’t realize they’re missing it. It’s deeply tied to musicality but it’s not quite what we specialize in in the Musical U membership. It didn’t quite fit into here’s a new training module or two. So we wanted to put that together and have it in a 10-week program that could kind of immerse people in that skill and start from the very beginning because most people have never been introduced to that.

Christopher: Most recently we just had a course called the Circle Mastery Experience, and that was recent enough that I won’t rehash it all here. But suffice to say: isolated topic from music theory, approaching it in a musicality way instead. And, again, zero start point and very clear end point. You can probably figure out the common factor there is these are all cases where we were starting from scratch and trying to teach one particular thing with a very clear outcome. And in that case I think courses, and we’ve been finding, courses are a beautiful complement to what we offer in that all-inclusive membership. I don’t what to make this out as this is all about Musical U and our product line, because you may care about that, you may not. But I hope everyone will understand the more generalizable point there, that there are cases in your musical life where you need an all-encompassing, flexible solution. Just like in personal lessons where the teacher will provide you, where they can guide you through the wilderness as it were.

Christopher: And there are other cases where it does make sense to take that fixed course from A to B. It’s quite important to figure out which of those any given skill is, because it makes a huge difference to your success. So rambling, rambling. But all of that just to say there are cases where courses are a really good thing, and in particular if you’re trying to start from scratch and get to a certain point. You can kind of assume everyone’s got the same background and they’re aiming for the same thing, which is the biggest issues with trying to teach the whole of musicality in that way. So that’s what brought us to, why don’t we have an ear training for beginners course?

Christopher: It’s one of those ideas where once you hear of it, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, whoops.” You know it comes out of the thing where we moved too firmly away from ear training, and even though we were still literally doing ear training day in, day out with Musical U members, I wasn’t thinking any longer in that term of thinking can I help people with ear training? So our company wasn’t really thinking about making ear training products. We were just thinking about helping people gain the skills of musicality.

Christopher: And so, like this podcast episode, it’s very overdue in a sense, because the 10 years we’ve been focused on this, we’ve been trying to help the adult music learner get a better ear for music. For a long time we did that and called it ear training. For the last four years I guess, we’ve done that still but not called it ear training. It was just suddenly clear it was time to come full circle and put something out there that was very clear-cut. This is about ear training for beginners.

Adam: I think one of the common factors you brought up when talking about learning all these skills, whether it’s Foundations of the Musical Mind, Active Listening, Circle of Fifths, any of these topics that we went over. It’s about the immersion and fully learning about it, and then exploring it, playing it.

Adam: I know we have this process here at Musical U that really allows people to just immerse themselves into a topic. Explore, and play, and enjoy it. I’d love to hear more about that process.

Christopher: Yeah. Well, I want to do what we always try and do when we’re talking about a product or a product launch here on the show, which is make sure what we’re sharing is useful to you whether or not you buy the product. And so obviously we hope if you’ve never tried ear training or you want to get started, you’ll consider this new course, Ear Training for Beginners.

Christopher: But I did say before I want to share the solution, as it were, to that isolated ear training to make sure that whatever happens you go away and you have more success with ear training. So as you say, Adam, we have this particular approach and it’s an approach we call Integrated Ear Training, by contrast with that “isolated” ear training which is by default what everyone is doing. This has really been developed, primarily since that pivot to Musical U. You know there were pieces of it in place before for sure. Like from that first definition of ear training I was trying to make sure it was a bit more holistic than the standard.

Christopher: But it was really once we were in the context of Musical U, we were working alongside members every day, seeing how they got on, seeing what the sticking points were, seeing how we could support them and guide them, that it really began to take shape. And since day one at Musical U we’ve had a particular framework that we call the Learn, Practice, Apply framework for Integrated Ear Training. What it means is any module inside Musical U is in one of those three categories, and everything the wide world considers ear training is just our “Practice” modules.

Christopher: When I say it like that you can probably suddenly get a sense of what might be missing, all of those other solutions including, in all truth including our own, the original apps and the original eBooks and training albums to some extent. All of those really just hit one of three phases of ear training. You need to learn stuff which will help you understand the concept, help give you a kind of mental framework or structure to know how all of the exercises and drills fit in. Then you practice and you get those core skills, and that’s great. There’s a ton of stuff out there to do that phase for sure.

Christopher: And then you need to apply it. You don’t do ear training for five years and then hopefully one day you can magically improvise. In our world view and what we’ve seen work incredibly well with members is you want to get to that apply phase as soon as possible. And, Adam, you made reference there to the fact that we’ve kind of been bringing this into our courses in varying ways. So the clearest cut example is with the Circle Mastery Experience: what all of the world is doing is just the “learn” bit, frankly. They’re teaching people the concepts of the circle of fifths, how to understand it, what it means, what the words are, what the terminology is. But does anyone actually really practice with the circle of fifths? Does anyone really apply it in more than just can I remember the key signature? No.

Christopher: We’ve talked about that enough on the show, and we have a great episode about the circle of fifths with Andrew and Anastasia that I won’t rehash here. But just to say I think this is one of those mental frameworks where once it’s explained to you, I feel like you just become very conscious of when one of those three things is missing. In particular with ear training I hope anyone coming away from this episode is going to be asking themselves, if I want to learn intervals, or I want to learn to recognize chord progressions by ear, or I want to tighten up my rhythm, yes I’m going to need exercises and drills. But have I made sure I actually understand how those drills are going to connect to the theory behind this, the concepts, the structures, the frameworks of music? And as soon as I start doing those exercises, am I applying this? Whether that’s to improvise or play by ear, or write your own music, or just analyzing the music you’re already playing, are you actually going to take those drills and exercises and make use of them in your real musical life?

Christopher: It’s probably a different episode but we have this concept at Musical U called the trifecta where the three parts of becoming a musician are your ear skills, your instrument technique, and understanding music theory. And a big part of what I just talked about is the fact that people do each of those three things to varying degrees, but they’re often not drawing the lines in between all of them. So in our worldview there’s this diagram with arrows going between each of those three things.

Christopher: And the Integrated Ear Training is really about saying “make sure you have those arrows”. And make sure that when you’re doing the drills you understand how it relates to theory. I’m not saying you need to study theory in great depth. Often it’s just kind of some basic concepts that let you fit that ear training exercise into your brain in a useful way and make sure you’re applying it. Because all the drills in the world won’t help you do the things you actually care about doing in your musical life.

Christopher: So we have this Learn, Practice, Apply framework. That’s what we’ve been bringing into our courses as much as possible. It’s what’s we’ve put throughout this new Ear Training for Beginners course. So, yes, we have like literally seven or eight years where we were developing exercises and exercises, seeing what worked, perfecting them, figuring out the tips, figuring out the sticking points, getting those drills really, really good. And that’s the practice bit. But we also bring this learn bit, and this apply bit. We’ve found that is really what makes this a completely different ear training experience for people.

