Author: musicalitywrld

We really enjoyed getting the chance to talk to Anne about her experience and observations of the various approaches to musicianship training, and we’ll throw in our normal disclaimer that although some of the specifics we’ll be talking about are geared towards music teachers and early childhood music education, if you are an adult and/or a student yourself, keep listening! There are plenty of insights and valuable nuggets for you in here.

We talk about:

• Anne’s own musical upbringing and a few key experiences, both positive and negative, that influenced her own musicality and how she approaches her teaching
• The relative strengths of Kodály, Orff, Dalcroze, and Music Learning Theory
• The importance of sequencing in teaching and learning – and the two timescales you need to be thinking about for designing effective music learning sequences.

Anne is a great story-teller and we know her stories will resonate with you, as well as her insights on singing, sequencing, improvising and more.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Anacrusic
• The Anacrusic Podcast
• Book: Teaching General Music: Approaches, Issues, and Viewpoints

Transcript

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

Anne: Yeah. Thanks for having me, I’m excited.

Christopher: So you specialize in early music education, and I would love to hear about your own early music education. Was it so good or so bad that it inspired you to go into this area yourself?

Anne: Oh my gosh, that’s such a loaded question. My early musical background, in terms of school music, is memorable in bits and pieces but is very different from the way that I teach as an early childhood music teacher. The biggest influence in my life was actually my father. I grew up in a really musical family, my dad was a high school band director, a composer, so I grew up in this really rich environment of musical everything all the time. I grew up as a trumpet player, and singing in a university children’s choir, and taking piano lessons from the time I was four til I graduated high school. I felt really, really moved by music, I felt like that was a huge part of who I was.

Then when I went to college I decided I wanted to do something totally different. That completely bombed because when I got to college I just was a total fish out of water, I felt really, really uncomfortable and like I couldn’t my way because I wasn’t doing anything with music. So after my first semester at university, I transferred into the music school at the University of Michigan with my trumpet. From there, I trained to be a professional trumpet player, it was my goal to be a trumpet player in an orchestra. Moving through undergraduate studies I decided to go do a master’s in trumpet performance.

I was in my master’s program that I actually met a wonderful elementary music pedagogue by the name of Julie Scott. She kind of showed me what elementary music could be. I thought if you were going to be a music teacher it meant you were going to be a band director. While I have lived that life, and it was a wonderful like and lots of cool things that my dad got to do, and I got to do as a student of his, it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. So once I got a little bit of a glimpse at how rich elementary music could be and how it could impact kids in a lot of different ways outside of just musically, and then having the opportunity to work in some preschools, and some early childhood situations, I just really found my footing there.

It was a little bit of a curvy path to get to being a childhood music teacher. I would definitely say that the influence of just growing up in that musical environment, and having the experience to be really proficient on my instrument sort of paved the way for where we are today.

Christopher: Interesting. I definitely want to come back in a minute and talk about what she showed you that opened your eyes to what early music education could be, and compared with your expectations. But first let’s go back a little bit, because you mentioned your memories are … You’ve got little bits and pieces of what the journey was like for you, and you just said it was a bit curvy. I’d love to ask, what were the other memorable phases or moments for you developing as a musician before you went down this path of becoming a teacher?

Anne: You mean growing up, like in my school years?

Christopher: Yeah, what kind of musician were you, or what was the music learning experience like for you? We’ve had guests on this podcast who just learned playing in their church gospel band, others who were learning sheet music note by note, some who are very music theory oriented, others who were on the jazz improve end of the spectrum. What was that like for you? What was your music education like?

Anne: Well to be very honest with you, it was very formalized in the sense that it was very reading notation driven, I guess. That’s not a very clear way to say it, but I remember, and my brothers would admit to this too, we were all great readers, so we were great sight readers. You know, you have a week in between your piano lessons, and then your piano lesson’s on Tuesday, so Monday night you’re reading through everything so that you go into your piano lesson and make it through, right? Of course the piano teacher always knows, as they always do.

I remember kind of relying on that, and not being able to play by ear very well at all, to be very honest with you, throughout my high school days. So when I got to college I kind of continued along that trajectory. It was really reflective in my playing, to the point where my undergraduate teacher, there were a couple of experience I remember, particularly with this. But my undergraduate teacher, one day in my lesson, said, “You can’t hear anything that you’re playing.” I just kind of got very quiet and thinking, “Yeah, that’s definitely true. I’m just pressing buttons and looking at the notes.” So he’s like, “You need to sign up for the Jazz Lab Band.”

