Author: musicalitywrld

When we made the switch to video back in January we were delighted to have our first interview be with Sabrina Peña Young, someone we know well and who has deep insights, which made for a long and fascinating converation.

We’re excited now to kick off this new incarnation of the show similarly, with a particularly meaty episode that is going to have a big and positive impact on your own musicality journey.

Our guest today is Scott Devine, the man behind Scott’s Bass Lessons, the #1 website for learning bass guitar – they have over 650,000 YouTube subscribers, and have trained over 25,000 bassists to date. If you play bass, then you know Scott – he’ll be all over your Facebook, your YouTube, and there’s a good chance you’re already a member of the Academy site where they provide extensive training, masterclasses and live calls with a faculty of the top bass educators in the world.

In this conversation we talk about:

• How spending six months at sea transformed Scott’s bass playing.
• The simple piece of advice that immediately put an end to Scott’s umming and ahhing over what to study next in his own bass learning.
• And, after talking to, interviewing, and studying with dozens upon dozens of the world’s top bassists and musicians, the one thing Scott has learned they all have in common – and (spoiler alert) it’s not “talent”!

Scott also gives a fantastic mini tutorial on a particular bass technique, walking basslines, which is something that’s really valuable to understand, whether you play bass or not – you’re going to hear these everywhere, and after today’s conversation you’re going to understand how exactly they’re put together.

There is a ton packed in here and you guys are in for a treat…

This is Musicality Now.

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Links and Resources

• Scott’s Bass Lessons
• Scott’s Bass Lessons On YouTube
• Scott Devine’s Bass Picks
• About Succeeding with Online Courses
• About Choosing an Online Music Course
• All Things Vocal, with Judy Rodman

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Scott. Thanks for joining us today.

Scott: Hey, Christopher. How’s it going?

Christopher: Really good. I am particularly delighted to have you on the show because I was lamenting recently the fact that we haven’t had that many bass players on the show and how better to remedy that than with the man himself, Scott Devine, the man behind Scott’s Bass Lessons, the leading website for bass education online. So it’s a total pleasure to have you and I just have a head full of stuff I want to talk to you about, so I’ve been trying to rein that in and figure how we can best pick your brains in a concise amount of time so we don’t have you here all day long. But I want to start out, for sure, with your own back story, because you are an excellent top level professional bass player yourself, as well as being a leading bass educator, and I want to know what your own bass education was like, because you didn’t have SBL and the academy back when you were learning bass. What did it look like, how did you get started?

Scott: Mine was bitty to say at the least. I was a guitar player to begin with, and that really was it followed the traditional routes. It was I was 13 years old in school. I had no aspirations of playing a musical instrument. I just wasn’t into music really at all. A friend of mine really wanted to get guitar lessons, and he’d been told that to get guitar lessons in the school, we had to have a minimum of three students for the year, for the school to consider it. So, he strong armed me into it and another friend of mine, and suddenly we were the … All three of us were getting guitar lessons once an evening through the school.

Then slowly, and actually, as soon as I started playing guitar, I felt, “Oh, you know, it doesn’t seem so hard.” It seemed like it made sense. And I carried on. They didn’t. Obviously when they didn’t, the guitar teacher stopped going to the school, but my dad worked at a factory at the time, and the guy that worked next to him in the factory actually played guitar. So, he said that he’d teach me. My dad used to pay him a packet of 20 cigarettes for every lesson, whatever that equates to nowadays.

Then I just got into guitar that way, so I started doing that. My dad had heard somewhere on the grapevine that learning classical guitar would be a benefit as well, so I started getting classical guitar lessons along with my regular electric guitar lessons, which I did enjoy it. I think that it ran hot and cold with me, because obviously I kinda wanted to rock out Van Halen style and I was playing classical stuff, but it was all good, and from a technique standpoint as well, I think it was really beneficial for me to study classical guitar. I think that’s come with me my entire career actually, that the foundation of the technique that I got when I was studying classical guitar.

I did that up until I got my grade 8 and stuff like that. the old grading system. Really just traditional kids music education I suppose. And then got to around 16 or 17. Didn’t really know what I was going to do with my life. Wasn’t doing very well in school. An apprentice luthiership, which is guitar making, for anybody that doesn’t know, came up in the local newspaper, and I just thought, “What the hell. I don’t really know what I’m gonna do with my life right now.” I played guitar, but I didn’t have any aspirations of being a professional musician, because there was no real professional musicians in the town I lived, ’cause it was so small and so isolated. And no internet, as well. So, no internet and no professional musicians. So, how on earth could I know that there was a thing like a professional musician. As far as I was concerned, it was either you had to be a pop star or nothing, right? And I definitely didn’t have any aspirations of being a pop star.

So, got the job as being an apprentice luthier. That was really my gateway into the discovery of basically being able to be a professional musician, because the guy I was working for, he was making basses for all the guys that were working in the West End, which is the UK’s version of Broadway, obviously. So, all of these guys were coming in to the workshop every single week, and I was talking to them, and I’m a curious dude. I’m talking to them like, “Oh, so what’s your thing?”, you know. “Oh, I’m working as a bass player in the West End, and this is how I got the job, and this is …”, you know. And suddenly, it started to unravel, and it came very clear to me that it was something that I could possibly venture into as a career. At the time, I didn’t even play bass … I was thinking as a guitar player. But I did start tinkering around on the bass and thought, “You know, I might be able to do this.”

Something that the guy I was working for, who is called Chris May (great friend), he said, “You know, there’s a lot of guitar players. There’s not that many great bass players.” And it was true, you know. It’s true. There is more guitar players than bass players. So, I think it was an unknown career choice, moving to the bass. Now, I did love bass, but in some part of my subconscious, I think that statement that Chris told me back in the day that there was more great guitar players than great bass players definitely was in there.

So, I ended up experimenting on bass, and then through some round of events, somebody called the workshop and said, “Do you know anybody?” This is to Chris May, my boss at the time. “Do you know anybody that could step in and cover a gig in a theater band with zero notice?” This was for a theater band who was playing locally, and the bass player (I think he had a collapsed lung or something like that) had been hauled into hospital. And they didn’t have a bass player. They were reaching out to everybody in the area to see if they could find a bass player, and Chris, my boss, said, “Oh, yeah. There’s young lad that works here that could do it.” Now, bear in mind that I didn’t read bass clef at all. I read treble clef, but I didn’t read bass clef at all, and I’d only ever jammed riffs on the bass. I think I even knew a full song. Like, I didn’t know anything about bass playing. I just had a four string bass. In fact, I didn’t even own a bass, really. I had to borrow it off the store.

I ended up on that gig.

Christopher: Okay, well listen. Let’s hit pause there before that pivotal moment, ’cause I want to understand a bit more about that musical background you had up to that point. Just to clarify, when you’ve been saying “bass”, we’re talking electric bass, not upright, when you were in the luthiers.

Scott: Yeah, electric bass, yeah.

Christopher: Okay. You mentioned being able to read treble clef and going through the grade system. Clearly, you were good at the technique and learning repertoire in advance. Had you explored anything more kind of dynamic and creative and improvisational? Did you have that kind of relationship with the instrument? ‘Cause you mentioned it seemed like it came fairly easy earlier on. Were you learning by ear? Did you feel like you had a instinct for it? Was it just kind of a skill, in a robotic way, that you knew you could do on guitar, or how were you thinking about music at that point?

Scott: Yeah, I was just learning by ear. All of the electric stuff, I was just learning by ear. I didn’t know any of the theory behind it at all, like nothing. I didn’t know what an A triad was or … I mean, like I knew nothing of diatonic harmony, so it was just by ear. The only improvisation I could do was around at the minor blues scale. The curse of the guitar player. So, that was as far as that was concerned.

But in terms of the classical side, yeah, I was learning by memory really, you know. Obviously, you learn these pieces, but really you’re learning it by memory, bar by bar, or measure by measure, depending on where you are in the globe.

In terms of music theory, you know … You can get to grade eight on classical guitar and know nothing about music theory. It’s like painting by numbers, really, in terms of like you don’t know anything about diatonic harmony or anything like that. So, yeah. I knew nothing.

Christopher: Okay. So, when they said, “Can you step in at the last minute?”, on an instrument you only sort of play, you were coming from a background of “I know I can play something if I carefully prepare in advance. I’m not someone who can just kind of sit in with a band and play on the fly.”

Scott: Yeah, exactly. I was, I think, given two weeks to prepare for it. I was given 280 charts, because the … Yeah, 280 charts, all notation. All notation. I don’t read bass clef at this time. So … Trying to think back how it went.

Essentially, I took two weeks off work at this point, so I didn’t … I just took the two weeks off. I can remember getting up, eating my breakfast, sitting down with the cassette tapes and those charts, and just writing all of the notes above the, seriously, above the actual notation and memorizing as much as I could. Just like full-time, 14 days. Ate my breakfast, learnt the stuff, had my lunch, ate the stuff, had my dinner … You know, learnt the stuff. And then just went to bed and then got up, and did that 14 days straight.

Even then, I was vastly under-prepared. I gave it my best shot. Then when I got there, they didn’t have any other choice. I was really the only choice that they had, and I think I scraped by. I did a good enough job that I was gonna scrape by, and they took a shot on me. I can remember thinking to myself, “Sheesh, this is just insane. This is just crazy.”

Yeah. Actually, on my first gig, there was this disaster moment as well, when all my music fell off the music stand, so it was really … Yeah, yeah. It was just trial by fire, but I got through it. I got through it. And I’ve been in various different situations like that in my life, as well. Always pays off.

Christopher: Well, yeah. It sounds like you rose to the occasion, for sure. I love that as a moment in your trajectory, because I think that is as far as a lot of people get with bass. In terms of appreciating the bass, they think of it as someone who just kinda steps in and plays the root notes on quarter beats and like that’s it, or as a bass player, often it is a guitarist how just subs in when the bassist is off sick, and doesn’t do much more than that.

Scott: Yeah.

Christopher: One thing I really wanted to dig into with you was for yourself and when you’re talking to students, how do you gain a real appreciation of what the bass can do as an instrument? Maybe that will come out naturally in your story as you go beyond that kind of last minute prep or what the sheet music tells you to play, but yeah, I really wanna hear your perspective on how you gain the kind of deep appreciation of the bass that you have at this point.

Scott: Well, for me, it’s a little bit of a weird one, actually. The appreciation from the bass came … It was forced for me. Thinking back … I’ve never actually been asked this question, but I’ve got an answer for you. So, it came back to that day that Chris May, my boss at the time, stated that there are less great bass players than great guitar players, and you can actually be really successful, or I could be successful within the bass niche if I really gave it some serious effort. Because, up until that point, I’d never really listened to bass on albums, so I kind of set upon that task to find music and bass players that were gonna really inspire me. So, I went and looked for it. There wasn’t a moment where it happened. I thought to myself, “Well, if I’m gonna be a bass player, I really need to find some inspiring bass players to check out”, and just went hunting for it.

For me, it was all of the soloists, actually. Because I was a guitar player, I immediately gravitated to bass players who were playing solos, so it actually wasn’t the bass playing role that was initially attractive to me as a musician at all. It was the soloistic side. I was listening to guys like Jimmy Johnson who plays with … Well, he plays with a ton of guys, but he was playing with Allan Holdsworth, at the time. And I found a guy called Skuli Sverrisson, who I actually went and studied with out in New York. Just all of the solo improvisations soloistic kind of players.

But through that, it did filter down, and then I did get this real appreciation for the bass and its role within the music. And that really first … This is kind of weird to say. Can you remember the band “Wham!”.

Christopher: Yeah.

Scott: Wham! Right? With George Michael as the vocalist. Well, one of the tunes that that theater band played, it was a Wham! tune. I can’t remember which one tune it was. But the bass line was just crazy awesome. That was honestly the first time I was like, “Wow. This bass thing’s pretty cool.” You know, it was a good thing that that happened, ’cause I was about to go and start doing this as a job in a theater band. But yeah, that was really the first time I really found an interest in the low end of what the bass is actually sort of like all of the time really. So, got into that.

Then, as I was playing all of the tunes in the theater band, that was really my first … It was absolutely the first time I’d played bass. You know, in a band, but actually just played bass even on my own, because when I was playing bass at home, I was just playing slap riffs as you would when you were 17 years old, you know. What do you do? You just play slap riffs all the time or you just rise up and down scales and try and do cool solos. This was the first time that I was actually playing bass lines, in that band. That was my first introduction to what a bass does, and it was amazing. It was really amazing.

In that theater band, as well, we rotated nights, as well, so some nights we’d do … I think we did a ’50s and ’60s night. We did ’70s and ’80s night. At the ’70s and ’80s nights were really fantastic, because that was all of the disco stuff, you know. All of the folk stuff. Everything from Wham! right back to Larry Graham & Graham Central Station, and that kind of thing. Then we also did Motown, a Motown and Broadway night, as well, which was all of the classics from Broadway. That was a really interesting time as well, because it gave me a real appreciation for the music that had been written for stage, because up until that point, I’d just never played … Never even listened to it. I was like, “What? West End Broadway?” You know, just wasn’t even in my … I was listening to Steve Vai and Van Halen, you know.

Christopher: That’s so interesting. It reminds me a bit of a past interviewee, Judy Rodman, who was talking about her time as a jingle singer, and it was kind of a boot camp for her in terms of becoming a professional singer because they’d just go in and have to do so many different styles on the fly, perfectly in tune with no prep. It sounds like you had a similar experience where you were kind of thrown into a situation that exposed you to every kind of bass playing and every style of bass there was.

Scott: Exactly, yeah. Perfect. It was perfect, yeah. ’50s and ’60s, which was all the old school stuff from … You know, we were playing Beatles. All of the ’50s and ’60s was really fantastic. Playing some jazzy styles stuff, but it was written. You know, it wasn’t traditional walking basslines. It was two in a bar, and it was all written out in notation. But, doing that stuff, and then as I said, the ’70s and ’80s were just sort of like a school in itself in terms of bassline construction. And then into the Broadway and Motown stuff. But I’ve gotta say that I was still painting by numbers. I knew nothing about what I was doing. I didn’t think to myself, “Ah, that’s an A triad” or “I’m doing a chromatic run here.” I was just literally painting by numbers, playing what was on the page. Didn’t know what the heck I was doing.

Christopher: Okay. Well, I wanna pick up on that in a moment, but before we move on, we’re just coming off the back of a big focus on active listening, here on the show. I love what you said about needing to go off and find the people who were playing solo, like the bassists who were really front and center, not just playing root notes in the background.

It reminded me, like for me, what made me go out and buy a bass in my 20s was there’s this Maddy Prior track where Rick Kemp is playing solo upright bass, and he starts off the song with this riff, and it just hit me in my heart, and I was like, “Ah, I wanna play that riff.” That was literally enough. I went out and bought a fretless bass and started learning.

I think there’s real value in doing that, bothering to do that, ’cause you said you took the proactive steps of going out and seeking those bassists. I think when we play in instrument, we tend to tune into that instrument in the mix, and we can hear what it’s doing, but for instruments you don’t play … And I know for a lot of our listeners, bass is not their primary instrument, and they may have never realized there’s a lot more to bass than just playing underneath the chords in a robotic fashion. So, I would love if you could give people some homework or some recommendations. Thinking about those more creative, improvisational, melodic leading bass players from the past or today, who would you say go out there and listen to, to get a sense of what the bass can do?

Scott: Oh, wow. Of what the bass can do. Oh, that’s a deep question. A side note, by the way, I know Rick and Maddy really well. They live just a few miles outside of Carlisle, and I used to hang around with Rick.

Christopher: No way.

Scott: I actually taught their daughter, Rosie, guitar at one point, yeah. We had saw it … Anyway. So, in terms of bass players that you should check out … Well, first of all, winding right back to the beginning of the electric bass, the first guy really to have a voice, I suppose, that showed what … ‘Cause there was electric bass players before this guy I’m gonna mention, but he was a real virtuosic player, and also in terms of the way that he represented the harmony that he was playing. He did it in a really, really great way. The guy is James Jamerson.

James Jamerson was on upright player to begin with, and he also played piano as well, which not many people know. I’ve learned a lot of his lines, and the way that he outlines the chords … And I think that this is a really key thing for your listeners to understand as well, is that bass players do exactly what the rest of the band do, especially the rhythm section. So, for instance, a guitar player, for the most part, is playing chords. He’s outlining the harmony, by playing chords. Same as the keys players, right? Their outlining the chords. Yeah, that’s sort of like doing a few licks here and there and a few … You know, maybe the guitar player’s doing a solo, but for the most part of that song, they’re gonna be outlining the harmony by playing chords. The bass player’s doing exactly the same thing. They’re just outlining the chords, but instead of playing the notes all at the same time like a guitar player or a keys player would, they play the notes linearly. So, they’ll play roots, thirds, fives, sevens. They’ll play passing turns in between that whether is be scale tones or chromatic runs.

So, when I’m listening to a bass player play, that’s what I’m listening to. I’m thinking, “Okay, there’s a chord going on at this moment. How is he outlining that chord?” And yeah, that could just be a root note, you know. Sometimes a root note is just enough. You don’t need anything more, but for some styles of music and some players, they might want to throw in other elements to that.

So, James Jamerson was the first real guy that I’ve heard that really ran with that. As the chord went by, he was doing exactly what I just said. He was outlining all of the chord tones. He wasn’t throwing them all in, but he was outlining them in a really musical way. He was using chromatic approach notes as you would in bebop. There was just so much more going on than initially … When you listen to a Motown track and Jamerson’s playing on it, you’re like, “Yeah, great bassline.” But when you actually start deconstructing it, it’s like, “Wow.” This guy obviously knew his harmony really, really well to be able to do it in the way that he did.

I think that … I don’t think. I know that, for instance, I think one of the key things to point out is that Motown Records actually used to postpone recording dates so they could get Jamerson on it. That’s how important he was to that music. A lot of the time, as well, that his basslines are actually melodies in their own right. It’s like a counter melody to the melody, right? And they knew that. There was obviously something magical about the way that he approached creating a bassline, that added so much to the song that the record company was willing to actually postpone recording these songs until they could get him on the track. So, yeah, definitely check out James Jamerson. And if you want to … Go on, Chris.

Christopher: Sorry. Just before you move on, tell me … ‘Cause you described in quite theoretical terms there, which is super interesting for those among our audience who know what you’re talking about, but when you were first listening to him, or if someone’s listening without knowing what a chromatic passing note is for example, are they going to be able to appreciate what’s going on when they hear him play?

Scott: No.

Christopher: Okay. Are they gonna be able to enjoy what’s going on?

Scott: Yes. They’ll absolutely enjoy it, but for me … Like, I listened to Jamerson for a good few years and didn’t really have the appreciation that I should’ve, until I started transcribing what was going on and learning, you know, “Oh, okay. That’s like a G major going to a D flat diminished. Oh, that’s really interesting how he got there.” He’s not just playing G and then D flat. He’s using these chromatic notes to run up to the D flat, or he’s using a suspended triad to move down to it. All of these crazy things that you just wouldn’t do naturally. He’s not playing by ear. He is playing by ear, you know, obviously, ’cause we all play by ear. Whether you know theory or not, we all play by ear, but he’s doing it in a really, really intelligent way. He’s doing it in a really intelligent way. So, I don’t think necessarily, if you don’t really know any of that stuff, that you will hear it instantly, but I do recommend that you sit down and try and listen and pick apart the basslines, figure out what he’s doing. He’s the best example in that era of … There’s somebody to do that. And he was so much more developed than anybody else. Like, so much more.

Another guy that people loved the basslines off, and rightly so ’cause he’s crazy good, was Bob Babbitt who was around at the same time in the Motown area. He was sort of like second in line to Jamerson. Can’t get Jamerson. Bob Babbitt will do it. You know?

