Author: musicalitywrld

If you haven’t yet been introduced, refer to our primer on the musical modes for a short lesson on the concept of modes, how they are derived, and where they’re heard.

There’s the cheery and straightforward Ionian mode, the bittersweet Dorian, the heavy metal-esque Phrygian, the floaty and tranquil Lydian, the energetic and rebellious Mixolydian, the melancholic Aeolian mode, and the… off-putting and chilling Locrian mode.

In both music textbooks and practical lessons, those first six modes are explored in detail, with a description of the theory and myriad of uses of each mode, and multiple examples of songs where you can hear the mode.

Not so for Locrian mode – treated as the bogeyman of the musical modes thanks to its strange, unsettling sound, this is by far the most unexplored and underappreciated mode.

But just because something is rarely used doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore its curiosities and quirks. Quite the opposite – music can get very interesting when you throw some odd elements into the mix. So take a dip into the murky, strange waters of the Locrian mode with us – we guarantee it’ll open up your ears to the beauty that perpetual tension and a sense of foreboding can hold…

Looking at Locrian

First, a bite-sized piece of theory on the Locrian mode.

Each of the seven modes is easily derived by starting on a white key on the piano, and playing your way up using only white keys until you reach your starting note.

Starting on different notes will give you seven radically different-sounding scales. This happens because of the differing intervals that result when you shift the starting note – in other words, each note that follows the tonic will have a different relationship to the tonic, depending on which white key you start on.

If we start on a “B” on the piano and play our way up the white keys to the next “B” on only white keys, it sounds like this:

Even with the bare-bones scale, you can probably hear that something is a little off, right?

The scale leaves you hanging, in a sonic sense. It sounds incomplete, unfinished. To get even a semblance of resolution, you’d have to tack one more note onto the end.

An Aural Illusion

In Western music, we really like when things resolve neatly, ending on a stable tonic note and bringing an end to the tension found in a phrase or melody. We want to hear the tune “finding its way back home”, so to speak. Officially, the tonic of the Locrian scale heard above is B. However, the ear has a lot of difficulty hearing B as the tonic, because the Locrian never really resolves.

That final B note is inherently unstable, and no matter in which order you play the notes of the Locrian scale, when you end on that B note, the melody will not sound complete or satisfying or resolved. Instead, it will give off a mood of incompleteness and instability – our ear is so desperate to hear it resolve to that C note right above the B, we almost hear it in our heads!

For this reason, the Locrian mode is sometimes referred to as a “theoretical” mode – one that the ear cannot hear, at least not very easily. It is natural to want to “tonicize” that second note (C) in the scale when starting from B, which simply gives us the C Ionian (or C major) scale – a scale that our ear loves and is very used to hearing.

Why the Instability?

So what makes this mode so resistant to resolution? How do its inner workings prevent our ear from easily discerning it in music?

A Shaky Tonic Chord

Let’s look at the chords that appear in the B Locrian scale:

Look at the tonic chord in particular. Whereas the tonic chords of the Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Aeolian modes are all either major or minor chords, the Locrian mode’s tonic chord is a diminished chord:

This B diminished chord contains the notes B, D, and F. It sounds unfinished, and wants nothing more than to resolve to the C major chord:

Where’s the Fifth?

To make matters even worse, the Locrian is the only mode that contains no perfect fifth above the root. Looking at the scale again, we see that the fifth degree is flattened, creating a diminished fifth or augmented fourth interval with the tonic. This interval is also known as a tritone because it contains three whole tones:

Now listen to the tonic and this flattened fifth degree together:

Unsettling, don’t you think? At least, that seems to be the popular consensus – so much that this tritone has been nicknamed the “Devil’s Interval”, and was avoided entirely for centuries by composers. And they had good reason – legend had it that simply playing this interval was enough to summon the devil himself.

So where every other mode contains a perfect fifth – one of the most consonant, satisfying intervals in Western music – the Locrian features a dissonant interval that evokes the devil.

This lack of a perfect fifth is another quirk that makes the Locrian sound so odd and even “unmusical”. Found in the popular chord progressions I-IV-V-I and ii-V-I, one of the central tenets of Western music is that special dominant-to-tonic resolution.

Remove that and you’re left with a feeling of the floor dropping out from under your feet.

Spotting the Locrian Mode in the Wild

We’ve established that this mode is all-around unsettling, unresolving, and just plain weird. So why would anyone want to use it? And… does anyone even use it?

Contrary to what music textbooks might lead you to believe, the Locrian mode has a surprising number of uses and can be heard in genres ranging from jazz to pop to rock. It’s somewhat rare that a whole song is written in Locrian mode, but its “spook” factor lends itself well to transient passages, solos, and basslines.

Let’s look at our first example, from the Queen of Avant-Garde herself…

A Locrian Army

Who else would take this strange, inaccessible mode and turn it into a brilliant industrial rock tune but Björk?

Though not nearly as buoyant and pop-derived as much of her other work, “Army of Me” still manages to be catchy and intriguing – all while having its bassline and melody written in Locrian mode.

Listen to the whole song, paying particular attention to where Björk sings “army of me”, signaling the end of the chorus at around [1:07].

This end of chorus-beginning of verse transition is the place where most songs resolve to the tonic, bringing a sense of “going back home” including this one. However, notice how the song resists the feeling of resolution, sounding like there are still notes to be played and sang – the trademark restlessness of the Locrian mode.

Despite sounding “unsatisfying” in some ways, most people can agree that this track is a wonderfully dark and moody pop-adjacent masterpiece – the instrumentation, catchy drums (sampled partially from Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”!), and beautiful vocals are the perfect foil for the oddness of the Locrian mode. That’s the magic of Björk.

Classical Meets Locrian

If you’re a classical music buff, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the prelude and fugue combination. These two types of compositions are like a musical peanut-butter-and-jelly – the loosely-structured, somewhat improvisational prelude is the perfect introduction (and foil) for the complex, layered, and idiosyncratically structured fugue.

The prelude-and-fugue structure was a favourite of big names such as Bach, Liszt, Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, and Mendelssohn, and has been used in countless compositions from the 1700s to the modern day.

So you have to wonder, what happens if you combine this classical structure with the mode that is least frequently seen in classical music?

Israeli composer Ami Maayani decided to find out:

His “Fantasy No.7 in Locrian Mode” ends up being an intriguing fusion of the familiar and the odd, the comfortable and the unsettling. The structure, phrasing, cadences, and overall feel of the piece remind us of the classical pieces we know and love – and yet the modality of the music makes it sound restless, strange, and at times even scary.

Locrian in Folk

Though the Locrian does tend towards the unsettling and macabre, it’s also capable of producing some truly beautiful melodies.

Take a listen to John Kirkpatrick’s folk tune “Dust to Dust”, sung here by Jon Boden:

It’s still very much Locrian (listen for that total lack of resolution at the end of the song!), but rather than sounding chilling, it gives off a pensive mood, the feeling of a story being told.

Hearing Locrian

After hearing a few songs that use the mode, you kind of start to recognize the sound, right?

Let’s recap a little. The song you’re listening to is likely in the Locrian mode if:

• There is no feeling of resolution; the tonic does not feel like the tonic
• There is no perfect fifth above the tonic
• There is an overall feeling of instability and tension about the piece, and
• There is a morose, melancholy, creepy, or outright scary mood to the music

Once you’ve gotten a feel for the sound, you’ll want to dabble in creating music with this underrated mode. And because of the nature of the Locrian, the music you’ll make will end up sounding (at the very least) unusual and interesting.

Get started by playing through the Locrian scale, building chords above each note, and stringing them together to produce your own unsettling progression. Or, sneak a Locrian passage into a song with an otherwise straightforward major or minor key. If you feel really daring, take the ultimate challenge and write a whole song in Locrian – bonus points if you, like Björk, manage to make it a pop song!

 

The post The Aural Illusions of the Locrian Mode appeared first on Musical U.