I looked at him like he was crazy because at my university, it was very much… There were a couple of people who did both jazz and classical, but it was a very direct road. Like if you were in this studio, you were going to be a classical trumpet player in an orchestra, or a military band, or something like that. And if you were in this studio then you were a jazz player. And the two very rarely crossed because the teacher for the classical studio didn’t really dabble in jazz at all, unless it was in an orchestral context, but that’s a different story.

Anyway, so he had my sign up for the Lab Band, and I remember there was one day that… And the director knew that I was Anne In This Box, had not played jazz every in her entire life. He just went around the room one day to improvise, and it got to me, and I literally could not play anything. I literally, I was just like, “I can’t do this.” I was like, “Pass! Somebody else can go now.” And he just kind of looked at me and moved on, and that was the end of it.

But you know, obviously that’s something that stuck with me, it’s been over what? 15 year now? Longer than that since it happened. Looking back that’s really kind of sad in a way because I should have tried something, but I was so in my head and so about making things right that there was no way I was even going to try.

Playing by ear is really having a good idea of the context of the musical situation that you’re in and being able to sort of process what you want something to sound like before it comes out, right? That’s how I think about it. For me, ever practicing excerpts, practicing orchestral excerpts, practicing more of these well known classical things, there are times I would have a really good aural picture of what something should like before I played, but then there are other times that I didn’t.

That’s something that my master’s degree teacher told me. I was playing a really complicated, almost atonal, etude in one of my lessons, and he kind of pulled the same thing on me. He’s like, “You have no idea what you’re playing.” I was just like, “Yeah, that’s true.” He’s like, go to the practice room, sit at the piano, and you need to be able to sing this before you can play it. I did that and then I came in and he was like, “Okay, now we’re talking. Here’s the next one.” Like, now we can check that off.

I hope that answers your question. I think that for me, improvisation is something that still does not come naturally on my instrument because I honestly think that that is an extra step. It’s something that now, after doing lots of elementary music, pedagogy training, and thinking about how to teach it to kids, comes much more naturally to me in terms of singing. And I am not a classically trained singer, I am trained to the point that I teach children to sing, but I would never go audition for an opera or something. That’s more natural because of the way that your brain processes music, and being able to sing something is very different than being able to process something and then put it on an instrument, because there’s an extra step there.

Christopher: Very good. I’m going to add that to the list of things to cycle back to in a moment, that singing, improvisation. I love the way you talked there about how playing by ear works and then nuance od improvising because, as you say, it is an internal and an external skill, it’s not just magic on your fingers on the instrument.
First, you mentioned a couple of really memorable experiences there that were both kind of a blow, by the sounds of it. Like emotionally, it was hard advice to hear. It clearly did you favors in the sense that it opened up your ears and you put in the effort to live up to what your teachers were saying you could do. But at the same time that’s not the most encouraging. You clearly, you had a great trajectory through music and into becoming a teacher. Were there any kind of counterbalancing experiences that encouraged you that yes, you were becoming a good musician, you were someone who was cut out for this?

Anne: Yeah, absolutely. First I want to address what you said. Yes, there were definitely blows, but bear in mind that I was training for a situation where if you don’t go in an orchestral audition and play perfect, you’re not even considered. It’s not just playing the right notes, playing the right rhythms, it’s a lot more beyond that. But that’s the first step. There were days that I would leave a lesson crying, but I always learned something from the situation, so there’s that.

But there absolutely were counterbalancing moments. When I was in high school, I mentioned earlier how I kind of pushed back against this whole idea of being a musician, and largely because that was what everybody expected out of my, and that’s what I was always good at. Since I felt like I always good at it, I wanted to try something different, which maybe seems weird. It’s like, “But I’m also good at school, and I like math and science, so let’s go do this thing.”

Anyway, I remember when I was in high school, I was a sophomore, so I was in my second year of high school. In the United States, in the state of Michigan, where I grew up, they do these proficiency tests. What it entails is you play a solo, and then you play scales, and you do sight reading, and they give you a numerical score out of 100 essentially. I got a 99 on my first proficiency. Like I said, I was a really good reader, and it was the first level of performance in this competition, so the sight reading was fairly accessible. The reason I missed a point was because I didn’t do a trill, because in my brain I was remember, like my piano background got the best of me, and I was trying to remember if the trill should start on the note above on the note that it was written. So I was just like, “I’m just going to skip it,” so I lost-

Christopher: I love that you remember that all these years later, that one point.