But in terms of his approach, harmonically speaking, to creating basslines, James Jamerson was, I’m not gonna say in a different league, because that has some sort of negative connotation towards Bob Babbitt, but he was much more …

Christopher: He was playing a different game, maybe.

Scott: Yeah. He was seeing it in a different way. You know, he was seeing it in a different way. He was seeing more as a piano player would see it. I would say that.

Christopher: Okay. In terms of bass appreciation, who else should people go on to listen to?

Scott: Oh, going through the eras … I’m trying to think. So, Jamerson up until the ’70s. Carol Kaye, as well, did some great stuff. I wanna mention her. As did Bob Babbitt. You know, those guys. Carol Kaye, Babbitt. ’70s has got to be Larry Graham from Graham Central Station. Just listen to the tune called “Hair”. Obviously, I am follicly challenged. I know not much of hair, but yeah. Check out Graham Central Station. He was one of the godfathers of funk and slap bass, as was Bootsy Collins, who originally was bass player for James Brown back in the day, and then went and did his own thing. But man, he was just like killing it as a bass player.

There was in the ’70s, obviously, there was the whole punk thing going on, but I think in terms of bass appreciation, they were really doing what the guitar … They were just playing root notes, chugging along in the background, so I don’t think there’s much to really, for me anyway, to learn from those guys other than kind of like cool attitude and rocking out. But go do it.

’80s. I think by the ’80s, obviously, Anthony Jackson is a huge player to check out in the ’80s. Marcus Miller. Yeah, again, you know. These are huge session guys that … I think the session scene was in full flow still in the ’80s, which obviously it isn’t now, but … Anthony Jackson. Marcus Miller. Will Lee towards the end of the ’80s did some fantastic stuff with the Brecker Brothers and their band. I suppose you wanna know who these guys played with. Well, Marcus Miller … “You’re Never Too Much” by Luther Vandross. Check out the bassline on that. That will tell you all. You don’t need anything other than that, right? Luther Vandross with Marcus Miller. Anthony Jackson, he played on a lot of stuff, but some of the really key things that you should check out is all the stuff that he did with Chaka Khan. Great by bass … What’s that tune called? I’ve got a terrible memory when it comes to the names of songs.

“What Cha Gonna Do For Me”.

Christopher: Oh, yeah.

Scott: What cha gonna do for me. Right? So, check out the end of that track. That’s amazing.

’90s. Oh. We’re moving into a strange era in the ’90s, aren’t we? Which is a different conversation in itself. Then I think you’re got the super breed of bass players that came out. Obviously, I should just rewind a bit. Jaco Pastorius. Let’s not go any further without mentioning him. Jaco Pastorius releases self-titled solo album in 1976. Jaco Pastorius was really the first guy that came out with like a soloistic style of bass playing. He had a solo album. Herbie Hancock was on there. You know, all of those guys. Wow. He’s was just killing it. So, that’s just “Jaco Pastorius” by Jaco Pastorius. Check him out.

Jeff Berlin around the same time. Just a little later, I think, was another one of those guys that was just … It’d come across like amazing techniques. Soloistic techniques. They were playing stuff like “Donna Lee”, which is the Charlie Parker tune. Definitely worth checking out. Jaco Pastorius was also playing with Weather Report. Any of the Weather Report stuff you wanna check out.

Then this new breed of player came along, I suppose, really, I wanna say with Matt Garrison, but before that, Victor Wooten. A lot of your listeners might have heard of Victor Wooten. But there is a guy called Matthew Garrison, son of Jimmy Garrison, who originally played for John Coltrane.

So, Matt Garrison was really a new breed. The way that he approached harmony was very different from the way that the original soloists like Jaco Pastorius and Jeff Berlin approached harmony. Matt Garrison, there’s a lot more melodic minor … It depends how deep you wanna go, ’cause there’s a lot more melodic minor harmonic major stuff being used with Matt Garrison. Then really, from Matt Garrison, there came a whole slew of these crazy amazing soloistic style bass players. And I would say the last one really that really sticks out in my mind was a French bass player who now lives over in L.A., called Hadrien Feraud, who was just phenomenal. I can remember checking Hadrien out when he was like 17 on YouTube, when I first found YouTube a few years ago. Then I remember seeing him in Manchester, the Manchester Bass Day. I think he was in his early 20s at this point. And I’ve seen a lot of bass players live, and this for me was like … I’ve just never seen anything like it. Nothing like it. And still haven’t seen anything like it. He’s just an anomaly in terms of being able to do what he does on the bass, from a physical standpoint and a harmonic standpoint, is just an anomaly. There’s nobody been on the earth like him. At the minute anyway.

Also, just to rewind a little bit … Obviously, you know I’m a huge fan of Gary Willis as well, so Gary Willis is also a great bass player to check out. So, those … I think I’ve given you like 10 to 15 bass players.

Christopher: Yeah, tremendous.

Scott: Lot of stuff to check out there. Lots of different styles of music, as well. And apologies if anybody’s thinking, “Please mention this player”, you know. I do apologize if I missed anybody out. I’m a fan of a lot of bass players. All of the bass players. I love them all.

Christopher: No doubt. We’ll definitely have those names and some recommended links in the show notes for people who, like myself, now immediately want to go off and do a lot of listening. But let’s come back to your own story, and maybe factor some of that in, because you’ve hinted a couple of times that there was a transformation in your bass playing. You’ve made reference to understanding the triads you were outlining or knowing what the theory was behind what you were playing. Where did that start to come in to the picture, and why was that important compared with just playing the notes on the page?

Scott: Okay. So, I did the theater band. It kinda comes in the story. I did the theater band, and I ended up doing that gig … I ended up leaving my job, actually, at Overwater Basses, to become the full-time bass player in that theater band. So, I was playing six nights a week, and it was just the best start to any music career. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. It blew my mind. But it was the culture of that band was very … We were in and out. Like, I turned up. We didn’t really speak about the music or anything like that. These guys were old-school guys. They’re just playing in the theater their whole lives. They don’t really wanna sit and talk about music. They’ve done it forever, you know. They’re probably a little bit grumpy about it, you know. They were always a little bit grumpy about something.

We turned up ten minutes before. We plugged in. The theater lights went up, and off we went. We did the gig. And then after the gig, we packed up. Well, we didn’t pack up, obviously. It’s a theater band, so all your gear’s just left in the theater. We jumped in our cars and went home. And that was it, right? So, I did that for year, and didn’t really get any tips or anything like that from the band. It was just in and out.

So, that contract ended. In fact, that whole band ended and went and did their own thing. Then, strangely, the guy that gave me the gig, that called the workshop the year before and had the collapsed lung, he called me again. At this point, I’d just moved to Leeds. The phone call goes like this. “Hey, Scott. It’s” … What’s his name? I can’t remember his name anymore. He said, “Hey, Scott. I heard that gig ended.” I was like, “Yeah.” And he was like, “I was wondering if you want to go on a cruise ship, because I’ve just been offered a cruise ship gig. I can’t go, obviously, because my health is still quite bad. I was just wondering if you want to go for the audition.” I was like, “Yeah.” Seriously, I didn’t know that cruise ship gigs were a thing, at the minute. Again, no internet. I was living in the middle of nowhere. Had nobody to ask. And he was like, “Oh, yeah. It leaves in two weeks, and you’d be going to the Caribbean for six months.” “What? This is a thing? This actually exists?” He was like, “Oh, yeah. It’s a thing.” Obviously, I said yes, I wanted to do it, right?

But the key thing to understand here is that I’ve been playing the same sets of however … 280 tunes, I think we used to do in that band. Just rotated around. I’d only played them for The past year. I’d not done anything else. I wasn’t listening to any of the musicians really. I wasn’t practicing. I was just doing it. I actually worked a lot that year. I worked in a music store during the day, and I gigged every night, so I had no time to practice. So, I wasn’t being lazy or anything like that.

I went to the audition for the cruise ship, and it was going in two weeks. The musical director put a piece of music in front of me. No, it was a chord chart. Put a chord chart in front of me. I think it was “Girl From Ipanema”. I said, “Okay. So, we’re just gonna do “Girl From Ipanema” in second bossa.” He didn’t say it was a bossa. It just said “bossa” on the page, on the sheet. I didn’t know what a bossa was. So, I said, “What’s a bossa?” And he was like, “You don’t know what a bossa is?” It was “bossa nova”. I was like, “I’ve got no clue what a bossa nova is.” So, just hangs his head In shame. Now, this guy actually was notorious for being a super hard ass.

In fact, there’s a great story. His name was Eric. I’m not gonna mention his surname, ’cause he might still be around. But his name was Eric, and there’s a great story about him. He did a gig. He did the first set of a gig, and in the break, picked up the bass players bass, opened the back door of the venue they were playing at, and threw the bass into the street. This is serious. Then, obviously, he didn’t throw the bass player, but he told the bass player to go, and he said, “I’ll play the bass for the rest of the gig, with your mother.” It’s a notorious story, but he was a real hard ass.

Yeah, when I listen to, or hear, stories about … What’s the film called? “Whiplash”. People have said, “That doesn’t happen in real life.” I’m like, “Oh, yeah? I’ve got stories that will go in exact opposite”, and tell people that actually, stuff like that does go down in real life. Yeah, maybe not in music school, but actually on the road. I think there is a few harry stories out there to be told. But anyway …

So, I’m in this audition for this cruise ship gig. It just goes disastrously wrong. It’s horrendous. I don’t know what a bossa nova is. They hand me another sheet. They’re like, okay, well this is just like a walking bassline around. I’m like, “I don’t know how to play a walking basslines.” Right? Imagine the worst audition in the world. You wouldn’t even be halfway there. It just goes horrendously wrong. Essentially, right there and then, in front of the rest of the band, Eric is seriously is just like, “Pack your bass up. There’s no way you’re going on this ship.” So, I packed the bass up, got back in my car, and I’m driving back to Leeds, and I’m torn to shreds. I’m so gutted about it. I’m just like there’s … But, as everybody listening could imagine, it was like the ultra, the worst humiliation, you know. You just can’t do anything. I’m a complete failure.

I get to Leeds. I’m feeling really down that afternoon. The phone rings. It’s Eric. I’m like, “Hey. How’re you doing?” He’s like, “Scott, I’m not gonna lie. There’s no way that you are ready to go on this cruise ship gig.” He said, “In fact, I’m pretty well 100% certain that you will be sent home within the first four weeks of going on this cruise ship, but I’m gonna send you anyway, because if I don’t send you, I can’t send the rest of the band, because we’ve only got two weeks to prepare to get you on this cruise ship, and I can’t find anybody else to go. So, you’re gonna go on it anyway.”

Christopher: What? Talk about-

Scott: “But you better get your stuff together, because if you don’t, you’re gonna get sent home within the first four weeks.” So-

Christopher: Talk about proving your point from earlier about there not being that many bassists around.

Scott: Yeah, oh, yeah. Well, going away for six months stint only having two weeks notice is just really hard. It was even hard for me, you know. I didn’t have really many responsibilities. I didn’t really know how to prepare, to be honest, so I just kind of sort of like prepared my solo, I suppose for a total beating, the total beating that it was about to get.

I went on that cruise ship. We did two or three rehearsals, which were total carnage, all because of me. Yeah.

Christopher: Pre YouTube, pre internet almost … That’s tough to prepare for, if you sat at home in a small town, needing to study walking basslines with no teacher or resources to help you. Did you have anything to go on?

Scott: Nothing. Nothing. No books. Nothing. The guitar player that was doing the ship with us, in the rehearsal weeks, he told me to buy any tapes with Ray Brown on it I could find. He said, “Find tapes of Ray Brown.” He said, “Find the charts that he’s playing, so you can figure out what the chords are that he’s playing over and just figure out how you’re gonna get through this.”

So, I did. So, yeah. That’s all I did. Then through actually, quite interestingly, I found a really hacky way of playing walking basslines, which I still teach today, because it really nails what a walking bassline is, and helps people that haven’t played a walking bassline ever to be able to play a walking bassline within a few weeks. And it’s pAssible. Right? You’re not gonna get sent home. If you’re on a cruise ship anyway, you’re not gonna get sent home. Okay? It was what kept me on that cruise ship.

The cruise ship gig was actually a different experience. Yeah, it was quite different from the theater gig experience, because the players were discussing the music in between gigs. You know, how can we make it better? How can we make Scott better? How can we get him through this gig? And the piano player and the guitar player where absolute diamonds on that contract, actually.

That was really the appreciation for knowing triads, roots, fives … “Oh, I should learn jazz. Here’s why I should learn jazz. Because of diatonic harmony. Because it’s gonna give me an appreciation of how songs are written and why the 2-5-1 exists, or the 1-6-2-5, or the 1-6-3-2.” I mean like, all of that came from that contract. It had to come. It was the only way I was gonna survive.

So, I learned how to play walking basslines. Leaned how to play walking by ear. Learned that when people do this … And for anybody that’s not watching this video, have like two fingers down, or two fingers up, I understood exactly what that meant. It’s two flats, which means you better know that that’s B flat or you’re in trouble, right?

And the MD on the ship, as well, a lot of the time … This was old-school, but I think it just exists still in certain scenarios. You wouldn’t know the tune, they wouldn’t tell you the title of the song, and he would turn around and he’d say, “Three down.” One, two, one, two, three, four. And then they’d go into the tune. You don’t know what it’s called. All you know is, right, he just said “three down”. So, it’s in E flat. And you obviously know what tempo it is, because he’s just counted you in. And you are meant to go into that and be able to outline the chords, even though you don’t know what the song is. It was like, yeah. It was a real hard school, and the MD was really, really hard. He was really hard MD. Yeah, it was just brutal, but amazing at the same time. Wouldn’t change a thing.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, I wanna pause for a minute and talk about that walking basslines, because a few years ago … Yeah, this would have been before you and I met. I was abroad, so I didn’t have my normal bass, and I picked up a U bass, like those little ukulele style basses. And I found it sounded like an upright bass, and I really loved that. I was like, “Cool, I kinda wanna play some jazz now.”

So, I joined the SBL Academy, and I found your essential jazz survival guide course, which was terrific and exactly what I needed right then. You gave this wonderful explanation of walking basslines, why they matter, what they are, how they work. I think up until that point, I would consider myself fairly well-versed in music theory, but that was one of the topics that I … You know, I knew the phrase very well. I could tell you if something I heard was a walking bassline, but I’d never really paused to be like, “What are the notes they’re playing? What is going on there?” And I loved your course, because you just constructed it from scratch and explained it in a really great way.

I wonder if we could do the same with the listener. Maybe if someone kinda knows what a walking basslines might be, but doesn’t really understand them. Can we just explain what is it? Why does it matter? How does it work?

Scott: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve got my bass here, so I’ll play you some examples in a second. What a walking bassline is … If you remember a few seconds ago I was talking about what a bass player does within the band. They do exactly what the rest of the rhythm section are doing, except the drummer obviously. They’re playing the chords, and they’re playing the chords in a linear fashion. They outline the chords. So, if a listener, if a audience member … A member? A member of the audience … If someone in the audience is listening to only the bassline, they will be able to hear the chords going by, not just root notes, but the entire chord going by. And really, a walking bassline, traditional walking bassline, that’s what it’s doing.

Traditionally, it’s doing it four notes per measure. Okay? So, I’m just gonna play this. So, if you’ve got a measure of music, let’s say the chord is C minor.

Scott: So, if that’s a C minor, you know, the bassline might be going … Okay? All I’m doing though is just outlining the chord from the root to the minor third, and I’m using this passing turn here, to the 11, to the five, to the flat seven, to the root. I didn’t need to do that, but traditionally that’s what it’s gonna do. Four notes a bar.

Take 2-5-1 in the key of B flat, for instance. C minor, to F dominant seven, to B flat major seven. Amazing cool chord sequence. It’s gonna go like this. C minor, to B flat here, to F dominant seven. So, your root notes would obviously be … two, three four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four … two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one …

We wanna do more than that, so the really easy way to get into this is start in using the fifths first, the fives. So, we’ve got C and the five. We’ve got F and the five. And then we’ve got B flat and the five. When I say the five, I mean the fifth of the chord, right? So, C minor and the fifth of C minor. F dominant seven. The fifth of F dominant seven. And then B flat and the fifth of B flat. Okay?

So, you can actually create a pretty cool walking bassline just by using those. What I start to get students to do first of all is learn how to play two in a bar. So, a two in a bar walking bassline is like if we were doing a standard like this. We would literally play two in a bar, or two in a measure. Two notes per measure. One. Two. One, two, three, four … A one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four … Two, three, four. C minor. F dominant. B flat. Right?

Then, after that, instead of just sort of by throwing … ‘Cause people think walking basslines are this. Just like this slew of chromatic notes, which they’re not, right? So, once you’ve got the root and the fives down, then you can actually play a decent end of a walking bassline actually just using roots and fives, and it would sound like this. A one, two, three, four.

Christopher: Great.

Scott: Right? If you play that, you’re not gonna get sent home. You’re on the cruise ship. You’re on the gig. Right? Seriously, that’s all the band want. They just want it to sound solid and do its thing, right?

Now, once you get the root and the fives down, which that’s pretty easy to do roots, fives, and-

Christopher: Let’s make sure everyone’s keeping up. The different between what you played first, just two notes per measure, and what you just played that sounded a lot more musical … You were throwing in some little swung notes in between? You were using the octave as well as the fifths, so you had a bit more variety?

Scott: Yeah.

Christopher: Anything else you threw into the mix there?

Scott: One note by accident, but it was all roots and fives. It was just roots and fives. Just sort of like … That’s all roots and fives. It’s a great exercise in itself, because it’s like, okay, how inventive can you be with just roots and fives. Like, before you worry about the rest of the notes, just be inventive with those two.

Then, to push it just one step further, it’s like, okay, let’s do roots, fives, and thirds, as well. I know that sound everybody thinking, “Well, why not just do root and thirds first?” It’s because. Just because.

Christopher: Just trust me.

Scott: Just trust me, okay. It’ll take me ten minutes to explain. So, once you’ve done that, you can start adding the third in there. I’m gonna slow it down a bit for you, so … So, all of that, which is roots and fifths … There we go. There’s a little third there, so root, third, five, root, root, root, five, five, three, three, root, three, root, root, three, three, root, five, root, three, root, root, three, three, five, five, root, three, three … Yeah, all right so … And then it’d be to speed. Two, three, four … Sneaky little chromatic in there. Right?

Then, you can carry on. You can start adding the sevens in and stuff like that. And you can add chromatic notes in. So, instead of going … You could … You got these little chromatic notes in there that work in between, but that’s a whole, you know … We could talk about walking basslines for the next eight weeks. But that’s just a great way to encapsulate what a walking bassline is, and also give a little bit of a indication into how to actually get into it, how to actually, you know … If one of your listeners is like, “Oh, well, this is great. How do I actually start doing walking basslines?” Start with … And jazz standards. Take a jazz standard. Be able to play, obviously, all. Find out where the roots are. Be able to play roots and fives over the full thing, and then just start doing roots, fives, and thirds.

You obviously don’t have to play in the order. You don’t have to play root, five, third. You know? You can use them in any order you want. You just need to be able to, when you’re working on it as a musician practicing, first start with your roots, then add the fives into the mix, and then add the thirds into the mix. Okay? So, don’t wanna get anybody playing roots … “Oh, you’ve got to play roots, fives, thirds in this specific order.” Yeah.

Christopher: No. Love it. That was wonderful explanation. Thank you. And hopefully it gives people a sense of why I was able to sit there for hours at a time with my U bass, happily just playing walking basslines for several weeks.

Scott: Right. Yeah.

