Author: musicalitywrld

This episode is part of the Musicality Unleashed series. Learn more and get a bonus “cheat sheet” at musicalityunleashed.com. In this episode, we delve into the oft-debated topic of how to learn pitch – and the answer doesn’t lie in intervals! Learn about the power of solfa and how it can help you understand the relationships between notes that is natural, intuitive, and simple.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Solfege: Why Do Re Mi Isn’t Just Child’s Play
• Starting Solfa
• Musicality Unleashed: Did You Skip Step One?

Transcript

5: Mental model: Solfa – “A Better Mental Model for Pitch”

If you want to play notes by ear you can learn to – but don’t follow the common advice: intervals are not the solution.

Learning to recognise notes by ear is a dream for many musicians: to hear music and be able to name, play, or write down the notes you heard.

This isn’t magic – it’s a learnable skill. And it doesn’t take an innate “gift” like “perfect pitch”.

You can develop what’s called your “relative pitch” using simple proven exercises.

The most well-known approach uses what’s called “intervals”: training your ear to recognise the different distances between pitches such as a “major third” or “perfect fifth”.

The interval approach has some strengths but it’s actually not the best way to quickly learn a useful level of relative pitch.

What you find if you study intervals is that you can get very good at recognising intervals – but it’s then actually very difficult to put it into practice when you hear a real melody or try to improvise something.

Your brain just can’t think through and process each of the intervals fast enough.

And what’s worse: as soon as you hit an interval you don’t recognise, you lose your ability to name every note that follows – you’re lost.

If you want relative pitch to play by ear, write down music, improvise, or write your own music then there’s another approach that will get you there much faster and give you a much more reliable ability to recognise notes by ear.

It’s called “solfa” and you might have come across it as the “do-re-mi” system for naming notes.

I should mention this isn’t the same as the “solfege” system used in some European countries where “do” is always the note “C”, “re” is the same as “D”, and so on.

We’re talking about what’s called “movable do solfa”. It sometimes gets called “solfege” like the European “fixed do” system, which is where it can get confusing.

So I’ll be super clear: With “moveable do solfa”, we call the first note of the scale “do”, whether that note is C, D, E, G♯ E♭, and so on.

Okay, what does that have to do with relative pitch? Well, adopting this mental model for thinking about note pitches produces almost magical results in your ability to identify notes by ear.

That’s because solfa actually matches how your ear already understands music

Our ears tune in to the relative pitch distances between notes and the tonic, that first note of the scale – not the absolute pitches of notes.

This must be true because otherwise if the DJ on the radio sped up a song and all the pitches went up a bit, you’d hear it as a completely different song. In fact, we don’t even notice because our ears are tuned into the relative changes in pitch – and those haven’t changed.

If I sing the melody of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” [sing] and then sing it again starting on a different note [sing] you still hear it’s the same song – even though literally every note pitch has changed.

So that’s how our ear inteprets music already.

That means if your mental model matches up with that, you don’t need to start from scratch to develop your relative pitch skills.

You can leverage the work you’ve already been doing for years, passively training your ears to understanding instinctively how music works.

The result is that learning the solfa mental model can be done fast – we’re talking a few weeks to get to a decent standard – and pays off immediately.

This means that it’s far more effective and rewarding than the interval approach for the practical skills like playing by ear or improvising.

As I said before, intervals aren’t wrong or bad – they have real strengths in certain contexts and the great thing is they’re totally compatible with and complimentary to solfa, so you don’t need to choose one or the other.

But if you want to learn relative pitch and name and play notes easily by ear, adopt solfa as your mental model and you’ll be able to take advantage of the existing ear skills you didn’t know you had – and go far fast.

That’s one example of a mental model that you can put in place to quickly find new freedom in music. Learn more in the rest of this Musicality Unleashed series.

The post A Better Mental Model for Pitch appeared first on Musical U.

This episode is part of the Musicality Unleashed series. Learn more and get a bonus “cheat sheet” at musicalityunleashed.com. In this episode, we discuss the importance of having a solid foundation in music – and how neglecting to build this foundation can be detrimental to your musical understanding and autonomy later in your journey.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Musicality Unleashed: What Makes A Musician A “Natural”
• Musicality Unleashed: The Two Things Most Music Education Is Missing
• Musicality Unleashed: The Truth About Talent

Transcript

4: Missing Foundation (that’s why everything’s hard) – “Did You Skip Step One?”