Anne: Oh yeah, that one point. But anyway, that’s okay. Never got as good of a score in my later years. But anyway, I remember I was outside after and the man who had judged me, knew my father because he was a band director as well, but he was kind of standing over by the window, this is very vivid in my brain. He kind of gave me that “come here” motion with his finger, and I walked over and I don’t remember the exact conversation, but it was essentially, “What are your plans in four years when you graduate,” and, “This is what you need to be doing.” I was just kind of like, “Okay.” I mean, I was what? 14? 15? I was like, “Yeah, sure.” I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow, let alone what I’m doing in four years when it comes to trumpet.

But that really stuck with me, and the fact that somebody noticed that I just sort of had this natural … I resist the word talent a little bit, I think that’s a whole other podcast, but just this natural inclination. That it came naturally to me, and that if I really, really fostered it, it would probably be something great.

So there was that moment, and also the same moment that my trumpet teacher in undergrad … Well actually this is a different moment. He assigned me a very difficult etude, and it was when I was getting ready to go do master’s auditions. I was always pretty good because I got by, and I’ve never really loved practicing. I love playing, I love going and going and sitting in an orchestra, I love sitting in a brass quintet, I love doing all of those things, but sitting in a practice room with a timer for five hours was never my jam. When it came time to audition for master’s programs, I got really motivated because I had that goal.

So he assigned me a brand new etude that was really, really difficult, and I think he thought it was going to take a couple of weeks to get it under my belt. I walked into my lesson, and if I can be so bold, I totally nailed the snot out of it. I did, I played it really, really well. He just looked at me and pushed back his chair, and he said, “You mean to be telling me you can play like that and I haven’t heard you play like that for the last three years.” I was just like, “Oh.” I wasted some time, you know?

From that point on… It was rare to get a compliment from him like that. At least, I mean, obviously because I wasn’t practicing the way I should have been for the last three years. I mean, he was a very, very caring teacher. I love Bill Campbell with the University of Michigan, he is an amazing man, he really, really cares about his students more than just as trumpet players, just as people. Like we were really a family.

But it was rare to get a compliment like that because he was honest. And unless it was really, really good, he wasn’t going to tell you that it was really, really good. But that day he told me it was really, really good, and I rode that high all the way through my graduate school auditions.

So having that positive experience where I just worked my behind off and then got that positive feedback, and then went on to do fairly well with graduate auditions. That was a big, big turning point for me where I was like, “Oh, this is something I can actually do.” If I put in the time, if I really, really want it, if I’m working toward this goal, this is definitely something that I can do.

Christopher: Fantastic. I think that gives me a much better sense of where you’re coming from as a musician, that’s awesome. I want to come back to… I’m sorry I forget her name, but you had a pedagogue who was particularly inspirational for you, and said she showed you what early music education could be like. So now that we have that sense of who you were at the point where you were like, “Maybe I’ll become a music teacher,” what were your kind of mental notions of early music education and what did she show you that changed that perspective?

Anne: Yeah. I’d be so interested to talk to you on a later day about what the early music education is sort of like outside of the United States, because I’m just very ignorant when it comes to that, just to be very honest. But for me, and for a lot of people sort of my age, when you talk to somebody about their elementary music class they remember the musicals they put on, and playing the recorder. Those are the two things that everybody remembers. To me, I might not make friends if I say this, those are my two least favorite things teaching elementary music. I think that recorder can be done really, really beautifully, but at the same time, it’s just not my most favorite thing.

But anyway, that’s what most people remember, I remember that too. I remember going to the lunch room, because that’s the only place we had for a music room in my elementary school, and sitting on the benches. We would either be playing B-A-G on the recorder, we would be singing along to the prerecorded music for the musical, or we would be singing out of the textbooks, the music textbooks that big companies, like Pearson, puts out. Like Silver Berta and Nicky Music, maybe those are owned by Pearson, I don’t know.

Anyway, so I remember also reading the textbooks and singing along. Just kind of following the ups and downs and all kind of stuff. For me, kind of doing the monkey see, monkey do whatever … Singing first of all, let’s say this, singing first of all, no matter how you’re doing, I think kids love to sing and they love to sing in a community setting. When you get on a bus, what do kids start doing? They start singing songs. So, on a field trip or whatever else, I think that’s jut part of what they do, and on the playground, and all that good stuff.

However, I think that in music teaching environment there are things we can do beyond sitting and singing from a textbook, or singing along with prerecorded music, or just kind of playing fingerings on a recorder instead of knowing what the notes are. So that was my image of elementary music.

That’s not what sticks out in my brain about what formed me as a musician. I think about the children’s chorus experiences that I had, where we were treated like real musicians who needed to practice their music, and we went on tour, and we did recordings, that’s a very special experience, not everybody would have something like that. But that really kind of gave me an idea of what you could do with kids. I mean, I was in fifth grade when I was in that ensemble and got to do those sorts of things.