Christopher: Because it’s like when we talked about improvisation in music, we often use this framework of constraints and dimensions where you apply a constraint, and in this case it’s like just play the roots, thirds, and fifths. And that actually gives you a whole different mindset on what you can change, like you say, the order of the notes, the dynamics, the timing. There’s so many different combinations, and I love walking basslines as a really elegant playground that’s kind of limitless for just improvising in a safe way. As long as you’re sticking with the notes of the chord, there’s so many possibilities, but it gives you a safe zone to play in.

Scott: Absolutely. Yeah.

Christopher: Pick any jazz standard, and you can while away the hours.

Scott: Yeah. It’s also great because … Just to talk about constraint. Well, two things. First of all, it’s great because when you first start studying walking basslines and practicing them, it completely eradicates anything about rhythm. It’s like, okay, you’re gonna play four notes a bar. And it’s there’s not many practical applications that you’re gonna come across where it’s like, okay, the rhythm is just this one thing. Like yes, it can get a little bit more complex, but for the most part, you are just playing bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, you now? You’ve just gotta do that.

Then all of the emphasis is do you actually know where the notes are on your instrument? Do you know? It’s a yes of no answer. It’s like, can you play a walking bassline at this speed over these chords on your instrument? Yes or no answer. It’s really fantastic because it removes any … Even though walking basslines are beautiful and, when they’re done really fantastically, they can create counter melodies in themselves, but when you’re just learning them, when you’re getting into it, it just removes all kind of … It’s almost like a mechanical exercise in a way. It’s like you’ve got to outline the chord. You have to play four notes a bar. That’s it. Go do it. Can you do it or not?

It’s not subjective. It’s like when you look at a great piece of art and you’re like, “Hmm. Is that a great piece of artwork, or isn’t it a great” … And some people might be like, “Yeah, it’s great.” And some people might, “It’s horrible.” With a walking bassline, that doesn’t happen. You can either do it or not. Four notes a bar, outline the chords. Can you do it, or can you not?

So, because of that, it’s really fantastic, because I think sometimes it’s hard for students when they’re given this openness. “Well, was that good, or was that not good?” It’s really nice to be able to do that.

The second thing I wanted to mention, just in terms of constraints, is you can do that with walking basslines, as well. You can take, say, a jazz standard or a small chord sequence like a 2-5-1, and you can say, “Okay, I’m only gonna do it within four frets. Can I do that within four frets?” So, let me do this within four frets … It’s all within four frets, or you could think to yourself, “I’m only gonna do it on two strings.” … Or one string … You know? It’s hard when you do it. Like, yeah. When you’re doing it on one string, you’ve gotta get quite inventive, but being able to see where all the notes are and … Yeah. So, adding those constraints is really, really beneficial.

Christopher: Wonderful. I think that gives a sense of where you were headed as a bass player. You’d started out with this very kind of “play the notes on the page” mentality, but across a wide range of genres. The cruise ship opportunity brought maybe a little more improvisation or creativity or spontaneity to your playing, and put you into the world of jazz, specifically.

Where did things go from there? How did you develop as a player?

Scott: After the ship and that schooling that I got … And I should mention as well that I actually met a guy, a passenger, on the ship who was, I think he was like a teacher at Juilliard or it was one of the big music school in New York, and he was on holiday with his wife and friends. Only for a week. Every single day that we got into port on the ship, all his wife and friends would go off the ship, and he’d sit and play piano all day. All day. All he did on the holiday was play piano all day, while all his friends and his family … And he was older guy, probably in his early 60s. I hate myself that I don’t know his name, ’cause I’d be able to look him up. Anyway, he was just such a beautiful player.

And I used to just sit and talk to him, and he’d just kinda give me these off the cuff music lessons as he was … ‘Cause I was practicing a bit when I was on the ship. And we’d play together. And it was through him as well that this really … He really hammered that message home. He was like, “You’ve got to learn jazz. You have got to learn jazz, even if you don’t ever wanna play it.” He was like, “Because you really need to know how to outline the chords and how all the chords work with each other.” For that, whatever happened that week, really stuck with me. So, when I got off the ship, that message was just like rolling around my mind. “I’ve gotta learn jazz. I’ve gotta learn jazz.” And I’d been playing jazz every day on the ship, as well as sort of top four hits, but the first two sets that we played on the ship were jazz. You know, sort of like bossas and swings and stuff like that. Gotta say it was rough. I think it was like five or six, I think. No, five sets a night we played to. It was five 45 minute sets a night. It’s pretty grueling, yeah.

We had one night off in that six months, as well. Oh, actually we stayed on for seven months, in the end. We stayed on for seven months. I had one night off in seven months, and I played five hours a night. So, it was great for getting everything together, my chops and stuff like that.

But when I got off, that message was rolling around in my mind of thinking, “Gotta learn jazz. Gotta learn jazz.” So, I moved to Leeds. I’d lived in Leeds for a tiny while before, but moved to Leeds and thought, “This is where I’m staying. There’s a good music scene here.” There was a music college there, as well.

I forgot to mention, I did try and get into music college when I was 18, actually, but I was knocked back because I didn’t have any of the qualifications I needed to get in. So, I did the audition, blah, blah, blah, and then the guy came through and said, “Oh, it looks like you’ve got no qualifications.” I was like, “Yeah, I’ve got no qualifications.” You know, “Well, you can’t get in then.” I was like-

Christopher: Like academic qualifications?

Scott: Academic qualifications, yeah.

Christopher: Got ya.

Scott: I had terrible results from school and that whole thing, so it didn’t matter how the audition went, actually. It went really well. The audition went fantastically, but, yeah, I didn’t have any academic qualifications, so I couldn’t get in.

And that’s really why I ended up going on that cruise ship and all. That’s a whole other story, but yeah. But interestingly, I knew there was a music college in Leeds. So, I came to Leeds. At that time, I knew that I wanted to get in amongst the musicians, so I just thought, “Well, I’ll move into a house where there’s loads of musicians living that are going to music college”, ’cause I just thought, “I don’t want to go to music college. I’ll just move in a house full of these guys that are all in the music college. Get involved in the scene.”

So, that’s what I did. So, moved to Leeds, met all the guys on the scene, got involved in loads of different projects, studied jazz, and at the same time as well, I took upon myself to study with as many people as I could. So, instead of going to music college, which effectively puts you in a scene of other musicians … It does that, but it also gives you access to good teachers. I thought, “Well, I can just move in a house. I can take care of that part on my own.” You know, just getting into the scene. “I’ll just hang around with everybody that’s going to school here.” So, I did that, and then I took it upon myself to do the educational part myself.

So, I started studying with great players. So, for instance, I ended up doing some workshops over in New York with a trumpet player called Ralph Alessi. I can’t remember the bass teacher was on there, but like Brad Shepik, the great New York guitar player was teaching on that. Then I got lessons from, wow, Jeff Andrews, actually, who unfortunately passed away a couple of weeks ago. Got some lessons from him while I was in New York, and a few of the great players. Skuli Sverrisson, who is somebody I mentioned earlier, Icelandic bass player and fantastic player.

Then I started traveling to Barcelona at the same time, as well. I was traveling to Barcelona to study with Gary Willis, ’cause Gary Willis had just left L.A., move to Barcelona, got married, and that whole thing. So, I was traveling out to Barcelona once a month to study with Gary Willis. So, really just took my education into my own hands and then my socialization with other musicians, as well, just kinda took care of itself.

Through that, just ended up gigging. Got on the scene and getting gigs. Ended up being musical director for things, just because that’s the way it goes. As long as you can do a great job at what you’re being employed to do, as long as you’re helpful in terms of not just from music standpoint, but just from a dude, you know … Like, “Oh, Scott’s always on time. He’s professional. He’s really nice to hang out with. If anybody’s having any problems, he’ll be there to help.” You know, just be that guy, and just worked my way up the ladder from there. And really, the rest is history. [STOPPED HERE 1:03:00]

Christopher: Got ya. Well, in a minute, we’re gonna transition to talking about Scott’s Bass Lessons and the academy. A few of the topics we’ve talked about so far like practicing, like studying with the greats, like putting yourself among the right people. All the things I wanna dig into on that side of things, but first I want to understand what it was like for the kind of traditional in-person music education you were getting.

So, I’d love if we could talk specifically about studying with the greats, because I think on interviews like this, people often hear, “Oh, I went and studied with such-and-such.” And I think often we don’t understand. What does that mean? Did you sit down with them for 30 minutes and they told you some stuff? Was it a weekly lesson? Were you going to a one off master class on a random topic that you then tried to apply to your life? When you refer to some of those great teachers, what did it look like in practice to learn from them?

Scott: I only did a few musical workshops where they were like week long workshops, where I’d be studying with the guys every single day for a week or two weeks. That was what I was doing over in New York. Then while I was over in New York, I went and got private lessons from some guys, so just sitting with them. But, for me, I don’t know if it’s where I got the skill from. Somebody can say a sentence, and I will just get that one sentence, and I will hold that one sentence with me for my life. I’m very good at just hooking on to the things that certain people say, and I can still remember like every single one of my lessons that I’ve had with guys like that. There’s certain things that I always hook on to.

For instance, I just mentioned Brad Shepik. I had one lesson with Brad Shepik, but one thing that he said in that lesson has stuck with me forever. I asked him a question. I was like, “So, should I learn chord tones first and then scales, or should I learn the scales and all fingerings? And then should I learn them positionally over the neck? And what should I … “. He was like, “Yeah, all of that. All of it.” All of it. He was like, “That’s a prerequisite.” He said, “That’s unimportant. That’s just what you have to do.” He said, “So, there’s no point asking questions about it. There’s no shortcut.” And that stuck with me forever. And he was absolutely right. There’s no shortcut.

You look at all the great players, improvisors. Do they know their scales? Yes. Do they know all their chord tones? Yes. Do they know them all over the instrument? Yes. Should we all stop looking for shortcuts? Yes. He just said that. He didn’t it in that exact word. I said that, but that’s what he said. All of that stuff is just a prerequisite, so stop looking for shortcuts. There isn’t any. Just start learning it. And just be diligent every time you pick up your instrument. Make sure you’re learning your scales all over the neck for all the different fingerings and all of the different modes. That’s what ended the question I asked him, is well, in that question I was like, “Should I learn all of the modes, or should I just learn the major scale, and therefore I will have learned all the modes within the major scale?” He was just like, “Yeah, all of it. Just everything. All the different directions.” He said, “There’s not one direction.” He said, “Don’t learn one thing from one direction.” He said, “Learn the thing, but from multiple different directions.” And he said, “And then you’ll have a deeper appreciation for what that thing is, and you’ll know it much better.” So, …

Christopher: Well, that’s awesome advice.

Scott: Yeah.

Christopher: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah. And that was just from one lesson. I think that we should all be really always be better at looking out for these little tidbits that get thrown your way, that you can grab onto, like life lessons, probably. Life lessons passes by every single day that we just don’t grasp onto, you know. Just get good at that. You know, get good at that.

Sometimes, I’m listening to a podcast with my wife, and somebody will say something, and I’m like, “Ah.” And I’ll stop it. I’ll pause. “Did you hear that?” My wife’s like, “What? Hear what?” I’m like, “Ah.” So, just get really good at actually listening to what people are saying. It’s not just noise. It’s really good stuff that they’re passing on.

But yeah. In terms of how I studied with them, just like that. Some guys like Gary Willis … It was a longer thing where I’d go every single month. The other guys, it was more sporadic, but I got … You know, they’re all kinda teaching the same stuff. I think that one of the things that I’ve said before is that there is no secret sauce to why those guys are great. Well, there actually is, but it’s not what you think. So, I always used to think that these guys are great. You know, Gary Willis, or whoever the guy is, right? James Jamerson. Jaco Pastorius. Oscar Peterson. Whoever you … Steve Vai. All of these guys are great and they, because they’ve got to that level, they must know something that the lesser mortals of the world don’t know, and that’s what’s giving them the ability to get where they are and play like that, because they have these extra exercises and these extra things that the other guys don’t have. And that’s what did it for them, right? And I went and studied with all of these guys that I thought had the extra sauce that we all don’t have, and they didn’t have any other information than the other guys.

So, for instance, I went to a guitar player 40 miles away from here called Mike Walker. Great guitar player, actually. Some of your listeners might have heard of him. Mike Walker, great guitar player, but not … You know, he’s not one of the uber famous guys, right? But he’s a good guitar player. The lessons I got from Mike were equally as good as anybody else. Equally, you know? So, they were all giving me great information, but it wasn’t this secret information that got them there. It was actually their personalities that got them there. I would say that the biggest secret to learning any musical instrument, or actually learning any skill, is actually your mental approach to actually the learning in itself, no the thing that you’re learning.

For instance, if you take a great musician and you took away all of what he does, his guitar or his piano, and said, “All of that is gone. Now go do something else.” He’s gonna be great, or she’s gonna be great, at whatever else they put their mind to, because of their particular mental approach to learning. I think that’s their tenacity, their consistency, their … Just the way that they learn and their focus is gonna make them great at whatever they do. I think Gary Willis is a really, really great example of this.

Gary Willis is the founder of the band Tribal Tech, who were founded in the late ’80s. He was a co-founder, actually. Scott Anderson was the guitar player. Gary Willis was the bass player. It was really one of the biggest jazz fusion bands ever, you know. He rocked my world in every single way. He was just an absolute … Like, as a soloist and a bass player, he is just sort of like unearthly. He’s like an alien. So, obviously I studied with Gary in Barcelona for over a year, and he dropped some knowledge on me, knowledge bombs, that just blew my mind.

First of all, he said he never practiced more than four hours a day, ever. He said it would drive him crazy. He was like, “I just can’t do it.” He said, “It’s how I practice which is important.” He said, “I’m really laser focused when I’m practicing.” He said, “I’m only practicing the stuff that’s right there in front of me, and I’m really, really tracking what I’m doing.” That was one of the key things he told me.

Then, also, randomly he mentioned that … Like, he doesn’t use melodic minor scales at all. I can remember stressing for months about, “Oh, my god. Everybody’s using melodic minor scales. What am I gonna do? I can’t use those. I must be a bad person.” I can remember studying with Gary Willis and saying, “How do you use melodic minor scales?” And Gary was like, “I don’t use melodic minor scales at all.” He said, “I tried them for a little while. They just didn’t work for me.” And that was it. That knowledge bomb was, “Oh, wow. I can do that, as well.” You know, I can try things, and if they don’t work for me, it’s cool. I don’t have to beat myself up about it. I can move on and do something else, and then revisit it, you know. That’s something else that I took from Gary. But yeah, he didn’t ever practice for more than four hours a day. He didn’t stress himself out about not being able to do the stuff that everybody else can do. He was just a real school in itself.

So, I fly Gary over. Obviously, I start Scott’s Bass Lessons online learning education for bass players. I reached out to Gary. I’m like, “Gary, do you want to come and do this workshop for us like a stand alone master class?” He’s like, “Yeah, wicked.” So, I fly him over to Leeds, and I’ve got the videography team there and the whole thing. We’ve got three videographers there. And Gary rocks up. He’s got his bass out, and we start. We’re doing the filming and stuff like that.

Within two to three hours, it is really evident that Gary knows as much, if not more, about videography then the videography team. Seriously. And the guys, the videographers are like, “What? This is insane. This guy’s incredible.” Yeah, we went out for a lunch that night, and I’m like, “When did the whole video thing start?” He’s like, “Oh, I just got into it a few years ago.” It was obvious. I was like, it’s so obvious. That geekery, that inner geek, that child inside him that wants to learn all of that stuff, and learned all that stuff about bass … It’s not just bass. It’s not just music. It’s just about anything he learns. He just does it in the same way, and he’d just done the same thing about video.

Then that night, he was like, “Oh, I’ve been doing some stuff” … His wife is a glass sculptor. He’s been doing these videos. He said, “I’ve been doing these videos that showcase her work.” And he showed me some of these videos, and the guys, the videographers, and the videographers were flipping out. They were just like, “What? This is insane.” He’s like, “Yeah, well, I was doing this thing”, and he’s like, “This is quite funny, because actually it took me 24 hours, a straight 24 hours to film this piece I’m showing you here.” He said, “I just got so into it, I just stayed up for the full 24 …”. He said, “I finished it like 7:30 in the morning.” And I’m like, “Well, what’s rotating it?” ‘Cause this glass sculpture’s rotating. These lights shining. He said, “I built a rotating table.” I’m just like, “Come one, you are kidding me.”

The point is these guys don’t have any secret sauce. The secret sauce they’ve got is their ability to focus on the thing that they’re learning, and just doing it in such a way that that’s the incredible thing, the way they do that. They’re all really curious. They’re all really curious about … You know, the thing about like Brad Shepik when he said, “Don’t focus on one thing in one way. Focus on one thing in a multitude of ways.” They’re all doing that. They’re all focusing on all of these different things on multiple different ways and learning things in that kind of super human way. That’s their super human strength is the way that they learn.

Christopher: Cool. That is so fascinating, and I love that you have been able to look at so many different greats and see that same characteristic trait, and that you identify that as the secret sauce, if there is any.

I do wanna ask you straight out though, because you framed all of that in terms of there’s no special information they have, or there’s no special technique or practice routines. It’s all down to the personality, the attitude. What about talent or a gift? Are these people not different and special because they just have some inherent aptitude for music?

Scott: I think some of them do, and I think some of them don’t. I think all of them will have some natural talent towards the instrument or any probably plasticity of being able to actually physically do what they’re doing, but I don’t think it is an on or off. I don’t think some people are really talented and some people aren’t. I think that, and there’s definitely some guitar players that are … All musicians are physically more adept and probably you could call that talent, I suppose.

I talked about Hadrien Feraud who is in terms of physical ability on the instrument, there’s nobody who really ever existed that’s been able to do what he does, but then there’s also bass players like James Jamerson who just … In terms of soloistic stuff, he just didn’t do it, but he was really incredible at what he did because of the knowledge and how he approached the instrument. And then modern days players … Let’s take Pino Palladino, right? Technically, he’s average. Yeah, I mean, technically he’s average. There’s probably kids in school that will be able to play all of the lines that Pino Palladino can play, but it’s his placement within the groove. It’s his taste. Can talent give you taste? I’m not sure it can. I mean, like I think you can be physically talented, but in terms of tastefully talented, I’m not that sure. So, I think that it’s more. It’s a deeper conversation there.

When I was studying guitar with those two other guys when I was 13, I physically found it a little easier to play than they did, but I don’t know whether that got me to where I am now, and I’m sure there is definitely sort of like a sliding scale. You do have guys that are crazy, that can just pick up things crazily easily and can play them ten times faster than anybody else, but I think it’s multi-angled. I think it’s multi-angled. I think you can definitely have average technique and work to and extremely high level, like extreme. You can be one of the greats with average technique.

Christopher: Love it. Well, I wanna make sure everyone puts sufficient weight behind your opinion on this, because I like that you picked up that it’s rich deep as a question. It’s not simple binary you’re talented or you’re not, ’cause as you say, there are many different aspects to being one of the greats.

Scott: Yeah. It’s not like running the 100 meter race. It’s not that. It’s interesting, ’cause people are like, “Oh, yeah, it’s like, who can run faster. Obviously, he’s more talented.” Well, obviously, maybe on the race track he is, but like music’s not that. Music’s made up of yes, technique is one part of it. And when people talk about talent, they … For me, I don’t know about you, Christopher, but when people talk about talent, they think about dexterity and the ability to move around the instrument in a certain way, not about coming up with how to move from one chord to the other in a really musical way.

Christopher: Got ya. Well, I said I want people to put weight behind it, because not only are you the man behind the leading bass education website in the world, not only did you study with those greats in person at that stage of your journey we were talking about, but at this point with Scott’s Bass Lessons, you have on your faculty, the world’s leading bass educators. You’ve interview dozens of the top bass players in the world. You’ve been among the great musicians of today, and so you’re informed not just by a handful of teachers you studied with or your own personal opinion and experience. You are kind of at the epicenter of seeing all of these greats we admire and look up to and seeing in person what that looks like.

