Author: musicalitywrld

Educational songs aren’t a new idea but Music Notes brings a really fresh take to it, and their songs have been shown to improve test scores in non-music subjects as well as encouraging more responsible attitudes towards schoolwork and peer support for healthier living initiatives.

We must confess that when we first came across Music Notes we thought it was really cool – but we weren’t certain it was a good fit for this podcast… Because it’s a fascinating musical project – but is it really about musicality? Well, as we dug in we realised that yes, there are some really interesting questions about musicality here that we were excited to pick LaMar’s brains on. You’ll find there are big learning points in this interview for any musician wanting to connect more deeply with music.

We talk about:

• Why music is so powerful as a channel for learning
• The challenges of writing a song that has an impact beyond just entertainment
• How LaMar got started freestyle rapping – and a simple way you can try it yourself

We’re really impressed with the work LaMar’s doing with his team at Music Notes and it was cool to hear his thoughts on how their projects are influencing young minds both for their musical development and their education and upbringing outside of music. We all have a tendency to get stuck in the weeds and the nitty-gritty of learning music, so we hope this episode will do for you what it did for us, which was to serve as a great reminder of the magic of music and just how impactful it can be.

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Links and Resources

• Music Notes Online
• Music Notes on Facebook
• Mr. Q-U-E’s instructional music videos

Transcript

Mr. Q-U-E: Hey what’s up everybody, it’s Mr. Q-U-E from Music Notes, and you’re listening to the Musicality Podcast.

Christopher: Welcome to the show LaMar, also known as Mr. Q-U-E, thank you for joining us today.

Mr. Q-U-E: Thanks so much for having me Christopher, it’s a pleasure to be here this morning.

Christopher: I’ve had such a good time studying up on you guys and watching your videos online. I can only imagine what it’s like live, because the kind of math concerts you put on are like nothing I’ve seen before. You’re such a compelling performer, and I’m really keen to talk about all of it, but before we dive into Music Notes, I’d love to learn more about you as a musician. Because you are the musician co-founder of this project. You wrote a lot of, well the early material, and now you I believe have a collaborator. But where did you come from as a musician, how did you get started in music?

Mr. Q-U-E: Well, my background in music is an interesting one. So as a young child at the tender age of five, I’m proud of this story, but I’m also a little bit ashamed of it because I became a bit of a thief in the process. But my sister, she got a keyboard for Christmas that she never played, and it just sat in her room. One day I just went and I took it and brought it into my room and just started playing and I had a relative, my older cousin, he came by and he taught me a few songs.

He taught me chopsticks and a Stevie Wonder song, I wish I could remember, maybe Overjoyed or something like that. I would just practice those songs until I got them. So that’s pretty much how I got started as a youngster. Then as I got older, there were songs I would hear on the radio that I would enjoy and I’d try to play them. You know played a little bit of trumpet and clarinet as a kid, but let that go pretty quickly and stuck to piano. So that’s how my actual playing began and then my songwriting and rapping is like a whole nother story.

Christopher: Cool, well let’s stay in those early years for a moment and was your household musical? You mentioned your sister had the keyboard to begin with. Were your parents musicians, did they encourage you in music?

Mr. Q-U-E: My family comes from the church background. So a lot of my family either sung in the choir or played an instrument in the choir ’cause my grandfather had a church. So my dad was the drummer at the church, and aunts and uncles played all the instruments. So I saw them playing, I guess, I don’t know if it was more nature or if it was my environment that led me to stealing that keyboard.

Something happened where I was just drawn to his music. My parents they never put me in lessons or anything. I give them a hard time, even to this day, I said how can you see your five year old child playing an instrument and not put him in a class. I noticed I make them feel a little too bad about it, so I stopped giving them a hard time. But I didn’t really have a push externally, it all pretty much came from within.

Christopher: Gotcha, you mentioned Stevie Wonder, and you also mentioned you were into rap and songwriting. What kind of music were you surrounded by growing up?

Mr. Q-U-E: Growing up, a lot of hip hop and gospel and ’80s and ’90s R’n’B.

Christopher: Gotcha, and when did you first start to think you could write your own stuff rather than just learning chopsticks or Stevie Wonder?

Mr. Q-U-E: That started in middle school. I would be a very irresponsible pre-teen and I got like a daily allowance for school, $4.00 to catch the bus to school and home and buy lunch. On some days I would spend all my money at school and I would have to walk home. I’m gonna sound like one of those old guys, I walked five miles uphill to school and five miles uphill back home. But I wouldn’t have bus money, so I’d walk a few miles back home, and I had my best friend that would walk with me.

To pass time, because this was pre-internet and cell phone, I would rap, whatever was happening at school that day, I pretty much would summarize the day as a free style walking home with my best friend Jason. So that’s when I realized that I could rap and then I decided to write my first song, maybe a few months later, and oh my god, my friends gave me the hardest time for that.

They told me it was so bad and laughed at me, I pretty much quit writing until another friend of mine got me back into it. But middle school was when I really got into the actual like songwriting and becoming an instrument myself opposed to like playing it.

Christopher: So we haven’t really, I don’t think we’ve ever talked about free style rap on the show before. We talked a lot about improvisation and a little bit about scat, but not otherwise vocal rap. Free styling is such an unusual skill in the world of music, think just because you’re not just coming up with the rhythms and some cases the pictures. But you are coming up with lyrics on the spot.

I know we’re going back a little bit, think back to when you started doing that, you said you realized you could rap. On day one, when you were walking home with your friend, when for the first time you tried it, did it just kind of come out of you, did you have any kind of sense of how does someone free style? Did you have any kind of rhymes you knew at work or, how did you get going?

Mr. Q-U-E: Great question, I think for whatever reason I’m more expressive through my music and through art. I will share a thought musically before I’ll just sit down and have a conversation with somebody. I can’t pinpoint exactly how it felt or what I drew from for the lyric, but I do remember it as just being so free flowing its natural and it was just easy for me to say. I know these are all the things that happened today. As I’m rapping, I’m just one step ahead of myself thinking of what that rhyming word is gonna be to connect the previous thought.

It’s something that I’ve never really be able to explain like, the way I want to, but it’s just something that kind of came to me. The more I did it, the easier it became. I’ve noticed there are times when I fall back from it and then it gets a little harder for me. So it’s definitely a skill that, seeing how I’ve digressed and have also gotten better at it through my work is something that I think can be learned from anybody through either practice or teaching training, you know if free styling is something people wanna do.

Christopher: Yeah, so if someone came to you and, as a teacher and performing musician yourself, you’ve probably had teenage kids come up to you and ask, how would you get started with free styling, or how could you improve your odds of getting going with it if it’s a bit intimidating to you.

Mr. Q-U-E: My step one is a word challenge, it’s a challenge that you do where you just give somebody a word and tell them to rap to it. So when I’m doing it with amateur free stylers, I’ll always given them rhyming words.

So the first row I’ll turn out as cat, then I’ll draw a bat, then a hat. So that they’ll hear the word and then they can just rap to it. As they grow in their skillset, I’ll start throwing out three syllable words that aren’t rhyming, then it’s up to them to come up with their own system of how to put everything together.

Christopher: I see, that’s really interesting, well I’m definite gonna go away and try hand the cat, bat and rat, I’m not gonna do it here on the spot. But you mentioned that did lead onto songwriting for you, and the first song was a bit of a bomb.

Mr. Q-U-E: Oh it was terrible, it was awesome to me.

Christopher: Can you remember what it was about?

Mr. Q-U-E: I really wish I could. The only thing I remember, and I probably blocked it from my memory because my friends made it so traumatic for me. But EZ-E, NWA had a famous line, rolling down the street in my 64. For some reason, that is how I decided to start my rap, and that’s the only line I remember from the song. If I started off with that, and then I started doing my own thing, and they laughed at me, told me never do it again.

I almost listened. Luckily I had a friend in high school that kind of got me back into my writing and recording. But I tell even my students and people I work with till it’s day, please don’t let friends and people that don’t see your vision distract you. Because I love music, but just being a young impressionable kid, that negative energy from my friends really kind of like threw me off for a second.

Christopher: Yeah for sure, I wanna come back to that because of the role you play now in other kids’ musical journeys. How did you go forward from there. You had that discouraging experience with your friends, but you said it didn’t completely stop you.

Mr. Q-U-E: It didn’t completely stop me because of my family. I was still going to church, we’re still singing in the choir, we’re still doing our music thing on the side. So that’s where I was able to continue to hone in on my skillset and build up in that regard. Because if it weren’t for my family doing a lot of music we did on weekends and stuff like that, I probably would have completely stopped. So it really was church and family that kept me grounded and help me remember, oh yeah, I am good at this and this is fun. So it’s not all about impressing your friends all the time.

Christopher: In that period, from writing your first song and getting that bad feedback, to the point where you started music notes. Did you have in your head, you wanted to use do something in music. I’m still trying to work out a musical trajectory.

Mr. Q-U-E: Not at all, I’ve never imagined myself being a musician as far as professionally playing or performing. I thought that I would be playing sports. I was really into sports, and at one point I thought I’d be a lawyer. Honestly everything I’m doing now, I never imagined as a child that I would be doing. Never thought I would be a musician, it all was a part of a plan that was setting out for me that I didn’t know I would have to fulfill.

But growing up it was just I think typical kid stuff, just sports and video games and I just wanna make money doing what I love.

Christopher: And you went into teaching, not the obvious choice for someone wanting to make money doing what they love.

Mr. Q-U-E: Exactly.

Christopher: So how did that come to be?

Mr. Q-U-E: Oh man, my wife is gonna get me for telling this story. But it’s the truth, so my ex-girlfriend in college, she was the one that convinced me to teach. So early on I started out in elementary school tutoring, and I had a teacher very early on say, you know what LaMar, you’re going to be a mathematician, I didn’t even know what that meant. I was in fourth, fifth grade tutoring and helping out second and third grade classes.

So I guess that was like my first understanding that I liked working with kids in teaching. But in college, I would go home and tutor little cousins who were struggling in school. So when I came back from one the vacations, my ex told me that I should become a teacher.

She had a background of teachers in her family, now she’s like, oh LaMar you would be a great teacher, I see you working with your little cousins during their vacations, I think you should change your major. I was a business major. So the start of my junior year, I totally just dropped business and went into education based off of her suggestion.

Christopher: It wasn’t music education right, you went into math?

Mr. Q-U-E: No, elementary education, it wasn’t even math. Elementary, my dream grade was like fourth or fifth grade and I’ve never taught that. I always done secondary middle and high school. But I went into elementary education because I wanted to make my impact early and start a solid foundation for students so as they progress up into middle, high school and college, they will have something solid to lean on in case they have any doubts or fall off.

Christopher: Gotcha, so you graduated, you went into teaching, at what point did you meet your co-founder, Jimmy Pascascio and dream up Music Notes?

Mr. Q-U-E: This is where the Music Notes story begins. So I graduated, went into teaching, I was overly confident. I think I had some level of false confidence where I thought I would go in and the kids are just gonna like me just because I’m me and I’m young and I like me so they’re gonna like me. That totally wasn’t the case. So the first few weeks of school, I’m teaching an eighth grade class and they’re like, Mr. Queen, your class is boring.

I said, what, like no my class is turned up, we having fun, we doing these notes, y’all just need to get with my program, and I had a student [inaudible 00:13:43], she recently graduated from college, still keep in touch with her on Facebook, I love her. She started a revolt in the class and she said Mr. Queen, your class is boring and if you don’t rap, we not listening. Is said, no, I’m not gonna rap for you, this is school, you don’t do stuff like this in school.

Christopher: Did they have an inkling that you had a musical background, that you had done rap in the past?

Mr. Q-U-E: That’s the crazy part, I never told them I did music. We just met, we’d only been in class together for a few weeks, maybe a month. So this part of the story is harder for me to tell now because of this artist new reputation. But they were like, Mr. Queen you look like Kanye West and your class is boring so you need to rap. This was in 2008, so Kanye was ultra popular.

Christopher: On top of the world.

Mr. Q-U-E: So after they begged and begged for like two weeks non-stop, they asked every single day. I said, you know what, let me just try it ’cause they were failing, I was stressed out over being called boring, like my ego took a huge hit. I said, you know what, let me just try this out. So I had a beat, so me and my cousins were working on a track, and I’d hijack the beat.

I stole that beat and I started working on this Slope Intercept song because that was my current lesson plan. Wrote Slope Intercept, went back and performed it for them, and it was a huge hit. After I performed it, teachers started hearing about it, and a teacher asked me to perform it at the holiday party. So at this point, a few months had gone by, I had a couple songs, but the teacher asked me to perform the first song, Slope Intercept, at the holiday party.

So I did it, and when I finished the song I sat down next to my boy Jimmy, my business partner, and he just kind of leans over and was like, hey you wanna make a video for the song, get the students in there. I was like yeah, let’s do it, and that’s how it all began, that one video just changed everything.

Christopher: Yeah, so I’m sure after hearing this interview or watching it, our audience is going to run off and watch all of your videos and check out MusicNotesonline.com. But most of them probably haven’t yet heard or seen your rap videos. Can you give them a taste of what Slope Intercept is all about. I should ask first, I don’t wanna take a massive detour into math, but for someone who grew up in the UK, that phrase, actually slogan is not super familiar to me. So can you just explain like what were you teaching in class that the kids wanted you to rap about, and what was that track like?

Mr. Q-U-E: So, Slope Intercept is just graphing a linear equation and the form y equals mx plus b, because there’s a bunch of different formats you can graph an equation. You can use point slope form, slope intercept form, you can just use points. So we were working on slope intercept at that particular time and that’s just using the y intercept and the slope to graph a line. It’s the standard format, it’s the more popular.

So that’s what we were doing, and the rap, it was just very straightforward. Like, let’s talk about slope intercept. I don’t mind if you interject, just don’t disrespect. You say you got a question for me, yes, what’s y equals mx plus b, this is a line and function form, it’s also slope intercept for it. Half y’all like, this is boring, the other half is like, this sounds foreign. N represents the slope of a line, if it’s negative, then you know it declines. B is where it crosses the y axis, if you don’t pay attention, then why ask us to repeat. Sit down in your seat, listen to the words that I say to this beat. Parallel lines have the same [inaudible 00:17:29] even at the y intercept, so a nine and a one. Question, can you [inaudible 00:17:34] hit the x, y use and the y is there, oh my I swear this math stuff is easy and I’ll take you there. Life let’s talk about slope intercept.

Christopher: Nice, very good, that was just off the top of your head all these years later. Is this still like top of your ladder when you perform?

Mr. Q-U-E: Pretty much, that’s my baby. That’s like your first born. It just has a special place in my heart. So it actually still is, I think, my favorite song. But I don’t perform it as much lately, because students and teachers are more familiar with our most recent stuff. As often as I get a chance to perform that, I do it, so thank you.

Christopher: Tremendous, well I’m a massive fan of like nerd core hip hop music, which is all about science and geek culture. So to me, the idea of a crowd screaming out for Slope Intercept isn’t all that wacky.

Mr. Q-U-E: Oh my god.

Christopher: But I think probably for our listeners, they’re going what did I just hear.

Mr. Q-U-E: Exactly, but it’s so crazy-

Christopher: You can’t stop listening, like that was really compelling, and I was feeling that physical desire to know what was gonna happen next. In a way like even I as a nerdy mathematician growing up never experienced in math class. I was never quite as engaged as I was just then listening to you rap, very cool.

Mr. Q-U-E: Nice.

Christopher: So it went down well with your students, by the sound of it, and you performed it for the teaching community at your school and Jimmy leaned over to you and said, let’s do a video.

Mr. Q-U-E: Um-hmm (affirmative). Did the video.

Christopher: And what was that video like?

Mr. Q-U-E: That video was very amateur, what’s below amateur, is there anything below amateur ’cause that’s what it was. We used science heat lamps as our lighting for the video. So I’m in class sweating like a baked ham, and we shot the video. It was Jimmy’s first video, but the great thing about it is, his background in middle school was in video.

So we came together with this synergy like, oh I started rapping in middle school, you started doing videos in middle school, let’s do this. He was doing a video production class at school with students, I’m rapping with my students, so it was definitely something that we were meant to do together.

We shot the video, we got a bunch of our students to come play different parts. We got some t-shirts, then did the video. We made it a community event. So we did it, we didn’t even post it online, someone else posted the video online and it ended up going viral at the time. Not compared to today’s virality, but in 2008 a video getting like 250,000 views in a week was big.

Christopher: Yeah, that’s still pretty big.

Mr. Q-U-E: Oh yeah, I guess it is. I just saw the Avengers get like 20 million in one day, so I think that might [inaudible 00:20:26].

Christopher: Well if that’s were you’re setting your standard.

Mr. Q-U-E: So we [crosstalk 00:20:31], and the teacher just started reaching out, and that’s when it really began. When we got the outreach from public teachers asking for more.

Christopher: So thinking back to that phase of things when you were first standing up in front of the class, first doing it in the teachers’ lounge or the get together and collaborating with Jimmy to put together the video. Were you at all nervous, were you feeling like this might go wrong or I don’t know what this is gonna be or I want this to be amazing but it might not be. How were you feeling at that stage?

Mr. Q-U-E: I think something in me was just too dumb to be nervous. I just did it, maybe it’s because it was music, and I was always comfortable just doing music. I don’t know too many middle schoolers that would have just went to their friends and say, hey I have a song, wanna hear it. For whatever reason, that fear didn’t exist in terms of me getting up and performing.

