Author: musicalitywrld

Bradley is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, recording artist and educator. He’s the author of That’s Jazz, a nine-volume jazz piano method and is also known for his live online group jazz piano classes. He runs 88 Creative Keys along with Leila Viss, who’s a past guest on this show. They host webinars and workshops helping music teachers bring more creativity into their lessons.

In this interview we talk about,

• The one piece of advice from a restaurant pianist that changed Bradley’s trajectory from a sheet-music reader to a primarily by-ear player
• How the piano can be seen as an orchestra with four distinct layers
• How customising a melody can be an easy first step in improvisation, and 3 specific embellishments you can try right now on any melody you know how to play

You’re going to love hearing about Bradley’s own musical journey and how that’s all fed into the educator he is today, as well as the examples and demonstrations he provides along the way to illustrate what it means to bring creativity and musicality to your playing.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Bradley Sowash Music
• Bradley Sowash – “That’s Jazz”
• Musicality Now – Getting Under the Hood, with Leila Viss
• 88 Creative Keys

Transcript

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

Bradley: Every time I hear somebody say that, and the correct response is “Thank you for being here” or “Thank you for having me.” I often think that my mother was actually a radio … She had her own radio show and a local radio station and I just think it would be so wonderful if she had been able to welcome me to her show. And I could say to my mom, “Thank you for having me.”

Christopher: Absolutely.

Christopher: I always knew I liked you Bradley, I was telling you by email I’ve admired you from afar for last several years, and it’s clearly a love of puns that brought us together underneath it all. Speaking of things we have in common, you are someone who also really appreciates the importance of musicality or musicianship for being a musician and becoming all we can be in music. And so I really wanted to start off this conversation by asking you: what is musicality? What does musicality mean to you? 

Bradley: I can answer that in a lot of ways. We can talk about the psychology that goes into being a musician, that sort of inner mindset that I know you touch on. We could talk about technique and experience, but the way I use the word musicality is that point where you move from mechanics to organics. So if I’m learning a tune, I often tell my students it’s in this style of Jazz, pop and improvisation. You need to make it your own at some point and stop thinking and stop being mechanical. Let me see if I can give a little demonstration here. If suppose I learned this little “Five foot two, eyes of blue”.

Bradley: Everything is square, everything is there, everything is nice and clean, but it doesn’t … I don’t own it yet. It’s not musical, it’s accurate. It’s not musical. So maybe now I feel it. I’m bringing myself into it. So I use musicality to describe becoming what I said from mechanical to organic.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well, I definitely want to unpack some of that later in the conversation and help our listeners understand what just happened in that before and after you demonstrated.

Christopher: These days you are very well known among piano teachers in particular for helping them understand how to bring more creativity into their piano teaching, and I’d love to understand how you came to be such an expert in that area. Were you someone who grew up finding themselves easily creative on the keyboard? Were you someone who felt like a natural or got told they were talented? What did your early music education look like? 

Bradley: My music education was a requirement in my house. There were three brothers of which I’m the youngest and we all had to study piano lessons. And as it turns out, my piano teacher was the same piano teacher who taught my mother when she was a young girl. So my piano teacher was ancient and to a sensitive eight year old boys’ nose her mothball sweaters and coffee stained breath was intimidating and strange and I also used my mother’s own method books, cause she hadn’t changed to any new resources. And so had the same circles on it that she had made in corrections for her. And I asked her at one point how that this was all very nice, playing, but what about, could I write my own music? And as I recall, and sometimes memories and myths blend, I believe she said, “Why would you want to write music? All the good music’s already been written.” I said, “Well, what about just improvising my own music?” And she said, “Well, that improvisers use a lot of patterns, so we’re going to study hand exercises” and you’re learning patterns – and 20 exercises later, I’m still not improvising. And I was just discouraged. I took the logical step of deciding instead of being a dedicated musician, I became a dedicated skier.

Christopher: The obvious plan B.

Bradley: Enough of this, but at the same time during all of that, my family had Friday night jam sessions, not sort of in any regular scheduled way, but we just goofed around. There was a lot of instruments in the den and My mother and father had met my playing in a very local, not big deal, but a local big band called the Joe Hoff Orchestra who was my uncle. And so we had trombones and trumpets and my mother was a singer, but she could also play that sort of pumping piano.

Bradley: And it was around that and then my older brother went off to Indiana University to be a composition major. And when he came home that summer, he’s kind of intellectual and geeky and most of his friends were away , and he was kind of bored I think. Because he decided to teach me freshman college theory, even though I was only eight years old and then he did the second year theory the next summer.

Bradley: I guess I had this advantage of being around music a lot and having an early take on, on theory. In fact, a lot of the way I got to college was tutoring other students in music theory and even trading theory help for math help with which I’m terrible at math. I forgot the original question, but along the whole way there, nobody ever told me I was talented. 

Bradley: Nobody ever said “you have a special gift”. I’ve got short fingers. I just liked it and I just imagined that I would make my own music in spite of not liking my teacher, including those lessons. And then when I was around 12 years old and had been composing and messing around with my brothers music theory instruction, we heard a guy in a restaurant playing piano with no music. and it had a little bass and drums and piano. His name was Louis Mendez. And I went up naively and pulled on his pant leg on the path to the stage and said, “How do you do that? How can you play with no music?” And he said, all without skipping a beat, “Learn your chords kid.” And he was right. 

Bradley: Later I told my parents I wanted to get to know him and he became my teacher. I learned some jazz from him and the whole improvisation approach. And then I just think a little further, when I went to music school, I applied to several music schools and I couldn’t get in because I flunked all the sight reading exams. Because from there on out I was playing mostly by ear, looking at the chord symbols, not so much on jazz tunes, but on like Elton John Books, looking at the guitar symbols above and making my own voicings and singing and jamming and being a rock and roll loving teenager. 

Bradley: I went to a music … Very small school that didn’t have a particularly good reputation, my first of college because that’s all I could get into. My piano teacher there said, “You know what, you’re only 18 years old. You can still learn to read. It’s easier than what you do know how to do.” So I kind of did a lot of catch up on that. And now in fact, let me show you this, my whole teaching philosophy is based on the experience of wanting more teachers to not do the damage that the classical training did to me, which was inhibit creativity.

Bradley: I’m so glad I broke out of it, when I broke out of it I was never proud of it. I was ashamed of it. I kind of secretly improvised on the side and I secretly figured out songs by ear and joined a rock band and wore spandex and … all that. But I know that this is audio too, but I have this piece of paper here. This is my teaching philosophy in a nutshell is that scales here with an ear on one side and an eye on the other.

Bradley: The eye reads and the ear plays by ear. And those are in a perfect world, are equally taught and equally practiced. In fact, I would argue that every musician should do 50% of reading and 50% of off-page playing every day because they aren’t separate. They make, they join together and inform each other to develop… (you’re gonna like this!)… musicality!

Christopher: Terrific! Well I want to continue with your story in a moment, but first I want to unpack that a little bit because I had the pleasure of interviewing your partner from 88 Creative Keys, Leila Viss, a little while back, and she was telling the story of how it was an encounter with you that really unlocked the whole creative side of piano playing in piano teaching for her. And in that context, I think in a different interview, you were talking about how she and you had different musical backgrounds and for you the creative, the playing by ear had always been a part of who you are as a musician, and I think we understand now how that kind of developed over time, but it’s really interesting because I hadn’t realized it was something that developed over time. 

Christopher: It wasn’t that you were one of these kids at the age of three figuring out melodies by ear note-by-note and after that it was all just instinctive. Clearly there was a methodical learning process going on here, and I wonder if we could just pause on that particular example because I think there’s a lot bound up in it. You said something like from then on I was, playing by ear and going from the chord charts or the guitar chords and doing it that way, and I’m sure to some of our listeners and viewers, that’s clear, and they get what you’re talking about there, but if they haven’t explored this idea of improvising your own arrangement or playing from chord symbols or playing by ear is actually quite a lot in there.

Christopher: And so I wonder if we can just unpack a little bit. What do you mean – if we take that moment when you are starting to explore this stuff, you haven’t really been figuring stuff out by ear. You maybe didn’t understand chords, you hadn’t asked that guy who told you to, “learn your chords”, yet. What did the process look like if you picked up an Elton John Book or something, how did you go about that and how does that relate to being creative or playing by ear?

Bradley: Great. Well there’s another brother, the middle brother, at this time had a band called “Livin the Blues” who’s playing around local. who lived in a small steel industry town in Central Ohio and he had gigs around town and was playing around with cool saxophone players. You know what I mean? It was like those big guys, and he even plays sax and closes his eyes when he plays. “Oh that’s so cool.” And I want to do something like that. I had the typical, if you’re lucky, admiration for both of my older brothers and I just wanted to be like them because I was that little.

Bradley: “The little haymaker” was my nickname by them and I wanted to be the big guys. any way, and so it was the middle brother who actually broke down the chord symbols for me because the older brother teaching music theory, that gets pretty quickly into like counterpoint in parallel fifths and kind of hard stuff that classical music theory is kind of misses in some ways, some basic skills like, what in the heck is an E flat major seven. So my first experience with chords was actually not the Elton John Books, that followed pretty soon afterwards because he was the big name then. But I have on my piano growing up, somewhere we’d got to a great big poster of diagrams of all the normal chords on the piano. Not just triads, but seventh chords as well. 

Bradley: And I remember laboriously going through and learning to play “Misty” by Hoagy Carmichael one chord at a time. It was like this. Look at the poster. B flat minor stuff. I didn’t know what inversions where. I didn’t know how the chords went together. but I’d just imprint the chords to that tune. And in retrospect, I might have started with a little bit easier tune because it’s got some pretty strange harmonic shifts in it, although maybe not, because it’s nothing like learning a tune you want to learn to motivate. But it shows that my weird routes when everybody else was listening to Led Zeppelin, I’m trying to learn a Hoagie Carmichael tune on my own steam, since I want to. You know, it’s just a very lot of jazz playing on the Hi-Fi and a lot of music around like that.

Bradley: I don’t know if I unpacked that enough, but it just came from absolute monkey see monkey do off that diagram. And I didn’t know how to even name the notes in the chords. I didn’t know that C minor, instead of being C E flat G, I might very honestly call it C D sharp G. I didn’t understand the reason for the note names. Then started playing in rock bands and listening to the recordings that give you and then the guitar player to help you. Hey there this is A and G.

Bradley: Okay. I can do that on the organ and so I’m just holding a lot of organ wearing a bunch of rings on my fingers for some reason and playing in bowling alleys. Bowling alley lounges, with my mother being the supervisor because minors aren’t allowed. I’m playing with these hairy guys that are calling out chords and it’s all about chords. The guy was right, learn your chords kid. Does that answer?

Christopher: It does, and I’m sure we’ll talk more about the specifics of piano in due course, but I think it’s a really special case, playing by ear on piano. And is there are other instruments that may be similar, but you know if we’re talking about saxophone and learning to play by ear on saxophone, it’s very cut and dry in the mind of the saxophone player. I need to play these notes in this order. I need to figure out these notes. With piano, and to some extent guitar, you’ve got this whole world of arranging. Not just playing a melody by ear, but playing a whole arrangement, as it were, by ear, which can come from just the bare bones of a chord chart or something.

Christopher: And I think a lot of what you just said kind of takes for granted how exciting a playground that can be, compared to, “I’m on saxophone, I better play the right melody notes or I’m getting it wrong”. And I just want to pick up on that because I think for anyone in the audience who isn’t a piano player or has some explored this on piano, I think it’s worth just noting that it’s an instrument of way of playing by ear and improvising and arranging are all beautifully blended together in a way that doesn’t often happen on other instruments.

Bradley: Right. I mean even strictly reading musicians, if you push them, pianist I should say, will admit, that they won’t call the improvisation, but they might call it scuffling. When you’re in choir and you have to buy a piece. You can’t get all those notes the first time they learn to get what they can. But maybe we should demonstrate that … Let me tell you quickly, my concept of piano is that it’s an orchestra and there are layers and there are at least four layers and we have to play them with two hands. So the first from the bottom up, the first layer is the bassline, so maybe it’s a … Make a simple song, right?

Bradley: And then the next layer up the piano as you move up is this area below middle C, where chord sound the best. Those chords up high are kinda tinkly and down too low they’re kinda muddy, so they sound good down there. And then we add that to the melody, but now we’ve run out of limbs. So there are all kinds of strategies to get the bass and the chorus at the same time, such as stride or to play the melody and the chords and the same hand, something like let’s say … Now it frees up our left hand to play even a more elaborate bass. 

Bradley: And then in between there, there’re fills. That is imitating. If you have a bass player, guitar player on chords, maybe a melody player is a singer and we have got say clarinet on the fills. There’s my fill, it’s an in between thing. So you’re right, the arranging is a big part of it. but when you do that stuff, people say, “Oh, you’re so talented” And everything I just played, there was stock accomplishments. It wasn’t even … I didn’t even take it to the musicality.

Bradley: One of the things that piano players don’t learn enough and it’s not talked about enough is what drummers talk about, which is I need a basic rock beat on this. Boom, boom, boom, boom. I need a Latin beat, Dat, Dat, Dat, Dat, Dat, Dah, Dah, Dah. And that’s the same thing for piano players. There’s, stride and walking in Alberti bass and waltz and jazz waltz and just some stock patterns that once you know the chord what you do with that chord becomes part of your arrangement.

Bradley: That’s a lot of the nuts and bolts of what is learnable. If I could take this back to Leila Viss for a minute. Leila Viss works with me at 88 Creative Keys, we’re business partners in webinars and workshops for piano teachers and one of the main reasons I was drawn to working with Leila as a business partner is that her training is totally a classical and she loves pop music but never played it on the piano. And the problem I have as a teacher of teachers, a teacher of teachers. is that there is the underlying assumption that I’m from Mars.

Bradley: You’re one of those guys. You’re one of those guys that can just do that. You’re just born like that “Yeah, yeah., yeah.” And so it’s very important to me that Leila, who now is making beautiful arrangements of hymns and is very comfortable with these skills and has become on fire improviser, is the poster child for that these skills can be learned and furthermore, that can be learned as an adult. And I would argue that these skills are harder to learn. The more classical training you’ve had, the harder it is to recover and rebuild your ear. And that’s not to trash classical music.

Bradley: It’s classical music training is very in depth and very helpful and certainly I benefit from it and I still practice it, but it’s just not complete. It’s all about the eye and you can’t learn to play by ear by reading little black dots. It has to be a combination of reading, closing your eyes and sometimes not reading at all. So that was kind of long-winded but yeah.

Christopher: It was beautiful. Sometimes on the show there are moments where I immediately think “I wish I could travel back in time and just show that two minutes to my younger self, because it could completely change my trajectory”. For me, I studied piano for five or 10 years without any of this stuff and I had to come back to it in my twenties and started kind of piecing together what you just explained in terms of the layers, in terms of relying on patterns, not just making up each and every note.

Christopher: And what had been completely intimidating, like could I sit down and play a whole bunch of notes at once by ear or improvise, couldn’t have done it when I was younger, despite tons of lessons, tons of load reading and this new perspective, I began to explore that and began to understand and with the ear training I began to actually be able to do it. And I love that you shared that and I’m sure we’ve got a lot of people in the audience for whom light bulbs are going off and they’re like, “Oh, that’s how it works.” That’s how somebody could just sit down at a piano and play this kind of thing. And particularly the idea of patterns and that you have a vocabulary or a toolkit that you’re bringing to bear. It’s not, I must decide each and every note of this arrangement that once.

Bradley: Correct. You have to have a certain amount of things you can plug in that are muscle memory or at least mental memory and so only when that’s all secure, can then start improvising over top of things that are being made in the moment. All of this, as you mentioned, the saxophone player is … They have their own huge issues, such as tone production, that piano players don’t have. Cause you can play the piano with a pencil. but still weren’t dealing with one note at a time. We have both the luxury and the misery of having a lot to do. But really had nobody pays money to go hear a solo saxophone player on a gig. I mean it’s the ability to simulate a band that makes the piano lovely to listen to it by itself.

Christopher: I think we’ve talked a little bit there about playing by ear and improvising an arrangement. I do want to definitely focus on improvisation in its own right because that’s obviously a core specialty of yours. But let’s return if we may to your story and where you took things from there. You are beginning to understand how to play from chord charts or play a bit more by ear. You were discovering this world of jazz. What happened next in your own story?

Bradley: Okay. That’s, I’m about in high school and I was moving into that kind of music, which combines jazz and rock and my heroes were like Chick Corea, and on the jazz side, and people like Emerson Lake and Palmer and the band Yes on the rock side. This sort of art rock. Because of growing around a lot of jazz in the house. And let me mention there was a heck of a lot of classical music playing in the house too. There was just a lot of music going on. And my mother singing all the time in the car.

Bradley: As I matured, I wanted more sophisticated music to listen to. It didn’t interest me, on a musical basis, to listen to pop songs. Although it did interest me on a cultural basis. I wanted to know the same tunes my friends liked and things like that. So I got the difference because I was listening for pleasure. I wanted to hear a sophisticated music and then electric instruments, had come out. And around that time I had a very bad broken leg from a ski accident because I was getting into trick skiing and jumping and stuff. I did a back flip and landed poorly and I spent about 18-

Christopher: I have to ask at this point, were you assuming skiing would be your career and music would be the hobby or vice versa.

Bradley: For sure, yeah. When you’re a teenager, you can’t decide whether you’d like to be a skier, drive race cars or swim with dolphins for a living. It’s all very practical at that age, right? My mother wisely bought me an electric Fender Rhodes piano and it showed up in our den and I’ve got really involved with that and got excited about electric instruments and being like my heroes.

And around the same time, the jazz band in my high school, had just had particularly terrific crop of kids that at that time. And we began to win jazz band competitions. The band director asked if I’d be interested in improvising an intro to “La Fiesta”, a Chick Corea standard. And so I did that and began to get attention for that because the piano players tend to get sort of rolled over like a tractor on dead corn in a big band. Five saxophones, four trumpets and trombones, it’s hard. The Piano player can be totally rolled over. 

Bradley: It was neat that I had all this space up front. And so I got a probably a little bit more confidence than I should have had. I got a little cocky about that and I decided since I couldn’t walk very well for a while and I would, frankly just between you and me, I was not good at sports. I can’t catch to this day, because I have some eye troubles. It was very embarrassing for young man to just be terrible at ball sports. Although I enjoy track and soccer I could do.

The point is you’re looking for at that age some identity. You’re looking for something to be proud about and something to wow you’re friends with. And it seemed like music, it was going to be that for me. That takes me up through high school. You want to hear the whole bio?

Christopher: I want to hear the big turning point because I think that paints a really vivid picture of where you’re coming from. But I know that at some point you must have doubled down on jazz or really gone deep there. And I know you had an interesting kind of career. A serious performing career before you really went into education in earnest. I wonder if you could explain how those things happened.

Bradley: Okay, sure. When I went to college after my first year and where it got my reading together and everything, I decided to go to a larger school. I went to Ohio State University, which at the time was the largest school in the world. It’s definitely, it’s 60 000 students, and it was a nice chance for me to rethink who I wanted to be, because you didn’t see the same face every day.

I became a composition major. And it was again stuck. It was again a 19th century approach to music. I was being forced to write fugues and then on the one hand and to be more modern I was forced to write 12 tone music or bump squeak music, and I had no time for that. I had played too many gigs by then to understand that people wanted to, I wanted to relate to listeners. I didn’t want to push for the envelope of the history of music. I want to play for people. So around that time I wandered over to the dance department and took a dance course, a modern dance class and just to see what that was all about.

Bradley: And there was a very lovely teacher there and a piano player and the teacher is now my wife. I met her there and although it was a long trajectory till we hooked up, but that was the beginning of it. But I noticed the piano player was playing on the side there again with no music and that the dancers needed the music too to swoop and play. they’re doing a waltz and they needed like not just … they would jump that like the music mattered. 

Bradley: And I went straight to the head of that department and said, “I need to be a dance accompanist as soon as possible.” And that saved me from the tedium of music school, because it music mattered there. Around the same time I joined the traveling a rock band and so I was playing dance classes in between classes, studying music and on the weekends playing a lot of rock and roll. And eventually I just actually literally physically dropped. I had big backaches and troubles in and went and got my kidneys checked, all that. And the doctor said, “Son, you’re burning the candle at both ends. You got to cut something.” I cut the rock band. But the dance thing went on for years and years. 

Bradley: I moved to New York City after college and I brought all my little compositions in my box I’ve written a lot of music. I wanted to be Aaron Copeland. I have a letter from him on the wall over here. And he was my hero. But I had settled for Leonard Bernstein and I thought that there was a job occupation called American composer. But it wasn’t evident. I had a skyrocketing plummet to obscurity in New York City. But I continued to play for dance classes for years there and a dance class in a ballet class, they often ask for the music of when the ballet was the popular art form, stuff like this, a lot of Chopin or Strauss and so on. But in a modern dance class, they’re just as well as saying, kind of like peanut butter music. And it’s sort of like you, and then you watch the move and you think…

Bradley: Yeah, I like that. Later on now we’re going to do some quick footwork. You just need to come up with it right there and you need to make it square in terms of little phrase lengths so it fit the dance. I did that for at least four hours a day for eight years. It’s how I made my living in New York City and then I’m playing jazz on the weekends at weddings and stuff like that. So just to keep going. We moved to Belgium because my wife was a performing concert dancer, and she was in residence at the Tiatros Dolla Mone, which is the opera company and in Brussels. And I had taken a three week course in French and it wasn’t very successful and I couldn’t speak very well. And so I started doing some gigs as American pianist that, that knew something about jazz. 