We doubt there’s a musician alive who hasn’t felt overwhelmed at some point in their musical journey, like everything was just way too difficult and complex. In this episode, we share the three biggest causes of musical overwhelm, and how to combat them.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Handout on the MAGIC Framework for goal-setting
• About Choosing an Online Music Course

Transcript

Today I want to talked to talk about overwhelm. Recently I put on a free training series in support of the new course we were launching, Foundations of a Musical Mind. And if you’re on our email list or social media or you’re a member of Musical U, you will have heard a ton about that already! But you might not have caught the free training we provided before the launch, on the subject of complexity in music.

Now part of this was going into the nitty-gritty of what makes particular skills like playing by ear or improvisation complex. But first I tackled the issue of general complexity – feeling like everything is just too hard and complicated in your music learning.

This bit of the training *really* resonated with people – this feeling of overwhelm, that can end up stifling your passion and creativity and enthusiasm for music.

So I wanted to share a quick excerpt from that training here today, where I run real quick through the most punchy advice we give on this topic here at Musical U. I mention a handout and a podcast episode in this excerpt, and I’ll put links to both of those in the shownotes for this episode.

If you’ve battled this problem of overwhelm in your musical life – and if you’re like 99% of us musicians, you have! – then I hope you’ll find this framework useful for pinpointing the source of that overwhelm and how you can squash it.

—-

Musical complexity.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I believe there is a single root cause of most of the complexity that may be plaguing you in your musical life, and in the next session we’ll be discussing that in detail and how you can unravel it once and for all.

But first I think it’s important to address the overwhelm part of complexity. Not any one topic or skill seeming complicated or difficult. But the simple fact that there are lots of different things vying for attention in your musical life.

And what’s worse, it can seem like even when you manage to focus on one area, that sends you down a rabbit-hole and suddenly even that one area seems vast and overwhelming.

Tell me if any of these sound familliar:

“I really struggle”
“I dabble in lots of things but never go far”
“I’m reluctant to sign up for anything new until I complete the courses I’ve already started”
“we end up developing many bad habits and waste a lot a our time”
“I wish I had more time”

I want to particularly pick up on that last one, lack of time. Because it’s one of the most common frustrations among musicians that I’ve ever encountered.

And I’m not going to deny it. Your lives are genuinely busy. If you’re anything like me you have a busy work or study life, you’ve a family, maybe even kids or other family members you look after, you have responsibilities in your local community, and somehow on top of that or squeezed in there you have your passion music – and possibly even another hobby or two that’s battling for precious time each week.

It can feel like you’re pulled in a thousand directions and everything is yelling out for attention, and wherever you choose to spend your time there are things you end up feeling guilty for neglecting.

So there is a real challenge there.

But what I’m going to propose to you in this training is that lack of time isn’t actually a cause of your lack of progress or frustration in music learning, even if it feels like it right now.

Lack of time is actually a symptom – it’s a symptom of the complexity that’s going on, and we’re going to be talking now about what you can do about that overall complexity, then in the next session about some of the skill-specific complexity that comes up in music.

I’ve seen repeatedly with our members at Musical U that it’s possible to fit in enough music practice time to make steady progress forwards, even among the busiest of lives. But there is no time to waste, so it’s essential that you crush the complexity and use your time as clearly and effectively as possible. That’s what I’m hoping this training is going to equip you to do.

So let’s get into it.

For this topic of overall complexity I’m going to talk in terms of “overwhelm” because I think that’s the emotion it stirs up. When we think about our musical life and there’s just too many moving pieces and too many tasks and everything seems inter-related and complicated – the result is that we feel overwhelmed.

It can feel like a great crushing weight that paralyses us and makes it hard to take any action at all.

And so normally it’s that overwhelm itself that becomes the barrier for us. Because if we tackle any single area of our musical life we’ll do fine. There are some that are in themselves complex, and we’ll be talking about that next time. But if we assume that any one bit is manageable then what we really need is tools and strategies to handle the overwhelm.

I’m going to share with you the three big causes of overwhelm and strategies for tackling each. You can use one or more of them, they’re most effective when used all together.

In short we’re going to be talking about: Where are you going? How are you going to get there? How can you ensure your journey is successful?

Now if you’ve been following us for a while or you’re a member of Musical U then some of this will be familiar to you. And there’s a lot to pack in here so I’m going to move quickly. But whether the ideas are new to you or not, if you take a few minutes to think about each of these and how to apply them in your musical life you’re going to find those feelings of overwhelm quickly start to fade away.

Since I’ll be going through these quickly I’m going to provide a handout too with more detail and examples for you, and of course if you have any questions or need help just shout in the comments.

1: Vision and Goals

The first of the three is about vision and goals. The easiest way to feel muddled in music is to dive in without being clear on what you’re actually trying to accomplish.

You know you’re enthusiastic and excited – and when you simply combine that with all there is possible to learn, the result is total overwhelm.

Instead you need to begin with the end in mind. Set a clear picture of what you want to accomplish, what at Musical U we call your “Big Picture Vision”. And then figure out what training goals are going to lead you to that vision.

Just setting a goal, any goal, isn’t necessarily enough – not all goals are helpful! So At Musical U we have a framework called the “MAGIC” framework for goal-setting that helps you make sure the goals you set will really work for you. I’ll put the details of that in the handout for you.

If you can’t say immediately, right now, what your Big Picture Vision is, and what your current Goal in music is (ideally a “MAGIC” one) – then I would say that’s the #1 cause of any overwhelm you’re feeling. Fix that first.

And a quick side note because I know some of you are thinking it: How many goals should I have? • The answer is “try to keep it to one, for each area of your musical life”. I’m not going to insist on a singular focus across all your musical activities. But if, for example, you’re taking instrument lessons, working on ear training, and starting a band – then a single goal for each of those would be appropriate and help you to avoid overwhelm in any of them or overall.

2: Plan

So once you have a clear vision and good goal, you need to figure out how to get there. You need a plan. But like goals, not all plans are created equal.

What we’ve found most effective is a 6-8 week training plan leading towards your specific training goal. Break it down into about 5 steps that lead you there in sequence. Factor in all three of the essential aspects of music learning: instrument, theory and ears. Plan on spending 15 minutes each day, most days. Try to keep to a fixed schedule where possible. Don’t overdo it, a little and often is better than occasional epic practice sessions. And plan where you’ll get help if you need it.

Now I could talk at length about the reasons behind each of those recommendations, but if you’re looking for a shortcut to creating a plan that will work, I suggest starting with this. Of course the details of what goes into the plan will depend entirely on the goal you set, and that’s a whole other topic – right now we’re just talking about crushing complexity and ridding yourself of that feeling of overwhelm. And I can guarantee that a plan like this is going to do that for you.

3: Progress Tracking and Support

Now it’s all well and good having a suitable goal and plan – but that only alleviates the overwhelm for a day or so. After that it’s time to actually do the thing!

So you need some strategies for ensuring your journey is actually successful, that you follow through on your plan and that you reach your goal.

There are two big pieces to this.

The first is progress tracking. It’s easy to get overwhelmed in the midst of a plan if you lose track of where you are in that plan and what’s next. So there are various techniques that can help here, including: A practice log (simply what you did each day), a progress journal (more detailed and descriptive and reflective), recording yourself and listening back, and trying to keep up a “streak” of practicing day after day.

Those things will all help you stay clear and motivated in following your plan. But what if there’s a problem with your plan, or you hit a point where just putting in the practice isn’t moving you forwards? That’s why the other big piece of ensuring a successful journey is having support.

This can come in the form of: teachers, coaches, musician friends, accountability buddies, or whatever support options are provided along with the training resources you’re using.

Now just to pick up on that point for a second – I’m going to provide a link to a podcast episode I did about this because it’s really important to understand what support for an “online course” should look like – because that word can mean a huge range of things, and the right kind of support can absolutely make the difference between you having easy success and you feeling frustrated and overwhelmed.

So I’ll link to that podcast episode for more info on that.

So those are the big three causes of overall overwhelm and what you can do to tackle them.

If you:

• Have a Clear Vision
• Set a MAGIC Goal
• Create an Effective Plan
• Track Your Progress
• Get Suitable Support

Then those feelings of overwhelm will quickly disappear. If you feel overwhelmed right now thinking about your musical life then ask yourself which of these are missing.

