Author: musicalitywrld

We’ve long been fans and so it was a delight to get to sit down with Adam and learn more about his own musical background, and how he thinks about practicing, audiating, modern composing, and more.

In this conversation we talk about:

• How distinguishing between “prescriptive” and “descriptive” can totally flip how interesting learning music theory is for you
• The perspective on keeping practice interesting that for us personally would have been a massive liberation if we could travel back in time and give it to our teenage selves
• And a cool extension of audiation that goes beyond simply imagining a particular piece in your mind and lets you stretch your ear in interesting, creative ways

Adam also reveals the particular vowel sound you should use when singing for ear training – and a whole lot more. Don’t miss the shownotes for this episode at musicalitypodcast.com which will be packed with links to all the videos we mention, so you can go and do a deep dive of Adam’s extensive and fascinating back catalog right after this interview.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Adam’s YouTube channel
• Why you should learn music theory (video)
• The music theory of mashups (video)
• John Cage’s “4’33”
• AUDIATION – play what you hear (video)
• Why pop music sounds bad (to you) (video)
• Which key is the saddest? (video)
• Why You Shouldn’t Use Tab (and it’s not why you might think!) (video)
• Exploring Minor Pentatonics – Linear Sequences (video)
• 7 Cool Metronome Games (video)
• Avoiding the 5/4 Clave (Sungazer’s Ether) (video)
• Drunk Septuplet Dubstep! (Sungazer’s Dream of Mahjong) (video)
• Scott’s Bass Lessons
• Turning Ordinary People Into Musicians, with Casey McCann
• About the Ear Training Trap
• The Gordon Institute for Music Learning

Transcript

Adam: Hey everybody, my name is Adam Neely. I am a YouTuber. I have a channel called Adam Neely. I’m also a bass player and composer and you are listening to The Musicality Podcast.

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

Adam: Well, thank you so much for having me. This is exciting.

Christopher: I have been really looking forward to this one because I’ve been watching your videos ever since discovering incredible VaporWave explanatory video which is not a topic you expect to find a good music theory based tutorial on YouTube but ever since then, I’ve been watching your videos and loving them because they blend humor with really solid music theory teaching in a down-to-earth way and I can’t do it just in words but just to say I’m an avid watcher so I’ve been looking forward to this opportunity to chat with you.

I would love to know a bit about where Adam Neely came from and this phenomenal YouTuber who is followed by so many people. What’s your own musical backstory?

Adam: Well yeah. I grew up in a fairly musical family. My mom is a musician and she’s a voice teacher in fact and her brothers are all musicians too. My uncle is a church musician, my other uncle is a producer in Nashville. My dad isn’t a musician but he’s an avid listener and lover of music and I grew up basically with music in the house, not just any kind of music though, some fairly strange music.

My mother in the 1980s was a classical soprano singer who sang a lot of contemporary classical music which is very strange music, it’s very avant-garde. So I grew up listening to what my dad liked which were The Beatles and Bob Dylan and things like that but also, I was very familiar with the works of contemporary classical musicians like Lori Lehman and John Cage.

The story that I loved telling is that my mom had a busy box for me as an infant. A busy box is basically something that you … infant, I can play with, like I press this button and it makes a bell sound. Look at me. I’m a stupid little kid. So that was me. I loved this thing and my mom got a chance to perform with John Cage and John Cage really wanted to her to play my busy box on stage, like just playing with all these weird bells and she’s singing these crazy, weird intervals and sounds and music and that was what was in the air when I was a kid literally going back to when I was just a freshly baked infant.

Yeah. So I started playing piano when I was about eight years old and I took classical piano lessons and I hated it. I really didn’t like it at all. I just wanted to play Diablo II or I want to play videogames. And it wasn’t until-

Christopher: We need to do a whole another podcast episode about Diablo II some time.

Adam: Yeah man. Diablo II. So many hours wasted, or wasted? No, they were well-spent. They were spent very well. But it was when I was about 13 or 14 years old where I got bit by the bug of bass guitar. There was a band that was starting at, I think I was middle school. There’s a band that was starting. It’s a tale as old as time. They had a guitarist already, they had a drummer already and they needed a bass player so I was like, all right. I’ll pay bass.

And for whatever reason, I got sucked in. I really, really got sucked in and I started really, really obsessing over this instrument because I thought it was so cool that you could play such low affecting notes like the notes really resonated in your chest in a way that nothing else could. It was really exciting for me. Yeah. So I then became really obsessed with playing bass and I guess it was like in high school, there was the jazz band and I started playing bass in the jazz band and that’s when I started getting into jazz music because that’s what I’m known for in a lot of ways, just being a jazz musician or talking about jazz, modern jazz music.

And it really started in high school because I was in a band at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, Maryland. [Jon Racki 00:04:44] was the name of my teacher and she was the one that really kicked my ass in gear to be able to play … read sheet music, to be able to improvise, to be able to play an ensemble and I learned all these skills in high school and yeah, it was around that time where I knew that I wanted to become a musician.
All these things coalesced my love of pop music and older, classic rock that I got from my dad, the weird avant-garde stuff that I got from my mom and then jazz music that I got in high school. That is the beginnings of Adam Neely right there.

Christopher: Very cool. You clearly had an instinctive passion for the bass and I was reminded of a comment in I think a course you did on ear training about the bass, you were making reference to feeling the sound physically and you talked about playing your bass through a hefty amplifier and physically feeling it in your body and it made me feel really stupid for my current setup where I’m playing bass on this tiny little practice amp. I was like, yeah. I’m definitely missing something.

So you got bit by that bass bug and that powerful feeling of playing a low-end. Was that enough to power you through I think early learning of an instrument can be really frustrating and challenging? Was there an easy experience for you or was there a balance of passion and hard work that got you through high school and to a proficient level with the bass?

Adam: Well, this is the thing. When you’re in high school, you have a lot of time to kill that you don’t have when you’re older. So I had a lot of time to kill, to just mess around on the instrument which was a Godsend. Earlier though, I was … I studied piano for about five years and I hated every second of it because I didn’t connect with the instrument in any sort of way. Since then, I understand the instrument on a much deeper level and I appreciate it on a more intellectual level and I enjoy playing piano but I don’t connect with it like the way that I did with bass.

And because I connected with bass the way that I did, I became obsessed and it helps to become obsessed with something because even if it’s not the most deficient way of playing or practicing, you’re going to dedicate a lot of time to it. I definitely would say that my love of the instrument helped in terms of the most efficient way of getting better through high school. It’s just that I came home and I noodled on bass a lot, just hour after hour after hour and I attribute a lot of my continued desire to practice to the fact that I got better over that period.
There’s nothing quite like seeing … you’re seeing yourself get better because you do something a lot. That’s a very motivating thing. It’s like you know where you came from and then you did something a lot and then you got better. For a 17 year old making that realization, that was very formative. Yeah.

Christopher: Very cool. I was watching some of your earliest videos and I imagine you at music school already at this point but you were talking about practicing exercises in a really interesting and self-aware way that would both make a practice more interesting and I’m sure, deliver better results. At what point did you take that kind of intellectual curiosity to your practice and start thinking about how do I spend all these hours most wisely?

Adam: All the time. One of the things that I think about and I definitely was thinking about back then when I went to music school, I went to Berklee College of Music, I was always excited about new ways to practice. I wasn’t really excited all the time about practicing something. I just wanted to know different ways of doing it. So for example, you could take a major scale and you could play a major scale in one octave.

I got bored with that very quickly. I was like, “Well, what if I played a major scale in one octave but just on one string?” Okay. I’m going to play that, or how many different ways could I play this thing on one string? Okay, I can do that. It becomes a game. So maybe I can play a major scale on two strings. How many different ways could I do that? Could I just do it using my fourth finger? That’s strange. What about my fourth and my third finger? That’s also strange. And it becomes this whole what-if game of just cycling through every iteration you can possibly think of of just playing a major scale in one octave.

Eventually, it just becomes this whole thing where you could … No idea is too stupid to try if you just keep yourself open to that and you’re not doing it with any goal which is kind of the other liberating thing that I found. You’re doing it just to see if you can. And that sort of thing took me through a lot, definitely in high school and also through my music career at Berklee. So I didn’t really have much of a goal besides … for myself besides just seeing how many different ways I could do these little exercises.

For example, how many different ways can you play four notes in terms of if you were to play the notes C, D, E and G? How many different orders can you do? It turns out you can use math to find that out. That’s four factorial. That’s 24 ways but I didn’t know that at the time. I just started writing them all out and just tried playing them. Little things like that can take you a long way, just always asking the question, what if. What if I did this thing?

The answer is probably not a whole lot but then you’re forced to … or at least I was intellectually curious enough to just try and figure it out. I think that that was really the core of how I developed a lot of the stuff that I developed for myself on my instrument and also for myself as a teacher and for all the other extra musical things that I’ve started learning since then.

Christopher: That is super fascinating and I have to ask you a follow-up question because I am someone who always struggled with the repetitive practice instrument technique.

Adam: Yeah.

Christopher: I get bored very quickly. I like things where I can find out the answer and then move on so in what you just described, that to me is infinitely more appealing than let’s play the major scale for 10 minutes straight. I imagine there has to be some balance. Presumably, you weren’t just trying each thing once and then moving on. Was it a matter of actually challenging yourself to be able to do each thing, not just see that it’s possible. How did you manage to actually improve rather than just dawdling and scattering your efforts?

Adam: Well here’s the thing, each time that I do that, that’s an iteration of an idea. So every time that I’m practicing the major scale and coming up with a different fingering or whatever, that’s iterations of finger on your instrument and I can definitely attribute a lot of this to my high school bass teacher, [Pepe Gonzales 00:11:39]. What he would do is he would play a scale or plays a lick on his … this was upright bass but we were studying … it applies to everything else.

He would play something and then just have me play it back, a fingering. He’s like, “You could play it this way”, and I play it, “Or you could play it this way”, and I play it, “Or you could play it this way”, and that was basically our lesson is we would just go through each way of doing it and through the, just constant repetition of just going through every different angle, like just playing it once, you start to see the inner logic in it and your fingers are actually moving in different ways.

Now, yeah, it is important sometimes sometimes to do repetitive motion and repetitive rote practice but for the most part, I never really did it that way. I just played a lot of different things, a lot of different ways but all kind of variations on a theme. So I have this video and it’s really stupid. It’s one of the stupidest videos that I have but I streamed myself practicing for five hours straight. It’s basically, I play everything once. Technically, I play every exercise that I do for five hours only once but I just do a bunch of different iterations of the same idea.

So I play the C major scale. Okay, great. I play the G major scale. It looks a little bit different. So intellectually, I have to understand my instrument from a slightly different angle. Then I play the D major scale. Okay, it looks a little bit different. I have to reorient myself a little bit. My mind is active while I’m doing this. I play the A major scale. Okay again, I go through all 12 scales. Okay. Now, I play them in thirds so it’s a particular way of playing a scale where you start on the root and then you skip a note so in the case of C major, we go C, D, E so you play C and E.

Then you go to the next pair, so instead of C to E, it’s going to be D to F, D, E, F so you play C, E, D, F and after that, you would play E to G and then after that F to A, G to B, A to C, B to D and then finally C. So that’s playing the major scale in thirds. So that’s a workout for your brain while you’re playing and it takes a while. You play it and it’s kind of mentally exhausting but at the same time, you get the sensation of aha, this is exciting because I can do something now just because I thought of it and then I practiced and I focused.

Then I play the C major scale like that and then I then went and play the G major scale like that and then the D major and then the A major so all throughout this process, yeah, I’m playing everything only once but they’re all iterations of an idea every time I’m active in this. I’m not a passive … I’m not a passenger to my own body playing my instrument, I’m an active participant in playing the music the same way that I’m an active participant in playing a song or playing a piece of music or improvising.

I’m never playing anything by rote. I’m never mindless in my practice and that’s my general philosophy for all of it.