Scott: Yeah.

Christopher: So, with the SBL podcast, you’ve had the chance to sit down and talk about the craft of music and learning music with some of the most amazing players in the world. You know, people like Victor Wooten, you mentioned earlier. Billy Sheehan. Michael Manring. Divinity Roxx. Steve Lawson, our own resident pro at Musical U.

Scott: Yeah.

Christopher: A huge variety of players all super top level. Have there been any kind of mind-blowing moments through talking to them, or any other insights or epiphanies you had along the way in those conversations?

Scott: Yeah, absolutely. Two that jump to mind is … One, actually, kind of dovetails into what we’ve been talking about. I suppose that first one for me, the mind … Not mind-blowing, but it was definitely something that was really interesting to see across everybody is that everybody that I’ve interviewed and everybody I’ve studied with as well (all of them, great to have met) have all had a childlike enthusiasm and appreciation for what they do. Across the board, they’re all like super geeks. It’s not worn out. It’s not sort of like the candle’s gonna burn out. We’re not candles, right? We’re not gonna burn out. They have all got this really … Can you remember when you were a kid and you were just really into this certain thing? Remember it was a computer game, or whatever it was, and you were just so geeky about it and you were talking to your friends about it. And you’re just like, “Oh, yeah, this is amazing.” They all have that. It might not be about the whole music thing that they’re doing. I think it can be a little bit more laser focused than that.

For instance, Tim Lefebvre, who I was hanging out with a couple of weeks ago, he was the bass player that did Black Star, David Bowie, and we were interviewing him for something. He’s an amazing bass player. He’s a really fantastic bass player, but I wouldn’t say right now in his career he has got this child-like enthusiasm for just playing bass. But one thing that Tim’s known for is using bass effects, so like effect pedals, in a very specific way. He’s really the godfather of that, of this current generation. If you go to a gig and you’re everywhere, or your listeners, if they go to a gig and they see a bass player there and he’s got ten stomp boxes, ten effects pedals, and they go over and you say, “Do you know Tim Lefebvre?”, they will give you an answer of 110% yes, right?

So, he’s that guy. Well, as soon as we started talking, or as soon as I started talking to Tim about effects, you just saw it. It was like he became sort of like 12 again. He’s like, “Ah. And I reached out to this guy, and I saw this pedal manufacturer on Instagram, and he sent me this pedal, and it just this … “. It was just like he’s like a 12 year old talking about a computer game that he found for the first time. Everybody has got that. All of them guys, across the board, have got that. Maybe not about the whole thing. Some have got them about it the whole thing. Some of them just absolutely love it, but even if they haven’t it about the whole thing, they’ve got it about the things within it, you know. Like, this thing, whatever it is, okay?

Another example is Ricky Minor. So, I’m over in L.A. and Ricky Minor, who is one of the most successful musical directors in the states … He does America’s Got … Not America’s Got Talent. What’s the one with Simon Cowell? I know Simon Cowell’s on it.

Christopher: American Idol.

Scott: American Idol. So, he’s the music director of American Idol. He was musical director for Whitney Houston. He did Ray Charles. The whole thing, right? So, he’s doing all right for himself. Put it that way.

So, in his studio. And for me, I’m like, “Whoa, this is Ricky Minor. This is like a big deal. I’m gonna hang out with Ricky Minor.” So, got to his studio, and we did the interview and he was really great. Straight after the interview he’s just like … He’s just getting all these basses out, and he’s so geeky about it. He’s like, “Ah, this bass is …”, and he was telling me about all these basses just like a kid. He’d just got the inter … And somebody else that I’ve never met actually, but I’ve talked on Instagram really a few times knocking certified messages back and forth is Nathan East. Now, I’ve never met Nathan East in the flesh, but I absolutely know he’s gonna be … You can just tell it a mile off, this guy just loves what he does in a way that is just that teenage … Not even a teenage. That 12 year old kid geeking out on something.

But, yeah. Everybody’s got that. That is something that I’ve really noticed across the board. So, if you haven’t got that, I think it’s worth looking into yourself and thinking, “How do I rebirth this? How do I get into it? What is it? Is there anything that I’m doing that can lean into?” And if you’ve not got it, why? I think it’s probably we get older and just crap gets on top of us. I think it’s just something worth bearing in mind, that we need that in our lives. Life is short.

The second thing that is really evident is that the best players are not the most successful. That’s got little to nothing to do with where you are gonna be in your … In terms of where you sit in hierarchy of musicianship in the world. If you sit there practicing whatever instrument you’re on, and you’re practicing and you’re practicing, practicing … “As soon as I can play this lick, it’s gonna be okay.” And then when you can play that like, “As soon as I can play this next lick …”. I suppose Ricky Minor’s another great example of this.

Ricky Minor is uber successful. He’s worked with some of the biggest talents in the world. Whitney Houston. Ray Charles. Mariah Carey. I could go on and on and on and on, right? He’s a good bass player. He’s a good bass player, but he’s not like a freak show like Hadrien Feraud or Victor Wooten, or any of those guys. Just a good bass player. But, he’s really, really great socially. He’s really professional. He can obviously take care of business. He reads music well. He’s got good knowledge of studios. He knows how to work in the … I mean, he’s got this all rounded thing. He’s an all-rounded musician.

So, here’s another example for you. Chris Chaney, who is the bass player from Jane’s Addiction. You think you might look at Chris Chaney and think, “Oh, yeah, he’s rock guy. Yeah.” Well, actually, he plays on a lot of the films coming out of Hollywood, as well. He’s prolific in terms of playing on films. Never talks about it. You go into any interviews or anything like that, you just won’t hear him talking about it. But he’s doing that day in, day out. He’s on those scores. He also was the bass player who played with Alanis Morissette when she released “Jagged Little Pill”, and she took that out on the road. He was the bass player on that. Is he the top of like craziest technical bass player in the world? No, but he plays great. He’s got a great knowledge of working in and out of the studio, on the road. Again, he’s sort of like a well-rounded musician.

On the flip side, do I know musicians who I have interviewed who are incredibly adept on their instruments in terms of technical facility? Yes. Do I know that some of them have kinda struggling for work even though they’re really held high in the public eye? Yeah, I do know they’re struggling for work. So, I think that’s something interesting that I’ve gotta … If you want to play as a professional musician … If any of your listeners like, “I want to be a professional musician”, it’s not just about being the craziest player on your instrument. I think it’s about being a great player on your instrument, but you don’t have to be crazy. But all of the other stuff you have to get down as well.

You should have a good working knowledge of studio stuff. What it’s like to … When people talk about compressors and stuff like that, you should have that knowledge down. You don’t want to be the guy that doesn’t have a clue about it. You need to be able to learn music really fast. You need to have a good knowledge of diatonic harmony, so when people are talking about, “Oh, it’s just like a 1-6-2-5”, you need to know that stuff. You need to be able to fit into a social situation and not take over, but not be the underdog. You need to understand … And that is all key skills that people don’t really put as much emphasis on as we probably should do. Probably because it’s hard to teach. You know? It’s hard to teach that stuff.

Christopher: Interesting. That is such valuable advice for people. I think we’ve kinda been picking up a lot of little glimpses of your perspective on learning music, what matters and what doesn’t, what all the different aspects to it are, what it means in terms of career.

I wanna come back for a minute to that early part of your story when you were facing the prospect of six or seven months on a cruise ship. I’m not gonna say “in the middle of nowhere”, but in a small town without the internet, struggling to learn what you needed to learn. Couldn’t be further away from the situation people find themselves in today. Deluge of information. YouTube tutorials up the wazoo. You obviously are at the forefront of defining what does music education look like online, and what will it look like in the future. So, I wanted to talk about what you have going on at SBL and the academy, and in particular what you see as the challenges and the opportunities for people learning music today, because clearly from what we’ve talked about, it’s not just about technique. It’s not just about making your fingers do the right thing at the right time. We are in this almost as challenging environment, I think, where there’s just so much information for people to take in and try and evaluate.

Maybe we could begin with you just talking a little bit about SBL and the academy, because you got a ton going on there. If people aren’t familiar, I can give them a little synopsis at the beginning, but how do you see Scott’s Bass Lessons as it exists today?

Scott: Yeah. So, Scott’s Bass Lessons is a … It’s Netflix for bass players. As you sit down and log into Netflix, or you don’t log in. You know, you open Netflix, there’s a ton of different films for you to watch. You open up Scott’s Bass Lessons, there’s tons of different courses for you to watch on different topics, all specifically to do with bass playing, learning bass. How to play walking basslines. Getting into jazz. Blues. How to improvise. The whole enchilada. Everything, right?

So, that’s what Scott’s Bass Lessons is. That’s the elevator pitch. That’s what I tell my mum it is, because I’ve gotta nail this down, because sometimes I think my mum doesn’t know what the heck I’m doing. I’m just like, “You know Netflix, Mum? I just do that for bass players.” She’s like, “Oh, right. Okay.” Or another way that I talk about it is it’s like a gym for bass players. You know? But I think the Netflix thing frames it better for what it is.

I think that what’s happening in education over, obviously, the last few years, really probably 2008 onwards, in terms of music education and the explosion of the internet, is obviously what you said. To coin what you termed, we’ve got information up the wazoo. We’ve got a lot of information, and I think that what this has done for the music students around the world or people that wanna be music students around the world, it’s given them the opportunity to drastically reduce the learning curve. I think it does come with its own issues I’ll talk about in a minute, but I think that it’s really drastically reduced the learning curve, because when I was a kid, I used to ask my dad, “Hey, Dad, can we go down to the library in town so I can check out if they’ve got any guitar tutorial videos in?” They used to come in every quarter. So, every quarter they’d get a new guitar 60 minute video in. And I’d get that, and I’d rent it out for a week, and then I’d take it back. And that was the learning back in ’80s or early ’90s, however … Yeah, later ’80s, early ’90s. Whereas now, you go online and it’s instant.

Me, if I wanted to learn another instrument, if I wanted to learn drums or anything like that, I don’t need to wait for that to drop into the library every quarter. I can go straight on the internet and I can get that information. It is amazing. It’s just like this … It’s crazy. I can’t imagine life without it now, ’cause I use it now. If I want to … Well, anything. I’m learning a lot about building an online business. You know, how to do that, because obviously, I’m building an online business, so I go on and I watch all the YouTube videos, and I sign up to all the courses. And I’m doing that because I’m reducing my own learning curve. I don’t need to wait any more. It’s instant. So, that’s really great.

But with that comes the ability to kid yourself and use views as vanity metrics. Let me peel that back a bit. So, somebody watching a tutorial video, it’s very easy for them to think that they’re actually learning by watching a video, and you’re not. You’re just listening to information. The learning happens on your instrument. So, you’ve got to listen to the information, and then you’ve gotta go learn on your instrument. You don’t learn by just listening to information on a video, right? You’ve got to apply what you are listening to and figure that stuff out on your instrument. And that’s the unfortunate thing. But you know, I think that some people … I think it depends on what you’re like as a person. Some people will have to be strict with themselves and think to themselves, “Okay, I’m learning this one thing. I’ve watched the video. Now, I’m going to go do it.” Whereas, some people might watch the video and they might be burning to go and do it. “Oh, I’ve gotta go do it. I’ve gotta go and figure it out on my instrument.”

I do think that the vast majority of people will get that dopamine hit by just watching this information overload. Not information overload, but information addiction, you know, to watching video, upon video, upon video. And we get it in Scott’s Bass Lessons. We have students that say, “Oh yeah, I’ve been through that course.”

For instance, we’ve got something called the Harmonic Layering Course, which is all about learning chord tones and then layering scales on top of that, and really helping you learn it over the entire instrument. It’s nine hours long. And students will crop up in our community and they’ll say, “Oh, I’ve been through that course. What next?” And I’ll be like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. That is a lifetime’s worth of information in there. You will be practicing that stuff for life. You have not been through that course.”

Now, this is a failure on our side as an online educational resource, ’cause we’re not putting the roadblocks in the way somehow, and … Figuring out how to do that. At Scott’s Bass Lessons, that’s where we’re at, at the minute. How do we actually do that? How do we put roadblocks in front of people so they can systematically not go past that point until they’ve learned that stuff? Because, that’s really hard. I think some of the online coding sites have actually done a better job of that, but I think it’s easy for those guys, because they’re, “Hey, can you code this website?” So, yes, you can. Okay, now you can pass to this next step.

What I’m gonna have to do, in terms of building Scott’s Bass Lessons, is figure out how to do that, to help people gauge where they are within their journey as a musician so they can really get focused on what they’re doing and they don’t just watch a nine hour course and think, “Tick. That’s done.” You know? So, I think that, yeah, it comes with its drawbacks, but it really comes with its bonuses. And that’s why you also see in my 13 year, 12, 11, year old kids online, absolutely tearing it up on all the instruments under the sun. There’s not like one kid, now. It’s like multiple. There’s many, many kids that aren’t even teenagers yet that are really, really proficient on their instruments. And that’s directly down to online learning, I would say.

Christopher: Very good. I mean, I know from literal experience that you and I could talk about how best to design progress tracking and modules and that kind of thing for hours, so I won’t go too deep there, but there’s more than just a course library at the academy.

I was watching an interview you did a few years ago with Jeff from the team, where you said the vision for Scott’s Bass Lessons was that if you’re a bass player and you want to learn and you can’t go to music school, you come to Scott’s Bass Lessons. I was wondering now a few years on, as the site’s grown and things have matured in terms of online education, would you still put that caveat in there? If someone, we’ll say a teenager, considering music school versus teaching themselves, what would the pros and cons be? Or, indeed, if someone’s an adult and they’re thinking, “Maybe I should go back and study at music school”, how do you see those two comparing? Is music school’s a thing of the past? Is learning in person with a teacher a thing of the past? How does someone make that judgment call?

Scott: If you’re a kid, I think it’s great to go to music school, because I think it’s easier than what I did. I kind of went alone, and I ended up hooking up with … You know, moving in a house full of musician, and therefore went and … But I was really proactive about it, and some people aren’t as proactive as I am. So, music school, you get forced. I did a little bit. You are going to meet other musicians, because you’re in school. You’re gonna get access to great teachers, because you’re in school. It’s kind of like a one stop shop. It’s easier for kids to music school.

I wouldn’t recommend it for everybody. You know, it depends on who you are as a person, but I definitely wouldn’t shun the idea. I’ve got two kids. If they were like, “Hey, Dad, I wanna go to music school.” I’d be like, “Go for it.” Yeah. It’s part of your journey, so do it. If they feel like … If that’s gonna be helpful to them, they should go for it.

I think it depends on where they see their life going. I think that’s the more interesting question. But yeah, music school’s great. If for any reason they wanted to go traveling and … I’m just trying to think of a different path that they wanted to go down. “I wanna go traveling, and I want to travel to different cities around the world.” This is my kids talking to me, by the way. “I wanna travel in different cities around the world, and I wanna learn music as I go.” Well, that’s when online education would be great. Or, “I don’t want to go to music school”, for whatever reason. Can you substitute that with online learning? I think you can. I think that I could get more information online than I could get offline.

I think what music school really helps you do is it’s accountability. It’s the stuff that you’re learning, you’re actually trying to use it with people every day. You’re in jam sessions situations where you are having to do it, where you’ve got teachers looking at what you’re doing and saying, “Yeah, that’s great”, or, “That’s crap.” So, I think music schools great. I think the school’s great, but I don’t think … I think that my blanket overall statement would definitely be, though, that people going to music school thinking that they’re gonna pop out the other side and be a full-rounded professional musician … And I hate to be the bearer of bad news. That is not gonna happen. A hundred people got into Leeds College of Music, and all of the guys, when I was hanging out in and around the … And I know all the music teachers there now. They will be a small proportion of the students that come out of music school and actually end up being professional musicians. The majority will not, and they will go off to do other jobs. It’s unfortunate, but that’s just what it is.

So, I think that if you wanna go to music school, great, but be aware that it is how you learn, how you approach learning, how you are socially, and all of that that’s gonna basically contribute whether you’re a professional musician or not, not the actual fact that you went to music school.

But, the other side of that is online education can get you … If online education was around when I was doing what I was doing, I would’ve just got so much from that. I would’ve got so much from it. It would’ve been a real, real benefit to me, and I would say that anybody thinking as an older person, thinking about going back to music school, it’s tough man. I think that it depends on what your goal is. Like, what’s your goal? Do you wanna be a professional musician? If you wanna be a professional musician, no, don’t go through music … If you’re older, don’t go to music school, because you can do it yourself. You’ve got online. You’ve got all of the information that you ever need online. You can go and study with people in person. Now, I do think people should go and study with people in person. I don’t think that’s dead at all, because I think you need guys that are going to give you comments like Brad Shepik gave to me. Like, “Scott, stop trying to find shortcuts. Just do the work, and it’ll be fine.” You sometimes need that kick, and I think that that sometimes doesn’t translate as well over the internet that it does in person.

And I think you can have one off lesson periodically. I don’t think it needs to be a every week thing. I don’t think it needs to be an every month thing. It could be like once a quarter you go and study with somebody. They give you a bunch of exercises. They impart some wisdom, and then you go and work on that for a few months. I think it depends also where you are on your … In terms of skill level. So, when you’re not as skilled, every week or every month might be better for you, in terms of one-on-one, whereas, when you get further along in your journey as a musician, it’s gonna be every quarter or something like that, for instance, might be fine. Or every six months.

But yeah. But if you’re older … Like, Lisa for instance, my wife, was talking about going back to university. And my first question was, “Why? What’s your goal?” I always said be really, really clear on what your goal is, because it is so easy to fall into that trap that everybody’s been in for the last … It’s a different world we’re living now with that internet, okay? So, learning has changed, and Lisa is my age. She’s 40. Well, nah. She’ll kill me for saying that. She’s 39. She’s nearly 40, and she’s been brought up in an era where, hey, if you wanna learn something, you go to school to learn that. And I think that that model’s definitely broken now. I think that it … You can take it for what it is. If you a kid and you wanna go to music school, go for it, but if you’re and elder and you’re looking back thinking you want to go to music school, I would say just be really, really clear on what that goal is. If you wanna be a professional musician, it’s not gonna give you that. Something else is gonna give you that.

Christopher: And you touched there on a few interesting things like the structure, the immersion, the accountability, putting yourself among the right people. I love at SBL you emphasize community the same way we do at Musical U, like just being among the right peer group goes so far in keeping you motivated and keeping your momentum up. But one of the most interesting things I’ve seen come out of the academy or Scott’s Bass Lessons in general, in recent times, have been your accelerator programs, which maybe a step more towards that structure. Can you talk about our technique accelerator and your practice accelerator?

Scott: Yeah. How do I encapsulate what these are? So, these standalone programs that are drip fed information … So, the technique accelerator is 26 weeks, so you get one piece of information, a video actually. One video every single week for 26 weeks, and there are very set exercises within each week that we give you to do. Then the practice accelerator is over 8 weeks, and it follows the same formula, but with the practice accelerator, it’s really helping people structure their practice time and break down how to work on what they’re doing on their instrument.

So, for instance, you pick up your instrument. Let’s not say to ourselves, “Huh, I wanna get better. What do I practice today?” That’s like the worst thing, okay? Let’s break down, systematically, what areas you should be focusing on, and then within each of those areas, where you’re gonna get the biggest bang for your buck. Okay? So, if it’s leaning the fret board, if you on a fretted instrument, what really specific exercises are going to actually gonna get you to that next step? Because it’s not all, okay. All exercises aren’t equal. So, it’s that kind of thing, okay.