Adam: It reminds me of another podcast I listen to frequently where the host will say, “If you read 100 books about swimming, does that mean you know how to swim?” No. Eventually you have to jump in the water. Right? And that’s where all these things tend to come together. Personally for me thinking about this, just from my own musical journey this would have been huge if I had done this more when I was learning ear training, when I was going through the conservatory. I did it in isolated little bits where I would sing the intervals on the trumpet before I would play them. I’m a trumpet player.

Adam: But it was never holistic. And I think personally for me it’s a bit hard not to be disappointed because I feel like I missed out on all these things I could have been doing. But you know I think it’s a great time to take stock of where you are now and even if you don’t come along for the course or come along with Musical U, any of the courses or membership, just to understand that there are all these great things that you can still do. And you can go in this other direction and just continue learning. And I think that’s phenomenal.

Christopher: Yeah. Well you know I was saying to you the other day, this whole course release is a bit bittersweet for me because I’m super proud and excited of what we put together and the chance to have an impact with it. But I’m also kind of kicking myself that it’s taken us this long. The same goes for this episode, where I know there will be people in the audience who’ve had light bulbs going off, being like, “Oh, that’s why I had so much frustration.” Or, “That’s why I completed the app but I still couldn’t really do anything.” I think once that clicks in your head it just opens up this whole new possibility. It’s probably been clear in this conversation, this is a topic where if you get me talking I have to keep catching myself and being like, “Let’s not rant and rave about that. Let’s not be too rude about this, that, and the other. Let’s not be too annoyed about the state of things.”

Christopher: But I try and frame it all positively, and this is a case in point, where putting this course out there, it’s a chance for us to really move the needle on how people experience ear training. I want to mention there’s a couple of things we’re doing to try and make that happen. One is, you know I mentioned before one sticking point for people can be “ear training must be really expensive”. Like if it’s that amazing, it must be pricey. We made the decision to price this course at a point where it’s affordable for any hobbyist musician, and I’m really excited about that, not least because it still includes the kind of unparalleled personal support and guidance we always provide at Musical U. So this isn’t like a Udemy course where you could email the course instructor and hopefully get an answer back one day. This is just like our membership where we’re going to be in there with the students day in day out, helping with questions, sticking points. Helping keep them moving forwards. So I’m really excited to be able to price it at a point where we can still do that and anyone can get access.

Christopher: And the other thing I’m really excited about, but I’m not really allowed to talk about yet, is our teachers program. All I can say for now is just if you are a teacher, and the stuff I’ve been talking about today and this idea of making ear training integrated to the extent that it’s actually fun and enjoyable and effective, and connected with theory and instrument stuff, if that’s exciting to you we would love to work with you to get that into your students’ hands. I don’t know what we’re doing for this, you can get in touch with us. We’re kind of behind the scenes getting some stuff together. But if you are interested in that just shoot an email to hello at musicalitynow.com and we’ll get you taken care of.

Christopher: So I’m really excited that we can do those two things to hopefully get a bigger impact with this course than it could otherwise have. Hopefully in a year, three years, whenever it is, I hopefully won’t be so prone to ranting and raving.

Adam: That’s one of the things that I’m most excited about, getting this …

Christopher: Christopher not ranting and raving any more.

Adam: Christopher not ranting and raving. I’m not going to hold my breath on that one. No, The teacher’s program. I think that’s going to be phenomenal. I’m looking forward to that as well because having taught private lessons myself, you know, teachers are so stressed for time. It can be so difficult. I don’t want to go on a big diatribe about it but it’s a very difficult thing to balance out lessons and practice exams and all these things that teachers do have to do.

Christopher: Yeah. I’ll just say that we did a teacher survey recently and this was another point at which I kind of wanted to cry a bit, was just hearing how ear training is approached. No disrespect or judgment of the teachers. As you say, there’s a ton for them to cram in and they’re got all kinds of pressures and responsibilities. But from my perspective knowing what’s possible in ear training and what we can potentially do to help with that, I was just looking at those responses and being, “Oh, this could be so much better.” So, yeah, likewise, I’m super excited about the teacher program. If anybody wants to get involved, hello at musicalitynow.com.

Adam: Fantastic. We look forward to hearing from you. So where can people find out more about Ear Training for Beginners?

Christopher: Yeah. We should mention that for sure. Eartrainingcourse.com is the domain. If you just go to eartrainingcourse.com it’ll take you straight to the details of this course and you’ll find all the information you need.

Adam: And I have to tell a joke about Christopher because when we were getting ready to launch he said, “We’ve actually owned this domain for a long time and we never used it. So clearly I’ve been thinking about this and somehow we got distracted.”

Christopher: We could have framed the whole conversation around that point, like the domain purchase, domain expiry, and domain repurchase of eartrainingcourse.com. But we are finally going to have something worthy of that name, and I hope everyone will go take a look.

Adam: Any parting words today, Christopher?

Christopher: I think just to cycle back… I never like to end on “Come buy our product.” I think I just want to make sure everyone is coming away from this with the most important learning point, which is: ear training is for everyone. It is the means to the end of having a good ear for music, which powers everything from playing by ear, to writing your own music, to jamming and collaborating easily. It is universally accessible, whatever age you are, whatever background you’re coming from, whatever theory knowledge you have or don’t have, whatever instrument, style of music, ear training is for you.

Christopher: And if you do it in the right way it is not a hard slog. It is not endless dry, abstract drills. It is something that feels as musical as anything you do in your musical life. And if you take away this one idea, that the biggest problem is isolated ear training, and the biggest thing you can do for yourself is to connect with theory, connect it with your instrument, make sure you’re always learning what you need to, and applying what you learn not just practicing. Not just that middle phase. I think if people just take away that we’ve done good work today.

Adam: Fantastic. Well, I always look forward to speaking with you again, Christopher. Maybe I’ll host another episode in the near future and we’ll talk about another subject.

Christopher: Absolutely. I would love that. Cheers, Adam.

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The post What Is Ear Training? (and why does it normally fail?) appeared first on Musical U.

Dave is the author of the brand new book, The Perpetual Beginner, A Musician’s Path to Lifelong Learning. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read that will be relevant and impactful to anybody who enjoys Musicality Now.

We are excited to have Dave Isaacs back on the show to share some of the powerful ideas and stories from “The Perpetual Beginner”.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Why so many music learners find themselves stuck in the “beginner” phase, even after months, years or even decades of learning.
•  The painful experience that opened Dave’s eyes to the downside of respecting tradition and having reverence for doing things in the most technically correct way.
• Why some teachers discourage students from returning to earlier, easier material – but the two important reasons you should be doing this regularly.