Christopher: That is so interesting. So a theme that’s come up a few times on the show is how do we make practice more interesting? How do we stretch our brain while we stretch our fingers? But I wish I could send you back in time to my teenage self just to give him permission to make it interesting because honestly, I would have felt guilty spending 30 minutes trying lots of different versions because I would have felt like I wasn’t spending enough time on any one of them to get better and I guess I didn’t have the gumption to try it for a few weeks and see how I got on.

Adam: Well, it was really, like I said, I can attribute it to my teacher because that’s how he had me … We still did some rote stuff but that is definitely how we learned … how I learned how to play scales and walking bass lines and improvise little licks. He would just play something and I would play it back and then we’d move on to the next thing. It was never, okay, now we have to practice this thing to get it perfect. It’s just a different way of approaching the instrument than just repeating it over and over and over again.

Christopher: Yeah, and I think we’re getting a sense of what led you towards jazz and your particular expertise in music theory but you are bringing this intellectual curiosity to your music-making and it was very much about what could be done rather than just, can I master the physicality of playing the right notes at the right time as the sheet music tells me to do? So how did your journey continue? You mentioned Berklee there. Was that immediately after high school?

Adam: Yeah. Berklee was immediately after high school. I spent, I guess it was three years there. I was able to do some fancy things with the credits to graduate early. I studied jazz composition at Berklee and it was fantastic. It was a really exciting environment because a lot of people were really into … a lot of jazz musicians there were also into metal at the time because we’re trying to come up with these jazz metal hybrid things where … electric guitars and distortion. It was an exciting time for me, very formative in the sense of like a lot of my passions from high school and earlier on, just developed.

There’s one band in particular. The band was called [Jersey Band 00:16:51]. I don’t think they exist anymore but this band was like my idol. They’re just this ridiculous band with a bunch of horn, saxes and trumpets and guitars and playing polyrhythmic jazz metal and I thought polyrhythmic jazz metal was the coolest thing. And at school, that was like my goal, is to be able to play in this style or be able to explore this style and nobody told me that I couldn’t because other people were there, they were also excited about it.

And yeah, that’s I guess your … Following on the theme of … Excuse me. I guess following on the theme of intellectual curiosity, I always was following everything that I wanted to do at the moment I wanted to do it which was exciting and I’m very grateful to have had that opportunity.

Christopher: And how were you approaching music theory through all of this? Was it something you thought of as [inaudible 00:17:55] in a textbook that you studied separately like it is for a lot of musicians or were you someone who somehow surpassed that and connected with it on a more practical level? Imagine jazz composition at Berklee is pretty hardcore when it comes to the theory side of things.

Adam: Yeah, it was pretty hardcore. It was always for a purpose though. That’s the thing that I think is … was exciting for me is that anytime that I learn some crazy music theory concept like for example, multi-tonic system. A multi-tonic system is when you have three or more keys that are equidistant from one another on the circle of fifths and they combine together in this crazy cycle of keys and this weird color, it was always for a purpose.

The purpose was achieving a certain musical effect. The color of a multi-tonic system is very specific and I connected with the sound and the feeling of that color rather than the intellectual exercise. The intellectual exercise was fun but at the same time, it was more for the purpose of getting that feeling that I could only get really by delving into the more technical nature of some of the musical concepts I was doing and exploring at Berklee.

Twelve-tone serialism is another crazy thing that was being applied to the music that I was making where you take every note, all 12 notes and you jumble them up together and make music using all 12 notes at the same time. That’s a vast oversimplification of 12-tone music but that was kind of what I was thinking. It was like, all right, that’s a cool sound. I think it also speaks to the … speaks to my musical upbringing.

I had some of these weirder sounds in the back of my mind because I grew up with them and because I had been exposed to them and had this current of musical color already in my being. I was more amenable to it and I was also more amenable to going down this rabbit hole because I was chasing these musical colors and textures and things that felt good and felt right to me. It was not this textbook thing. I would never say it that way. It was something that I was just chasing a sound that I could only really get through studying the theory of it.

Christopher: I see. You explain this better than I think anyone I’ve come across in your video of why you should learn music theory.

Adam: Yeah, yeah.

Christopher: I feel I have tried to say this to people who’ve [inaudible 00:20:36] music theory with me and try and change their outlook on it but you do such a masterful job in that video and we’ll definitely link in the show notes to the full video, but maybe you could just give us the nutshell of the point you make in that video about what music theory is should be for.

Adam: So yeah, there’s this thing in linguistics called prescriptivism and prescriptivism basically is the whole philosophy behind like telling people what they should be able to use in language, like what they should say. You should not use a preposition at the end of a sentence, something like that. Descriptivism basically is this whole philosophy where it’s describing how people use language so maybe sometimes, people use prepositions at the end of a sentence and they make no value judgment one way or another. Maybe that’s good in certain circumstances or maybe not even good. Maybe that’s just how people use language.

And I think music theory is like that. Music theory is really a descriptivist discipline where it’s used to describe how people make music and you can use different music theoretical concepts to describe different kinds of music. So maybe for contemporary classical music or something, a minor ninth interval. It’s a very strange and dissonant interval but it’s good. That’s what people use, this weird strange dissonant interval but if you’re trying to compose music in the classical style, you probably wouldn’t want to use that interval all over the place. That’s bad. Don’t do that.

Music theory really is just describing how people use certain musical elements to achieve certain effects in different styles. That’s something that I always intuited and always knew. I wasn’t listening to rock music which uses a lot of parallel fifths because of power chords. I wasn’t listening to rock music and saying, “They’re using music theory wrong.” That’s not what it is at all. Parallel fifths are bad in certain styles of music but good in others. And I say bad and good, I really just mean these are terms used to describe how people use things.

So I really think that music theory is this, it’s descriptivist, it’s just you’re using this … these musical elements to achieve a certain effect. And a lot of times when people go in and learn music theory, they’re thinking of it as kind of this prescriptive thing where it describes or it’s telling people what they should and what they shouldn’t do. That’s not what it is at all, it’s just these are the tools, use them as you will. That’s really what music theory is and that’s how I’ve used theory for myself.

Christopher: I love that and I think it’s such a valuable mindset shift for people to make because suddenly, music theory isn’t an intimidating set of rules that might limit your creativity and you must get right or you’re failing as a musician.

Adam: Yeah, yeah.

Christopher: It’s actually just a really useful tool. And I love how you apply that in one of your other videos. You took music theory of matchups. You talked a little bit about that and how music theory can even have nothing to do with something as whacky as a matchup.

Adam: Yeah. It’s a skillset. These are tools and this is like your drill. This is your hammer and you can build a piece of music and you can build a sort of concept for yourself if you have the right tools and mashups are one of those. One of the reasons why mashups work is because a lot of times, songs … you might need to know what key two different songs are in and so if you know the keys and know the key centers, you know how they might work with one another. If they’re in the same key, they probably work.

A lot of songs have diatonic melodies and have the same sort of melodic structure and understanding that melodic structure and how those songs work together in this sort of counterpoint can help if you have the basic music theory tools. A lot of the time though, it’s not just the theory, in fact, it’s mostly not just the theory, it’s using your ear and the theory in your ear go hand in hand. Honestly for me these days, even though I have this kind of wide musical theory pallet, a lot of the time, I’m just relying on my ear because I’ve used the music theory to develop my ear.

And now, at this point in my life, I’m just trying to listen to things and trying to accept things in ways that both satisfy that kind of intellectual curiosity and also, things that just I think sound cool.

Christopher: I love that you mentioned the ear now because I think it’s easy. Once you get past that intimidation factor and you realize how much fun you can have exploring music theory, it’s actually easy to go down a less helpful route there and get very textbook about it and get very intellectual and forget that music is about hearing and creating sound.

Adam: Yeah.

Christopher: And you have not made that mistake clearly. It comes across in your videos as much as there are a plethora about fascinating subjects in music theory. You also talk about things like active listening and audiation and the ear training and I’d love to get your perspective on some of those topics. Maybe we could start with active listening. You recently put out a performance of John Cage’s famous 4’33”. I don’t know how people refer to it, 4’33”? Four minutes, 33 seconds? People say it out loud.

Adam: Yes to all of them.

Christopher: Have you ever read it?

Adam: I call it 4’33” or four minutes, 33 seconds, yeah.

Christopher: Cool. Well maybe for anyone who isn’t familiar with the piece, you can explain what it is and why it was relevant for active listening.

Adam: So it’s this piece of music, although that’s kind of debated by a lot of people. Basically what is is a performer gets on stage and just sits there with an audience and doesn’t play any note on their instrument. And of course, you would … most people would be very quick to dismiss this like, “This is some modern art nonsense. Forget this. This is like some … people are high off their own supply. This is not music.” But the exciting thing about this, when you actually see it performed live, and I’ve seen it performed live, is because you’re waiting for something to happen, your ears immediately get attuned to what’s happening around you and you start hearing like every little shuffle, every little piece of ambient sound in a different light.

You start hearing maybe that shuffle of somebody makes like three rows over, maybe somebody coughs a little bit. All of a sudden, you start to be a lot more aware. And this is something that is super … was super affecting to me when I first saw it performed live because I started to realize, wait, everything around me is actually happening. I’m so used to tuning it out but if I basically open up my ears a little bit, I can actually hear the world in a lot more of maybe an aesthetic way.

I’m hearing different little rhythms, different little melodies, almost chirps I can identify, maybe the chairs squeaking is a perfect fit. And there’s this really affecting quote that I heard. There’s this jazz educator Charles Banacos and he unfortunately passed but he wrote this email to somebody where he was describing how he was … as he was lying in his bed in the hospital, he started hearing all the beeps and sounds of the hospital as a B7 chord and then he started hearing everybody’s voices as different melodies against the B7 chord.

And that was super affecting to me because I realized that if you have an open ear enough and you can train your ear to that point, anything and everything is music. Anything and everything can be music so long as you just make the active choice to listen to things as music and that’s such an exciting thing to make that realization and also to have trained your ear to that point where you can actually identify these intervals and start hearing things in a much deeper way.

All of a sudden, music is not just the thing that somebody tells you is music. “Here, this is music. Have a listen to this music. I’m going to put on some music right now.” No. Everything around you can be that as long as you make that choice to listen. Music is an active process.

Christopher: Fantastic.

Adam: Yeah.

Christopher: I haven’t seen the piece performed but I guess I had a similar experience a few years back. I was getting into meditation for the first time and I had been reading this audio, I guess like film sound blog talking a lot about audio recording and there was this model of sound where there were like five spheres you could be thinking about in terms like closest to the farthest away and as an audio engineer, you can think about what you are putting in your soundscape at each of these levels.

And anyway, with that percolating my mind, sitting there, meditating in what I thought was silence, you do have the opportunity to start exploring and tuning your ear into what’s happening in this room versus out in the street versus far away. And I think once that little light bulb goes on in your head, the world can be that fascinating from an overall perspective. You don’t really lose that then and when you bring it back to music, that can be a really interesting journey to take.

Adam: Yeah, and it’s almost overwhelming too because if you just start sitting there, I don’t really meditate all that much but I guess just sitting there is a form in listening and trying to center yourself. It’s overwhelming because of how much there is. There is so much, just sound everywhere. It penetrates through walls. It’s just a big part of our lives. And if you make the effort to try and at least understand where it’s coming from and try and make a musical categorization on it, things start to become a lot more musical.

I am very influenced by this composer by the name of W.A. Mathieu and he’s written a lot of these books. And one of these books that he’s written is called The Musical Life. And this is one of the things that he talks about. He’s a very, very inspiring person, just read all of his books if you can but that … yeah, I like listening to the world around me.

Christopher: And maybe we could talk particularly in the context of music. How should people be thinking about active listening versus just passively hearing music? What’s the advantage apart from the kind of curiosity aspect we just talked through where it’s an interesting new thing to explore?

Adam: Well referencing earlier, you’re a part of it now. It’s not this sort of passive thing. Your body is not a passenger in your practice and also, hopefully your body isn’t a passenger in your musical listening too. You’re part of it, you’re active in it and you’re a participant in the music in a way even if you’re just listening to a piece of music and then trying to analyze the chord progression. You’re participating in this whole endeavor. There is now a little bit more of a … you’re taking something more directly rather than just letting it wash over you.