I think that might come from just my background presenting like at my grandfathers’ church, getting up as a kid and performing. So when they made the request at the holiday party, I was a little nervous just because I had never performed in front of professionals before, and we’re doing rap songs in front of a group of professionals. But the actual rapping part didn’t bother me.

Christopher: I see, and was it immediately clear to you what Music Notes would become. Like once you saw that initial reaction and people seemed to be responding to it, could you just envision the next, however many years or what were you thinking?

Mr. Q-U-E: I wasn’t thinking, that’s where Jimmy comes in. He’s the more visionary. I’m the instinctual, emotional type of person and I just go off of feel and passion. So he was the one that saw the vision for the video. I’d never thought of a video. So even to this day, I still don’t fully know or see where it’s going.

I know we have a purpose in terms of reaching children, and playing sort of a schoolhouse rock, like fill in that lane so to speak, but I kind of stick to what I’m good at, which is just doing music and making school fun for kids. The other things I leave to other people to work out.

Christopher: I think that’s a smart move. So I think for people listening, maybe the obvious next step is people like these songs, they like the videos, let’s do more songs, more videos about math. Music Notes has become much more than that in a few different ways. So for example, you’ve done a lot of live performances, can you talk a bit about that?

Mr. Q-U-E: Yes, the first time I heard a whole audience singing Slope Intercept, it was crazy. The first time I did a classroom visit and students started crying when I walked in, crazy. The first time I got stopped in public behind like educational music, it was just crazy. I never thought, I still tell people till today, you realize I’m a teacher, but in their eyes, when you’re on a stage or on a screen, you become a celebrity so to speak.

So that progression has been crazy. Going to schools and just motivating children to learn through music. Getting them to believe in themselves, even in my own classroom, giving students the opportunity to showcase they understand content through a song is amazing. So the growth from that one song to where we are now is something that I couldn’t see, but it’s a lot of fun getting up on stage and performing.

We’ve been blessed to perform at Petco Park where the Padres play. We’ve been blessed to collaborate with [inaudible 00:24:38] and write songs about genomics and songs about DNA. We’ve been blessed to help students with their health and wellness aspect of things and teaching about anti-smoking and tobacco use. So that one song has led to so much.

Christopher: Yeah, and that touches on a couple of things I was really keen to ask you about. One is, how do you come to write a new song. You clearly feel like someone who’s creative and figure music is a fairly natural thing. But I think there’s such skill in taking a boring topic, for lack of a better word. Something that people assume is boring, and turn it into good music is actually compelling to the listener and has the educational impact your music has. Can you give us an insight into if we take that genomics song or one of the health songs you’ve been working on recently? What does that process look like to you in terms of going from nothing to the finished song?

Mr. Q-U-E: So now we definitely have a system where we have to do our homework. Especially if it’s a new topic. There are experts in the field that we’re working with. We’ll have them send us relevant content, vocab, key points that the listener needs to understand it. Then us as teachers, we say how is a novice gonna be able to digest this, excuse me. How will they be able to digest the content, then the musician comes in and says, all right, how do we make this sound good.

So that’s how the systems works. It’s a song that we’re working on exclusively on our own and it’s a new subject. We’ll hop on YouTube University, or we’ll go on Google and just start doing our homework, find some reliable sources that we can site if needed. Gather all of our information and then we follow that same process. Put the teacher hat on, and say what does a new learner need as a scaffold or as like the building blocks to understand and digest this information.

Then put the musician hat on and say all right, how do we make this hot so that our listeners will listen and enjoy it.

Christopher: Is there a struggle, is there a tug of war between, I’ve got to educate them with these things and I just wanna make a track that’s good to listen to.

Mr. Q-U-E: God yes it is. That is a struggle that I had to really overcome. My business partner and I are polar opposites. So he’s like structure, and I’m like free flowing. So we’re just butting heads, but I learned we have to have a certain structure in place for the songs to meet the need of a learner. Also, gain a respect of the experts in the field, and be good enough for students to listen to.

I was solely stuck on the side that, it just needs to sound good, it just needs to sound good, the music will do all the talking. It took me a little while to say you know what, I do have to do this homework, I do have to respect the experts that are gonna hear this song. I don’t want to just say like, oh they’re just doing a bunch of words together that sound good and they’re not actually teaching anything.

So, that was a little bit of a struggle. But one thing about me is, I’ll get in my feelings for a second, and then by the next day I’m over it and I’m back to work.

Christopher: Yeah, interesting. I love the way you put it there, that you can’t just throw a bunch of vocab in there, call it a math song and be done with it. You guys really are educating through music, not just coming up with music that you can get away with playing in a school because it has the right words.

Mr. Q-U-E: Exactly.

Christopher: So have there been any kind of big learning points for you. I’m asking not because I don’t think apart from just being interesting, I think our listeners, there’s a lot to learn from how you communicate through your music. I don’t think our listeners are gonna go away and write songs for the elementary math class. I think they probably can learn a lot from you about how to approach a song with a purpose, like a sense of purpose beyond entertainment. So have there been any kind of big learning points or any kind of processes you go through to help you write those tracks and make it coherent and effective?

Mr. Q-U-E: Yeah, I think I have different process for different songs in different stages wherever I am at the time. But I think on thing that probably is consistent throughout is this idea of just knowing exactly what I want the listener to know and feel once I’ve done it. That happens regardless to how I approach a song. Once it’s done, it’s kind of like a lesson plan. I think that’s why this ends up working out for us because our teachers have to create a plan that has an objective and standards that have to be there for the student.

The same thing happens with my songs. What do I want the listener to feel after we’re done and what do I want them to know. Then I typically I’ll make sure my hook or my chorus is just the epitome of those ideas. Then my verses, break it down and explain everything.

Christopher: I love that you use the word field there. I think that maybe is the critical thing here because it would be easy to do a math song and just shove a bunch of vocab in it and have no educational impact, and it would be only a bit more difficult to write a math song that has all of the educational content and delivers the lesson, but no one wants to listen to it.

It’s a bit harder still to have a math song that educates and gives good music to listen to. But you actually do have this real spirit to all of your music. I’m sure it’s critical for it to be used by teachers and so popular with students. I guess that comes down to the feeling, the fact that you aren’t just thinking about what are the facts they need to know. You’re thinking about how do we motivate them, how do we inspire them, how do we get them feeling the right way about the subject matter.

Mr. Q-U-E: Yeah, a lot of what I do comes down to feel when it’s all said and done. I’ve scrapped so many songs. I’ve written some of these songs three or four times because it just didn’t feel right. Or if step away from it for a week or two and I come back to it and I’m going this just isn’t it.

So sometimes more than anything, that feeling, that energy works out. As important as I know the content is, when it comes to music, if it doesn’t feel good, why are we doing it. That’s our whole purpose of having music is to shift emotions from sad to happy when needed.

Christopher: So that’s the other thing I was hoping to talk to you about, which is, you’re using music as a really effective tool and channel to reach these young kids. You know we’ve mentioned your math stuff, and due to the fact that you’re starting to do some healthy living material too. You also told me, you have videos about going back to school and being organized and prepared and showing up in the right way.

You’re shaping these kids mindsets in such a positive way through music, and I just wanna understand why through music. It’s clearly not just pure entertainment and it’s easy to watch your videos and imagine how much more effective it is than just telling the kids that same material.

So why do you think music has that power? Why is it for you the medium through which you’ve chosen to do that work.

Mr. Q-U-E: Great question, so there’s a few different reasons why. The first reason is [inaudible 00:33:08], that first group of students, that class. They asked for music, and our responsibilities as adults and educators is, we have to listen to our kids. A lot of times we’ll feel like through our life experience we have all the answers for them. But our babies know what they want and what the need.

If you sometimes just take the time to listen. So that was the first thing, just listening to them. Then two, just understanding the power of music and there’s been extensive research done on how music shifts emotions, how music is curing people in particular ways. I think the first thing I’m thinking about is, you know, our elderly community that suffers from Alzheimer’s or dementia, and how music is able to bring life back to that group.

We have seen music totally been weaponized against our kids. So it’s appropriate that responsible adults create a balance for our kids to listen to in terms of hip hop popularity like, I don’t even wanna say hip hop, just music in every genre has a level of conflict that we don’t want our student’s to listen to. So I feel like we gotta have that same worries. Those were all of my reasons for doing what we do.

Christopher: Terrific, give us a sense of what Music Notes looks like today. We’ve talked about making videos, we’re talking about live performances, but what does the whole portfolio or the whole project look like?

Mr. Q-U-E: Oh, it’s pretty extensive. So we do our concerts, live educational concerts. We do positive behavior intervention concerts, where students that are having issues at school behaviorally can come and listen to our character development concert. We have testing pep rally concerts, where students excited and prepare to come and take those standardized testings we have here in the states.

We do professional development, we train teachers on how to use music in the classroom. We train teachers to write their own educational songs. We do key notes, we do talks at conferences where we just give teachers and adults, a framework for how important it is to introduce these concepts in the school setting, and a lot of times I like to let the teachers know like we aren’t reinventing the wheel. School House Rock did it at a very high level.

We have people like Bill Nye that had music in his TV shows at a very high level. I’d just like to say we’re just a chrome rim on the wheel. We just made it shiny, made it appealing to the kids today and that’s what we do. We pretty much provide a supplement for our teachers to use in the classroom. We’re not a replacement for good teaching or anything like that. We’re something, we’re like a tool you can pull out of the toolbox and use as needed.

Christopher: One thing I was curious about and you and I touched on before we hit record, which was that teaching kids songwriting and actually having the kids create music is becoming part of what you do as well. I think that was in the context of your healthy living work. Could you talk about that a bit?

Mr. Q-U-E: Yeah definitely, the songwriting component is important especially when it comes to this new program that we’re doing, just getting students to understand the hazards of tobacco usage, just smoking, vaping is very popular now, and it’s marketed as a healthy alternative to smoking. So what we’re doing is, we’re taking our skillset as teachers and songwriters and we’re gonna go into schools and take those student leaders, show them how to write songs, and perform them for their peers or get their peers to write songs. Because sometimes, the peer to peer interactions are stronger than the adult to student interactions.

So we’re just trying to take everything that we do, teach it to the kids and let them led each other. Because peer pressure is way stronger than adult advice sometimes. So we just wanna give our student leaders the tools they need to be able to pull their peers in the right direction.

So that’s what we’re doing with the TUPE, Tobacco Use and Prevention. Our songwriting in general covers like that same dichotomy where we just want the students to become the leaders and do what we’re doing so it’s not always like an adult telling you what to do, it’s your friends trying to pull you in the right direction.

Christopher: That’s fascinating, and I think it comes back a little bit to what you were saying in the context of your own story, which is the impact your friends words, whether positive or negative can have on you.

Mr. Q-U-E: Definitely.

Christopher: To be able to empower those students to create their own music, share it with their friends and have a positive impact with it is a huge thing.

Mr. Q-U-E: Yes sir, I like the fact that we’re able to go and get students to be competent enough to go from I’ve never written a song to okay, I will go perform this song in front of my peers, and to see the peers respond to it so positively, I feel like our songwriting and our training component of Music Notes is gonna be really big for us moving forward. Especially once I’m just too old and wrinkly to be on stage for the kids. It’s good to know we have something in place where this can keep moving forward.

Christopher: Do you ever find kids struggle with the music side of it. I ask because a lot of the work we do at Musical You is about helping people see that they can be musical after all. With us that mostly is with adults, but there’s such phenomenon of kids being discouraged early in music, feeling like they’re not musical. I’m just really interested to know how you guys have experienced that in terms of trying to reach the kids through music and going even further as you just talked about and trying to get the kids making music. What’s your experience about them?

Mr. Q-U-E: It’s been very interesting, getting students to make music is harder than I thought it would be initially. I thought it would be way easier, but once we got started I realized, everyone isn’t a songwriter. So we really had to dig into our teaching bag to put scaffolds in place for students to actually be songwriters. Whether it’s by sentence frames, where we’re starting off rhymes for them. Whether it’s a list of rhyming words that relate to the specific content that we’re focused on.

If it’s sitting with them for hours at a time and helping them streamline their thoughts, maybe graphic organizers that we’ve created that helps them organize their thoughts so that they can put it into a song. Initially I thought it would just be come, sit with them and they’re gonna start rapping. I realize that is just another level of teaching where we have to meet every student in their learning space, visual learners, physical learners and everything in between.
So it’s definitely a process, but we’re getting better at it year after year. We’re finding new things that are working with different types of students.

Christopher: I love that and for a moment I thought you were gonna say, I realize not everyone is a songwriter, so now with some kids we just give them the maracas and we put them at the back and they shake them [inaudible 00:40:56]

But no as a teacher of course you saw that as an opportunity to get everyone writing songs. You just needed to find the way to do it and the tools to give them the stepping stones they heed needed.

That’s awesome, and you mentioned something in passing there that reminds me I was reading on your website about the Power of Movement, and I wanna be respectful or your time, so I’ll make this my last question. But given that we’ve talked about the power of music and what makes it effective for teaching. Can you just talk a little bit about that, the movement aspect a bit and how you make use of that or how you make use of that or how you see it being effective in your work.

Mr. Q-U-E: Yeah, movement allows for you to teach to the whole student. We have this epidemic right now in schools of ADHD. So we have to just get our students up and moving just as a management, classroom management. If students were sitting the whole time, your class is going to flop.

So that’s on a management side, now on the actual teaching side, I forget the actual language and the context that I was taught this framework, it’s called Total Physical Response, which is getting students up out of their seats, getting them moving and get them to respond to content they were moving. So for example, if I’m teaching multiplication. Every time I say multiplication, I’ll do this. Then the kids do this too, now they’re associating this x with the multiplication symbol, that’s like for third graders are seeing this symbol for the first time.

So multiply, everybody said multiply. They do it, they remember it. Divide, this is the division symbol, so they’ll know divide. That movement just to give students something to hold on to, especially the ones that need movement in their classroom. It gives them their brain actually stimulus to latch onto the content.

Christopher: I see that’s fascinating. We’ve been saying this a little bit recently at Musical You. We’re doing a new course that uses the [inaudible 00:43:03] approach, and there’s a lot of hand signs for different pictures. We really see some students are super into it. They’re like finally, I get this, it makes sense. Others are like, I cannot coordinate my body and enjoy this. This is not helping me.

I definitely hear what you’re saying involving the body and not just the mind does make for much more engaged learning right, whatever age you are I think.

Mr. Q-U-E: You guys need to teach a [inaudible 00:43:29], ’cause that’s like a big part of teaching and understanding like those different tools are gonna work with different types of earnings. So kudos to y’all.

Christopher: Tremendous, I so enjoyed having the chance to talk with you LaMar, and like I said at the beginning, it’s just been a blast watching your videos online and getting a sense of what you’re up to at Music Notes. What’s coming next for you guys, what are the big projects for 2019?

Mr. Q-U-E: So 2019, the biggest thing is our work with the LA County Office of Ed., that’s number one.

Christopher: And that’s the tobacco usage.

Mr. Q-U-E: Yeah that’s the Tobacco Use Prevention Education. TUPE for short, so that’s the big thing and then, we also have a good tour that we ‘re gonna be doing. Every year we’ve been going to Texas and Louisiana tour. So it’s two week long tour where we hit a school every day, sometime two schools a day in the Texas-Louisiana area. So those are gonna be our two biggest moves for the second semester, so we’re excited.

Christopher: Amazing, well thank you so much for joining us on the show. If anyone’s been enjoying hearing about this and wants to see the videos, head to MusicNotesonline.com.

Yeah, just wishing you every success in the year ahead and the years ahead because I think the work you’re doing is tremendous.

Mr. Q-U-E: Man Chris thank you so much, you all keep it up and so glad to be on the platform, thank you.

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The post Entertainment and Education, with Mr. Q-U-E appeared first on Musical U.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Whether it was persistence or momentary inspiration that produced Alex’s first big radio hit.
• The most important thing a beginning songwriter should do on day one, and the #1 thing you can do to improve your odds of succeeding with it, and
• The four elements she thinks are essential for a song to be really great.

It should come as no surprise to regular listeners of this show that as someone invited to be a guest here she shares our encouraging and inclusive attitude to music-making. Far from teaching that song-writing is just for the gifted few, Alex teaches that anybody can and should give it a try – and her enthusiasm is infectious so we think there’s a good chance you’ll go away from this episode inspired to try writing a song or two yourself!

Listen to the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• CreativeSongwriter.com
• Breakthrough Song Workshop (video series)
• Contact Alex Forbes

Transcript

Alex: Hey, this is Alex Forbes from CreativeSongwriter.com, and welcome to the Musicality Podcast.

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

Alex: Hey, it’s great to be here.

Christopher: I’d love to understand where this successful songwriter and songwriting coach came from, once upon a time. How did you get started in music? Was songwriting a part of your life from early on, or was it something that came later?

Alex: Well, for me, I guess I was always into songs. I guess I came of age at a time when The Beatles were coming on the scene. Compared to the music my folks were listening to, that really lit me up, and my brothers, as well. We thought we were The Beatles. We had a piano, and we started playing around. Next thing you know, I was picking out songs on the piano, and my parents thought it was a good idea to give me piano lessons. Unfortunately, the teacher I had was a bit more by the book, literally by the book. Those songs that we were learning in the piano lessons weren’t as much fun as the ones that I loved. I remember being able to pick out a song now and again on the piano, and those were the ones I really wanted to listen to.