Bradley: And people started really listening and asking questions because Europeans tend to value jazz as an import more than Americans where it’s indigenous. And they would say, that’s very nice what you played, but could you please play some Thelonious Monk. And they’re asking for sophisticated, very aficionado type tunes. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, these people are listening, it matters.” So I didn’t have anything to do all day because I didn’t actually have papers to work. I had to just get paid cash and so on. I just spent a whole year of practicing.

Bradley: That was the year I turned it around. I practiced all day long and go out to the fish market. That’s the market, bring home dinner and practice again because she was buried in rehearsals. That was I think at one point in your life to be a professional musician, I think the trajectory goes like this. The best first teacher you can have is almost like a childhood TV show. Isn’t music nice. Look at this. Doesn’t this sound great to have you fall in love.

Bradley: The next teacher you need has a little bit higher expectations and shows you the ropes and was able to actually give you the skills you need. And the last teacher you need is either to be scared out of your pants or have a complete tyrant who, forces you to do the necessary hard work to take it to a professional level. And I have a theory that if any of those teachers are out of order, people quit because they get the tyrant early on, it’ll just break you. And if you’re desperate to learn more and get better at some point that the nice sweetie is not going to give you what you need to take it to a high level.

Bradley: That’s kind of my story. Then I moved back to Columbus, Ohio for the dogs and babies phase where I am now. And for the next 30 years made a living as a concert artists and gigging artists. Do you want me to talk about that? I feel like I’m talking a lot.

Christopher: No. Well let’s pick up in a moment, but just to say I love that model of thinking about the teachers you need to become a serious musician or a professional musician. And those sound like two really transformative phases of your life. I was reminded when you were describing the dance classes of this amazing show I went to Canada once where it was improv comedy, but it was musical improv comedy and I was at a very impressionable age where I had no concept of how someone could improvise singing, let alone improvise an accompaniment for the singers who were improvising singing. And now looking back, I can kind of understand as you’ve been explaining to some extent how that is possible and particularly, like collaboratively, that just blew my mind.

Christopher: But I remember thinking at the time, I did at least understand, that is hardcore. Like for that guy to do a show every day and have to respond on the fly to what’s happening in a way that resonates with the audience because it’s familiar enough that they get like the joke being made. I could see how intense that would be to change you as a musician. 

Bradley: And he had to do it whether he was in a good mood or not. That’s the other thing about being a pro. Every once in a while, some of my students will say, “I don’t really like this style or I don’t want to learn that tune.” And it’s kind of, “Oh, 80% of the music that I played as a pro performer was picked by someone else.” I didn’t even think of it that way. This is what the set list is. So it’s … I don’t know where I was going with that. But-

Christopher: It sounds like you’ve had a genuine love of jazz. You’re describing it as kind of having to respond to the demand in terms of playing Thelonious Monk rather than Gershwin or whatever you might be instinctively wanting to play as an American aspiring composer. But, tell me a little bit about how you were thinking came out of jazz at that stage, because I know that today if someone walks up to bradleywalsh.com they’re going to see jazz for the rest of us alongside your photo. What did jazz mean to you? Then maybe you could also share what it means to you now if that’s changed.

Bradley: Jamie Aebersold is a wonderful jazz teacher in Louisville, Kentucky here. I went to his camp and he said, Jazz is the freest music you will ever play. And that’s what resonated with me. I heard that and thought, “Yeah, that’s what I’m drawn to.”  Because even though I’d grown up around it and heard a lot, of course most people come, they work backwards in their musical tastes. So they start with whatever’s current and then find out who influenced them and then who influenced them. And the further you go back, you find that there really is nothing new under the sun. It’s just twists on old ideas. And what drove me to it was actually not first the sound, but the approach. So while I’ve come to love swing music and I adore the Brazilian streak in jazz and I still love jazz rock. 

Bradley: It was the idea that you are not only allowed to, but expected, to personalize every moment of your playing. And that just thrilled me. I’m a kind of person that loves to make things when I’m not playing the piano, I’m in my wood shop. Nothing makes me more happy than being in the zone and creating something. And here’s a way that I can do this with music. So to this day, I still describe jazz as an approach, not a style. And that approach involves already knowing that harmony, already knowing the structure and imposing your own ideas on to the top of that. Yes, it’s possible to be free improvisation when you just play whatever comes to mind. But most of the time there’s a structure. So jazz is any kind of music where people are able to leave the moment, close their eyes and improvise. 

Bradley: Let’s look at that. That could involve a hot band, just solo in a bluegrass band. I would say that’s jazz. It could evolve an older style if anybody would still have the guts to do it. Concerto player in a classical orchestra setting who actually does not rehearse the cadenza. The big point right before the end of the concerto where they show off. Over the years that’s been codified and people, I’ve learned it and written it down, but the original intent was that the musician made it all up and show what they could do. 

Bradley: If it’s a hard rock band and the guitar players suddenly in the spotlight in his eyes are closed and he’s wailing away on a beautiful blues lick, that’s Jazz. In other words, when we talk about classical and jazz, we may as well be saying in my book, written and precise and versus deliberately vague to leave room for your own musical input. That’s how I see it.

Christopher: That’s beautiful and really valuable. I think we get so caught up in the way culturally we think about genres and classical is one genre at that means it sounds a bit like this and these are the instruments used in jazz this up the genre and it sounds like this. But I love that perspective that actually is much more about how you approach the music and how you express yourself. And maybe year versus I think that it is about, are you playing seventh chords and blues pentatonic when it comes to the solo.

Bradley: Right. I mean you could play Bach in a jazz approach. You could play. Actually a year ago I taught a course on the Beatles. Beatles on jazz piano so it was, rethinking those pop songs in a jazzy way. There’s also jazz has the vocabulary you just mentioned a lot of seventh chords and ninths and 13th those wonderful … This is great chords and so there’s just a real rich sauce and the normal vocabulary but jazz musician, that is exciting. That’s it.

Christopher: Sorry, maybe a redundant question at this point having just heard that, but were you thinking at that stage and do you think now that jazz is kind of an advanced level of skill or an advanced way of playing music? Because I know a lot of listeners in our audience probably have the same worldview that I did in the past, which is, this kind of classical and rock and then blues is this slightly more advanced creative thing. And then beyond that as jazz. And there were definitely some method books to blame for me having that worldview in terms of basic, intermediate and advanced and mapping that somehow to the genres or the styles. But I imagine your answer is no to both of those questions. 

Bradley: Right. I wrote the best selling jazz piano method in the world. Is it because it’s brilliantly written? I don’t think so. Is it cause it has cool illustrations? No, the reason it’s popular is that it starts simple. It starts easy. It’s called That’s Jazz to nine books series and it’s because I’m a firm believer in if you begin improvising and playing by ear alongside reading early then it is no big deal. And if the teacher doesn’t show their cards and say, now I know this is going to be really scary for you as it is for me because I hate to improvise but we’re going to try this today. You know can steal it. In fact, I use improvisation when I was teaching kids as at the end of the lesson as a reward, “Ah, you played that” You played that so well and I’m going to let you improvise.

Bradley: “Oh really? What are we going to do?” It was a treat. And it builds it actually, it goes back and forth and builds expression when you are playing written music and so on. But the reason historically that jazz is regarded as difficult is that the first jazz educators we’re teaching in a university environment and in a university environment, in order to get tenure, you have to be complex and use hard words that the review committee doesn’t understand kind of joking there.

Bradley: But it’s not uncommon for a jazz text to say something like on page one, in Jazz we use modes. There are seven modes. Here they are, learn them in all keys. Okay, I’ll see you in a year. Geez and that’s not necessary. Improvisation doesn’t even begin with crazy scale records. It begins with simple personalization of a melody. Simple embellishments, phrasing little things that makes the music your own music. Some people are doing it already, and not even knowing it. And they get their hand slapped by overly zealous precise teacher. You can tell I have a chip on my shoulder about that. And then it squashes that creativity. There’s a place for being accurate and there’s a place for being perfect, but it can’t be your whole education or your suffer. 

Bradley: Because I spend half my time putting balm on the burnt wings of recovering classical musicians who are terrified of wrong notes and it’s just not necessary. Music is a blast. And do I play wrong notes all the time? The first thing I say at a concert before I sit down, I sit down and I look at my hand and I say, “I don’t know a lot of people out there, but I have 88 friends in front of me on these keys.”

Bradley: And the second thing I say is, “I’m going to make a lot of mistakes tonight.” I’m going to have a lot of unintended notes. But I know that I have a vast skill-set would allow me to navigate those who keep the music rolling. I just acknowledge it’s like you may as well get a new car and put a scratch in it and stop worrying about it. It’s the same mentality. Yes, of course I’m going to make mistakes. And we’re going to have a blast. In another way to say it is, I think that the jazz approach starts at … Let’s do it this way. 

Bradley: A classical approach starts at perfect and then you take the demerits, of everything you do wrong. And a jazz approach says that right is music doesn’t exist at all in anything that I do is good thing and the causes of music to happen. So I keep earning points by all this stuff that worked out rather than keeping track of the stuff that maybe didn’t come out like I thought. And just to go further with that, half the stuff you play that was terrible, was actually kind of cool. So even though you didn’t mean to play it, if I do this … So was that really sophisticated and neat or wrong? You don’t know. So you go with it. Okay. Maybe he meant that anyway.

Christopher: Love it. Well, I know that there’s a lot of people, in our audience right now feeling a new enthusiasm and passion for the possibility that jazz might be accessible to them and improv might be accessible to them. I’m going to ask you for some practical pointers on both of those things, but I’m going to leave people dangling for a moment because I do want to finish the last stage of your story. If we may, you clearly have strong feelings about the way music is taught and you’ve moved more and more into education, educating piano teachers, teaching students directly online. Tell us a little bit about that phase of things for you and how you took that trajectory. 

Bradley: Okay, yeah. I have a little like in the movie that they make up my life and put in all the museums, they’re going just totally teasing there. There’s going to be a scene called epiphany on Rich Street. The epiphany on Rich Street happened when I reached a point in my career where I was playing more and more concerts. But at the same time, in order to feed my children, I was also playing, cheesy little, society gigs. Maybe you’re the man behind the FICA tree at a corporate bank meeting for their Christmas party or can you just give us a little music here to warm up that provides social lubricant as the party gets going and just racing around doing all these, working blue collar musician gigs that you need to fill in the blanks. 

Bradley: And at the same time I’m doing concerts. So there literally was a night where I played, a Friday night concert, I think in Cleveland. Took vows, sold CDs and signed autographs for 45 minutes, drove home in the next night I went to a house or some kind of party in the … I came to the front door and my Tuxedo with my gear and the woman said, “Oh, you’re a musician. You can’t come in the front door, go around. Back. We don’t let musicians in the front door.” And that was an extreme example, but it began to feel a weird pull between … On the one hand, people actually paying money to hear me do my thing. And on the other hand, being completely ignored on my daily bread gigs as when the music was … I could’ve just sat there and wiggled my hands and played a recording, who cared?

Bradley: And so I hit this point where an awful thing happened where I started not caring how I sounded. And the good side of that was I would give myself challenges to stay awake. Let me see if I can play the melody, my left hand for a change in the chords in my right. I wonder if I could play this. Let me change keys every eight measures. I would do my things like that. But even that got old and I just got literally teary or anxious so I got to where I reached a point where I’d rather flip hamburgers then trash my art form. And I played at a bank party and I brought my rig and it was snowing on Rich Street and I got chewed out by the doorman for coming in the wrong door again with a big case.

Bradley: I set it up. There was a barbershop quartet there who had no singers when we’re out of tune. They insulted me and said, you know how they had to practice and not just roll into gigs and did I practice? Then I was introduced by the wrong name and I just sat behind this ficus tree and my piano thinking this is the last gig I’m ever going to play. I hate this. And I walked out with my rig on like little rig is a big, like a wagon with my big keyboard on an amplifier and all that. And I went across the street, it’s snowing like crazy. And the little wheels in the front went in a pothole and my everything dumped in the street and my keyboard case opened and a microphone rolled out in the snow. And I’m standing there in a Tuxedo in the snow.  And then the light changed and the car started beeping at me. I thought, I’m not going to be a musician anymore. I am done. Literally, that was it. I don’t care what I do and so for about six months, I didn’t play anywhere. And then a guy asked me if I would be interested in playing a jazz worship service and I played in it and I said, “Yeah, put that together” And that people were into it. And I thought, “Wow, here’s one place that people listen is in churches.” 

Bradley: I did a lot of church playing and then I put a sign up down the street and said, jazz piano lessons and my phone number. And then started to build a studio there and maybe I’m going on too long, but let’s see that I eventually couldn’t find books for my students, so I wrote my own and then eventually I sent into a publisher and said, “What do you think of these?”. And they said, “The tunes are great write down how you teach. Write the teaching part too.” And then when you’re published, you get more attention. And then the next thing you know, you’re speaking at conferences and getting asked to do musicality podcasts. And that’s been my route.

Bradley: I still perform and I still play music live all the time. A lot of it is in a jam sessions and just playing with friends and I like to play Irish music and jazz with friends. And I still do maybe 10 performances a year. I played with this professional concert with a string quartet just a week ago. But I don’t rely on that anymore. And that pressure’s off looking for gigs and being ignored and traveling and being alone and lonely on the road. And instead I get to help change people’s musical lives in that and I love it. I’m all in. It’s not something I do wishing I was still out on a stage somewhere. This is what I like doing now.

Christopher: Tremendous. And the world of music education in piano teaching in particular is much richer for that epiphany on Rich Street having happened. No doubt. I know that our audience are hungry for the practicalities, the nitty gritty. We’ve got them excited about Improv and a new perspective on jazz and whether they play piano or not. I know there are some who are like, “But what do I do?” Like what can I try it today or tomorrow? What can I do to explore this? And I wonder if you’d be willing to share. You’ve had such experience teaching. I know you’ll have a real appreciation of both the kind of mental blocks or barriers people might have around improvising or indeed jazz and maybe also some of the exercises or techniques or strategies that can help them get a handle on it and get going.

Bradley: Yeah, I can do that. I have a couple of general ways to get started. The first thing I would just say is what we talked about learn your chords. It doesn’t matter if you’re a piano player, not the chords opened the door to so much. You can’t hesitate and sometimes people say, “well, I know my chords, the D chord, let’s see that’s D….. uh..” That’s not knowing your chords. It has to be instant. It can’t be any hesitation and that is a big obstacle, but it opens up so much.

Bradley: Second thing is, do not underestimate the importance of a steady beat. A few minutes ago I demonstrated some deliberately off notes on “Mary Had A Little Lamb”. But the reason you accepted it was because I kept the groove happening. You can get away with murder as a musician if the beat is steady. And so what do we all do? We, make a mistake, we stop and fix it, we pause, we go back and we work and we fix it. And then what we’re actually doing is burning in the pauses and having no group. You can literally play garbage. And if you had a steady beat. All of that was nonsense. But you sort of accepted most of it. 

Bradley: All that stuff and fix it. It’s right notes with no rhythm is not music. If the beat is not steady, the piece is not ready. So those two are general comments. But in order to personalize music, the process is to go ahead and use some cerebral devices to know your have techniques, which you think about and are deliberate sought of in a sense you’re imitating. And then after a while they become your own and they come up by themselves. In other words, intuition doesn’t just happen. You first have to feed in ideas. And they’re specific ideas and you can name them. Maybe I can show you a couple of embellishments that can be used on any tune. They’re generic, they’re devices, they’re tools you can plug in. So does that sound good?

Christopher: Perfect. 

Bradley: Okay. So let’s say we’re going to play, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Without any patterns or anything. And we want to go through a nice process where we decide what left hand pattern we want or what kind of accompaniment we want in there, what kind of backing track we’re going to put on our automated drum machine. We might want to go through that. But right now let’s just look at that melody and there’re three ways that work on any melody to dress that up a little bit, and one of them, the easiest of all is simply to repeat some of the notes.

Bradley: It seems simple but, I got a little bit of that jazz feel going there. So by repeating notes, there’s other things that come with it sort of instinctively like their notes tend to move a little bit to make room for the repeated notes. There might be some rest. Other things actually happen if you keep that steady beat. Another real simple, one of the three is neighbor notes. If you live on a hill as I do and you go up the hill to borrow some sugar for your baking project because you are out of sugar and you come right back, that’s a neighbor note. 

Bradley: If I have a G then I go up to A to borrow my sugar and thanks for that and come home. I played an upper neighbor and then I get down to my baking project and I realized I have no flour, I’m not going to ask twice to the same uphill neighbors. So I goes downhill neighbor and borrow some flour. So the definition of a neighbor note is it always comes back and it can be as quick or slow. He would be an example of of a quick neighbor note. 

Bradley: Quite classical sounding. You could also draw that out. I put both upper neighbors and lower neighbors on there. It’s just in a way in back. And the what note do I go to? It doesn’t matter. As long as you get back to the note, it’s a target note. You can play any note you like and, maybe it’s a half step. Maybe it’s a whole step it. But what if it’s in the key? Just do it. It doesn’t sound good, then change it. The last one I call fill notes and there sometimes they are referred to as passing tones, although I think of them a little bit differently.

Bradley: When the music has a gap in the middle of the a large space or large interval, you have the opportunity to fill that in and twinkle twinkle. And the third note of that has just a point right there, It does. We have the first note of the scale and the third notice the fifth note scale, one, two, three, four, five, right? So you can simply feel that in. Again, what notes do I use? Try things and you can get as interesting as you like. But if we combine those all three now that’s kind of a simple base here. You get the idea. Improvisation in my mind begins with customizing known melodies, working with something that’s already familiar but making it your own.

Christopher: Love it. That’s such an elegant way into improvisation in terms of demystifying it. And I guess removing the intimidation factor a lot because you could have that known starting point and you’re just taking little diversions away from it rather than looking at the blank canvas and panicking because all 12 notes are possible at any given time.

Bradley: Right? Right. And then the other thing about knowing your chords is, if I tell you what terrifies me is eight measures of the same chord. When you actually just get through the chords on a busy song, it takes care of you. There’s a lot going on in there already earlier I did this. We just like running those chords, all chord tones, all notes in the chord.

Now that gives me, an obstacle course, like a skier going down the hill around the gates. Those become chord points where I have to deal with them and that is sort of the next step after embellishing is acknowledging the chords that are there in your playing. But yeah, I can’t teach it all in today.

Christopher: Absolutely. Well, on that front, I’d love if you could share a bit about how you are teaching these days. Obviously you have, I think at least a couple of very popular series of method books that can be used by students, but you’re also doing a lot online and in particular that you’re doing online group piano lessons. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Bradley: Okay. Just to touch on their books. I just saw yesterday, somebody said, I see this all the time. You can’t learn jazz from a book. It’s one of those myths that are out there. And the reason I find that funny is every professional jazz musician who I’ve ever met, and I’ve rehearsed in a lot of basements with getting ready for gigs, has a vast collection of jazz books. So it absolutely use your ear, but you also… There’s nothing wrong with book learning combined with listening. But yeah, what I’m doing now, I was teaching in this very room one on one for many years and I can brag some of my students, I have a student who went to Julliard and various award-winning and things like that.

Bradley: I know that I know how to turn out pro musicians. But that’s not everybody’s goal. And I got too busy. I just had too much going on I came back to Leila Viss, she said, “Why don’t you get into teaching group lessons?” And then I’ll call Debra Perez, um, who’s down in Florida. And she came as a guest to 88 creative keys summer workshop. And she’s a big advocate of group teaching. And I was a little bit nervous about that, because I really hadn’t done it but I thought, well, I present all over the country as a speaker, I’m comfortable in front of people. Why couldn’t I do this here? So I began to teach teenagers four at a time and it worked out really well. So because if I have literally off camera who you are four pianos over here and they could do what I broke down earlier.

Bradley: I can say, “You play the bass, you play the chords, you play the melody and you do the fills and embellishments.” And then we would switch that so everybody could isolate those skills with a goal towards eventually playing them all themselves. And just really worked well. Plus there’s a subtle competition, if they weren’t prepared to kind of look more embarrassing in front of their buddies. And I eventually phase out all in individual lessons and only offered group lessons. And then I started doing webinars, with 88 creative keys and Leila again said, “Why don’t you teach your lessons online?

Bradley: Today I exclusively teach online live group jazz piano classes, and they are very valuable compared to bouncing around YouTube, looking at a tip here in a tip there because their sequence and well organized and because the participants get to know each other in our private forum group where they share practice videos and give each other support. And I have a detailed resources and handouts and backing tracks will become almost like a college course where you have the lecture, that’s the class, you have a lab, which is what the private group’s all about, putting in practice videos out there, getting the individual feedback. 

And you get the textbook with all the resources and the backing tracks are very, very important to have to practice with a backing track. I just love doing it. Every time one of those ends I’ve just grinning and we have so much fun. I’m never going to go back. It’s where it’s at. 

Christopher: It’s super cool. It’s definitely another kind of time travel moment for me where like I wish I could go back and signed myself up for that because that’s exactly what I would’ve wanted to have someone like yourself actually explain how all of these mysterious things worked in a practical way on the keyboard with all these amazing resources. You’ve mentioned several resources, they’re like backing tracks and the textbook and so on. In the moment for the lesson itself, it’s presumably not four students each playing a layer in sync with each other. What’s the actual group lesson like as it were?

Bradley: There are both students onscreen and some prefer to lurk or just watch only and that is actually evidence that there have had their wings burnt. Um, as a lot of people have performance anxiety and a lot of my teaching is psychological as well as practical just to help people become in touch with the joy of music making again. And so I highly encourage on camera participation and yet don’t force anyone. How does it look? I always start with technique and we just do the scale that day, which would be the same key as the song. And it may not be a normal major scale, it might be like a blue scale or jazz scale.

Bradley: And then I’ll say we have some worksheets and things like that. I’ll say, “Okay, Christopher, can you hold up to the screen the worksheet where we wrote down the chords of this song.” And then “Kathy could you play those? And we can hear each other and see each other, and then we’ll review a tune and somebody will feature it. They’re sharing where they are on it so they get, maybe they’ve got the beginning of it, but they’re having trouble in the bridge. So it’s a more of a lab thing they aren’t perfecting it. 