Plus: we’re so keen to get this book into as many music learners’ hands as possible, we’re giving away five copies, shipped to your door, absolutely free! Listen for the details in the episode.

If you’ve ever found your enthusiasm and motivation waning, or you’ve felt stuck and frustrated at how long it’s taking to reach a higher level, or you’ve felt torn between doing things “the right way” and doing things “your way” – you’re going to love how this episode helps you.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Nashville Guitar Guru
• Dave Isaacs – The Perpetual Beginner
• Musicality Now – Follow Your Ear, with Dave Isaacs
• Shunryu Suzuki – Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice
• Christopher “Preacher Boy” Watkins

Transcript

Dave: Hi I’m Dave Isaacs, They call me the Nashville guitar guru and the author of the new book Perpetual Beginner. This is Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome back to the show Dave thanks for joining us today.

Dave: Thank you so much for having me, it’s great to be back.

Christopher: I am really excited about your new book The Perpetual Beginner and in our first conversation on the show we talked a bit about your own back story and your transition from classical guitar into revisiting it in country rock and learning some improv along the way and the kind of twists and turns your own path went through that led you to be the teacher you are today.

And we talked in there a little bit about your blog where you’ve been publishing, which is also called The Perpetual Beginner, and I’d love if we could begin just by talking about that phrase and what it means to you. Why is this book called The Perpetual Beginner?

Dave: Well the idea started when I started to realize that the majority of people that I was working with, or at least a really large percentage of the people I was working with had played the guitar for many, many, many years and were expressing lots of frustration that they still felt like beginners, or they would say, “Well, I started playing guitar five years ago.” Or, “I picked up the guitar in high school and that was twenty years ago or even thirty, but I still feel like a beginner.” And there was an ongoing discussion in an online line group that I moderate about what transitioning into an intermediate player actually meant.

Dave: And I realized that so many people fall into that category and if I really look at it, it seems to be that a really large percentage of people around the world that play the guitar probably fall into that category. and so, I started thinking about how we identify the things that a player needs to absorb and ultimately master to feel like they can actually play.

Dave: And it struck me that ultimately what that is about is not a particular level of skill, but about a level of confidence that when you get up to do what you’re going to do, that it’s going to happen, more or less the way you wanted it to.

Dave: Because you’re never going to achieve perfection as a player, I don’t care what anybody says, but you want to a least feel like you can walk on a stage and deliver a performance. And that to me is the benchmark for when you’ve moved up to this next level.

Dave: So then, extending that idea a little further, and a lot of people immediately, on hearing the phrase, will also, if they’ve heard the phrase, “Beginner’s Mind,” will connect to that, which is this idea of maintaining a beginner’s enthusiasm and openness and, this comes from, I’m not going to say the first name right, so I’m not going to try, but the writer’s name is Suzuki, a Japanese writer, maybe philosopher, but the book is called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. And the way that he describes it is an attitude of openness and enthusiasm for any task or any area that you approach. And it struck me that that mindset is a great way to get past that perpetual beginner feeling, and at the same time, the phrase itself is something to cultivate because there’s a lot of power in remembering what you felt like when you first started to play and you knew nothing but it was all exciting, and you didn’t care that you didn’t know how to do anything.

Dave: It was not an obstacle. I mean, obviously you had to learn how to do things, but it wasn’t a psychic obstacle that you had to defeat to be able to do better, the way that it becomes for almost everybody at some point.

Christopher: I really want to dig into this a little more because I think that situation you described of, often an adult, but a long-time music learner who still considers themselves in some sense a beginner, it’s so prevalent, as you say, maybe most guitar players, most instrument players I think, and certainly a lot of our audience at Musical U would have felt that frustration of, “I thought I’d be better by now.

Dave: Right.

Christopher: And I wonder… I think a lot of them jump to the conclusion that they’re lacking, you know, there’s something missing and that’s why I’m not better by now. And maybe I’m not talented or gifted enough. Is that what’s missing compared to those who succeed and go on to that intermediate or pro stage quicker, or is there something else that keeps people in that beginner phase?

Dave: Well, I think there are lots of people who are talented that don’t choose to develop it, so that’s a separate point. I think talent is great for… I think when you are given a gift of musical aptitude, it’s easier to move through the process. I think you learn faster, certain things come more naturally and someone that feels that they don’t have that gift, looks at a person like that and says, “Well, I can’t do that, so how am I ever going to get to that point?”

Dave: And I write about… I wrote a whole chapter about this in the book called The Talent Trap, which is on the one side thinking that you don’t have talent and therefore you are not going to be able to get to where you want to go and on the other side, someone that does have aptitude hitting a wall because it’s been easy up to that point, and not knowing how to proceed from there, because I think everybody has a ceiling.

Dave: Now whether someone like a Paul McCartney ever reaches his ceiling, he may never have. We could talk about any given musician and say, “Well, you know, they peaked at such and such.” But, there’s the handful of people that just seem to have this endless fountain of creativity but for most people you’ve got to go back to the drawing board and cultivate it.

Dave: So what’s missing, I think is number one, maintaining that positive mindset, being excited by what you’re doing, no matter whether it’s challenging or not. So at the end of a practice session, even if you’re feeling discouraged knowing that it’s going to go away, that you don’t ever feel like a bad day practicing is going to make you quit.

Dave: That’s that the first thing. And then the other is to have a clear game plan, is to be able to recognize that any kind of a challenge in playing an instrument is, or at least a physical challenge, if there’s something that you can’t accomplish on the instrument, there is a technical reason, you can break any technical problem down into its component elements and solve them one at a time. You can do the same thing with musical problems. You isolate where is the problem. This is the thing that my teachers taught me how to do and it’s the most powerful tool that I have.

Dave: And it’s given me the confidence to know that if I can’t do something today, I can at least figure out how it was done and figure out how we might get to being able to accomplish that, whether I choose to put that time in, or not.

And I think that’s huge, because that keeps the door open all the time.

Christopher: I think the way you talk about this is so fascinating and you know, the actual meaning of beginner can be, “I’m stuck in the beginner phase.” Or, I’m taking the taking the beginner’s mind to it. The fact that that’s common to both groups, those who consider themselves gifted and those who don’t and is maybe for those who get an easy start, the reason they plateau and struggle is that they never had to cultivate that beginner’s mind, they never had to absorb that idea of how they approach their music learning because maybe it came more easily than to others. As you say, it’s a trap whichever camp you’re in. And one thing you touch on a few times in the book, is the idea that what you just referred to there, the technique and technicalities of playing can become an extreme focus for people and is maybe part of what stops them gaining the right relationship with music or a fully fledged relationship with music throughout their life.