And from and educational point of view and an educator point of view, we’ve had our best feedback from those courses, bar none, because I think that it’s done what we’ve just been talking about. Talked about online education and saying that people … It’s just this information overload, you know. People just watching this video, after video, after video. It’s stops people doing that. It’s one video per week, and it’s for that duration of the course.

So, in terms of what we’ve put out over there, because we’ve only been doing Scott’s Bass Lessons for seven years. I think it’s seven or eight years. Seven years, I think. We’ve only been doing it for seven years. Out of all of the stuff that we’ve ever done, those two programs we’ve got the best feedback from in terms of the students going back and saying, “Holy crap. This is just like … Everything’s falling into place.” So, I think that that educational module really, really works. And actually, I was saying before. Say I’m building an online business, so I’m researching this stuff as well, how to put together educational products. And I’ve heard that drip fed live courses are really, really great. I’ve heard that the completion of those is really great. So, I would like to experiment with that, as well.

Up until now, we’ve had this all you can eat buffet, if you will. That’s sort of the Scott’s Bass Lessons membership, so everybody runs in there with their plate, fills up with much … They’re getting something like three scoops of ice cream and everything they can fill on their plate. Then we’ve gone with these drip fed, pre-recorded on our side courses. So, we pre-recorded it on our side, but they get, you know … We deliver it to the students over one video per week for a set amount of time. And I definitely would like to experiment with a live course, as well. It’s hard, I suppose, because of obviously time zones and stuff like that, but I’ve just heard or read a lot of great case studies for the live thing. Because, I think that, again, it’s a different experience for the student, being able to interact a little live and for the teacher to be able to interact back with the student, you know. You teach the information, which might take like 45 minutes depending on the length of the lesson, and then you’re like, “Any questions?” It sounds silly, doesn’t it? But come on, it makes sense. Any questions? Then everybody gives their questions and you can actually interact in realtime, and everybody’s … It’s good. Everything’s good in the world, and because it’s live.

I think people are like, “Yeah, you’ve gotta turn up and do this. It’s live. Let’s do this together.” So, I think that, yeah, it’s definitely something I want to experiment with within the future, just to help students actually get through the courses, because if you look at the completion of online courses, it’s terrible. If you go into the data, your data online, completion of online courses is like below 10%.

Christopher: Well, at the risk of ending on a gloomy note, because I know you are definitely at the forefront of the pack that are doing a lot better than 10%, and obviously you are continually innovating … I’m a huge fan, clearly, of everything you do at SBL, both from a business perspective, but also a pedagogical perspective, and as a student of yours myself, I’m in there in the academy learning my little slap riffs and walking basslines.

Scott: Really?

Christopher: So, it’s been a real pleasure and an honor to have you on the show, and you’ve given so generously with your time, too. You’re one of the busiest men I know, and I thank you so much for sharing as openly as you have and dropping these insight bombs on our audience.

Tell people, if they are a bass player, where can they go to learn more about SBL, if they somehow have not seen you all over the YouTubes and Facebook already?

Scott: Oh, yeah. If you wanna check us out, just go to YouTube. Scott’s Bass Lessons. And the website’s Scottsbasslessons.com.

And to just end it on a happier note, I think that with all of these online educational resources coming out now over the last few years, I think it’s really a hot bed of experimentation of the platforms as well. So, I think that even though completion rates of online educational courses can be low, and across the board it’s less than 10%, but obviously decent places like Scott’s Bass Lessons and Musical U, it’s gonna be a lot higher. I think it’s still in its infancy, so … And it’s cool for me to say that I’m at the forefront of bass education, but I’m still wildly experimenting. I’m kinda just going for it, and just seeing what we can do and how we can help musicians get to the next level, so yeah. I think there’s gonna be some cool stuff coming up in the future, not only from Scott’s Bass Lessons, but just online education in general. I think it’s gonna be pretty explosive. It’s a great, great time to live.

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The post The Roots of Greatness, with Scott Devine appeared first on Musical U.

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Links and Resources

• The Musician’s Ear
• Productivity Academy Episode 22 – Mindset or Mindfulness – Setting The Stage Internally With Christopher Sutton

Transcript

Christopher: Hello and welcome back for part two of this special two-parter on active listening and how to hear like a musician. I’m joined by Andrew Bishko from the Musical U team and in part one as you may have heard, we geeked out for a lot longer than we intended to on this whole topic of active listening because it’s something we are both very passionate about and I’ll just briefly recap to remind you or to encourage you to go back and listen to that first episode in full if you missed it, but it’s probably already clear, but this is a very informal, laid back type of episode. We haven’t scripted things out. We are kind of winging it and relying on the fact that we have been geeking out on this topic for a few months developing this new product called The Musician’s Ear, which we were originally going to release later this year, but got so absorbed in how relevant it was to Beatles Month, we realized actually that was the perfect time to put it out there.

So as of today, as of a couple of days ago when the first episode came out, you can go to MusiciansEarCourse.com and learn all about this amazing new training we put together for developing the skill of active listening. But in the last episode and in this episode we really wanted to just give you the overview in a very informal, relaxed way, the way we would if you were a musician buddy of ours who had never done active listening and we wanted to get you excited about the prospect and show you a little bit about how to do it.

So, in part one we tackled the “what”: What is active listening? What does it mean to have a musician’s ear? And in this part we’re going to follow that up, assuming you’re already super excited to know about active listening by talking about the nitty gritty of how to do it. So if you want this end result that we talked about in part one where rather than just experiencing music as a bit of a blur that you might feel an affinity to or get an emotion from and have a few words to describe or a few things you’re aware of, transforming that into hearing it the way a professional orchestral musician would or a seriously good composer would or your friend Jeff who always seems to be able to talk for 10 pages about the track he’s just heard, without knowing anything about the band or the kind of facts and trivia behind it, he just seems to hear music in a completely different level of depth and detail and richness than you seem to.

How do you get that kind of ear? That’s what we’re talking about and in this part, as I said, we’re going to go through the kind of process of active listening and how you can do it. Before I ramble any more, I will just give Andrew a chance to introduce himself. Andrew is our product manager and content editor at Musical U. Andrew, say a little bit about yourself, if you would.

Andrew: Well, I’m a musician. I play many different instruments. I’m a world music enthusiast, so I have played in reggae and salsa and Irish and Klezmer and right now I have a Mariachi band, Mexican Mariachi band.

Christopher: Terrific. So if our listeners or viewers aren’t already aware of what active listening is, please do go back either to part one of this two-parter or we also have an episode all about active listing from the archive. We’ll link to both of those in the show notes. We’re going to take for granted now that you know what active listening is, why you should be so enthusiastic about it, and we’re going to pick up where we left off really of how do you actually do it, what does it mean? When we talk about actively listening, what does that look like in practice?

And maybe we can pick up with a point from the last episode that really at the core of it, we’re talking about listening mindfully. We’re talking about being present in the moment and actively bothering to listen, not just hearing music in a passive way, not just having it on in the background and not just hearing that big blur of sound without making any effort to pick it apart. We’re talking about being 100% focused on the music you hear.

And at the end of this episode, we’re going to talk a little bit about the fact that although that might sound like really hard work, in practice it isn’t super hard. So even though I’m talking about 100% attention and paying careful details, don’t worry that this is an arduous process. I think probably in the last episode we talked too much, if anything, about how much fun this is and how enjoyable it actually is. So rest assured, when we’re talking about paying attention, you’re paying attention to the thing you love most in the world. If you’re anything like us.

So Andrew, what are we talking about? If we sit down to do some active listening, what’s the clear and succinct way someone can approach this?

Andrew: We talk about mindfulness and being mindful and being able to be aware of something. There’s something that you need to focus your attention and that thing is to listen with a question in mind. You’re looking for something and so if you have a question, if you actually think, okay, what’s going on here? And we’ll talk in a minute about what this question is could be, but if we have a question in our mind, we’re actively engaging, it’s not hard to pay attention because we’re wanting to know the answer.

Christopher: Absolutely. And this is another case where there is that parallel to mindfulness meditation in sense that with meditation, if you try and just be present, it’s really hard to do. And so a lot of the methods will say, focus on your breath, like pay attention to that thing, whether it’s like the sensations or the sounds around you or your breath. Most meditation teaching for mindfulness meditation will give you a specific thing to focus your attention on. And that’s what we’re talking about here.

And before we go any further, I want to make sure we reiterate something we said in the last episode, which is this is not about getting the answers right. You know, that is one thing that distinguishes it from ear training, I guess, is that we’re not listening with a question in mind because we want the answer to that question right now and we need to get it right or we are a failure.

That’s not the way we’re using the term question here. We’re using it for the broad sense of focus. We’re listening with a curiosity in mind, would be another way of putting it. So we are tuning into a particular thing, but it’s not about “can I get the answer right?” or “can I score a perfect result on this quiz?”

So that being said, Andrew, you said you could give some examples of the kind of questions you might have. And in the previous episode we’ll link, I reeled off a few that you might think about, but what kinds of things are we talking about here? If we listen with a particular question in mind?

Andrew: One of the best places to start I think is with, what are the instruments? Simply picking out, and a lot of times we can start with just general instrumentation. Is this a rock band? Which is, drums, bass, guitar, keyboards. Is this a orchestra? Does it have this or that or the other thing?

And then next, when we have a general sense of what we understand the ensemble to be is picking out the different instruments and saying, okay, here is a guitar, there’s a keyboard sound here. Oh, they put a violin in this part. And that was one, for example, with the Beatles, it was a big deal because they were a rock band, when George Martin added strings to the band. So like hearing, “Oh you know, here’s the strings.” That string sound. You know, how does that come in there? So you’re listening for what the instruments are. So, that’s one really good question.

Then, you can take one of those instruments. For example, you can listen to a song and follow that instrument all the way through. What’s the bass doing in the song? A lot of times, the bass is something we don’t really pay a lot of attention to because we’re listening to the melody, we’re listening to the lyrics. So we start to say, okay, what’s going on here in the background? And so there’s this idea of the background and the foreground. Usually we’re paying attention to, in a pop song, let’s say, to the melody, to the lyrics, to the vocalist. So we’re going to say, okay, what’s happening in the bass? What’s happening in the guitar? What are the drums doing? What’s happening back there? We start to listen to those different instruments. So first picking them out, second, listening to them. These are questions.

Then we can start asking questions about the rhythms and the pitches and all the other different musical elements that come together to make a whole piece of music.

Christopher: Yeah, and that’s a great case in point I think because if you ask yourself, what are the instruments? That’s not a super interesting question on the face of it. Right? And to come back to what I was saying before, we don’t really care about the right answer. So, we’re not saying ask yourself what the instruments are, because then you will know what the instruments are, because that matters. As Andrew just talked through, you’re asking that question because it immediately starts your ears listening in a different way. Once you ask that question of exactly what instruments can I hear, your ear is actively going and trying to find different instruments in the mix in a way it wasn’t before and you would have just heard this general rock sound, for example. But as soon as you ask actually what instruments are there, you might hear a keyboard part jump out at you that you’ve been oblivious to before.

And what’s cool is that will never go away. Like, next time you hear that song, whether you’re listening with that question in mind or not, you’ll be aware of that keyboard part. And on a larger scale, the more you do this kind of thing, the more what you’ll start to hear that, even without asking the question. So, I think that’s a great case where a very simple question and one you don’t particularly care about the answer to actually is the perfect vehicle for awakening your ear to what’s going on in a depth and a detail you just weren’t aware of before.

Andrew: You were describing this experience in the last episode, and I want to highlight that here is that the cool thing about active listening is that once the door is open, it stays open. You hear something. It’s like once it’s there, it’s like seeing a new color. If suddenly if all your world was only, you know, blue and yellow and someone suddenly gave you a red crayon and you’ve never seen red before, it’s like you would never not see it. It would always be there. And when you hear these things and it’s not like you have to like strain for it, once it’s there, it’s there. And just with a simple little question in your mind, you can open these doors and your awareness just starts to pop and pop and pop.

Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah. And I fear if I mention meditation one more time, listeners going to write in and be like, “Look, Christopher, just start your own meditation podcast. We’re tired of hearing you talk about it.” But I was interviewed recently on a productivity podcast and I was going on about mindfulness meditation and one of the points I made was I would’ve bothered to try it out a lot sooner if someone had explained to me what people don’t often mention, which is yes, the daily practice of meditation is good, but actually if you do it daily for a few days, it changes your brain in a way that lasts forever and you have that more mindful ability to respond rather than react. You have that present moment awareness in a way that never goes away, even if you stop your daily practice. And the same thing is true here, like Andrew was saying, it’s not that you need to make sure you always listen with a question in mind and give music your 100% attention to get all of these amazing benefits.

It’s kind of an investment where you put in the effort and the more you put in the effort, the better your ear becomes. And then it’s just automatic and it’s effortless and it’s joyful because you’ve transformed the way your brain and ear operate. So I think that’s a really important thing to say because like I said, you know, with meditation I would have bothered a lot sooner if someone had mentioned that to me. I always saw it as this ongoing thing I’d always have to put effort into.

But actually, this is the same, where you put in the core effort and in our Musician’s Ear course, it’s a 10 week program, not requiring a ton of time for 10 weeks, but spread over the course of 10 weeks. By the end of that 10 weeks, you’re going to hear music differently for the rest of your life. It’s not that it’s just that 10 weeks where you have some fun with music. It’s that it transforms you in a way that lasts forever, whether or not you continue giving it careful care and attention.

So, sorry. Another little burst of enthusiasm there. We’re meant to be focusing on the how Andrew, the how, not just the benefits and joy.

Andrew: It’s easier than meditation. Okay?

Christopher: It’s true. It’s a lot more musical than meditation, too.

So we said questions are useful and I’m sure at this point you’re thinking, you know, how do I know what questions to ask or what do I do after I’ve asked what instruments are present. And Andrew, you came up with a really beautiful framework for thinking about all of this kind of stuff for the handbook that goes in the Musician’s Ear Course. So maybe you can just share that four dimensional model, at the risk of sounding too scientific that we use in the course to kind of group these questions and give people a structure that lets them explore a lot in different directions.

Andrew: Okay. So we like to use the term “musical dimensions” thanks to our bass pro Steve Lawson. We like to use it when thinking about music as all these different components that come together and them each one being their own dimension and how they work together. And so we are talking about instruments. The sound of an instrument is a timbre. A timbre is what makes the banjo sound different than the flute.

It’s what makes one instrument different sounding than the other. And again, before, you don’t have to even be able to name it. You don’t have to know the difference between a banjo and the flute to hear that their sounds are different. So, that’s one of the dimensions.

Then the next one we talk about is pitch. Pitch is the highness and the lowness of the sound. So you know, basically if you think of a melody, it goes in three directions. It goes up, it goes down, or it stays the same. I mean, when you move from one note to the next note. And it can go up big or it can go up small or same thing. So, this is the element of pitch and also pitch has do with harmony, how notes sound when they play together. So listening to the harmonies.

Rhythm also has several aspects. Rhythm being first of all, the pulse of the music, and then rhythm has to do with the longness and shortness of the notes. So is it going to be short little things or it’s going to be? Are the notes gonna be long and simply by looking at melody for example, where the notes are short and where they are long can tell you a lot about that melody and what the differences between one part of one section and the other section of music. A lot of times, you think about rhythm, we’re just thinking about drums and things like that, but rhythm is in all of music, in melodies as well.

Dynamics is the loudest or the softness of the sound. So, it’s the amount of energy that it’s carrying. A lot of times that could mean just loud. Everything loud. But there’s certain things in the music that are going to be more loud and certain things are going to be softer. There’s certain styles of music like classical music where there’s a great amount of attention put on the dynamics and things growing louder, growing softer and the dynamic and interplay between it. So these are like the four basic musical dimensions and if you use them to create questions, you’re going to start to hear more and deeper into the music you love.

Christopher: Yeah, and I think what’s super cool about this is part of the reason we use the term dimensions is so that you don’t think these are just topics. You know, we could have talked about the four topics and given you a list of questions for each, but in the same way that in the real world and physical space we have like forwards, backwards, left, right up, down, kinds of dimensions, you can use those dimensions to answer a question like how do I get from my house to the bus stop? Or you can use it to answer questions like, when I’m making a sandwich, what order do I stack things in? That different level of granularity and different sense of exploring the dimensions is totally the case here too.

So for example, as you listened to Andrew talk through those, you may well have been thinking about a melody and hearing everything he was saying in terms of a melody, one note at a time, how do the notes move, how loud are they, but step back and you could be thinking about the whole piano part with up to 10 notes at once and asking those same questions about the instruments part, as a whole.

You could be thinking about them in terms of this instrument versus that instrument, or as Andrew was referring to before, the foreground and background of the music. You can think about them in terms of the time change and we’ll talk more about this in a moment, but how do these things differ from this moment of the piece to that moment of the piece and so they really are these broad, fundamental, structural, dimensional things that you can use as the kind of lens to look at any aspect, any layer of the music, any moment of the music, any role in the band.

And so in the handbook that goes along with the Musician’s Ear course, for example, we have a chapter on each of these and we go into them in great detail, but we also remind you frequently like the questions we’re giving you, you can ask them of a note or an instrument or a rhythm section or the brass section of the orchestra. You can apply them in so many different ways. It gives you this really versatile mental model for how to kind of approach listening to music and how to direct your attention to different areas that might be worth asking questions about.

So Andrew, I made reference there to how things change over time and we kind of tied this together in the handbook with the idea of form. So, for someone who’s not familiar with that or indeed, somebody who is, can you talk about how musical form that relates to those four dimensions?

Andrew: Absolutely. Musical form is how something changes, what changes and what stays the same through time in music. And we know when we’re listening to music, things are changing, otherwise it’s boring, right? But also things are staying the same. If they don’t stay the same, otherwise it’s just like, scattered. And there’s different levels of that.

And oftentimes there’s sections of music, like in a lot of popular music, there might be a section called diverse and then one called the chorus or something called the hook or something like that where you notice, okay, there’s a big change. Something happened to make this difference. Those are all conversations about form, about the structure of music and the form music. Now, it goes down to very small things. Like for example, in a melody, you might have just like a two or three note motif or a little thing that repeats, where you know, there was like, a five note thing that repeated at different pitches and you notice that it went up. It kind of wiggled around and went up and then I did the whole thing at different pitches, going up. So that’s a small example of musical form.

Or it could be, again, like the shift from one section to the other section and any one of those musical dimensions can be used to mark out that shift. So there can be a change in rhythm. Like, we were just talking about the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and how there’s actually a meter shift, like from the verse is in triple meter. And then it shifts into this rock and roll four beat thing. It’s like, in four. Big, huge change, huge shift, this time marked out by the meter aspect of rhythm.

Also, things tend to get louder and softer in different sections. So you know, there’s all kinds of ways in which all the musical dimensions conspire together to separate different sections in the musical form.

Christopher: Yeah. And in the last episode we were talking a little bit about how active listening, at least as we approach it, is not about getting the answers right. It’s not about knowing the perfect terminology and that kind of thing. And I think this is a great example where if you tried to study musical form, unfortunately often all you get is the kind of clear factual, this is what form was used in the Baroque era and this is the verse/chorus structure of this song. And that’s the answer.

And actually, it can be so much more interesting than that. As Andrew’s just described, form is really about the grouping of music by keeping these different dimensions the same or changing them. And you know, any one of them can be tweaked and mark a new section or it can work with the others to define a section and once you start hearing form in this way, it’s so much more fluid and versatile, and by all means you can pin labels on it and say, you know, this is the refrain and this is the verse and whatever you like.

But the bottom line is, are you hearing those changes and can you pay attention to each level of the structure that’s going on? Because as Andrew said, it could be a few notes, it could be a few bars, it could be a few minutes. And that is really an exciting way to think about form if you’ve only ever heard about it, talked about, as “this is the answer. These are the forms you may use.”