Put it in place and you’re going to feel much clearer and more confident in everything you’re doing.

The post About Overwhelm in Music appeared first on Musical U.

When we are creating our own music through improvisation, understanding tension and release brings our music to life. Otherwise, our solos may sound bland.

While tension and release can be found in many aspects of music, one of its richest manifestations is in the area of harmony, and how our melodies intersect with the harmonic environment set up by chords and chord progressions.

Often, when beginning improvisers first learn to play over chords, they practice hitting the chord tones in their melodies. That can produce a “safe” improv, where everything blends and works well. But without some tension and release, there’s a risk of the music sounding static, bland, and boring.

This tension and release can be produced with chord tones through rhythm, dynamics, and other musical dimensions. But even more magic happens when you step out of the box and explore pitches beyond the chords – or, as Resident Guitar Pro Dylan Welsh shows us, even beyond the scale!

Yes, it’s a risk, but a risk worth taking. And the more you explore beyond the chord tones, the more you’ll find that all the “other” notes have varying degrees of tension that provide new and wondrous shades of harmonic coloration to your musical expression.

In this month’s Instrument Packs, Musical U’s Guitar, Bass, and Piano Pros open your eyes and ears to the possibilities of harmonic tension and release through fun and challenging improvisation exercises.

Piano

Good vs. evil, dark clouds with silver linings, sweet & sour… so many great things in our lives are accompanied by their opposite. But it’s the bad that makes the good feel so wonderful – we experience this polarity every day of our lives and it’s also within music. In music, we have different words for it: harmony and dissonance, or as talked about in this Resource Pack, tension and release.

In this resource pack, Guest Piano Pro for piano, Ruth Power, teaches how to grow your awareness and skills through improvisation:

Including:

• How to direct your tension to create the most satisfying release.
• Eight powerful exercises that explore the nuances of non-chord tones and the varying ways they resolve to chord tones.
• MP3 demo and backing tracks that illustrate and provide practice opportunities for each exercise.
• Bonus MP3 “Level Up” backing tracks in every major key.

Tension sounds like something we really wouldn’t want in our music, but tension is the very reason that the release is so sweet! Ruth shares some techniques we can use in improvisation to easily create moments of tension and release. We can create an improvisation on the fly that is intentional, that pushes all the right buttons in yourself and your listeners, and gives meaning to the music.

Guitar

Using tension and release deliberately in your improvising provides the listener with a sense of satisfaction and really helps to take them on a journey through your solo. Once you understand the basic concept, you can apply this to various degrees on the guitar.

Resident Pro Dylan Welsh demonstrates different kinds and levels of harmonic tension, and how to drive them forward to release:

Including:

• How to get the most out of scale and chord tones to really take the listener on a journey.
• How to use various amounts of chromatism to increase the tension of your solo, thus increasing the feeling of satisfaction from the release of tension.
• How to play all the wrong notes and still sound good.
• Bonus: using rhythm, rather than note choice, to introduce additional tension into your solo.
• MP3 backing tracks to hone in on your improvisation skills with harmonic tension and release.

This kind of practice is very, very structured and targeted. It may feel like work, but if you put the time in, it will make a massive difference in your improvising (as well as in all other aspects of your guitar playing).

Bass

Steve Lawson, our Resident Pro for bass, guides us through a musical world of intriguing opposites –

• tension and release
• question and answer
• consonance and dissonance
• back and forth
• moving away and coming back
• expectation and confirmation
• ambiguity and directness

In the process, we will learn how harmonic tension and release fit within the grand scheme of music:

Including:

• How harmonic tension and resolution can be top-down or bottom-up.
• The special role of bass players in determining the harmony.
• What basslines do to the harmony.
• What melodies do with the harmony.
• Ear-opening exercises that demonstrate the principles of tension and release for bass players.
• Custom MP3 tracks, TAB, and scores for each exercise.

Whether playing basslines or melody, bass players exert a powerful control over the harmonic structure of the music. Steve will show you how to wield this power with wisdom and authority!

Coming up next month…

More fascinating, fun, and growthful resources from Musical U’s Resident Pros.

Interested in getting access to these resources and much more, with an Instrument Pack membership? Just choose that option during checkout when you join Musical U, or upgrade your existing membership to get instant access!

The post Harmonic Tension and Release: Resource Pack Preview appeared first on Musical U.

Tim’s really a thought-leader among piano teachers when it comes to making piano lessons fun and creative, getting off book and away from the dry rote learning and note reading, and into a world where the student is actually empowered to feel confident and creative on the keyboard.

We’ve long been fans of Tim’s work, and we’ve actually interviewed him a couple of times for our website in the past – so we decided it was long overdue to have him on the podcast and he kindly agreed.

Hearing him talk, it’s probably not surprising he’s as well known and well respected as he is in the world of piano teaching – but what maybe is surprising is the route he took to get there…

In this conversation you’ll hear about:

• Why it may have been a good thing that Tim took a ten year hiatus from focusing on piano, and the impact that had on how he teaches
• The value of getting “off the page” – and the part of this which is often glossed over but actually essential
• The relationship between creative exercises in composing and improvisation on your instrument and “ear training” exercises for developing your musical ear

This episode will obviously be of particular interest to any piano teachers, or indeed piano students out there, but as always the topics and ideas we discuss can be useful to any music learner wanting to develop their musicality. And Tim shares some really cool ideas and specific suggestions, so we know you’ll get a lot out of this one.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• The Power of 4-Chord Composing
• Annual professional membership to InnerCircle – discount code is: MUSICALUPOD
• Ultimate Guide to the Circle of Fifths

Transcript

Tim: Hi this is Tim Topham from TimTopham.com and you’re listening to the Musicality Podcast.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Tim, thank you for joining us today.

Tim: Absolute pleasure Christopher, thank you very much for having me.

Christopher: So I was joking with you before we hit record that I was gonna have to try and stay on my toes, because you and I know each other pretty well at this point and I have to remember to be an interviewer and not just a buddy and have a chit chat with you. So I’m gonna stick to my traditional first opener question and ask you how did you first get started making music? Obviously you’re known as a very creative piano teacher these days, but was that kind of the spirit of your music learning from the outset or where did that come into the picture?

Tim: My training was real kind of traditional I guess at the start. It actually began with this … I know people can’t see but I’m gonna tell you, I’m holding up a Casio PT1. It’s about a foot long little plastic keyboard from the 90s.

Christopher: I totally had that.

Tim: And it made these beautiful sounds like bossa novas and things. I don’t know if I can … yeah et cetera. Anyway, drove my parents absolutely mad. I used to play in the car, on long trips, literally they wanted to throw it out the window. But they sort of heard me making sounds that were kind of musical and thought, “Maybe we should get Tim some piano lessons.” And so they asked around friends. I was put in touch with an amazing teacher, Rosemary McIndoe, who was just inspirational and wonderful at getting me playing and loving music.

But I guess having said that, there were certainly very traditional aspects to her teaching and I did do something exams and I did my scales, and I often really didn’t like performing. But what she always did, which has always stuck with me, and what I always do with my students, is if I brought anything into a lesson she would help me play it, regardless of just how wacky it was or how difficult it was. And so I can remember taking in something like Glenn Miller In The Mood and wanting to play that. Or actually I remember wanting to play Chattanooga Choo Choo at one stage. And I’d take this in and I’d fumble through it, and she’d say, “Great Tim, let’s work on it.” And that’s always stuck with me and always been something that I do with my students and I encourage other teachers to do as well.

Christopher: That’s awesome. And when your parents were hearing you playing that Casio keyboard in the back of the car, were they hearing it as musicians themselves or were your family non musical and you were the oddity who was bashing away at this keyboard.