Bradley: I seen you don’t have trouble right here. Can you explain again how to walk the bass here? When the time comes where everybody’s reasonably competent on a tune, I introduced the new tune a bit by bit and showed to them both by rote and I give something called prep sheets where I highlight target notes, the main notes and a tune the backbone of a tune as a way to memorize it. 

Bradley: So yeah, it’s kind of like that. We usually end up something fun and there’s a lot of laughs and good times. I mean it’s a ball. It goes by like a flash. We have a great time. And then every day on, it’s, this particular group right at the moment is on Facebook. That’s where my private group is. Every day there’s buzzing activity there about, “Hey, what do you think of this a new way that I figured out to play Summertime,” I found this neat chord. “Oh that’s neat. Show it to me.” So they’d becomes a community involvement, which kind of substitutes for the physical distance in between. 

Christopher: Got you. Well, we talk fairly often on this show about the current landscape of online music education and like how difficult it can be for an adult beginner self taught or aspiring to teach themselves to figure out what’s worth pursuing and what’s worth trying and what will help them versus just confuse them. And it can be really challenging. But at the same time, my hopes are lifted by initiatives like this that you’re putting together where it just creates this whole new opportunity for learning in a really exciting way.

Christopher: And like I say, it’s the kind of thing where I think, Wow, if I could travel back and give myself that, it would just change everything. And so I’m so excited to have people like yourself innovating in that way and doing such cool things in online music education because yeah, it’s so empowering for people around the world. It’s fantastic. 

Bradley: One of the things that people are concerned about is there’s always a variety of levels and that’s part of the art of teaching in a group. And listeners might be interested in knowing how to get around that. For every tune I offer multiple options. Here’s an easy accompaniment style. Here’s the more difficult one. For those of you who have a lot of jazz, here’s a neat scale you can try. 

Bradley: There’s always several ways to get at it. And it’s a little like the one room schoolhouse, that my mother talked about going to where there’s all the grades in the same room and then there’s mentorship going on. Because as a teacher I try to move that kid just far enough ahead that it’s attainable for each student, but is still challenging. And that’s the problem with people keep saying, “Why don’t you just prerecord a bunch of videos?”

Bradley: And the reason is because I like teaching people. I know after a while how you learn and what you need, and I listened to those comments carefully and watch the the group and actually structured lesson plan upon how it’s being received and what the progress is like. So it’s not like this preset course that I just opened up in here. Now we do page five. I believe the best teaching happens through personal relationships and that’s, achievable online.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, one of the big challenges for me doing this podcast and doing interviews like this, is that it can be really hard to not just fanboy out and be super effusive all the time about the amazing people I get to interview and particularly with someone like yourself who I have admired from afar and have such respect for – I’ve completely failed at that today.

Christopher: And I apologize to our listeners if they’re like “We get it Christopher, you wish you could go back in time and give yourself Bradley Sowash, we understand.” But I know the point is hitting home if anyone in the audience does want to explore jazz. Explore Improv is a piano player, wants to be a piano player, checkout bradleysowash.com we’ll have a link in the show notes and I hope whatever instrument you play, whatever style of music you like, you found this conversation inspiring and giving you some new ideas and enthusiasm for pursuing your own creativity and music learning. Bradley, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. It’s been a real honor.

Bradley: It’s been an honor for me to, and it’s lovely to get to know you better, Christopher.

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The post From Mechanics to Organics, with Bradley Sowash appeared first on Musical U.

Today, we’ll be discussing music theory and some mindset shifts you can take to open up the world of theory to your mind and ears. You can make the music theory experience more accessible, fun, and easily actionable in enhancing your own musical growth and joy. Here’s how….

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Musicality Now – Why and How to Learn Theory, with Matthew Scott Phillips and Jeremy Burns
• Musicality Now – How to Improvise For Real, with David Reed
• Musicality Now – Fundamentals Over Flash, with John Hatcher
• Richard Wagner – “Tristan und Isolde”, Prelude

Transcript

Adam: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Musicality Now. I’m Adam Liette, operations manager for Musical U, and I’m joined by the Musical U team for this rewind episode. Now, if you’ve ever heard one of our rewind episodes before, the team and I go back through our past interviews and share with you some of our favorite moments from the show. We’ll include links to the previous rewind episodes in the show notes as well.

Adam: Today, we’re going to be diving into the world of music theory, but perhaps not the way that you would expect. While there are a myriad of tips about theory that we’ve covered in great detail thus far on the show, this episode is all about the mindset that musicians should have when they are learning theory.

Adam: Ask yourself, why should you learn music theory in the first place? And what are some of the approaches that will be helpful in making music theory part of your musicality, not just a disconnected subject that you study alongside your music practice. But before we go any further into this subject, I’ll let the team introduce themselves. Andrew.

Andrew: Hello, I’m Andrew Bishko. I’m the product manager at Musical U. I’m a long-time music educator and performer, and I play wind instruments and keyboard instruments, and soon, I’m … more instruments … I’m going to be adding some more. I’m really happy to be here to talk about music theory.

Stewart: Hello, I am Stewart Hilton, and I am the community conductor at Musical U. Most of you know me inside the site as GTRSTU777, and I have probably chatted with most of you in there. Also, I am a, I guess you call a professional musician. I go out and play with a tribute artist who does Elton John, Billy Joel, and Rascal Flatts, and then also have another band on the side. So, I’m looking forward to talking about all we are going to talk about, and that is it.

Adam: Fantastic. It’s so awesome to have you guys with me again. We talk about these things so much just on chat and through Musical U, through the various discussion boards, but to get face-to-face and to get to be able to share these things is always such a pleasure. So, what we do, how this show works is we’ll introduce an old interview from the show, and then we’ll all talk about it and various things that we learned. I know Andrew picked a particularly awesome interview that we’d like to start with. Andrew, why don’t you kick us away.

Andrew: All right, this is the Jeremy Burns Matthew, I forget his last name, but they have a podcast themselves called Music 101. Is it Music Theory 101?

Adam: Yes, Music Student 101.

Andrew: Music Student 101, and they’re an interesting pair. One of them is super-conservatory, educated, degreed, master musician, and the other one is basically coming from like a garage band background. They’re both professional players and everything, but they are on a mission to make music theory more fun and more accessible, and more purposeful and practical and useful for people. So, let’s go ahead, I’m going to have lots to say about this clip and about another idea I wanted to share too. So, let’s go ahead and listen to clip.

Mathew: Basically looking at, well, here’s all this music that has come before us, and this is what is going on in this music, and it makes us feel this way. We like it for this reasons. Why is that? How does it do that? It’s more of a process of discovery, and I think that if you understand that, it’s easier to communicate that to other people. I try very hard not to slam down a set of rules and say, “This is how you write music.” What I try to do is say, “This is kind of the way music has worked up until now.” There are exceptions to everything, but this song that makes you feel really sad, or this song … it feels like it’s moving forward to a conclusion in a way that songs I write or whatever may not be doing that.

Mathew: Well, there is a music principle reason for that, and I find that’s easier for people to deal with. It’s less intimidating to think, “Well, this is sort of like a secret thing I can discover,” than thinking, “Well, this is a whole lot of stuff I have to learn before I can consider myself an educated musician.”

Andrew: Okay, so first thing, there’s a lot in there. But right before the beginning of this clip, he’s talking about the rules, and he mentions it in this clip too, is that a lot of people think when they think about music theory, they think about rules. Oh, you have to do it this way, and you have to do it that way, and he’s saying it’s not about the rules. It’s about figuring out what … This is how the music feels, and this is what it feels like to me. Well, how did that happen? What was done musically to produce that feeling, to produce that emotion? So it’s more of a description than it is a rule that’s like, “Oh, you have to do it this way, or you have to do it that way.” That’s what a lot of people get turned off about theory, because they think about rules.

Andrew: When you’re learning something specific, let’s say you want to learn how to write a Bach four-part choral or you want to learn about a certain jazz progression, well, yeah, there are certain rules, but in a sense it’s not really rules sort of like you do this or you don’t do this. It’s more like rules in the sense of a game. When you have a game and you’re playing rules, the rules are what make the game fun, what make the game work, what make it hold together.

Andrew: I watch my children with their friends, and it’s interesting because they will say, “Okay, let’s do this. Let’s play this game,” and they’ll spend 20 minutes negotiating the rules of this game. “We’re going to do this, this is going to be the rule, this is going to be the rule.” They spend all this time negotiating what the game is going to be, and then they’ll play the game for three minutes and they’re all happy and satisfied with how it came it out. But it was all that rules, all this negotiation, and not in the sense of rules like something where if you break the law, you’re going to go to jail. It’s more like rules of the game.

Andrew: Another way I like to look at the rules, it’s more like the laws of nature. Okay? We all know that there’s something called gravity and it’s something that we work with. We’re not like, “Oh man, gravity, what a drag. It’s just always pulling me down.” We’re like, “Yeah, gravity. Well, I can learn to jump higher and I can learn to climb a tree. I can learn to do this, or I can learn to lift up. I can always be working with gravity and playing with that.” That’s kind of like what music theory is. It’s like a law of nature. It’s like how things are, and it’s like what are we going to do to ply with that, how are we going to work with that?

Andrew: Communication is the other thing that he mentions, and I remember in the 80s when I was in this reggae band I was really stimulated. I wanted to write songs. I would write these songs and I would go back to the guys, “Oh, it goes something like this. I want the bass to go boom, boom, boom, boom.” I couldn’t sing either, so it was a combination of not being able to say, “Okay, guitar, these are the chords I want you to play. Bass, this is notes I want you to play.” I was trying to communicate with them and they were amazingly patient with me, and the songs came out good. But gosh, it was so tedious to try and get my ideas across to get the things that I was thinking of and hearing in my mind, and to communicate them with other people.

Andrew: If I could have just gone in and said, “Hey, here’s the chords, here’s the notes, boom.” Now, because I know music theory, I can do that. I can even write out a score or I can say these are the chords, or I want you to play this note or that note, and that’s because of the music theory. I mean, that’s why I went back for a music education. That’s why I said, “Oh gosh, I really want to keep doing music, but I need to stop what I’m doing now and I need to educate myself.” I quit the band and I went to school. And gosh, it made a huge difference. So, communication, being able to communicate with others is the next thing.

Andrew: The other thing I like in this description is again, it’s about how thing work. It’s not so much about what you have to do, but it’s how it all works. It’s like, okay, if I’m going to play … and it’s even how things don’t work too. It’s like if I’m going to be playing in one key and then throw in some notes from another scale, it’s like, okay, now I know why those notes don’t work or I know why those notes don’t work and I like it that way. It’s like how does this music feel, and how am I going to produce that feeling? Music theory gives me the tools to say, okay, if I want something to feel this way, I can do this in my music. I can use a minor chord here or I can use this kind of a progression, or I can use a downward sequence. I know what these things are now, and so it’s like I can produce that. It’s really cool to be able to know that and having there be a principle behind what our experience and what our emotions are.

Andrew: So, I love what he said at the end. It’s like this is a secret I can discover. This is about discovery. Music theory is about discovery. I can figure this out and then I can use it. That is the wonderful thing about learning it. Now, I do want to add one thing about music theory that came to me as I was listening to this, and I don’t know if it’s addressed in another podcast episode, but when I was a child, I learned music theory in a class. I had a music theory class with a tuba player name Eric Benson, whose claim to fame was that he had written the Moog synthesizer part for the old TV guide commercial. I don’t know if you remember that, but it was like one of the first commercials to use the Moog synthesizer and he did that. Anyway, he was a great guy, but everything we were doing, he would sit at the piano and I would sit at the chair, and I’d be writing things on a piece of paper. It all made sense to my mind.

Andrew: Then I went to my piano lessons, and my piano teacher was great. He was this Lithuanian guy, Jonas, classical pianist, great guy. I was learning my piano, but he never talked about theory. I always had such a rough time. I would see a stack of notes and say, “Oh, my gosh. I have to read each one of those stack of notes,” the big black stack of notes. But if I had understood theory, not just in my head about what it looked like on paper, but also what it looked like with me hands … and this is something I discovered when I started teaching. Piano was always really hard for me when I was growing up. I learned it and I could play a good song, but it took me forever to learn songs. But when I started teaching and teaching beginner pianist, I started figuring out, oh, okay, if I know that this is the shape for this chord … and you guitar players know all about the shapes, but we don’t talk about it in piano.

Andrew: This is a shape. This shape is this chord. It sounds like this chord. And if I move the shape, it’s a different inversion. Getting the theory not just where I could see it on a piece of paper, where I can hear it in my ears and feel it in my hands, putting theory together in all those different ways. So, a lot of times on Musical U, I do a lot of interaction with our members and they say they’re having trouble with something. It’s like invariably, I would say 95% of people who can’t get something or are having trouble with something with ear training or with their music, it’s because they’re not doing it. They’re just listening to tracks and doing the ear training and stuff like that, but they’re not actually playing it on their instrument. They’re not actually singing it with their voice. They’re not actually doing it some way … doing it with their own body. And that is such an important component, taking music theory and making it real. Making it work for you is actually using it in what you’re doing.

Andrew: So, I want to add that to what we were saying about this great podcast from Matt and Jeremy. I’m really excited that we’re doing this, Adam, and that you’ve put this together, because it’s such an important thing and it’s so cool and so exiting. Most people are like, “Music theory, oh my gosh.” There was that meme … I don’t know if you posted that meme or someone posted the meme. It’s like there is a music theory instructor and he’s trying to teach this class and the class is going, “Aw.” He says, “Come on, it’s music theory. It’s not rocket science.” Then the next frame, you have the rocket science teacher and he’s saying, “Come on, this is rocket science. It’s not music theory.” Getting beyond that is what it’s all about. Changing the mindset, as you talked about.

Adam: Andrew, you stole my joke. I was planning on telling that later in the show and now I can’t. But that’s okay because it’s worth telling, and I love some of the things you said there because it’s so … we tend to inflate this idea of theory is this is very serious work that we must very seriously work at and studiously attempt. It’s not that way at all. I remember, gosh, we’re going to get to John Hatcher later on the show, but John Hatcher talks about his beginning days of playing when he was just in a garage band, right? And I remember starting that way too, you know, 12, 13 years old playing Nirvana cover songs in a garage.

Adam: It’s like, hey, it’s the power chord. That’s all we played was power chords. And a year later I happened to have this older musician. He was a junior in high school and we ended up playing in a band together. He was like, “Yeah, it’s just the root five octave.” I was like, “Wait, root five octave? What do you …” He showed me the scale degrees, and it’s like, oh. And now that I’m a little more educated and I know … well, that’s why it sounds good because that’s some of the fundamentals of music right there and that’s why those chords sound great, and they sound great no matter what you’re playing. You can’t screw up when you’re playing power chords, which is probably why all the rock stars play them because you can’t screw them up. But just that little insight when I was a kid, like, whoa, and it just opened up this whole other world to me.

Adam: There was this other moment where there was this band back in the late 90s called Korn, and they had this chord that they would play all the time. They called it the Mr. Bungle chord. I guess it was a from the band called Faith No More, Mr. Bungle. It was one of the most awful sounding chords ever because it was root tri-tone octave. So, it sounded absolutely horrible, but in the world of heavy metal it was like, “Yeah, this is great. This is what I’m talking about.” And when you discover, well, that’s why it sounds the way it sounds, it’s because it’s the tri-tone. I just love this concept of playing, then learning from what you’re playing. And this analogy, I mean, we talked about gravity and all sorts of things, and how we don’t get mad at these rules.

Adam: Right now in the United States where I live, it’s the middle of baseball season and everyone’s nuts for baseball, and I am too. But when I’m teaching kids baseball, I don’t teach them everything about baseball. Like okay guys, get to the plate, I’m going to pitch, you hit, run to first. Then once you figure out hitting, then I’m going to teach you about balls and strikes. Then we’re going to learn how to steal, then we’re going to learn about the infield ground rule or infield fly through. It’s through playing that we learn all of these rules. If you try to tackle all the rules at once, you’re just going to go crazy. But learn through playing, learn by doing, it makes the whole experience so much more enjoyable and really, I think, more intuitive. It’s like you play something, you realize it sounds good, you realize it works, and then you learn why it works. That’s kind of a cool way that I like to approach it even to this day.

Stewart: Yeah. I was actually thinking when Andrew was talking and what you just said, I’ve always had the tendency to … I guess I would call it walking in the exit door backwards when it comes to music. I get things in my head, and I’ve talked to Andrew about this before, I’ll get some sort of music thing for the guitar and it’s going in my head. So I go and I work it out on the guitar, but then later after that, then I can go look at the theory and go, oh, okay, this is kind of cool. Andrew’s like, “Well, I think that is a G7 with a minus, but also you’re doing a suspended right there and it’s kind of cool to hear how all that is working together.”

Stewart: I guess I would call it the sweet spot of being creative and also having the theory interrelated, because I’ve seen it go both ways where I’ve known guys who are so theory related that they just stay there and they don’t jump out of anything. Like, “I can only write an original in one, four, five. That’s it.” I’m like, “But you have the rest of the neck. You have all these different chord forms that you could use, or you could try this.” “No, no, no. I must use this mode here.” But then you also, on the flip side, you can have people that are so creative, they don’t know what they’re doing. So, if you say, “Well, what did you just do there? Can you show me what you’re doing?” “I forget.” So yeah, there’s that kind of nice middle ground where everything kind of works in a nice cohesive way. Yeah.

Andrew: That’s such a good point, Stu, because I know that a lot of times my music theory is backtracking. Like what you said, going through the exit door backwards. I’ll be messing around on the piano or I’ll hear something and I’ll mess with it. It’s like, I don’t know what it is when I’m listening to it necessarily in my head, but then it’s like, oh my gosh, that’s what that is. That’s a sus2 chord or that’s a thing, or there’s a moving baseline underneath that, and I can describe it. That way I can write it down and I can remember it, or I can communicate it to other people. So, that is so important.

Andrew: It’s not just like … theory comes from what we do, from the music that we make. It’s like people make the music and then the theory describes it. And yeah, theory can help us when we’re creating music. It’s like sometimes you get stuck and it’s like, okay, well, what scale am I in? Where are my possible chords? It narrows down your choices and you can say, “Okay, these are my …” It narrows down my choices. I can choose from this and this. I can try this or that. Oh wait, that worked, that sounded better. So, it’s this constant thing, going back between how it works what it sounds like and what you know in your head, and then what it sounds like, and trading off on those things.

Andrew: So, it is a sort of dialogue with your understanding and with your experience. In terms of experience, Adam, you mentioned the Mr. Bungle chord, and so I wanted to make sure that we had a chance to experience it. So here, I’m going to … you said it was the root, right? And the tri-tone. That’s a tri-tone, Okay? And then the root again, right? Okay. So, I’m sorry, I don’t have my distortion turned on in my keyboard, but that would awesome with some distortion. Anyway, so we just experienced Mr. Bungle, right? All right. So, carry on.

Adam: Fantastic. Yeah. It requires a certain level of distortion and angst to make it work, but yeah, wonderful.

Stewart: And proper look on your face.

Adam: The proper look on your face. That’s how you look cool when you’re playing the Mr. Bungle chord. Awesome. Well, let’s move on. I have a sound clip from David Reed. So, someone completely different. David Reed has this fantastic website called Improvise For Real. If you ever want to learn all about improvisation and so many different ways to approach it, I mean, David Reed is one of the best out there. It’s been wonderful getting to know him on the show and getting to just share things with him. So, I couldn’t let this episode go without sharing this episode from David Reed.

David Reed: I believe that creativity and a genuine understanding of music is the result of the student having the opportunity to get to know the raw materials of music first hand, okay? I think human beings learn best when we’re able to explore the world directly and get to know the raw materials of our heart. When we make our own decisions, our own creative choices about how to use those materials. It’s through that process that you actually learn to understand music. In other words, improvisation is not the result of 10 years of studying theory and learning what chords go with what other chords, what scales should be on top of those scales and so forth. Improvisation is actually activity that leads you to the understanding in the first place.

David Reed: If you think about the way we teach any other art form … for example, in a painting class, there might be some technique you learn. Maybe you’re talking about lightning effects or foreshortening or whatever, but then there’s always this moment in the class that the teacher says, “All right class, now you’re going to have an opportunity to make your own original painting. You’re going to choose the subject and you’re going to choose the composition, and we’re going to practice this skill that we’ve just learned.”

Adam: It’s so much goodness in that short little clip, right? When I hear that, talking about experiencing the music, it brings me back. When I first really began studying theory it was in my first year at the conservatory, so this was hardcore musicianship. It was counterpoint, it was very strict rules, going all the way back to early Gregorian chant, and it was so strict. The inner rock musician in me that I was, it didn’t make any sense to me. I was being taught these rules and I was like, “Wait a minute. What do you mean parallel fifths don’t work? They are to be avoided. That’s all I do,” right? I play parallel fifths. But I kept with it and I kept experimenting, and kept listening, kept learning.

Adam: I remember my a-ha moment, the point that turned everything else around, and it was Wagner opera, Tristan und Isolde. If you haven’t heard this opera, I’ll put a link in the show notes because it’s worth it. The prelude is one of the most beautiful haunting pieces of music in the entire literature, in my opinion. It starts with the root and goes to this minor sixth interval which resolves into this chord, and it’s just this beautiful chord. And to this day it’s known as the Tristan chord, like how it resolves, how it works functionally. It’s one of those things. Theorists will debate how this chord actually works, so they just call it the Tristan chord. And for me, that opened up so many doors. It’s like, whoa, I get it now. I get how this opens up so many things.