That’s really the thing that I think about when I’m listening to music. I don’t like having music as wallpaper in the background of my life. I like to have music as the foreground of me as I’m going through life if that makes any sense. There’s this term that I’ve talked about, I borrowed it but I think it’s applicable for a particular thing. There’s this term audiation. Audiation is when you visualize something in your mind’s ear, if that makes any sense.

So the same way that you can visualize your childhood home, you can audiate a piece of music that you know very well. So for example, you can audiate … we could audiate right now Happy Birthday To You, like a happy birthday song. If you just think about it, chances are, you can just imagine what that sounds like. That’s audiation. You can imagine what maybe your favorite songs are. That’s audiation because it’s very much tied to your memory and you’ve been an active participant in this song for a lot … a while.

A big part of my ear training process, and I like to think about this way, is being able to audiate things that you know from your past and because audiation is very much tied to memory, the same way that visualization is and also being able to audiate it so clearly that you can change the music as it’s happening. So for example, the happy birthday, maybe you could do happy birthday but like in 7/4, what would that sound like? Maybe try to do that.

That’s a little bit more advanced to try and do that sort of thing but audiation is very much a big part of what I do when I’m playing music and also, listening to music, trying to pre-hear it in my head.

Christopher: Was that just something you started doing naturally instinctively or were there resources or teachers that set you on that particular path in terms of how you approach your training or think about your musical mind?

Adam: Well, I got the idea originally from Hal Galper who … I have a video from Hal Galper who … it’s a great video. I forget where I found it but he talks about when you’re improvising, you should be able to scream your solo in your mind’s ear. So basically, just be … try and make every musical idea you have so vivid beforehand before you actually play it so that when you play it, you play with intention and confidence and really, yeah, intention is basically the whole thing. Intention and confidence.

I’m not sure if I got that from any other particular thing. It was something that I was doing beforehand and I watched that Hal Galper video and then did some more research and this is something that I had been doing a lot beforehand, it’s just now I have a name for it, audiation. Edwin Gordon is the name of the guy who actually developed the course of audiation.

It’s this whole music education program but I’m just using it to describe this whole idea of musical visualization.

Christopher: Got you. I am guilty of the same bastardization and I got gently rebuked fairly recently. We did an episode of podcast about the official audiation of music learning theory because I, like you, accused it for that very convenient purpose.

Adam: Yeah.

Christopher: [crosstalk 00:36:47] across to people. There’s real value in just visualizing music in your mind and having that kind of mental playground for exploring these.

Adam: Mental playground, that’s a great term. Yeah. The problem is that yeah, it’s a whole system but there is no other term for it so people are going to start using the language that way. Maybe this is going to be a descriptive versus prescriptive argument because if there’s a term that is perfect for something and there was no other term beforehand, it’s just going to get used. So yeah, he coined it but we’re now using it this way.

Christopher: Yeah. And I spoke with them, Cynthia Crump Taggart who’s the president-elect of the serious GIML organization.

Adam: Yeah, yeah.

Christopher: She was very down to earth and cool about it and basically said, “It’s not wrong to use it that way. It’s just there’s a lot more to it that people should probably be aware of and that’s fair enough.”

Adam: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah.

Christopher: I was keen to talk to you too about training which is obviously connected to this idea of audiation that you mentioned, developing your musical ear, but it’s something that often like music theory is seen as kind of a dry academic and tediously repetitive thing and so you are clearly not someone who puts up with dry, academic, all repetitive in your own musical development. Tell us how you approach this idea of ear training and developing your musical ear.

Adam: Well, there was a degree of dry academic or repetitive stuff to it. I definitely did ear training exercises in college and we did solfege exercises and those sorts of things. I hated every second of it but I did them anyway. And honestly, just like eating cod liver oil or spinach or something, like terrible that you really dislike, it will improve. It will improve your ear. It will give you abilities that you didn’t have beforehand.

And for anybody who goes through that sort of thing, that is an intensely motivating factor to be able to do something that you couldn’t before because you went through and focused and did something that you maybe didn’t like to do at the time. That’s a tale as old as time. Maybe you hate exercising but you exercise and all of a sudden, you feel better. It’s very simple in that regard. So with ear training, that is definitely what happened.

I also love listening to music and picking out elements in music. That’s something I just love doing. If the pop radio is going on, I’m like, okay, well, what is this chord progression? Okay, it’s like 1 flat 6 flat 3, I’m picking out whatever chords are there. That’s something that I started doing in high school because I was curious about chord progressions, I was curious about what the chord progressions were and the jazz band, there were these fancy chords like, this is an a flat major 7, sharp 11, what is that? Well, I don’t know.

All I know is that basically, I’m playing a flat. That’s cool but I’m a little bit too intellectually curious to just accept the fact that I’m playing an a flat here. So I started listening for these things that I have a name for and through my bass education, through my private teacher in high school, I started being able to pick out these little elements because I just was curious. I wanted to become a little bit more invested in the thing that I wanted, I was listening to. I didn’t want to just be there sitting in the backseat.

So that’s the genesis of a lot of it and then I started … it was a very harmonic ear training. I think that’s where it came from because I just was picking up chords that I heard everywhere. Every song you hear for the most part has some kind of progression. I’m going to say 98% of everything has some kind of chord progression and so that’s a place to start, is being able to pick out chords.

Once you’re able to do that, then being able to pick out the individual rhythms of the different instruments as they’re playing them, you can tap them out on your chest which is great, like a monkey see, monkey do but then being able to transcribe them is another level, like understanding the rhythm’s relationship to the pulse. That’s something that takes a while to actually be able to do and it’s related to the harmonic ear training but it’s also not related at all.

From there then, melodic ear training became a big part of it, just being able to play back and provide solos that I was hearing. So that was a lot of just listening to the same four seconds of a piece of music over and over and over and over again playing it, moving on to the next four seconds over and over and over and over again. It all really was just coming from the desire to not only listen to the music more actively but also being able to play it.
So I listen to it and then I try to play it. At the end of the day, it ends up being that simple.

Christopher: Well, it’s really interesting to hear that because I think the best approach is often that combination of the dedicated exercises and the more interesting application in your musical life and finding the balance between those two.

Adam: Yeah.

Christopher: When I saw you done in the ear training course over at Scott’s Bass Lessons, I knew it was going to be unusual in a good way. It was not going to be your traditional just do this drill for 18 hours straight kind of training course and there were two things that really stood out to me in it, even glossing over the main thing which was your approach to everything in terms of the harmonic series and build things up in a very elegant and fascinating way but the two other things were talking about bass.

Specifically, you are a bass player and you have a particular perspective on your training by way of that. And also, the fact that you incorporated the voice so much. So I’d love to unpack those two a little bit. How should a bassist consider ear training or what position are they in compared to other instrument lists when it comes to that?

Adam: Yeah, bass guitar is actually quite difficult for ear training because the fundamentals of the notes that you play are well below the fundamentals of notes that humans can sing. So for example, the fundamental of the low E string which is a note that a lot of bass players play all the time is 40 hertz. It’s super, super low in terms of the harmonic spectrum. The lowest note that a male can sing comfortably usually is in or around 80 hertz. It’s like the low of a baritone vocal register.

So the bass guitar is just really, really far low. It’s super low and it’s just difficult to wrap your ear around what’s happening because we have evolved to be able to hear the frequency spectrum of the human voice clearly, not so much the frequency spectrum of a bass guitar clearly. So my advice for all bass players is to play everything that you are playing and practicing with your ear training up an octave or like up in the upper register of the instrument, places where you wouldn’t normally be playing your parts.

And also, try and sing along and match the pitch of those upper octave notes. And in that way, you’re connecting what you’re singing and what you’re feeling and what you’re hearing with what you’re doing on the instrument in a way that your ear is evolutionarily designed to be able to understand. That is the trick in the challenge of practicing ear training with bass guitar specifically is getting that sort of understanding and applying it to your instrument in a way that makes sense from a physical and also biological standpoint.

That’s really my philosophy with bass guitar ear training is sing everything and this applies to everything honestly, it’s not just the bass guitar. Sing everything and play it in a register that your ear can connect with.

Christopher: Got you. I found it deeply reassuring to hear you say that because I suspected that were true but I started bass lessons … for the first time, I played bass on and off but started taking proper lessons a few years ago and I considered myself someone with a pretty good ear but my teacher was demonstrating things low down on the fretboard and expecting me to play them back by ear and I felt really stupid because I couldn’t and I was like, I’m sure if we just jumped at the neck, I would be okay but my ear is not working down there the way I would expect it to.

And that was a real eye-opener for me. I didn’t realize I would be that ill-equipped in the low register.

Adam: Yeah, and here’s the thing. When you’re more experienced, one of the things that helps with hearing things in lower registers isn’t necessarily your experience with your ear, it’s your experience with your fingers because you can hear things down in the lower register that you know physically how to play. For example, I can hear like a box shape down in the lower register like that because I played a box shape so many times and I really understand how that pentatonic box shape works on a bass guitar.

I played it, I feel it, I understand it. There is this kind of like relationship between your fingers into your hands to your ears in a very deep way that I feel like not a lot of people have really explored all that much but I know this personally for me is if I hear certain shapes on bass guitar, I know what it is. If a synthesizer or a keyboard player would be playing down in that register, I wouldn’t be able to intuit it as quickly as if I hear a bass player play it because there are certain shapes and certain patterns that are unique to the instrument and so I understand pretty quickly what they are.

When you’re first learning though, that sort of thing isn’t probably always going to be there so it can be tricky and it can be challenging. Seeing it also can help, like there is this whole feedback loop between what you’re feeling, what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing and I think that’s important for anybody who is learning is to kind of go back and forth between the three of them, just like cycle, no one method is going to be your magic bullet for learning something. No one method is going to be your magic bullet for hearing anything either.

Christopher: That’s really interesting. I want to talk a little bit more about the singing aspect of it. You mentioned a feedback loop that [crosstalk 00:47:42] and I think that’s something you talked about too in the course in terms of your singing voice and your ears. You said something in the course and you had these great exercises with a friend where you are harmonizing with each other out loud to demonstrate different intervals and tune your ears into them.

And you talked about the particular vowel you should sing on which I heard someone talk about before in the context of ear training.

Adam: Yeah. Well, the vowel is A and if you look at the frequency spectrum of A, la. If you look at the frequency spectrum, it’s the most even out of any vowel. E is a very hollow vowel so there’s like a lot of the midrange content is gone. O is a very low register vowel so a lot of like the upper register stuff is gone. So A works very, very nicely for ear training especially when you’re harmonizing with a friend because the harmonic spectrum is very, very even across all registers.

And I don’t know a whole lot about Indian solfege, [pronatic 00:48:48] Indian solfege but they have a different name for each one of the notes of the scale like do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do, the basic solfege syllables in the west. I think it’s sa, ve, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni, sa. Most of them are A vowels and the ones that aren’t A vowels are specifically designed to have a particular harmonic content associated with that scale degree.

So ni has a very … is the seventh scale degree, it’s a very kind of like open sound or like it’s … like almost a dissonant sort of sound and because it’s ni, E is like a midrange scooped vowel, you have that ni on the seventh scale degree. So it’s a really interesting sort of understanding of the relationship of vowel sound to musical content and it’s something that exploring a lot for myself personally but the different vowel sounds have different … Do is like our normal hum like for scale degree and that’s not super great for harmonizing.

It’s hard to get in tune but sa is an open scale or it’s an open vowel and it’s a lot easier to harmonize with somebody if you’re on the same vowel like that.

Christopher: That’s a great point. We’ve come up against this in Musical U when we’ve hired professional singers to record solfa syllables for us and what we wanted is kind of every syllable on every note which is an incredibly, yes, exercise for them in the recording studio but less than the … they went ahead and did it. But we found when they were in the top of that range, the vowels were coming out very differently because it’s very difficult to sing those notes on say, an open A or an O because as a singer, you would naturally adjust your vowels with the lyrics and the piece to match what you are capable of with your voice.