Christopher: Could you talk a little bit about that. What are they missing out on if their focused purely on, “Can I play this chord, or can I master this fingering?”

Dave: Well, I think that it’s that the… when your emphasis is on the mechanics to the exclusion of the music, I mean I just said that you need to be able to look at the mechanics and break things down and there are people who have done an amazing job of really looking at, “This is how the body works, this is how the instrument works, and you are looking to interface this mechanism with this one.” Or whatever it is, and that there is a logic to that. So there’s a lot of validity to that and that approach.

Dave: But that’s only one side of the equation and I think there’s a lot of people, this is going to sound really mean, but I think there are a lot of people, and it’s not a put down to guitar players, I think it’s an inherent challenge to guitarists, because a guitar to me, is a geometric and therefore highly visual instrument and so many people learning the guitar through shapes and diagrams and I realized, and I would say fairly recently, that that is the way that I made sense of the guitar neck from the beginning and then I looked at my experience with math in school and I was terrible at algebra and the equations and things like that seemed so abstract. But geometry and trigonometry made perfect sense. So applying that idea to a guitar neck, whoa, of course, sure.

Dave: And then whether, it probably spins off into fractals and all kinds of crazy stuff that I don’t even really know how to talk about, but given that, if you’re focused on those shapes and formations, your ears might just shut off or it might not even occur to you that, “Oh, there’s a sound there,” and it’s the only explanation I can possibly have for the way I hear some people playing, is one of the challenges that I hear from people all the time, is, “Well, I learned all my scales and I’ve got my alternate picking up to 168 beats per minute and I did all this, but I still can’t play a solo.” Well, that’s basically like saying, I have learned grammar and I have memorized the dictionary but I still can’t talk.

Dave: So, if you’re not aware that there’s no meaning behind what you’re doing, it’s like learning a language transliterated and not having any idea what the words mean.

Dave: And I think that’s one of the problems I find, I’m going to put the blame squarely on guitar teachers who are not thoughtful teachers and there are many, many, many who are, but I can’t tell you how many times someone comes to me and says, “Well, you’re my third teacher, you’re my fifth. And all so and so did was say ‘well what do you want to learn today’ or ‘I’m going to show you how to play this song’”

Dave: And it was always “Well, just do this.” It was always, “Here’s the how, here’s where to put your fingers,” but there was never a “what”.

Dave: It’s if you put your fingers here, this will happen, well, what did I just do, what chord is that? I don’t know. “Well, you’re not supposed to have to know, what about the gifted people?” I’m going to go off on a little bit… not a rant here, okay but Nashville, and I say this with great love, is like the world capital of savant musicianship. There are more people here who are amazing at what they do that have very little training or real knowledge about it. And some of them are deeply superstitious about learning about what they do.

Dave: And I mean most of the pro players that I know would not fall into this category, most of the pros I know are professionals because they learned a craft. No matter what kind of gift they might have had. I don’t know anyone who’s working at a high level professionally who would say, “Well, you know, this is just my god-given talent. And if I mess with learning about it, it’s going to somehow interfere.”
Dave: Honestly I hear that probably more from songwriters and artists because I think if you… and this was another insight… I’m going to bounce around quite a bit here, but this was something else that occurred to me in writing the book is that when you study music formally, you are being trained to be a working musician, rather than being trained to be a creative artist, at least in my experience and that’s a separate topic road we can go down later. But it does say something about this split and whether you want to say it’s left-brain, right-brain or Apollo or Dionysus, or whatever, it mirrors the whole ways that people fall on one side or another of favoring order or favoring freedom and the ability to explore. So I may have lost the original question.

Dave: Oh, I know what it was. There are a lot people who are teaching guitar that only show people how and don’t teach them anything about the what and my own experience is that when I was physically capable of exploring on the instrument, I absolutely fell in love with that and it’s something that I never want to lose the ability to do, but learning about what I was doing, made me a better musician and helped me learn music because I think of when I was studying classical guitar, especially early on and playing music that was way above what I was able to comprehend. And so I know that I had just memorized a series of moves. That there really was no directing the performance in the sense of, “I am singing to you and I am in control of what’s happening here.”

Dave: It was strictly mechanical and I might have even learned to crescendo here or change the tone there, or all those things that were written into my score, but all of those things are things that you can do technically and then you learn to parrot a performance. And obviously I’m speaking very generally and I don’t know that anyone falls into any one of these categories quite so neatly, but I think there are a lot of people out there that teach in that way, they’re teaching geometry, they’re teaching calisthenics and movement and they’re not teaching so much music. And that’s where people fall into the trap but I don’t know that that comes necessarily from a technical predisposition. I don’t know if that comes from having the gift for it, because I think the greatest gift honestly, is the ear and the ability to comprehend music because that’s what leads you down the road in the first place.

Dave: When it comes to learning the mechanics I mean, some people are certainly more coordinated than others, I mean, I think about trying to learn how to coordinate how to coordinate a layup or a jump shot when I was a kid, which I really had great difficulty with but I didn’t care enough to work at doing that, whereas with the guitar, I cared and that opens up all kinds of other questions we can get into but the book gets into that as well, as far as, why did I care about this and not that. And there again are your predispositions that lead you in one direction or another.

Christopher: Yeah. And I love that you talk so early in the book about the connection to music. In a sense, the whole book is about having a rich and sustained positive relationship with music throughout that learning process, throughout your life. And I think what we just discussed is one of three things you identify as kind of, sometimes keeping people from that connection or being a barrier to the true connection to music, which is playing notes instead of music as you put it.

Christopher: The other two are living on the edge and going it alone. And I’d love if we could just touch briefly on those so that people can identify, “Oh, am I doing that, a bit of that in my musical life?”

Dave: Okay. Well, the living on the edge idea started with a student of mine who would express frustration one day that everything he was trying to do was difficult. And it’s not the first time that I’d had this thought, but it really coalesced at that point and then my response to him was, “Well then you need to pick up the guitar and play something that we did six months ago, or that you learned before we started working together. It isn’t so difficult

Dave: And if you haven’t done that, go back and revisit those things, and I will guarantee you will find that they’re not as difficult as they used to be.

Dave: And you realize then, and I’ve certainly said this to students before, that when you study it is your teacher’s obligation to continue to push you forward, so that you’re always getting things that are at the edge of your ability.

Dave: If you’re not balancing that with things that are just satisfying to do, then you’re never getting the real satisfaction out of the performance, and you never get to an important stage of practicing, which is what I call flow practice, which really means the performance itself and being able to get from beginning to end without stopping or stumbling.