Learning music is hard. But it doesn’t have to be…

Has music felt like a struggle for you? I know what that’s like. Sometimes it feels like every practice session is a slog and every step forwards is followed by a step or two backwards. There’s so much to juggle and not enough time to fit it all in!

But music itself, when we listen to it and love it – it seems so natural!

So if music is so natural and wonderful, why is learning music such a struggle?

Part of the reason is that most of us only get taught one of the three essential components – see the link alongside this video to another in the Musicality Unleashed series to learn more about that.

But the main cause is actually that you’ve skipped a fundamental stage of learning music.

Imagine setting out to build a house – and focusing all your efforts on painting an elaborate mural on the walls. You skip the step of putting a solid foundation in place and just start laying bricks and painting on top of them.

Things will start off okay – but the higher you build the more unstable things become and the harder it is to keep making progress.

At a certain point the house actually starts to collapse faster than you can build it up!

If you follow the traditional path for learning an instrument, this is exactly what you’ve been doing.

By focusing on instrument skills we leap forwards in the complexity of the music we can reproduce – which at first seems good – but we’re totally missing out on developing the corresponding musical understanding and autonomy – the ability to do what we want in music rather than just painstakingly reproducing what we’ve been told to play.

You don’t have the “mental models” which empower you to feel like you know what you’re doing in music.

As a result of this missing foundation of mental models when you do decide to study some music theory, or composition, or improvising, or ear training, you’ll find it really difficult to wrap your musical mind around.

That’s not because the material is inherently super complicated.
It’s because you’re not just missing some mental models – you’re actually missing the most fundamental of them.

You’re missing the foundation of mental models which can set you up to easily understand whatever you choose to study in music.

Any time you encounter something in music that seems really hard to wrap your brain around or develop a musical instinct for, the chances are it’s because you weren’t given the first few steps of developing the most fundamental and important mental models you need to “think like a musician”.

The good news is: It’s never too late to put that missing foundation in place – and once you do, everything else in music follows on dramatically more easily and enjoyably.

Learn more about what goes into a foundation that will truly empower you in the Musicality Unleashed series.

The post Did You Skip Step One? appeared first on Musical U.

This episode is part of the Musicality Unleashed series. Learn more and get a bonus “cheat sheet” at musicalityunleashed.com. In this episode, we explore what really makes a musician “natural” – and as you’ll learn, it’s not countless hours spent at the instrument!

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Musicality Unleashed: The Two Things Most Music Education Is Missing
• Musicality Unleashed: The Truth About Talent

Transcript

3: Mental Models (not technique/skills) – What makes a musician a “natural”

Mastering your instrument won’t make you a great musician.

If you’ve wanted to be more capable in music, then putting in more time practicing instrument technique is not the answer.

If you’re someone who’s dreamed of feeling free, capable and confident in music – but instead feel restricted, limited, and like learning music is a struggle – then you may have fallen for the big lie which mainstream music education tells: That learning music means learning an instrument.

Yet if that were true, surely anyone who’s studied an instrument for years would feel free, confident and capable? They’d be able to play whatever they want, improvise or create their own music, they’d perform and collaborate with ease.

In reality, very few musicians ever enjoy that kind of freedom – and it’s because learning an instrument doesn’t deliver what you really need to become that “natural” in music.

What is it that distinguishes a “natural” musician from the average music learner?

Why is it that even when you get good with instrument technique you don’t really feel any closer to feeling really “musical”?

We think the better we get at our instrument the closer we’ll get to those pros and “naturals” we admire.

That’s understandable. They often do have some impressively flashy instrument technique.

But even a robot can play music note-perfectly! And it wouldn’t move the listener.

All the instrument technique in the world doesn’t capture the essence of true musicality.

In fact, if all it took to be a “great” musician was instrument technique then every concert would be performed by robots.

So if the difference isn’t in the instrument technique, where is it?

Well, there’s only one place it can be: in the mind of the musician.

That’s not actually surprising, right? You’ve probably suspected that the “great” musicians just have a different kind of “musical mind” than you do.

They think about music differently, they understand it more deeply and intuitively than you do.

If you’ve thought that, you’re absolutely right – BUT if you also assumed that is something they were born with, here’s some good news: It’s not. You too can learn that “musical mind”!

The difference between you and the greatest musicians you admire and dream of being is all in their “mental models”. Meaning the way their brain represents musical ideas such as pitch and rhythm.