Time went on, time marched on, and I stopped taking those piano lessons and sort of just was listening to music more passively, and also singing in chorus in school and that sort of thing. But then, at about age … I guess I was 16 … I met a young woman who was a classmate, and she played guitar. I just remember sitting on the rug in her room, fascinated, watching her play the songs I loved on her guitar. It was like magic. We would do sing-alongs, sitting on her carpet.

One day, she offered to give me lessons, and I was out of my mind with excitement. I couldn’t believe that I could actually participate in these things, and that marked a turning point. I asked for Christmas for a guitar, and I was kindly given one. And she started teaching me. The next thing you know, I was buying these books of Beatles songbooks or Elton John or Joni Mitchell, and learning the songs that way.

I had never started writing songs until a few years later. At that point, I was at university, and I saw a little piece of paper taped to the wall that said “songwriting workshop.” I tore off one of the little pieces of paper, and I called the number, and the guy said that the workshop started right after Christmas. So I went home for Christmas vacation and, knowing that I was starting the class in January, I wrote a song. I wrote my first song. It kind of brought together my interest in lyrics and my interest in music and my ability to play the guitar.

It brought it all into … For me, that was the moment when peanut butter met jelly, you know? Or whatever, when A met B, when Ulysses met … I don’t know what. But it was like the sparks went off. I brought that song into the class and, for me, that was the beginning of just becoming a songwriter, just sort of declaring out of nothing that I was going to be a songwriter. That’s how it happened for me.

Christopher: That’s really interesting. Thinking back, were you at all nervous or intimidated about taking that new direction with your music if, up until that point, you hadn’t really been writing your own?

Alex: Well, I’ll tell you one thing, he ripped the song to shreds.

Christopher: Oh, no.

Alex: And a woman in the workshop who had a beautiful voice said, “Actually, I think it’s really good,” and she stuck up for me. I went up to her after the class and I said, “Wow, thanks for defending my song. You have a beautiful voice.” The song that she sang showed off her beautiful voice. And I said, “Can you sing my songs? I would love someone else to actually put their beautiful voice …” And she goes, “Well, I teach voice.” And that was the beginning of starting to perform my own songs. So it was this coming together in that one workshop of that … It was like magic, and something ignited.

Christopher: Take us back to that room for a minute, because I think a lot of people would tell this story about how they got really excited about songwriting and they went along to the workshop, they had their song ripped to shreds, and so they never wrote a song again. And clearly, that’s not how it went for you. Was it emotionally painful at the time?

Alex: Yes, certainly. Anytime anybody criticizes your creativity, it’s like a stabbing feeling. But also, I’ve been in the creative world for a long time. I mean, I used to think I’d be a painter. And that’s the nature of teaching, is that people criticize you. If you want to be in the Olympics, you fall on your butt a lot of times on the ice. It’s the same thing. Anything you want to do well, you have to pass through that however long period of learning the ropes and falling down and getting back up and being criticized and being guided.

And sometimes the criticism is painful, but it’s actually … Some of your worst songs can be your best learning experiences. It’s the same with learning an instrument, or learning to sing, or anything. The people who are willing to give you the feedback are actually your guides and your teachers, and you can be thankful to them. Even when it hurts, it’s actually … If you let the passion drive you through that painful process, you get to the other side.

Christopher: Were you mature enough at that early age to have that attitude? Because that sounds like a super-sensible attitude, but I find it hard to imagine myself in my early 20s not just kind of coming home and crying a bit, with an experience like that.

Alex: No, I think it builds character. I mean, I imagine if you play the stock market, you’re going to lose a lot of money at some point. It’s that same process. It’s like climbing a mountain. I imagine if you climb Mount Everest, you don’t start at the top of Mount Everest. You start at the bottom of Mount Everest, and you make your way to the top. And it’s a process, and there are Sherpas.

Christopher: Tell us a bit about where things went from there. You’d had this initial experience, you’d had some song critique, you’d met someone who was a vocal coach or a vocal teacher. What was the next step for you in songwriting?

Alex: Well, I did enter that song in a contest, that first song I wrote. It was called At Night. I’m telling you, it was not great. But it won a quarter-finalist prize in this contest and, for me, that was like a sign. I took it as a sign from the heavens that I was meant to do this, and I took it on. And I was in university, as I said, and I was sort of trying to figure out what I was going to major in. I knew it would be something creative, but I wasn’t sure what. They didn’t exactly have songwriting majors. This was 1977. At the time, it was … unless maybe you were in a music school. I was not at a music school, and the closest I could come was a creative writing degree, which I then enrolled in and received.

Then I decided I was going to move to New York. I had checked out LA. I didn’t feel at home there. And I grew up near New York, so I moved here and just dug in. I had a real job. I was a graphic artist assistant, basically. And during my spare time, that’s all I did, pretty much. That and boys. And of course, the boys gave me something to write about. So I kind of applied myself. I took a lot of workshops, I found some mentors, I met a lot of colleagues. At first, I was only writing alone. After a while, I began collaborating, which was really a good move in my case because I started writing the same song over and over. So finding a team and finding a community was extremely important for me.

Christopher: I see. What did it look like for you to learn songwriting in those years? Were you reading from books? Obviously, the internet wasn’t there in the way it is today. Were you able to learn in kind of a theoretical sense, or was it purely practical?

Alex: No, I was reading books. I read the books. I went to the workshops, as I said. I joined the organizations. There were a lot of organizations. In a major city like this, of course you have groups that are meeting, and showcases. And I went and saw people’s performances. But the basic work was every week or every other week submitting a song to a group and getting the feedback. So it wasn’t just the theoretical knowledge, it was the hands-on thing of trying and failing, and trying and failing, and getting a little better, and failing, and getting a little better. That went on for seven years before I had any success.

Christopher: Wow. I know that one thing a lot of aspiring songwriters struggle with is that it can be really hard to put your finger on whether you’re getting better or not, apart from that intangible sense of “I’m doing a bit better than I was last year.” Compared to learning instrument technique, for example, or studying music theory, where it’s very clear-cut, the path ahead of you, it can be quite difficult to know, am I getting better as a songwriter? What was telling you, along that seven-year trajectory, that you were on a good path, that you were putting in effort that would pay off?

Alex: Well, at a certain point, people started performing my songs live. A few people responded to the point where they were like, “I’d like to perform that song.” That was really exciting, for example, if a band would do one of my songs or if … Some cabaret acts started doing my songs in their show, and I’d go there, and they might call me out from the stage and say, “And this is a song by Alex Forbes,” or whatever. And it would be just such a rush, and I felt my heart pounding, and I was looking around like, “Are people liking this?” I mean, I think that’s also a huge thing to see how the song is landing over there. It’s landing a certain way to the writer because you’re enmeshed with the song and you are one with the song. But to see how it goes over in the world is really a whole other thing.

It’s the same thing with recording. At the time, recording equipment was a bit … let’s just say the home recording setups were not great in those days. You had to pay a certain amount of money to go into a studio, and I was living pretty hand-to-mouth, so I didn’t have a lot of money to go into the studio. So I had one of these multi-track cassette recorders. I think you could record four different tracks on a cassette. You used both sides and … Oh, my God, it was ridiculous. But you could get the point across, let’s put it that way.

Christopher: I see. If we set aside the lyrics for a moment, when we talk just about the music of your songs in that period, how were you writing that music? How were you composing? What were you drawing on, in terms of music education or music theory? When you sat down to write a new song, what did that look like?

Alex: A lot of guitar lessons.

Christopher: Is that right?

Alex: A lot of guitar lessons. I must have studied with 10 different teachers, sure. I’m no great guitarist, really. I’m no great shakes as a guitarist. But what I learned is that some of my favorite songwriting heroes were not great guitarists, either. Songwriting doesn’t require mastery of an instrument. It requires mastery of songwriting, which is really melody meets lyric. So if you can come up with an interesting melody and set it to a pretty simple set of chords … I mean, unless you want to go into jazz or something, you don’t need to know a million chords. You need, as the saying goes, four chords and the truth.

The truth is the part that’s a little hard to get to at certain points, because we do think we might need to impress people, or we might think we can get away with copying something that’s already out there, or whatever. We have influences. But at a certain point, we have to declare ourselves and find ourselves on the instrument, find out what our own spin is on that instrument, whether it’s a piano or a guitar or a ukulele or whatever. We have to get the basic skills enough on the instrument to be able to find our way as an individual.

Christopher: It sounds like you, from fairly early on, identified as a creative. You were someone who wanted to have that artistic output in the world. Did you have any doubts along the way, when you realized it was going to be a journey of years rather than months before you had a big hit or before you had major success? Were you at all concerned that that meant you didn’t have what it took or that you weren’t quite the right type of person for it?

Alex: No. I don’t think I … I mean, I still struggle with making it in this industry, because the industry keeps changing. But I think I still get so excited … When I’m in the middle of writing a song, that’s what drives me. That’s the most fun you can have. It’s like Woody Allen said, it’s the most fun I ever had without laughing. And you do laugh. So it’s just a great emotional release. It’s like therapy. It’s all the highs and all the lows of a rollercoaster.

And you can do it in a few hours. It’s not like writing a novel that might take you a year or something. You can write a song in a few hours and, whether it’s good or whether it’s bad, at least while you’re doing it, it’s so immersive, and I think it’s its own reward. Like I said, those seven years before anything was successful were equally fun to the fun I’m having now. I think it has to be an end in itself. In order to find any success, you have to enjoy the process of the writing. And if you don’t, well, maybe that’s not your cup of tea. But if you enjoy it, well, then it’s better than watching TV, really.

Christopher: That’s a really tremendous attitude. I was motivated to ask a question, partly because I know a lot of people in our audience feel like they need permission or like they need to prove something quickly to be allowed to spend their time writing songs, that it would be a waste of time unless they have a certain gift, a certain talent, a certain natural ability. So I can imagine many of them, if they got a few months in and they didn’t see clear tangible signs of improvement like we just talked about, or they didn’t have big success … like for you, it took a few years to come … they might be quite discouraged. And it sounds like, for you, the key was enjoying the process as much as aiming for the outcome.

Alex: Right. And actually, I’ll tell you, the moments of process are like 100 to 1 to the moments of success. But if you can find success in the process, then you’re always succeeding. I think we live in a fame culture. It’s a bit obsessed with that sort of thing, fame and money and yada-yada. But what about honoring the process of becoming better at a skill and enjoying that unfolding of the … the word “process” just keeps coming to mind. The result is the process, in this kind of a field. You can’t be chasing something. You have to be in something. It’s not a striving. It’s actually a becoming and a blossoming feeling, more.

Christopher: I love that description. Well, I definitely want to come back and talk a bit more about the process and your advice for making that an enjoyable one, but let’s jump to the other side that we just said isn’t the point of it, which was the success. You said after seven years or so, you started to see real success. What did that look like? What made you think, okay, now I’m really managing it?

Alex: Well, I’d say one of those … I had a turning point, and the turning point was sort of the moment I went from amateur to professional. And that, for me, happened at … As I said, I think I’d been writing about seven years, and I was in a workshop, and the workshop leader said, “We’re going to do a showcase at The Bitter End.” Now, if you ever have been to New York City, The Bitter End is this club on Bleecker Street. It’s the legendary Bitter End, where Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and all of the greats played back in the ’60s, and it’s still there, to this very day. I had been there, but I had never played there, so for me, this was very exciting that we were going to play.

So we were all, in the workshop, tasked with writing a song that was the best we could do that we would perform at this thing. Within that few weeks that we were getting ready, I was walking down the street and I had this idea. I got like, wow, that’s a good idea. There was a phone booth on the corner, and I called the idea into my own phone message machine. This was in the old days, okay? You didn’t have a cell phone with you. So I called it in, in case I forgot it, because I didn’t have a notebook with me. I was just walking down the street.

So when I got home that … Actually it was earlier then, again that same day, I wrote some lyrics. I was scribbling down lyrics madly. I showed them to my friend, Shelly Peiken, who is actually a really great songwriter and a great friend. She looked at the first line and she said, “That’s a little violent, isn’t it?” because the first line was “love is a cliff, and I’m pushing you over it.” And she was like, “That’s a little violent.” And I remember thinking, yeah, but I like it. So I kept it.

I went home that night, and I was up for hours and hours and hours with that little cassette machine, and I recorded it. All night, I couldn’t sleep. My heart was pounding. I was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, this one’s better. Sorry, that probably went ouch on the microphone. But when I brought that song into the workshop, the reaction was completely different from all the songs before it, and everybody just said … they clapped, and they said, “That one’s a hit.” Nobody picked it apart. It was the first time that had ever happened. And I knew in my heart that something was special about that song.

So I hired someone to demo it, and it wasn’t very great. The song was good, but the demo wasn’t great. And then I spent the equivalent of two months’ rent, which at the time was $200 a month, so I spent $400 to go into the studio and record that song, and that became my first hit. So that was the moment I crossed over.

Christopher: I see. So this touches on one of the things I was most keen to talk with you about, which is the dichotomy or the spectrum between this idea people have of songwriting being a flash of inspiration by a talented musician and the song just appears out of nowhere, and the kind of down-to-earth practical advice you hear about putting in the work, practicing every day, writing a lot of songs, learning the craft. How do those two relate to one another? Given that you just told this great story where it was more an inspiration moment, how do you think about that?

Alex: Well, I think it has to do with that quote … was it Einstein who said it? You know, success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. I really feel that’s true. But we look at these … there are these tales out there that people wrote their hit song in 15 minutes on a table napkin. But if you scratch the surface, that person never spent less than five or ten years preparing for that moment. There is always a backstory. You might not know it. Of course, like I said, that inspiration for me came in a moment. But I had been preparing for it for seven years. I had been laying the groundwork and learning the skills and doing the studying and playing the music, going to the clubs and whatever.

I mean, we each have our own path. Everybody has a different path. And there’s a mythology that these things come out of the woodwork, but they never come out of the woodwork. Any overnight success takes many years of preparation to get to that one night where the success occurs. There’s people who would like us to believe that we pop out as these prodigies or something, but I really don’t think that’s true. Or nobody I know has done that. Everybody has done the groundwork. I just think people use that to deny themselves the permission to engage in the process.

Christopher: Talk a little bit more about that final point there, people who feel like they don’t have the permission or they don’t have what it takes. If someone came to you and said, “I always had this dream of being a songwriter, but my voice isn’t very good, or I just don’t have any inspiration,” what advice would you give someone like that?

Alex: I would say give yourself that … I don’t want to preach at anybody, but I think if they have the desire and if they’re asking the question, that means that they really do feel like they have something to say. We all have something to say. I think it’s a question of what form we say it in. You know, I don’t have kids. These are my babies. Other people might put that creative energy into baking a cake or building a building. We all have creative urges and creative talents. It’s a question of what form we put those in. Like I said, I thought I was going to become a painter at some point in my life, when I was in high school.

And it almost doesn’t matter what the shape is. If you’re going to choose songwriting, well, then you have to declare … and this is one of the exercises in the very first pages of my book, which is called Write Songs Right Now … the first thing you do is declare that you’re a songwriter. And then immediately, up comes that voice that says, “No, you’re not. You have a terrible voice. You don’t have the equipment. You don’t have the skills. You can’t play an instrument.” It’s like yada-yada, thank you for sharing, now I’m going to write songs. And we really have to let the passion outweigh the criticism, the self-criticism or the criticism of others.

Like I said, we’ve all been criticized. If we let that stop us, what does that say? I have people in my life who do not support me as a songwriter. I’ve been doing this for 40-something years, and they don’t believe in me as a songwriter. Well, you know what? Thanks for sharing. Sorry. Sorry to disappoint. This is what I’m going to do. And that’s almost the attitude you have to have. If you have a relative or a friend who poo-poos what you’re doing, you know what? They probably wish they were writing songs. They’re just jealous.

Christopher: Fantastic. I love that, and I love that you begin by declaring you’re a songwriter because, even if it conjures up that negative voice, I think it gives you the space, doesn’t it, to start exploring what that means to you.

Alex: The permission.

Christopher: Yeah, and the permission.

Alex: Yeah, I call it your artistic license. I mean, we all have an artistic license. It’s a question of whether we choose to use it or not. And the artistic license means that you can do whatever the heck you want to do artistically, and you will suffer the consequences or you will enjoy the consequences, either way. I think if you write a terrible song, they will let you know by not listening to it. What’s the worst that can happen? You write a terrible song, who cares? It’s like, “Next.”

Christopher: You mentioned that, for you on that learning journey, you stuck with it because you were enjoying it. And you said something along the lines of, if you’re not enjoying that process, then maybe it’s not right for you, and maybe you need to go off and be a painter instead. If someone’s at that early stage, and they’re just kind of getting into it and they’re just trying to give themselves permission, is there anything they can do to improve their odds of sticking with it? If they want to stick with it but they’re feeling quite discouraged or maybe they don’t have a supportive community around them, what advice could you give them to make that a more successful journey?