Dave: And to be able to sustain the mental part of the performance that you can… there’s no way to not sound cosmic, but to me it is, to be able to inhabit the music. To be able to really get inside it. If you’re singing a song and really communicating of what you’re saying and feeling the rhythm and the way that all those things fit together. And if you’re playing instrumentally for it to sing.

Dave: And if you’re not, even if the thing that you can do that with is absurdly simple in your mind, it still doesn’t matter. And this is where we touch back on beginners mind, because when you first learned, or you were just starting out, the first time you did something that ten years later you might say is absurdly simple, you felt accomplishment.

Dave: So it’s a little bit of an over-simplification to say, “Well, if you’re struggling with your guitar lessons, go back and play Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and you’ll feel better, but the idea is sound that you’ve got to do something that just feels good, because that was why you started in the first place, or hopefully it was. So, that’s that side of it.

Christopher: I think it’s so valuable that you point that out and when I read that part of the book, I was wishing I had read it six months earlier. I had a perfect case myself where I’ve been learning drums, and my teacher is very technical, very exercise focused, which is superb and keeps me at that forefront, as you say, of what I’m capable of, but I’d literally gone two months without playing any of the kind of music on drums that had got me into it in the first place, and I was starting to lose my will to practice. And I was like, “Why am I losing my will to practice?” “Oh right, because I haven’t actually played any of the stuff that I picked up the drums sticks to play.”

Dave: Right.

Christopher: And I think it’s such a valuable thing to point out to people that that’s not a waste of time, or a just feel good experience, it’s a core part of motivation and accomplishment and how you continue to develop. Right?

Dave: It is, and I think one of the challenges for the teacher is that, if you’re trying to say, shape somebody’s technique in a particular direction, you don’t want them to do things that are counter-productive.

Dave: And so, one of the ways that people do that is by restricting what they do. For example, when I started my Master’s program at Manhattan School, there were a bunch of students who had come in and I would say many of them, that were restricted back to first playing open strings and then only playing scales and naming the notes, for a month. And not playing any music. And when you enter a program like that, a rigorous conservatory level education, especially at a graduate, or post-graduate level, you know that you are submitting to a program.

Dave: It’s like joining the service, you are going to boot camp, they’re going to kick your behind, and you can’t have anything to say about it, you know what you’ve signed up for, and you know what’s on the other side of it. But, the balance that I find difficult, and I really wrestle with this, I wrestle with this a lot, that I want to push my students to get better, but I do not want to push them off or push them away. And that any accomplishment, any progress forward, anything they do that they get a sense of accomplishment is a win and is going to keep them in the game.

Dave: So, I think there’s a distinction to be made. I think there are teachers that insist on these absolutes, and they will say, “Well, I’m building foundation technique, and we can’t mess with this and if you go play you were playing before, you’re going to interfere with the work we’re doing.” I’m not sure I agree with that because I think ultimately, if you want to talk about technique, at least with the guitar, and I think you could probably say this about any instrument, but there are some great idiosyncratic players out there, and I think that you don’t necessarily want to encourage someone to just blunder their way through learning an instrument. That’s maybe too judgmental a way to put it, but there are people who play in ways that no teacher would ever teach, but you cannot deny the power, and their skill in what they do.

Dave: And on the other side of it, getting back to the idea of a mechanism, and a mechanism… all mechanisms, all mechanical constructs have a logic, there’s a way they work and if you look at how they work, you can find it. Some people do that more naturally than others right? First time you try to take a sink apart. “Wait? Where does this go, Oh, that goes here.”

Dave: But the mechanically sound approach should just inherently be better and feel better and so my contention is that when you start to explore that taking into account the variables, say with guitar, we have to account for the proportion of people’s hands. Not everyone’s fingers are the same length. Their proportion of hand to arm and just the whole construction of the body. Everyone is a little bit different, so you’ve got to modify that ideal often, but I have never had somebody say when I start to steer them into playing a different way, that it didn’t feel better. Now, then they go to play and muscle memory kicks in, and they go back to what they were doing before.

Dave: So, I think of it the way that people teach meditation. You bring your attention back, you make the correction, it goes away, you make the correction again. I’m actively trying to work on my posture. I’m doing the same thing. You notice, you make the correction. And then ultimately the noticing is the thing that’s going to change your technique. Because if it really is better, and you start to absorb that, why wouldn’t that be the thing you would favor? Right? It isn’t he path of least resistance… well, it is the path of least resistance on the one hand because the mechanical aspect, but the resistance on the other hand is muscle memory and your habits. And if you are willing to submit to the kind of program that really allows you to completely create new muscle memory in a concentrated period of time, great.

Dave: But most people don’t have that luxury, so you have to look at it as an ongoing process and allowing the technique to develop by paying attention to what really works. And this brings in another one of the traps that people fall into, Which is to say, “I don’t know anything, therefore my opinion about what’s working or not working doesn’t mean anything because I don’t know the right way to do it.”

Dave: So it goes back to this idea of you find what’s natural because the body has a logic, and a way that it works and playing anything, making any kind of technical move has a logic and a sequence of movements and what my trainer friend would call a firing pattern of the muscles. This goes first, this goes second, this goes third.

Dave: If it’s so logical and sensible and natural, why wouldn’t that be the best way to go and so, we cultivate that over the long term. But to say, “You won’t be able to develop this if you play music that just feels good, I think is really just going to thin the herd.”

Dave: Which, unfortunately is what some people at a high level think they’re there to do when they’re teaching.

Dave: And maybe in a high level conservatory program they are there to thin the herd – but that’s not what my job is. And there are plenty of people out there… there’s a great big world out there to cut down people’s motivation and self-esteem, so that’s not my job.

Dave: My job is to try to cultivate good technique, and a good approach to the instrument in a way that doesn’t push them away from it.

Dave: And I guess, when you really come down to it, it’s a problem that I’ve identified that ties into one of the bigger problems that we have with music, which is, it’s a spectator sport for so many people. And it goes back to the talent question. It goes back to the aptitude question, “Well, only the best should do it.” When meanwhile, I go back to my trying to shoot a layup when I was ten and the fact that I wasn’t any good, didn’t mean that I couldn’t… maybe I wasn’t helping the team much, but you could still enjoy the game. No-one says, “Oh you shouldn’t play pick-up basketball if you’re not good, until you’re taking it seriously.”

Dave: And I’m not talking about giving out participation trophies, it’s nothing like that, but I am saying that if there’s a benefit, if there’s a positive in your life to take up any activity athletics, or music or whatever, then cultivate it. And ultimately isn’t that the human experience part that we want most of all? And then if you decide to take it seriously, there’s always the opportunity to knuckle down and do the work.

Dave: I don’t understand why some people don’t see that as an inescapable reality. They just live in a different universe than I do, maybe.