And until we butted up against that, I haven’t really appreciated how actually the solfa syllables can be a bit awkward in certain situations.

Adam: Yeah. Well, it’s also the English language have something called a diphthong which is when you have two vowels together, and this is something that singers have to deal with all the time. I’m not really a singer but I deal with this sort of thing musically. When you have A, E, A, E, A, E, it’s the two specific musical notes in the word I. And that’s fascinating. You can even see in the harmonic spectrum when you say I, the notes change. The melody changes along the course of saying the word.

And it’s something that you again, don’t really have to deal with unless you’re a singer but once you start ear training, this sort of thing actually matters. The musical note changes as you say certain vowels and so you have to just in the beginning, I think it’s very useful to pick a single neutral vowel to sing everything on and A is a fantastic neutral vowel.

I forget if I said this in the Scott’s Bass Lessons video, the SBL video, but one of the reasons, and I’m just hypothesizing, why Buddhist monks chant uhm is because if you say A and then you close your mouth while you’re saying it, ahm, what’s happening is you’re still singing that vowel with all that rich harmonic content but then you feel the buzzing in your lips in a very visceral way. You can feel the note in a different part of your body. So when you’re chanting uhm, what you’re doing is you’re feeling the note that you’re singing and it feels nice and you can balance yourself on that note.

So yeah, so everybody should chant uhm all the time because it’s harmonically rich and it’s useful for your training.

Christopher: That is the major takeaway from this interview.

Adam: Yeah.

Christopher: Well, that touches on actually one of the other interesting points from that course which was you talking about embodied cognition and the value of feeling in your body what you’re doing. And I alluded to this earlier talking about the beefy bass amplifier that, like you, enjoy playing bass in a different way. And I think it’s a really valuable point and another reason why singing should not be considered a separate activity or an optional activity. It should be kind of a front and center in how you develop your ability to understand and express musical ideas.

Adam: Yeah. And a lot of people just are scared about singing and I’m still scared about singing because I’m not a singer. My mom was a singer and so because my parents did something, I want absolutely nothing to do with that thing. But I still do it all the time just for myself and as means of just connecting to the music because there is no more direct way to music than through your own body and your own voice is a way of making it … the music resonate in your body in a way that you have to turn the bass amplifier up really, really loud to feel the music in your body the same way that you could just hum a little tune softly to yourself.

It’s much more direct and it’s much more … everybody has it too. So I think singing is very important. Even if it’s just for yourself, it’s for no other person. You’re not performing but you’re doing it for you and I think that is an important thing.

Christopher: You said something a few minutes ago about visually processing information and making a connection between the sound and the sight of the music on the page for example.

Adam: Yeah.

Christopher: You have a slightly controversial or provocative video, subject of tab. Can you tell us about why you shouldn’t use tab and for anyone listening who isn’t a guitar and bass player, we might just need to explain briefly what tab is.

Adam: Yeah. So tablature is … actually, it’s a fairly old style of music … fairly old style of musical notation. It goes back I think to this 15th century. It basically was a way for [Lutness 00:54:45] originally to read music. Basically, it’s … the long and short of it is it tells you which fret to play on what string. So there will be a line that represents the G string and then you’ll have like a 3 or something so that means that you play the third fret on the G string. You don’t need to know the name of the note, you just need to know that you place your finger on the third fret.
And this video, I’ve since revised my thesis on why shouldn’t use tablature. I think tablature is absolutely fine. The main crux of the video is that the way that we process, way that our brains process sheet music in terms of written notation is very different, at least I think it’s different than the way our brains process tablature.

There’s this thing called saccade. A saccade is whenever your eyes dart very quickly back and forth like when you’re reading something on a page. If you film yourself, if you could do a close-up of your eyes with your phone, you can just film yourself looking at your eyes as you’re reading and then look back at the phone footage of your eyes. You notice that your eyes just dart back really, really quickly back and forth.

It’s super, super, super fast. And there’s some interesting research on how the brain processes these really, really quick snapshots that your eyes deliver information to your brain. There is research done on how eyes do the same thing when you’re reading sheet music in terms of reading sheet music and processing information very quickly. What happens is you process a huge chunk of information as one unit, like you don’t process every letter as … when you’re reading, you don’t look at the letter A and the letter E and the letter I or whatever.

You process whole words, whole sentences, maybe even whole paragraphs at the same time. It’s the same thing with sheet music. And I doubt, I’m just going to say it this way. I doubt that you can do the same thing with tab because there are so much information in a piece of tablature that is just delivered visually and it’s very difficult to be able to chunk large pieces of that information in the same way that a professional musician would be able to chunk large pieces of information with staff paper.

I don’t have any research to support that. Maybe somebody could chunk that quickly but I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen pianists chunk absolutely ridiculously huge amounts of information in sight, read the most complicated pieces of music like that because they are able to just process it like that. I’ve never seen a guitarist or a bass player just do the same thing with tablature just because I haven’t seen it, I don’t know. Maybe it could happen at some point but I think that the way that our brains will process sheet music ultimately is a lot more efficient. Even in the beginning, if it’s like really painful to read, I understand that.

I think tablature is a great learning tool. I think it’s a fantastic learning tool. I think everybody should use tablature if that’s the way that you want to learn the music. I think that’s absolutely great but I think in the long term, sheet music is better because it gives you a quicker approach to playing music. Yeah.

Christopher: Yeah. I really liked how you sound up at the end of the video by saying tab is great for telling you how to play something and so it has that role in teaching and learning but actually, sheet music is much more elegant for telling you what to play. So once you get to the point of just needing to [inaudible 00:58:09] what to play and you can figure out the how yourself, you’re better off with the sheet music.

Adam: Yeah, exactly. The tablature is the instructions, sheet music is literally what the music is. And for somebody who knows how to do something, you don’t need to be told how to do it and that’s the advantage of sheet music.

Christopher: Cool. So I know that even if our listeners weren’t already familiar with your channel, they now have a rich idea of just how interesting a perspective you bring to topics like music theory and audiation and the ear training. I mentioned earlier that there’s a potentially limiting path when it comes to music theory of just getting into the textbooks and thinking a very dry music theory way. And often, people end up just analyzing music and forgetting that they could be a musician themselves.

They write fascinating articles about music but don’t really play it. You have not fallen into that trap and you do still perform regularly. You have your own band called Sungazer. Tell us a little bit about your creative process in that context and your identity as a performer given that you have such an interesting perspective.

Adam: Yeah. So I’ve spent the past, in addition to having a YouTube channel, I spent the past eight or nine years in New York City as a professional musician, whatever that means. I played a bunch of musical theatre gigs, I played a bunch of weddings, I played a bunch of pop gigs, jazz gigs, I really enjoy playing music. That’s one of the things that I feel like just is a big part of my identity. I never want to stop playing music and if I stopped teaching, if I started … stopped making YouTube videos, I would just go and play music and figure out ways of doing it.

Sungazer is a band that is kind of a collaboration between me and a drummer, bass players love drummers and drummers I think love bass players especially if they’re good. And Shawn Crowder is the drummer and he’s absolutely amazing and we wanted to create a project that explored a lot of the same like interesting rhythmic and harmonic concepts that we had been thinking about but in the context of electronic music because I feel very strongly that electronic music is the next wave for musical development.

There’s so many cool things that you can do with electronic textures and sounds that you couldn’t normally do otherwise. And we wanted to do that but we wanted to do it in a way that we were still playing the music. We were still playing all these ideas but we’re interacting with technology, we’re interacting with the sampling, we’re interacting with drum triggering, we’re interacting in all these different ways but using the vocabulary that we had developed as musicians over the past decade or so.

So that’s like what Sungazer is, is like we’re just playing the music that we want to make, just pushing ourselves to explore new textures, new sounds, new feelings in the music that wouldn’t have been afforded to us if we were starting this music, the whole project 30 years earlier. That’s the exciting thing for me, is to explore new things, explore new things that I wouldn’t have had in a different time period.

Christopher: I see. And I really enjoyed, you shared a few videos on your channel about Sungazer projects and how you’ve approached particular composing or arranging in that environment and yeah, I definitely will link up to some of those in the show because I think you give a great insight into what the modern creative process can look like in some of the ways you’re approaching music in that group. Fantastic.

Well Adam, it’s been absolutely a pleasure. I knew it would be an interesting conversation. We didn’t disappoint. Let’s leave people with a very clear direction of where they can go to learn more about Adam Neely.

Adam: So you can find my YouTube channel by Googling Adam Neely YouTube. My channel’s name is just my name, Adam Neely. And you can find my band, Sungazer on sungazermusic.com and we have an EP coming out on January 7th, full of explorations of rhythmic and harmonic concepts. And I hope you guys enjoy it and I hope you guys enjoy my videos too.

Christopher: Tremendous. Thank you. Well, I feel like this wouldn’t be an official Adam Neely appearance if we didn’t end with your trademark bass. Can you send us away with a good low bass?

Adam: All right. Thanks for watching and until next time, bass.

The post The Power of Curiosity, with Adam Neely appeared first on Musical U.

In this episode, we talk about your musical path and trajectory, encouraging you to think about your Big Picture Vision and how to get yourself there.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• About the Little “Why”
• About Taking A Long-Term Mindset

Transcript

Hey! Where are you going?

No, really. In your musical life: where are you going?

There’s this scene I’ve always loved in Alice in Wonderland.

Alice is lost in the Tulgey Wood and meets the Cheshire Cat. And she says:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

To which the cat replies:

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

Alice begins to answer “I don’t much care where–” and the Cheshire Cat interrupts her to say:

“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.”

Have you felt yourself sometimes feeling like you’re going nowhere in music?

Maybe you’re not progressing as fast as you hoped.

Or you keep changing direction, leaping from project to project, idea to idea, trying to move forwards but somehow never quite getting anywhere?

I want to take you through a simple but powerful exercise.

It takes just a few minutes – but it can bring you greater clarity, confidence and success in your musical life.

Now I could tell you that this exercise will transform your musical life …. but I’m not going to do that – because in just a few minutes I think you will see it for yourself.

What we’re going to do is to set your “Big Picture Vision”.

And before we go any further I want to speak to those of you who heard the word “vision” and started to tune out. I get it. I’m a scientist by background, highly analytical, very pragmatic – and it was only through a gradual process over the years and putting these things to the test myself that I realised that something as seemingly airy-fairy as “setting a vision” could have highly practical outcomes.

As Dr. Stephen Covey once famously put it: You need to begin with the end in mind.

So this exercise is all about getting clear, getting detailed, and getting excited about exactly where it is you want to go in music.

Another disclaimer: This is not about career success. Or maybe for you, it is. But this is something for *every* musician, whether you’re just starting out, or deep into your journey, whether you play music as a hobby, you’re trying to make it a career, or you’re already a seasoned pro.

Every single musician has a unique Big Picture Vision – this is 100% about you and the things you truly care about.

The Big Picture Vision is something we start new members with at Musical U, one of the first things we have them do. And if you’re a member of Musical U yourself you will almost certainly have done this.

Whether you’ve done this exercise or something like it before, I want to encourage you to do it with me now. Because this isn’t a one-time thing, it’s worth doing regularly to keep your musical life on the best path forwards.

So let’s dive in.

As we go through this it’s ideal if you can be making notes. Obviously if you’re on the move at the moment that may not be possible, so I’d encourage you to think about this as we go through it, and then make sure you take the time later to sit and write down or type out all of your thoughts on this. Because actually capturing the result of this process in a concrete form is a really important part of it.

I’ll leave short gaps but you’ll probably need more time, so do please pause this and give yourself time to think or to write every time you need it.

We’re also providing a free downloadable worksheet you can use to make this easy for yourself. Just check the shownotes for this episode at musicalitypodcast.com to get access to that.

The Big Picture Vision exercise begins with a simple question:

Imagine yourself 5 years from now – and everything has gone perfectly with your musical training.

What does your musical life look like?

I’ll say that again.

Imagine yourself 5 years from now – and everything has gone perfectly with your musical training.