Adam: It inspired years of songwriting. Years, just hearing how that minor sixth interval resolved into this chord and how it went from there, that whole … and how the melody progressed over time, and the various little tricks Wagner was using. It opened up so many doors for me. And so, if something doesn’t work for you yet, if something isn’t connecting yet, keep searching for your moment. Keep searching for that piece of music that will bring it out for you. We all have the music we’re really seriously inspired from. Use that. Use that moment.

Adam: It’s not that I didn’t know theory before then, it’s just it hadn’t been pulled out of me yet. And from there on, I was able to really see the forest for the trees, so to speak. And then David moved into talking about improvisation and how this transpires, and improvisation is something I try, I work at; it’s not something that comes necessarily naturally and easy for me, still to this point. So, I’m continuously working on it, but in my head it all becomes easier when I simplify it and try things one at a time.

Adam: So right now, I’m just starting to play in a jazz combo again, and what I’ve started to do is the first time we go through a chart, it comes time for my solo, I focus on chord tones. Just improvise with the chord tones, and then I’ll move into a pentatonic scale. And as I get more comfortable with the chart, more comfortable with the progression, more comfortable with the changes, then I’m able to experiment more. I’m able to use different passing tones, leading tones, blue notes. By the end of the day, it’s this basic theory knowledge that allowed me to get there.

Adam: I’m trying make sure my children don’t have the feelings about improvisation that I do, so they’re really in their introduction stages of piano. So, I’m having them start improvise with just pentascales, which is really cool because it fits into their one hand, and they’re having so much fun with it. It takes me back to what we’re seeing in the foundations course, where just starting with something very simple … hey, just improvise a rhythm. Take one note and do an improvisation on it. That’s all it is, and just starting with that very basic thing. Man, it just opens up doors.

Adam: I think sometimes we put things in our own way. We try to see it all at once. But just take what’s right in front of you and let it inspire you, let it move you, and I think you’re going to be really surprised by what you find. And the great thing about this is it never ends. It never ends. You are always going to find new music, new things that just … they tug at your heart strings. They get every synapse in your brain firing and you want to discover why this works, why this moves you. It’s this lifelong journey. So, when we talk about being a lifelong musician, that’s where this clip really speaks to me. It’s about that lifelong discovery.

Andrew: Wonderful. I think that improvisation, like what you were saying and what David Reed’s whole is, is improvisation is not the end product of your learning. A lot of people think, and I like this on the site all the time, it’s like, “Okay. Well, once I get this ear training down and once I get this theory down, and once I can do this and this and this, then I’ll improvise.” It’s like, improvise can be your companion and actually your mode of learning all the way through from the very beginning.

Andrew: I’m so glad you’re starting your children out that way because it’s … like Matt was saying, it’s that process of discovery. Let’s say, okay, I want to learn how to do … one of the things I noticed is that when we learn scales, for example. I mean, scales, it’s like … so, when people think of theory, the first thing they think of are the scales. It’s like running up the scales. Okay. So it’s like, okay, you can run up and down the scale, and it’s like, but what does that do for you? Do you ever see that in music? Okay. Sometimes in Mozart you have these scale runs, but it’s not really that common in music that people are just running up and down scales. So, what are you going to do with that?

Andrew: It’s like, so, okay, I want to learn scale. Well, first of all, what if I do that scale from the top to the bottom instead? Oh, my gosh. It’s like a whole different thing. It sounds different, it does something different. Then you start playing around with the notes in that scale. You say, okay, I’m going to do an improvisation and I’m going to use the first three notes in that scale and I’m going to use the second three notes. Or what if I, instead of thinking about the bottom note being C, I’m going to think about it being D instead and using the same notes running up and down the scale. You start to learn that scale inside out by improvising, by playing with it, by messing with it.

Andrew: There’s this thing called modal theory, and people think of it as something really super advanced and really complicated. It’s like, my gosh, it’s so easy and it’s so fun. That’s where you take a scale and instead of making C the bottom note, you make D the bottom note in the C major scale. You’re playing the Dorian mode. And my gosh, it’s like it just opens up a whole new area in that scale. It’s so much fun to do, and it’s like the doing of it that makes it work. You know, the doing of it, of getting it in your hands and actually doing it where you’re improvising and making things up, and you’re exploring and you’re discovering the theory and how it works for yourself. That’s what brings it alive.

Stewart: I will say that I guess in the terms of improvisation, some of the bands, what we always love to do is write via improv. Normally it’s three of us. So, there’s a bassist, the drummer, and me. We always find some great stuff just by kind of improv-ing and getting in the jams, and just kind of winging it.

Stewart: The worst is normally we get to the end and realize that we had never recorded anything that we had, so then we have to go back, “What were we doing two minutes ago?” So, that was the only thing. But, it is. That improv, it leads to great creative moments that then … like you were discussing scales and I was thinking about a lot of times … that’s part of that whole theory thing is being able to go back, because sometimes I’ll come up with some kind of bizarre rhythmical thing and I’ve got to go back and go, “Okay, what am I supposed to solo over this?” Because there’s got to be some scale going on even though this seems like a bizarre key. But yeah, knowing that theory is the proper thing that makes it all come alive.

Stewart: The podcast on this subject that really seemed to speak to me and I could relate with was episode 160 with John Hatcher from The Blues Guitar Institute. He talked about the mix of flash, or technique, with also knowing the fundamentals of theory and putting it all together. Here’s that clip.

John Hatcher: I think what I teach at Blues Guitar Institute, try to balance the technical stuff because it’s fun. It really is, and you need it. You need it to pull off certain things in great music, but I try to balance that with the theory and kind of move together in lock-step and explain why. Because you can learn something out of a tab book, but it doesn’t mean that you can recognize that and the next thing if you don’t really understand it. And for me, it’s just part of me having that framework of those basics, those fundamentals. It helps me recognize things, it helps me recognize patterns, it helps me learn things quicker, it helps me not feel like a complete idiot sometimes if I’m sitting in a jam circle, I’m like, “I can at least get through this”

John Hatcher: So, I don’t know if that totally answers your question there, but I just think that this stuff is very important to learn along with those crazy, cool things from the tab books.

Christopher: Fantastic.

Stewart: So, the whole podcast was kind of … it gave me a lot of flashbacks of my earlier years doing heavy metal, which I won’t go back to what year that was. Anyway, we would have folks come out who would try out to be a second guitar and lead, and they would come in and they would hit these solos and just nail them. I mean, they would be note for note perfection. But then when it came to doing the rhythm or having them play rhythm behind me doing the solo, they would get off. They weren’t able to, number one, be able to sync with the bassist and the drummer, but also number two, if we said, okay, we’re just going to improv here a little bit, they would kind of look at you like, “What in the world is going on?” So, it seemed like they never got past, what he was saying, the tab books. They’ve learned it and they’re perfect, but they’re kind of stuck in that place. Not that there’s anything wrong, but you’ve got to go to that next step.

Stewart: It also happened … there was a guitar player back then I just had huge respect for. He was just a phenomenal guitarist. They would write their own stuff, great player. His technique was just … it was Jon Petruchi style technique. So he came out and just watching the band I was with at the time, and we were like, “Oh man, you want to jam? We’re going to do some blues.” He look at me and he goes, “I don’t know how to do that.” I’m like, “What do you mean you don’t know how to do that?” He goes, “I’ve never jammed.” He goes, “All the solos I do, I write out.” I’m like, “Really?” I was kind of blown away because I was like, number one, I was like, wow, he writes every solo out perfectly but he can’t just kick into a jam session and have fun with it. But still, I’ve always had huge respect for what he did.

Stewart: So today, I find knowing and having a decent idea of theory, along with some technique and flash, has helped me. I’m definitely not the flashiest guy you’ll ever see, but I have learned the things that has gotten me gigs and some good paying gigs, that has helped going along with also professional work ethic. So, such as these shows I do with this tribute artist. We do Elton John, Billy Joel, and Rascal Flatts. When I first got in he told me, “Oh, by the way, I do wardrobe changes during Elton John. So, be prepared for longer than normal guitar solos,” to which my jaw hinged and fell over, and I thought, “Me?”

Stewart: So, I needed to know how to improv and be able to actually develop it. And also what made it more interesting is this guy doesn’t do band rehearsals. So, to have that theory and know how to develop things using improv became a big thing for me because it’s knowing how to be able to use your ear, improv correctly, add rhythm and everything else. Because the other band I play in, I’m the only guitar. So when I do a solo, I have to make sure that I’m rhythmically correct too and paying attention to that.

Stewart: Speaking about improv, we have discussed this. We have a great improv roadmap that hits on all these things that we are talking about, about chord tones and using melody. And I have to say, I have learned from it and it’s been great, as Andrew has put so much time and effort into those modules. But it has helped me, especially during these longer abnormal guitar solos, and I appreciate that. But yeah, I always think learning off tabs is great, it’s fun. It sounds great on video on Facebook clips, but you also have to know the fundamentals of rhythm; how to phrase a solo, how to work it, especially if you’re called on to improv. Knowing scales, knowing improv techniques like the roadmaps, knowing how to find the keys of songs, which was an issue in one point because when you’re playing with these guys who are all piano, playing in the key of the song becomes a little sometimes trickier than a lot of other songs.

Stewart: So, I’ve had to learn how to find that. You know, doing the chord progressions through when playing songs written by piano guys. Yep. I just said that. But anyway, and I had mentioned this early, it’s finding that sweet spot of flash and technique, so to speak. Or we can say theory and fundamentals along with the flash. It can really make you a nice rounded musician that can go into different styles and really help your playing.

Andrew: Stu, I think it’s so cool what you’re saying. My big takeaway from what you’re saying is that theory makes things easier. A lot of times we think that, oh my gosh, how am I going to learn that? It’s going to be such a thing, it’s so difficult to learn it. We learn from what Adam was saying from David Reed, that it’s not that hard to learn if you’re doing it by exploring it, and improvisation is a great tool to explore it. It’s not that sort of out of this world.

Andrew: Then once you learn it, without your knowledge in music theory, doing those gigs would be a nightmare because you’d be basically stabbing in the dark in every … that’s what Mathew talks about. It’s like this idea of stabbing in the dark, where it’s like, okay, well, that sounds really cool, but what is it? Then you just goof around on your guitar until you figure out, okay, this sounds kind of right. But if you know, it’s like, okay, well, I know what this progression is and I know what this is going to be. It narrows down my possibilities. Then you can do the kind of gigs that you’re doing. You know, doing gigs where you’re learning massive amounts of music in a very short amount of time, and still having fun and enjoying it.

Andrew: It’s one thing, like for me too, it’s like when I growing up it was always about learning that recital piece. You know, that recital piece. It was like I would spend all year learning my recital piece, and then the day after recital I’d … I’d kill it on the recital, then I’d forget it the day after the recital and sit on the next year’s piece. It’s like there’s so much fun you can have with music, either creating music or learning music, and with just a little bit of theory and having the right mindset to learning that theory, it just makes things easier and funner. Funner, there’s a word for you. I just improvised that word.

Stewart: Speaking of funner, I have a funny story in relation. So, the first time I play with this guy, and it’s been a three year process doing these improvisations, and I’m learning and getting better at it. You’re always feeling like, okay, I can still do better than what I just did.

Stewart: Anyway, the first time I did it, he already warned me. One song was Benny and the Jets. So, we hit it, and I’ve done long solo things before, but this is longer than anything I’ve ever done. So I go into it. I mean, I’m feeling really good and I feel like I’m building it. I get to where I’m like, okay, I’ve got all my ideas done. I look over and we’re not done yet and something hits me I’m like, “Oh shoot, now where?” But it hit me like, oh man, I’ve got a lot more work to do because I’m out of ideas. But yeah, it definitely put me through my bases, and still does.

Adam: Stu, you were talking about the guitar player who could play these solos note perfect and didn’t know what he was doing really. I had the exact opposite experience where I was … I immediately jumped into Metallica, Dream Theater, all these really good guitar players. I’m like this kid on this little stratocaster, and I couldn’t play them. I was trying to play things note perfect, note by note on these tablatures. It didn’t work for me until I discovered pentatonic scales and I discovered these boxes that all these other guitar players were working on throughout the fretboard, and suddenly the fretboard became alive for me. I could see the fretboard in this three … I was like, whoa. So, not only could I learn solos way quicker than I ever could before, I could see things. I could see where they were going, I could see how they were moving in and out of the different inversions of the scale.

Adam: I could also improvise more. And best of all, and this is just the 14 year old in me, everyone thought I was amazing. Like, “How are you doing that?” Well, it’s just this scale. I didn’t want to tell them. I don’t want to give up my secrets because it was earning me gigs, but it was just that very basic understanding of theory that just opened up all these doors, tons of gigs. Anyway, it’s cool how we have this fundamental thing and we all kind of come at it from these different angles. I think that’s healthy. And as teachers, as musicians ourselves who are talking to other musicians, we should encourage that exploration. Hey, that didn’t work? Try this. That didn’t work? Try this. There’s so many different ways to come at it and there’s no right way to learn this stuff. There’s your way and whatever works the best for you.

Stewart: Yep. Very much agreed. Yeah. I mean, luckily, this guy … the guy I play for, he does let you explore, but he will also tell you if you may have gone too far. So, I actually did that. We did the song Rocket Man, and I came up with this ingenious idea to use the delay pedal as part of an effect for the solo. If you hold it, it does this little thing where it takes your notes and it goes kind of up and then back down. So, I kind of warned him first, and then at the end I said, “So, what did you think of that?” He’s like, “It may be a little too much.” But at least he was cool and he let me kind of experiment with it a little bit. So I thought it sounded like it was a rocket taking off and going to outer space. But maybe only once it should do that, not five times.

Andrew: That was so much fun. I love talking about this stuff, I love being with you guys, and it’s really cool. I’m looking forward to the next one.

Adam: Fantastic. I have to admit that this mindset was not something that was in place when I first started learning theory at the university level. I remember being frustrated by learning all these rules and guidelines that seemed completely disconnected from the music that I was playing, especially the popular music. This was something I’ve heard from Musical U members, from followers on our Facebook post, from just people I meet on the internet. And as Andrew reminded us, come on guys, it’s not rocket science.

Adam: At the end of the day, music theory is simply a way of explaining what is occurring in the music that we are playing. But, the music came first. Music theory was born out of the way the composers and musicians were creating music. You can almost say that it’s as simple as defining best practices, rather than a strict definition of rules that you must follow. I would encourage to start with the music they love and learn how it is put together. These abstract rules like a third, a tri-tone or secondary dominant, make a lot more sense when you hear them first.

Adam: My final thought is the argument that we hear so often, that certain musicians never learned music theory, so why should you? I would argue that while popular musicians like The Beatles, Metallica, and even Jimi Hendrix may have never learned what a particular musical trick was called in theory, they certainly understood how it made sense in their songwriting. If you were to sit these musicians down and give them the technical word for what they were doing, they would certainly understand because they already understood how it worked through their listening and their musical ears.

Adam: I hope these approaches are a good jumping off point for you, and encourage you to dive into a better understanding of music theory, exploring this wide world of music that surrounds us. A big thanks to Andrew and Stu from the Musical U team for joining me on this rewind episode. It’s always fun talking about these subjects. Until next time, thanks for watching Musicality Now.

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The post Rewind: A Mindset for Music Theory appeared first on Musical U.

Her music may sometimes get classified as “new age”. However, as you’ll hear in this conversation, that’s a misleading label that doesn’t do justice to the emotional variety and powerful storytelling of her music.

It was fascinating to hear about her improvisational approach to composing and there are lots of ideas here for anyone interested in being more creative or expressive in their playing.

We talk about:

• The concert she attended at eight years old that inspired her to start creating her own music
• Her “100% emotion” approach to improvising and the process that takes her from improvising to a finished piece on an album
• How she thinks about learning and improving her skills year by year

You’ll love hearing Michele describe her music but you must go listen to it too! We’ll have links in the shownotes, including for her latest album, Memoirs, or you can find it at michelemclaughlin.com.

This is one of those interviews that will have you itching to run off and spend some quality time with your instrument exploring new possibilities – enjoy!

Listen to the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• Michele McLaughlin Online
• Michele McLaughlin – “Memoirs”
• Michele McLaughlin YouTube
• Michele McLaughlin Spotify
• George Winston Spotify
• Chad Lawson Spotify
• Ludovico Einaudi Spotify
• Jim Brickman Spotify
• Louis Landon Spotify

Transcript

Michele: Hi. This is Michele McLaughlin, and this is Musicality Now.

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

Michele: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Christopher: I’ve been really looking forward to this one because as I mentioned to you a moment ago before we hit record, I’ve just been geeking out on your music over the last week, and I love it in a very deep and genuine way. So the chance to actually get to talk to you and hear where this music has come from is really exciting for me. I know that your backstory is in some ways typical of children learning music, and in some ways quite different. So, I wonder if we could start there and you could share with our audience where did Michele McLaughlin come from as a musician? What were your early experiences in music like?

Michele: I started playing when I was, like kindergarten, maybe five years old. And we would sing songs like at kindergarten class and I would come home and recreate those songs by playing them by ear on the piano. And then I would show off at show and tell every Friday, and I would play those songs back for the class.

And then from there I just, music that I would listen to through television or movies that I watched, radio, I would just learn how to play those melodies by ear and I just was drawn to the piano. It was where I wanted to be.

Christopher: That’s so interesting. And were you in a musical household? Was it kind of taken for granted that you’d be dabbling at the piano at that age, or what kind of environment were you in?

Michele: No.

Christopher: No?

Michele: No, nobody in my family played. I had an uncle that we saw occasionally that played guitar, and another uncle that played drums. But my immediate family that I lived with, nobody played piano. We had an old upright piano in our living room and I think that it was my Grandma’s maybe. And I wish I still had it today. Looking back, I wish that that had never left our family. But yeah, I was the only one.

Christopher: Fantastic. And put a bit more detail on that, if you would. If we paint that picture of you at that age coming to the piano with the song you were singing in school all day and you figure it out by ear, you play it by ear, what did that look like? Was it trial and error? Were you figuring it out note by note? Were you able to just kind of rock up at the piano and pay it straight off? What did it look like?

Michele: It was very much trial and error. It was sitting at the piano and figuring it out note by note, and knowing sort of like, okay, the next note is up, the next note is down. How far up do I need to go? How far down? And just making the mistakes and figuring it out. And the early days it was really just right hand melody. There was no left hand pattern to go along with it. It was just that minimal tune is what I would sort of play. But yeah, it was very much, I’m sure my family hated it.

Christopher: Got you. But thankfully they didn’t discourage you in in any way. You did, I think, take some lessons at that time. What was that like? Were they kind of formal strict lessons? Was it more of this play by ear approach? How did that go?

Michele: It was formal strict lessons. And my Mom, so at this point I’m in second grade, and my Mom knew that this was something that I was passionate about, because at that point I was playing all the time, all kinds of melodies and really incorporating a lot more skill into, there was growth involved. So, she thought, well, we’ll put her in lessons. And it was very classically-driven, very strict, very scales and lots of things that I didn’t want to be doing at the piano. I just wanted to play. It wasn’t, I didn’t want it to become work. 

And when I would practice and I didn’t want to be at the piano, then it was a fight with the family because I was a difficult child and I wasn’t supposed to, I didn’t want to do the things that they were having me do. And so, it took all of the fun for me out of playing, and it made the piano sort of an unattractive thing. Which was a shame. So, I basically said, “I don’t want to do this.” And he didn’t force me. Which was nice.

Christopher: Got you. But that experience didn’t discourage you from the piano generally. It just discouraged you from that particular approach. Is that right?

Michele: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Because I didn’t enjoy classical music. And there were a few songs that I liked, like Für Elise and Moonlight Sonata. Some of the slower, prettier, more I guess what we would consider New Age music for back in that time. That’s what I was drawn to, and I just played those by ear and just would listen to them and just, and I didn’t want to have to be rigid and technical and practice the scales and be perfect. I didn’t want to do that.

Christopher: Yeah, it’s interesting. The way you tell that, I can imagine that it was probably a bit frustrating for a child who was quite capable in one way of playing the piano to kind of have to go back to basics in presumably the sight reading and notation approach. You were probably being taught to play things much simpler than you were already playing by ear. Is that right?

Michele: Yeah. Well, it was really difficult. Like even back then when they were trying to teach me how to read sheet music, it was very difficult for me to grasp that concept. And so, even today like, I know where middle C is and I know where G is on the treble scale. And then I had to figure it out note by note, and then I had to memorize again. And so, I really, I can’t read sheet music. It takes way too much time and it’s really frustrating for me. So.

Christopher: It’s funny. There’s that kind of 13-year-old version of me in my head, whenever I’m doing an interview and the guest who is a very successful musician says something like, “I didn’t want to play scales, so I didn’t,” or “I wasn’t good at learning sheet music note by note, so I stopped doing that.” I feel like someone’s going to bust the door down and  tell us off. “You can’t tell people that! You have to tell them to do their scales.” But that is just the 13-year-old version of me that unfortunately went through many more years of that kind of approach that you seem to have gotten away with, which is fantastic.

And so, you start with the piano, but in your own way, how were you thinking about it? Were you thinking I want to get better at this? Were you just playing for pure enjoyment? Did you think this could be a career? I better extend my skills and figure out what that looks like? I realize going back a little bit, but if you can imagine what was your perspective on piano at that stage?

Michele: At hat point in my life it was just something that I was connected to and I enjoyed, and for me it was just a place to go to kind of clear my mind and just be in the music and find this little bubble of emptiness that is just me and the music. And I had no aspirations or thoughts, or I had no drive whatsoever or dreams of even doing this as a career because I was so embarrassed about playing in front of people. And when you think of, at that age, when you think of being a professional musician, you think concerts. And for me that was like, no. No, no, I’m not going to do concerts. Not ever. And so, yeah, for me it was just, it was my quiet place and my happy place. So.