So anyway, my picture of elementary music was very, very limited, I guess. When I went to Southern Methodist University I met Julie Scott. Even though I was a trumpet player, I was randomly assigned to the music ed department for my teaching assistantship, to help them with things. At that time, Dr. Scott was working on her doctorate, she was working on her dissertation. So she had finished all her doctoral coursework and she’s back to teaching, still working on her dissertation. Her dissertation was all about Orff Schulwerk and the role of singing within Orff Schulwerk.

So through that I was talking to her about all these different people she had interviewed in the field and their take on what elementary music is like. I was also helping sift through different choral octavos that were unison or two part, so things that I sang when I was in children’s choir, and remembering all of these things. It was kind of this wash of stuff that just made me think, “Oh, this is so fun.” And in the meantime there was an undergraduate in the trumpet studio who was an ed major, and she was in her methods class, so we’d be sitting and lunch and she’d be doing her homework, and I’m like, “Oh that game looks like so much fun, and you’re using it to teach this.”

I just sort of had my eyes wide open for me, I guess, to realize that elementary music is not just sitting and singing. Which is so crazy to hear myself say that, because how many years have I been doing this, and up until the point that I really started doing it, that’s what I thought it was. I think that that is a very common misconception because a really, really great elementary music teacher is somebody who is not only helping build skills for children in terms of literacy skills and all of that kind of stuff, but also somebody who is taking the time to really, really build community, and build positive self efficacy, and all of those things when it comes to doing music, but also applying that outside of music classroom. Very little of that has to do with sitting and reading music. A lot of it has to do with everything else, right?

Meeting her … If I had to name one of the five influential people in my life, she would be right up there, because I wouldn’t be a music teacher if I wouldn’t have met her.

Christopher: I see. So you were exposed to offshore work, you decided that was the be all and end all, it solved all of your problems and you went on to become an become a music teacher for the rest of your life?

Anne: No, not even a little bit. At the same time I was doing my master’s degree, I was also teaching a part time early childhood music. The lady that I was working with doing that was a very, very Kodály inspired music teacher. The books that she gave me, so I knew what in the world I was teaching were the Lois Choksy, The Kodály Contracts and The Kodály Method. That gives you the sequencing and everything else for what to teach. Not that orchestral work does it, I’m not saying that in the slightest, but you can find resources that are more prescribed, we’ll say it that way, that have the title Kodály Inspired. That stuff we can get into a minute about how I feel about that.

I knew about orchestral work, I knew about Kodály, I knew that there lots of these different sort of pedagogical approaches to teaching elementary general music, and I knew that none of them included just sitting and singing. I think that that was the big eye opening for me.

Christopher: Gotcha. Yeah, without going down a rabbit hole of what things are like in the U.K. and my own early music experiences, I think that your description of it as “sitting and singing” or “playing the recorder,” unfortunately covers a lot of it, in a lot of countries. It’s interesting that there were those two pedagogical approaches that specifically opened your mind to what was possible. I know that you’ve also become a Dalcroze practitioner in some regards, and I’ve also I think seen mention on your blog of music learning theory and the various aspects of that.
I’d love to ask you, because there aren’t many music teachers I’ve met who have explored each of those to a decent standard, so I’d love to hear your perspective on how they all relate or don’t, how they fit together. I gather you’re not someone who is like, “Orff is everything.” No. “Kodály is everything.” No. “Dalcroze is everything,” and switched. So you have found a way to kind of reconcile them and draw on each. Maybe you could just talk about what you see as the strengths or what people misunderstand about each of them if they think it has to be all of nothing, choosing one.

Anne: Yeah, so that’s a loaded question. There’s a really, really wonderful text, if anybody’s interested, called Teaching General Music: Approaches, Issues, and Viewpoints, I believe is the subtitle. It’s edited by Dr. Brent Gault and Dr. Carlos Abril. Dr. Gault is professor of music education at Indiana University and Dr. Abril is a professor of music education at the University of Miami in Florida. They are both wonderful, wonderful pedagogy and they edited this book and brought together sort of their dream team when it comes to all of the different things that you need to think about and all of the different things that you need to consider when it comes to teaching general music. Within this book they have experts on Kodály, they have experts on Dalcroze, on Orff Schulwerk, on Music Learning Theory, on world music pedagogy, on constructive teaching, I mean, anything you can think of. It’s a pretty dense text and pretty comprehensive. So that’s a good resource for anybody because I am not the expert, I wouldn’t necessarily say.
If I had to put myself in a box, which I violently oppose and don’t like labels, believe it tr not, but if I had to be pinned down, to be put in a box, I would definitely say that I am predominantly a Kodály inspired teacher. I don’t really make any bones about that. And the reason why is because of in a way sort of that prescribed sequencing that I talked about.