Christopher: I think everything you described is part of this baggage we inherit from the classical conservatory system and so many hobbyist musicians, adults in particular, I think, are taking on assumptions about what it means to learn music, that really have no application to them. And it’s certainly been eye-opening over the last three or four years at Musical U, being able to work day in day out alongside these students using our material to really recognize, I’ll put it bluntly: motivation is the biggest problem. Like however much they love music, if we’re not recognizing the fact that the best thing we can do for them is help them stay motivated, we’re failing them, however good our educational content may be, motivation is a huge part of it and I love that you’re so pragmatic and practical about this, that you’re not a purist saying it must be done this way or don’t bother because you’re not a real pro, or you don’t have talent. You’re finding that middle ground sweet spot of mixing the two worlds I think.

Dave: I don’t get along well with purists in general. I wrote about that too.

Christopher: Well, let’s talk a little bit about your chapter, The Purist and the Maverick, because I hadn’t thought about this in quite that way before, but I’m sure it’s something that our listeners will be able to relate to.

Dave: So, well, this was story that I really wanted to tell although at first I wasn’t sure whether there was a lesson in it or not. It was interesting, because when I started the book, the whole driving concept was to start to with stories, so talk about experiences that I had that were formative.

Dave: I learned this lesson, working with this person in this moment, and it might have been one interaction, or it might have been a series of interactions over a long period of time. But the story was important and so, when I started to tell this particular story, I wasn’t sure what the lesson was until I really started getting into it.

Dave: So the year after I finished graduate school, so I just completed a Master’s degree in classical guitar at Manhattan School of Music in New York, and I applied and was accepted to perform in a masterclass at the Yale School of Music, Yale University for a very well known player that I won’t name. And I was excited about doing it, I knew who he was I respected him, and I went and played for him, and he kind of took me apart. Now that’s fine, you can do that in a masterclass, that’s what you’re there for, but he did it in this, kind of a jokey, winking to the audience way that made me feel like he made me the butt of a joke, which he did. I played, so you’re in Spain, you’ll appreciate this, I played the Sonata by Joachim Tourina, it was written for Andre Segovia, which is a gorgeous piece of music and very challenging, powerful, Spanish nationalist flamenco influenced. Beautiful stuff.

Dave: I didn’t know that this guy had studied under Pepe Romero, who is to Spanish guitar, I mean the Romero family are the source for a lot of this stuff, and so, this player knew this style intimately, and he didn’t like my rasgueado.

Dave: So I wasn’t doing it right, or I wasn’t doing it the way a proper flamenco player would do it, and so I played the piece, and he says, “You know,” he looks at the audience, “You can’t rasgueado like Gringo.” And he got a big laugh. And I was like “eugh”. And I swear to you, I don’t remember anything else he told me about the piece, I just walked out of there like, “You just took a cheap shot in front of 200 people, I don’t respect you for that.” Which was actually, when I told the story, I sent the book to one of my former professors at Manhattan School, and when he read that story, he said, “You know, as teachers we really have to keep in mind the impact of the things we say.”

Dave: So, I’m thinking about this experience, and I had played that piece in my graduation recital at Manhattan School. So I’d worked on it with my teacher who as an eminent, world-touring classical guitarist. He didn’t have a problem with what I did. I’d played it in a masterclass for Sharon Isbin, that founded the guitar program at Julliard. She didn’t have a problem with it. The person who had a problem was the one who had been taught by someone very, very close to the source and the traditional folkloric element of it and I think that there’s a fair point on both sides that if you’re going to play something with a flamenco influence, you should understand how to play a rasgueado.

Dave: Now, I had found a work around because my hand wasn’t doing what I needed it to do to play a proper flamenco rasgueado, I don’t play flamenco, or at least I enjoy it… I love it in fact, and I’m a little bit jealous that you are in Spain, but the work around that I found was still musical and out of three world-class experts, only one of them had a problem.

Dave: So, of course, in a masterclass, and I know this from judging students in all kinds of situations, and I mean judging when it’s a formal situation, where you have to have comments. Sometimes you just need something to say. And it’s not always constructive. You hope it is, you try. But you’re there to give your opinion, so you’ve got to have something to say about it and that was what he latched on to. But ultimately it is a purists view because he’s saying, “That’s not the way they would do it in Grenada.” “Okay, fine.” But I also remember playing a duet version of Summertime with somebody once, who at the end of it said, “Well, you know that’s not the way Gershwin wrote it.”

Dave: “So? And your problem is?” So that mindset to me lacks context and then I start thinking about this idea and extending it further, and you realize, and I’ll relate this to another genre that I also mention in talking about this.

Dave: A friend of mine who I will give a shout out to, because he’s a great writer about music, but his name is Christopher Watkins and as artist he goes by the name Preacher Boy and if you like traditional blues and Tom Waits, he kind of fuses these two in a very, very cool way.

Dave: But he’s also a poet, an essayist and he’d written this long piece about the blues and purists and said, “All you people who are trying to say, ‘well, that’s not the way Muddy did it.’ Do you not realize that Muddy Waters was an innovator? He was a maverick, he created something that wasn’t… that didn’t exist before. And what he sounded like in 1960, did not sound anything… was a different style, and a different sound than what he sounded like in 1945 when he was being recorded on the front porch at Stovall’s plantation.”

Dave: This was not someone that followed the way he was supposed to do things. This was someone that did it his way and became the model. And you could say the same thing about any number of people. You could say it about Bill Munroe, in bluegrass, you could say it about… I mean, in any genre, those people exist, and those people found a way to do something that made them individuals and made other people want to be like them.

Dave: Those people inspired other people to play. And then what happens? Now we have founded a school. Now we have an orthodoxy and now we have followers who line up and say, “It must be done that way.” And there is a lot of beauty in authentic anything. Authentic dixieland, you know, authentic delta blues, authentic flamenco, all of that. I mean I grew up on folk music and that led me into traditional music in different parts of the world and world music and all of that. It’s beautiful, and it’s amazing, and it’s something to preserve and celebrate, but why does that preclude, in some people’s minds, the option of taking this and making something new with it because that is the only way music is ever innovated. That is what music has done throughout the history of music. Somebody heard something, and they absorbed it and through the filter of their minds and their creativities, something new came out. And if that wasn’t happening, we wouldn’t be doing this anymore. So, it’s a short-sighted isn’t even a strong enough word.

Christopher: “Deluded”, we could say.