Christopher: It’s a really lovely way of describing it. And you mentioned playing by ear. These days improvising is a big part of what you do, and you’re obviously composing in a sense, putting out finished versions of tracks as it were. When did those things enter the picture and relate to playing by ear? Did you consciously think, and now I’m going to create my own stuff at the piano? Or did it emerge naturally?

Michele: It emerged naturally when I was about eight. It was after I saw George Winston in concert. And I remember sitting there, we were in the front of the audience on the left-hand side, so I could see everything that he was doing with his hands. And he would reach in and pluck the strings. And it was so fascinating with that, and I loved his music so much that I played his music by ear, and then I started trying to write kind of my own songs in that same fashion. 

And they were little. They were short. Like maybe 15-second songs, 30-second songs. Maybe a minute. And I had gathered, I would record those with a tape recorder. Like an actual cassette tape recorder with the tape in there and I would hit record on the piano and I still have all these tapes of these old recordings. And it was just, same thing. Trial and error, just trying to figure out what sounded good to my ear and kind of emulating other things that I had heard through George Winston and the radio and television and stuff. 

And once I started doing that and once I started composing on my own and doing, that’s what I wanted to do more than anything. Playing other people’s music became sort of a second thing. And then writing my own and coming up with my own melodies was what I did at the piano most growing up.

Christopher: I see. And I’m always fascinated to talk to someone like yourself who comes from almost purely, maybe purely an ear background. In music, we talk a lot about improvising and playing by ear, but we almost always approach it assuming that the student is sheet music trained, and kind of understand how to play what’s written down on the page, and they want to add this skill to their repertoire. And so, we always approach it from the angle of after we break it down to the point where there’s no sheet music in sight anywhere. But we’re kind of still coming from that perspective of how to play the notes you’ve been told to play, now figure out this other thing. And I’m always fascinated to talk to someone like yourself and ask what’s going on in your head when you come to improvise?

And maybe you can think about it in those days and a little bit now too, if it’s changed. But if you’re not thinking in terms of scales or chords or notation, or maybe you are, what’s active in your mind as you touch the keys?

Michele: For me, it’s 100% emotion. It’s how I’m connected to those notes. And I always tell people it was kind of like the Avatar movie where they connect their brains together and then they’d be kind of one mind. That’s sort of what it’s like for me at the piano, and I just sit at the piano and I play notes, and some notes sound better with different chords and some don’t. And some things are really atonal and kind of off and so you know not to go there. And I just kind of play around.

And now in my career, I mean I know my scales a lot more than I did back then. But it’s just, for me it’s just what feels, more than anything, what feels right, and what sounds good to my ear than, “Okay, this is a D major scale and we’re going to go from whatever this note is to here because that’s the proper way to go.” I don’t even really understand it because I’ve never grasped the theory the technicality behind the music. So, my brain doesn’t really understand it in that way.

Christopher: I see. That’s so fascinating that emotion is at the heart. I have read it said of your music that, that is the most striking thing. That it is purely emotion and storytelling, and it’s not all of this kind of clever wizardry in terms of theory or structures or what a lot of solo pianists maybe get pigeonholed into, particularly in Jazz. Like I’m thinking of Jazz, if we’re honest. But that very kind of theoretical, analytical approach to deciding what notes to play and I guess I want to ask this question that might be on the minds of people watching this or listening to this, which is, is there any kind of conscious knowledge or patterns or rules of thumb or anything to let you know, “Okay, now I want to make it, say, happier. Or I want to introduce some tension. These are the notes I should play.” Or is it we’ll let the kind of instinctive subconscious kind of silent, wordless level?

Michele: It’s probably more along the instinctive subconscious. But I know that if I’m going to write something happy, and that’s the thing is I don’t really sit down and try and write anything happy sometimes. Like more sometime I just go to the piano and what happens, happens. But if I do say, “Okay, I’m going to write a song and I want it to be happy,” then I know that I probably should be in a major scale versus a minor scale. Although you can write happy music in minor scales. 

But, and I try to tend to be more light and fluffy and jumpy and dancey on the keyboard, versus kind of slow and paced and, given that that just kind of anticipation and the patience. And that to me is more saddened or more pensive or thoughtful music. So, happy is more dancing. And so, I’m basing off of how it feels, again when I write something with that mood in mind. 

Christopher: Got you. It’s really striking how many adjectives you have at your fingertips there for describing the way you play. I say that because I mentioned to you before we started recording why I’ve been enjoying your music so much, and it’s not just that it’s great music, is that it reminds me of when I first discovered this kind of style and artists like George Winston that you mentioned. And it made me realize how much was possible with just a piano. And that sounds rude to say. It’s not “just” a piano, obviously, but I think when you immerse yourself in listening to music like yours, and you get such a vivid feeling for how much emotion can be conveyed and how expressive the instrument can be. And any instrument, I suppose. 

But it almost makes me laugh because then you come back to say, mainstream music, and you hear a pop song, and it’s just so heavy-handed. There’s no subtlety to it. The singer is literally telling you what the song is about. And when you realize how much depth and complexity in terms of sophistication and how much variety of emotions is possible with just the pure music of a piano, it’s really a wonderful thing. 

So, I just find it really interesting that you clearly think about music in such a sophisticated way in terms of the emotion and that comes through in your playing.

Michele: Yeah. Well, to me it’s all about having to feel, right? When I listen to music, I mean any kind of music, it can be Rock music. It can be singer/songwriter music. It can be Country. It can be anything. As long as that music grabs me and makes me feel and like, my sister and I always call it, “It hurts my heart.” And we’ll listen to something, she’ll say, “Ah, this song hurts my heart.” And I’ll do the same thing and that music is what connects to me the most. The stuff that really grabs me emotionally. And so, when I’m writing, that’s the kind of music I’m creating because that’s my favorite. I’m basically writing what my favorite style of music is. I’m just writing songs for myself.

And so yeah, the emotion and how it makes me feel is really the most important.

Christopher: Fantastic. And so, you mentioned that seeing George Winston in concert was a turning point for you and kind of unlocked this idea that you could create your own, and you were recording on tapes and so on. Where did things go from there? What were you doing learning or practicing or exploring that led you to be this very proficient and expressive and versatile performer on the piano?

Michele: For many years, from starting at composing at age eight all the way through to my 20s, I wrote music and I would record it and keep copies of it, but I didn’t, I never played for people. And I was very shy and I didn’t think that I was very good, and I didn’t believe that anyone would want to listen to the creations that I’d made.

And so, I didn’t do anything with it. I just, I wrote and played for myself. And then in the year 2000, my Mom wanted me to make her a tape of the music so that she could listen to it in her car. And so, I was like, “Oh okay, I’ll make you a tape.” And I borrowed a digital piano from my aunt and on the top of the piano I put a, like a regular tape recorder, and I created a recording of 20, the songs that I had written over the years. And I thought, well, if I’m going to make a tape for my Mom, I’ll make one as kind of a Christmas present for people.

And I named it Beginnings, and it had, it was a cassette tape and it had this super makeshift album cover that I had designed. And the song, I kind of didn’t know how to title songs back then, so I just, this song sounds like water, so this one’s Waterfall. This song sounds like winter, so. And I gave it as a present for Christmas presents for that year. And I was not sure what I was going to, the kind of feedback I would get back from people. But what really kind of changed everything for me is that everyone that received it was like, “Whoa! First of all, I had no idea you even played.” Or, “I knew you played, but I didn’t know you’d written all these songs. And you need to do more of this. And your songs need to be longer,” because my songs were so short. 

And I was just totally inspired. Like, “Wow, people like this. And so, I want to do another one.” And I bought a digital, like a Yamaha Clavinova digital piano that I could record midi. And I spent maybe four months, that was it. Yeah, about four months. And I recorded and wrote 16 songs for my first official album release which was Elysium. And I gave, so basically the goal was every year, I was going to give a Christmas present, and it would be an album of my music. And that’s how it started. It was really just this unexpected thing, and now people like it, and so now I want to be able to give something to them because they liked it.

Christopher: That’s wonderful. And I want to circle back in a moment and talk about your song writing process and what it looks like to say, come up with 16 songs for the next album. But before that, I know that if our listeners haven’t come across your music before, they might be wondering what were those tracks like? What kind of piano are we talking about here? 

And they probably have in mind the classical piano like Für Elise that you referred to, that kind of very carefully note-by-note written down on paper and then performed with great accuracy and seriousness and the music of several 100 years ago for the most part. And not really have in mind things like George Winston maybe where they’ve heard more, maybe more freeform or more expressive or more emotive piano playing. How would you describe your own playing? And I know that New Age is a term that comes with some baggage and preconceptions. So, I don’t want to throw that in there and complicate things. But maybe we can talk about that too in a moment, and where you would categorize yourself or if you would.

Michele: So, for me it’s definitely emotive and expressive and freeform. It’s very difficult for me to play to a metronome, so I’m not on time. I’ve had people tell me that are drummers, like my music is really hard to play along, because I don’t play on time. But it’s definitely not technical. And any technicality that you might hear in it is just things that I’ve picked up by listening to other musicians and other different types of music through the years. It’s just me emulating them and mimicking those things that I heard. 

But, but yeah, New Age, I like to call it more contemporary instrumental. Or contemporary solo piano.

Christopher: Got you. And why not? Why not New Age?

Michele: Well, New Age tends to, that’s the genre that we fall under. In the mainstream genres, there’s only a certain amount. And solo piano kind of either falls into Jazz or classical or New age. And New Age is kind of an unfair category for us to be in because New Age typically tends to be more ambient and chill groove and slow drums with strings, and stuff that you hear at the spa.

And solo piano is, it’s very different from that. So, there might be a little Classical influence. There might be a little Jazz influence. There might be some Rock influence. And so, the solo piano itself I think deserves it’s own category because it’s so much of all these different genres all in one.

Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah. I’m reminded randomly of Japanese anime, and I went through a phase of watching anime and had a similar realization that most of the world views it as this category, like that is an animated Japanese show, therefore it’s anime. But actually it’s more of a medium. Like you can do any genre of television in the format of anime. And they do romance. They do drama. They do action. It just made me realize how unfair it is to apply that kind of actual label and pretend it’s all the same thing.

Michele: Yeah.

Christopher: And it sounds like a similar thing is going on here. And I love that you made that distinction of ambient, too. I think that’s a really useful word to distinguish with, because I think a lot of people would assume solo piano is kind of a background thing. It’s just kind of freeform and flowing and just goes on and on. 

Michele: Yeah.

Christopher: But that’s obviously not at all what you play. And yeah, I guess for me the other stand-out word when I was listening to your music was “storytelling”. Like there’s a lot of structure and story and substance to it compared to some of the kind of ambient piano you find on Spotify.

Michele: Yeah. And I think it matters on the composer because certain composers have a certain format or a flow that they follow. And if you listen to certain people, you can be like, “Oh, this is a George Winston song,” or “Oh, this is a Jim Brickman song.” Or “This is a Michele McLaughlin song, or a Louis Landon song.” You can kind of tell people’s style. But for me particularly, like I have a very specific, if you listen to music, I’ve got kind of like there’s a theme and then I kind of repeat that theme maybe an octave higher or lower or something, and I might add something in between there. But I have this theme that I kind of follow. And then I kind of break away for a little bit into something that’s different, but similar. And then it’s sort of like a tie together, and then I go back to that theme. 

And that’s generally a very consistent structure that I have in my music. And you can kind of pick that out on different composers and the way that they do things.

Christopher: if you’re coming from this improvisational mode and sitting down and playing what you feel, how do you get from there to a finished album of 16 songs? So, how do you think about the difference between improvising and composing or when it’s time to take the seed of an idea and say, “Now this is what this song is.”

Michele: For me, it’s instantaneous. So, if I’m at the piano improvising and something catches my ear and I’m like, “Oh, this is awesome.” Then that’s what I will focus on. I’ll take that theme or that melody or that line that I’ve discovered right there, and I will start to work on it consistently and repetitively until it becomes under my fingers and in my brain. And then I’ll work on that and do that with that structure. It’s like, “I got my theme. I got my idea now.” And then I’ll kind of work with that back and forth on keyboard wherever I’m going to go with it.

And then the part that I usually struggle the most with is that segue away where I’m kind of going to go in a different way for a little while and then come back to that main theme. That is for me the weakest link in the writing process. It’s the hardest for me to grasp. It’s the hardest for me to bring it back in.

But the bare bones of it happens pretty instantaneously. I’ll just, I hear it, I feel it, I’m excited about it and that’s what I work on. 

Christopher: Wonderful. I love the way you talk about that. It sounds like a really fascinating exploration that you go on. You kind of see what’s possible with this starting idea and then raking it in and give it more definition. I wonder are there other, you mentioned there that, a theme and then an exploration of different and then coming back to the theme is kind of, I guess a mental model you have for how you structure things. Are there any other kind of ideas or approaches that you use or that you could say characterize other solo pianos that you admire? Any other kind of, I don’t know, tells or characteristics that you’d pick up on?

Michele: In particular, I’m going to answer that with Chad Lawson, and Ludovico Einaudi. I think that’s how you say his last name. Einaudi. I’ve said it wrong many times. Anyway, those two pianists, they’re so spacious, and there’s so much silence between the notes, but it’s not just silence. It’s emotion. It’s anticipation. It’s beauty. And I really admire the stillness and the patience in between the notes when they’re writing. So, when you listen to their music, there’s a subtle just hhhaa, breath in between the notes. And I admire that. It’s really hard for me to play that way because it’s not my, I tend to be a lot more heavy-handed and all over the keyboard and I really admire the pianists that can bring in that space. 

Christopher: So, one advantage as it were, of the kind of book-based learning approach is that there’s a very clear path ahead of you. If you say, “I want to get good at piano,” there’s umpteen method books that are going to promise to lead you step-by-step towards that level of mastery. You obviously outside of that way of thinking piano. Has there been any kind of guiding principle or ways you’ve gone about approaching that of how will I be better next year than I was this year? At any point in your journey, how do you think about improving when your skill-set is not handed down to you from on high?

Michele: Well, this is a struggle that I go with every single time I release music. I’ll release an album or a single and I’ll think how am I going to top this? How am I going to do better than this? And sometimes I have to take that thought out of my head because it’s not about being better. It’s about just evolving and growing. And so, if I had an idea in my mind or I have something at the piano where I really kind of struggle to maybe stretch or play fast. Like my left hand patterns tend to be very similar.n so I say to myself, “I’d really like to strengthen my left hand capability.” Or, “I’d really like to be able to strengthen my eight hand ability to run up and down a piano.”

So, what I do is I will try and write something that kind of pushes me outside of my comfort zone and takes me outside of that box so that I can gradually and slowly try new ideas and techniques and concepts. And then I just practice and practice and practice and kind of put myself into rather than reading a book that says, “Okay, you’re going to practice these scales and you’re goin to do it at this pace and this tempo,” like that’s, I do it in a more, I’m forcing myself to learn something new, but on my own terms sort of a thing.

Christopher: And is there any kind of input to that process in terms of listening or studying? Or is there anything you’re taking to that practice, as it were, apart from the kind of exploration you’ve talked about? Or is it purely I’m going to explore, but I’m going to do it having in mind that I want to be more creative with my left hand patterns, for example?

Michele: Yeah. It’s more of a, like this is my goal. I set these goals for myself and so every time I’m at the piano and I do my improvisation time where I’m just sort of messing around with ideas, that’s when I practice those. And I see what I can do. And sometimes it’s frustrating and sometimes I don’t have the ability that I want to have. And sometimes I’ll walk away from it for a while because it’ll just, it turns me off and then I’ll come back to it and so, it’s very much a, let’s see what can happen today sort of a thing. 

And sometimes it takes years. Sometimes there’s, I have a song that is in my head that I want to write, and I know what I want to do with it and my hand will not. And so, for years I’ve been practicing this one particular composition idea, and someday, someday I’ll get there.

Christopher: Cool. I want to pick up on something you said there which is you sit down and say, “Let’s see what happens today.” If you’re not learning from books or you’re not following a syllabus and if you’re not I don’t know. If you’re not feeling obliged to do things in a certain way, do you sometimes sit down and noting comes? Is there a frustration of, I guess what I’m reaching for is relying on inspiration and something that you can’t quite explain? Or do you have kind of practical, pragmatic things that you can sit down and kind of get into it with?

Michele: Well, I can always write. So, I started this Monday morning improv series on YouTube a couple of years ago, where I just, I force myself to sit at the piano every Monday morning and I record, first try, first take, whatever comes up. And I did that to kind of force myself to compose an entire song in the moment without really thinking about it. I did it also to strengthen my ability outside of my comfort zone because sometimes I’ll try and write a piece in a key that I’m not proficient at. Or that I’m not comfortable with. Or I’ll start off a piece in a very energetic way so that it’s, I’m really having to do something fast. 

But I can do that at any time. I can sit at the piano and just make something up, a song anytime. But what happens in the middle part is when it really grabs me emotionally, that’s when it becomes a piece that I release. Something that speaks to me internally and really makes me feel, those are the ones that become pieces that are singles and pieces that are on the album. The rest of everything just kind of is I have them recorded, but they don’t really speak to me. And it’s funny because my boyfriend will sit on the couch while I’m playing, and he’ll be like, “Oh wow, that’s awesome.” And sometimes I don’t even record them. He’s like, “Did you record that?” And I’m like, “No, it’s gone.” Because it’s gone. Forever.

And he’ll get really frustrated, he’s like, “Oh, that was such a good piece.” But for me, it didn’t speak to me. So, it’s not something that will ever be again. Know what I mean?

Christopher: Yeah. And one thing I love about your music is there’s always a story behind each song, and you share them sometimes in the liner notes so that the listener can understand and appreciate where you’re coming from with the emotion, with the storytelling. And I wanted to ask do you sit down with that story in mind and say, “I’m going to play this part of me?” Or do you find your way there through improvisation and be like, “Oh, that’s what I was expressing? 

Michele: It’s almost always after the fact. So, very rarely do I sit down at the piano and say, “Okay, this song is going to be about this idea or concept.” It’s always just I write and then as I’m going to either release it as a single, I listen to it and think okay, what is this telling me? Where did this come from? What was I thinking about? Where did the emotion come from? And then I’ll put together that theme for the song.

Same thing with releasing albums. It’s just kind of all comes together later. Titling songs is the hardest thing ever and coming up with that concept. But normally, I can listen to a piece that I write and I can say, “Okay, this song is pensive and it’s thought-provoking and it’s melancholy and it’s got all these attributes to it.” And so, I’ll kind of draw from those attributes and say, “Okay, this song,” like my song Alone on the new album, “This song is about loneliness. This song is what feels to me to be utterly lonely and kind of just really wishing you had somebody to share your life with.

And so once that kind of, that seed plants in my brain, I’m like, “Yes, that is what this song is about.” And so then I release the music based off of that idea and theme.

Christopher: I see. And maybe you could share a few more examples from the new album Memoirs, kind of what the piece sounds like and the story behind it. 

Michele: Yeah. Beneath the Surface is another one that really just came to me actually as I was composing it. I was writing and I did this weird, it’s kind of the one of the little segues away from the theme, but it was like an off note that shouldn’t have really been where I was going. But it sounded so cool and I was like, “Oh, I got to go with that.” And the more I played it, I’m like, “This I like squids and octopus and underwater life.” Like I could just, I could see the ocean creatures kind of just floating under the water. And as I was writing the piece, that’s what it became, so I released it with the theme of, it’s called Beneath the Surface and it’s all about ocean creatures. 

And another one would be My Life with You. As I was writing that song, I just could continually see my boyfriend and I in the future, 80 years old and we’re sitting on a porch on a rocking chair and we’re holding hands and we’re looking out at a field. We’re in the country for some reason. I don’t know why. But we’re old and reflecting back on our life. And so, that’s where that song came from.

And Little Love came from all of the inspiration and the joy I was feeling from, my son had a girlfriend who had a baby and they were here all the time and we got to spend the first year of this little girl’s life with her and she just brought so much joy to me. So, I wrote a song and dedicated it to her because that’s what the song reminded me of. And stuff like that.

Christopher: Terrific. Thank you. And I think that paints a really good picture for people of the variety in your music and how expressive the piano can be and the range of things it conveys. 

Christopher: And where did that come from to you this idea of having such a clear story behind each song? Was that something you always did?

Michele: No. I used to just write music and whatever the music sounded like is what I would title the song. It wasn’t until I started performing and sharing the stage with colleagues I would see them tell stories about what their music was about, and I thought, oh, I need to have a story to go with all my songs.

And so, I started having themes of the music and then themes of the albums. So, when you start listening to my music starting about my album Dedication is when all the songs sort of have a story to go with it. And certain albums have themes, like Out of the Darkness is all about my journey to recovery and healing after my divorce. Celtic Dream was on my trip to Ireland. Breathing in the Moment is all about my kind of myself and getting back into the present after my divorce. Life is very much just all of the struggles and everything that I’ve gone through over the two year period of kind of finding myself and getting back to where I needed to be in my life. 

So, the music is very much a musical diary of my life, and you can kind of tell like Michele had a really good year because this album’s really happy. And Michele had a hard year because this one’s kind of sad.

Christopher: I wonder if we could leave people with some advice. You come from such an interesting perspective on approaching the piano and improvising and composing that I think a lot of people don’t often get to hear about or relate to. And I wonder if there’s any advice or guidance or insights you might share with people if they want to explore this direction themselves. Maybe we can assume they’re coming from this strict note reading approach and they love the idea of improvising or expressing emotion and they’re not quite sure how to find their way there, would you have any advice for them?

Michele: The main thing I would say is never, ever give up and don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to follow the path. And you’re never too old. You’re never too inexperienced. All of these false beliefs that we put into our minds about I’m not good enough or I’m not strong enough or I’m too old, and I should have started years ago or, let those go. Just sit at the instrument and play around with ideas. Play around how it feels. Play around with how it speaks to you. And then just practice. Practice is, it takes an extraordinary amount of patience. And just continually trying and trying and trying, and the more you do it, the better you’ll get. And what once seemed like it was unattainable will becomes something like, “Wow, I can play that without really even trying.” 