Prescribed isn’t the right word, however, when you first begin to get into Kodály inspired teaching, or you get into getting Kodály certified, at least in the United States, there is a very, very good example of what a sequence would look like. Some people take that to be the prescription and other people say, “No, this is the example. Here is the essence of what it is, now I can take it and apply it to my situation.” Which is the whole point. So that’s a big misconception that it is prescribed, because a lot of the things that you see in textbooks or in training courses is that example. When people go into training courses or get textbooks, they want to see something that they can immediately apply.

The whole idea is that you see how to take repertoire, and how to take that repertoire and develop a instructional sequence that relates directly to the repertoire that you’re using, in the place that you’re living, with the culture of your students, and all that kind of stuff. It’s hard to wrap up in a pretty little box in a hot minute. But anyway, so there’s that.

Orff Schulwerk really has to do with finding ways to explore different musical concepts in terms of creativity. So, you see that throughout what would be considered a learning sequence, which in Kodály terms is generally taking a concept and preparing it, presenting it, and then practicing it. The Orff Schulwerk takes maybe that process, and improvisation is in there throughout. So the student has more opportunity to have their own definitions of whatever, and their own ideas, validate them, their own sort of musicianship come into play throughout the process. It may be considered more student drive, but I would argue that there’s Kodály teachers who do that really beautifully.
I am of the opinion that Kodály inspired teaching is not just about reading and writing, but I think people get really, really bogged down with that because it is so literacy based. I think that all approaches have that literacy component, it just maybe seems a little bit more clearly delineated in Kodály inspired teaching.

I think that if you can take the Kodály process and infuse some of the Orff Schulwerk inspired student agency along with the different Orff media, which is speech, singing, instruments, an movement, which allows each student to be their most musical selves, then you have a really, really beautiful package there. Then of course, Dalcroze is big part of that movement piece. What I love about Dalcroze is that Orff Schulwerk, when I first started doing my training, I think people are either really, really drawn to movement or they’re really, really afraid of it. I was really drawn to it, but I felt like I didn’t know enough about it, and how to use it really purposefully. While Orff Schulwerk allowed for a peek into that, going on to do some Dalcroze training gave me more tools in my toolbox essentially to be able to effectively to children and to teachers. I think that that is also a nice little piece.

The last one that I got training within that, I have the least amount of experience with, is Music Learning Theory. But what I love about Music Learning Theory is that Edwin Gordan really focused on approaching music as a language. So it’s lots, and lots, and lots of speaking before you read and write, and experimenting in sort of this oral/aural idea where you’re speaking and listening. So what’s great about that is sort of like Orff Schulwerk: improvisation is in there throughout. It’s getting in there and processing, and then processing what you’re thinking and hearing, and the context and then putting it out into the universe I guess. It’s very difficult to explain, it’s very, very heavy, Music Learning Theory is. I’m still working on that one.

You know, I think that, to be very honest with you, any of those tools can work together really, really beautifully, and it depends on the teacher, and their situation, and where they’re teaching, and the kids that they have, and the concept that they’re working on, or their repertoire that they’re using that’s going to dictate how they teach music. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with whether they’re an Orff teacher, or a Kodály teacher, or a Music Learning theory teacher, or a Dalcroze teacher, it just has to do with being a good teacher. If you can use some of those tools that come from those different approaches, that’s great. The more you know, the more you know, and the more you can do for your kids.

I always like to say, yes, if you have to pin me down, I’m predominately a Kodály inspired teacher, just because I thrive on that structure, I thrive on that framework, and being able to be flexible within it. I’m mostly active, maybe, I’m as active in the Kodály world as I am Orff Schulwerk world, but I do teach training courses for Kodály, so maybe I wear that hat a little bit more frequently. I like to say that I’m not a Kodály teacher, I’m a music teacher. I mean, I don’t teach Kodály to kids, I teach music to kids. That’s a very long winded explanation.

Christopher: It was a fantastic explanation, thank you. Depending on how familiar our listeners are already with each of those, I know they will have drawn a lot from your insights there. I did want to pick up on a couple of things you mentioned. One, was if you wouldn’t mind just briefly explaining the Kodály principle of preparing as the first step in a process of learning a new concept. I think that’s something that our listeners might not have come across before.