So, that’s kind of how we tie everything together in the handbook that goes with the Musician’s Ear course. And it’s a good way for you to start thinking about these questions. So if you go away and start listening to music and trying to do active listening, think about these four dimensions and ask that secondary question of, okay, something’s changed in the music. What changed? What can I hear has stayed the same? What has suddenly gone different? And it might be about the arrangement, the orchestration. So the timbre Andrew was talking about. It might be the pitch. It might be the rhythm. It might be the dynamics. It’s most likely a combination of all of those. And as you pay more attention to that, you’ll find you become more kind of conscious and aware of all of these overarching structures that are going on all the time in music. And that’s really fun and exciting to experience.

So I asked Andrew if he could put together a little demonstration because as we were working on the Musician’s Ear, what we found was it was great to kind of codify all of this and hand you like, these are the four dimensions, here’s the idea of form, here are lots of questions and examples to get you thinking in the right way.

But we knew people would come out on that being like, “Okay, fantastic. What do I do now?” So actually the way we designed it is it’s this handbook and then a series of 10 listening guides that span over 10 weeks and walk you through tracks and talk you through what is going on and ask you questions that you then answer to really get you into the step by step process of doing active listening.

And so, I asked Andrew if, for this episode, we could just give a little taste of that so that you see, “Oh, okay. This is how all of this stuff actually comes to life,” with a literal example track. So Andrew, take it away.

Christopher: Cool. Okay. Fantastic. Well, you know, one of the things we were aiming for with the Musician’s Ear course was that it would be a bit like if your expert musician friend whose ears you always admired, sat down with you and just kind of talked you through what they heard and helped you to hear it, too. And hopefully that’s given everyone a little taster of what’s in this course and what that can be like to just have your ear woken up in that way that isn’t painstaking. It’s not about doing drills. It’s just about becoming more aware, becoming more appreciative and really hearing music in a whole new way.

So there was one little final thing we wanted to touch on there, which is the process of active listening as we talk about is really about sitting down with a track, listening in this particular way and maybe doing that a few times to kind of uncover everything you can about a track.

But there is a really cool thing you can do after, and this comes back to some of the side benefits we talked about in the last episode about musical memory and audiation. And that’s once you’ve done active listening as it were, once you’ve listened through to a track and you’ve kind of picked it apart, that’s something you can do afterwards that kind of amplifies the effect it will have on your musical awareness. And Andrew, maybe you can talk people through the mental reconstruction exercise?

Andrew: Yeah. So here is the ultimate portable musical exercise, because you don’t even need to open your mouth and make a sound, where you can take a piece of music and you’ve exercised active listening with it, you’ve listened to it and then you try and put it back together in your head so you’re actually listening to it. You’re imagining it.

Now, this is something we all do all the time. We all have like, some little soundtrack or little ditty here or something like that that we hear as we go through our day. But here we’re putting more attention on actually putting something together, either a whole section of that piece of music or even the whole song from start to finish, where we really start to understand all the different dimensions of that piece of music and reconstruct them in our minds.

It’s really fun and it’s something, you know, I like to do it when I’m going to sleep, I’ll be thinking about a song and I’ll just kind of reconstruct it my mind and then drift off. But it’s just very enjoyable but also extremely useful in terms of you’re exercising your musical memory, as we spoke about earlier. You’re exercising your active listening, you’re exercising your mental modeling and then if you can do it in your head, well, the next step is to be able to actually make the music yourself if that’s what you’re inclined to do, such as musicians like myself.

Christopher: Absolutely. And so what we’re talking about there is audiation and using your musical imagination to conjure up the music, even when it’s not playing. And this can be a really powerful way to see what active listening has done for you. So even when you’re at the beginner stage, you know, someone who’s just at the beginning of the Musician’s Ear course, or if you’ve just listened to these two podcast episodes and want to give it a try yourself.

Before you listen to a song, try and reconstruct it in your mind, and I’m sorry to say that you’ll probably be stunned how little you can manage. You know, it sounds so easy, but what you’ll probably find is you can hear one instrument, probably the melody instrument, maybe a little sense of the rhythm. You might realize you don’t know all the words if it’s a song. You probably realize you don’t quite remember the structure of it in terms of verse and chorus or whatever it may be, and you’ll realize actually your ability to construct it in your mind is fairly simplistic, even if you’re a very experienced musician.

Then spend 10 minutes listening to the song three times, or whatever the case may be. Doing active listening and asking yourself these guide questions like what instruments are present? How are things changing over time? Part of the four dimensions doing in each moment? And without planning ahead to the mental reconstruction, just doing the act of listening for the sake of it, finish your session by doing the mental reconstruction again and you will be stunned how much more vivid it is in your mind and how exciting that is because you realize you’ve just kind of, I don’t know, trained your brain, trained your imagination, put rich detail on what was a very bare bones ability. And all you’ve done is pay careful attention a few times through.

And so that’s what we’re talking about here and that before/after transformation. I wanted to mention it in this episode because it’s a really clear-cut way of seeing, oh, active listening is going to be super useful and you can do on day one. You can do that before and after. And you won’t have the perfect mental reconstruction. That’s not what we’re talking about, but you will see the dramatic transformation just from having spent the time paying careful attention, listening with a question in mind and stretching that musical imagination by paying careful listening attention.

Andrew: I just had that experience recently. You know, we’ve been doing this Beatles Month, and I’ve been listening to the Beatles all my life and at the same time as you’re doing this, I was hired to play “Blackbird” as a saxophone solo at a wedding and yeah, I probably could have just written it out and just read the music or something like that or found it written out.

But I did a listening guide at the same time. I was doing a listening guide that’s going to be part of this product on “Blackbird” and gosh, I mean, I’d heard the song all my life and it seems like such a simple song and when I did some active listening with it, I just discovered so many riches in the song. I learned so much about it.

And then when I went to play it, you know, as I’m playing it on a saxophone solo where I was just playing the melody, I was playing a few tidbits from the guitar parts, but I was hearing the rest of the music and responding to it. So, playing it was such a deeper, richer experience for me because I had taken the time to do metal reconstruction, to do the active listening guide, then do mental reconstruction because I was thinking about my arrangement when I was driving, you know, or something, or when I was going to sleep and then to actually play it, such a richer and deeper experience with the song.

Christopher: Fantastic. I love that. That’s such a great example of how mental reconstruction can help you and how active listening can transform your experience even if it’s a song you know well. That’s super cool.

So that listening guide, you made reference to there, the Beatles one, is actually one of our bonus gifts for the launch promo we have going on. We have this exciting new course we’ve been putting together, The Musician’s Ear and if you get it now, you get a discount, you get bonuses. It is the perfect time to buy it. If you’re watching this episode as it comes out, we’ve got a limited time offer on.

So if you want our Fab Four bonus that actually applies all of this to Beatles songs as well as some other cool exclusives, check out MusiciansEarCourse.com and see if that’s something you might be interested in.

And I just wanted to finish up by coming back to something I said earlier, which is don’t be overwhelmed or intimidated at all. I hope that the enthusiasm you’ve heard from myself and Andrew has got you fired up about the idea of doing active listening. And even though the number of questions you can ask yourself is endless, that’s actually a good thing, because you don’t need to ask them. You certainly don’t need to answer them all.

What we’re talking about really is listening with a mindful curiosity and you know, material like we have in that training course can be fantastic for making it super easy and step by step and ensuring you kind of learn as efficiently as possible and enjoy the process as much as possible.

But even without that, just go away and give this a try, because you’re going to experience that before and after transformation. And as we talked about, this isn’t something where you always need to be putting in that effort to get the benefit. This is something where the more you do it, the more you’re investing in your musical awareness, your musical understanding. And that’s something that’s gonna pay off for you, every song you hear, every day for the rest of your life. And if you’re anything like us here at Musical U, you love music to the extent where that is a really exciting proposition.

So, hopefully listening to these two episodes has got you fired up about trying active listening and given you a taste of what it can be like and given you a few bits of guidance on how to go away now and try it for yourself. I hope you’ll have a blast. If you want all of the training material and support you could possibly hope for, check out MusiciansEarCourse.com. We’d love to see you in there. And until next time, thank you Andrew for joining me for these two episodes and my name is Christopher Sutton and we will see you on the next episode.

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The post How to “Hear Like A Musician” appeared first on Musical U.

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Links and Resources

• The Musician’s Ear
• How to Stop Doubting and Start Performing, with Brent Vaartstra
• About Active Listening

Transcript

Christopher: Hello and welcome to the show! We’ve got a slightly different episode for you today. Normally on this show, we have either a carefully prepared teaching episode, where I’ve written out what I’m going to say and I’m talking to the camera and I’m trying to explain very succinctly and carefully, a particular concept. Or we do an interview where I’m firing interesting questions at an expert guest. Today we’re actually taking the formality and preparedness down a notch or two, which I hope is going to work out well for everyone. My name is Christopher Sutton. I’m the founder and director of Musical U, and I’m joined today by Andrew Bishko, from the Musical U team. And we’re here to talk about a topic that has come up in the context of Beatles Month recently, and that’s active listening, and what it means to have the ear of a musician.

I thought what about how to do this episode. And obviously we could do it as a teaching episode, and carefully plan it out. But actually, we did that already. So if you go back in our archives, we have, about active listening. And we’ll put a link to that in the show notes, if you want a 10 minute summary of this topic, where it’s just me talking. But the other option was, we’re about to release, or we’re releasing today, as we published this episode, is out today, super exciting, theMusiciansEarCourse.com, or just musiciansearcourse.com. Go and check it out. New Product all about this topic of active listening, which we were going to release later in the year. And then we got super excited about this in the context of Beatles Month, and I rejigged things so that we could share it with you a little sooner.

So we have this product launch going on, and I was like, “Oh, we could do a thing all about the product.” And again, very careful and prepared. But ultimately what we decided was, if you guys were just a buddy of ours in the real world, what would we say to you about active listening? And so what we’re going to do today is, Andrew and I are just going to chat through this topic as if we’re in a room with you as our musical friend, who’s never done active listening. And we’ll mention the product along the way, because that’s what we’ve been immersed in. And if you want to check it out, by all means go to musiciansearcourse.com and we have an exclusive launch special going on at the moment with discounts and bonuses and all kinds of goodies. So do check that out. But in any case, we’re just going to talk a lot about active listing, what it means to have the ear of a musician, and what exactly that can mean for your musical life.

So that’s what we’re here to do. Like I said, it’s super informal. I hope you’ll forgive us if we blunder, or stumble, or cough, or sneeze, or my daughters yell in the background. We’ll do our best to keep going as if this is a Facebook live thing. And yeah, without further ado, I should give Andrew a chance to talk. Andrew is our product manager and a content editor on a Musical U team. I’ve been working alongside him for a good couple of years now. And he has a wealth of experience and expertise on this topic of active listening in particular. So Andrew, maybe you could just give a brief intro to yourself and we’ll take it from there.

Andrew: I’m Andrew Bishko, and I’m a multi-instrumentalist. For 21 years, I’ve taught college classes that were all about active listening. I also have my own journey, with active listening as I have different times in my life, sought to reconstruct music from the past, and bring it forward into my own life. Or, learn about different forms of music. I’m a world music fan, so I get very excited about music from cultures that are very different from my own, or things that I’ve experienced. And so looking deep into those cultures, and looking deep into those different kinds of music and learning to understand them, has been a great way for me to exercise my own active listening.

Christopher: Awesome. Well, we’re going to do this first episode all on the “what”: What is active listening? What does it mean to have musicians ear? And then we’re going to do a second part, in our next episode, on “how” to go about this process. So today we’re really focused on just making sure we’re all on the same page. When Andrew, or I say active listening, what does that mean? And we touched on this a little bit in the course of Beatles Month. And I was just saying in our summary episode, the last episode we published, that that was really what jumped out at me across those interviews. It was the Beatles’ ears were what sets them apart. It wasn’t some preternatural gifts that they were born with. It was that they had developed their musical ear to the point of deeply understanding music, and having all of these amazing skills come of that. And really, I don’t know that anyone can speak to how exactly the Beatles listened to music, but it’s clear that that was the source of their superpowers as it were.

And what we’re talking about today is a very particular kind of listening. So the Beatles, for example, they spent years and years playing in Hamburg, absorbing all of this different music. And you may be the same and you own in musical life. If you talk to gigging musicians, they may have been playing for decades, immersed in music. But depending on how they’ve been listening to music, they may have gained all of the amazing appreciation, and understanding, and awareness that we’re going to be talking about in today’s episode. Or they may not have. So that’s why this is the topic we’re talking about. Active listening is not just hearing music. It’s something very particular, and different, and empowering if you do it, and if you do it in the right way. So maybe I’ll fire the question at you Andrew, to get the ball rolling. What is active listening?

Andrew: Well, the key word there is active. You’re making a choice. In our culture, we use music for recreation. It’s in the background. It’s in the background of everything we do. There’s background in the podcast intro, background when you go into a store, background for socializing. That’s a big use of music where people get together, and they’re socializing, and there’s music on. And I noticed this when I was teaching classes in music appreciation, when I would press play and the music would go on, all of a sudden people would start talking. I think it’s automatic response, because we’re used to socializing while the music is going on. I said, “We’re not going to do that in this class. We’re going to listen to the music. We’re going to actively listen to the music. We’re going to put our attention on the music, and how it moves and changes from one point to another.” So that’s really the gist of what active listening is all about.

Christopher: Fantastic. Yeah. And to be clear, I also talked about like what does it mean to have the ear of a musician? And what we want to talk about in these two episodes, it’s really that if you’re looking for the kind of musical ear that just gets what’s going on in the music you hear or play, active listening is the essential tool, or the shortcut to getting there. Yes, you can just plug away and hope that after decades you’ll magically have that skill. But if you want to actually take active steps to get those skills, to get that understanding, the most efficient way to do it is through this process of active listening. So that’s why we’re talking about the musician’s ear, why we’ve called this new product, the new training, The Musician’s Ear, because that’s really the end goal with active listening.

And there’s loads of side benefits along the way, but we’re really talking about, what is the process that gets you from hearing music as the average person on the street, or as a fan, and just getting this blur of sound that you appreciate a little bit, or you enjoy a little bit? What takes you from there, to having the ear of the professional orchestra player? Or the composer, or your mate Jim Bob, who always has the most amazing things to tell you about what he just heard on a record, And you listened to it and you’re like, “Oh there’s a guitar there, I guess.” So we’re talking about that kind of transformation, and how active listening is the vehicle that gets you from A to B.

And Andrew, you mentioned several things that I want to unpack. And the first to maybe pick up on, is music appreciation. You were talking about teaching music appreciation at college and, so what’s the relationship, if we talk about active listening? Is that different from, say taking a class on music appreciation?

Andrew: Well, active listening is more a general skill. Like in music appreciation, you’re learning the components of music. And you’re learning how to employ your understandings of the components of music, the elements, the dimensions of music, in listening to it. So you’re learning a lot of terminology, a lot of vocabulary. The great thing about active listening is, yes, that really helps. And you will be learning that, like with The Musician’s Ear, we’re teaching a lot about that. But it’s more about really pulling your attention. It’s like the pre phase to music appreciation. You have to be able to put your attention on something and listen to it and call it whenever you want to call it. You call the note C, you can call it do, you can call it Ralph, whatever. It’s still going to sound the same, whatever your name is for that note. So it’s about really, an attitude, a mindset of placing your attention on the music in a different way. And then, you can develop it through adding the learning about music appreciation.

Christopher: Yeah. I didn’t really plan to talk about this, so forgive me if it doesn’t quite make sense. But I’ll give it a shot. From the conversations I’ve had, it was really front of mind for me, is that a lot of these parallels mindfulness meditation. So this, the topic of meditation has come up a few times on the show, and not least because to really be zoned into what’s going on in music, it has a lot in common with that process of developing a mindful state, where you are 100% in the now. You’re not thinking about last week, you’re not planning for the future. You’re right there right now, absorbed in your senses and what is happening in front of you. And to me, like that’s a big part of what distinguishes active listening from music appreciation.

So I, for example, growing up in school, music classes, we’d be playing Glockenspiel, and we’d be playing recorder. But we’d also later on have classes where it was like, “Let’s sit and listen to some classical music.” And that to me, was what character, that was the definition of music appreciation class for a long time. And there was some structure to it. Like you say, they were explaining terminology. They were giving some of the history, and the context. And they definitely were waking up our ears to the music. But to me, music appreciation only goes so far. It’s like the introduction to understanding music, whereas active listening is this, as you say, generalizable skill that you can apply anywhere and everywhere in your musical life. And it parallels mindfulness, in the sense that you are there doing active listing. You’re not doing anything else. You are actively giving 100% of your attention to the music in the moment. And we’ll be talking a lot more in the next episode, about how to make yourself do that, because just like meditation, easier said than done, particularly in this day and age of is zillion distractions and possibilities.

So there are techniques and tools and ideas we’ll be sharing, that can make this a clear, and step-by-step process for you. But I just wanted to touch on that, because that being in the moment, and giving it your full attention, to me, that makes active listening a world apart, from say, a music appreciation class at your local community college, where they tell you a bit about classical music. And they share a few observations about piece of music everyone’s listening to. It’s definitely, I guess it’s an applied skill, rather than a book of information, is one way to look at it.

Andrew: I think that’s the big difference. When you’re active listening, you’re making these discoveries for yourself. It’s coming from you, it’s coming from your experience. When you’re doing a music appreciation class, a lot of times you’re just getting information. And we’ve all met those kinds of people, who are fans of music, and they’re like, “Oh wow. It sounds like a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. Oh, did you know that the producer did this? And the history of that. And this person was born on this day.” And they have all of this line of trivia, memorized about the music, and it’s great and it’s exciting. But when you listen to the music, are you really there? Are you really present? And are you really making your own discoveries, having your own experience. I think that’s the distinction that you’re coming to here.

Christopher: Yeah, for sure. And so that touches on another distinction I wanted to make sure we talked about, which is the difference between active listening and “critical listening”. And Andrew, I don’t know how much personal angst you have about this, but I have an opinion, which is … It’s debatable. Like a lot of what we’re talking about to, part of the reason I wanted to spend this episode talking about what are we talking about, is, a lot of this terminology gets banded about. And people will call something active listening, but it isn’t really. Or they’ll refer to this whole area as music appreciation, when that’s not quite appropriate.

And critical listening, I think, is a slightly subtle one that I wanted to distinguish, because if you are coming particularly from the production world, like if you’re in a studio, or if you’re doing live sound mixing, critical listening can be used to mean ear training, and we’ll talk in a minute about ear training. But it can be used to mean your professional creative opinion about what should be changed. And it’s definitely a different thing to active listening.

So critical listening to me and how we’re going to define it, for now anyway, is it’s really about making judgments about what you hear, and using that to determine your actions. So you might be the studio engineer using critical listening to hear that the three kilohertz band on this symbol is off, and you need to tweak that dial a little bit. That’s critical listening. Or if you’ve heard me talk before, about the background of easy ear training of Musical U and my own journey, you might have heard me tell this story, where in my day job, I was doing these a- tests, these split comparisons, where you listen to the same recording, two different versions of it, two very slightly different versions. Like for example the CD recording and the corresponding MP3. Or the CD recording, and aversion where one of the 20 frequency bands have been adjusted by three db, up or down. That kind of comparison that can drive you a little bit nutty.

That is often talked about as critical listening, and particularly from that audio perspective, not the musician’s world of playing an instrument, but the audio perspective of those speakers, and cables, and EQ bands, and audio effects. They talk about critical listening with that perspective of, can we tell the difference between this version and that version? So that we know how to move the sound from here to there. And it’s obviously related, in the sense that if you are unable to do active listening, you’d be in no position to do critical listening. There’s a lot in common there. But I think it is worth noting, because when we’re talking about active listening here, and in the course, in the musician’s ear, we’re not really talking about, can you listen actively so that you get the answer right? Or can you listen actively so that you know what to do next?