Dave: Yeah, I tend to be fairly measured in my language, it’s just my personality for the most part, but that doesn’t mean that underneath that are not very, very strong beliefs and yeah, that is exactly what I would call it. It’s missing something that should be as obvious as anything in the world, but yet, that thought did not occur to me until I really started going down that road and saying, “You know, every player that really inspired me the most, I mean I’ve learned a lot from the schooled players, I wouldn’t have a career if I hadn’t learned from the schooled players, that I wouldn’t have fallen in love if it weren’t for Jimmy Page, who became a great session musician even though he said the first time he walked into a studio and saw a score, he said, it just looked like a bunch of crows sitting on telephone wires. Little black dots.” Or any of these self taught musicians, Doc Watson, I grew up listening to, it’s amazing the mavericks, the innovators are the ones that make everybody else sit up and take notice.

Christopher: I had the pleasure recently of interviewing the Quebe Sisters who call their style of music “progressive western swing” and they made the point really eloquently that there’s this amazing tradition of western swing and they respect that and they honor it and in some cases they kind of replicate it or portray it in their music, but they also realize that western swing came out of innovation and so the truest way they can honor that form, that genre is by innovating themselves and I thought that was such a superb point that we… as much as we admire what’s gone before, we can’t let it prevent us moving on. And I loved the way you put it in that chapter of the book, you said, “We have to learn from the past, but create our own future,” which I think is a really lovely way to put it.

Dave: Well, and it’s the only way that you… when you create a museum culture, I think you automatically and instantly narrow your audience. You narrow the number of people you’re going to reach. And on top of that, you create this set of aficionados that’s putting out into the world that this is the only way it can be done. And it’s absolutely maddening.

Dave: I get quite a bit in the book into my love hate, mixed relationship with jazz and jazz musicians. Which I have tremendous respect, and a great deal of love for lot of jazz music and jazz musicians and honestly, I wish it was a language that I spoke more fluently than I do, and it’s one of the things that, since I started learning very early on when I became aware of it, that within a musical world, this is a pinnacle of achievement to be able to play like this, and it’s also something that you have to devote yourself, you don’t become Wes Montgomery or Jim Hawe, by playing rock’n roll gigs on the weekends. You immerse yourself in that world. Just like you don’t become a great classical player without devoting yourself wholly to that world. But, if you sit down and read record reviews in Down Beat magazine, say there is, I mean the word venom comes to mind in the way some people are just savaged for not following the rules. I think I read something somebody said, “Well, he sounds like he never heard Thelonious Monk.” Or whatever it was. And I love Thelonious Monk, Thelonious Monk didn’t care if you never heard Thelonious Monk.

Dave: This was not… I mean, what happened there? How do you take a music that is all about improvisation and freedom. If you think about it, we got from Muskrat Stomp to A Love Supreme in 40 some years.

Dave: I mean, that’s amazing. And yet people can say, “Well,” and okay now, “Did Coltrane understand Muskrat Stomp?” He did. He had that foundation, he was a scholar. He was a student of music. He knew what he was doing. Picasso knew what he was doing. Picasso was a great figurative painter. And I just had this conversation the other day with a painter, an artist who said, “It’s funny how people don’t recognize how much technique goes into simple things that don’t look technical.” So I get all of that, but it’s not like there isn’t room in the world for someone who takes something sophisticated and does something primitive with it.

Dave: I mean, it’s funny. Now, you could say that some people just don’t belong in certain places. One of my favorite song writers who come out of, I suppose, the Nashville school of Americana music, what they call Americana music, is Gillian Welch, who I’ve just loved for as long as I’ve heard her. I just think she’s amazing. And she studied at the Berklee College of Music, and she said, “I was definitely… I was a primitive.” Or, I think maybe it was Dave Rawlings, her partner who called her a primitive, but saying, this was a very strange thing for someone who is learning about this deep, deep roots music, to go and study at what was essentially a jazz school for many, many years.

Dave: She went on to have a pretty fantastic career. She probably never learned how to play Donna Lee, but there’s room in the world for all of these people. That’s the part I guess, that I find personally frustrating.

Dave: And whether or not that has to do, without getting too deeply personal about it, and without getting into specifics, I’ve got a lot of cultural mix in my background and in my blood, and so I can belong in one place or another because of where I grew up and how I grew up and there are certainly communities I’m very, very comfortable in and I feel a part of. But at the same time, in terms of an identity, when a musician says, “This is where I live.” It’s like saying, “This was my town. These are my people, this is where I came from.” And I think there’s something powerful and comes in having that kind of sense of identity. This is me. But at the same time, what about that guy that isn’t you. And he’s got a little bit of that over here. You’re not going to let him in the door?

Dave: So, those ideas… the way I feel about those ideas may be related, but I think when you look at it from the perspective of music, you know I taught a class when I was teaching college, it was a world music survey, these were not music students, it was an elective class, so it wasn’t meant to be deeply technical, and I had a fair amount of freedom with how I present the curriculum, so I took it as… I taught it as a course on the way that musical styles influenced each other and using as a primary illustration American popular music, and the different threads that you can follow back to their roots.

Dave: So we started off working our way around the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. And so we’re touching on blues music and the American south, and we’re touching on New Orleans and Caribbean music coming in through New Orleans and creating really everything ultimately.

Dave: We talked about African slaves being brought over and bringing their music with them and hearing Spanish hymns in Cuba. Now suddenly there’s… how all of these things happen. Cultures come together and even when they are… even when there’s a horrific cultural relationship, because certainly if you want to talk about the slave days, I mean we all know the story. But, there was still the musical influence. So even among people that might have been on the one hand feared and hated, and on the other hand dehumanized, the music still found a way to meld. And what does that say? It’s part of the human experience that we take in everything around us, and it forms each individual.

Dave: So why shouldn’t music be like that? Or at least, why shouldn’t that idea be cultivated? And some people are just not… some people are more individual than others and that’s okay. There’s room for all of that. So whenever somebody is teaching music in a way that closes that world off, especially this part. So end of philosophical rants but… I don’t even know if that ended up where we started but… oh no, because it was The Purist and the Maverick okay. So good.

Christopher: I think what comes through clearly is this theme of beginners mind in the sense that maybe what’s missing from those people who are extremely purist is that openness to new possibilities. The willingness to consider doing things a different way and to actually trust in their own enjoyment a little bit along the way, rather than just blindly being told what to do.

Dave: Well, and the other thing is that that doesn’t mean you have to abandon standards. It doesn’t mean that you can’t try to hold yourself to a standard, but I think that needs to be a choice. I think that there is a level of submitting, as I said, to a school of thought and allowing yourself to be molded by that. But it is still a pipeline, and you can come out the other side of.

Christopher: And there was another place in the book where jazz came up as an example and it was in your chapter on Simplicity and Authority. And I think it touches a bit on what you just described and that ability to know what really matters so I wonder if you’d mind sharing that story about the jazz musicians versus the folk musicians?

Dave: Okay. So this what… I have such trepidation about putting some of this stuff out there. I’m just waiting for the comments from jazz musicians to show up on my social media feed saying, “What are you talking about?”