Tim: Both parents, I’d say they’re musical but not musicians. Dad was known for dirge-like singing in church, and loved some very unusual records. And mum would love music and would sing to music. So they were very supportive of it but they weren’t musicians themselves. My brother did play trombone but nothing spectacular. So yeah there was always music in the family, and I’ve since learnt that there was a lot of music in my my history. So my grandmother on my mother’s side was a pianist, not an amazing concert pianist or anything but there was definitely a lot of piano in the family, because I’ve got some of the music handed down. So they were elements right back through as far as I can tell.

Christopher: Gotcha. That’s interesting because, I don’t know, you can interpret that in a couple of ways. One is you had the genes for it and there was some family genetics that helped you become a musician, but what you said really reminded me of my own family, where my parents are music lovers and would kind of casually sing but have never played instruments, and so they were nurturing me and my sisters as musicians very much from that just we love music let’s give it a try attitude. And I know with them, like they could point to family members or parents that were instrument players. And for them it would be more they could do it so anyone could. It wasn’t we’ve got the genes so you can learn music, it was more just music is something you can learn.

Tim: Yeah and I think it’s a really important point for parents to take away too, that you don’t have to know how to play or teach an instrument if your child is learning, all you have to do is be supportive and play music in the family, in the house. Just play records, well not records now. Play MP3s, put music on, take your children to concerts, outdoor, indoor, different music styles. Just immersing your family in it, having it playing, talking about it, talking positively about it, I think can have a big impact on a child whose learning music.

And funnily enough, I’ve got always students who want to learn jazz, and one of the first things I’ll ask them if they want to learn jazz, and I’m not a jazz specialist by any means, I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve but that’s about it. I’ll always ask them, “Well how much jazz do you listen to?” Because jazz is such an oral tradition, you have to kind of be immersed in it to really get it. And none of them listen to any jazz, they just kind of think … they think they want to learn it because it kind of sounds cool and it’s not classical.

But you know, a lot of times students these days are really missing and lacking just the time to listen to music. I mean they listen to music but it’s often modern music which really a lot of it is bereft of a lot of guts, I think. It’s very basic music. So it’s a little bit sad that they don’t have that wide variety of music that they’re listening to. So if parents can fill that void a little bit, I think it’s a great approach.

Christopher: That’s really cool. I am a lot more conscious of that parent influence these days, I mean obviously for you as a teacher, and a teacher of teachers, this would be front of mind for you, like how do you handle the parent-child relationship and that kind of stuff. For me it’s something I didn’t think about until the last couple of years when I had kids myself, and it suddenly made me really aware of this kind of thing, was why did I turn into someone who was happy to play an instrument and enjoyed music and considered myself capable of it, and how can I create that encouraging and nurturing environment for my daughters? And obviously it’s particularly tricky because I am now a trained musician and I have quite strong opinions about how this stuff should be learned, but you don’t want to push all that on your kid, right? You don’t wanna be the parent that’s just kind of forcing their kids to do music.

So I’m sure you’ve seen that from all kinds of angles with the parents of your own students and the teachers you teach.

Tim: It’s a really fine line to walk. How much do push them? How much do you nag? How much do you force them to just sit there and play their instrument? And how much do you back off, because if you back off will they just quit and that’ll be sad? It is really difficult and I … you know parenting is hard enough without throwing a musical instrument in there. And I, if you’d spoke to my mother, she would say she tore her hair out at times with me. I remember distinctly putting my foot down and not performing at the first concert I was meant to perform at with my teacher and all her students, and it was highly embarrassing for everyone. And I was just a real pain.

But we got through that, and somehow my parents kept encouraging and eventually I got to that point where I felt more comfortable doing it. But I must say, I never really truly enjoyed performing when it came to classical concerts. I was only really enjoying it when I got into musical theatre and playing in bands and things like that. So I guess what I would say to parents, any parents listening, there’s going to be ups and downs just like anything with a child. Hang in there and don’t give up too soon.

Christopher: Good advice. So tell us more about that trajectory. You went from refusing to play classical concerts to someone who now really excels in teaching the creative skills and the expressive skills, and helping other teachers to do the same. What did that journey look like? Were you quite early on sure you were gonna be a piano teacher yourself or where did the journey take you?

Tim: Far from it. I never thought I’d be a piano teacher. Goodness, what a funny job to have. No, I had a very rounded out route back to piano teaching. So I studied music after school. I did a bachelor in music but I focused on audio engineering and not performing at all. And I really was not interested in performing or composing, I just wanted to do engineering and technology and acoustics, and I quite like the physics and the science of music, and computer-

Christopher: I never knew that about you.

Tim: Yeah I’ve got an audio engineering degree. There you go.

Christopher: Wow, we could take this conversation in a very nerdy direction.

Tim: Let’s not turn off your listeners.

So I did that, and then I went overseas and I taught in a school in England. And that was my first experience of teaching, and I absolutely fell in love with it, I really really enjoyed it. So I came back to Melbourne and did a diploma of education, which is the qualification we need over here to teach. And I did that with a double music major, so it was all classroom music. And then promptly went to another part of Australia and for the next 10 years I really didn’t teach any music at all. I became a PE teacher, outdoor education, I taught maths, I did some … what else did I? I did some relief teaching. I just did a whole random variety of different things, ended up on an island off the coast of Tasmania running a school campus, residential campus for 15 year olds. And then eventually came back to Melbourne after all of that and decided to set myself up as a music producer, and try and make money from remixing 80s tunes. Can you guess how well that went?

I had some success, I had a lot of fun, I had some things played in nightclubs and on radio, but that really didn’t form an income for me. So I started teaching. And that’s when I really got back, because I had been teaching and I still played piano during that 10 year hiatus. I would play and accompany friends who might be singing and things like that. So I wasn’t completely disconnected from it but I was not immersed. And I got back into teaching and reconnected with my childhood teacher when I realized this teaching thing, I was really enjoying but it was over my head and I didn’t know what to do. And I just fell in love with teaching piano and teaching music.

So that was the roundabout route. And I actually think that it was because of the break that I had and all the different experiences teaching all these different subjects and different ages, that allowed me to come back to music with a completely different perspective to what students who perhaps go through the standard university conservatory performance teaching path, their outlook. And so I think that really shaped this creative approach that I’ve taken on.

Christopher: Yeah I can see that, and I wanted to ask, why did you find yourself out of your depth? I think a lot of people would assume you sit down with the student, you figure out what grade they’re on, you buy the method book for that grade, and you just kind of plod through lesson by lesson. Is it that simple?

Tim: That’s actually what I did when I was asked to teach maths. As long as I stayed a week ahead in the maths book, because I have no maths training, I was okay. And I got a lot of help from other teachers. Don’t worry, I was only teaching 12 year olds, it was nothing serious.

So I think the issue for me was that I took on a grade four student, and for people in England and Australia you understand the grade system, that’s a reasonably accomplished level. I mean grade eight’s kind of the top so they’re kind of half way there. And I just realized I didn’t really know what the examiners were looking for and how to teach that, and how to be really precise with music, because I’d always been someone who could kind of sight read okay and play some chords and get through things, but sitting down and playing a classical piece perfectly and interpreted the right way, I really had no idea about because I wasn’t trained in that. So that was why I really wanted to reconnect with Rosemary, and she just guided me through all that. That was the out of the depth feeling.

Christopher: And clearly it didn’t push you into a kind of shuttered view where you just did that kind of grade-led, exam-led teaching from there on out. So how did you manage to kind of balance those two, that you maybe had students coming in expecting that, and the exam board expecting that, but you had this background and this kind of desire to teach in a broader way or a more expressive creative way?

Tim: That’s a good question and I know it’s an issue that many teachers have, and probably students as well, perhaps with parents who are very focused on the exams, perhaps because they went through that system and they believe that’s the way music should be taught. So it’s a difficult line to walk sometimes.

I was very passionate about the need to teach students more than just dots on a page, because of the experiences that I’d had, and I should mention too that while I … pretty much from the time I left school to … well really to coming back to piano, I’d often done a lot of the accompanying of singers, and I’d conducted musicals and played piano in a lot of musicals. And so I had this knowledge that when you’re playing it for let’s say a musical theater company, and you have to play a reduced conductor’s score, which has pretty much every instrument written into a piano part. So you’re playing sort of 1- notes all the time, and it’s often sort of one two three, one two three, one … and then people have got to dance to this. The only way you can do that is to simplify it down to chords. So you have to know your chords.