What does your musical life look like?

Now you might immediately have answers and ideas popping into your head, or you might not. Maybe you just have a few words or one particular goal you’ve been thinking about.

I want you to try to stay in that space of “Anything’s possible, and everything’s gone perfectly”. Because your brain is going to want to immediately jump to “How would I do that? Could I really accomplish that? I’m not sure I have what it takes” – and so on. We want to totally sidestep that analytical brain and voice of self-doubt, and capture the truest, ideal future vision. And after that we can worry about all the practicalities of maximising your odds of actually getting there. For now, let’s just get 100% clear on the dream destination.

I’d also like you to shrug off any concerns about commitment. I know that for myself, I immediately flinch away from the idea of committing to one particular thing I’m aiming for, especially on a 5 year timescale. So don’t worry that this is set in stone. It can and may well change. But you’re going to find that taking the time to set a clear destination does wonders for your progress, even if it gets adjusted and updated periodically. In fact I’d encourage you to repeat this exercise at least once a year, if not once a quarter.

So now I’m going to ask you a series of followup questions, and the goal is to add richness and depth to your vision.

Imagine yourself 5 years from now – and everything has gone perfectly with your musical training.

What does your musical life look like?

What inner skills do you want, what level and kind of musicality do you dream of having by then?

Do you want to play melodies by ear? Chords?

Do you want to improvise?

How about transcribing, writing down music?

Or do you want to be writing songs or composing music yourself?

Are there particular pitch or rhythm skills you want to hone, or ways of expressing yourself that you’ve dreamed of mastering?

How about instrument skills?

Are there things you want to be able to do on your current primary instrument?

Have you wanted to take up a second, or even a third instrument?

Is singing something you want to develop and add to your skillset?

At Musical U we talk about the trifecta of instrument technique, listening skills, and music theory. So how about theory?

Are there areas of music theory that you know you’d love to understand inside-out? Or maybe the whole of theory is a mystery to you but you’re keen to peek under the hood. Maybe you’ve studied the theory already but in future you want to start applying it to great effect in your musical activities.

Speaking of activities, what will you be doing with all these new skills and understanding?

Do you want to be performing regularly? And if so, what kinds of gigs?

Is collaboration something you’re excited about? Maybe with a partner, or a group, or joining a band, orchestra or choir.

Is it important to you to make money or build a career around music?

Are there particular creative projects you’ve always hoped to one day carry out in music?

How is music appreciation part of your musical life, how are you discovering new music?

Are there genres or types of music you’re eager to explore more? Is there one you’re keen to go deep and specialise in?

Are you listening to music live, on recordings, or in other contexts?

Finally let’s step back for a moment. Reviewing everything you’ve got so far, ask yourself how it’s going to feel when those things become real.

Is there a sense of joy? Of excitement?

Are you feeling empowered and enjoying a new confidence?

Has your identity as a musician changed? Has the way you think about your musical abilities shifted?

What’s the day-to-day experience of music like for you now? Do you have a different relationship with music?

Is there a sense of triumph, of satisfaction, of pride – and of ongoing wonder and curiosity about what you’re capable of?

Write all of this down in as much detail as possible.

Depending on your personality and how much of this kind of thing you’ve done before, you might love this and find it comes easily – or it might feel like hard work! Be patient with yourself and give yourself the opportunity to daydream a little. Remember we’re capturing the ideal – we’re not judging ourselves or the ideas or trying to assess how realistic they are. That’s not the exercise. So let those kinds of thoughts just drift away, and focus on the dreaming, the imagining, the idealised future.

I’m going to say a few things to wrap this up but if you haven’t yet completed your thinking and writing, pause now and do that before we move on.

Okay, have you got it? You’ve hopefully written something that’s at least a few lines, possibly a few pages.

And I’m hoping that as you went through this you were able to shake off that voice of self doubt, or any self-conscious hesitation – and you wrote down what truly excites and motivates you.

Reading back through your big picture vision, you’ll know you did this right if it makes you smile. If you start to feel excitement welling up inside. If it helps put you immediately back into that mental space of “anything’s possible” and “my future musical life could be amazing”.

So what now?

There are two things.

The first is that you want to review this regularly. Reading through it should make you feel good and reignite your enthusiasm and passion – and the value of that is not to be underestimated, because motivation is an essential factor in any musical progress.

Reading through your Big Picture Vision will also help keep you on track towards actually accomplishing it, because as soon as you have this clear in your mind, a lot of the decision-making and uncertainty that can crop up in your musical journey becomes dramatically simpler. Things which before seemed hard to figure out will suddenly be crystal clear to you – because they either align with your Big Picture Vision or they don’t.

So that’s the first thing: Don’t just shove this in a drawer and forget about it. Make it a habit to review it, whether that’s once a week or at the start of every music practice session.

Once Alice knew where she wanted to go the Cheshire Cat could point her in the right direction.

So the second thing to do next is to start taking action to move yourself towards your Big Picture Vision.

There’s value in the vision itself, but clearly it’s going to have even more impact if you actually use it as the basis of goal-setting and planning. We have a unique framework for this inside Musical U, to help you set truly effective goals and the step-by-step plans that will get you there – because it’s easy to do goal-setting and planning wrong and cause yourself a lot of strife! Having a proven system can make it much more likely you’ll actually get to that Big Picture Vision.

But whatever goal-setting and planning process you want to follow, be sure that your Big Picture Vision is now your “North star” that guides it all.

Do that, and you will find a greater sense of clarity, purpose and confidence in your musical life – and you’ll start to see the tangible benefits and results that come from being 100% clear on your Big Picture Vision – and where exactly you’re going.

The post Hey! Where are you going? appeared first on Musical U.

It goes without saying that a house is only as strong as its foundation, as mastering basics leads to smoother sailing down the road, whereas skipping the rudiments can cause confusion, frustration, and roadblocks when you go on to the more advanced concepts and techniques.

Jenny has really made the most out of Musical U in the seven months she has been a member, using the SingTrue app to improve her singing, learning music theory from the ground up, and using community support and feedback to maintain her learning momentum.

Musical U interviewed Jenny on her musical background and trajectory, how Musical U has fit into her journey, and how her plans have changed along the way.

I had none until age 45, at which point I began vaguely daydreaming about trying banjo. A friend suggested I try a banjo uke for simple, cheap learning. I was hooked! I practiced on my own and participated in a weekly strumalong. About a year later, I joined a singalong group, and that helped develop my ear, voice, and confidence. Then, last February I did a workshop in bluegrass jam skills; that launched me a good ways forward. And then I found Musical U!

I have no favourite… but also hundreds of favourites! I listen to blues, folk, gospel, bluegrass, zydeco, and stuff that has elements of those.

At the moment, I’m building a repertoire of memorized songs, so that I can play paperless anywhere, anytime. I’m also working on developing impromptu soloing (lead break) skills – I may have officially given up on picking melodies!

I had learned bits of theory, and saw how helpful each detail was for progressing rapidly. But I was missing a lot of foundational pieces. I was frustrated with piecemeal learning – having to wait for one person after another to share a key bit of information with me. I wanted to have all the pieces, from the ground up.

The other big part was just general conversation and encouragement – I was very isolated, not just in learning but in having anyone to share with, wonder with, explore with.

I was desperate to learn music theory from the foundation up. I kept looking for an online school, preferably an accredited one. I never found that, but eventually Musical U popped up in my Google searches and seemed to speak to that desire. I thought I’d give it a go. Soon after, I bought a lifetime membership!

Interestingly, I was months into Musical U when I realized that the SingTrue App I’d previously tried was created by Musical U! I’d given the app a go without ever realizing there was a whole music education resource and community behind it.

That I could do music at all! I’d always wanted to be able to sing. On the one hand, I sensed that I might be able to. On the other hand, everything that came out sounded ”wrong”, and I didn’t know why.

In my mid-40s, I started being around more people who made music. It was amazing to me that they could create a musical backdrop and inspire singing, or that they could work out harmonies so quickly. I craved to be able to do things like that.

And now, I’m blown away that within two years of starting, I can!

The number one thing has been the support of the admin staff. I post in my journal, and it seems like at least two staff members read each post and at least one comments on each. When I post a question anywhere on the site, someone takes the time to answer it. So interestingly, it hasn’t just been the program itself; it’s been having people who support me in my forward movement, who pay attention and seem interested and say encouraging things. That resolves the isolation. That was something I really needed. If I have genuine human support, I am able to accomplish a lot. (Thank you, Weehauktaw and GtrStu777!!)

The program itself is also excellent! The quizzes and games help me to know where I’m at currently, and help me fill in the gaps in my learning. Information presented in writing or video is broken up clearly and progressively for easy understanding. It doesn’t assume prior knowledge, instead letting me start at the very beginning of any topic or skill.

I also really appreciate that Musical U refers us to other resources we might benefit from. This is professionalism at its best: to supply a top-notch program and then still link its participants to other excellent resources. That tells me that Musical U really cares about us having optimal results.

How? Oh, “constantly!” 😉

I started out with a training plan, completed a chunk of that, then focused again on what I’m doing ”in real life”, relying on the support of the journal. For me, it makes sense to keep it changing. My musical development is very organic, and is balanced between practice at home and online, and what I can do live with others. I like knowing that whenever my live scene is less busy, I’ve got endless resources here to delve back into.

It has really helped me identify my goals – both long term and short term – and to focus on them. It has also let me see where I’ve achieved a dream and to set out my next vision.

Putting the Pieces Together

A frustrating experience in learning music is falling victim to that “piecemeal learning” that Jenny describes above – where you are fed bits of information at a time, making it difficult to put it all together into a single, integrated body of knowledge.

The solution? Take matters into your own hands, and find a learning plan that will give you each piece of the learning puzzle right from the get-go – just like Jenny did.

The post Musical U Member Spotlight: Jenny appeared first on Musical U.

We admire and agree with Ruth’s perspective and approach to teaching play-by-ear skills so much that when time came to look for a new Resident Pro for piano at Musical U, Ruth was the first person who sprang to mind. We talk a bit towards the end of the conversation about her work here and how she’s helping our members apply their core training directly on keyboard in fun and creative ways.

This conversation was great fun and there are lots of good piano-specific nuggets in here for anyone who’s a pianist or wants to become one – but as always, most of the discussion is equally relevant and interesting whatever instrument you play.

We talk about:

• Ruth’s own journey of learning to play by ear and the distinct phases she went through to develop a fully-fledged ability on keyboard
• The particular challenges of playing by ear on piano compared with other instruments
• The terrible piece of advice she was given early on about how to learn to play by ear – and her top tip for actually succeeding with it.

That’s just the start – we also talk about humming, about basslines, about why and how modern instrument learning can look different to the traditional methods, active listening, and a lot more. You’re going to get a ton out of this one!

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Piano Picnic
• Songs by Ear course
• Ear Bootcamp
• Super Basics course

Transcript

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

Ruth: Thank you for having me.

Christopher: I was saying to you just before we hit record that I really enjoyed prepping for this interview, because I knew quite a bit about yourself and piano picnic now and what you’re up to, and obviously you’re working with us at Musical U as well. I didn’t know all that much about your own backstory. I knew the highlights, but not really the tale behind it.

I’ve been really looking forward to this chance to understand a bit more about where you’re coming from as a musician, and how you’ve become the person that now leads Piano Picnic and helps people play by ear.

I wonder if we could start at the beginning and tell the story of Ruth Power. How did you first get started in music?

Ruth: Okay. I actually started with recorder, which is the noblest of instruments as everyone knows. My oldest sister actually played piano. I would’ve been, I don’t know, six or so. I did the horrible younger sister thing where as soon as she got off the piano, I’d jump on and slam it, and just embarrass her. I think mum noticed that I was finding it cool and interesting, and she made me take piano lessons to start with.

I also had a friend actually really, my earliest memory of learning by ear and the idea of it was I had a friend I think when I was about seven, and she was playing Fur Elise, and I was at her house. She was teaching me the opening bits of Fur Elise, as you do, then I went home, would listen to the song, and try and figure out some more.