Alex: I would say start to find a community. Wherever you are, even these days with the … It’s a team sport, A. But B, there are so many incredible resources, especially … I talk to a lot of people, because I coach people one-on-one, and they might be isolated in a small town or in the middle of nowhere, but they still want to connect and they want to get feedback and they want to share their song with someone. Because it’s very hard. It’s like looking at your own eyeballs. You can’t tell how good or bad your song is, yourself, because you probably love it. But that objective viewpoint that another person, a like-minded soul, can provide … Not a critical, toxic soul, but a like-minded, enthusiastic, encouraging relationship.

That’s, I think, one of the main things, is to … Like all those guitar teachers I had, all those voice teachers I had, all those songwriting mentors I had, the colleagues I had. I would never have gotten anywhere, sitting in my room, trying to figure it out alone. It’s daunting. There are so many parts of the skill. We all need teachers.

Christopher: You talked about the need to write a lot of songs, and sometimes they’re going to be bad songs. How does that compare with this idea that you’re learning a skill and that your songs can get better and better? How do you go from writing a lot of bad songs to a lot of good songs? Or are you always writing a lot of bad songs, as well?

Alex: I’m still writing a lot of bad songs.

Christopher: Well, that’s reassuring to hear.

Alex: Of course. I think it’s probably … I’d say 90 to 10, bad to good, for the most part. I write a lot of songs, but I throw a lot of songs out. It’s just the nature of the game. I call it quantity towards quality. It’s like that with anything. If you ever did a photo session, they usually take 200, 300 photos, and you pick one. So it’s the same with anything. I just think that we have to get used to the idea of cranking out all those songs. Each of them has something to recommend it, but it’s almost … if you write enough of them, it will start to come together in certain songs.

What I’ve done, which I tell people not to do, and I’ve done it myself, is you get so excited … I call it “song high” … you get so excited about the song you’re writing that you go and spend a lot of money to record it, and then you find out it’s bad. I’ve done it many times, and I cursed myself afterwards. But it’s the momentum of writing the song that can push you to do the crazy stuff. Whereas, if you let it settle for a few weeks and you see, “Gee, how did that song go? I can’t even remember it,” that’s a bad sign. If you can’t even remember your own song, that’s a bad sign.

Christopher: That’s a really valuable tip, and you’ve touched on the fact that it can be really hard to judge your own songs and that sometimes you need to see how an audience responds to them. Is there anything else someone can do to be able to evaluate which songs might be in that 10% that are good, without going out there and performing?

Alex: Well, I’d say there’s a lot of resources these days where you can post your song, you can find a mentor. It’s just that bouncing off. You can also find a collaborator who is strong where you’re weak and weak where you’re strong. If everybody says, “Wow, I love that lyric,” and nobody says, “Wow, I love that music,” it’s like take a hint.

Or if you find yourself becoming very repetitive and writing the same song over and over, like the … oh, gosh, what was her name? The character who keeps writing the song about Joe in the movie. She keeps … oh, gosh, I can’t remember the name of the movie. It’s the one where he holds up the … In Your Eyes. He holds up the Peter Gabriel boombox with In Your Eyes. What the heck’s the name of that movie? But the girl in that is writing the same song about Joe over and over and over. And if you find yourself in one of those ruts, the way to get out of it is by finding other people to bounce off of.

Christopher: Got you. In your experience, having written so extensively and coached other songwriters, is there anything that people can think about in terms of what distinguishes a good song from an okay one or a bad one? Apart from that audience reaction, is there anything more specific or tangible they could be working on to improve?

Alex: That’s a big question. I have an entire chapter on that question, what separates an okay song from a great song. For one thing, a great song, you can remember it afterwards. That’s one of my key things. It has to stick. It has to have some lasting stickiness in terms of melodically, but also lyrically. There needs to be, as we were talking about, a hook. It needs to have a hook that embeds itself and that is unique and memorable.

It has to have a lyric that has meaning that has an angle that has not necessarily been explored before that’s yours, that you staked out some new territory. It has to have a point of view, a strong stand that it takes, a way of looking at the world, a perspective on things that is heartfelt and real and just palpable the minute you turn it on. All these things. It has to have a strong dynamic in terms of a rollercoaster ride.

I would say what happens with most songs that are not that great … and I have written, as I said, many of these myself … is that they have a good little spark, and they start out strong, but then they do what I call “hydroplaning.” They don’t grow over time. It’s like when your car is on the ice in the winter and it just keeps on sailing. It’s not really going up or down, and it’s not taking us … it’s not manipulating the listener. It’s not revealing something of importance. It’s not going anywhere. It’s kind of treading water.

Like I said, it has a spark, which is what propelled you to write the song in the first place, so it starts off kind of strong. But then it just doesn’t have enough there to sustain itself for three minutes, which is a big task. You think three minutes isn’t that long, until you hear a bad song, and then it’s like forever.

Christopher: So if someone’s working on a song and they feel like it’s not quite hitting the mark on one or more of those, how do they know whether to keep trying to improve that song versus jumping to something completely different and writing their next song? How do you find that balance of perfectionism versus volume and quality through quantity, as you put it?

Alex: I’d say go with the heart. Is it driving you? Are you feeling it? The most important ingredient of any song is the heart of it, is the soul of it. Is it ringing true to you? Does it reveal something about you? And if you start … let’s say you put the song aside, and you go to bed finally, and you wake up in the morning. Does it engage you? You’re the first person who has to be engaged by that song. If you’re not feeling emotionally engaged and excited about it, believe me, nobody else will, either. If all you’re doing is craft, which is … there’s nothing wrong with learning a craft by putting the bricks together in a certain way, but if you put it together and all it does is lay there like a pile of bricks, then it’s time to put that one aside.

And you might be able to pick through it and find something that’s worth keeping and recycling in another song. I’ve done that many times, where I was like, that song kind of bit, but that one line was really cool, or I loved that rhyme, or that relationship that sparked that song is certainly worthy of another go at another time in the future. You can kind of take the best of.

Christopher: Fantastic. Given that your own journey obviously started quite young and you were a teenager when you got into songwriting, a lot of our listeners are a bit later in life … mostly adults, some in retirement … and if they’re not in those teen years, is it kind of a pipe dream or a waste of time for them to think about putting on that mantle of songwriter and exploring this kind of journey? Do you need to start young to develop the ability?

Alex: No, you do not need to start young. I am old now, and I’m still doing it. But also, do you care, if a song moves you, how old the writer was when they wrote it? I don’t think so. I mean, is that something you’re measuring when you listen to a great song? Are you saying, “Well, they were 22 when they wrote it, so it’s a better song”? No. I think that it’s a different skill than performing. Like, let’s say that you want to be a ballet dancer. Well, by the time you’re 45, yeah, that might be a pipe dream. But by the time you’re 45 or 50 or 60 and you decide you want to write songs, I think that’s perfectly valid. And who cares, as long as your songs keep getting better? That’s the thing.

Like I said, if you can disengage from the fame and fortune notion for a minute and really just work with the actual song that’s in front of you … A lot of my coaching clients are older, but they do what I do, too, which is sometimes you find a budding artist that will perform your songs. Now, that budding artist is not necessarily going to ask, “How old are you?” before they listen to your song. They’re actually just going to listen to the song, and what’s on the paper and what’s in their ears is actually going to be what determines whether or not you have a shot.

Obviously, there are some people who are judgmental and they only want to write with a hot, young thing. Okay, those aren’t my cup of tea. If they only want to write with a hot, young thing, thank you, we’re never going to work out. It’s like, he’s just not that into you. But a lot of what I do these days is work with artists, write with artists, write for artists who are 20-something and have a viable project going on.

Christopher: Fantastic. So you have compiled a lot of wisdom on the kind of topics we’ve been talking about today in your book, Write Songs Right Now. Could you tell us a bit about that book?

Alex: Oh, well, it actually came out of a … I was teaching a 10-week workshop over and over and over. I think I taught it for like six or seven years. And I had a long series of notes, I think it was 17 or so pages, of bullet points that I would go through in the class. I had one for each week. And I started thinking, well, if I could just make a little workbook for the class, then I could hand it out. So I did that, and I started writing it out, and somebody referred me to a publisher because … I then self-published it.

Really, what I wanted it to be was an inspirational guide for people who … especially people getting their feet wet in this world. It’s not really about the music business, because I find talking about the music business can be very … let’s say it’s just not my cup of tea, talking about the music business. But talking about songwriting and music and lyrics, to me, is really fun and brings out the best in us. Whereas talking about the business can kind of bring out the worst in us because people … you know, it’s just a different can of worms, let’s just put it that way. But talking about songwriting …

So I just had divided it up into the same 10 chapters that I used in the workshop, and somebody picked it up to make it … I did a spoken-word version of it, an audiobook, and also an eBook. I’ve sold a few hundred copies, and it’s great.

Christopher: Fantastic. And the other thing I love of yours is your Breakthrough Song Workshop that’s a video series, a series of short videos, available for free on your website that covers some really … I hesitate to say “unusual,” but certainly distinctive angles and opinions on songwriting. Could you give the listener a little idea of what’s in there?

Alex: Oh, boy. I haven’t watched it in a while.

Christopher: Well, one thing that sticks in my-

Alex: Do you remember any specifics from the chapters?

Christopher: I do. Well, fittingly, one thing that sticks in my mind is you talking about hooks and hooks per square inch. Tell us about that idea.

Alex: HPSI, yes, hooks per square inch. I guess, for me, that came out of listening to the songs that make it to the radio, my own and others. What I’ve noticed is that, with a lot of the songs that make it to the radio, which for me has been the touchstone of … I grew up on radio, I had a radio. I didn’t even have a record player when I was young. My brothers did, but I didn’t have a record player. I had a radio, and I listened to the radio, and that infused my brain somehow. And what I’ve noticed is that pretty much 100% of the songs that make it to the radio have musical hooks, they have lyrical hooks, they have vocal … the background vocals are a hook, the lead vocal is full of hooks, the guitar part is a hook, the bassline is a hook, the drumbeat is a hook. It’s almost like these multiple hooks interacting with each other.

Like, you can be in a store and you hear the first few notes of a song, and you go, oh, I know that song. And it’s not even the … it’s not the vocal melody. It’s that little thing in the intro, that little sound and that little drumbeat and that little combination of maybe some of the background vocals. And if you can start thinking that way, of multiple hooks interacting with each other so that there’s never a dull moment … There’s this concept out there that everything is leading up and then you get the hook. No, it’s all hook, all the time. They’re just different kinds of hooks.

Like, think of the bassline of My Girl, [inaudible 00:43:02], you hear that and you go, “I love this song!” And that’s not the main hook. The main hook is where they go, “My girl, my girl,” right? But the bassline is a fantastic hook unto itself. Or Stevie Wonder, Superstition, where it goes [inaudible 00:43:19] and you go, “Yeah, I love this tune!” But is that the main hook or not? Maybe it is, in that case.

Christopher: I love this. I think the reason this struck me so much was that it’s almost counterintuitive. We think if the song has a hook, that’s what we showcase. Like you said, we build up to that. And anything else, we don’t want to make it too interesting, because it might distract from the hook. But as you described there so well, the best songs, the one that catch your attention on the radio and the ones that are interesting enough to be played on the radio, are kind of continuously interesting, which means they must have more than one catchy bit.

So yeah, I think that’s just one example of that Breakthrough Song Workshop, what makes it so interesting. I definitely encourage anyone listening to go and check that out. That’s at CreativeSongwriter.com. Correct me if I’m wrong, Alex, but I believe that’s the best place to learn more about your books and other projects. Is that right?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah, I have a lot of links there. There’s a mailing … a contact-me page if people want to get in touch. I try to write back to everybody. It takes a few days maybe, but I do write back to everybody who writes in to the site. I’m passionate about this. I don’t know if you can tell. I care deeply, and I really do think it makes a big difference in people’s lives to be able to express their true self in a song. A lot of the people I work with one-on-one or in workshops or whatever, you can see that they’re bursting at the seams and they want to get something across.

And to be able to embody it in one of those three-minute forms, it’s so fulfilling to see someone write what I call a breakthrough song. A breakthrough song is that all those years you’ve spent learning the craft and the art, experimenting with your own art … in other words, putting your heart and your art into something and learning the craft of it … there comes a moment, if you keep at it, where it flips over and you have a breakthrough song. And that song actually … it leaves everything else in the dust, and it opens up a new future that wasn’t there before you wrote that song.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well, I think it’s rare and tremendous to encounter someone like yourself who speaks with such clarity around these topics that are often a real mess inside people’s heads, around talent and inspiration and creativity. I really admire the way you blend the creative arts with the practicalities of learning the craft. I know that’s going to have been really inspiring and helpful to our listeners today who are at one phase or another on that songwriting journey. So just a big thank-you, Alex, for joining us on the show today.

Alex: Hey, my pleasure. It’s great, and I really respect what you’re doing. I look forward to hearing from folks if they’re interested at all in finding out more.

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The post Song Writing: Start and Succeed, with Alex Forbes appeared first on Musical U.

What allows such individuality? Your interpretation.

Interpretation can bring a piece of music to life and put an artist into the spotlight if executed well. Conversely, it can also become a byword for sloppiness and inconsistency, where musicians put their mistakes down to the excuse, “Oh, but it’s just my interpretation.”

To avoid being labelled a haphazard virtuoso, it’s really important to have a philosophy behind “interpretation” – something British pianist David Hall believes we owe to our audience. Here, David describes three approaches you can take when interpreting a piece of music – and how understanding these approaches will make you a better musician.

Approach #1: Re-imagine a piece of music completely

In 1959, Miles Davis and Gil Evans recorded a version of Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”. Gil Evans had no copy of the original guitar concerto, so he listened to a recording of the haunting second movement and wrote down what he heard. He then scored the music for his soft brass/jazz band and added a newly composed middle section. Miles Davis played the melody on flugelhorn and trumpet, necessitating a completely different interpretation than any guitarist would give:

This is a sublime illustration of a creative interpretation that transcends the original score. It also shows that in order to re-imagine a piece of music and make it your own, you need to use your imagination. Listen to a piece in separate parts, and consider how the different sections make you feel – even writing down the emotions the music conjures. This will help to colour the tone of your rendition, and you can use tonal variations to enhance the mood you want to convey.

If you don’t know Miles Davis’ recording, listen to Sketches of Spain now and enjoy!

(And for another great example of creative re-interpretation, listen to George Gershwin’s own piano arrangements of the songs from his shows.)

Steal – and then make it your own!

There are countless examples of performers and composers borrowing themes as the source of inspiration. Rachmaninov wrote variation sets on themes by Paganini, Corelli, and Chopin. Benjamin Britten took a theme by Purcell as the basis for his “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” And Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” is best known in the orchestration by Ravel.

J. S. Bach was also a keen arranger of music – and several of his best-known organ pieces are actually arrangements of string music by Vivaldi and Telemann. Throughout the 17th and 18th century, most keyboard players were adept at improvising variation sets. Handel and Mozart were famed for their variation skills at the keyboard, and what they wrote down is only a tantalizing glimpse of what they may have performed.

Approach #2: Realise the composer’s intentions

When you are interpreting a piece of music, it’s often helpful to have a broader understanding of the composer and the culture at the time they composed the piece. That’s why many performers study the life and music of a composer before trying to create a performance that is historically authentic.

Historically informed performance is an approach to interpreting music that aims to remain as faithful as possible to the style of the era in which the music was written. This can be done by simply mimicking the stylistic and technical practices of the time, or going a step further, even using period instruments to play the piece!

This practice started in the 1960s as an obscure and interesting pursuit, but has since become the norm. Recordings by performers like Ronald Brautigam, Trevor Pinnock, John Eliot Gardiner, and Ton Koopman are historically performed – they are vibrant and exciting and ear-opening:

In music, a little context goes a long way. If you choose this route to interpretation, arm yourself with some knowledge about the composer, their life and culture, and their motivation for writing the piece of music. Not only will it help you play the piece to its full potential, but it’s fascinating in itself to learn about the origins of a musical masterpiece.

Dr. Gonzol, Director of Music Education at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, summarised the need to realise a composer’s intentions before performing their music when he said:

All the best professional and amateur musicians, from Ella Fitzgerald to Paul McCartney, Adolph Herseth to Johann Sebastian Bach and Clara Schumann to Jean Ritchie, all made sure to know their field thoroughly and well. They knew their own performing skills, other performers, the repertoire, the history, the theory, the business, the culture, the people, everything. One can sing a melody or play a harmony, only if one really understands how those melodies or harmonies have been valued in their particular culture. How they have been performed, thought about, composed, improvised, listened to, danced to and worshipped to. 

3. Enjoy a piece of music and make your own decisions

So we’ve talked about the extremes of the interpretation spectrum: the complete re-imagining and the complete faithfulness to the original.

Time to explore the middle ground.

Take a listen to this string quartet playing Schubert:

All chamber music players love to interact with each other to develop a performance. These chamber musicians and concerto soloists’ performances are frequently described as witty, sparkling, and inventive. Sounds like the dream, right?

When relating this example to your musical interpretations, remember that many aspects of a “witty, sparkling, and inventive” performance cannot be embodied in the score. When you play in an ensemble, it is important to listen to the other players and respond to their ideas. You have to make decisions about which melodic line is the most important, whether or not it is appropriate to be flexible with the tempo, and where each phrase reaches a climax. You can make these decisions in rehearsal or even spontaneously during performance.

A Little Help From Your Friends…

While incorporating your own ideas into a piece is a very genuine way of creating a fresh performance, it’s also a good idea to run your innovations by musical collaborators, colleagues, and friends. They may help you to solidify your interpretation and make it even more meaningful.