And so I knew that from my own experience, and I instantly therefore wanted to teach that to students because I knew it was such a fundamental skill. And so for me, in regard to the parents and expectations and things, it was about managing both and helping parents see the value in giving this skill to their child, and not just trying to leap over the next exam hurdle. Because that can actually be an incredibly destructive process if it’s done the wrong way. Exams can be great, as long as they’re managed and are used for their purpose, which isn’t to be a step every single year, bang bang bang bang bang. So I won’t get on my exam high horse unless you want me. But that’s what I would just suggest, it’s about a holistic view, which I know you have with all the work that you do.

Christopher: Well let’s unpack that a little bit. You said there you were trying to help the parents see the value of teaching something like chord playing versus just playing dot by dot. What is the value?

Tim: Well the value is that a child can quickly see music for more than just the dots on the page, so they can start to see patterns in music. What that will allow …Oh and they can also notice chord symbols written above the music, which might, if they’re not taught about it, they won’t know what that actually means. What that gives them is an ability to learn music more quickly, for one. And it allows them to simplify music that’s hard, number two. And number three is if they can understand that chords are the root of all music, pretty much, then they can start to create their own music using chords and that’s where things get really exciting for students.

Christopher: Yeah well let’s talk about that a little bit, because one of the courses I love in your inner circle is your four chord composing course. And the idea of a four chord song or a three chord song even is something that’s come up on this podcast a few times from the perspective of playing songs by ear. And once you understand that pop or rock idiom of a four chord progression you can figure out the chords to songs much more easily. But your course isn’t four chord songs by ear, it’s four chord composing. So tell us a bit about that and how you can enable a student from early on to start doing something creative rather than just playing the dots on the page.

Tim: Well to the students I would say the fundamental aspect regarding chords and harmony in music, and it’s most notable in popular music which is why I like using that as an example, is that for the most part chords are all linked together. So there’s a certain set of chords that are used in each particular key, and they’re all shown on the circle of fifths. And I know you’ve got a great course on the circle of fifths, or you’ve certainly got resources about that, which I’d encourage anyone to to look at. Because the circle of fifths is basically my one page bible of piano teaching and music teaching, full stop. It just gives so much great value if you know what to look for.

And what to look for is the chords on either side of the key area. So if you take C major for example, the chords on the left, the major chord on the left is F, and the major chord on the right is G. They’re the primary triads. The relative minors of those, D minor, E minor and A minor. Those six chords tend to be the chords that are used when someone composes a pop song. So what I love doing with my students, once they unpack that and I unpack it by teaching them the three most common pop song progressions, the one, six, four, five … those ones, I’m sure you’ve talked about those before. There’s kind of three ones that are used in so many pop songs.

They can learn those, they can start to see that well actually these songs all use the same set of chords. Well let’s unpack that, why do they use these chords? Well they’re are all connected on the circle of fifths, they’re harmonically connected, and they work really well together. So why don’t we create our own? So I just give them a … I write the letter C, I give them three spaces, three dashes, to write chords on, and they just pick three chords, without playing anything, without listening to anything, just pick three of those six chords and let’s play them. And lo and behold, you’ve kind of got a pop song already written in the space of just a few minutes.

Now of course some chord combinations will sound better than others, and there’s some great talking points that I have with my students about the fourth chord, because the four … So normally we’ll go chord one, two, three, four, and then that will repeat back to the first chord. And so that last chord moving to the first chord will form a cadence, musicians out there will know that that’s a really fundamental thing to learn about, and certain cadences sound better than others.

So I don’t want to use too much jargon in case people listening are a little bit unsure, but what I would say is if this sounds interesting and intriguing and you haven’t explored it before, find the circle of fifths, and I know Christopher has copies in his membership, find the circle of fifths, have a look at the key C, which is at the top center, and the chords around it, and play a little chord progression using four of those and see what happens. And you’ll be amazed at the outcome.

Christopher: Very cool. Yeah we’ll pop a link in the show notes to our ultimate guide to the circle of fifths, there’s a free article on our site that has the circle and a bunch of kind of different variations and explanations that people can check out. But let’s get piano nerdy for a moment, because everything you just said is super cool for any instrument, but I know the pianists listening, or maybe the piano teachers listening, are thinking, “Okay so am I just playing block chords? Am I playing the triads? That’s gonna sound a bit boring.” How do you help students to turn this into something that actually sounds like a piano arrangement with two hands?

Tim: I tried start with triads, always. So triads in reposition. And what I find is that if … so I guess there’s a few steps that I skipped over. One is that I get students to play the chord in their right hand and a base note in their left hand, or octaves if they’re an adult and they’re capable. And I get them to use the pedal, and they need to play in rhythm. And those three things really come together to make it sound musical. If you don’t do those then it’s not gonna sound like a song.

So if you can picture let’s say a C chord and they’re playing C, C, C, C, then they go into A minor, A minor, two, four, and F, or whatever it is, and they’re using the pedal each time. It might take a couple of weeks for them to get their hands around it, to get used to moving, to using the pedal. There’s quite a few things that they’re doing. But that alone makes it sound really musical, and that’s one of the great benefits of piano because using that pedal, it makes things just blend and makes it rich, warm. So I would encourage you to try it with the pedal. And I can give you a sheet of my resources as well for my first lesson that I actually teach in regard to four chord composing, more than happy to share that with you. Christopher, we can put a link in your show notes and people can check that out.

Christopher: Very cool. And this all sounds really fun and interesting from the student’s perspective and, you know, it’s the kind of thing that looking back I wish my music teachers in general but also piano teacher had just kind brought in quite early on and didn’t. Why isn’t this kind of front and center in piano teaching, this kind of exploratory, creative, ear-based learning?

Tim: Well I hope it will become more and more, the more work we do, but I think it’s not currently because of the tradition of the classical traditional piano lesson. And I do a lot of work with classically trained pianists who are now teaching and who are really struggling to teach anything but interpretation, performance, and note reading, because that’s what we were all taught. And Forrest Kinney, who I know he’s been on your show, I’m pretty sure. He may have talked about the history. I could listen to him talk about the history and how we’ve got to this situation for hours, he’s just a superstar.

But that whole idea of the printing, the effect of printing presses and playing things as they were, as they should be played, and the recital formats and things like that, they’re all just this historical thing that’s happened in the last 200 years. Prior to that, Bach and all his buddies, they were teaching improvising galore. If you weren’t an improviser you wouldn’t get a job in a church or in a court or anything because that’s what they wanted people to be able to do. So I think we’re coming full circle, we’re starting to see the value in this.

And I always just think all this music that we’re getting our students to play, written music, it’s all being improvised and composed and created by someone. So let’s give our students some idea about how they can do that too, because it’s not some amazingly difficult rocket science type thing, it’s actually quite simple if you look at those foundational … the fundamentals.

Christopher: Nice. So obviously in your inner circle you have in-depth resources to help piano teachers step-by-step learn to teach all of this good stuff, but I wonder if we can just share any other kind of tid bits or ideas that … that four chord composing idea and taking the circle of fifths and a group of four chords and just kind of exploring and dabbling, I think it’s a fantastic one that anyone listening can go away and try.

And I say that because I’m sure a lot of our listeners can relate to what we’ve been talking about, that you come from a more classical background, whether you think of it that way or not, you come from this sheet music led, play the notes on the page, perform it note perfect, that’s what music is, mentality. And I wonder if there are any other kind of, not tips and tricks but any other exercises or areas you lead your students to that can be rich for helping them get into that other mindset to music.

Tim: Yeah there’s a plenty. One I can instantly think of is using the blues as well. The four chord composing is very much a pop style of playing music, and I use the pentatonic scale when … when they’ve got their progression they will start improvising melodies using a pentatonic scale, a five note scale that we know will work. I just like giving students things that will guarantee to sound good.