The learning by ear came very quickly after starting to learn the piano when I was really young. Then I went through all the grades, had many, many different teachers, and did competitions and recitals and all that sort of thing, but all the while through that traditional training, I was always mostly just passionate about what I could do on the side with playing pop songs and TV themes and things like that.

Christopher: Interesting. Tell us a bit more about the interplay between those two? I think it’s fairly unusual for someone to manage to juggle those two. You meet a lot of people who are firmly in one camp of sheet music reading or playing by ear, and kind of grow up with one or the other. Not many manage to keep the two going side by side. How was it for you? Did you identify more with one of them than the other?

Ruth: Yeah. What I wanted to do was to play cool songs, what I thought was cool songs, so stuff I’d hear on the radio. When I was growing up, there wasn’t… well, I didn’t know about any sort of way to learn how to do that. The only way, especially the small town I came from, was to go to a classical piano teacher and learn the traditional way. Since in our family, we were allowed to have one thing that we could do, and my parents worked very hard to pay for that one thing, I made sure that I kept up with my lessons and my exams.

What I was really doing and not practicing all that much, the exam material was just plain songs that I liked, and the soundtrack from Romeo and Juliet mostly.

Christopher: The Baz Luhrmann film?

Ruth: Yeah, yeah.

Christopher: Was there anything that helped you? You mentioned a friend showing you a bit of Fur Elise. Was there anything … obviously you’re in the formal lessons for the sheet music side of things, but was the playing by ear purely dabbling and teaching yourself, or did you have any resources or teachers or peers that helped you figure that out?

Ruth: Yeah. That was my early days with it. When I got to a high school age, we used to go to church and church teams are a great source of inspiration when you’re playing music. There was a keyboardist at our church, her name was Bridget. I talk about her a lot in my Piano Picnic emails and various correspondence, because I think that everyone should have a Bridget.

My Bridget, she was just the most amazing pianist I had ever seen play from just some letters on a page, which I now know is a lead sheet, but at the time, I was like, “What is she looking at? That is so bizarre. It’s not dots, it’s just letters. It’s really strange to me. It don’t even make words.”

I was very intense as a young pianist. I went through a lot of different teachers. If I didn’t like what they were teaching me, I would change. I said to my mum, I need her to teach me what she knows. My mum hooked it up, and then I had some lessons with Bridget, and it was the best thing ever. She taught me how to play chords, how to play different rhythms with chords, just everything that I now love and obsess about over music.

Christopher: I see. For anyone listening who has heard of a lead sheet but never tried playing from one, could you give a glimpse of what that different was like? Why was it so much more appealing to you to learn the lead sheet way versus the note-by-note notation way?

Ruth: Yeah. I think there’s two advantages of lead sheets. If you already know a song basically in your head, it allows you to pick up how to play it really quickly. A lead sheet is just naming the chords, or with chord symbols, or sometimes they write out the chord names. You can just read those chord names, and with your knowledge of chords, be able to play those, and play those in a rhythm that you basically know the song has, and therefore, be able to play a song I think much quicker than if you were reading that rhythm note-for-note off the page. Yeah.

Christopher: I see. When you started learning the lead sheet method with your friend, it was more a matter of finding a song you liked and constructing your own way of playing it based on the lead sheet. Is that right?

Ruth: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Also, that opens up the whole ball game of being able to play parts within a song that you know that aren’t the piano part as well, which makes things really interesting. With her, it was just chords and playing off a lead sheet, but from there, everything I learned after that point just completely changed the game.

Christopher: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I don’t want to jump the gun too much, but thinking about this phase of your story, I do want to ask you one particular question, which is about the interplay of learning the serious technique of playing piano and learning these more creative, expressive activities on the keyboard. I think adult learners in particular, we often get our knickers in a twist feeling like we should do one or we should do the other. Particularly, if you’re at the very beginning stage of both, I think it can be quite tricky to know how to balance those two. Should you master the technique before you try this playing by ear thing, or should you just go with the playing by ear and the technique will figure itself out?

I’ve always found it interesting that at Piano Picnic, you offer a Super Basics course that addresses the technique side of things. I’d just love to hear a little bit about your experience juggling those two in those early years, and also how you think about it now for say an adult beginner.

Ruth: Technique, I’m not the most technical pianist. I say I did all the recitals and competitions. I wasn’t the one that was taking away the trophy all the time by any means. I think maybe my left hand is still a bit heavy.

I think that the technique, I used to have a love/hate with it because I’m not the type of person that likes to get something perfect. I’d just rather be able to play the song and jam it and have fun with it. That’s what I like to get my students to do as well.

I think the whole, the pursuit of perfection is sort of a different approach to playing your instrument. I also think that to a certain extent, learning the technique of your instrument allows you to have more tricks up your sleeve for when you want to improvise.

For instance, I think a lot of my go-to rhythms when I’m comping with chords or writing a song, are rhythms that I learned from a piece that I learned at some point. I think the balance is good, a little bit of technique, and a lot of learning by ear.

Christopher: Very good. Yeah. I think that’s a really good way of putting it. I was thinking that this week, myself and my own musical life, I was returning to playing bass a little bit. I was just sitting down and playing what I felt like playing, but I was quickly conscious that my fingers were not as fluid as they once were on base, and my left hand threading technique was not quite up to it, which meant, even though I knew which notes to play, and I knew exactly what I wanted to play, my left hand just wasn’t quite keeping up. I was thinking, might need to do some scales and exercises and try and get this fluidity back.

Of course, there are ways to make that fun, and maybe we can talk about that a bit later on, but it just really, I think that’s why it stuck in my head to ask you about this, because I think it is a tricky balance sometimes when we feel obliged to do one or excited to do the other, to try and find a way to combine the two and make sure you have the requisite technique to empower you to play by ear.

Ruth: Yeah. I think developing technique, I think my attitude is based on the way that I learned technique when I was younger. There’s so many different things out there now, different resources that you can use to make learning techniques fun. For instance, you mentioned the scales. There’s so many cool apps and backing tracks even within Musical U, and I do backing tracks as well, that you can use to play your scales.

You’re playing scales, but you’re playing along to a funky blues track or something. It’s not as boring as just going, “Duh, duh, duh.” You can make it into something cool. You can reward yourself once you’ve played the scale perfectly. Then you can just jam on the backing track for a while or whatever you want to do.

Christopher: Absolutely, yeah. I was really enjoying a conversation I had recently on the podcast with a pianist called Josh Wright who has a course that digs into piano technique, but he takes it a step further. He’s like, every time you play a scale, you should be consciously working on something more interesting with that, whether it’s dynamics or phrasing or rhythms, you should use it as a vehicle for learning something else. That stuck in my head, because like you, I’m a proponent of this idea that even the technique practice should be musical in some sense, it should feel like playing music. I had never really thought of structuring it in such a conscious way, and I thought that was a really neat way to approach it.

Ruth: Yeah, that is cool.

Christopher: Talk a little bit more about your Super Basics course before we continue with the Ruth Power story. Tell us, how do you approach it? I heard you say something interesting on a podcast episode recently about a modern landscape of learning music. Again, I think this is something that adult beginners often struggle with, is, is it okay to just learn online, or is it okay to study with an app, or should we really be doing it in person with a teacher the way they’ve done it for hundreds of years? I wonder if you could just talk about your Super Basics course in particular, and how you approach this idea of learning with internet resources?

Ruth: Yeah. I think it’s totally reasonable with the piano being such a traditional and very, very old instrument, for us to think that, well, that’s the way it’s always been learned, so that’s the way we must continue to learn it. We’re not playing piano for the same reasons that necessarily people used to play. We’re playing it in different ways as well. It makes sense to me that as technology advances and there’s more fun ways to play the keyboard, things that we can use a keyboard to contribute to as well, with using the keyboard as sort of a mini-instrument that you can plug into your iPad, there’s so many possibilities that I think the learning of the keyboard can also become more contemporary as well.

My approach with Super Basics is that it’s all online, it’s all prerecorded and there’s video lessons and cheat sheets and backing tracks and all that cool stuff. The main thing is that it’s accessible online anytime for anyone in any country whatsoever. You can do it in your own time. Also, the other thing is the lessons are on average two minutes long. You’re consuming new information two minutes at a time, and then I encourage you to stop.

I do this with my in-person students as well. If they sit at the piano bench every day, then I’m happy, even if it’s for two minutes or five minutes. I think it’s the same with learning through my Super Basics course and my Songs By Ear course as well. You’re just making the habit to get on the piano, and you’re just learning from a short lesson, and then the next day you do the same with the new lesson, then you’re building on, every day you’re building on that new information, rather than, the tendency traditionally is to have a weekly lesson, and then jam an hour long practice session the day before your lesson because you feel guilty for not practicing. That’s not the best way to progress in my opinion.

I’ve had loads of students go through Super Basics, and they say they didn’t realize it was that easy to start. It didn’t have to be this big deal basically. Yeah.

Christopher: Fantastic. I’m reminded, there’s a quote I think is often attributed to Mark Twain where he is writing someone a letter and he began by saying, “I would’ve written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.” I think there’s such a skill in condensing something down to be brief.

I think you are particularly good at this, and I’m sure people listening would be surprised to hear that you can have a two minute piano lesson. You are very, very good at this, and I think it really does your students a service, because as you say, they’re probably better off spending two minutes getting familiar with a new concept, and then 10 minutes playing around with that, then it’s a short practice session, they can keep up day after day, and that’s where they’ll really see the progress.

Ruth: Yeah. And you’re just so much more likely to actually keep it up long-term if you’re like, I just have to make two minutes. Even some of the lessons, particularly in the Super Basics course, you don’t even have to have a piano for, but you can start the course and just be watching the videos and going through the cheat sheets, or you can even download a little keyboard app onto your phone, and that’s enough to actually start, which I love because so many people are like, “I want to learn piano. I don’t want to buy one before I’ve started.” That solves that problem a little bit.

Christopher: Very cool. You said something else really important there, which is the difference in how we can learn piano today is mirrored in the different reason we might have for learning piano compared with a traditional, I think that is such an important thing to stop and ask yourself if you’re embarking on learning a new instrument is, what do I actually want this to look like?

We inherit so much in terms of assumptions and expectations, and particularly with piano, because it has such an amazing history in the classical world of note perfect performances and recitals. I’ve met so many people who have clearly just assumed that is what learning piano is, and they have this desire to play the keyboard, but actually if they stopped and asked themselves, probably what they wanted to do was play pop songs, or just sit down and play and make something up. They start lessons with a teacher, the teacher gives them their Hanon and their first Mozart piece, and they’re off and away, and they assume that’s all there is to it.

Ruth: Yeah, yeah. That’s really, those are my people, the people that … even people that maybe don’t realize it just yet, but the realization when you’re like, you know what, I just want to play a song. I just want to write songs, and I just want to compose or improvise, or I want to jam with my mates. I like those people, because I can definitely teach those people a thing or two, yeah.

Christopher: Obviously playing by ear is something we special in teaching at Musical U, and so I’m not going to go as far as to say playing by ear is hard. It doesn’t have to be hard to learn. I am going to say somewhat provocatively, playing piano by ear well is really hard. Relatively speaking, compared to other instruments, piano is quite a tricky one to really master playing by ear. You have this initial experience with your friend Bridget, and you kind of got the hang of figuring things out from a lead sheet. How did you take things on from there? How did your playing by ear learning progress?

Ruth: Yeah. I said that Bridge taught me chords. Prior to that, my learning via poking out the notes to Fur Elise or … it was mostly about melodies and baselines for me, so I was picking out one at a time, and I’m like, ooh, I figured out this melody, I’m pretty cool, which is pretty cool. There came a point when I was introduced to chords that I realized that there was this whole undertone, that sort of … I don’t know, guts of music that I was not getting when I was playing songs by ear.

I didn’t actually learn about chord progressions until I went to university, which is pretty late in life for a musician possibly. When I did and I noticed that you could get chords to do things for you basically, you can order chords around and be like, “Hey, you do this, and you send us back home and give us this feeling,” and they’re like, “Okay, got it.”