Dave: So I attended a workshop when I was in college that was supposed to be with the great Be-bop guitarist Pat Martineau, who is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant player, another maverick. Someone that found his own way and really respected as a teacher. And he was teaching people that were not just jazz musicians, so I was really interesting in where he was coming from. And he ended up having health issues and did not teach the workshop. And Mick Goodrich, who runs the guitar program, I think still does at the Berklee College of Music, came in and taught and he was amazing. He was fantastic, so this is not in any way an indictment of the topic and honestly it was way over my head. I didn’t have the foundation musically in the language to really get the most out of it.

Dave: And ultimately I think I also just wasn’t in love enough with that direction to want to go into it. But I was definitely interested, and I liked playing the tunes. I liked learning about it, it made me feel like I was also growing as a musician, which is true and important. But the thing that struck me is that, the people who were attending, were all trying to squeeze through the same door. They were all approaching very similar things in very similar ways and when they would get together to play together, they didn’t do it very well. They always needed the book first of all.

Dave: They hadn’t absorbed the tunes which is, I think, one of the essential things if you really want to learn to play jazz, you have to memorize a bunch of standards in a bunch of keys to really begin to speak the language. And so, if you’re always… and, it took me a long time to realize this. That having a classical background, that one of the problems I had was I was relying way too much on the music. I didn’t fully comprehend just how much was open to interpretation. So in any case though, you would get these guys, and it was mostly guys at the time, playing together and very rarely did something really connect. These were students, but these were students who were probably not at least, in their teachers at home, may be not getting the full picture about the listening part.

Dave: And the thing that really was striking is in an ensemble class, and there were probably 20 of us, all with guitars and the instructor said, “Let’s see how long we could sit here without anybody playing a note?” And we didn’t last very long, which is absurd when you think about it. Like how hard is it just sit on your hands, don’t be the first one to crack. Right?

Dave: But it was very, very difficult. Everybody played too much. Nobody was listening as well as they could have. So the next week, I go to a folk music retreat where suddenly there are 20 people sitting in a circle playing songs that 19 of them have never heard before. Playing seven different instruments and singing in five part harmony. And I’m jamming with people who are playing three chord bluegrass and folk songs, but playing these accompaniments with an authority and a conviction that I couldn’t match even though I was a Master’s student in classical guitar and thought of myself as a very skilled musician. And I wasn’t keeping up. It was effort and I’d grown up on folk music.

Dave: And it really hit me in the face, that over here, these people studying this very complex music were still not learning to be great musicians yet because they had their… they were too deep in the weeds of the nuts and bolts. And I hope that some of those people got a lot out of that class, there was a lot to get from it, and I hope that Mick Goodrich opened some eyes during the course of that week.

Dave: But it was very striking to sit down then in contrast with musicians playing very simple music but with a degree, a level of authority that I couldn’t match. And the only way to get there was to live in their world for a while. That’s how they got there. That’s how those people were individuals. And so, all of this, it never occurred to me fully… I would say jokingly for years, as I was starting to write about music that I was looking for my unified field theory. And this book really started to bring a lot of these things together in that way that I think is fascinating. That it’s beginner’s mind. Listening and learning to solve problems. Those are the… and then staying connected to keep yourself motivated. That’s it. Everything else is just details.

Dave: But how do you learn to play music? You figure out what inspires you, you start to play with it. You make sure that you always can play in both senses of the word and then you do submit to a course of study that might be just self-directed, but understanding that you are learning how to solve problems and that all of these problems to have solutions and know that it’s going to get difficult and when it does, you go back to, either your inspirations the things that connects you to that feeling, or to connect to other people. So you’ve got to show up to rehearsal, and you’ve got to have that part down, so you’re going to practice for another hour until you have it. And I think if everybody started with that, that more people would reach a point of satisfaction. Would reach that point of conviction and a level of competence and skill, which is where we started in talking about how do you get from feeling like a beginner, to feeling like, “Okay, now I can play.” And that’s what it is. It’s I can do this authoritatively. There’s your unified field theory I think.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, I’d be an idiot to try and ask any follow up questions after that even though I a handful left on my list. This book, The Perpetual Beginner, I can’t recommend highly enough. There’s chapters in there of being aware of your body, on critical listening, on how to let go and just play. None of which we’ve even touched on today and Dave also wraps up with a really powerful story about how all of this is still playing in his own life. So, clearly can’t recommend the book highly enough. If you head to Amazon to get your copy, you’ll find my review there, and I also want to give away five copies of this book. It is one of the handful of books that I know is relevant to every single person watching or listening to this podcast. So were going to give away five copies and to be in with a chance of winning, all you need to do is share this episode on your social media platform of choice, whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, if you’re still on Twitter, Twitter, if you’re in a forum where you share with other musicians, do it there.

Christopher: Take a screenshot where you shared it and send that to hello@musicalitynow.com. So screenshot your share, send it to hello@musicalitynow.com and a week from now, which I believe is the 23rd October, we’ll be drawing five lucky winners at random to get a copy of this book, The Perpetual Beginner. If you can’t wait until then, or you’re not lucky enough to win a copy, head to Amazon, head to Dave’s website and grab your copy, because it’s… as this conversation I’m sure demonstrates, it’s packed with stuff, and we didn’t even get through everything.  Dave any parting pieces of wisdom for our audience today?

Dave: Well, I think we’ve touched on… like I said the core of it. But I think the biggest thing I can say is find what you love, find what inspires you, recognize that there is a feeling behind that and that what you’re really looking to do in learning to play the instrument is to touch that feeling. The thing that listening to that music made you feel, made you want to be able to reproduce that feeling for yourself. And that you can find a way to do that in one way or another and as long as you maintain a level of kindness to yourself on the one hand and self discipline on the other, to recognize that there’s work to be done, but that every accomplishment is still an accomplishment worth celebrating, and that you can learn to make great music in very primitive ways if you so choose. That everybody can find some kind of musical place for themselves. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, run the other direction and find somebody that agrees.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, thank you so much Dave, both for writing this book and also for joining us again on the show today.

Dave: Thanks so much, and by the way, I just want to close with this. And this is just as a shout out to any of our jazz musician listeners that might have felt that I was being unfair, of course at the bottom it says, “Playing for tips.” So keep that part in mind too.

Christopher: Well, any offended jazz musicians or jazz aficionados can direct hate mail to me rather than Dave.

Dave: Just write to Down Beat magazine and complain about how they’re too nasty in their columns… in their reviews. With all respect. I say it with love. I really, really do.

Christopher: Thanks again.

Dave: Thank you so much.

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The post Your Connection To Music, with Dave Isaacs (The Perpetual Beginner) appeared first on Musical U.