Anne: Yeah, so if you think about preparation, present, and practice, those are sort of the three P’s. People have variance of it, and they add in assessment at the end, or they have different … I sort of have my own terminology that is outside of the Kodály framework, but you’re talking specifically about a Kodály inspired teacher that you find in sort of that realm of the world. Prepare, present, practice: prepare is the whole idea of singing a song, playing a game, doing some sort of iconic representation if you’re talking more learning theory type stuff, so that students can aurally, visually, and kinesthetically understand a concept before they’re asked to name it. So the preparation phase is really sort of the exploration phase, that’s the term that I like to use, because you’re having them, being students, work within the context of a concept without really knowing what it is in terms of a literacy component.

So for me, when you get to the present moment, the idea is that the teacher is presenting this to the student as well. In my opinion, the students have already learned it, you’re just naming it for them. In the process of presenting or naming something, they get to see the formal terminology, the formal notation, and then they’ll probably practice reading and writing then.

Then when you go on to the practice phase, that’s when they can really apply all of that exploration and all of the literacy components to new experiences. So practicing creating the higher level practice activities like improve composition, all of that type stuff.

Christopher: Cool. So you and I were talking briefly before we hit record about the differences between children learning and adults learning, and I think this is a nice case because when you’re teaching children music, I think you get to start with a blank slate to a large extent. So you get to start in that prepare phase. What we find when people come to us at Musical U, they often think they’re starting from scratch, but essentially we have to explain to them, “No, you’ve already done all of that preparation. You already know what a wonderful five chord progression sounds like,” for example. So really our work is really in the kind of presenting and practicing stages of mastering the skills and really knowing mentally what’s going on. A lot of the internal work has been done. I always find it really interesting to look at teachers such as yourself and how you design things, because you’re starting from the very beginning, but you’re working through each of those phases.

One thing that I wanted to pick up on to is you mentioned sequencing when you were talking about the different approaches, and I know that’s a particular strength or yours as a curriculum designer. I wonder if you could just explain what is sequencing to a music teacher and where does this come up?

Anne: Yeah, so I think about it… There’s sort of two different ones, there’s a macro sequence and a micro sequence. So macro sequencing has to do with what you’re going to teach kids from the moment they come in your classroom at the beginning of the year through the end of the year, or through the end of their time with you, which for me I see my kids from kindergarten to fifth grade. So the idea of how are you going to build concepts from the simple to the complex.

When kids come to me in kindergarten, the very first thing they have to do is sing. You know, they have to learn to be musical if they haven’t grown up in a family where they sing songs, or play games, or that type of thing. So finding their singing voice and steady beat, because everything is built upon those two things. They can’t do anything with melody, or chord progressions later on in life, or anything else if they don’t have some sort of musical instrument, I guess. Singing is their first and best musical instrument, so that’s where we start. Then when it comes to steady beat, that’s the foundation for anything rhythmic.

So that’s where we start, and from there you build upon whatever will be the next smallest scaffold, I guess. Or the next building block in a sequence. So, for me I go from steady beat to faster and slower, right? Because there’s fast steady beat, and a slow steady beat, and all that kind of stuff. It goes on, and on, and on, and on building from the simple to the complex. That’s the idea of a macro sequence.

When you get to micro sequencing, that tends to be a little bit trickier because I think largely, at least in my experience, there’s some variation, but there are probably about two or three different sequences that I think most educators could agree are good for kids to learn music in terms of concepts, right? Some people say you should start with Do Re Mi instead of So Me- there’s all that kind of silly banter that goes on. It’s not silly because people are very passionate about it. I have an opinion, most teachers do, but at the same time, as long as you have a solid macro sequence, it really doesn’t matter where you start as long as you stay with thar trajectory.

Anyway, so the micro sequencing is a little trickier because you’re talking about how you start with steady beat, how you even begin to present that to kids so that they can master that concept before you move on to the next. For me, when I comes to micro sequencing, I think about a learning sequence in terms of a specific concept, and how I’m going to, as a teacher, gather resources. So that means, what songs, what games, what activities can I bring to my students to help the be their most musical selves. So it might be a singing game, it might also be an instrument activity, it might also be a dance, or a movement activity. Whatever I think will help as many students as possible sort of get into the next phase, which is exploration.

So that’s the whole idea of the aural-visual-kinesthetic prep, right? The whole idea of letting them experience and sort of speak the musical language before we get to the discovery moment, which is that literacy component. So saying, “Okay, we did all this stuff with this thing, now here’s what you were doing. Here’s the thing that you were actually exploring.”