But if students are interested in more jazzy feel then using the blues is great, and the fun thing is that the blues is based on … if we do the 12 bar blues it’s based on the three primary triads. So in a key of C, using C chords, F chords, and G chords. So students can make this connection, “Oh well I was just doing pop music with these same chords and now we’re doing the blues.” So it starts to make connections and links. And so that’s why this approach of looking and exploring the fundamentals of chords, not just looking at them but getting students to create them, they can start to see connections in other music that they’re playing.

And you could take any piece of music by Christopher Norton, Dennis Alexander, these are well-known piano composers. And if a student has that understanding of what key it’s in, and therefore what chords are likely to show up in that piece of music, they can start unpacking it and start seeing those movements and patterns. So that’s one kind of thing that I like doing.

The other one I love doing is using pop music and asking students what pop they like at the moment and trying to help them learn something just through the chords. So I have a student at the moment actually who, he’s 11, I’ve just taken him on recently, 11 or 12. And he really loved The Greatest Showman music. And so in one lesson I asked him, I actually asked his mother to speak with him and email me some of his favorite songs that he wants to learn at the moment. And one of them was The Greatest Show from The Greatest Showman, and so I went and looked up the music before his next lesson. Sure enough, guess what the chords were. I think it was in C. So it was C, F, A, there might have been an E major in there.

And so what I was able to do is bring that into the next lesson and I demonstrated what I was doing, I played the song for him, and his eyes lit up and he went, “Oh my god. That was amazing. How can I do that?” And so I was able to teach him how to play that song with the four chords that it’s built on. And you know it doesn’t sound quite … it’s not quite perfect yet, but he’s also quite a strong singer, and so I’m gonna be getting him to … And the thing that he came to me wanting to do is learn to play and sing at the same time. He already plays cello, he’s quite a talented young man. So this is a great opportunity. I can teach him those chords and he can start singing over the top. So I love doing that.

And the last thing I’d say is regarding lead sheets, as well. Just teaching students that even if you download something let’s say from music notes. So I was talking to you just before we started, my dad’s 80th is this weekend, and I’ve put together this quite significant musical item list because we happen to have quite a few musicians in the family. My nephews and nieces particularly. And so I was looking through music online and having a look at the chord progressions, because I’ve got to learn quite a bit of music, I’m not gonna learn all the notes, but Hey Jude is based on about four chords as well. So bang, I can just look at the chord symbol.

So teaching students about that, and if the students … if you’re a student now, just yeah don’t get freaked out by all the black notes on the page, you don’t have to learn them all. It’s a great thing to be able to play them but you don’t need them at the start to be able to play music. Just have a look for those chord symbols and get some help about how to actually put them on the piano or on your guitar or however your … whatever instrument you’re playing.

Christopher: Very cool. So one thing I think we’re glossing over a little bit here, and partly why I asked you that question about how you actually arrange on piano to make it sound musical and not just straight block chords in four four time, is there’s actually a lot of ear work going on here, and this is something you and I have talked about a fair bit in the past, is how you develop your musical ear while learning an instrument. And for my own part, I discovered ear training as this whole separate thing, and I did drills and exercises, and then I had to try and kind of re combine it with the instrument skills I had learned over the past decade or two.

But what I love about everything you’ve been discussing there is this is actually a really organic way to develop your musical ear and develop that instinct. Because if we say something like, “I just look up the chords for Hey Jude and then I play them.” Well sure you know what triad chords to play, but turning that into something that sounds like the song is actually drawing on quite a lot of oral skill I think. How do you think about this stuff with your students and how do you help them develop their musical ear?

Tim: That’s a really good question. You’re right, if you do downloaded a lyric sheet, so let’s say you go to Ultimate Guitar and you’ve got the lyrics and the chords above them, it sounds nothing like what you want it to sound like unless you use your musical ear. You’re absolutely right. So you have to have an idea, if you’re going to take this approach to playing, you’ve got to have an idea of what the original song sounds like, and importantly the groove I call it, or the feel, the time signature. And you need to have ideally a repertoire of patterns up your sleeve, both for left and right hand eventually.

Now I think your question was more about helping students with this, and this is quite a long process. So it does take quite a bit of time to build up the skill to be able to play something convincingly without the lyrics or a backing track or anything like that, that people can go, “Aha, that’s Hey Jude.” So over time, what I do with students is I just introduce them to a new pattern, a new lick. So this is a cool thing you can do, let’s add a ninth to a chord and we can play it in a certain way that’s gonna sound quite cool.

And just take that home, try and add that to a chord progression that you’re playing at the moment. Can you add a suspension here or there? In the left-hand, let’s uncover a few really common patterns, and I love comparing things like the Alberti bass pattern, all pianists will probably be familiar with what that is, Mozart was famous for it. If you can picture the left hand, that’s all it’s doing. Versus something like the pop left hand, which tends to be root note or bass note, the fifth, and the octave, going up and down.

So giving students some of those skills I think is really important, but crucially and why you are doing such great things for helping musicians around the world, is you’ve got to be able to listen to the original and try and work out what it is about the style or groove or feel that you need to try and replicate on the instrument. And that’s a challenging process, it just takes time and it takes a lot of practice.

Christopher: And you’re presumably still doing some grade exams with your students. How does all this relate to what they call the oral skills section of the exam?

Tim: Well it doesn’t does it?

Christopher: I was trying not to phrase that as too leading a question there.

Tim: Well it depends on the exam, and I think you saw I did a little exam board oral test wrap up a little while ago. And the sad thing about oral tests in exams is that a lot of them are just so disconnected from musicality, using your word, that it’s just … I don’t know, it’s a bit sad.

So I think my my wrap up was the … I think the ABRSM actually, and Trinity do it quite well, the thing I want to see in oral tests do is get students to listen to things that are useful, and be able to talk about it. So things about style and dynamics and articulation, things like that, that’s great to be able to talk about, but can they hear a chord progression, an underlying chord progression? If they hear a four chord progression, can they replicate it on the piano? Can they play it back? Things like that, that that to me, they’re strong oral skills. And I mean there are many more.

So I laugh because a lot of the exam boards it’s like you’ve got to sing … okay here’s the notes, sing a fifth above it. And students just … it’s a bit like theory, Christopher. Theory is often so disconnected from the practice of playing an instrument, which I think is just such a waste and such a shame, and it’s again, if we go back just briefly to the four chord composing, I mentioned the idea of cadences. Pretty much every exam board asks you at some stage to write a cadence. And I remember sitting at a table, so I’d move away from the piano, I’d sit at a table with a pencil and a book, and I would have to write out a four cord … sorry, cadences in four part harmony. Did you have to do this?

Christopher: Yeah.

Tim: And I wouldn’t even necessarily play it or hear it, I’d just learn that the tonic rises to the thing and the fifth rises … you learn these rules and it’s just such a waste, and such a missed opportunity, which is why again, if I can help other teachers and students out there try and form connections and learn things through the music that they’re playing or exploring, then we’ve got a winning combination.
But oral tests, look, I hope they … They will change over time I think, but exam boards are often slow to move, not from their own fault it’s just part of the system. So if you’re out there and you’re a teacher and you agree then just look around, the exam boards are quite different, so find one that suits the student, that’s what I always say.

Christopher: Yeah and I think that pressure to change to a large extent probably has to come from the teachers, and I think when we first interviewed you for our website a few years back I asked you basically like why is it you teach teachers and don’t just teach students? And you said basically, “It’s because I can have a bigger impact. If I teach 30 teachers and they have 30 students each, I’m reaching a lot more students than if I just teach them one on one.” And that’s why I love what you’re doing with the inner circle because you’re getting these ideas about creative piano teaching out, not just to individuals but to the teachers who can then have a great impact and maybe even update our oral skills with a bit of fresh air.

Tim: Yeah I’ve got good relationships with most of the exam boards. So we’ll see what happens in time. But yeah, look I did put the inner circle together in order to support teachers and be able to form a community around it so that people can come together and ask questions and support each other, share their own resources. So I’m teaching an adult student, and one of my members recently uploaded a two piano … no it’s a duet version of Toto’s Africa. And so I’m like, “Yes, let’s try it, because we’re always playing duets together.” So she’s really excited about that.