And, but the biggest thing is just don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to try and don’t let the negative talk in your mind get in the way.

Christopher: Wonderful. That is such fantastic advice for everyone. Thank you, Michele. Thank you for joining us today, and thank you for leaving our audience with that really, really important message. Don’t be afraid. It is possible and you just need to get in there and try it.

Where can people go to hear your music? To learn more about you? To find out where  you’re playing concerts?

Michele: The best place, number one place for everything is my website at michelemclaughlin.com. And Michele is with one L. And then the best place to listen, just to hear the music, any of the streaming sites: Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music. And then if you want to see all of my videos and in follow me there, I’m on YouTube as well. 

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, we’ll have links to all of those in the show notes of this episode of musicalitynow.com, and I will just for anyone rushing to type this into their web browser, I will just spell out, Michele McLaughlin is M-I-C-H-E-L-E, Michele. And then McLaughlin, spelled M-C-L-A-U-G-H-L-I-N. M-C-L-A-U-G-H-L-I-N. Not like Sarah McLachlan, different spelling, different person.

So, michelemclaughlin.com is the place to go. I highly recommend listening to some of Michele’s music, and listening with that question of how is she bringing this emotion and storytelling, because I think that’ so much there for all of us to learn. Thank you again, Michele.

Michele: You’re very welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

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The post 100% Emotion, with Michele McLaughlin appeared first on Musical U.

What do you do in that moment? How do you handle the mistake with grace and recover in the best possible way?

In this episode we share two mindset tips and two practical tips for handling mistakes – both in a performance situation, and in the bigger picture of your overall musical life.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Musicality Now – About Recovering From Mistakes
• Musicality Now – Is Aiming For Perfect Actually Holding You Back?
• Musicality Now – Making Music with Ease, with Gerald Klickstein
• Gerald Klickstein – “The Musician’s Way”
• Cheat Sheet – How To Handle Musical Mistakes With Grace

Transcript

We’ve all been there.

Whether it’s alone in the practice room, during a lesson with a teacher, or up on stage in front of a live audience, we’ve all experienced those painful moments where the wrong note or chord comes out of your instrument.

Often this causes a real physical reaction in your body. You tense up, you feel suddenly anxious, thoughts and feelings of regret, shame, frustration well up inside.

Depending on how experienced you are as a musician and performer you’ll either take mistakes in your stride, or they’ll shut you down completely, or most likely it’ll be something in between where they cause problems in the moment and then linger in your mind afterwards.

In a recent episode I talked about the hidden dangers of aiming for perfection – and in particular this pervasive idea that being a good musician means “playing the right notes at the right time”.

And let me say up front, any time I use the phrase “right notes”, please assume I’m doing air quotes Because as we talked about in that episode, part of the problem is the very limited and limiting idea that there are specific “correct” notes which are the only acceptable ones to play.

We talked in that episode about how fear of mistakes and expecting perfection can restrict or even prevent creativity and often leads to stage fright.

Now if you haven’t seen that episode please check it out because the first thing to tackle is letting go of absolute perfectionism.

But assuming you’ve done that, you’ll probably still be wondering: “Okay, if mistakes are alright and I’m not getting paralyzed by regret as soon as I make them – what should I do?”

How do you recover when you do make mistakes?

Now naturally mistakes can crop up anywhere in your musical life – anywhere in your life in general, in fact! – but I want to talk about two contexts in particular…

The first context is a biggie – performance. Most of us can move on from a mistake made privately in a practice room.

But what if I ask you to imagine making a big mistake when you’re up on stage playing? Maybe you’re up there playing by yourself or maybe you’re playing in a group.

Did you instinctively flinch or tighten up just now? Depending on your personality you might feel one of those two scenarios more acutely, making a mistake solo or screwing up when you’re playing with others.

Unless you’ve spent time consciously working on this, you probably feel utterly unequipped to handle that situation.

We’ve all heard the one piece of advice – Just keep going! I think that was literally the only advice I was ever given by music teachers, they just emphasised the importance of keeping playing and trying to keep the beat steady.

And that should be piece of advice number one. As far as your audience is concerned, the most important thing is that the music goes on.

Sure, there are times when a performer might choose to call a halt, crack a joke, and start afresh – particularly if it was right at the beginning of the piece or song. But that’s rare.

For the most part we want to remember that we’re up there to create a music listening experience for the audience. And they would always rather a mistake be a small blip in the midst of an overall enjoyable, smooth, listening experience than that it completely ruin the moment and break the spell they were under, immersed in your music. Don’t let one little blip ruin that.

So keep going.

And there’s an important psychological and emotional point to mention there – the reason we keep going is that the mistake does not matter as much as the performance as a whole. In the moment it can feel like your whole world has suddenly come crashing to a halt – but the reason we’re told to keep going is that this is not the case for our listeners!

So here’s the first additional tip for recovering from mistakes – Remember that the reason we keep going is that the mistake is tiny in the context of the whole performance. A wrong note, a bad rhythm, even a forgotten phrase or fumbled melody – all of these are quickly forgiven and forgotten by the audience if the music continues.

The second tip is another mindset one and it comes back to the previous episode on perfectionism.

Remember that music is an art, not a science. We’re not trying to regurgitate facts and get answers right on a test.

When we’re up there on stage we’re creating art for our listeners to enjoy and appreciate as human beings. It should be natural, it should be organic.

If perfectly playing the right notes at the right times was the epitome of music-performance then all our concerts would be performed by robots at this stage. and in fact the arrival of the phonograph back in the nineteenth century would have put an end to live music.

So remember that mistakes are part of what makes your performance human, organic and unique – and it’s no lie to say that audiences often enjoy, appreciate and remember performances more when they had a few rough edges to keep them interesting.

Those are two big mindset techniques for recovering from mistakes, to reframe them as unimportant, and even natural.

I have two practical tips for you too.

Both reinforce that principle of “keep the music going”.

The first is to start from a very clear mental picture of the music you’re there to perform. Another way to put this is that you should be able to audiate vividly, meaning hearing in your head, how the music should sound. If you’re a notation player then you may well have skipped this stage, relying on your note reading to get you through.

But having a clear memory of how the music goes is important because it means even if you play the wrong note, in your head the right music is still playing.

To recover if you don’t have the music playing in your head like that is tough – you’ve got an awkward analytical exercise to perform rapidly in the moment to try to reconnect the notes on the page with the number of beats that have passed and what you should play next.

But if the music has continued in your head all you need to do is slip back into sync with what you’re imagining yourself playing.

That’s another way of saying that if you have a kind of “inner musician” playing the perfect performance in your head then it’s easy to just join in with them again. Without that it’s much harder to slip back into playing the right notes at the right times.

The second practical tip is a looser and more powerful form of the same thing, and that’s to learn some basic improvisation skills.

If you’re comfortable improvising a bit in a given key then at any time in a performance if the right notes escape you, you know you can fill in with something that will sound fairly sensible and natural to the listener. This is a particularly handy one if you’re performing from memory – if you forget what the “right notes” are, you can fill in with some “good enough” notes until you re-find your place.

So that’s the performance context. There’s plenty more that could be said, and especially about practice techniques that can reduce the chances of making mistakes during a performance in the first place. And my top recommendation on that front would be to check out Gerald Klickstein’s book “The Musician’s Way”, or our past podcast interview with him which we’ll link in the shownotes.

The second context I wanted to talk about is the big picture of your musical life.

Back when we launched Musical U we knew we wanted to put a heavy emphasis on community and personal support – because I’d seen over the years that having good training material was only one part of what determined a musician’s success with musicality training.

In turns out, there are all these challenges around goal-setting, planning, follow-through, and motivation – all the bigger-picture things that actually have a huge influence on whether you succeed or not.

So why do I mention that here? Because a lot of it boils down to how you recover from mistakes. In your musical life overall.

It can feel like a lonely journey learning music, especially if you’re taking it up as an adult or your learning online. Even with a teacher or a few musician friends or a group you perform with – there’s a ton of stuff going on in our heads – planning, analysing, trying to optimise, hope, regret, frustration, doubt, uncertainty… It can be a real mess in there!

And so it’s incredibly important to learn to roll with the punches. And I wanted to help you draw the analogies from the four tips I shared in a performance context to this bigger picture context.

Firstly: The biggest lesson to take on board is – Just keep going! As long as you love music you should keep learning music. Yes, there will be setbacks, yes, you will do things you then view as mistakes. Maybe you chose the wrong instrument, or the wrong teacher, or you start learning a piece and it’s way too hard, or you go down a rabbit-hole trying to master a certain technique before deciding that it really wasn’t that important…

There’s all kinds of things that can cause a moment of “Oh, maybe I should just give up!”

But you must. Just. Keep. Going.

And so what of the four other tips?
Firstly, remember that a mistake is a blip on the overall journey. It’s only a “show-stopper” if you allow it to be. Step back and see it in the overall context of your whole musical life and I guarantee it won’t seem like such a big deal.

Secondly, remember that you are not a robot. If learning music was simply a series of facts to memorise or drills to master we’d be quickly bored. Fortunately music is much more varied and strange and wonderful than that – and the upshot is that our journey through learning music is never going to be a nice, clear, straight line. That’s part of the nature of it.

What about the two practical tips?

Well, if you think about having the idealised version clear in your head, that can be applied to planning. I love the Eisenhower quote that “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything”.

Things are never going to go perfectly to plan in your musical life, but there is enormous benefit in having a clear plan intended in your head.

That lets you resume the intended course after a mistake throws you off and gives you a kind of safe zone where you can see “okay, it’s not the end of the world, I’ve just deviated from the plan a little bit – let’s get back on track.”

And the second tip, to improvise your way back in, is a powerful one here too. The analogy is that you do need to learn and practice this a little bit.

Depending on your personality it might not come naturally to make things up as you go along.

But we can all take that attitude of “Okay, I’ve gone off my intended course… I know that I can do some things in this area for a while and maybe that will help me find my way back on track.”. You learn to find creative ways to keep your musical life going and keep it moving forwards to hopefully reconcile with that intended ideal in your head.

It’s often said among musicians that what you learn in music applies in life – and that becoming a better musician tends to make you a better person too.

And I think this is a clear example of that. Learning to recover gracefully from mistakes during a performance can teach us a lot about how to recover from mistakes in our musical life – and life in general.

So those are my four tips for handling mistakes with grace:

• Remember that mistakes are small in the overall scheme of things.
• Start to view mistakes as natural.
• Have a clear plan of the ideal in your mind.
• And learn to improvise your way back to that ideal plan.

Would you like a handy cheat sheet with all these tips and a few extra powerful ones? We’ve made one for you and you can get it for free. It’s the perfect thing to glance at before a performance or keep in view during your music practice. Just click the link with this episode or visit the shownotes at MusicalityNow.com.

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The post How to Handle Musical Mistakes With Grace appeared first on Musical U.

This episode is packed with ideas. Some you may have come across before, including in past episodes of this show. But I suspect some will be new to you and you’re going to love how Michael brings it all together into a really coherent picture of what these various tools and mindset shifts can do for your music learning.

For example, we talk about:

• The value of taking a “growth mindset” to music learning
• Tools that can help you handle negative self-talk when it arises
• How a habit of reflection can help you past sticking points, improve your practice efficiency and accelerate your progress

That’s just a taste – we also discuss learning online and being your own teacher, mindfulness and bringing awareness to your practice, setting and reaching goals, and we ask Michael about the concepts behind the percussion-cello duo “New Morse Code” and the ground-breaking solo snare drum project “Unsnared Drum”.

As always, please listen with the question of “How could this apply in my own musical life?” – and we guarantee you’re going to find some really high-impact ideas in here.

This is Musicality Now, from Musical U.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Michael Compitello’s Website
• “New Morse Code”
• “Unsnared Drum”
• Matt Sharrock – Marimbist/Percussionist
• Carol S. Dweck – “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”
• Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool – “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise”
• Todd Meehan – Liquidrum
• Musicality Now – Music Learning at Warp Speed, with Jason Haaheim
• Musicality Now – The Truth About Talent, with Professor Anders Ericsson
• Musicality Now – Letting the Music Play You, with Paul Wertico
• Musicality Now – About Deliberate Practice in Music
• Musicality Now – About Mindfulness for Musicians

Transcript

Michael: This is Michael Compitello, assistant professor of percussion at the University of Kansas and this is Musicality Now.

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

Michael: Oh, it’s my pleasure.

Christopher: I was saying to you before we hit record that mutual friend, Jason Haaheim pointed me to your website a little while back and I was just fascinated by the projects you’re involved with and your career as a musician and I feel like I know a fair bit about Michael Compitello now, but not a great deal about where you’ve come from as a musician. So, I’d love if we could begin with your kind of musical backstory. What did your own music education look like?

Michael: Sure. I would say that my musical education is, in the one sense, kind of typical for Americans but in another sense, kind of atypical because of how I kind of got to percussion. I started when I was pretty young. My parents were teaching at Michigan State University and Michigan State has a community music school and so they signed me up for lessons after I requested drum lessons and forcefully un-requested piano lessons. They signed me up with a graduate student there who kind of insisted that I play more than just drum set, so that I learn all of the different percussion instruments. That kind of set me on this path of taking lessons and sort of learning about percussion and so I studied all through grade school, middle school and high school, in which I started to participate in youth orchestras, marching band, all that sort of stuff.

Then, I went to college for music and history in Baltimore at the Peabody Institute and so that’s kind of a typical American thing to go to some sort of music school, be at a department of music or school of music or conservatory of music, where you kind of focus a little bit more on the role that music has in your life. Then, I went to a graduate school. I did my master’s and doctorate at the Yale School of Music and both of which are increasingly focusing experiences around not just music, but a certain type of music. Broadly speaking, classical music and even more narrow within classical music, kind of new classical music combined with a training. I guess I would say that in my college and school years, I was fortunate to work with somebody who is really interested in … classmates had was really rigorously old fashion.

We were learning the sort of classical orchestral repertoire, which at least by his reckoning and mine too is a really great way to learn how to play your instrument. So, I would say that that is pretty typical of somebody who goes to a music school. I grew up of course playing drum set like most percussionists do, but by the time you get to college, I still played for fun but it stopped becoming a part of my degree life because at most places in the states, you kind of choose between studying jazz where you play drum set and studying classical percussion where you don’t. That’s sort of the musical story, which is that I sort of randomly started playing percussion, managed somehow to stick with it long enough to get exposed to some really inspirational teachers and experiences that kind of made me think, “Oh, I should keep going with this,” and was fortunate to be surrounded by people who were really both like-minded and also inspirational from peers and teachers and other colleagues. That’s sort of the story, the general story.

Christopher: Fantastic and I want to pick up on the way you put that there, you said, “Somehow managed to keep going with it.” Give us a little picture of what those school years maybe were like. Did you find music came easily to you? You clearly had some passion for it to be doing so many activities and ensembles and that kind of thing. How did you feel about learning music?

Michael: Yeah. Well, I would say that in the broad spectrum of people in the world, music probably comes less naturally to me than to other people. I would say I’m much more on the sort of learned spectrum than on the natural talent side, which kind of explains a lot of the stuff that I do with my music making. I would say that what kept me going was having really great teachers and getting inspired by the content. So, I would say that actually music is, on the whole, one of the more challenging things personally I can do with my life, but I kind of like it that way. I’m not sure if that really answers your question, but it’s sort of what it feels like. Somehow I kept going because I found the content so interesting.

If you’re somewhat of a nerd and you’re someone who appreciates both being alone and being around other people, music is a great field because you do a lot of practicing alone, you do a lot of playing with other people, you’re sort of working with music… at least, what I do… working with music that’s both kind of new and also related to the past. So, it gives you a lot of opportunities to kind of contextualize what you’re doing and think about what you’re doing and to work with really interesting people. That’s sort of, I guess, what kept me going is that I found the music interesting and I think the music continued to be interesting even as I got better, got smarter, got more focused on what I wanted to do. That seems like a pretty good sign, I guess.

Christopher: When you think back to that teacher insisting you move into being a percussionist, not just a drummer, how did you feel about that at the time? Where you gung ho and curious and excited or where you kind of wishing you could stick with your mock beats?

Michael: Well, I’m not sure. I can’t quite really remember my thoughts at the time. I’m sure I, like any little kid, was very pissed off, but I’m fortunate that both my parents are sort of in academia and one thing that kind of runs in the family is the idea that when you want to get good at something, you find a guru and you do what the guru says. So, I don’t think I was ever in a position to say, “You know, that’s crazy. I’ll never do that.” I think I probably was super into it. I do remember though that there was this point at which he said, “You should come to our percussion ensemble concert,” and I was sort of like, “What is that?” And you go to the concert and of course it’s just this complete overwhelming onslaught of percussion playing and at that point, if you’re under the age of 10, you think that is the absolute coolest thing ever. I’m sure that I felt really excited about that, although maybe my parents would dispute that in someway.

Christopher: Sure and maybe that’s one of them that you mentioned, there were kind of inspirational experiences along the way that you feel kind of spurred you on or gave you a fresh burst of enthusiasm. Can you share any of the others?

Michael: Yeah. Okay, so I would say that was one, although I wouldn’t of counted it at the time. A few years after that, our family moved from Michigan to Arizona and I started studying with percussion with somebody who played in the symphony. One day, he asked me if I would want to audition for the youth symphony, the youth orchestra in Tucson and joining that group I think was a real turning point for me. One, because it exposed me to a community of people that were like me, you know, these are people that are choosing to … of these are the people in my fifth grade school, whether you like it or not and it exposed me to … out, orchestral music. I thought that was great and it kind of established the theme for me that it’s really important, at least for someone like me, to have a community around what you’re doing.

Even if it’s a community of like-minded people or people that sort of gunning for kind of similar things, that really helps to both push you and then also to help you define who you are, at least for me. I would say that another formative experience was when I started my undergrad school in Baltimore, I was really … for me since then and his focus with all of his students was really on what we call chamber music, so playing music with other people unaccompanied. I guess what differentiates that from a band is most of the time that we’re playing music that somebody else has written, but the principles are the same that you’re developing your communication skills, you’re developing your collaboration, you’re developing your teamwork, your individualization of large tasks.

For me, that was a huge turning point because on the one hand, I loved the music that we are playing and on the other hand, I loved that I could work with other people on something and the thing that we were making was much better than any of us could’ve done alone. That kind of lit this passion for me or it kind of ignited a passion for me in terms of what I could do with myself that might be really interesting. I bet a lot of people have experiences like that, especially playing with other people or if you play alone, playing your music for other people because in a certain sense, audiences are your collaborators as well. I think for me, just kind of realizing, “Oh, I don’t have to be completely alone all the time when I do this.” That’s really interesting to me, so that was kind of a turning point and I guess another turning point was when I started to really focus on working with composers.

I mean, I guess this sounds unusual if you are somebody who writes the music that they play, but in my field, in the last couple hundred years we have sort of a tradition of people who play and people who write music and they kind of haven’t, at least until recently, really met that closely. The schools that I attended, we’re studying the music of dead people and so it was kind of great for me to realize, “Oh my gosh. There are all these people that are writing music that I can just go talk to them,” or better yet, I can ask them a question if I’m playing a piece by them. “What did you mean?” and for me, that was a real revelation because it put me on this path, both in terms of my actions where I started to seek out experiences like that and also just in terms of my attitude that music is a lot more malleable than it is stiff and unbending.

Even the music of the past has to be really reinvented every time that you play it and for me, that was kind of a… I mean, it was kind of both a sort of a, Oh. Of course,” moment but also, “Oh. I should just do that.” So, I think those were kind of formative experiences for me, although they’re not single light bulb moments, they were more sort of like somebody says, “Well, have you tried this kind of food?” Then, you get really excited about that thing and go, “Oh, I could just eat that all the time.” Then, somebody says, “Oh, well what about this kind of food?” Then, you try that and so I think that, for me, it was formative enough that I keep trying to seek out those kind of experiences where you sort of discover something new in a way that allows you to keep doing that thing.

Christopher: That’s so interesting and we’re going to be talking shortly about a couple of your creative projects. I think people will understand, having heard all that, a lot more about how you’ve come to be the man behind those projects or at least one of the collaborators in them, because it’s not your typical percussionist project. In my intimations anyway, they’re quite distinctive and unusual. I want to talk a little bit about your mindset through all that, if we may, because you’ve described yourself as coming from an academic household and at least in retrospect, you seem to have a very thoughtful attitude towards the learning of music. You said you weren’t someone on the natural talent end of the spectrum, as it were, you were studying and working and trying things and learning as you went. Something that jumped out of me in one of your blog posts was talking about Carol Dweck’s concept of the fixed versus growth mindset and I’d love if you could share a little bit about how you relate to that concept and maybe how you view your musical journey in terms of one versus the other.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. I would say that … at least Americans in terms of music school, which is that you get a certain distance based on how your natural skill. If you’re pretty good at the flute in high school, you get accolades for it, but then by the time you go to university, all of the sudden at a certain point, the way you have been doing things kind of runs out. There’s a certain way that people who play instruments that are not the piano or the violin where there’s really much more rigorous training for really, really young people. People who play percussion start later, generally, and I sort of discovered, “Wow, I don’t actually know how to get better at my instrument.” My teacher would assign me to learn a piece in that very generic way, “Okay, learn this piece,” and I would kind of go, “Okay, well how do I do that?” … until I know how to do it.