There are those knock on benefits for sure. But we’re really talking about it from a perspective of, how can you do it almost for the sake of it, because you want to know what’s going on. You want to enjoy more, appreciate more. And that does then, become this amazing new bedrock for writing your own music, for arranging the song yourself, for playing your part of that song in a more dynamic and interesting way. Like it all feeds into this vague, inner musicality. But we’re not teaching it for the purpose of, do active listening, therefore you can answer these five questions and get the answer right. And I think that’s more where people talk about critical listening, whether it’s a right answer, or a right action that you’re trying to listen for. What’s your opinion on all that, Andrew?

Andrew: Well, I think what you’re getting at Christopher, is what’s your agenda? The agenda of someone who’s doing critical listening for audio, there’re listening to something with the intent of changing that recording, improving it, or making it fit on a certain platform. Like making it sound good on a certain kind of speakers, or something like that. And with active listening, the agenda can be simply, enjoyment. Deepening your enjoyment, getting more deeply into it. And yes, there’s other agendas that you can use with active listening. Like, I do a lot of transcribing. And so I’m listening, and it’s with a purpose. I’m transcribing an arrangement to use with my band. And so, I’m listening with that purpose in mind. And then using those active listening skills with that agenda.

Another kind of thing that might be called critical listing, are someone who’s a critic, who’s going to write up a blurb, evaluating this band, how good or not, they are. So they’re listening with that agenda, like we’re saying, “I like this. I don’t like that.” But with the active listening that we’re talking about, it’s not a matter of …You may make judgements on the music once you’ve listened to it, and you may have all kinds of, like you’ve said, these knock on benefits. But you’re first of all, the first step is just to say, “What’s going on here? What’s happening? And what are all these things?” And then, you can add your agendas and your tools and do what you want with them.

Christopher: Yeah. Great way of putting it. And I think we should address the emotional, psychological aspect of this too. I said you’re doing it for the sake of it, and it’s the state thing. And that’s true. But there is, actually, something, where even if you don’t have that particular agenda, this will do something very concrete and valuable for you, which is, I think a lot of us, and a lot of our musicians, and the musical audience are coming at it from this hobbyist perspective. They haven’t had the Julliard training. They haven’t necessarily possible of their grade exams. They’re doing it because they love it, and they may have achieved a very high level on their instrument, or in their career, or whatever the case may be. But I think a lot of us end up with this little chip on our shoulder that says, “I’m not a real musician.” Or, “I don’t have the knowledge I am meant to have.”

And I had a similar case for myself in the business world, because I’d never really studied business. I felt very inferior for the first several years of running my company, because I hadn’t been taught how to do what I was trying to do. And we had a great episode recently, on this with Brent Vaartstra of Learn Jazz Standards, in the Passive Income Musician Podcast, where he was talking about imposter syndrome, and that sense that you are not worthy of doing what you’re doing. And for me, what really helped, was going through this accelerator program for my business, which was like a mini MBA. And actually, it wasn’t that I learned specific things that then helped me in my business. It was really just, a quiet to that voice inside that was saying, “You don’t know what you’re doing.” Or, “You haven’t been taught how to do this, therefore you shouldn’t do it.”

And I think, I wanted to underscore that this is a big tangible benefit of doing active listening, and learning to hear in this way, is, it means you know for sure. You are hearing it like a musician. And yes, you can go on to all of these applications of that new knowledge, understanding, appreciation. But also, it feels really good to know, “I’m hearing this music. I’m hearing everything there is to hear this music.” Okay, you never hear 100%. That’s part of what makes this process fun. But you hear more and more, you appreciate more and more. You look back and you’re like, “Wow, I can’t believe I was oblivious to that stuff before.” And it’s just this really fun journey of living up to your own potential as a music listener, as a musical ear, as having the musician’s ear.

So I wanted to mention that, because I think a lot of us have that psychological baggage, that chip on our shoulder, or inferiority complex, or imposter syndrome that says, “I don’t hear music the way I meant to.” And it’s worth noting that active listing delivers you that, whatever your background, whatever your training, whatever level of formality you’re coming from or wanting to go to. This is the process that can put that mind at ease.

So the third area we wanted to distinguish it from, is something I mentioned in passing there, which is ear training. And if you’ve followed Musical U for a while, you’ll know we’re all about ear training. It’s at the core of a lot of what we do. A lot of our training modules at Musical U, are ear training modules. And they’re teaching these very solid, specific, practical skills, like identifying the notes for scale by ear. Or being able to transcribe rhythms you hear in music. All of these cool nitty gritty things, that can empower you to play by ear, or improvise, or write your own music. Ear training can lead to all of that. And you might be wondering at this point in the conversation, what’s the difference? Like, if active listening is about getting a better ear, and ear training is about getting a better ear, how do we tell the two apart? And Andrew, maybe you want to pick up that one?

Andrew: Well, ear training is very specific. You’re learning to hear certain intervals. You’re going to hear certain scale steps, certain chords. You’re learning to hear certain rhythms. And in that way, it’s more compartmentalized. Where active listening for me, is all about hearing how the parts fit in with the whole. Hearing how this little counter-melody over here is accentuating the melody over here. Or this, “Oh, I hear that. The way the bass is, the rhythm and the bass is pushing the song forward.” But the whole song, it always comes back down to this huge context of seeing how the whole thing fits together. So yeah, ear training skills are great for assisting with your active listening. But active listening is in sense, bigger. And also, it’s not necessary, really, to have all the ear training to do active listening.

One thing when you were talking before about active listening, it’s that, the most fun thing you can do, it’s easy in the sense that it’s really easy to get started. It’s really easy to improve. It’s a very pleasurable process where there’s not a lot – you have to be able to do things with your body and your hands like you do with an instrument, or with your voice. It’s something that’s very light and portable. You can take it with you anywhere, you can do it anywhere. And so, ear training is more specific, and more detailed. And it’s great because it’ll help you take what you’re hearing with your active listening, and then put it into practical use.

If you’re actively listening to a piece, and you want to play that song, you’ll be able to say, “Okay, I know where the chord started there, and I can play those chords.” But you can still, even without knowing what the chords are, you can still hear, “Oh, there is a shift there, in the chords.” You can still actively hear that. And there’s a change there in what’s happening in the harmony. There’s a change that’s happening in the rhythm, and it’s affecting the whole song in this certain way.

Christopher: Terrific. Yeah. And it’s been really interesting over the last couple of months, since we made that decision to release this thing we’ve been working on, behind the scenes, and at the end of it, getting our heads around that, and what it means. And with my marketing hat on, I have to think quite carefully about, what’s it going to look like? We have Musical U membership that’s mostly about ear training, and those practical actionable skills. And we have our Foundations of a Musical Mind Course, which is in some sense, introductory to Musical U. And in another sentence, is quite a different thing. And we have this third thing, which is the Musician’s Ear, that’s going to introduce people to active listening.

And it was clear to me, these three deserve to coexist because they were all doing different things. But I did have to think quite carefully to be like, “Where are the lines? What is each of these doing for people?” And in a nutshell, because I think this is useful, as a case in point of how these things are different, Musical U membership, all about ear training, it’s all about, “Can I learn the difference between a perfect fourth and a perfect fifth? Or can I learn to hear a straight versus one rhythm?” Those kinds of things that have a right or wrong answer, and you’re listening to try and identify something, or classify something, or get the answer that’s going to enable you to improvise, or play by ear, or write your own music. All of those things.

Foundations of a Musical Mind, is that our promise is it puts a new foundation in place, that gives you the mental models to understand music instinctively. So in a sense, it’s the perfect foundation, that I’m going on to Musical U membership. But it’s a different thing. It’s not just ear training. It’s very practical. It’s very physical. It’s multimodal. It’s a very different learning experience, and it develops that instinct in a different way, than just ear training drills traditionally do.

So the question was then, how does this “The Musician’s Ear” thing fit in, if it’s not quite ear training, and it’s not quite mental models? And the answer we came around to was, it’s about this experience of understanding music. It’s about that bigger picture, as you were talking about Andrew. And it isn’t a smaller version of the same thing. It’s not step one of the same thing. It is its own thing. You can definitely be a musician, who has done a ton of ear training, can tell you any interval, any code type they hear, but actually has no idea whether they’re hearing a trumpet or saxophone on that jazz album. Or they have no idea listening to a piece where they are in the overall form of the piece. Is this the verse or the chorus? Is this the introduction section, or what’s going on? Why has one of the instruments suddenly disappeared. They don’t have that big picture awareness, and that appreciation of how music’s put together.

And contrary-wise, you can absolutely do a ton of active listening, and get how music fits together in that bigger picture without ever knowing what an interval is, or whether solfa is the right choice for you, or whether the rhythm is straight towards one. So they are two very different things, but obviously they’re beautifully complementary, as you were saying just there, Andrew. The active listening can provide you with a perfect context into which to put those more specific training skills.

Andrew: Yeah.

Christopher: So that’s how they fit together. And once that clicked in our heads, it became a lot easier to think about how to release this product, and how we’re going to present it to people in future. And if you go to MusiciansEarCourse.com, you’ll see how that’s turned out. Hopefully well. I haven’t quite written that sales page at the time of recording, so wish us luck. So that’s how active listening relates to music appreciation, to critical listening, and to ear training. And hopefully, you’re getting a sense now, of what it is, how it’s different from those. But maybe we can just wrap that up by giving an illustration. And Andrew, maybe you want to take this one, where we could paint a picture of like, “What would my experience of listening to a song be, before practicing active listening for a while, and learning this process?” Versus, “Where could I get to afterwards?”

Andrew: Okay. So let’s say I’m listening to a piece of music, or I’m hearing a piece of music. And I’m not active listening. So basically, I’m feeling it energetically. It feels good. It sounds great. I might be able to sing along with the words. And the way the whole thing fits together, I might say, “Well, that sounds like … I haven’t heard this song before, I put it sounds a little bit like this band.” Or, “It sounds a little bit like that band. It has a little of a grunge sound to it.” A lot of people talk about music like it has a sort of funky bass, with grunge, or something like that, where these terms that define genres for us. And these shortcuts, or use words like, “Oh, it’s really upbeat because it makes me feel happy. I have a happy feeling. I like this rhythm.”

But basically what it comes down to, is like in a relationship, if someone says … If you say to your girlfriend, you say, “Oh, I love you.” And she says, “Oh, why do you love me?” And, then you’ve got to come up with all these reasons. Like, you know, you love her. You’re feeling it. You’re expressing it honestly. But it’s like, “Okay … But …” She wants to know what you love about her. She wants to know, what are the things? What are those qualities? And don’t we all want to know those?

So it’s the same thing with music. It’s like, okay, now you’re active listening and you’re saying, “Yeah, I know why this makes me feel happy. Because there’s this backbeat on two and four that I like to move to. And because this is an ascending line in the bass, the bass line’s moving up, and that that gives me that feeling of lifting up from underneath or something like that. So it’s lifting me up to my feet. And that sound of the guitar, it has just enough distortion where it’s warm. But it’s clean enough where I can still hear the tone. I can hear the pitch and discern that. And the vocalist is shaping their phrases, and singing, where it’s able to communicate their emotion and their joy, whether there’s an exuberance in there because they are … I’m thinking right now, like Aretha Franklin, the way she just has this round sound to her, that just bubbles out and it feels like it’s easy. Where there’s not a strain to it, where it’s bubbling out.”

I’m thinking things like that when I’m active listing, where I’m able to say, “Oh, this is why this music feels like this to me. These are the elements.” And I can describe them. And then, if I could describe them, I’m one step closer to saying, “Look, if I want to make some music like that myself, this is what I can do.” Or, “This is what I can shoot for.” I might not be there. I might not be singing like Aretha Franklin yet, but I know what to do to make those steps. Or, I might not be playing bass like Paul McCartney, but I know he’s playing lines going up. So I can practice that, skipping up type of thing.

And so now that you’ve listened to it, you know you can do it as a musician. You know what you can do to create your own music like that. And even if you’re not going to, you understand what it is that you enjoyed about the music, and you can talk about it, and you can communicate about it. If you’re in a band, for example, you would say, “Let’s do a song, and I want the bass to go up like that. Can you do that, bass player? And can you do that, singer?” So if you’re getting together, you can create with it. You have the tools, because you understand what was going on.

Christopher: Awesome. And I love that analogy to a relationship, because one of the concerns people sometimes have with active listening, or inndeed with ear training, is, doesn’t this take some of the magic out of it? And I know it comes up in music theory too. Like, songwriters worrying that if they learn theory, they won’t have creativity. Like those are an either-or proposition. And the reality is, this is empowering. It’s not taking the magic out of music. It’s giving you a much deeper appreciation of how that magic works, and where it comes from. Which makes you feel it’s even more magical. You enjoy it even more. And Andrew, you gave some great examples there of the concrete impact this could have on your musical life, both in terms of describing, and interacting, and expressing in music.

I want to play the role of just bringing it back a notch too though, to say, it’s not about being able to write down the perfect description. And it doesn’t matter if you’re ever going to collaborate with anyone, or write your own music. Even before all of those amazing real world implications, imagine you’re hearing all of that stuff. Even if you don’t do anything outwardly, imagine the transformation from hearing this blur where, yeah, you can make out the words. And you get the overall feeling of the music, to having this crystal clear, in the moment appreciation of everything that’s going on.

It’s really hard to explain. I’ve been trying to put words on it to explain this new product, and I was remembering back to when I was doing that critical listening, and as part of it active listening in my day job, and I was listening to these tracks for hours on end. And I was driving myself crazy. But the silver lining, what made it all worthwhile, was when I’d finished one of those sessions of painstaking A-B tests, I would then just kick back and put on some music to relax to. I wasn’t zoned out. I wasn’t exhausted. My ear was 100% awake. Like it was 200% more appreciative, and alert to what I was hearing, than it would have been before I’d spent that time engaging and getting mindful and getting in the moment. And before I’d done that training, to understand what I could listen for.

Even without any active effort, at that point my ear was just awake and aware in a new way. And that was one of the most wonderful experiences of my 20s, was just giving myself that gift of enjoying the music I loved even more. That was amazing. And I’ve talked about this before in the context of ear training, because ear training played into it, and active listening played into it hugely. And that to me is the prize. All those other benefits like describing it, knowing the right terminology, collaborating, those are fantastic. And we’ll talk in a moment about two other great side benefits, but before all of that, to me, the prize, what makes all of this so exciting, and why we sat down today to do this informal episode, and just geek out and enthuse about active listening, rather than doing hardcore teaching, was that prize.

What better prize is there, to someone who loves music, than to appreciate every piece of music you hear in so much more depth and detail and richness? Like I said, it’s hard to put words on it, but hopefully you’re getting a sense of what we’re jibber jabbering about. I said that there’s a couple of other side benefits. Andrew’s obviously described some of the impact it could have on your musical life, but as we were developing this material for The Musician’s Ear, we realized it dovetails really nicely with two of the areas we talk about a lot in the context of ear training. And those are, musical memory and audiation. So maybe Andrew, you can tackle musical memory, and I’ll talk a bit about audiation.

Andrew: Okay, very good. A lot of what I see, working with Musical U members, is that some of them are saying, “I can’t remember what I just heard. I can’t even remember three notes in a row.” And for example, a lot of musical training, where it’s based on … In a lot of the traditional musical training, our musical memory is obliterated very early on, because we’re taught to rely on those dots in the page, tell us what to do. And so we don’t really remember, and we have a hard time memorizing music. But, even without memorizing music, being able to remember a piece of music, is a huge benefit to active listening. And there’s a great exercise we’ll talk about, I guess, in the next episode, about reconstructing a piece of music. Because when you can sit down and okay, you just take the headphones out. You’re not listening to anything and you can reproduce this piece of music in your head, Gosh. It’s wonderful, because you can go anywhere. You don’t need headphones. You don’t need anything to be plugged in. You don’t need an instrument, and you can hear music.

And we all do hear music in our lives. A lot to us, we have a soundtrack going all the time. But to be able to do that with more clarity, and to have more memory, and be able to reconstruct a whole piece of music, again, as you said before, just the sheer enjoyment and the sheer pleasure of doing that. We do that all the time, where like, you feel good about something. We’ll sit there and think about … Again, talking about if you’re in love, you’re going to sit there, and you’re going to think about your beloved, and think about everything that she does, everything that she looks like, and all this that happened, and at those experiences, and you reconstruct those experiences. And those memories are alive in your mind.

And, you know, when people grow older, and they lose their spouse of 50 years or whatever, they remember. They go back in their minds and remember this, and it’s a great source of comfort and joy and pleasure. And this is something we can do with music, where we have this. And active listening is what gets us there, because we’ve spent the time to give it our attention. Then it’s there for us, and it’s a wonderful experience.

Christopher: Yeah. I think the relationship analogy is a good one. Again, because if someone says “my wife’s always – to take a totally stereotypical example – my wife’s always yelling at me for forgetting to pick up the milk”. You can look at that and say, “It’s because I have a bad memory.” And we hear this at Musical U, “I just have a really bad memory for music.” Or, “I don’t seem to have a musical memory.” Or you can look at it and say, “Well, the reason you’ve got to pick up the milk is because you weren’t really paying attention when she asked you to. You weren’t really listening. You weren’t really giving it your active awareness. And if you had, maybe your memory wouldn’t have had to work so hard. Or maybe it wouldn’t have even been a question of memory.”

And I think the same is true of music. Part of the reason we find people struggle is, as you say Andrew, their music education has not required them to pay that close attention to what they’re hearing, or even what they’re playing. And so when it comes to memorizing songs in the Foundations Course, for example, that’s where we hear it, people saying, “You’ve given me the short song to memorize. It’s going to take me ages to do that.” And to us, people who’ve practice active listening, it seems hard to imagine that memorizing four lines of a saxophone with the very simple melody, using only three notes, could be hard. Or that it wouldn’t just stick in your head. But it’s because we spend that time to train our brain, and ears to actually pay attention to what we’re hearing, in a way that, through no fault of their own, these members, and students haven’t been trained to do that. They haven’t spent the time awakening their ear, and their musical brain, to pay enough attention that it sticks.

And this is actually a specific case of the other thing we want to mention, audiation, the other side benefit. And some of what you said there Andrew, you are really talking about audiation. Like if I’m at the bus stop, I don’t have headphones on, can I conjure up in my mind, a piece of music? And one specific case is, can I conjure up the Queen song I was listening to when I was at home? And can I replay that in my mind? And there we’re talking about musical memory, but that skill of audiation is a general one. It could be, can I improvise a pentatonic solo as if I’m in a jazz band, in my head, when I’m at the bus stop? Or it could be, can I take that rhythm that I hear on the radio over there, and imagine what it would be like if it was a song beat? Or, can I run ear training drills, just in my mind’s ear, without singing them, without doing anything on my instrument? Can I actually spend time just in my head, just hearing in my mind’s ear, the difference between a perfect fourth and a perfect fifth? Or whatever it might be that you’re working on.

And that musical imagination, that ability to conjure up a vivid piece of music in your mind’s ear, is 100% down to active listening. And have you spent time paying so much attention to music, that you have the mental facilities, the structures, the kind of “muscle” … You’ve built up that muscle of being able to recreate in vivid detail, what’s going on in the music. And if all you hear on a piece of music is a big blur, all you’re going to be able to audiate is a big blur. And we’ve talked about audiation a few times on the show before, and the benefits go throughout your musical life. Like, once you think about it as musical imagination, and the ability to hear music in your head, you realize just how wide reaching that is.