So these kinds of things pop up in the community and it allows me to support more teachers. And I do know that there is a real lack of confidence in teachers who have that more traditional upbringing to just suddenly jump off the page. It’s literally a leap into the unknown. And so if I can provide demonstration videos, lesson plans, examples, notes, things to do, things for the students to do at home, then that gives them that confidence to go, “You know what, I think I could try this.” And that’s what I really enjoy.

Christopher: Great, well I think you and I have celebrated and commiserated and exchanged tips and woes on the topic of music education membership websites to a fair degree. And I just want to say if we do have any piano teachers listening in, the inner circle is seriously impressive. Like you have such a lot packed in there but I think you definitely … you have the edge on us at Musical U in that you manage to present it in a very clear and coherent way, something that we’re still working on. We do okay but-

Tim: Oh I think you’re being a bit harsh on yourself Christopher.

Christopher: The inner circle, every time I log in, I just feel like yes there is lots here that I can get great value from. So if anyone is listening and curious, do check out Tim’s inner circle.

Tim: Oh that’s fantastic. I’ll also just mention too, if there is anyone who’s interested I would be absolutely delighted to offer your listeners a discount too. So we can leave some information in the show notes but more than happy to give listeners $100 off an annual membership, which is locked in for as long as they’re a member. So yeah great great deal and yeah, it would be fantastic. And anyone that’s interested too, if you’ve got questions about it let me know, I’m more than happy, Chris can forward me comments or questions.

Christopher: Very cool, thank you. You also have a podcast to which I am a devoted listener, despite not being a piano teacher myself. I wonder can you just talk about the kind of stuff you discuss on that show and the kind of topics you cover that are the reason I’m such a devoted listener?

Tim: Well it’s obviously the Aussie accent firstly, but what we do is I tend to interview, it’s mainly an interview podcast. And I just love having conversations like we’re having now with other people who have cool ideas, and rather than doing it over a cup of coffee and we are the only people that benefit from it, recording it and getting it out there and sharing it.

So I’ve interviewed lots of people and am very excited that in just a week or so after this goes live, or couple of weeks, we’re getting to our 150th podcast episode and we’re doing a big launch of a very special little product that’s going along with that to celebrate. So we can put a link to that in the show notes too.

But yeah I just I genuinely love talking to people, as you can probably tell, and exploring ideas. And also having my ideas challenged and questioned and making me think about new ways that I can do things. And so we’ve focused on … we’ve had like a month long focus on group teaching and we did a focus on online teaching, and there’s pretty much any topic you can think of we’ve probably covered, and will continue to do so. I’ve interviewed composers. The highlight was obviously my first celebrity interview, John Schmidt of The Piano Guys. That was great fun to do and I’d love to do some more people like that.

So yeah, a little bit for everyone. Obviously directed at piano teachers, but I think as you’ve said, you’re not a piano teacher and you’re enjoying it. I think anyone that’s in music, interested in music, a student of music, will enjoy just hearing what goes on.

Christopher: Definitely. Well if you’re curious about the inner circle or that podcast I think the best place to head is TimTopham.com, is that right Tim?

Tim: Yes. T-I-M-T-O-P-H-A-M.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well I am sure it’s been clear from this conversation but I am just a huge fan of the work you do Tim and the way you approach this, so just want to encourage anyone who’s been inspired and interested in the stuff we’ve talked about today to head to that website, TimTopham.com and learn a lot more about Tim’s created piano teaching and the resources he might have for you as a student, a teacher, a music fan, and all of the above.

Thank you so much Tim for joining us on the show today.

Tim: Absolute pleasure, thank you Christopher, and thank you for all that you’re doing for the students of the world too, the hobbyists and the students and teachers. You’re putting out fantastic resources for that musicality, which I think is a great focus. So congratulations to you as well, and thank you for having me, it’s been great.

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Katie Wardrobe of Midnight Music shares her tips on hearing key changes in music.

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Transcript

Christopher: Today I wanted to share with you a little nugget from a Musical U masterclass, because it’s something I know a lot of musicians struggle with, particularly those early on in their ear training – and that’s hearing when a key change occurs in a song.

We were joined by Katie Wardrobe of MidnightMusic.com.au, a fantastic website specialising in the ways that technology can help you learn music faster and easier. Katie presented on the topic of “Using Technology to Learn and Arrange Songs Quickly By Ear” and it was really a terrific walkthrough, packed with lots of handy tips and tech recommendations.

But what I wanted to share with you is actually just a little bit from the Q&A we did at the end, where someone asked about hearing key changes. I loved what Katie said and we had a bit of back and forth about what often trips musicians up with this, which I thought might be helpful for you.

So without further ado, please enjoy this little snippet from our Musical U masterclass with Katie Wardrobe!

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Christopher: We had Sharath post a few comments, thank you, hopefully, Sharath, for taking part. And your question was, how to listen for a change in the key of a song? Katie, I don’t know if you have any tips on that one?

Katie: That’s a good question. Yeah. I think, often there’s a key change in a song and it’s often if there is one, there’ll be one three quarters of the way through, two thirds of the way through. It’s like a tension building thing from a songwriting technique point of view.

So listening for the key change, I suppose, I always feel it naturally. That’s from my point of view. I can feel that everything’s just shifted. But, one of the dead giveaways, if you’re not sure, would be that the melody suddenly has moved up a step, or a up a third maybe. So it’s moved up a bit higher. It’s often higher to build the tension. It’s not so much lower. If it’s changing to… yeah, that would be probably the main thing.

What I would do is, if you’re not sure, if you’re singing along and you can’t feel that internally, you could play along with the melody on your instrument, before the key change. Play along, perhaps, some of the melody, and then if you suddenly find that at some point in the song, when you’re playing along with the melody and it’s the same, but your notes are now not matching, and they’re sounding really strange, then you might want to try shifting your notes that you’re playing up a pitch and just see if that works. Or try fiddling around somewhere in that area.

So, things to look out for. Often the key change happens in an upward motion. There’s a song that I was listening to recently, and it was a pop song, and I was actually thinking key changes are not often used these days in pop music, as a compositional device to build tension, but there was something where there was… I wish I could remember the song, there was about four key changes in this song, it just goes up, and then up, and then up, and I’m thinking, “Wow, this is crazy.” If it comes to me, I’ll pop a note in. Yeah, that’s probably the approach that I would take and if you’re playing something like a guitar and you’re playing chords along with the song, same sort of thing, you might find that at some point it’s shifting. Suddenly your chords are not working and so you might need to search out the new key of chords along there.

Often, this sort of thing, where you learn about relative keys and that type of thing, you’ve probably got material on that in Musical U, I’m guessing, Christopher, that, understanding what normally… what composers do commonly is a really useful thing because… this is a lot of what I do in transcribing is, I know that commonly the one chord might move to the four chord or the five chord next, and so if you can’t hear it you can often guess, guess one of those options and go, “Yeah, I was right, it is the five chord at this point.”

And same with the key change thing. Often, if you know the short list of what composers do, you can often just do process of elimination. A lot of the time I really do do that. I think, what logically would this be, and this goes down to working out the chords of a song, generally. If I know that the song is in C major, there’s a short list of chords that are more commonly used in C major, particularly in pop and rock music. There’s gonna be the one chord, the five chord, the four chord, the six chord, and then occasionally some of those other ones, but pretty rare. If you’re thinking, I wonder if it’s the three chord at this point, you can try it, but, it’s more likely to be one of the others, so often I do that process of elimination.

Even on a granular level, process of elimination with acapella arrangements, in this bar I’ve got covered off already the root note of the chord so let’s pick a C major chord. I’ve got a C somewhere in one of the parts. I’ve got a G somewhere in one of the parts. And someone else is singing a C as well. What would this other person be singing? I can almost guarantee it’s gonna be the E, which is the other note of the chord, which is not covered yet. I will go, “I think it’s probably around the E,” and then I’ll, process of elimination, just work things out that way.

I hope that answers the question.