There’s only so many experiences doing that and just kind of going, “I have no idea,” before you start to realize, “Well, maybe I could try to figure out how to improve in a concrete way.” Not to say that I’m going to try to explain my inspiration, but try to figure out when I had those moments of inspiration, what exactly happened? What were the conditions? This idea, the fixed mindset, I only came across pretty recently through a kind of career consultant named Astrid Baumgardner who suggested this book by Carol Dweck about the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. Basically, the idea is pretty basic which is that on the whole, there kind of two ways of approaching issues. You can say, “I have a fixed amount of talent, skill, time, energy and my goal is to use 100% of that and when I’m more stressed or more tired, it goes down, it goes down. Different experiences don’t really add to that.”

Then, there’s another mindset that says, “Actually, my goal is to just increase the amount of stuff that I’m good at, to turn every experience into sort of a learning experience.” That’s all really nice and it’s a very positive thing that you might put on a postcard or something, but when you get really specific about it, it’s much more interesting on the minute to minute level. If you’re a musician and let’s say you’re trying to learn something and you play it and it doesn’t come out the way you want, you could say, “Ah, that’s wrong. Therefore, I’m not good,” or you can say, “Actually in my little test here, my practice test, I’m going to see if I can improve this somehow and thereby improve my ability of doing this type of thing in other ways.”

It sounds kind of scientific but when it comes down to it, it’s really this mindset of like at the granular level when I’m working on my music making, I’m always trying to ask the question, “Well, what do I do to make this a little bit better?” I guess there’s a corollary part of it too where musicians, especially classical musicians, I’m not sure if it’s like this for non-classical musicians, we tend to conflate our sense of self worth with how we’re doing with our instrument that particular day, which is probably not a very smart thing to do. But, you kind of go, “Oh, I missed that note. Ah, I’m the worst person ever,” and that’s so totally true and I think what this growth mindset… I’m doing a really bad job of explaining it, but it’s a whole book. The idea behind it is that every situation you’re in, you can approach from the mindset or point of view of, “I’m going to take this as a opportunity to learn and to kind of expand my capabilities instead of always working on precision.”

You know, always working on, “I’m just going to get more reliable at my mediocrity,” but saying, “Oh, every time I play I’m going to try to raise the bar.” I think creative people tend to do this intuitively, but saying it out loud can really help, especially those moments where you feel like, “Oh, I’m not in the flow. I don’t know what I’m doing. This is a bad day.” It kind of saves you from tanking those hours, so I found that really helpful for myself.

Christopher: Fantastic and is that something where these, in other words, you put on what you had been doing already or was discovering this growth mindset idea a new practice perspective for you?

Michael: I think both. I think as you get good at something or as you try to get better at something, you do things that work and you don’t question why they work. You thought, “That was great,” but then at a certain point, at least in classical music, it ceases to be fun and generally for most of us, fun is a great motivator of development. At a certain point when you’re in college and you have all these assignments and maybe it’s music you’re assigned to play that you don’t really like, you start to think, “Well, how the heck am I supposed to do this?” So, I think on the one hand, it kind of described random things that I thought had worked in my life and on the other hand, it sort of allowed me to be a little bit more … from these ideas of positive psychology in practice. The idea that we all know what it feels like to be in the flow, right? Where you are demonstrate effortless mastery.

You encounter challenges but you feel like, “Oh, I can do that.” You tend to lose a sense of time and the question people always have was, “Well, how do you do that?” A lot of times it comes from taking the mental zone you’re in and reframing it. I found that it really helped me to sort of change what I physically am doing or what I mentally am thinking about, so I would say it’s kind of both. Not to say that I’ve reached any Jedi level of this, I’ve just started to notice that it’s … When a practice session doesn’t go the way you want or you get angry that like, “Wow. Why aren’t I progressing as much as I wanted to?” It kind of helps to give yourself both an explanation and then also like something to do when the flow is not there, maybe. I think it’s kind of both.

Christopher: That makes sense and yeah, you alluded in your blog post to how this had helped you a bit with negative self-talk or anxiety and I guess that’s what you’re referring to there when you say you were being annoyed that the practice session didn’t go right or tying your self worth to how you’re doing on the instrument that day. Is that right?

Michael: I would say so. Yeah. I think that, again, I really only can talk about people sort of broadly in the classical music world, but I’d say that negative energy and anxiety are kind of big issues or at least I’ve noticed this among my own students in Kansas. It’s really hard to just say, “Don’t think about that and just practice,” because that doesn’t work. It really doesn’t work, so you kind of have to find something that’s a little bit healthier, at least I hope so.

Christopher: Are there any other tools that you found useful or that you equip your students with in terms of handling that negative self talk or that inner critic?

Michael: I mean yeah, but who knows how helpful they are? I think one is that when you’re working on your art in any form, it’s helpful to be aware when you practice. This is something that we had this incredible marimba player, Matt Sharrock came to Kansas and he gave a master class kind of about learning music and he said… I actually thought that was really helpful that maybe when you standup or sit at your instrument, your muscles are feeling really great, be aware of that or maybe your brain is kind of fried, be aware of that so that you don’t get frustrated with the results when you already know what’s going on. I think that’s really helpful. The big thing was to sort of get a little bit more aggressive about sort of how do people get better at things. That kind of alludes to this burgeoning field of deliberate practice and you mentioned Jason, who’s sort of a…

He’s become sort of a real proponent of this and I admit I sort of drank the Kool-Aid and read a lot of the extent literature about it because, at least I’ve noticed in my own life and my students’ lives too, that there’s a lot of emotion and anxiety about this idea of talent. We use the talent really broadly, you know, “That person’s really talented,” but talent is one thing and especially in music, I think it matters much more sort of what trajectory you’re on and sort of the amount of work that you’ve done going the right direction. Talent might enable you to run really fast, but unless you’re running on the right track, you’re not really doing anything helpful. So, I think for me sort of discovering that idea of being pretty deliberate with your practicing really helped.

I’m not sure if it’s generational. I do find that the world now is much noisier than it was when even I was a little kid. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people 15 years younger than me, my students and so it was really helpful to find something that just tried to get me to focus a little bit more. I’m not doing a great job of explaining that, but I found that those general things really helped me and they kind of helped rekindle a little bit of joy when you play too. We all get into those ruts where you’re like, “I can’t do this. This is dumb. Why can’t I do this?” Sometimes it’s helpful to just say, “Wait a minute, you just said you were going to climb Mount Everest and then you didn’t do it the first day. Why are you upset?” You know and so that sort of helped me calm myself down a little bit in terms of, “Oh, that’s why, because in my own personal training I haven’t gotten it yet.”

I think that’s pretty helpful for musicians and at least I see a lot of my friends sort of once you get out of the structure of school, you kind of have to figure out, “Well, how am I going to plan getting better?” You know what I mean? How do you do that? “Oh, I’m just going to get better. I don’t know.” So, I think that those things have really helped me. It’s allowed me to go back in my own training to those epiphany moments and go, “Wait. What actually was so great there? Was it the content? Was it how we did it? Was it where, when, who?” and sort of think, “Oh, maybe I can try to replicate these kind of epiphanies in my own life even without a teacher that you see everyday or every week or something.” So, I found the transition to sort of like becoming your own teacher kind of a big help.

Christopher: Love it. Yeah and that’s so relevant. A lot of our listeners and viewers are in that situation of trying to construct their music education for themselves to some degree or another and we often talk on this show about how as easy as it is to go online and buy a course for learning something. The chances are that course isn’t going to start where you are and it’s not going to finish quite where you want to go and you’re going to get halfway through it and get stuck and frustrated or bored or you’re not going to be sure what’s going on. Even though there is this proliferation of online courses available, it doesn’t solve the problem that you’re talking about there and I love that you’ve got some tools and some mindset angles that can help with those sticking points or those frustrating days or those moments where you’re not sure if you’re headed in the right direction.

Michael: Yeah and I would say to everybody who watches your site, you’re probably in a stronger position than a lot of people who’ve gone through many, many years of rigorous formalized music education, because there’s a element when you’re in music school where you just sort of go, “Fix me!” The reason why you’re studying with this teacher is because you want that person’s opinion, right? But that doesn’t necessarily set you up to be your own doctor and actually that was something that Jason Haaheim mentioned. He also came to Kansas to give a class and he said something like, “Great students bring you problems to solve, not mysteries to diagnose,” and I think people who study their own, that’s a huge challenge is to sort of maintain that motivation and specificity. You want what you’re learning to be fun and you want it to be inspirational, but you also want to get better because it will be more fun, the better you get.

I think those are huge challenges, especially again with online courses. Even in person, no teacher’s ever going to start at the development of the wheel and then join you there. There’s a big part of playing music that’s individualization, that’s someone saying, “Play this note on your guitar,” and you go, “Okay, my fingers are this long. I guess I have to figure that out.” You take a task and you apply it to yourself and that’s challenges, yeah I know, but these kind of tools can really help. At least they’ve helped me because what I’m saying is that it’s not that you’re trying to eliminate inspiration and the ephemeral nature of creativity from your playing, you’re trying to buttress set with skills. You could have the greatest idea in time for a sculpture, but if you can’t sculpt marble, you can’t make it and there’s an element of… especially when you’re at that turning point of learning an instrument where you’re okay, but it’s harder to get better.

Start trying to buttress your inspiration with some sort of technical framework can be really helpful. It does seem that that part is irrespective of talent. It doesn’t matter and it’s irrespective of inspiration, it also doesn’t matter. It has a lot to do with how do you approach what you’re doing, at least I think so.

Christopher: Wonderful and that blog post I mentioned, where you talked a little bit about the growth mindset and we’ll link to it in the show notes, it was predominantly about the idea of reflection and how that factors into your learning experience. I’d love if you could talk a little bit about that because I think it’s another of these tools that a lot of us, as self-taught musicians to a large extent, are missing out on. We don’t really realize we could be making use of it.

Michael: Yeah. Again, none of these ideas are my own. I try to take what other people do and apply it to what I’m doing, which I think is really a great way because you have to steal to be creative, I think. But, this idea of reflection, I would say I encountered in school writing stupid reflective essays about things I didn’t really care about, but it really came into my life where I started to notice, “Man, I really remember my lessons or my experiences better if I like wrote down what I did afterwards,” or if I looked through the music that I played at that concert and go, “Oh, yeah. That went really well. Oh, that went really badly.” Then, I started to look around and noticed actually, a lot of people have said this and a lot of people are doing this. I sort of started to really passionately believe that the learning process isn’t really complete, unless you take your experience and you add some sort of reflection to it.

It doesn’t mean … your journal every night, “Today I ate this and then I did that,” but that there’s some element of thinking about what you did that can really help cement that experience. For someone like me, that would mean, “Okay, I’m recording my lessons with my teacher and then after the lesson, I listen back to it,” because there’s no possible that I could’ve gleamed everything I needed in the moment or written down everything that I wanted to write down. If, let’s say I’m going to go teach at a school or like a grade school or a high school or give a class, I might after the class stop and think, “Wait, what went well? What didn’t go well? If I was going to do that again, what would I do again?” I started to apply that to my students mostly out of frustration because I was starting to get so upset with them. “Why aren’t you doing what I tell you?”

I started to notice, “Oh, maybe it’s just because they are doing what I tell them to do, but it’s not sticking.” If you’re in college in the states, you have this class from 8:00 to 8:50, then you have this class from 9:00 to 9:50, then this class from 10:00 to 10:50 and then this class from 1:00 to 1:50 and so how is it that you’re supposed to memorize absolutely everything that happened to you if that was seven hours of stuff ago? So, I started to notice, “Wow. If I really force them to regurgitate what we covered, the experience somehow goes deeper,” and so for me, that idea of reflection, it really touched a nerve. Hearing Jason’s recommendation to read this book called Peak by Robert Pool and Anders Ericsson about kind of this science of practice, for lack of a better term, a lot of what they were talking about were the same kind of reflections I was writing as a history major or I was writing for more humanities-based projects.

This contextualizing, connecting to other experiences, connecting to other people’s experiences, and so I started to think maybe there’s something there that you can actually help the rewiring of your brain and the inspiration by reflecting. It doesn’t mean that you have to be super formal about it. It could even mean that at the end of a business meeting with someone, you say, “Okay, who’s going to call who again? Who’s going to write that down? Wait, what time did we say we were going to meet?” That’s a kind of reflection or that at the end of a practice session, you write down, “Okay, next time work on scales,” or I guess you should always write that but, “Next time, start at this part of the piece or here’s what I covered.” That kind of stuff really helps, not just on the organizational level, but on the mental level as well. It kind of makes you feel like you’re not going back to zero every time you touch your instrument.

I think that’s really helped me. I mean, it was total click bait for me because I love trying to think kind of contextually about everything that I do, because if you get really deep into classical music, sometimes it’s hard to answer the question of why. You know, “Why am I doing this?” If you don’t immediately have this idea of absolute personal fulfillment or absolute world changing explosions. So, I think that it’s also a kind of nice side benefit.

Christopher: I see. Yeah and people who’ve been following this show for a while will have heard me talk before about the progress journal system we use inside Musical U with our members and it’s very much that spirit of… it’s not let’s write dear diary everyday for the sake of keeping a journal, it’s really actually stopping even just once a week to be like, “What did I work on this week? How did it go? What went well? What didn’t?” It just gives you that moment to pause and reflect and really kind of double your learning and see the opportunities to problem solve or to do better next week and it kind of pays double because our team is keeping an eye on that too, so we can jump in and kind of rescue people as needed.

Michael: Yeah. Well, I found it has this interesting side benefit of you start to discover how long it’s going to take you to do something. I found that-

Michael: … in my practice… Actually, this is a big burgeoning field in percussion. There’s some people who started to print these beautiful practice journals. This guy Todd Meehan runs this website called Liquidrum, where he makes these practice journals for musicians because he also believes in this idea of keeping track of your practice, but I went through this period when I was in school where I would say to myself, “Why am I not getting any better? Why can’t I learn this piece?” I would get so frustrated and then I made this decision, “Well, why don’t I just write down everything I practice for a year?” So, I did it on a Google spreadsheet and then so I had all these kind of nerdy charts about every hour, every minute that I was practicing. What did I do. Not did I want to do, but what did I actually do and I started to discover, “Oh, the things that I’m mad at myself for not getting better at, I didn’t work on.” You know?

I made these goals for myself, but I didn’t actually do them and so I started to adjust my expectations to say, “Okay. Well, it looks like when I said I was going to learn this song, I thought it was going to take me this long but it actually ended up taking me this long. So, maybe the next time I plan learning a song, I’m going to plan this amount of time so that I don’t get pissed at myself for not doing it.” I found that to be super helpful and journaling and practicing, … and then I’ll try to warm up or work on a technical challenge or work on learning some notes and then I sort of adjust based on how it actually went. People would say, “Oh, work on this for a half hour. Work on this for an hour. Work on this for 20 minutes,” but that’s just sort of an abstract concept.

If you know that for you that’s going to take you 45 minutes, then why don’t you plan that amount of time for it instead of saying, “Well my teacher said to do this for an hour, so I’ll do it for an hour even if I finish 55 minutes early or even if I… ” You know what I mean? I found that to be super helpful and it’s something that… I will say though that it’s personality dependent. Some people really feel less cluttered in their mind when … by the pressure of having to write everything you do. I think, like you said, it’s nice to have some sort of framework. Either it’s Monday through Wednesday I work on Dark Side of the Moon or Monday 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM play this, but I do think it’s cool to incorporate with the journal sort of how it related to your goals, even if the goals are really broad.

I have found that my personal frustration goes down when my goal is achieved versus every time I play, “Ah, I can’t do it.” Every time, “Ah, I can’t do it.” Well, why don’t you set goals that you can accomplish so that you’re in this frame of mind where you actually feel like you’re accomplishing something instead of, “Okay, day one. I didn’t run a marathon. Okay, day two. I didn’t run a marathon. Okay, day three. Still haven’t done it.” After 10 days of that, you start to get kind of mad at yourself, but maybe you say, “Day one, I’m going to buy shoes,” but you know you have this larger goal of running a marathon. I totally agree that journal is super helpful and it kind of breaks down…

I think the other thing along with this deliberate practice that really helped me was another idea stolen from this woman, Astrid Baumgardner, which is the idea of the smart goal. You can have a big goal, but it’s helpful to set a goal that is… It’s an acronym like everything. Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. Let’s say you say, “I want to learn how to play the guitar.” That’s not really a goal. A good goal for yourself might be, “Okay, this week I’m going to try to learn this song,” because it’s specific, it’s measurable, you can tell like, “Can I do it? Maybe. No. I don’t know.” Is it attainable? That’s up to you, I guess. Is it realistic? I mean an unrealistic goal is, “I’m going to learn 100 songs,” and is it time-bound? Is it someday or is it oh, by next week.

I think that’s a goal that if you accomplish, you feel good about and if you don’t accomplish, you adjust, but I was finding that I was setting these goals in my life like learn physics and that’s on your to-do list next to sort of go to the dry cleaner. Those are not equivalent level goals and I totally agree that some kind of journal really helps with that too, because it actually frees your mind to be more creative when you’re doing stuff, because you’re not always looking over your shoulder or you’re not always comparing yourself against some better version of yourself, which actually doesn’t exist. But, that you’re freeing your mind to focus on actual creative stuff, so I found it to be actually kind of a paradox, which is kind of neat.

Christopher: I see. Yeah. I think it’s hard to communicate to someone just how valuable that kind of tracking and reflection is until you try it and I love some of the issues you kind of picked apart there in terms of the resistance people might have to it or the personality types that might gel with it or not. I think you’ve got to find your own method, whether it’s a meticulous Google spreadsheet or just jotting down a few sentences each week, but taking that time, taking the opportunity to look at what you’re doing and make sure that you’re not trying to climb Mount Everest on day one, as you put it.

Michael: Yeah, but it’s also helpful because if you get in the flow, don’t disturb it. If you find, “I looked up. Oh my god, it’s been 10 hours.” That’s great. Keep that, but on the days where you get really upset and you want to smash everything, you could look back and go, “Well, what was I actually doing?” I’ve actually found just as a last thing, sometimes it can be just as mild as having an accountabilibuddy. Somebody in your life that you’re communicating with about what you’re doing, it can be casual with somebody you know. “Hey, I’m going to try to do this,” and then later that person might ask you, “Hey, how’s the kitchen remodel going?” and you go, “Oh, actually I haven’t been doing that.” That kind of thing can really help you, especially if you are the only person doing what you’re doing near you, but it sounds like you have a great framework set up that people can enter at a bunch of different levels, which is really helpful.

Christopher: Well, it’s such an important aspect that people often overlook. We get buried in the nitty gritty of, “What do I learn and how,” and we forget to kind of step back and look at the trajectory of the learning and how it’s going and kind of-

Michael: Yeah. You know what’s one thing is interesting is that we’re all really good at starting stuff. … energy of being a beginner, “Oh, I’m going to learn Taekwondo or I’m going to learn how to bowl,” and the first is always amazing, right? I think to some extent, reflecting and being deliberate in setting really specific goals can help you try to recapture that feeling later. It’s not like it’s week 10 of guitar and you’re writing from the trenches of World War I or something, but you go, “Actually, today I’m still a beginner. I’m going to try to learn this new thing that’s going to help me with this other thing.” That, I’ve actually found to be really helpful for me because those little sparks of joy you get when you’re learning something like, “Wait a minute. I can’t do that.” You can recapture those years into learning an instrument if you frame it that way instead of like, “Okay, …”

“What if I try this this way?” Because then you actually also develop your skill on your instrument because you become a master of every possibility of your instrument instead of just, “I can only do it this way and I’m improving my ability of doing it this one way.” That’s super helpful.

Christopher: Got you. In one of your posts where you’re talking about all of the different method books for learning percussion, you touch on this idea of flow and you made reference to a teacher who had kind of framed learning technique in terms of repertoire rather than exercises and I’d love if we could talk a little bit about that, because I know it’s something that frustrates and confuses a lot of musicians like do I set aside 20 minutes for scales and 20 minutes for my pieces and 20 minutes for technique and then how am I going to improve fastest?

Michael: I know. Okay. Well I would say, again, everything in music is very individualistic. A lot of it has to do with where you are as a player and what kind of person you are. I have students for example that I could say, “Okay, do this for this amount of minutes, this for this amount of minutes,” and they will do it and I have other students that I’ll say that too and they say, “I literally cannot do this without a reason for doing it.” That’s sort of the caveat here. My primary percussion teacher from the time I went to university was really big on choosing a piece and then developing the skills necessary to play that piece. Then, by carefully choosing repertoire that is both representative of what you might do as a professional, but also you encounter a broad variety of types of musical situations, you actually develop your skill really quickly.

It’s kind of the idea of would you go out and buy 50,000 tools or would you have a project and say, “Well, what tools do I need to build this shelf? Let me buy those. Okay, now I’m going to build a dresser. Well, what do I need to build that? Oh, I’ll buy this other hammer.” Then, you don’t have a thousand wrenches that you’ve never used and that said though, in order to do that, you need to be also working on your technique. What my teacher did and what I think his students who now teach do is that we try to say with an analogy, “Okay, you want to be a basketball player. Well, here are the types of things you do as a basketball player, so let’s get good at those types of things.” Instead of saying, “Okay. Well, let’s just do some random exercises. Oh, let’s run and let’s do pushups! I don’t know.” So, I think it’s helpful to have a targeted approach, especially if you’re over the age of 5 or 10.

If you’re an adult, you always have to be answering the why, because otherwise if your brain is working much faster than your hands, you’re going to want to quit. If you don’t get something in two times, you’ll probably say, “Oh, geeze, I can’t do that.” So, I think this idea of repertoire has really been helpful. A good example of that is say… and this is where having a teacher or having a program or at least having inspiration can come in handy… you say, “You know, I want to learn how to play… ” For me, let’s say, “I want to learn how to play the marimba, this instrument.” Your teacher says, “Well, learn this piece because this piece is not impossible for you. You could probably technically do it, but it’s in a style that a lot of other pieces are written. So, by learning this piece, you’re going to learn a lot about how your instrument works, but also like the other kinds of music people will ask you to play.”