Once I realized that, I thought that was a really cool thing, and that’s how most songs work. A songwriter has put them chords together to tell a story or make you feel something. That was opened up, me being able to figure out songs based on the effect that they had on me, if that makes sense. Yeah, it’s the sort of listening, internalizing what that listening is making you feel, or what feeling it’s given you, put with your training skills, and that’s how you can play a better version of it on the piano. Yeah.

Christopher: Very cool. In practical terms, did that mean you were no longer starting from a lead sheet, you were going purely by ear?

Ruth: Yes. Able to, yes. Sometimes I still go back. It’s being able to, and having that skill is worthwhile, mainly for the fact that you’re able to figure out a song without the internet, which is always a good thing. Not every song has a lead sheet, and not every song has sheet music. In a way, you’re opening up your possibilities as a musician to play anything that you can think of.

Christopher: Got you. When you said there that at university you learned about chord progressions, could you explain a bit more what you learned? What were they teaching you that in your head suddenly helped you with playing by ear?

Ruth: Yeah. It’s harmony really. The functions of various chords and where they can lead you and bring you back from all that sort of thing. Yeah. Basically, you add that to your baselines and your melodies, and you’ve got a full arrangement, which sounds really impressive when someone else hears.

I think that’s what Songs By Ear, which is my course, tries to tie together as a little bit of chord knowledge, a little bit of how to find a baseline, and a bit of how to find a melody, and then putting that together in a way that gives you options for which rhythms to play with those chords, and ideas of how to riff further with a melody, and basically building an arrangement for it for any song that you want to work out and play.

Christopher: Great. Yeah. This is kind of the answer to my provocative question about piano being harder than other instruments to play by ear, and it’s why we invited you a while back to come and give a master class on arranging by ear, because if you’re playing say a trumpet solo by ear, you’re trying to figure out some cool jazz solo and you want to play it by ear, essentially what we found is you need to learn the ear skills for pitch recognition, so some kind of interval recognition or solfa approach so that you know what the note pitches are.

Most musicians most of the time can pick up the rhythm instinctively by ear, they can mimic back the rhythm fairly easily, even if they wouldn’t be able to transcribe it, write it down in notation. That kind of pitch recognition is enough to get you going playing a melody by ear.

As you just painted a picture of, on keyboard, even melody plus bass line is going to sound a bit like a skeleton. It’s going to sound a bit empty. Throwing some chords in there, just playing block chords on quarter notes is not going to sound too amazing. You really do need more of a tool kit, more of a palette, and the corresponding chord recognition skills to make it work.

Ruth: Yeah, totally. You’ve just succinctly said it like I couldn’t.

Christopher: Well, I think part of why I was able to is because I was looking again at your Songs By Ear course, and because you structure it so nicely there, you have exercises to help people get just the melody down, and just tune their ear into the bass line.

One thing I wanted to pick up on there is you have them hum as a way to find those notes. Could you talk a little bit about that? How you have your students use their voice to help them figure out the notes by ear.

Ruth: Yeah. I do with my in-person students as well, despite them being sometimes not so keen to be singing in front of me, I try. Basically, it’s the idea of … when we know how a song goes in our head, and we’re like, I’m going to work that out on the piano, you go to the piano, and you start playing notes. As soon as you do that, it’s all over in a way, because whatever it was in your head is gone, because now the louder noise is of course the piano, the piano is going to be louder than whatever was happening in your head.

The idea of humming a note is hearing that in your head, humming it out loud, so that when you press a key on the piano, the note that you’re humming is as dominant as the piano note, so that you can actually try as hard as you can to hold the note that you’re humming, and not be swayed either way by the note that you randomly find on the piano, and that way you can start playing a few more notes, and eventually get to the one that you’re humming. That’s the idea behind that.

Christopher: That is a terrific answer. I’m going to take this little clip from our interview, and immediately give it to some of the students in our foundations course, because this subject has come up a lot, the singing. In the foundations course, we’re teaching the Kodaly approach, and there’s a lot of singing to train your ear.

People have been asking, “Is it okay to sit at my keyboard or sit with my guitar, and find the notes that way?”
My answer has been, “Well, not really. You should do the singing thing, because it helps you internalize it, and it means you’ll know the notes and then play them, rather than always relying on trial and error to find the right notes.”

That I think is a nice complementary answer to what you just said, which is fantastic, which is, as soon as you play a note on the keyboard, your audiation, your mental image of what you’re trying to play by ear is completely shaken, it’s completely ruined.

I know a lot of people watching this, listening to this, will have had this experience where as soon as they play that first note to try and find the right note, they’re like, “Wait. I know it’s wrong, but where was the right one again?” You can immediately lose your sense of the tonal center, you can lose the melody you were trying to remember. I think that’s a really fantastic point, and an important one.

If it’s not a matter of just sitting and trial and error, could you explain a bit more about how you get them in to finding the notes of the melody or the bass line by ear? Is there a lot of drilling interval recognition or that kind of thing? How do you approach it?

Ruth: I actually haven’t stepped into interval recognition yet within the course. It’s somewhere that I’ve wanted to expand to. I think to keep my lessons short, the course starts out here, and then it comes out and I try and get to these two minute lessons, so I haven’t gotten to interval recognition as yet.

At the moment, it’s the humming method for finding the melody. It’s following, we go through a lesson specifically about following the bassline, also using the humming method, and then using the bassline as a starting point to find what the chords are. It’s kind of that sort of style with humming the melody, then go to the bassline, use the bassline to find the chords. Once you’ve got the chords, then that’s where all the fun begins and you can start trying out some different rhythms and things like that.

Christopher: Very cool. Well, I was asking partly to make sure we made the point that you don’t need to do a lot of interval recognition. One thing I really admire about your course is that you get people doing this without them needing to master a ton of ear training.

I think a lot of people who go down the route of trying to play by ear discover something like interval recognition or solfa and while those are fantastic tools, well worth learning, they do not need to be step one. You don’t need to master all of that before you start playing by ear.

I really love the way your course, it just gets people doing it, and I think that’s something we don’t have enough of in music education is, just try it, see what happens, and you can improve your skills and add these tools as you go, but don’t feel like you need to master all of that theoretical abstract skill before you sit down and actually do the thing you want to do.

Ruth: Yeah. I’m a massive advocate for being able to play a song as soon as possible. To me, that’s biggest when I try and get people through the course, I want them to learn their first song by ear straight out the gate. You’ve got to have that quick win to realize that you can do it, and then have the motivation to maybe go further and do your solfege and all that.

I think a worthy point is that despite the fact that I didn’t learn about chord progressions and chord functions until university, I also didn’t learn about interval recognition and solfege until university either. I was just sort of a pet pianist who liked playing songs by ear. I think that says something about the volume of, even with the skills I had, was able to learn lots of songs and enjoy playing by ear.

I definitely wouldn’t rush people into having to learn everything there is to know. Yeah.

Christopher: Yeah. I think something else you touched on there was that your course is about getting them to playing their first song as quickly as possible. Your course is not playing by ear, it’s not piano playing by ear, it’s songs by ear. You do structure the whole course as let’s play a song.

Could you talk a little bit about what goes into that? We’ve mentioned melody and bassline and putting some chords on. What more is there to having a song you could perform by ear, versus just knowing a few of the notes in the melody?

Ruth: Yeah. I think it’s having, as you were saying before, having those sort of tools in the toolbox, knowing your basic chords, how they work, how to recognize them, being able to pick out your melody and your bassline, and then having the tools to be able to take chords and be able to play along with the rhythms.

For instance, if someone was like, “Let’s play this song,” and there was a drummer, then you’d be able to play with the drummer and the rhythm that he would be playing. It’s that sort of idea of maybe playing with a band, or even if playing solo on a piano, being able to replicate the idea of a band, having that rhythm there.

Another thing that we go into in the course is breaking down riffs. By a riff, I mean … quite often with piano songs, particularly ones on the radio that have a really pretty intro, you know, piano part or something like that, or maybe in the chorus there’s a really recognizable bit that sounds a bit complicated, and that’s always the bit that people want to learn, because it’s the kind of cool or complicated bit.

What I try and get people to recognize is that even those complicated bits are still basically, we strip it down. It’s teaching people, there’s a whole chapter in Songs By Ear about how to break down those riffs into their chords and make it seem easy in your head so it’s easy to actually play.

Christopher: Got you. That was something I loved in your masterclass at Musical U on arranging by ear, was that point that if what the listener is conscious of is the hook or the guitar riff or something, that’s something you want to factor in to your arrangement. Your arrangement doesn’t necessarily start from melody plus chorus plus chord progressions. It can start from whatever the list there is thinking, oh, that is the catchy bit of the song or the distinctive part of the song.

Ruth: Yeah. Also, I mean, especially, as you said, especially if it’s in a different instrument, there’s nothing … I get really frustrated, especially when I see sheet music for a piano arrangement of a song, and that piano arrangement has got the melody and it’s got the chord.

Then there’s that cool layers like, dun, dun, dun, dun, guitar riff or something. It’s the piano solo arrangement, but it hasn’t got that thud in it. It’s like, what? That’s the funnest part of the song. If I don’t have a guitarist with me, you can bet that I’m going to be playing that. It’s thinking about that sort of thing as well.

Christopher: Yeah. That maybe touches on something else I wanted to ask you about, which is … we’ve talked about how your course takes an ear-first approach. You are having people rely on their own ear to figure this stuff out, but not in the kind of formal structured, I am doing ear training, I have mastered these intervals kind of a way. It’s much more, not instinctive, but it’s much more tied to their understanding of the music they hear and their own judgment about what the notes are or what the important bits are.

You’ve built on this in an ear bootcamp course that really focuses on what we might call active listening and waking up your ear. I’d love to hear you a talk a bit about that, and how you think it relates to this overall skill of playing or arranging by ear.

Ruth: Yeah. It was through the process of doing the Songs By Ear course, and I actually, as I said, I had thought it was going to be this huge thing with their training and everything. Then I realized that I could actually get people to play a song with this much information, which was the major driving force behind the idea of Piano Picnic actually.
It was after I had put the course together that I realized that if I really am talking about taking people from zero piano experience, which I do say, I actually need to get them just listening properly. Anyone that’s not a musician, and even so many musicians, we are used to listening to music as a background activity. We’re used to going shopping, and just being musical at the mall or in the grocery store. We’re used to having the music while we’re doing the vacuuming.

Probably the majority of the music we listen to is just passive in the background. Even when we have headphones and we’re only listening to music, sometimes we’re not even thinking about what we’re hearing. There’s this sort of initial step before learning by ear where we need to actually just bridge the pathway between our ears and our brain. That’s why my ear bootcamp is. It’s daily lessons, daily training, I do a live video and some assignments. Assignments is the wrong word, that sounds like school work, but some activities.

We go step by step from complete passive listening, through to every day making new observations about the music we hear. By the end of the bootcamp, I send people on with a new appreciation for the music that they listen to every day.

Christopher: Terrific. I think this is a big part of why I was so keen to bring you on as our new Resident Pro for piano at Musical U. We’re sadly saying goodbye to Sarah Campbell who’s been our pro up to this point. She’s getting busy focusing on other projects.

I was so delighted when you agreed to come on board, because what you just described is, I think, such an important outlook on how to approach playing by ear. If you go online and look for play piano by ear, you’ll find a lot of stuff that immediately puts you on the keyboard, trying to trial and error your way. It assumes you have good technique.

There’s so much that’s wrong with it from my perspective, compared with an approach that says, let’s begin by waking up our ears, and making sure we’re hearing what we should be hearing, and listening to music as a musician would, and then let’s start deciding for ourselves where are the right notes, and using our voice to find the right notes, and giving ourselves the tools without rushing to master every abstract skill.

I think it’s such an elegant and effective outlook. I’m sure that’s why you have so many happy students with your Songs By Ear course, because you’ve made it not just bite sized and manageable, but actually effective and delivering the result of being able to play a song by ear, which is no small thing. That’s something most musicians can’t do.