Shaping Your Own Rendition

These three approaches to interpretation are equally valid. Each has resulted in great music-making and fantastic recordings, and as performers, we should remember the many avenues available to us when we play the music of another.

What piece have you been dying to play? Do you want to follow in the footsteps of the composer to a “T”, change some elements of the music while retaining the basic idea, or re-imagine it completely? Whichever you choose, your interpretation will be a welcome addition to the music’s own special mini-universe – where the music is played again and again by different musicians, and no two versions are exactly alike.

David Hall is the course director of classical piano at Finchcocks, the newly transformed piano school in Kent in the UK, where he teaches piano courses for adults of all levels. He studied the piano with Laura Cole and the organ with Anne Marsden Thomas at the Royal Academy of Music. Learn more about David and his teaching on his Finchcocks profile, and visit the Finchcocks website to see the range of programs and amenities offered.

The post 3 Ways to Interpret Your Favourite Piece of Music appeared first on Musical U.

Sabrina is an award-winning composer who created the first ever original fully-animated opera, Libertaria. We’ve long been in awe of the range and scale of projects Sabrina manages to take on and bring to success, and for the first time we got to sit down with her and actually dig into the question of how she manages to do all that she does.

Sabrina is certainly someone who people would be quick to call “talented” or “gifted”, yet we knew from working with her that she had as little belief in the importance of natural talent as we do – so we were utterly curious to know: if it’s not talent, how does she do it all?

In this conversation we talk about:

• Sabrina’s musical upbringing and how helpful attention to detail can become harmful perfectionism
• The remarkable college environment that transformed who she was as a musician and shaped who she’d become as a composer and film-maker, and
• The role that mentors have played in her journey and her advice for aspiring musicians seeking a mentor themselves.

With Sabrina’s extensive experience, fascinating projects and deep expertise, this conversation was never going to be a short one! And honestly, even after running a bit long we felt we’d only just scratched the surface. We’re hoping we’ll be seeing Sabrina on the podcast again before too long! And we think after hearing this episode you’re going to be feeling the same way.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Sabrina Peña Young’s website
• You’re Invited to Composer Boot Camp, with Sabrina Peña Young (interview)
• Interview with Sabrina about her Boot Camp
• Songwriting 101, by Sabrina Peña Young
• Filmmaking Crash Course, by Sabrina Peña Young
• Libertaria: The Virtual Opera, on YouTube, iTunes, and Amazon
• Futurist Music Anthology

Transcript

Sabrina: Hi! This is Sabrina Peña Young, I am the creator of Libertaria: The Virtual Opera, and the author of Composer Bootcamp and this is the Musicality Podcast.

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

Sabrina: Thank you for having me.

Christopher: So I was joking with you via email that it’s bizarre to me that you have not been on the show sooner and I was kicking myself recently when we were doing an episode all about clave and Latin rhythms and I was just like, “Why is Sabrina not here with us? This is stupid.” Because obviously you’ve been a really long-time collaborator of Musical U and Easy Ear Training before that, and I consider you such an important part of our team, and so I’m really excited to finally have you on the show here with us today.

But I realized in preparing for the show that although I know quite a lot about your recent projects of which there are many and always impressed me, I don’t actually know all that much about your back story. So I’d love if we could begin by talking about a bit about your own musical background and how you got started in music.

Sabrina: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, so when I first started playing, I started playing I was 10 years old. And I had a choice between taking study hall or band and I can’t sit still so I decided to take band. And what happened was we had this amazing guy come in. He was this big guy, tattoos, bald, one earring and he just started jamming on the drums, and he was like incredible! And I said, “I wanna do that when I grow up!” And so I decided to start playing the drums and I started playing the typical thing in band and then I joined orchestra.
And then I just kept playing through high school and I really, really, really wanted to be a professional orchestra so I spent hours and hours and hours and hours just practicing and playing and learning all different kinds of styles of music. I kind of moved away from just being a heavy rock drummer which would have been cool in the ’80s but maybe not so much now, you know?

And eventually I expanded everything in college when I went ahead and I ended up studying composition and music technology and started doing film as well.

Christopher: Got you. And you mentioned spending hours and hours there, what was the process of learning percussion like for you? Were you someone who found it, it was always a delight to sit at the drum set or was it kind of a slog and a grueling challenge to get through your practice each day?

Sabrina: I would say yes.

Christopher: All of the above.

Sabrina: I would say … I think I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and so I literally would spend an hour and a half making sure a simple crash sounded just right, or I would sit there with a metronome and instead of spending my summers out with my friends, I’d spend hours in beautiful sunny Florida with beaches in a practice room just trying to get things done. So I was a little too obsessed with it I think. Because now that I’m older I realize that music is enjoyable, it’s fun, it’s a wonderful experience and I think I just got a little too much into the nuances.

I think practicing triangle, playing eighth notes on a triangle for 45 minutes, there are so many better things I could have done with my time. And I did get better, but I also burnt out. So in college I burnt out entirely because it’s only sustainable, that kind of … It’s only sustainable for a while before your brain shuts off and says, “I can’t do this anymore.”

And so, I think that I kind of pushed myself too hard. And I actually had a lot of friends that had played as long as I had that we all burnt out about the same time. And so, I kind of had to reintroduce myself to music and performance. I had to drop it for a couple years. Just studied composition, worked on composition, writing music, writing songs, doing music technology and electronic music in audio engineering. And then kind of eased back into playing to where, honestly, when I perform and I play … I actually just did a Christmas thing the other day at my church, jamming away at the drum set and stuff again.

And you know, it’s just enjoyable now. It’s just fun. It’s an expression of myself, but it’s not this big, stressful, nervous breakdown kind of thing anymore. So, that’s really good.

Christopher: Got you. I’d love to dig into that a little bit if we may just ’cause I know that perfectionism and the challenge of how repetitive and systematic to be in your practice versus enjoying the process of learning music. I know those are two things that can be really challenging, particularly for adult musicians who are coming at it with a lot of background in different kinds of learning, some of it musical, some of it not.

What was the reaction to that perfectionism growing up from your parents or from your teachers? What was the kind of environment that lead to you being so diligent and focused like that?

Sabrina: Well I’m a third generation musician. So my grandmother was a professional opera singer in Cuba. And my mom was also a pianist. But she just played for church and things like that, she didn’t do it professionally. My sister’s also a professional musician, and she’s in Ohio. She’s a music educator primarily but she’s a vocalist and pianist. She was even more dedicated than I was. She used to wake up at 6 AM and play her scales for two hours before she went to high school, that kind of thing. I also feel like pianists have a tendency to be …

I’m a drummer, for me half of it’s a lot of fun, you know? Playing on a drum set for two hours is fun, even if it is a little crazy. But playing the hand and études for that long is crazy.
We had an environment that really … It was a home environment that it was very important to be excellent at what you did. You had to be good at it. My dad’s a perfectionist, he’s an engineer. He’s a very good engineer. He’s designed incredible houses. And my mom had the love of music and so it just kind of combined for both myself and for my sister where we just kind of got it.

And so, it was very much a very focused environment. And of course educators and teachers, once you get to high school you’re thinking about music scholarships and going to college and so it kind of promotes that kind of thing where you practice and practice and practice. I think one of the negative things about it is the tendency to compare yourself to others way too much. Where you sit there and let’s say you have this big solo or you have this thing that you did or just even a small part, and you’re just sitting there going, “Man, I could have done that better because I know so-and-so did it better.”

And it kind of becomes this obsessive thing where instead of enjoying the performance, you’re just constantly comparing yourself and saying, “Someone else is doing it better, I need to do it better.” And that’s a perfectionist part of it and I think that’s the part that damages you as a person because you become more focused on that and comparing yourself to others and there will always be somebody better because that’s just the way life is. And that doesn’t mean that you need to tear yourself down or give up or force yourself to practice 10 hours a day to where it’s a detriment to yourself.

So I think that on the one hand it’s good that I’m detail oriented ’cause I do compose large works and things like that. On the other hand, I think that it’s a balance. I think one of the easiest ways to balance things is to have kids.

Christopher: You can’t help it.

Sabrina: Because of all the sudden you’re sitting there going, “I really wanna write an opera but I have to change diapers.” And so, all of the sudden there’s this reality. In college, I had some health problems and some family issues going on that really slowed me down in terms of what I could performance wise. And it kind of really made me have to drop everything that I loved for a while while I tried to deal with just the basics of getting myself back on track as a person and as a human being.

I kept doing music throughout it all. Music will always be what I go to during any stage of my life. So, I think that yeah, I’m still a perfectionist, I’m a recovering perfectionist. But I’m also more forgiving of myself and I also realize that hey, it doesn’t have to be the best of the best of the best. I don’t have to sit here and compare myself to these imaginary people that I never meet that I think are better than me.

I really just need to do as best as I can right now. And just enjoy the process. I mean life is so short, there’s just no reason to stress about it, you know?

Christopher: Yeah, it’s so interesting hearing you talk through that because obviously we know you now as someone who’s had great success at a high level as a musician and a composer, and it’s always hard to know, for me anyway, what degree of perfectionism is a necessary evil and when I look back on my own journey, I can relate to a lot of what you just said. My high school environment was a fairly serious, classical music style music department and everything was let’s ace the exams, let’s perform it note perfect, let’s aim for excellence.

And it took me a long time to realize that actually I had felt like a mediocre musician throughout that period and when I stepped out in to the real world, I realized actually I was a pretty good musician in a lot ways. And still today in my work there are things I take for granted in terms of rhythm, or pitch, or music theory that I learned as an eight year old and have always had.

I see people struggling to learn it as adults and I just count my blessings that I was in that really excellent oriented music learning environment. But on the flip side, I felt mediocre throughout that and it was very frustrating and as you say, it would affect your identity and it took me a long time to feel comfortable identifying as a musician because to me, I was always the guy kind of bodging it while the guys that were really good at music, who were really natural in music were able to do it easily.

So, I struggle to decide how much of that kind of thing is a good thing, and how much harm it does. I think maybe the word you mentioned there, balance, is the key one.

Sabrina: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). I agree and I think it’s kind of interesting too because I shared with you earlier that … I had played in drum line and my senior year I was expected to take on the head of the drum line and I was told I couldn’t because I was a girl, and they didn’t think the girl could handle the boys. That actually, for something so small now that you think about it years later, it actually kind of wrecked my life at that time and made me change my course to where I said, “Okay well you know what? I’m just gonna focus on going to college and being the best percussionist I can be.”

And just really just honed in on focusing on my music. Unfortunately I’ve had to deal with that numerous times where … And I think that that does affect you, where you’re sitting there going, “I’m gonna play drum set but I know that … Or I’m gonna play whatever and I know that I have to be really, really good because if I’m mediocre, they’re gonna say, ‘Oh that’s ’cause it’s a girl.” And even though that’s not the situation today, that was the situation I had growing up. And so, it kind of sits back there where you’re sitting there going, “Well am I good musician? I don’t know if I know what I’m doing. Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing.”

And the other day, I’m just playing drum set playing White Christmas. It’s a simple jazz tune and I’m sitting there going, “Man I hope I can do this.” And I’m like, I did this … I was like 12 and I could do this.” It’s not really … It’s not even that difficult but because that self doubt keeps creeping in there for whatever reason, it can affect how you perform and how you feel about the performance. So, I did have a good time by the way, it was a blast.
But yeah, it was one of those things where I’m just sitting there going, “Can I play White Christmas? Well of course I can play White Christmas.” It’s ta ta ta ta ta ta. How hard is that? So, anyway … But, yeah …

Christopher: Yeah, that little voice in your head never goes away completely, does it?

Sabrina: No.

Christopher: So you mentioned there that in college as you turned your attention away a little bit from performance and instrument technique, you got into the music technology side of things. Can you talk a little bit about that and I guess what are we talking here, I don’t want to cause offense! But I guess we’re talking about the early 2000s, are we?

Sabrina: Yes, that’s good. We’ll just keep it around there. A lady never tells her age. Okay, anyway-

Christopher: What was music technology like and what was it that got you excited?

Sabrina: It was actually kind of a really great time to be a musician in music technology because we were… At our school, we were a public university, I was at the University of South Florida at the time. I had taken composition lessons earlier at another school with Dr. Clare Shore. She’s an excellent composer, really writes lots of choral music. She actually still helped with Libertaria and she’s still a part of my life because she’s just this mentor that’s stayed with me this entire time.

But then I transferred to the University of South Florida and they have a technology department there. It’s called SYCOM which is a System Complex with Performance Arts. But it’s also just a really crazy group of creative visual artists and musicians and we just get together and do really crazy experimental music. It was a great time because we were just transitioning from … We still had a giant E-Mu and all this analogy synthesizers and everything.

We still had a basic studio with a microphone and everything but we also had a digital work station. I got to learn how to patch chords and all this kind of thing and create sounds and do basic sound synthesis and audio engineering with analog and then also with digital. By the time I got to graduate school at Florida International where I was studying with Dr. Christine Burns, it was all digital at that point.

But because I had a chance to learn analog first, I was able to understand the digital in an entirely different way. It wasn’t just clicking around, it wasn’t just hitting buttons. It wasn’t just copying a loop over and over again, I understood the processes behind it, remember that I had first learned, sitting there taking a patch cord and going, “Okay I gotta put it here and plug it in to there and then plug it in to here and then …” At the end of it, we did … I remember one day we got this ancient 1970s synthesizer that fits a room.

We had to do techno music and it wasn’t supposed to do techno music and my professor was not happy with us. ‘Cause he’s like, “What are you guys doing?” And we’re like “Yeah! Look what we did!” And he’s like, “No! No! That’s not … ” And we were sitting there playing with the lights and having a rave in the middle of this and he’s just sitting there going, “No!” I think we disappointed him that day.

So it was just a great chance and then because it was so experimental, we just did whatever we wanted. And then we collaborated with visual artists and filmmakers and that’s when I first started getting interested in visual imagery and film and things like that and just kind of realizing that music is powerful and visual images are powerful and when you put them together, they’re this crazy force that just … Audiences just … I don’t know, it’s just a different experience.

So I started incorporating imagery or collaborating with people. I even collaborated with dancers and things like that. And that kind of formed a background for some of my later work.

Christopher: Interesting. Okay, there’s two things there that I really want to unpack and one of them is you mentioned mentors and I’ve always been conscious with you, you’re very quick to name the people who have helped you and guided you. In your book acknowledgements, in your website, anytime you’re writing a press release and that kind of thing, you’re always quick to call out the people you admire and appreciate, who’ve influenced you.

This has come up a few times on the podcast, this question of mentorship or having a coach or a guide. And I know you’ve also, I believe, played this role in a few websites where people can get song writing coaching and that kind of thing, or advice on their career. I’d like to just hear your perspective on mentorship in music learning. What does it mean to be a mentor and how does it help a musician?

Sabrina: I think having a mentor is why I am where I am today. It wasn’t just the people in college like my first… I had several instructors but I had one in particular, his name was Ged Davis and he still teaches drum line and all kinds of things, and percussion in South Florida, and he has taught so many percussionists. I think every percussionist in South Florida has studied with him. It’s just to be able to work with someone who has done the journey, who loves and has a passion for music, and is able to impart that to you.

And not only that, but cares for you as a person. I think that’s the difference between somebody just being your piano teacher and somebody being a mentor. It’s somebody that sits there and goes, “You did a great job on this and this and this and stuff, but how are you really doing?” And I think, for myself, because I had a lot of family issues growing up, I kind of latched on to different people and looked up to them professionally and then also just as somebody to look up to for encouragement and just saying, “Okay this is going on in my life, am I gonna make it through this?” And they’re like, “Oh yeah, you can. Let’s do this. I’ve done this before.” And that kind of a thing.

I was very fortunate because I had two women that were composers that were my mentors. In the States that’s very unusual, even today there’s not a lot of women that are promoted to areas of professorships in the United States. And so, there’s more now than there were when I was growing up but… Dr. Shore, she was the first female to get a, I believe, accomplishing degree from Julliard. She’s gone over these massive hurdles her in life and then to be able to kind of follow along.

I remember Dr. Burns, she just did some incredible thing, she did an opera as well. She did a children’s opera. In fact, I wanna do a children’s opera soon and I think it’s kind of funny that I’m paralleling some of those things. But she also had to deal with some things too as well and she started her family later in life. I kind of, inadvertently, I had one child and then I had to wait a while to have another one and it’s just kind of funny to sit here as a professional and be like, “Okay I’m writing music and I’m still potty training.” That kind of thing.

So, it’s good to have people that are a little farther a long and can kind of show you the path and show you that it is possible. The nice thing about it is then you can make your own path and you can try to create new things and then you can mentor people underneath you. And so yes, I’ve mentored probably, through different websites and online things and consulting and things, like over 150 musicians I think at this point. Different levels of all different things.

Really, I just try to help people see that where they are is fine and you can get to where you wanna go and it might not be tomorrow. You have to give yourself time and patience and realize life is life. Sometimes you wanna do this big project but you might have to wait a few months, or maybe you get to do it right away and then what? Because that’s the other problem as a musician. You’re like, “Oh I just accomplished something great, now what?” ‘Cause you kind of get that high of like, “Yeah performance! It was awesome! Woo!” And then you get home the next day and you’re eating Cheerios and you’re like, “My life … What do I do with my life now?”