Then moving on to extension, which is that practice phase. So they get to take all of the experience that you’ve given them, right? So you’ve built sort of schema or that knowledge context as well as a literacy component, combining the two to apply to a new context. Then from there, whatever they’re able to extend, or whatever they’re able to create with you turn into a sharing moment because music is meant to be shared. So whether it’s within the context of a class, or with parents, or the community, and then taking some time to reflect on that experience in terms of a lot of different things, but also how it pertained to the actual concept that you were sequencing through.

Christopher: Very cool. I think that’s a super valuable mental model for people to have as they’re exploring music. I think a lot instinctively think about that macro sequencing of taking a course, or figuring out what I’m going to work on this year, but I think very few of it really pause to wonder about the micro sequencing, and actually how am I approaching this thing, and what is a logical progression. I wonder if we could just take an example and briefly talk through what that would look like, if there’s a particular skill or topic where you could explain what each of those stages might involve.

Anne: Yeah, sure. Just really quickly, if I think about just taking, we call it ta’s and ti-ti’s, so if you’re taking quarter note into eight notes in kindergarten, right? Then end of kindergarten for me, so maybe I have a singing game where they’re singing a song with those two rhythm, so like apple tree is the classic example around here. So you know, “Apple tree, apple tree,” over and over, it’s kind of that ti-ti ta rhythm.

They play a game with it, then maybe they’ll take that same song, and after they play the game they’ll put the song in their head, but they’ll play the rhythm on rhythm sticks, so they’ll play the way the words go, right? That’s how we present it to little kids because they’re not thinking about rhythm necessarily. So, it’ll just be [clapping], and so on and so forth.

Then maybe they’ll step that in their feet. So they’ll go, ‘Tip toe walk, tip toe walk,” and then maybe we’ll put some icons on the board. So that’s like sort of the immediate preparation to that literacy component. So there’ll be two apples for apple, and then one apple for tree, and then two apples for apple, and the one apple for tree. So that kind of sets them up aurally, visually, and kinesthetically, right?

So they’ve had all of those preps … That was a super fast rundown. All of those preps going into, “Well, okay now we have all of these apples on the board, here is what musicians call this. And you’re really musician, so here’s our ti-ti, which is two eight notes, and here is our ta.” And then they go on to read it. So that’s all that the discovery or the present moment really is, it’s really just saying, “Here’s what you were doing, here’s what it’s called, here’s what it looks like.” And then you instantly move on to the practice phase. It’s just super duper quick if you’ve built that context.

So then moving on, you can have them take apple and tree, because that went over, and over, and over again and have them read different patterns, right? And then translate that into ti-ti and ta. Then they start making their own patters, and maybe they make a four beat pattern, or maybe they make an eight beat pattern, and maybe they share it with a friend and they put their two patterns together to make a longer piece. Then there’s your extension.

Then they go on to play those patterns that they combined together for the class, or maybe that turns into something that you record and put on a class blog or something. So now they’ve shared it and have the opportunity to watch it back and then reflect about what they did, and make decisions about whether they liked it, whether they didn’t like it. Maybe they could notate it if it wasn’t notated before. The opportunities are endless, you know? But the whole idea of just giving them, like I said, as many opportunities as possible to explore something aurally, visually, and kinesthetically. It can be as basic as what I just said, putting it in their feet. Obviously as kids get older there’s ways to incorporate more creative movement and maybe not so overt. Like put the ti-ti ta in your feet.

Finding ways to do it aurally, visually, kinesthetic, giving them that literacy component, and then instantly moving on to the opportunity where they can be the music makers, where you’re not necessarily just spoon feeding them.

Christopher: Wonderful, thank you. That was a perfect illustration I think of why that kind of framework is valuable. Because if you said to an average music teacher, ‘Teach them quarter notes and eighth notes,” there’s a lot to think through. Whereas I think when you have that step by step process in mind it’s a lot easier to be like, “Oh, we could do this here and that there, and build it up bit by bit.”

Anne: That’s one of the struggles too is I think especially for new teachers, if you’re not thinking necessarily this specifically, and this intentionally, and this sequentially about how you’re going to approach a concept, it’s really easy to just throw up a quarter note and two eight notes and say, “This is what this is called, now let’s do it.” But if you haven’t given kids, or adults, or anybody, an opportunity to sort of play with something first, they can turn out to be good readers, but they won’t be able to play by ear. Let’s bring it full circle.