Andrew: As you were speaking, I kept on thinking about these Beatles podcasts that we’ve been doing, and how they really, and getting back to what you said at the beginning, their active listening was amazing. They were absolutely devoted to listening, and figuring out music. And they had very little understanding of music theory. But because they were able to listen to the music, they figured out how to duplicate it. Or they worked with George Martin, who was also someone who had spent a lot of time active listening, but had had more of a education with the theory, so he could take their ideas, and translate them. Paul could go home. He was recording Penny Lane, and turn on the BBC, and hear this piccolo trumpet solo on a Bach piece, and say, “Okay, I want that in Penny Lane.”

He’d come back to the studio and say, “George Martin, I want that sound.” And he’d go, “Bup, Bup, bup, bup, bup.” With mind. And George Martin could then write it down, and bring in, I think his name is Dave Mason or whatever, to get the piccolo trumpet guy to do this awesome performance. And they could work like this, not because of their theory, because they knew the intervals or anything like that, but because of their active listening, and all the time they spent with that, and because their ears were awake. They were ready to hear something, whether it came from classical music, music hall, Indian Music, traditional blues. They were able to hear everything that that was going on around them, and then bring it together.

Christopher: Absolutely. Andrew, I don’t know if you feel a bit stupid like I do, that it’s taken us this long to put together an active listing product. It’s come up recently, a lot, as we’ve worked on Musical U together, and as I’ve worked on it over the years. And the focus has been so much on ear training, and then gradually broadened out to musicality, and I think both of us, once we’ve sunk our teeth into this project of developing a Musician’s Ear, the handbook, and the listening guides, and the solo, we were both like, “How did we not do this sooner?” I think it’s partly because we taken different ground to them a little bit. And it’s only through working with our members at Musical U that we realize that there’s so much of that contextual understanding, and awareness, and just appreciation of what’s going on, that you and I, until we stop and think about it, we take 100% for granted, it’s part of who we are as musicians. It’s part of how we’ve experienced music.

And so it’s been super fun to step back and be like, “Oh, so if someone doesn’t have that, how can we get that to them in the best possible way? How can we make it so easy, and fun, and appealing, that they have this amazing experience of developing their active listening skills that we know is possible.” And I’m sure if anyone watching, or listening, you’ve felt our enthusiasm in this episode. We could clearly geek out about this for many more hours, and indeed we do, behind the scenes. And we have been, for months, developing this product. But just to say, it’s not coming late in the story of Musical U because it’s less important than the ear training, or the Foundations course. This is going to exist right alongside those, and it’s something we’re going to continue building and developing, because if you haven’t already done this, it is such a vital part of developing your musicality, and it’s such a powerful and exciting part.

I know everyone on the team is really psyched to have this now, as part of our offering in our training at Musical U. So all of that just to say, hopefully, you’ve caught our enthusiasm at this point. That’s what we had in mind to this first episode, is just to get everyone on the same page about what is active listening? What does it mean to have the ear of a musician, to have a musician’s ear? Why would you care about that? How does it relate to these other areas? And hopefully, leave you itching to know, how can I actually go away and do this? So that’s what we’ll be tackling on our next episode, where I’ll be joined with Andrew again, and we will be talking about, how to hear like a musician.

Thanks for joining us for this one, and we’ll see you real soon.

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Links and Resources

• DeconstructingTheBeatles.com
• Mattblick.com
• Beatles Songwriting Academy
• Clarion Faculty Profile for Dr. Scott Kuehn
• AaronKrerowicz.com
• KennethWomack.com
• HardDaysNight.net

Transcript

Hi, my name’s Christopher Sutton, I’m the founder and Director of Musical U, and it’s been my absolute pleasure to host this recent series of episodes interviewing some of the world’s top Beatles experts to try to discover:

It’s been my absolute pleasure to host this recent series of episodes interviewing some of the world’s top Beatles experts to try to discover:

• In what ways did the Beatles’ musicality contribute to their unparalleled success
• Where did that incredible level of musicality come from?
• And what can each of us as musicians learn from that for our own musicality journey?

I’m sure you’ll agree there were some fascinating insights from each of our experts, all of whom brought their own particular perspective on the Fab Four.

There was also one big running theme that jumped out at me while I was doing these interviews and we were putting together Beatles Month – which is something we’ll be following up on in our next episodes of the show… more on that in a little bit.

First I wanted to do a quick recap of each of the interviews and what we learned. And if you missed any of these I hope it’ll inspire you to go back and catch up – because I think they were some of the most interesting and potentially impactful interviews we’ve had on the show so far.

First up we spoke with Scott Freiman, of Deconstructing the Beatles. Scott’s particular expertise is in having picked apart some of the original and rare recordings to really understand the process behind creating a Beatles hit song. He credited both the personalities of the band and their well-trained and broadly experienced ears as crucial to their songwriting success, and how their years in Hamburg set them up with the raw potential which George Martin then helped to bring out in the best possible ways.

A major learning point from Scott’s studies was that their amazing musical creations never came out of nowhere, fully formed. Each song was *crafted*, with a combination of experimenting and editing, right from the beginning, trusting their ears to lead them to the “right answers” and doing so in a collaborative way. This skill in songcraft was amplified by their willingness to completely reinvent themselves almost on an album-by-album basis.

Hearing the stories behind the origins and development of some of their classic songs can help to humanise these stars and inspire us that such things could be possible for us too. As a composer himself Scott’s able to dig into the particular techniques they used and he shared the example of how playing around with tension and release in ways that challenged the listener’s expectations in unusual ways was one thing which frequently set the Beatles’ songs apart from others of their time.

From there we continued on the songwriting theme, speaking with Matt Blick of Beatles Songwriting Academy. He talked about how openness to trying new things and a willingness to say yes to things beyond his comfort zone had been key to creating the interesting musical life he’s had himself, and that’s maybe part of why he’s come to admire and connect with the Beatles in the way he did.

We just picked up on a couple of Matt’s interesting lessons from studying the songs of the Beatles and there are plenty more to be enjoyed on his website. We talked about how being prolific and having a songwriting partner are two great ways to more quickly get to a song you’re happy with and avoid writer’s block or perfectionism holding you back.

In terms of the musical techniques used, Matt noted that although the Beatles pushed the boundaries of what was normal at the time they didn’t go fully off the rails. They were often borrowing little distinctive twists from other songs of the time and using them in moderation. By looking at their influences in this way and the way they followed the rules and bent them consciously we can see clearly how their songwriting skill was learned, not an innate gift.

Matt was one of a few of our guests who agreed that although the Beatles hadn’t studied music theory and wouldn’t have known all the correct terminology, they certainly did “know” theory in some instinctive sense, having deeply internalised by ear all the normal conventions of notes, chords and rhythms across a range of genres.

The other big lesson about song writing which Matt shared was that if we wanted to improve in song writing from studying the Beatles, it’s not about adopting some weird, arcane, specific tricks and techniques. In fact, a lot of what makes Beatles songs great are their use of broad, general songwriting principles and ideas – one simple example being repeating a verse again, or having a second refrain as well as the chorus. We shouldn’t turn our nose up at the “easy” or frequently-used principles of song writing – because for a song to be unique and great doesn’t mean it does every single thing differently to the norm! Again: they bent the rules in moderation, and took full advantage of what their ears told them worked in all the music already out there.

Taking a step back from the process of writing songs to think about the listener’s experience of them, we spoke with Scott Kuehn of Clarion University and one of our members here at Musical U. Scott’s an expert in semiotics and applies this to study the messages in the music of the Beatles. He broke down for us how the Beatles came onto the scene at a time when pop music was quite unsophisticated in its lyrics and messages and although when we look back now we might think the Beatles’ early songs are fairly simplistic (especially compared to their later works), at the time they were much more interesting than the status quo.

He pointed to the two types of desires fuelled by the lyrics and music: the listener’s desire for the singer, and the singer’s own desire to be satisfied, and in both cases this comes through both in the words of the songs and the way particular musical techniques such as additional vocal harmonies, dynamics, or instrumental embellishments are used to emphasise particular words or moments.

As well as these musical techniques they used stage techniques such as flicking their hair back at just the right moments in the songs to encourage the kind of over-the-top fan reactions that defined Beatlemania in the 60s.

Scott said it’s clear the use of these techniques was conscious and intentional, something the band figured out for themselves along the way and adapted to suit their new musical styles over the years, becoming more subtle and sophisticated as their songs did.

I loved this interview as a completely different angle on the same idea: that what appears magical and beyond explanation, i.e. the Beatlemania phenomenon, can actually be broken down into some clear building blocks and a process of learning, experimentation, and improvement. And though the Beatles may have done it better than anyone else, it’s a peak case of a learnable skill rather than an other-worldly miracle.

We dove back into the interesting musical details of what makes Beatles songs tick with Aaron Krerowicz who found that studying theory and ear training equipped him to appreciate and understand the music of the Beatles in a whole new way.

Aaron talked about how the Beatles assembled their toolkit of things that sounded good to their ears over their years in Hamburg and that positioned them to write the kind of simple-yet-sophisticated songs that would stand out and last. He shared the memorable statistic that the Beatles were more than halfway through their lifespan when they had the pivotal Ed Sullivan show appearance which many think of as their starting point. So there was a lot of legwork that went into becoming even the earliest version of the Beatles that we remember today!

It was the balancing of accessible with surprisingly complex which he points to as setting the Beatles apart from other groups and songwriters: when you dig into the music there can be some really intricate and unusual things going on, but their well-tuned ears let them employ all that towards a result that struck the listener as natural and easy to listen to.

Aaron also gave examples of what we might discover by paying attention to the role played by each member of the band on each song, such as the relationship between the music and the lyrics in each case and the contribution Ringo made, both as a drummer and just as a personality within the group.

We think of them as the Fab Four, but you may well have heard the phrase “The Fifth Beatle” over the years as I did, and so we couldn’t neglect talking about George Martin, the music producer who had such a crucial part to play in both the musical development and commercial success of the band. Kenneth Womack, author of the two-volume biography of George Martin, told his story and how he came to work with the Beatles.

We learned that he shared a lot in common with the four members of the band, from his working class background, to his strong work ethic, to his slight “outsider’s view” of the industry, to his blend of creative and commercial ambition. Even with all that in common, the first meeting was almost a disaster, and Ken’s description of it highlighted two important points: that the Beatles were still in a sense a bundle of raw untapped potential when they met George – and that they came to him with a teachable mindset. We might remember Lennon and McCartney as willful personalities with no shortage of faith in their own abilities – but clearly they were not too arrogant to accept George’s input back then and that coachable mindset served them greatly in the years to come. It’s perhaps an extension of what we heard about in their Hamburg years, that they were like sponges, soaking up all the musical learning available rather than starting off on day one with a crystal clear vision and bank of magical “talent” to rely on.

Ken noted that the band’s breakdown can be seen, at least in part, in terms of the members’ egos growing beyond what allowed their collaboration to work – that willingness to work together and be open to new learning began to fade as maybe they began to believe a bit too much in their own gifts.

As somebody who grew up with all the Beatles albums available to me at the same time, it was really interesting in these conversations to gain a new appreciation of all that can be learned by paying attention to the actual sequence and trajectory of the band, musically. And I loved Ken’s observations about how the more sophisticated arranging skills and encouragement to explore instruments beyond the standard guitar/bass/drums of pop and rock were perhaps the crux of how the Beatles went from a pop act that might have had its moment with a teen fanbase and then been forgotten into a group that broadened its audience to include basically the whole world, spanning the course of decades.

That longevity is reflected in the ongoing success of Hard Day’s Night, one of the top Beatles tribute bands, and it was really fascinating to hear all the attention to detail that’s at the core of that success.

I think it’s easy as listeners to take a ton for granted as we listen to the Beatles. Like what I said before about not really appreciating the progression of musical development through the albums until you stop and think about it, talking to the members of Hard Day’s Night really painted a vivid picture of how varied and rich the music of the Fab Four is. The sheer range of instruments, styles, costumes, mood and pretty much every aspect of performing as the Beatles would be hard to find comparable examples of, and while that could make playing in a Beatles act an intimidating prospect, it’s clear that these four gentlemen love it and thrive on the challenge.

I love that the band’s approach to learning Beatles songs mirrors the Beatles’ own method of writing them, i.e. it’s very heavily ear-based. Not relying on theory or knowledge of how things “should be done” but instead going straight to the music and trusting their ears for what sounds good and right.

When I asked them what makes the Beatles so special, Pat pointed to the extensive catalogue which has something for everybody – we all have Beatles songs that resonate with us, and that goes across generations and probably will continue to for decades to come.

So. Clearly I’m biased – I went into Beatles Month hoping we’d learn some inspiring and encouraging lessons about musicality. But I did have a doubting voice at the back of my head worrying that one or more of these Beatles experts would come out and say basically “The Beatles were truly amazing. And we can tell you *what* they did, but nobody really understands *how* they did it.”

Fortunately, that didn’t happen! And even when discussing one of the groups most frequently and widely considered “gifted” or “talented”, these interviews underscored what we’ve heard so many times on this show before: That all the apparently magical skills of musical are learnable, and even if some people find things come easier to begin with, behind every incredible story, artist or band, there is a tale of hard work and perseverance to learn everything they can do.

So I hope you enjoyed this month as much as I did. As I said at the start, I’m sure whatever level of Beatles fan you considered yourself you’ve been able to learn lots of interesting and actionable things along the way – especially if you were inspired to check out our guests further material on their websites – and hopefully we’ve also nudged that Beatles fan meter up a notch or two!

It’s been great to hear from you along the way with comments on the episodes and messages to say how much you’re enjoying the Beatles focus. I’ve particularly enjoyed the discussion we’ve had going on inside Musical U – a shout out to Scott Kuehn, one of our featured experts who’s been sharing even more interesting insights in there, and Stewart our Community Conductor who’s been theming all his weekly updates around the Fab Four.

Although there were tons of fascinating facts, insights and angles across our interviews, ultimately for me there was one clear message that came through loud and clear.

The story I had always assumed growing up was not true. If there was one big secret to the Beatles success it was *not* their talent.

It was their ears.

They had the ultimate “musician’s ears” – developed in Hamburg and refined over their years collaborating and experimenting together.

They didn’t study theory, they weren’t the most technically proficient instrumentalists or studied composers – they just knew music inside-out as avid *listeners* themselves.

This enabled them to create music, perform it, and continually innovate to a level never before seen – and rarely matched since.

I think this is inspiring for us all – whether you aspire to that level yourself or not – because it shows that those kinds of ears can be *developed* – and will pay off in myriad ways.

I made reference in my introduction episode to the process of “Active Listening” and in a way that can be seen as a more intentional and efficient way to develop the “musician’s ear”, just like the Beatles did the slow and painstaking way over their years in Hamburg and beyond.

Active listening lets you hear more depth, detail and richness in all the music you listen to, and can quickly get you to a level of musical understanding and awareness that would take years or even decades of simple “passive listening”.

In the introduction I set you the homework task of choosing one or more favourite Beatles songs, taking a listen, and writing down everything you can describe about the track.

Now is the time to go back and take another listen. I’ve just recapped some of the big learning points from our interviews but of course there were many more specific things too and I’m sure you had a few of your own “aha” moments along the way.

As you listen again, pay attention to how your new knowledge of what went into the song writing and recording brings new details to light. Although your ears are functioning the same biologically speaking, you will literally be able to hear more in the same music as your brain tunes in to new details.

You may or may not know the right words to put on everything you hear – but don’t worry too much about that for now.

If you discovered that you could hear the song in a new, more appreciative and sophisticated way – then congratulations, you’ve just had your first taste of Active Listening and how bringing new knowledge and ideas to focused listening can reveal exciting new depths and richness – even to music you though you already knew inside out!

If you’re keen to continue this exploration of Active Listening and what it can do for you then you won’t want to miss our next two episodes where I’ll be sitting down with Andrew from the Musical U team to dive into this topic in more detail and show you exactly how it all works.

We’ll be answering key questions that might be on your mind like:

• How is “active listening” different to “ear training”?
• What are the practical benefits of active listening for your musical life?
• And: how exactly do you actually do it?

Thanks for joining me for Beatles month and for all the lovely and interesting messages we’ve received from you along the way. A big thank you again to our expert guests: Scott Freiman, Matt Blick, Scott Kuehn, Aaron Krerowicz, Kenneth Womack, and the four members of Hard Day’s Night, Mike Muratore, Frank Muratore, John Auker and Patrick Gannon.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of episodes. Don’t forget to check out our guests’ websites for a lot more Beatles goodness – and I’ll see you on the next one where we’ll be picking up on this powerful theme of active listening and what it can do for you.

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The post The Musicality of the Beatles appeared first on Musical U.

But to add feeling, richness, and depth, we need more. To save us all from the one-dimensional nature of only hearing one note played at once, Western music has given us the gift of chords – multiple pitches played at once, which give context to the melody, colour the music, and elevate our favourite tunes from a string of notes to a complex, harmonious masterpiece.

This month, for Part Three in The Play By ear process series, our Resident Pros sink their teeth into the topic of chords – how to contextualize them in music, use them to understand harmony, and pick them out by ear.

Singers – we have something very special for you, too. It’s likely you’ve heard the term “tone deaf” get thrown around a lot, particularly by discouraged singers who are convinced that they can’t sing – not knowing that the only thing standing between them and singing in tune is learning to match pitch. This month’s resource pack focuses on the foundational skill of recalling pitch and copying a note we hear.

Singing

Did you know that we are capable of two types of hearing?

That’s right – external hearing describes hearing a sound out loud, while internal hearing describes what we hear in our own head – our auditory imagination, so to speak.

Singing resident pro Clare Wheeler makes connections between these two types of hearing to teach an indispensable skill for any musician looking to sing consistently, comfortably, and in-tune – matching pitch.

Including:

• the three concrete skills involved in matching pitch
• exercises for practicing both external and internal hearing
• the close relationship between external and internal hearing, and how you can leverage this to accurately find notes
• a trick for hearing when the note is “right”
• MP3 tracks to practice pitch matching with

This resource pack is a powerful tool for vocal learning and will go a long way in helping you sing and accurately evaluate the pitches you produce.

Bass

If you think bass playing is restricted to a one-note-at-a-time mentality, Steve Lawson is here to shatter that myth. In his Instrument Pack, Steve explores the relationship between root notes and chords on the bass, and teaches you how to hear harmony more clearly through chords.

Including:

• how to hear root notes and chords
• how the bassline can change the feel of the chords and vice versa
• scores and guitar tabs to visualize arpeggiated chords
• how to change the timbre of chords by employing different right-hand techniques
• how building chord shapes on the fretboard will help you hear chords better
• MP3 tracks to tune your ears in to the relationship between arpeggios and block chords
• MP3s to train your ears to hear the next chord from the bassline

Steve’s lesson is geared towards really helping you hear the notes in chords, opening your ears up to harmony, and giving you a broader context of the notes you play on your instrument.

Piano

Chords and their harmonic functions are what makes a piece of music more than just a string of notes. Piano resident pro Ruth Power digs deeper into this concept, offering an ear-based way of understanding how chords connect with the moods and emotions of music – because after all, our emotional reaction to music is why we enjoy it in the first place!

Including:

• identifying the emotions (and thus, functions) of different chords
• going beyond major and minor chords to explore more nuanced chord types
• the ins-and-outs of playing these different types of chords on your instrument
• hearing the various “emotional flavours” of chords within a progression
• Ear training tracks embedded in the video, as well as exercises and MP3s for you to calibrate your “emotional chord-o-meter”.

With this intuitive approach to picking out chords by ear, you can let your heart be your chord guide. Enjoy!

Coming up next month…

Next month, singers can look forward to an instrument pack that focuses on learning to sing in different octaves. As for you bassists, guitarists, and pianists, in Part 4 of The Play by Ear Process, our resident pros will be tackling the topic of chord progressions, and bringing you tips, exercises, and tricks for hearing them and playing them by ear.

The post Matching Pitch and Chords By Ear: Resource Pack Preview appeared first on Musical U.