And it’s kind of that crazy mountain top experience and the next day you’re like, “I’m in the valley. I don’t know what to do.” And so, it’s just good to have a mentor. And I think also, I think it’s important for people to mentor others. Even if are not as far along as you think you would, even if you feel like you’re not that great of musician, I think you could always find somebody that you can inspire and you can encourage. And even if it’s a peer where you just encourage them and they encourage you and you guys move together in your journey. But I think it’s important that we remember that there is community in music and that we all work together to create something wonderful and that we don’t get stuck in the practice room and just forget about life and about anything and about everybody else.
It’s not just about me being good. It’s about, “What can I do to help others?” So, that’s kind of my idea about that.

Christopher: Amazing. That was a really wonderful description. And what you said just at the end there reminded me a bit of my conversation recently with Josh Wright on the podcast who’s a high level classical pianist and he was talking about his mentor and how one of the roles she performed for him was helping reign in his tendency to go too far down a rabbit hole and lose sight of what his taste in music should be, or could be, or would best be and it just kind of reset his perspective a little. And I think that’s what you touched on at the end there, there are a wiser, broader set of eyes that can look at your musical life and help you figure out what’s going on.

So I do feel obliged to ask on behalf of the listener, that mentor relationship sounds amazing. How do you find a mentor?

Sabrina: Well, I think, obviously if you are fortunate enough to be in a student teacher relationship, you’re taking lessons some where, or even if it’s somebody online you’re taking lessons with. Even if you are maybe in a community group, or a band, or a church orchestra kind of thing, usually there’s gonna be somebody there that you are gonna kind of just … I don’t know, hit it off with it. So I think that that’s probably the easiest way, is that if you are already in sort of a relationship where you’re playing and they’re the director or they’re your teacher or something like that. I think that’s the easiest way but not everybody has that.
I suggest not just playing music in a vacuum, don’t just stay at home and say, “I’m playing piano and I’m good at it.” And that’s it. Go out and meet other musicians, jam with other musicians. The great thing is that we have this thing called the Internet now and we can find out if there’s a group of … If there’s a drum circle going on, we can find out hey there’s a drum circle going on next Saturday and then you head there. And then I think it’s just really being open and just building relationships and eventually you will find that there’ll be people that maybe are a little bit farther along than you are that you’ll hit it off with.

If you’re younger, usually an older mentor helps but even if you’re an adult, usually it’s somebody that maybe a peer age-wise but they’re somebody that maybe they’ve done a little bit more than you have and they can kind of … You can talk to them and talk shop. I’m in the film community here in the area and we have a Facebook page and everybody’s constantly writing, “Hey, I had this really great idea for a movie, what do I do now?” And everybody just pipes in and just says, “Hey, do this, do that. Call so-and-so, do this. Don’t forget to do that!” You know?

And I think that online communities are really great because you can really just touch base with people from all over the world that have all kinds of experience. I think that that’s also another way to build a mentorship as well. I don’t think … The word mentor is kind of loaded where we think of like this great person with this massive brain that’s just like, “I know what I’m doing.” But that’s not really what it is. It’s just somebody that cares about you that’s maybe a little farther along in their journey and it’s a very basic definition.

I think almost anybody can find someone but you just have to be open to it. Just realize … You also have to be able to take criticism or take suggestions. And so, some people may not be secure enough in that and they just need to get over that. If somebody’s saying, “Hey, I like how you did that but you could do this.” Just say, “Great, thank you.” That’s just some free advice you didn’t ask for to make you a better musician.

So, I think that that’s a big part of it to, to able to take constructive criticism. Or even not so constructive criticism. And just plain honesty. So take that and be able to move forward with that as well.

Christopher: Would you explicitly ask them, “Hey will you be my mentor?” Or is it more of an organic thing generally would you think?

Sabrina: It’s always been organic for me. My drum instructor growing up and stuff, I looked up to him, I still look up to him. We’re Facebook friends, you know. And Dr. Shore, Dr. Burns. You just keep looking up to them and you just … It just happens. I never really asked them, “Can you be my mentor?” It just kind of happens one day where you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is my mentor.” And you didn’t really realize it but then you see what they’ve done in your life and how they’ve impacted you and how they’ve influenced your journey. And I think that that’s a big part of it as well.

Christopher: Very cool. So two things you said there actually loop back to the other big thing I wanted to pull out of your talking about your university experiences. One was community. You talked in there about being part of a community. And the other was criticism and feedback from other people. What I wanted to bring out was actually the number one thing I wanted to ask you in this interview, or try and get an answer to which is, you are an astonishing mystery to me in the degree to which you can produce incredible projects year after year.

I’ve known you at this point for nearly a decade and-

Sabrina: Yeah, I was gonna say … Yeah.

Christopher: I’m constantly amazed by what you work on and what you manage to accomplish and that in a sense to me is in juxtaposition with the childhood story you just shared of being a perfectionist, being kind of rigid in your music learning and kind of doing things the way they’re meant to be done, and what really jumped out to me there was that I think maybe that university period is the crux of it, of how someone who came from that background became someone who is so creative and so, from my perspective, fearless in the projects she takes on.

Because when you were describing that melting pot of creativity and experimental things and projects, I’ll be honest, I got nervous. I was like, I would not be comfortable in that environment, I would be worrying. I don’t wanna experiment. I might get it wrong. Am I good enough to collaborate with that visual artist? That to me is not something I’ve dived into in my own life and so I am much more straight laced and restricted really when it comes to my musical creativity.

And so, I’d love to hear you talk a bit more about that, and the impact it had on you in terms of where you were coming from and where you went on to go in your music career.

Sabrina: Well yeah, it was crazy. It was a crazy time and a good time. At University of South Florida they have, like I said, this group called SYCOM, I believe it’s still… They had all the electronic musicians in this basement, which in Florida you don’t have very many basements. And it was like this bunker that was meant to be a bomb shelter way back in the day or something. It was some sort of weird story. So you’d shut this door and you were just stuck in this basement and you would just create music and it was great. We were like the mole people. We just were crazy people that did this insane stuff.

And I think … It was headed up by Paul Reller at the time and he was, at that time, I think he was in his thirties. He was very experimental in his work and he wrote big pieces and small pieces, acoustic pieces, electronic pieces. But he just really forced us as a group of students to just kind of take our ideas and then just take it to the next level, and to really just force ourselves to kind of have … to make ourselves have no boundaries whatsoever.

I know sometimes people say, “Oh well I’m a little outside the box.” And I say, “Well I don’t even believe in the box in the first place. There is no box. It’s in your head.” And so, I think that that was a great opportunity. We used to have these concerts every year and the concerts would … We’d lose like half our audience because we were so experimental that people were like, “That’s not music.” And they’d leave. And we’d cheer. We’re like “Yes! We’ve succeeded! We are the avant-garde.” In fact, it was a joke that we’d always lose the head of the music department, whoever it was would just leave after 20 minutes and we’re like, “Yes! We are the true … ”

We were really hardcore about what we believed in and what we did. But yeah, I think it was really great for somebody like me that was a perfectionist that was classically trained, that had been in orchestra to kind of sit there and go, “Okay so you’re on a skateboard and we’ve got some footage of rabbits and I’m gonna write some music to this. And we can do this!”

And I’m not kidding. We actually had one concert where we took a guy in this really dilapidated rabbit suit that looked terrible. He looked like he’d been run over. We took him all the way around town and then everybody synced their electronic music as a soundtrack to this guy in a rabbit suit running around. And that was something we did. I don’t do that anymore. But it still affects my work. So a lot of my work will have all of a sudden these sections that are very experimental, very out there.

And Paul Reller also was a percussionist just like me, and I think that was another part of being a composer that’s a percussionist, I think in terms of timbre and rhythm and sound and I think in terms of sometimes melody.

Sabrina: I think in terms of timbre, of sound, even instrumentation orchestration color. And so, since Paul was also a percussionist, he kind of encouraged those things in me. So, I think that that’s the difference between maybe some of my writing and maybe somebody else’s writing. A lot of the composers I know, a lot of them are pianist. Some of them are singers or … And I think with the pianist, the nice thing about a pianist is writing music whether it’s songs or whether it’s a full blown, some big orchestra kind of thing, is that their instrumentation is they have harmony, they have rhythm, they have melody.

And while with instruments like the marimba, you have some harmony. I don’t really think in terms of harmony and when I put harmony in things, I think more in terms of, “Well I want it to sound creepy or I want it to sound this way or that way.” And I don’t really think of, “Okay well let me sit down. If I have a four chord, what comes right after that?” And I might follow some traditional, vertical writing then I’ll just totally leave it and say, “Okay, well what’d I really want?”

And I think that’s why some of my music sounds a little bit different than some other people’s music. So in college I got a chance to really experiment with that. I was in the percussion ensemble at University of South Florida is nationally known in the United States. It’s a really, really good program under Bob McCormick. And what happens with them, they just do all kinds of music, every kind of music you could possibly think of.

And so, that really gave me an opportunity to kind of expand who I was as a composer through my percussion playing as well. And so, I would learn something new in percussion and then I’d apply it in my next piece that I wrote. It was kind of neat how that kind of just fed into each other. And then like I said, I started taking classes. I took classes in Photoshop, I took classes in film. I took a class in science fiction fantasy film which was actually a real class where I just there and we got to watch Sci-Fi movies for like half a semester whatever and that was it.

And so it’s one of those things that that’s where I started combining everything. And I think also what was nice is that we also had a big musical theater piece as well. And so every year, at least once or twice a year, the Theater Department, and the Music Department, and the Visual Arts Department would get together and do these massive collaborations whether it was an opera or a musical or just something else that was just this big piece that was nice to see everybody working together.

‘Cause in many schools, the musicians are here, the artists are there, the filmmakers are there, the writers are here, and nobody collaborates. And because everybody was kind of enmeshed with each other, it kind of help form who I was later as a composer, I think.

Christopher: That’s really interesting. So I think when we first started working together you were a celebrated avant-garde composer and I was definitely a bit intimidated by that and certainly felt guilty asking you to compose a basic three chord pop song for some of my training material-

Sabrina: That was fun though!

Christopher: And that kind of thing. I felt like I was not leveraging your talents to the best. But I think, as impressed as I was, it was your Libertaria project that really hit home for me. “Wow, she is doing some incredible things.” So I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about that because it seemed like a bit of a leap, even for an experimental composer to do a project like Libertaria. That’s not an obvious career trajectory. So tell us how that came to be. And we should probably explain for the listeners who haven’t seen the movie, what is Libertaria?

Sabrina: Right. Well Libertaria is an animated science fiction opera. And you can actually watch it on YouTube, you can watch it on Amazon. Actually one of the reasons I created it was so that way everybody can enjoy it for free on the Internet. Opera is kind of this thing that seems like you have to dress up really stodgy and get these really expensive tickets and nobody talks and everybody just kind of stares and politely claps. And I just wanted to change that because it’s the 21st century and things are changing so rapidly.

So Libertaria’s an animated opera and it’s a science fiction opera and it’s crazy! But it actually had roots in an oratorio that I’d written. I had written when my daughter was … Actually I was pregnant with her, actually. I got a commission from… Oh gosh, was it Millikin University, I think it was. Was it Millikin or was it Kansas State? I think it was Millikin. Millikin University.

And they commissioned me to write an oratorio, which is a giant choral piece, is essentially what it is. So I did this giant choral piece. It was 50 women, women’s chorus, percussion ensemble, synthesizer. I had animation. It was called the Creation Oratorio, and the animation was very … It was based on the creation story but I also had been pregnant at the time so it kind of intertwined the idea of being pregnant and having a baby with the creation story that the seven days or whatever.

And it also had a lot of Sci-Fi so a lot of the creatures were very weird looking bald, alien-looking things. Anyway, so it was this great piece. It was standing room only, standing ovation, it was just … Performed at this church, it was incredible. And it was just an amazing experience. But! I have never seen it in its entirety again and that broke my heart.

Now I have had people ask me to do arrangements of it. So I’ve done many arrangements of this particular piece for all kinds of different ensembles. There’s a couple of the songs from there that have actually done pretty well on their own as standalone pieces, but as for it being done as a single oratorio, I don’t think it’s ever … At least to my knowledge it’s never been done the first … Like it was the first time.

And that broke my heart. Because it was in the year and a half of my time spent writing this piece and I feel like it was my first real masterpiece. You kind of have these pieces in your life where you’re just like, that was a really good one. And I feel like that was my very first one where I was like, “Hey, I think I’m a composer.” And so, even though I’ve done many other pieces, that was the one I was like, “Oh my gosh. I think I know what I’m doing.” So, I wanted to try to create something new that it could be replicated, that it could be experienced not just by a couple hundred people or whatever standing there enjoying this …

It wouldn’t be limited by the size of your auditorium. It wouldn’t be limited by, “Okay well can we practice this for eight months?” It wouldn’t be limited by, “Oh well, we don’t do electronic with voice. It’s too hard.” Or that kind of a thing. So, I decided well, I wanna do an opera and I’m like, what if I did it like a film? ‘Cause I always wanted to do film too. I’m married to a coach, an amazing guy who is very supportive of my work and is right now with the baby. So he also as a coach, we moved around the country a lot, and so because of that when you have an opera, you have to have an opera company and you have to be in one spot and you have to have all these connections otherwise …

And it’s a very expensive kind of a project. It could cost six figures. Especially since, of course, I didn’t wanna do something easy that was one person. It was like this massive, epic with tons of … This huge cast members and there’s explosions and space ships … Anyway, so obviously it was gonna cost a lot of money. So I decided, instead, to try to do an Internet collaboration. And so what I did was … I’d done some animation with a program called Moviestorm which was … It’s called a cinema animation.

Essentially, you don’t have to create all the characters from scratch. You create some of the characters, you create them in an environment, and then you kind of direct them like you would direct let’s say a regular actor. So you could tell your character, “Hey, I want you to sing this and then run around in circles.” And then you type it in and figure it out and it does it. And so, I decided to use that program to create the cast in terms of all the splendor of this insanity.

And so what I did was I put out calls online. I had people from as far away as Europe and South America audition and we ended up … The funny thing is we started out with one cast of about 12 people and we ended up with another cast of about 15 ’cause half the people had to quit half way through and there was just … The process itself took about two and a half years I think.

I would audition people online and I actually created these audition packs where essentially you could download an album with the click track for your voice type and all the scores and then you could download that for free and then you can practice with that and then send me the files. So we had the cast members send me files. I had a thousand audio files that I had to go through because I had some musicians… I had Perri Cook and Matt Meadows. They were both doing the lead of Simeon and I had to… For each part, each of the main roles had at least two people, as two people in them.

So I would mix the two vocal takes together so it was kind of interesting because it gave each character a very interesting range. It even had character sing a duet with himself which is … You wouldn’t do live. Some of them … And then I would have, for example, Perri went ahead and for one of the songs, he sent me all these incredible takes in different dialects like different accents and voices and then I was able to mix that and create an entire choir of soldiers from his eight takes and I was able to replicate it and make it like 20 or so.

And so, that kind of thing happened. It was a big endeavor in terms of just the mixing. And then by the end of it, what I ended up doing was I ended up hiring somebody to do the final master because by then. It was like two years in, my ears were shot, I couldn’t tell … Everything sounded the same and I had no longer had the ability to kind of differentiate between. “Well that was a good take or a bad take or does that work? I have no idea anymore. What are the levels? I don’t know.”

So, he finished it up. At the same time, I was also doing the animation with a group of three other women. We created the animation. At the end, one dropped out and so I had to kind of animate 20 minutes that I hadn’t expected which in animation, that’s a lot of animation. And then by the end of it, we mixed it altogether, we premiered it down in South Florida. Dr. Clair Shore actually was the one that actually arranged for that premier. I think that was October 2013.

And then after that, it has been shown all over the world. It was shown at OPERA America in New York City. It’s been shown at film festivals, it’s been shown at music festivals. The album’s out there. It’s on YouTube. It’s on other websites as well. So it’s done very well. I gave a TED talk on it as well. So, it’s kind of interesting but yeah, it’s kind of an usual … I never thought growing up from being that little girl being like, “I wanna be a rock drummer because that’s what’s cool. Heavy metal.” To being like, “Yeah I’m gonna do an animated Sci-Fi opera, that sounds great.” It’s just kind of a weird … That’s not really what you wanna say when you grow up.

So now, it’s kind of interesting because I’m kind of known for this one thing and so, I have a lot of people contact me about doing an opera for them or whatever. And actually right now, I might be working on a collaboration with somebody from Australia. We’re trying to figure it out. It’s kind of hard now ’cause I have two kids and time being the way time is … ‘Cause at that time, I just didn’t sleep all the time. That’s how I managed to do that.

When I did Libertaria, I never slept. And now that I have two kids, and my son’s definitely much different than my daughter, sleep is very important. So I have not been able to do that as much as I would like. But I’m hoping to do that project, at least on a smaller scale, and then I’m also … I’ve been working in pre-production for a children’s opera and I wanna do that one also. Part live action, part animation. It’s actually gonna be more of a comic book opera. And so, I kinda wanna do that. I don’t know if there’s been other comic book operas but I wanna try to do one.

I don’t know if there are other ones but … ‘Cause I know with Libertaria, it was the first one with machinima animation and it might have been … It’s one of the only original animated operas. There are animated operas that are like Mozart or something. But as for somebody creating an opera and then animating it, it’s probably one of the only ones ever done. So yeah, I think I wanna do a comic book opera next.