We all have mental models for music, whether it’s something you’ve ever thought about or not.

The trouble is that most musicians lack the specific and fundamental mental models that unlock those “instinctive” skills in music like playing by ear, improvising, composing, collaborating freely and so much more.

When you study music theory or do ear training you’re extending and improving your understanding of music – but not always in a clear and coherent way. It can feel very piecemeal, like you’re learning bits and pieces but it doesn’t all fit together into a single cohesive mental model of how music works.

Put the right mental models in place and the whole world of music opens up to you.

So if you’ve yearned for that freedom and confidence in music and wondered why instrument practice alone doesn’t seem to be getting you there – maybe it’s time to acquire some new, more empowering mental models for music and upgrade your musical mind.

Stay tuned to more Musicality Unleashed to find out what exactly that means…

The post Musicality Unleashed: What Makes A Musician A “Natural” appeared first on Musical U.

This episode is part of the Musicality Unleashed series. Learn more and get a bonus “cheat sheet” at musicalityunleashed.com. In this episode, we discuss the three aspects necessary for becoming a great musician – and how traditional music education often ignores two of them.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Musicality Unleashed: The Truth About Talent

Transcript

2: The Trifecta (instrument skills, theory, ears) – “The Two Things Most Music Education Is Missing”

Most people think that learning an instrument will let them become a good musician – but that’s actually just one of three essential things you need to be doing.

Adding in the other two doesn’t take any more practice time and will transform the enjoyment and effectiveness of all your music learning.

If you’re someone who’s putting in the time and energy to learn an instrument it’s probably because you love music and you’ve dreamed of being free, confident and creative in music.

And if you have ended up feeling bored, frustrated or fed up with learning music, it’s not your fault. Traditional music education has failed you.

Although it promises to turn you into a great musician in fact it completely neglects to give you two of the three essential components of becoming musical.

We pick up an instrument full of our excitement and passion for music – but what we get often feels like dry, repetitive exercises or trying to train your body to perform like a robot.

What’s musical about that?

You’ve probably felt like “that’s just the way it is” and it’s easy to understand why – that’s what all the “authorities” tell you learning music looks like.

The reality is that this approach to learning music was born centuries ago for classical music – and it persists because the authorities want to make music an easy thing to set exams and test students in.

If you follow this path of learning an instrument you’ll inevitably get bored – because it’s not really a musical experience.

You’ll get frustrated – because you’ll always feel like something’s missing and it’s all harder than it should be.

And you’ll probably end up always feeling a bit inferior, like you just don’t have what it takes to be a great musician.

This system produces musicians who are nervous to perform and feel trapped, unable to play anything except what they’ve carefully learned, note-by-note from sheet music, tab or chord charts. Does that sound familiar?

If you step back and ask what really goes into becoming a good musician you’ll see that everything covered by the traditional instrument-learning system actually represents just ONE of THREE critical aspects.

The first is that instrument technique. It is important and valuable to get good at making an instrument do what you intend it to.

But what about understanding what you’re playing, or having the instinct to choose your own notes or way of playing?

The other two aspects are music theory – something that is quite often part of music education, but taught in a dry, abstract—and frankly boring—way, almost entirely separate from the instrument skills and what you’re actually passionate about in music. So it’s no surprise that most musicians find music theory boring or difficult, and so miss out on the amazing benefits and deep insights into what makes music tick that real music theory can deliver.

The third aspect is your musical ear. Again, “ear training” is sometimes a small part of traditional music education, but it’s a tiny amount, taught in a dry, abstract way which makes it boring and difficult for the student. And so we miss out on the amazing benefits that truly developing your musical ear can provide.

The result is that we’re learning to be good music-reproducing robots – instead of feeling true ownership of the music we love and play and feeling empowered to create and express our own musical ideas with the freedom that we imagined when we picked up our instrument in the first place.

Now if you’re like most musicians you’re probably thinking “I’ve got my hands full just doing the instrument bit!”. Where are you going to find the time for these other two areas too?

Well if you approach them right, taking on all three does not take three times as much time. In fact integrating the other two areas can actually accelerate your instrumental progress, so you can go further, faster, without needing extra practice time.

Because when you think about it, if being a great musician involves your brain, ears and instrument, surely the best way to learn music would develop all three of those together, right?

Discover what this looks like in the rest of the Musicality Unleashed series!

The post Musicality Unleashed: The Two Things Most Music Education Is Missing appeared first on Musical U.