You start learning the piece and you sit down or you stand if you play the marimba and you say, “Okay. Well, I can’t play this bar. I can’t play this part of the piece. It’s because my hands… I can’t do this thing.” Then, you work on that thing and then you say, “Well, okay, what’s the thing? Oh, maybe it’s that I can’t open and close the mallets in my hand fast enough.” Then, you say, “Well how do I learn how to do that? Oh, let me look at this book about marimba technique. Oh, there’s section about doing that. Let me look at that section.” It’s not like you’re not working on your technique, it’s just that you’re looking at the situation that you have, the piece that you’re learning and you’re saying, “Oh, this is what I can’t do so I’m going to learn how to do that so that I can play this piece,” because it can get overwhelming.

Once you start to nerd-out about technique, you can get really overwhelmed. You could spend 10 hours a day just working on your technique, which is great but you kind of something to do with it and so if you start with an idea of, “Well, this is what my goal is. I’m going to learn this song. … to this. Oh, I can’t do that. Let me figure out how to do that.” Then, you start to discover that a lot of books and a lot of resources and a lot of videos exist for learning that one thing, but if you just start by learning that one thing, maybe you’re not that motivated to complete learning that one thing, you hope. I find that to be a really helpful approach, although it is infuriating to teach like that, because it means that every student you have, you can’t give the same assignments to every person.

Even if the assignment is the same, what the person struggles with might be really, really different. If I give three of my students the same assignment, “Be able to play this this fast.” Maybe one of them can do it immediately and maybe one of them goes, “I’ve never … Oh yeah, I kind of did that. Oh shoot, I have to improve that thing.” So, I find that having a piece at least for classical musicians or like something you’re trying to write or something that you’re trying to create gives you the inspiration to kind of weed wack the technique, because for at least most of us that have wondering minds so to speak or that think a lot about what we’re doing or overthink about what we’re doing, it’s helpful to have an answer to that question of, “Why am I doing this?” I find that something that stymieds my students, “Why do I have to do this for an hour?” That’s kind of the broad answer to it, but I’m sure there’s a million other ways of doing things.

Christopher: No, that’s tremendous and what we feel is kind of not the opposite, but the kind of mirror problem. You touched there on how your students, they won’t get motivated unless they’ve been told the why and this can help them see this is the purpose of learning this technique and practicing it. We see a lot of Musical U with our members the opposite problem, which is because we’re all responsible adults, if we go about learning something, we will find out what other technique things will I need to master, what should I do, and then every practice session becomes this burden of running through the five things I should do just because that’s what I’m told I should do. I love that this kind of tackles that problem too in terms of focusing you in on what really matters to you in your musical life.

Michael: Yeah. I know, but it’s so hard though because I would say this is the number one question I get asked as a quote unquote teacher of percussion or the question I ask myself, which is, “What the heck do you do when you practice? How do you divide the time?” Let’s say you have 20 hours, an impossibly high amount of hours, still like what do you do on a minute by minute basis? Do you warmup? How long? Do you work on your technique? When? Do you do it right away, do you do it later? Do you work on learning the notes to a piece? So, I find that having kind of like a goal can really shape your practice. You can do it in really specific ways. Let’s say you’re trying to learn this song or you’re trying to learn the notes to a piece, you can devote some of your practice time to learning those notes, which is a certain way of practicing where you start going, “Okay, what’s that? Okay, yeah. Let me figure that out.” But, let’s say that you know, based on what you did yesterday, there’s this part that’s really hard.

Well, maybe when you warm up, you warm up exclusively on that kind of technique that’s really hard so that after a couple days of doing that, maybe you can do it a little bit better so that you try to hone every part of your practicing towards this. It’s not like warmup, “Let me do my basic 10 step warmup that never changes,” but let’s say, “Well, I know that for this piece, I have to be able to play skills this fast, so maybe when I warm up I’ll try to incorporate that into my warming up,” because it increases the usefulness of everything that you do. Even from the moment you touch your instrument, it allows your goal to suffuse what you do, which I think is pretty helpful. Especially if you feel like all of these things you’re trying to learn, if you feel them as the burden, which it can feel like. “Oh crap, this is a lot.” I find that really helps.

Christopher: That’s so smart. I love that and I feel like people hearing about this probably have a good sense now of how this works. In the context of your teaching, for example, where a skilled, experienced teacher can select the repertoire, can guide the student to understand, “Okay. Bar 12 is difficult because you haven’t yet mastered such and such technique.” Do you think this is possible to someone who’s teaching themselves? If we imagine them just learning from YouTube tutorials or that kind of thing, do you think you have the perception and the knowledge to be able to say, “Okay. Bar 12 is problematic because of X, therefore I should go study Y,” or do you think this really is something that only works well if you have that guide?

Michael: I think it’s entirely possible because what the guide provides is something you can provide for yourself. What the guide really provides… I started to think what do you learn in a lesson? What you really learn is the idea of what it should … How do they tell what’s wrong with your car? Do they meticulously check every part in your car? They probably don’t, right? They probably listen to what you say, they listen to what the car does. They go, “Oh, actually most Hondas, this happens.” They have some sort of… the technical terms of mental representation of what the thing should be like. What should the flute sound like or what should this piece sound like or what should this style of music sound like? Those are things that having a guru or a teacher, they can impart to, but you don’t need one really. I mean, the world can be your teacher.

Let’s say you want to get really good at flamenco guitar, there are a ton of amazing recordings of people playing flamenco guitar where you can develop a sense of the style. You can develop a sense of the accent … does. Why not? You can totally develop that on your own, it’s just that teachers tend to be much more aggressive about telling you what’s wrong. You can totally get that with yourself if you have people you can check in with, if you have resources where you’re able to develop a sense of the style of what you’re trying to do or a sense of what might not be working for what you’re doing. I mean, I talk about style as… Style is also a technical thing, right? You can say, “Well, what does Prince do when he plays? What are the elements of his style,” so that when you say, “Oh, that’s not really like that song. What’s wrong?”

So, you can of course do that on your own, but I think the idea is that you’re trying to develop a sense of representation. This like mental and physical and aural, sonic thought about, “This is what I want it to be like,” and the world can expand your capabilities about, “Well, what are the ways it can be?” on the one hand, but also, “What might be not going the way I want it too?” on the other hand. So, I think it’s totally possible.

Christopher: Fantastic. I genuinely wasn’t sure what your answer to that was going to be, but I think that’s a very inspiring …

Michael: Well, I think that it’s very helpful in certain fields to have regular check ins with a guru. Especially fields where there is a long established tradition of how you get good at that thing, but that’s not a requirement at all and in some cases, that type of training can actually reduce your individuality. It can reduce your sense of how you learn. I think the most important thing is to just be passionate or to be inspired, to allow yourself to be inspired, to go, “Wow, that was so interesting, that video I just watched.” I would say like at the 100% of your experience of the notes you’ve heard on the guitar is yourself playing the guitar, that’s not good. That’s where the world can inspire you that way.

Christopher: I see. Well, speaking of super interesting videos you might see, I was captivated when I went to checkout your project, New Morse Code, which is a collaboration with a cello player and Hannah Collins and the music you create is just wonderful and I think-

Michael: Thanks.

Christopher: … I’d like to come back, if we may, for a second to just the point in your story where you went from being a drummer to being a percussionist.

Michael: Oh, yeah.

Christopher: No doubt, our classical fans in the audience will totally understand the difference, but someone who’s immersed in rock or jazz may not fully appreciate just how many instruments you play as a percussionist. So, I’d love to talk about that in general and maybe what more it takes from you or requires of you as a musician than a single instrument player and maybe we can also talk in that context of New Morse Code and what you bring to the table.

Michael: Yeah. I would say that as a percussionist, there’s a connotation and a denotation there. The denotation is that I will play anything you scrape, hit, shake, which means any kind of object. There are definitely instruments you play more than others, you know, drum set, marimba, timpani, all the stuff you might see in an orchestra. But, I would say that in my experience, I have ended up playing a whole bunch of stuff. The connotation of a percussionist is that, at least in classical music, is that we will generally do the stuff that most other people won’t do. “Oh, we need somebody to bow this Styrofoam. Oh, the percussionist will do it. Oh, we need somebody to shake this thing. Oh, I bet the percussionist will do that,” because we tend to have this attitude of sure, because our instrument is not really coagulated.

Even the drum set is just made up. Just, “Oh, maybe all the people that are playing these instruments in the marching band, what if one person did it? Oh, sure. Let’s just put the bass drum on the ground. Oh, now we need to invent something that allows you to play the bass drum on the ground. Okay, cool. Well, maybe we can find a way to hang this cymbal. Oh, okay.” So, it’s a pretty recent invention and I think that’s something about percussion is that we’re trying to invent things. What that means is that it has this very basic question, which is … if you’re trying to get good at everything. We try to look for kind of basic techniques that are common to all percussion instruments. Certain types of stuff and you work on instruments and pieces or styles of music that sort of develop those.

I think that the distinction on the hand, it’s kind of an egotistical distinction that percussionist sometimes sounds better than drummer, so I consider myself a drummer. I’m probably not a great drummer, but it’s a term that totally, totally works, but I would say that percussionists, what we do is we usually try to develop mastery over a whole bunch of different instruments. It may seem super daunting, but there’s certain common things that keep them together. I mean, we’ll play instruments that have … we’ll play instruments that have keys like piano keys but that you hit and then we’ll play instruments that you have to activate other ways. If you get pretty good at the snare drum or you get pretty good at timpani, that skill kind of transfers.

The same way that if you get good at playing the flute, maybe it’s not so challenging to learn the piccolo, because a lot of stuff is similar or if you get good at driving this one kind of car, maybe you can drive this other kind of car. So, it’s not as daunting as you would say, but generally I would say that for your audience, it just means that we tend to play a whole bunch of different stuff and we tend to own larger cars.

Christopher: Oh, got you. I love that you point out how intimately it’s tied to inventiveness and that’s certainly something that comes across from your own projects, but I think it’s not something people who would instinctively associate with percussion or drumming. We recently had on the show, Paul Wertico, the jazz drummer-

Michael: Oh, yeah!

Christopher: … and I think it was helpful for the non-drummers in our audience just to talk through all of the subtlety that goes into playing even a standard rock kit. All of the orchestration possibilities that are available to you and how much the drummer’s responsible for interpreting and making decisions and I think what you just described in terms of the different instruments you can draw on and develop skills for is another little angle on… to put it bluntly, like how ridiculous it is that there’s this joke of drummers being the less intelligent member of the band. It couldn’t be more wrong. What it requires of your brain to play percussion is like fields away from… I don’t want to be rude to any one particular instruments, so I won’t finish that sentence.

Michael: Well, everything has it’s own challenges. I think one thing, it’s interesting, underrated about people who drum set is that those people are just inventing what they play. You know what I mean? They don’t have to do it that way, they could do it this way if they want. I find that so interesting. I mean, I know for example the guitar is really hard to play. There’s so many possibilities for how you can get around that instrument and I think that percussionists, maybe we’re underrated in a certain sense, but I think it’s okay. Just surprise people.

Christopher: Talk, if you would, a little bit about New Morse Code and how you came to work with Hannah and the kinds of music you create together.

Michael: Oh, yeah. Well, Hannah and I went to school together at Yale and then we both were living in Europe at the same time. I was in Germany and she was in Holland and we both moved back to the states and we started talking about just playing music together, but as you might imagine, there’s not a ton of music written for a duo of cello and percussion. Instead of playing the pieces that did exist, although we did play the… not exclusively, we started to say, “Well, maybe we can get some composers to write pieces for the two of us and sort of see where that goes,” and we felt, “Well, what if we work with our friends because our friends know us, they know our capabilities. We know these people, we know what kind of music they like, what kind of music they write.” So, that’s what we started to do. We started to ask friends who were composers, “Would you write a piece for us and maybe this piece has this instrument in it or maybe this piece is in this kind of style?”

Through that, we are developing a repertoire for ourselves and it’s become really fun. I mean, we concertize of course, we record, we make videos and audio records and then we try to use ourselves because we’re not a big group. We try to use ourselves as sort of catalysts for other projects. Maybe there are people that we can team up with on something. Maybe there’s like a partner organization that might be a really great thing for us to try to increase the impact of what we do or increase the community around what we do because I think at first, we started this group to show off the amazing talents of our friends. One thing we thought at first was, “Wow, we know all these people that are really amazing composers. It would be great if everybody knew about these people.” One great way for us to do that was to have a piece by them that we could play as many different places as we could.

So, that’s sort of the approach behind the group, which I guess is a little bit different than the sort of get famous approach. We don’t play pieces that we write, nobody would want to hear that and so we tend to play pieces that other people have written for us, arranged in some curatorial way that makes that might … Yeah, so that’s kind of the general plan and we kind of expand or contract as necessary. We just did a project with a singer that was kind of a little opera and we were the orchestra and we’ve done projects where we’ll record something that’s sort of multiple copies of us that we can play as well. Yeah, so that’s kind of the energy of the ensemble. So, when we write, we ask people to write us a piece.

We try to get involved in the creative process along the way. We try work with the composer as they’re working on the piece. When they’re done with the piece, we try to work with them a little bit on it. It’s a little bit less sort of, “Can you do this and then show it to us when you’re done?” Because we find that we’re much more interested in doing something that kind of has an element of us in it. … Well, any other two people could do that. So, I find that very helpful and very fun and very intriguing.

Christopher: Yeah and it sounds like the natural continuation of what you referred to earlier, the kind of breaking down of the wall between the composer and the performer.

Michael: That’s right, yeah. It also sort of breaks a wall a little bit between us and our audiences, because it’s a little bit less like you’re going to a concert to see the two of us totally shred and that’s the goal, but actually you’re coming to one of our concerts to hear something that might interest you or to get some context for something that maybe you’re thinking about right now. I find that much more interesting, also a little bit less nerve racking. You don’t think as much about, “Oh, everybody’s watching how fast I move my hands,” but more like, “Oh, actually everybody here is interested in… Wow, this piece is based on this? Oh, that’s cool. Let me listen to that.” I find that much more, I don’t know, inspiring I guess, for lack of a better word.

Christopher: That’s really interesting and what I’ve read about the group, the word community comes up a lot and I’m sure people can appreciate a little bit from what you’ve just described. The connections you’re making with new music composers and a different kind of connection with the audience. Are there other ways that this project builds community or other ways you think about community in the context of New Morse Code?

Michael: Yeah. I’d say on the local level and on the large level. On the local level, one thing that we think about doing is really connecting people together or connecting groups of people together. That can be pretty bounded groups. Last year we did this program with a flute player at a penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas, where we worked with the inmates on music that they were writing. A lot of them have actually been writing songs and we went in actually with a composer, with a flute player and the two of us and we worked with them on building a piece that we all kind of wrote together. In the process of that, we gave some little presentations about how do you make music without words or how do you do this or how do you do that? That’s kind of an example of just kind of connecting those inmates to one another, that’s really helpful.

On another level, the community can be around the audiences… I think that we hope that the audiences, for what we’ll do is not just one subset of people. It’s not one slice of pie, but it’s actually like a whole bunch of different people who are maybe interested in a whole bunch of different things. Finally, I think that we like to think about what we’re doing as building community among musicians. One thing, we like to play with other people, we like to work with other people on pieces, right, and we like to work with other people on performing those pieces. So, I think that those three ways are pretty helpful or it’s just how we think about what we’re doing or contextualize what we’re doing.

Christopher: Wonderful and I particularly loved hearing you talk about how it changes your mindset as a performer to think about the audience in that way. They’re not coming to hear you play Tchaikovsky with break neck speed and accuracy. They’re coming to hear a Michael and Hannah collaborative composition of some kind that probably no one’s ever heard before or has never heard in this way anyway and I can see how that invites a different kind of relationship in the moment with the audience.

Michael: Yeah. I mean I like that personally, especially because a lot of the music we play is not canonical. Most of the pieces we play at a concert, nobody has heard this piece before in the audience. It may be the 20th we’ve played it, but nobody else has heard it and that kind of has a different energy than going to a Bruce Springsteen concert so that you could hear those Bruce Springsteen songs. I do think it has a different energy. I quite like it, but it’s just different.

Christopher: Got you and you have another major project, Unsnared Drum, which is a very different kind of a thing and in a way, I guess it takes you from the broad role as a percussionist and all kinds of variety into this very narrow focus. I’d love if you could explain to the people what Unsnared Drum is and where it came from and maybe you can talk a little bit about how it’s all going.

Michael: Sure. Yeah. We were just talking about playing percussion, how you play a lot of different instruments. For most of us, the instrument we start on is … and it tends to be the pedagogical instrument, but we sort of kind of stop after those pieces. We learn those études, we learn those technical studies and we say, “Okay, now let’s do something else,” and part of me wanted to think about, “Well, I actually really like playing this instruments and it seems weird to me that so many people are not kind of working to expand their range with this instrument.”

I started to think, “Well, I wonder could it be possible to play a whole concert of music just for the snare drum and have it not stink?” I don’t know, so I thought, “Well, the best way to do this is to work with people who are not percussionists.” You know how there’s like a whole genre of guitar music written by guitarists … they work super well, but maybe that’s not the most compelling music in the history of time. It could be, but so I think there’s an element for this where I thought, “Well, if I really want interesting music for my instrument, what I have to do is find somebody who doesn’t have the biases, the history, the sort of preformed opinions about the instruments.”

So, I asked four composers, who’s music I think is really different and daring and kind of mold breaking in a certain sense, could you try to reinvent this instrument? Which is traditionally perceived as being pretty flat in expression. It’s generally dynamically pretty narrow. It doesn’t seem like it has a pitch, although it kind of does, even if you probably don’t notice and it does seem like it has a pretty narrow range. I started to think, “I wonder if I could try to explode that a little bit.” There’s another element of it too, which is that I play a lot of instruments that are quite honestly pretty big, so I thought, “Well, maybe it would be cool to play a concert with instruments that are a little bit smaller.”

I asked four composers to say, “Just do whatever you want and if you want me to, I’ll show you some technical studies. I’ll show you some pieces that we all play in school, but otherwise do whatever you want.” I asked four people, Nina young, who’s a professor at the University of Texas in Austin and former Rome Prize winner, Amy Beth Kirstin, who’s a composer in New Haven, Connecticut who writes a lot of theatrical music that kind of blurs the line between theater and music. Hannah Lash, who’s a composition professor at the Yale School of Music and also phenomenal harp player and then Tonia Ko, who just did a post doc at University of Chicago and has a Guggenheim fellowship, who’s music is a lot about investigating the sound of instruments as a starting place instead of the sort of connotation of the instrument.

The four pieces, I would say they’re more on the experimental side and they’re a little bit more adventures. Nina’s piece uses a transducer under the drum, so like a speaker so that the drum becomes a speaker and then you kind of interact with the instrument that way. Amy’s piece has to do with… It’s called Ghost in the Machine and it has to do with all the sounds that the instruments can make, but you generally kind of don’t hear because maybe you’re far away or maybe you’re not like really trying to do that thing. Hannah’s piece is actually pretty, I guess, norm-core, but it’s probably the most well thought out snare drum piece I’ve ever heard. It has a very organized structure. It’s not improvisatory, it’s not… Yeah, it has like a scope, which I find very helpful, interesting. Tonia’s piece is sort of like a little sonic adventure, like a little ritual around…

We worked on kind of messing with the tuning of the drum so that when you hit it with kind of a soft implement like a timpani mallet or something, it makes a whole range of wobbly sounds and then from there as a starting point to sort of imagine the instrument as being like a choir instead of just one thing, so that was the idea. The four of them, we’ve had different working environments. One of them just wrote the piece and two of them, we’ve been working really closely on it. “What about this? What if you try this?” But I sent them all drums and I work with this drum set company, Vic Firth, and they were nice enough to send them all mallets and sticks and so they’ve each had an instrument in their living room for the last year or so.

Two of the pieces are done, one of them’s like almost and the other one’s also kind of almost done and the next step is to record them in some way, both audio and video and then to get out there. I’d say, again, I have no idea if they’ll be good together, if they’ll be good, what they’ll be like on a concert stage, but it was just sort of a challenge for myself to see what could we do. Because, as you get into teaching, you start assigning études and technical studies to people, right, and I was finding that on snare drum, they were overwhelmingly… Well, one by men and they were overwhelmingly kind of militaristic or overt … does not seem like it’s trying to teach me something, it’s trying to tell a story and then through that, I can learn something.

So, I kind of wanted to help make pieces like that and since I have absolutely no talent in writing music, I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll try to get people to write pieces for me,” and so that’s where we are and hopefully by the end of this year, I’ll have some recordings of… Certainly, I’ll have played them all, but in terms of a studio recording, I think they’ll take a little bit longer.

Christopher: Sure. Well, I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that I’ve been immediately sucked into your website and the projects you have going on and I’ll just say for our viewers and listeners, we’ll have a link in the show notes, but go and look at the videos Michael shared from Unsnared Drum so far-

Michael: Oh, thanks. Yeah.

Christopher: and little snippets of performances and I think your mind will be a bit blown by what’s possible with a snare drum in these various compositions. It’s really, really, wonderful. Michael, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. It’s been such a pleasure on a personal level as well as a professional one to get that-

Michael: Oh, this is great. Yeah, great to talk to you.

Christopher: these projects and-

Michael: Oh, awesome.

Christopher: the place for people to go is MichaelCompitello.com to learn all that-

Michael: That’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah and you’ll see it’s updated with the speed of somebody who works in an academic institution and from there you can find Instagram, Facebook, that kind of stuff.

Christopher: Fantastic. Wonderful. Thank you again, Michael, for joining us on the show.

Michael: Of course, yeah. Thanks so much.

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The post Awareness, Innovation and Reflection, with Michael Compitello appeared first on Musical U.