Christopher: Amazing. Well, I definitely wanna circle back and talk about the fact that you took on this complete other role of film maker for that project. You weren’t just the composer.

Sabrina: Just for fun.

Christopher: Just ’cause you could. I have this really vivid memory. I’m a big Sci-Fi fan and so I was eagerly awaiting the release of Libertaria and my wife and I set up our movie projector and we watched it. It was such a vivid memory for me. It was fantastic. And I remember at the time, I was blown away that this was something that people have made in their owns homes, collaborating over the Internet, and in particular, that you had kind of spearheaded this both in terms of composing all the music obviously but also organizing a project of this scale.

I think having heard a bit of your backstory now, it makes a bit more sense in my head that you’ve been in an environment where people did just do these audacious projects and not even think twice about it. I wanted to kind of reign in that sense of what it means to compose for a minute because that is an epic project and it’s been such a huge success and really made a mark.

But I know that some people listening are like, I couldn’t even write one page of music let alone 40 minutes or an hour to be an opera, an… That was probably blowing their minds right now as it did mine when I watched it. So let’s just come back a notch or two, because you said something interesting a few minutes ago that with the Creation Oratorio that was a moment where you were like, “Oh maybe I can be a composer.”

I’d love to just unpack that a little bit because it’s such a loaded word and we’ve already talked about coming from a classical music background and that obviously has huge history and connotations of what it means to be a composer. But it’s also this very generic versatile word that we can apply to any kind of music creating.

So I wonder, particularly because you have really kind of tackled this subject head on with your book, Composer Bootcamp. I’d love to hear your perspective on what does that word mean? What should that word mean? And how can the people listening explore what the role of composer could be for them?

Sabrina: Definitely. I think you’re right, it’s a very loaded word. For example when I went to college, nearly every composer I studied had been dead for a very long time, was European, was male. And I think I only studied two female composers. And I also only studied two non-European composers and that was only because they were friends with the professor so he mentioned them in class and he talked about them.

I think that we kind of have this idea that all composers must be these stodgy old guys, they’re very dead, they’re not around anymore, they wore powdered wigs. They wrote for kings. I don’t write for kings. I wish I did. It’d be great, it’d be great. Any kings listening, hire me. Anyway … I’m sure there’s lots of kings on Musical U, right?

Christopher: That’s a whole other podcast.

Sabrina: Monarchs… Yeah, you know? Anyway, but yeah, so it’s one of those things that … It was an engine and it was this creation of music within this very specific system. But nowadays, especially today, I mean even when I started doing composition, at that time, like I said we were going from analog to digital. The Internet was just becoming. It had been around but it wasn’t really a thing of collaboration yet. It was more of a “Hey, I got an email from a weird guy.” Kind of thing still.

It was one of those things that we really weren’t exploring all the things that we could do. And the amazing thing today … I really feel like our definition of composer needs to be expanded so much more than dead guy who writes symphonies, you know? I think if you are sitting there and you’re jamming and you write this song, even if you don’t write it down and you just record it or you just play it and you play it for some friends, you’re composing.
I think that if you are playing the piano and you’re like, “Hey, I wanna try play with these chords a little bit.” You’re composing. I think that a lot of times composing can just be improvising, jamming, experimenting, expressing yourself musically. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be this really complicated thing that’s written on paper and handed to a conductor and played in a symphony hall. It’s something very basic, and I think what’s interesting is that in Western society specifically, we kind of assign composer as a very specific job, as a very specific person.

It’s funny ’cause I’m in a lot of parenting groups because I’m a mom and I don’t tell people I’m a composer, I kind of keep it as a secret identity thing. And then people are like, and eventually comes to, “I am a composer.” And they’re like, “You’re a composer?” And I’m like, “Yes!” As I have spit-up on me and I have my hairs a mess and I’m wearing yoga pants, and I’m like, “Yes! Yes I’m a composer.” I’m like, “What did you think composers were?”

I think that we kind of need to move past this. Even those famous composers from back then, when you look at their lives, I think it was Bach who had like twenty kids, and some of them had disabilities, and he taught them piano because he wanted to. Things like that that we really don’t think about them as people. We kind of idealize them and say, “Oh, Mozart.” Yeah, Mozart had a pretty crappy life, you know? You look at them and they’re people. They’re not these crazy god-like characters.

I think that we need to kind of take composers off their pedestal, and I think right now, half the composers are going, “Oh my gosh!” Yes. We need to get off of our pedestal. Take us off and just put us there with everybody else. In fact, my sister who … Her name is Christina and she’s over in Ohio, Christina’s always telling me … She teaches composition to 10 year olds. And it used to be that composition, and ear training, and music theory, and playing was all part of learning how to be a musician. It wasn’t this strange thing.

And in other societies, people create music naturally. You have people that they just … My family, like I said my mom’s side of the family’s from Cuba, and everybody there is playing the drums, and singing, and dancing, and it’s just an expression of hope and joy and just sheer expression. And nobody’s calling themselves a composer. They might be composer. They might be creating things from scratch that nobody’s ever heard of before, and they’re incredible, but they’re just expressing themselves.

I think that we kind of need to get a way from that term a little bit sometimes, while also respecting that there are people that make these incredible things that you’re like, “Wow!” But I also think that anybody can be a composer if they wanted to be. That’s kind of why I created the Composer Bootcamp, which I’ll show you right now, Composer Bootcamp.

But that’s why I created that. What I did was I took a lot of the exercises and things that I’ve been teaching for years, and I compiled it into just very practical exercises. Some of them are meant for people that don’t have any musical background whatsoever, or barely any. So they can’t read music or they don’t have music theory and they’re mostly prompts, creative prompts to go ahead and kind of get an idea to write music or jam.

There’s encouragement to have community and to do things with groups and to not just do things by yourself. It’s also for intermediates. People that maybe have music theory or college students and that kind of thing. And then also there’s exercises there for people that maybe they’ve done this for a very long time and they just wanna do something that challenges them and so there’s a handful of exercises as well for that kind of thing.

The main reason I made that is to kind of take the mystic out of composing. I don’t think that we need to sit there and go, “Well I’m not a composer. I can’t do that.” I don’t think that’s possible. I think anybody can do it. If you’ve only been playing for six months, I think you could compose music. And I think what’s interesting is that, I have a couple friends that I keep … They play piano or they sing or whatever and I’m like, “You gotta write music. You have to write music.” And they’re like, “No I can’t do that. It’s so hard.” I’m like, “You improvise every week. You do this every week. You can sing. You can do that. You understand this. Write music. You can do it. It’s not that hard, I mean, it is hard, but it’s not hard. You just have to learn the skills and then it’s there.”

So I think that it’s very important that performers and musicians whether they can read or not read, that they explore creating music. If we went away from being like composing music and just saying creating music, I think that it’s a much better description of what you do. It’s not just you’re composing and sitting there and … You’re creating music, and if you think of it as creating music instead of just composing it, I think that people would understand it.

‘Cause if you were like, “Oh do you improvise, do you jam, do you create music?” I think people would be, “Yeah I totally do that.” But if you’re like, “Do you compose?” “Oh no. I don’t do that.” So, I think that that’s … We need to take away some of that stigma. And I also think that a lot of being a composer is having others hear your music, and I think that we need to be more open to people sharing their music and having their music performed. Because I feel like part of the reason that we have this mystique about composers is that a lot of, at least in the United States, a lot of our institutions are not open to people that are what I call living composers and not decomposing composers.

So a lot of times you’ll see these programs, and these are great programs and of course I love Tchaikovsky and I love Stravinsky but it’s 2018 now, and it’s gonna be 2019. We’re already 20 years into the 21st century. We shouldn’t be sitting there going, “Our symphony just played something from 1935, we’re so current.” Imagine if the medical profession was like, “Hey, they used to do this in 1885 and we’re doing it now.” Imagine if the medical community acted like the classical community sometimes …

And to that credit, I think a lot of organizations, especially a lot of smaller ensembles have been created to promote new music, and so you’ll have groups of musicians that are like, “Hey, I play violin, I play percussion, I play piano. Let’s write something for ourselves, let’s ask other composers to write things for us. Let’s just create something.” And they’ll go out and they’ll do it. And because of the Internet now, they don’t necessarily need to have the support of a giant arts organization. They can actually do it on their own.

I think that while, at least in the United States, some of the bigger organizations are struggling financially and things like that, there are lots and lots and lots of little ensembles, people just doing all kinds of things. You can find them on the Internet, you can buy their albums, you can go to their concerts. And you can support new music. So I think that’s kind of cool, too.

Christopher: Terrific. Yeah, there was so much I loved about this book when it came out and still do. I think the two major things that stick in my head were that you have designed it to be completely accessible. So yes, it’s useful for the trained musician who wants to learn about composing properly, but it’s also something that, as you say, anyone who has just a little bit of musical training, even just instrument playing, can pick it up and start creating, start composing, and start to feel like, “Yes. This is something I could do.”

And the other thing is you, as you always do, bring in a lot of the practicalities. You just talked there about opportunities to get new music heard and the book also touches on things like how do you market music, or how do you get your music out there, and how do you find opportunities that it can be performed, which I think is really valuable, too, so that you’re not just sitting in your bedroom scribbling on a piece of paper and hoping it’s a good composition.

Sabrina: Exactly. Well I think, that actually … When I was in college, actually at the University of South Florida, that was actually one of the things I realized. I had had a semester where I think I wrote like a dozen pieces and out of a dozen pieces, I think a handful got performed. Because you know college kids, we write for each other. You’re like, “Oh hey, I’m a percussionist, I mean, I’m a composer. And you’re a bassoonist, let me write something for you.” And so, I know that it was one of those things that we just kind of were trying but it didn’t always work out.

At that point in my career, which I was just in college, I said, “You know what? From now on I’m not writing a piece unless I know that there is a performance, a concert. There’s a concert date for it.” And I know that that’s kind of … It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to write music and assume that it’s never gonna have a concert date, but it was more of a thing that what is the point … It’s like if you write a novel and then you keep it in your drawer and you just leave it there and you’re like, “I wrote a novel!”

And nobody ever reads it. You never know what the audience thinks, you don’t know if it was good or bad or needs help, or should you do a sequel? Should you keep doing this? Or should you just go ahead and do something else? So I feel like for musicians that are exploring creating music, have other people listen. I know it’s embarrassing sometimes. I know for myself it’s hard for me to have a half-finished piece shown because I’m like, “Okay, well I don’t think this is finished yet but what do you think about this?”

And then just kind of have their input on it. But I think it’s really important that if you are creating music that you have it performed. So when I was in college, I started setting concert dates. In fact, I remember I had a lesson with my professor and he was like, “Sabrina … ” I was like, “Yes … ” He says, “Can you please come in here one day without a finished composition that has a concert date?” I was like, “What?” He’s like, “Yes. Every time you come in here, you’re like, ‘Yeah I wrote this and it’s being performed next week.” And I’m like, “Well, yes.” And he’s just like, “No.”

So he actually forced me to write this piece that is still unfinished and has never been performed. He forced me to slow down my writing process extremely slow to where it was just nit-picky and I still have sketches that I managed to orchestrate, I started as a piano piece, and then I orchestrated it into like five to 10 parts, and it still needs to be finished. It just sits there. It’s my unfinished piece. It’s probably a masterpiece but yeah.

My professor also forced us to write everything by hand. He didn’t let us turn in scores by computer because he said that too many of us were depending on computers to write our music, which I think is kind of an interesting thought, that I think that it’s important that if you’re writing music, that you do it with your instrument, your voice, and a paper and pencil. Start there. Because it is very easy to go into a song writing program and just go, “That sounds good! Copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, the end.”

By forcing his students to sit down and actually write everything painstakingly out, no matter how long the piece was, it was a lot of work. Of course then later on I had to transcribe it into music notation because nobody takes handwritten scores anymore. And so I’d have these pieces that are really great pieces that I had to sit and go, “Now I have transcribe this.” But I don’t know, it was kind of crazy.

Christopher: Coming back to music technology then, you took on this major project Libertaria where you weren’t just composing an opera, which presumably you didn’t do it entirely with pencil and paper. Did you allow yourself a computer?

Sabrina: I actually did allow myself a computer but I don’t know if I have it right next to me, I don’t think so. It might be back there. I actually have a journal. It’s like this thick, and it has a lot of the musical ideas. I keep trying to think if it’s around here. Usually I keep it close by but right now, if you saw my station, it’s a disaster.

But anyway. I would go ahead and I’d have… Nate would watch my daughter, my husband would watch my daughter. And then I’d go to the coffee shop and I’d just there and for a couple hours just write down lyrics, write down libretto, write down how I want the film to go in terms of the story board, musical ideas. I would try to take moments here and there and write down melodies. A lot of times when I write a piece of music, I will sketch out kind of a graphic notation kind of idea version of it.

So I’ll have a melody and then I’ll start trying chicken scratch. Lots of times it does look like chicken scratch, it’s just a bunch of scribbles and then a section that says, “Really big here!” And then a decrescendo and then maybe in parentheses “Flute maybe, question mark.” And that kind of a thing. So I’ll have these massive graphic notations things that I understand what they mean, nobody else in their right mind ever would.

And then I take those, and I would take those into the computer. Now, the challenge was that for these, not everybody that was on my cast could read music. So, not only did I have to have scores and click tracks where the click track would allow the singers to sing right in time to the score so it’d just be click, click, click. I also had to have the piano parts play what the musicians were gonna sing because some of them would just listen to the piano part and then sing their song, which was fine except once in a while, of course I’m human, and I went ahead and I would have a wrong note in there.

And I’d get the recording back and I’m like, “What happened there?” And then I’m like, “Oh that was my fault. Yeah, okay, we’ll just tweak that.” It was challenging because essentially, I kind of had to go from sketches then from sketches to a more musical kind of a sketch with a piano. Usually I write a piano part out first, and I’ll do it within the program. I do work in Logic.

So I’ll work within Logic and I’ll have the piano part. Then I start orchestrating it down. And then I had to figure out obviously the lyrics and the rhythm of the lyrics and everything like that. Then I have to go ahead and give them the click track with the piano part. Then I’d have to take their version without any music and then kind of mix it in. And then we have the final master at the end of everything, and then I keep adding instruments and making it more complicated. ‘Cause there was a lot of sound synthesis in the whole thing and stuff like that.
So it was just this really crazy process where, it wasn’t just one stage of pencil and paper. It started pencil and paper then it went into the computer then it went another stage. It was probably like every song went through six to 10 stages before it got to its final version. So, it was a little crazy.

Christopher: Yeah, but I think having heard you talk a bit about composing there and what it means to you and how people should think about it, it’s maybe a notch less staggering to hear you talk about a project like Libertaria because people understand it’s a step by step process. Composing doesn’t mean immediately writing down your note-perfect orchestra score. It can be an organic thing. It might still be a bit of a leap for them to understand how you were able to take that composer’s mindset and also take on this mantel of filmmaking, which I think in a lot of peoples eyes is a completely different art form. What was that like for you? Had you done much film work? You had animation, obviously, in the Creation Oratorio before that.

Sabrina: Right. Well, when I was at University of South Florida, I actually had wanted to go to film school and I got rejected. So, I had started … So I actually had started doing … Gosh, I want to say I had started doing experimental films. The kind that you see that you’re like, “What was that? Why was that … What were they thinking?” And these were things that I have them up on YouTube and I’m just like, “Oh … ” You know? Just crazy pieces that some of them made sense, some of them didn’t.

I got my masters in music technology at Florida International University and I actually went back a year later and I studied film for a year. So, I actually did get to go to film school for at least a year. By the time Libertaria came around, I had done dozens of short films. I hadn’t done any features, Libertaria is my first and my only feature that I’ve done myself, where I’ve directed it, I’ve produced it, I’ve written it. I’ve worked on other peoples features, I’ve written music for features, but this is the only one that’s like my film, that is a feature.
It was my first feature film. Obviously it was my first … I would say it’s my first opera. I did an operetta, it’s like a lost piece of music. There’s a sheet of it somewhere and I don’t know what happened to it. I totally forgot I even had it and then I found it one day and I was like, “Oh that’s right, I wrote an operetta once.” Anyway … So it was my first opera I would say, but I had already done an oratorio. I’ve written a lot of choral music before then.

It does seem like a different process but for me, I had learned how to do video editing, and for me, video editing is very similar to audio engineering. You’re moving around images instead of moving around sound. And actually, sound plays a massive role in film. Sound design, doing the voice, the dubbing, the recording audio, the dialogue. You would be surprised how much, if you know to audio edit, how much you could do film. Because really, it’s just a matter of now I’ve got images in there … And obviously the images have to be good, but you know, if you have cinematographer, they can do the images and you can just drop them in.

It actually isn’t that far of a leap. If somebody knows how to do a little bit of music processing software, music editing software, even GarageBand. Moving over to video editing actually is not that difficult. Now the whole process of creating a film is different, I think, than music because for instance, with music, let’s say I come up with a melody and I’m like, “Oh, that’s a really cool melody.” And maybe I repeat it a few times, add some lyrics, maybe we add some sort of instrumentation to it and it’s done.

But with a film, you can’t just sit there and go, “Hey! What if I wrote a story about a dog and a boy?” And that’s all it was. You have to have an arch, you definitely have to think it through. There’s expectations that I think are different than there are in music. I think people are willing to listen to some pretty strange music and they’re like, “Yeah!” But if you have a film that doesn’t make any sense, you’re just sitting there going, “Why did pay for that? Why am I here?”