Christopher: Terrific, yeah, I think that was a great answer and you covered the thing that I instinctively wanted to say, which was that the theory and ear training can help you a lot, and I think the slight subtlety to it is when we get this question it’s often asked from people who are trying to just hear the key and they want to know when the key changes to the other key. We have to kind of talk them through the fact that the key is actually expressed through the notes and the chords being used. So, really, if you want to tune your ear into that, yes, you can do it in kind of a vague, fuzzy, “I feel like the key has changed” way. But actually, if you’re learning, for example, like you talked about earlier Katie, to recognize scale degrees, or you’re learning to recognize the one, four, and five chords, like you just mentioned, it becomes very obvious because your ear is happily going, okay, so it’s Do, So, So, La, La, So. Then suddenly, it’s not, it’s like all of the weird chromatic solfa, and you’re like, well that… something has changed.

Katie: Yeah. That’s not good.

Christopher: Something is not right. And likewise with the chords, as you said, it might be the three chord, but if you’re suddenly hearing that it’s the sharp four or something very off.

Katie: Yes, the flat five.

Christopher: Yeah. Once your ear has the right kind of framework for understanding what’s normal, it becomes much easier to see, okay, we’ve moved from this big group of musical elements to something a bit different and that’s your key change. We find that really helps people when they shift from thinking they just need to recognize a key change to understanding, okay, I’m just learning to recognize groups of notes changing to another group of notes.

Katie: Yeah. Yes. Perfect.

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Christopher: I hope you enjoyed that short excerpt from our Musical U masterclass with Katie Wardrobe.

You can learn more about Katie and explore the resources she provides for leveraging technology to help you learn music at midnightmusic.com.au.

As I said at the beginning, that was just a little tidbit from the Q&A section of Katie’s masterclass, in which she ran us through the four-step process she uses to easily learn and arrange songs by ear, using technology.

If you are a member of Musical U, fantastic, you’ll find the full masterclass waiting for you inside the members website. And if you’re not yet a member head to musicalitypodcast.com/join for a special podcast listeners offer on membership. Right now that offer will actually let you try Musical U in full for free for 7 days, so you could watch this masterclass plus a dozen others, as well as getting full access to our 50+ training modules and a lot more. Heads up, this offer is likely to change or may expire in future so if you’d like to see Katie’s full masterclass and get access to all those other goodies then do head on over to musicalitypodcast.com/join and take advantage of that offer. And I’ll see you in there!

The post About Hearing Key Changes appeared first on Musical U.

It’s possibly the most common thought we have before we open our mouths to sing, especially in front of other people. We want them to enjoy listening to our voice and avoid seeing them cringe when we don’t hit a note bang on. So it seems like a useful thing to aim for, right?

The problem with this particular thought is that it’s more like a vague wish than a clear direction for the brain and the body. And in order to train our bodies to produce the sound we’re after, we need to be a lot more specific than this.

So why do we think like this?

Well, for one, singing scares the pants off a lot of people. It feels personal and vulnerable (even to those of us who have been doing it for years). Our voice is unique to us and is an expression of who we are, so we tend to take criticism of our singing to heart.

When I was younger, I used to enter singing competitions. I didn’t know what was worse; waiting to go on stage (the giant knots in my stomach making me feel physically sick), the performance (shaking like a leaf), or getting my results (rolling the dice hoping for pure elation over heart-wrenching disappointment).

The problem with getting graded like this was that if I got an A, I would feel like a winner. But if I got a D, I would think I was a D. I couldn’t distinguish between my voice needing more training and me being a complete failure. And I see this in many of my students.

We link people’s feedback with our self-worth, and we can begin to forget why we started singing in the first place – the joy, remember?

I think part of the problem is that we buy into this idea that singing doesn’t need to be learned like any other instrument – you can either sing or you can’t. We weren’t born being able to play the trumpet, so why do we apply that idea to singing?

“But I want to know if others think I sound good!”

The other issue with aiming for “good” is that it’s entirely subjective and it’ll change from person to person, so you’re never really getting a clear answer.

I’ve lost count of how many times my students have turned to me, wide-eyed after singing something, and asked “Was that good?” as though it’s a simple question than can be answered with either a yes or no.

It’s very understandable to want feedback for your singing voice – after all, we all want to improve! – but here’s the problem with that question…

Using beige, generic words like “good” makes it almost impossible to answer, because the idea of what sounds “good” can differ wildly from person to person. I can say I love Janelle Monáe’s voice, and yet someone else can tell me I’m insane because they think her singing voice is dreadful.

It’s your teacher’s job to make sure you’re singing safely and efficiently, but outside of that they shouldn’t be telling you exactly what your tone should sound like.

You’re in charge of how you would like your “end goal” to sound, and it’s going to depend on the styles and voices that you love. Once you have clarity around that, your teacher can give you more specific help and direction.

So what should we say/think instead?

The first thing I ask a student after they throw me the dreaded “Was that good?” question is “What did it feel like?”

Because we tend to judge our voices based more on what it sounds like, some singers have no idea how to answer this question. They aren’t paying attention to how it feels, only the result that flies out of their mouth.

When we focus solely on the sound we’re creating, we tend to get into some pretty bad habits. We add tension, pushing and squeezing to get closer to the sound we want, only to find that it’s still not quite right (and feels pretty awful).

You want singing to feel pretty effortless from the neck up. Paying attention to how it feels means you can catch little technical issues yourself and give your teacher more information to help you find the sound you’d like without the strain or the vocal fatigue.

Yes, the sound is important too!

I know I know, you don’t want it to feel like syrup is simply pouring out of your mouth but the sound of it is intolerable…

Instead of aiming for “good”, we need to get more descriptive, more creative and more specific. Listening to singers whose voices you swoon over is a great place to start. As singers, we can learn a lot by developing our active listening skills. We can start to be able to hear differences in tone that convey specific emotions or fit into certain styles.

To give a few examples, Adele’s rich, powerful tone is the perfect match for her emotionally-charged ballads. Sutton Foster’s crystal clear bright voice sounds like it was made for singing musical theatre. The intensity and versatility of Freddie Mercury’s voice helped him redefine the rock genre.

As you actively listen to music more and more, you’ll begin to notice that a singer will sing the first verse quietly with almost a whisper to their tone, and yet sing the second verse with the exact same notes in a much stronger, clearer way. You’ll start to notice subtle changes to the way a singer pronounces their vowels for a rounder, more resonant sound, or to add brightness to the tone.

So to get started, listen to a song by one of your favourite singers. What are the specific characteristics you love about their voice?

Yes, describing the qualities in someone’s voice is tricky, but there’s no right or wrong way to do this. You don’t need the technical terminology under your belt, you can use your own language to explain what it is that you like and would like to add more of in your own singing.

A few places you can start are:

• Volume (soft/loud)
• Clarity (clear/breathy)
• Fullness (full, rich or resonant/thin)
• Power or weight (strong, powerful/light, sweet)
• Brightness (dark/bright)

Now notice when they move between different colours and how this evokes emotion or helps to tell the story in some way. Perhaps they start the phrase strongly but pull back the volume at the end to show the switch from angry to sad. Maybe it initially sounds warm and rich, but then as they go higher, they add some twang to it to add intensity. Do they add vocal effects like growls or distortion, or is it completely clean?

Know what you want

So how do you get the singing voice you’ve always dreamed of? Together with actively listening to the singers you admire, it’s about educating yourself to make the decisions that are right for your voice and what you’re wanting to perform.

So instead of asking yourself “Was that good?” you can replace it with “Was that tension-free? Did that sound full and resonant? Was my technique solid? Was that too bright for what I’d like here? Does that tone suit the style I’m working on? Are the emotions behind the song getting across?”

Getting more clarity around what you want out of your voice means you’re making more of the decisions and no longer relying on other people to tell you what sound you want.

Being an artist means creating something that is uniquely yours. You get to decide for yourself what “good” is, and then experiment yourself or enlist the help of a teacher in order to get yourself there.

 

The post The Secret to “Good” Singing appeared first on Musical U.