Talk a little bit about coming on board at Musical U? We’ve been so delighted to have you as our new resident pro for piano. What kind of stuff are you working on there?

Ruth: Wow. I mean, thank you for all those lovely compliments right after each other. That made em feel really excited. I was like, yeah. [inaudible 00:38:27]. Coming aboard Musical U has been really cool, and I’ve just been so excited about it, because it allows me to reach even more people, and I just am so excited to be involved with Musical U with anything.

As you say, we had the same sort of, a really similar approach and a really similar attitude to non-exclusivity in music, and everyone can have a go, and everyone can do it, they just need those keys to the city. It makes me sad when people think that playing by ear or being a musician is just this thing on the other side of a brick wall, and they’ll never get there. I think that Musical U is just opening the door and saying, “Come in, everybody. We can all learn by ear.” I just think that’s so cool.

At the moment, I am working on the December resource pack, and that is about chord progressions I think. I’m actually filming it tomorrow, but I wrote it last week, so I’ve been concentrating on one thing at a time. I think it’s about I–V–vi–IV minor chord progressions, and the different things we can do with that, which there’s so many different things. I got sent the topic, and I was just like, wow, this is a can of worms.

Christopher: Well, for anyone listening or watching who hasn’t come across this idea of resident pros before, at Musical U, we have a lot of training modules on different topics. For example, we have modules that teach you the ear skills for recognizing a I–V–vi–IV chord progression.

Where our resident pros come into the picture is developing video tutorials for specific instruments. Ruth is working on piano for us. We also have guitar, bass, and singing. The idea is to bring it to life on the instrument, and give you the specifics to paly around with those ideas on your instrument.

Ruth, I’ve really enjoyed your videos so far for how you bring that creativity and enjoyment to it, which is really what we’re most looking for in those resource packs, is to bring it to life in a way that makes it all fun. When you’re just looking at a web page and reading or doing interactive listening exercises, there’s the danger it gets a bit dry or repetitive. We love how the resource packs help people get hands on with their instruments and bring it to life.

Ruth: Yeah. It’s awesome. I love it, because it allows me to pick the fun bit and teach that without the responsibility of making sure they have all the background info, which is what you guys do, so it’s great. It’s a great partnership.

Christopher: Tell us a bit more about Piano Picnic. The website is pianopicnic.com. Where can people go to learn more about your Songs By Ear course, or the seven day bootcamp we talked about before?

Ruth: Yes. Songs By Ear is pianopicnic.com/songsbyear. You might want to say Piano Picnic for me, because I know it sounds like pocnoc when I say it with my accent.

Christopher: I am certainly not the person to go for a clear accent. No one has a clue where I come from. Picnic, P-I-C-N-I-C.com.

Ruth: Perfect. Wonderful. I’m going to take that soundbite and put it on everything. For the ear bootcamp, which is run periodically, I should say Songs By Ear is only open for enrollments a few times a year, but you can sign up to the wait list to come on board the next time it comes through. To tie you over, I do regular ear bootcamps. They were five days, but now they’re seven days, I’ve just extended them. It’s free, and as I said, you get all those daily lessons. The link to sign up is my.pianopicnic.com, so just the my in front of it, /ear-bootcamp.

Christopher: Cool. We will save everyone the careful typing and make sure we have direct links to those in the show notes of this episode.

Ruth, it’s been such a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I would love if we could send people away with a big piece of advice for playing by ear. There’s been a lot of good tactical and mindset stuff in our conversation today. If you had to send them away with one thing that could help them, what would you say?

Ruth: It reminds me of some advice that I actually received when I was quite young, and I saw a guy that was playing by ear performing. I was like, “That’s amazing. Can you give me some advice?” He said, “Just keep playing. Keep playing a lot, and one day you will be a natural player.”

My advice to everyone today is that that’s bad advice. You can’t just keep playing and keep learning pieces and just hope to one day … I mean, it would take a lot of time to one day just be able to play by ear. It’s something that you need to learn about how music works, you need to build your ear skills and your listening skills and all those things that we talked about today. Those are all things that you have to work on in order to gain that skill.

Christopher: I think that’s fantastic advice to leave people with. The bad advice you were given I think is all too often given or assumed, and it doesn’t have to be a lifelong process if you actually give it the attention it deserves. I’m glad we finished with that.

Ruth, it’s been such a pleasure. I knew it would be interesting to hear your own backstory and how this perspective on teaching playing by ear had developed, where it had come from, and it certainly has been fascinating. Just a big thank you for coming on the show today and sharing all of this fascinating info on playing by ear.

Ruth: Thank you so much for having me. It’s my favorite subject. Honestly, I’d talk about it all day.

The post Making Music Learning a Picnic, with Ruth Power appeared first on Musical U.

It’s no exagerration to say there were a couple of dozen really meaty ideas he shared, and everyone who attended found plenty to help accelerate their music learning. We’re excited to be adding the recording to our masterclass library inside Musical U for members.

Today we wanted to share just one small nugget with you, Marc’s idea of “hacking habituation”. As you’ll be hearing, this led on to some interesting discussion of the emotion of musical expression and mastering the inner game too…

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• Marc’s podcast interview: Emotion and Efficiency, with Marc Gelfo
• Modacity practice app

Transcript

Hi, this is Christopher Sutton, founder of Musical U, and welcome to the Musicality Podcast.

This weekend we had an absolutely phenomenal masterclass with Marc Gelfo, the creator of the Modacity practice app, all about accelerating your music learning.

Marc packed a ton into his masterclass, from highly practical, tactical ideas about how you practice, to some quite deep emotional and mindset guidance. It’s no exagerration to say there were a couple of dozen really meaty ideas he shared, and everyone who attended found plenty to help accelerate their music learning. We’re excited to be adding the recording to our masterclass library inside Musical U for members.

Today I wanted to share just one small nugget with you, Marc’s idea of “hacking habituation”. As you’ll be hearing, this led on to some interesting discussion of the emotion of musical expression and mastering the inner game too.

You’re going to hear my brief intro to Marc, then a section of his presentation, and then a bit of the subsequent Q&A where Marc went into more detail.

I hope you’ll enjoy this little taster of Marc’s masterclass and find it useful for applying in your own musical life to accelerate your music learning.

My name’s Christopher Sutton and this is the Musicality Podcast from Musical U.

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Christopher: So the topic of today’s masterclass is accelerated music learning. And I’m particularly excited about that because we did a survey recently. Both of our email list and Musical U members. And it was astonishing how many of you called out practice as a hot topic for you. It’s something you were struggling with. And this came up in the sense that people were saying they didn’t have enough time to practice. Or they were putting in time, but they didn’t feel like they were really getting results from it. Or some people saying they sit down to practice, but they’re just not really sure what to be working on. And they wander around, and go back and forth, and it all feels very ineffective. If I had to sum it all up in one word, it was people frustrated that their music practice did not seem to be effective.

And that’s why I’m particularly excited to have Marc with us today. Marc Gelfo is an expert in just this topic. He is a neuro symphonic hornist, which is not a phrase you hear every day. And he has a passion for holistic health and self-actualization. He’s the man behind Modacity, which is a popular music practice app you may well have heard of, which is designed to organize, focus, and track you progress with music learning. So this is kind of the ideal technology companion to somebody who really wants to make the most of their music practice time. I had the great pleasure of interviewing Marc last year for the Musicality Podcast. And sorry, I should be polite and say Marc, please do just say a quick hello to everyone before I ramble on.

Marc: Hello everybody. I’m Marc Gelfo. I also deeply care about effectiveness in music practice just like you. And have been spending at least 20 years, 25 years thinking about it at this point. It’s a great pleasure and honor to be on here. I really enjoy what Chris is doing in Musical U and I’m looking forward to sharing everything I’m gonna share today.

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Marc: So that is a time hack that a lot of people are not aware of because I think they want to do more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. In fact, the slower, bigger, stronger is the way to go.

Okay, and finally hacking habituation. This is a really fun one. Habituation simply means that you get used to things that are in your environment. Like most of you are not aware of the feeling of your shirt, or your shoes, or socks, or whatever you’re wearing. I know it’s a Skype masterclass so no assumptions. But that is something that you’re not aware of. You habituate to it. Or you habituate to the fact that you’re breathing air. Well, when we practice, we habituate to our environment, we habituate to our sound. As a french horn player, I’ve always got the bell on the right side of my body. And one thing that I do is I just play reverse. And it sounds so different when the bell is in my left ear. It’s really weird.

Now as far as learning goes and accelerating music mastery, we can actually leverage this fact. This is a major time leverage point. There’s a bunch of environmental learning studies that show that you recall things better in the environment that you learn them in. So if you study for a quiz on a beach, then you will recall and perform better on that quiz at the beach than you would in the forest. Or orange classroom versus green classroom, you will do better remembering those things in the context that you learned them in. And that can be scary for us because we rarely perform in the places that we practice.

So one way that you can hack this and hack this habituation is actually to change your environment and make sure that the environmental learning effect only applies to your internal environment. And one simple do it for the rest of your life tip that will really change things around is to change location in your practice room. So you’re looking forward. You’ve got 360 degrees of rotation. Just rotate yourself 90 degrees in between reps. If you play four different scales, play them facing north, south, east, and west. And what that will do is give you a different environmental context and avoid habituating. It’s a really, really powerful, simple time hack.

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Christopher So there was a lot of interest in the hacking habituation. I think that was a new idea to lots of people and there were some comments about that. Marc, you did say you could speak a little more to how to change your location. But in particular, we had a question from Kayla and Amy who are both pianists. One of whom plays the grand piano wondering what is in it for them.

Marc: Look, your environment is so rich. The inner environment is one place where you can do that too. And one way that I hack habituation is to change my inner environment, especially on Thursdays, which is emotion practice day for me. And on Thursdays, I have a whole inventory of emotions like anger, joy, calm, resentment. And I will, like an actor, I will go … I play emotion bingo. And I’ll just land on one. And oh, okay, peace. And I’ll play the scale peacefully. And then I flush the inner environment. And then okay, shame. What would this sound like if I’m feeling incredibly ashamed? And that trains a certain resilience.

I want to actually go into this for a second. I think it’s really important. I noticed maybe five, six years ago that I was feeling sometimes a lot of shame in the concert hall. Something wouldn’t go the way that I wanted and I’d feel ashamed. Then I started to notice as I listened to myself more that I could tell when I was feeling ashamed and that had a certain sound. Or I could tell when I was feeling shy and that had a different sound. Or I could tell when I was analyzing as I was playing. And that had a certain sound. And you could hear it. You could hear what it sounded like when I was analyzing. You hear what it sounded like when I was managing my technique. You could hear what it sounded like when I was in an emotional flow state. And when you learn to listen that way, you never go back. You never go back to just saying, “Oh, yeah. That was the right note in a good tone.”

So the reason that I state this is because well, you don’t change those kinds of patterns over night. For better or worse, shame in the concert hall, fear, anxiety, worry, a lot of us have them. And actually, I don’t have a lot of that these days. But five years ago or 10 years ago I did. And so I practiced. What I did was I practiced cultivating those emotions in a safe place, in the practice room. Understanding what they sound like and accepting them. And that is the different way to practice habituation. In a sense, it’s actually to get used to some of these challenging emotions by cultivating them, practicing them, seeing what they sound like, changing the inner landscape around, and always having something fresh in your environment whether it’s inner or external.

Christopher: Wonderful. There were two different and equally valuable answers there, I think. One is that your environment doesn’t need to be where you physically are. It can be what physically is around you. And obviously, even if you’re sat at a grand piano, you can put different objects in sight. You can change the lighting in the room. Presumably, you can change your environment in a number of ways. But I love that you took it deeper and talked about the inner state. And I guess that touches too on your mastery of state and emotional state when practicing too. It’s part of that being very conscious of what’s going on inside.

Marc: Yeah, real quick, as a pianist too, you probably want to get up from the piano bench and to go play table piano at the kitchen table and stuff sometimes too. That can be a way to figure out what’s going on here that’s not the piano’s fault.

The post About Hacking Habituation appeared first on Musical U.