To me, it was … I had already done stuff so it wasn’t like it was new. And at one point in my life, I had wanted to be a filmmaker. And actually, when I was really young I wanted to be a writer. And I have a stack of rejection letters there, too. Like this big. ‘Cause I wrote really awful stories and thought I could get them published when I was in high school. I was like, “Yeah! This is a really great story It’s rejected, why?”

That’s the funny thing. You always think that people do these great big projects but you don’t see how many failures are stacked up behind them. There’s like this many failures and then there’s one thing that worked. It was kind of … It wasn’t actually that big of a leap for me, it was actually more of a natural transition. And that’s why I think it’s interesting that now, I think I’m kind of going more into filmmaking. I’m still writing music, I’m still composing, I’m still video editing, I’m still audio editing and doing other things, but I am finding that now I’m working on film more, and actually getting people together to do films.

I’ve helped produce a few films now at this point because I guess I was really good at getting people together and now I’m trying to experiment with that in just film. That kind of thing.

Christopher: Got you. And I’m sure at this point in the conversation, listeners won’t be shocked to hear that you’ve actually written a book to help people that are in that situation of feeling intimidated by film making.

And so, tell us a bit about Film Making Crash Course and who it’s for.

Sabrina: Well, the Film Making Crash Course is definitely meant for people that are just beginning to do film. I would say … It’s actually funny that a lot of the … Buffalo, New York has a very big film community, and it’s an independent film community. It’s not like Hollywood, it’s not like Bollywood, it’s not like New York City. So it’s definitely a lot of people working together. Everybody has families and jobs and real lives, and they just get together on the weekends and they create these crazy projects.

What I noticed was that there were people that were like, “I want to do a film but I have no idea how.” And so, what I did was I kind of just put together a list of exercises that I was teaching. I actually do a Film Maker Bootcamp now where six weeks they create a film. So we’ve done three films so far. And our last film was called Welcome to Space Force, and it was done at the Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival which I think was … It was incredible that this crazy thing we did over the summer in six weeks was actually shown to a bunch of people at a film festival.

I’m like, “Wow that’s incredible.” But really, it was just some people in the community that are like, “I want to do this but I have no idea how.” Maybe they’re a writer and they don’t know how to act, they don’t know how to direct, they don’t know how to produce. Maybe they’re a director that doesn’t know how to write, maybe they’re a director who can’t act, or somebody that doesn’t know how to do sound, or somebody that doesn’t know how to do cinematography. And so I just kind of took the basics and I kind of compiled it all into one book.

Actually I’m using this book right now for my bootcamp class and then I’m also using it … I’m teaching a film class to teenagers and so they’re working on … Next semester we’ll be just doing this massive Sci-Fi film. I don’t know if it’s gonna work out. We have to have giraffes and goats. Apparently somebody has a friend at the zoo so we might actually get the giraffes. But anyway, we’ll see what happens but really, it’s meant for beginners. My Composer Bootcamp is really meant for anybody that’s beginner, intermediate, advanced.
I would say Film Making Crash Course is great if you’re a beginner, or if you’re intermediate, or even if you’ve done filmmaking for a while but maybe you want to get better at say, writing specifically. There’s a lot of writing prompts because I’ve written … I’m a writer as well and so I’ve written for a long time. So there’s a lot of writing prompts as well. A lot of this stuff are things that people have taught me and then I just kind of elaborated on.

A lot of these exercises that my professors gave to me, my teachers gave to me. I remember Paul over at University of South Florida, one of his most infamous, infamous assignments was that in a week you had to write 10 short compositions. They were short compositions, but they had to be entirely different from each other. They couldn’t even be remotely the same. And everybody would spend like 30 hours that week just writing. He wouldn’t let us use a computer so we had to write it all out and we’re writing it all out and it had to be totally different from each other.

There could be nothing the same. And so you just give him this … I remember I didn’t even get 10 done, I think I got eight done. I went over there and I was like, “Here are my pieces.” And then he sat there and just put them all out. He says, “Well from this I can tell you, you do this all the time and you do this all the time. You need to stop doing that.” And you’re sitting there going, “What?” And so, it’s things like that where you take ideas that like that and you just expand on some of those ideas.

Honestly, if somebody was very serious about composition and wanted to write 10 pieces in a week, God bless them. But you don’t really have to do something like that, but it is challenging yourself and saying, “Okay well I know how to write for piano, or I can jam on my guitar. Well what if I jam on my guitar and I write some lyrics? I’ve never done that before.” And just kind of challenging yourself to that next step. So, Film Making Crash Course, essentially has a lot of exercises that are really, really great for filmmakers that are just kind of at that beginning level to intermediate level and that kind of thing.

I do want to expand on it in the future. Especially with the audio section. Everything’s really introductory but I kind of feel like since I am a composer, I can probably expand even more in that section than I did. But this was just kind of I wanted to make sure I got something out there that we could use right away. So the film making community can use this right away.

Christopher: Yeah and I love that like with Composer Bootcamp you’ve made it highly practical, this is not a text book of theory. This is exercises to start doing right away, it’s very cool.

Sabrina: Exactly, exactly. Well I think that a lot of times, especially with composition, you can get bogged down by the theory. It becomes very, very daunting and stressful, and people pay lots of money to take classes specifically on this theory. And it’s not that it’s not important, it is very important, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t start writing even if you don’t know it. And I think that it’s to take away the roadblocks, I think is the point, is to take away the roadblocks.

Christopher: Tremendous. So, I’m sure everyone listening now understands why I am constantly impressed and astonished by the range of projects and the scale of projects you do. Tell us a little bit about the latest … You were recently awarded a prestigious fellowship by the CINTAS Foundation. Tell us a bit about that.

Sabrina: The CINTAS Foundation hands out fellowships for visual artists and architects and composers of Cuban descent. They have been doing this for decades. I was very fortunate, I received it actually very recently. I went down to Miami and I received a fellowship. With the fellowship, now I’m going to be able to buy some much needed equipment. It kind of … ‘Cause you receive a monetary award with the fellowship. And what’s nice about it is that I’m going to be able to upgrade some things.

I’m going to be able to move forward on some projects that I would not have been able to. Not because I wouldn’t want to but like everybody else, I have obligations to my family that I need to do and I have certain things that I have to do, as in work. I’m a writer now, so I have clients that I have to write for and things. But this allows me to have the time and the breathing room to say, “Okay now I can move forward with some of these projects that I really wanted to do but I couldn’t because I didn’t have the equipment.”

And so, what I’m gonna be doing with it is I’m going to be buying myself equipment mainly for film making so I’m gonna buy myself a high grade camera and I’m gonna buy myself the gear that goes with that as well as buying sound recording equipment for on-site film. ‘Cause right now, I have a production studio set up in my living room. I don’t have what I need to record good audio for film projects and because I’m moving more in that direction, that is one of the things that’s kind of preventing me from going to the next level with what I wanna do.

Like I said, I want to do another opera, a children’s opera. It’s loosely based off of Alice in Wonderland, it’s called Alicia, and it’s set slightly in the future in New York and it’s got more of a Latino flair to it. I have that, the libretto for that is mostly written. I need to kind of start working on that, but I needed a camera for that because I want to try to do some live action and animation mixed together. I’m kind of moving away from animation in terms of just doing animated pieces. Although, I am finishing up a project called Spiritus which is an animated film that … It’s a Sci-Fi film we’re working for like two and a half years and I’m hoping to finish it up by Spring, is the hope.

So the CINTAS Foundation awarded me this fellowship, it was amazing. It was at an art gallery down at the University of Miami. There were hundreds of people there. It was nice, it was amazing for me because sometimes you get caught up in life and you kind of feel like, “Ugh, I’m not doing anything. I’m not … ” You kind of get down on yourself and you’re like, “Oh my gosh … ” And just to have people say, “Here, we think you deserve this.” It just … And it comes at a time of my life where I really felt like the last two or three years I’ve just been busy with … I had a baby and been dealing with toddler things, and just being a parent.

It was just really neat to see that okay, I can still be a composer and still be a parent and that balance in life. It just came at a really good time where I think I was starting to get kind of like, “I don’t know what I’m doing as musician.” Excuse me. That kind of thing.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well I think you managed to accomplish more when feeling like you’re not doing anything than most people manage at full speed. I’m sure everyone, like I am, is feeling inspired by the fact that even to you from the outside looking like that, from the inside there is still that voice in your head, there is still that sense that you’re not achieving your fullest, there is still a desire to do more. I’m sure there’s a lot that we can all learn from that.

Sabrina, tell us where can people go to stay up to date with the latest on these projects we’ve been talking about, and to find links to your books and Libertaria?

Sabrina: Okay, well Libertaria, you could just go to either Amazon, IMDB, or you can go to YouTube, and it’s Libertaria: The Virtual Opera. All have you to do is look for it and it will be there. If you want to go ahead and get Composer Bootcamp, Song Writing 101, which is also … it’s a song writing version of the Composer Bootcamp. So if you’re just interested in vocal writing, you can look at Song Writing 101. And also, the Film Making Crash Course. They’re all available at Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com. You can also go to my website which is sabrinapenayoung.wordpress.com. I’m gonna get something shorter at some point this year. But I haven’t done it yet.

And that’s S A B R I N A P E N A Y O U N G.wordpress W O R D P R E S S.com. I’m sure that there’ll be links below the podcast or whatever that’ll be helpful. And then I’m also on Facebook and I’m also under New Music Composer on Facebook, or you could just look me up Sabrina Pena Young. You’ll find me on Facebook. And if you join me on Facebook, you’ll get the latest projects, you’ll get the latest information about upcoming books.

I have sales coming up for Christmas time and all kinds of things, and all the projects that are coming up and just anything else that I might be doing like speaking engagements and things like that as well. So you can find me on Facebook, that’s also another great place to get a hold of me.

Christopher: Fantastic. Thank you. Well yes, as you said we will definitely have links to all of those in the shownotes for this episode. All that remains is to say a huge thank you, it’s been such a pleasure on a personal as well as professional level to have this chance to sit down and chat at length and learn more about the back story, because as I said, I’ve wanted to solve this mystery of where Sabrina came from and how she manages to do everything she does, and I feel like I’ve got a little bit of insight on that now…

Sabrina: A little bit, just a little bit.

Christopher: A little bit. So I know that our listeners will be taking a lot away from this too. Huge thank you for joining us on the show today.

Sabrina: Well thank you so much for having me. It was fun.

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The post Creativity, Composing, and Confidence, with Sabrina Peña Young appeared first on Musical U.

Can you imagine having the kind of musical mind that can:

• Hear music and effortlessly recognise the notes and chords by ear.
• Glance at sheet music, tab or a chord chart and immediately hear in your head how it should sound.
• Spontaneously create your own original musical ideas as easily as breathing and share them with other musicians or an audience using your voice or your instrument.
• Just sit down and play for your own pleasure, relaxation and creative fulfilment.
• Sit in on jam sessions or gigs with any group of musicians with no prior preparation required because you know you’ll have something solid to contribute.

A musical mind that feels capable and confident in any musical situation – because you understand instinctively how music is put together.

The kind of musical mind that makes learning new things in music is a breeze – because everything just connects together and makes sense.

Does that sound exciting to you?

In our Musicality Unleashed series we’ve been talking about the mindset shifts and mental models which can empower you to do all these things and more. And last time we talked about how to bring this all together with the established “Kodály” approach which has been proven over decades to effectively put in place an empowering foundation of musicality.

After discovering the effectiveness of the Kodály approach I decided we had to do something to get it into more people’s hands, so last year we launched the first ever online training course following a Kodály approach, Foundations of a Musical Mind.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Get the Musicality Unleashed cheat sheet
• 1: The Truth About Talent
• 2: The Two Things Most Music Education Is Missing
• 3: What Makes a Musician a “Natural”?
• 4: Did You Skip Step One?
• 5: A Better Mental Model For Pitch
• 6: A Better Mental Model For Rhythm
• 7: Don’t Just Learn Songs – Learn Music Through Songs
• 8: Singing Is Your Birthright
• 9: Creativity Is The Vehicle, Not The Destination
• Foundations of a Musical Mind: Special Launch Offer!

Transcript

We collaborated with Anne Mileski, a leading curriculum designer trained in the Kodály approach and she put together just a phenomenal 6-week course for us. We call it “Foundations of a Musical Mind”.

Now if you’ve been following our website or podcast for a while you’ll know that at Musical U we actually aren’t big fans of the course structure for learning musicality – for the general case of becoming more musical, a one-size-fits-all course just isn’t the best option. But rather than try to incorporate Kodály ideas piecemeal into our main training system we realised that because we were going to be starting from absolute zero with this new training, actually the course approach could work really well.

Because whatever background musicians are coming in with – whether they’re just starting out or have been playing for years, whether they’re a singer, guitarist, saxophonist, or anything else, whether they like blues, rock, classical, jazz – and whether they’re mostly driven by wanting to play by ear, improvise, write their own music, or just have a deeper and more instinctive understanding of how the music they love is put together – this course genuinely could help each and every one of them.

Easy to say! Not so easy to do. But knowing it would be a challenge we were able to draw on Anne’s expertise and our extensive experience helping adult musicians learn musicality skills online, and based on the results and comments from our first group of students who went through the course last year we actually managed to pull it off. I’ll be sharing some of those comments alongside this video so you can see for yourself.

As always at Musical U we put a big emphasis on personal support and guidance and that meant that we were able to learn from this first group’s experiences to fix, improve, refine and extend the course as they went through it. So it’s now even better than it was to begin with and I’m super excited to be opening up enrolment now for a new class.

Now one big advantage of the “course” approach is that it’s very clearly structured and time-bound. This is a 6-week course, designed to take about 15 minutes per day. And we know now that it does indeed deliver on that. Some people took a bit longer each day, others zipped through it, but we saw that on average it does take about that long, so it’s not a massive time commitment to get real results. And by the end of the 6 weeks you’ll have gained some really quite impressive skills in identifying notes and rhythms by ear and actually doing all kinds of interesting things with those skills.

One potential downside of the course approach is that instead of a small monthly fee like we charge for Musical U membership, it does mean putting down a single payment for all the training and that’s inevitably going to be a higher price.

And of course we do provide a really generous guarantee policy, so that if for any reason it didn’t deliver all these wonderful results for you, you can get all your money back. I wanted to make sure it was risk-free for you to make this investment in your musical life.

But I’m really proud of the price we’ve managed to hit with this – because compared to the in-person Kodály training you can get it’s an insane bargain.

And when you look at the impact it can have on your musical life (and the impact it’s already had on all the musicians who’ve gone through it so far) – it’s really hard to put a value on that.

You *could* just go on, feeling like learning music is a struggle. Like music theory and ear training never quite connect up with the music you know and love. Continuing to learn pieces note-by-note and feeling anxious about forgetting them, or needing to perform without sheet music in front of you. Feeling like you’re just not a “natural” and don’t have what it takes to feel free, confident and creative in music.

Or you could put in place a new foundation for understanding music, deeply and intuitively. You could experience, for possibly the first time, true freedom and creativity in improvising or coming up with your own musical ideas. You could hear music – and immediately know the notes and rhythms being used, and connect that all with sheet music or playing your instrument.

That’s something that’s going to transform the whole of your musical life for the rest of your life. What would that be worth to you?

Now let me ask you something: As I say these things, is there a little voice in the back of your head going “Yeah *maybe*. But I don’t know if it’ll really work like that for me.”

I’m personally a bit of a skeptic. If someone promises amazing results with a product or service I’m going to have my doubts.

But I hope you know from our brand and from the Musicality Unleashed series, that we are not about false promises of overnight success, or selling people on myths and pipedreams that get them excited but fail to deliver real results.

We’re about the methods that really work. The proven systems and training material that can genuinely transform a musician’s experience of music.

So when we saw that the Foundations course was indeed providing the kind of transformative experiences it was designed to, we sat down with a handful of course students to ask them how it had gone. So that you could hear from real music learners, just like you, that this stuff really does work.

So please check those out – so that you can allow yourself to get excited about this and believe in the transformation that’s ahead of you.

Because if you love music – and if you have ever felt limited, restricted, or you’ve struggled in your learning – and if you’ve itched for that freedom, creativity, confidence, that deep instinctive understanding of how music works – then it really is a seriously exciting opportunity that’s in front of you right now.

Now because of the personal support we’re offering to make sure this course really delivers results for you, places are limited. And enrolment is open for just a short period. Like I said before, this course quickly sold out the first time it was offered, so if you’re interested then please act fast to secure your spot.

And I look forward to seeing you in there!

P.S. For members

Oh – and don’t forget, as a member of Musical U you have access to an exclusive members-only discount on the normal pricing. Just make sure you use the special discount link we’ll be emailing to you and you can enjoy a nice saving on the regular price – our thank you to you for being a member of Musical U. See you in there!

P.S. For alumni

Oh – and don’t forget, as a former member of Musical U you have access to our exclusive member discount on the normal pricing. Just make sure you use the special discount link we’ll be emailing to you and you can enjoy a nice saving on the regular price – just our thank you to you for having been a member of Musical U, someone who’s dedicated to their musicality training and open to trying new things. I look forward to seeing you in there!

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The post Foundations Of A Musical Mind Is Open! appeared first on Musical U.