I think that that’s what ends up happening a lot of times, and it’s not because those teachers are bad teachers, it’s just an awareness issue. I think if you can find as many ways as possible to approach music like a language in the sense that you are giving … My one year old, she’s babbling like crazy right now, she knows exactly what she’s saying. I haven’t got a clue because she hasn’t gotten that formal thing happening yet until she sees the cat and she goes, “Kitty,” right? I think that the more opportunities you give them to play, and babble, and experience things before you put it in a box. And then also once you put it in that box, giving them the opportunity to make it their own. I think it’s really, really important.

Christopher: Fantastic. On that note of putting things in boxes, I did definitely want to come back to something you said, which was when people come into your classroom, when kids come into your classroom, they have to sing. I know that some of our listeners, even just hearing that the kids were going to have to sing they will have tensed up and they will have been like, “Oo, can’t sing.”

I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about that and specifically you mentioned a couple of times there, kids love to sing and they sing naturally, and that is generally the case, and particularly at the younger ages. But I think it’s come up several times on this podcast with guests from different countries, there is this cultural thing of, at a certain point your class, or your teacher, or your friends decide you can or you can’t sing and you get put in that box, and that’s that for the rest of your life.

Of course, we’ve talked a bit about this on the podcast before and the complete nonsense that that is, and what you can do about it, but I’d love to hear … I guess a couple of things. One is what you do to head it off at the pass and avoid that happening in the first place. And I guess the second is if a kid comes into your classroom and they’re already in that mental state of, “I’m too shy or too nervous to sing,” or, “I don’t think I can sing,” is there anything you can do to kind of help them on to the right track?

Anne: Yeah. Before that do you mind if I tell a quick story?

Christopher: Please do, yeah.

Anne: For me, performance anxiety, I won’t go down a huge rabbit hole, but performance anxiety has always been a little bit of an issue for me. Not when it comes to playing trumpet, not when it comes to playing piano, but always when it came to singing. So growing up, I loved singing. I often say that if I would have had the opportunity to have a really, really awesome musical theater program in high school I probably would have tried to go to college for that. But anyway, just because I love it.

I remember growing up, I was in children’s chorus, but I remember I one year was singing for a school variety show, the jazz band was playing and I was singing. And the whole week of rehearsals of our technology week, it went great and I love it, I was having so much fun. And then something happened the opening night, because it was a three night show, the opening night that I was on stage and the band started, and I froze. I couldn’t run off the stage, there I was in my dress, with my microphone, with the jazz band behind me. So I suffered through it and it was awful.

I got a letter from a lady that was a member of our church later in that week that said that she was working the school, because she was also a teacher, but she was working in the school and she heard somebody singing on night, and she came in, and it was me. She was so impressed because she had never heard me sing like that. Not to say that I’m so wonderful, anyways. She had just never heard me sing like that, so she was really excited for opening night. Then she came and she noticed that I really struggled. She didn’t say it like that, but she said, “Being a singer myself, I know that whatever you were dealing with in terms of laryngitis or whatever-” because that’s what it sounded like, I was croaking like a frog, I was so stinking nervous. She said, “Whatever that was, I’ve been there. I know what that’s like and you need to keep going.”

Talking to you today, Chris, I feel like I need to write all these moments down. Throughout the last couple years because there’s some good stuff in there. But anyway, she wrote me that letter, and that’s obviously stuck with me as well. The thing is is that, something my trumpet teacher told me too, and I’m speaking of this because if there are people who are listening and who are nervous about singing or say they can’t sing, I violently reject that. Because everybody can sing, we’re all born with a voice. It’s just that we have allowed our adult psyche to get into our head about singing.

My trumpet teacher told me, when it came to trumpet auditions, because I used to be nervous about orchestra auditions obviously, and most of the time those are behind a screen, right? They put up a screen so it’s blind. He said, “You know, I’ve sat on those committees before and everybody sitting on that committee wants you to come in and do an amazing job. They want to find this amazing player, they want to find this amazing musician. They don’t want you to come in an fall on your face.”

And that’s something that I’ve really tried to keep in the forefront of my brain with everything I do, whether it has to do with music or not. People are rooting for you. If there are people just sitting there waiting for you to fail, they aren’t people that you would want in your universe anyway and there’s something wrong there. I think that you have to remember that in terms of singing.

Moving past that to get to the question that you actually asked me. When kids come into the classroom and they are five years old, very, very rarely are they coming in with the idea that they can’t sing. To be quite honest with you, I don’t give them the opportunity to even think about it because the way that I have my classroom and the way that I pace things is in such a way that first of all, I’m always singing. And second of all, when it’s their turn to sing, it’s not a, “Okay, Johnny. It is your turn now, would you like to sing or would you not like to sing?” It’s not like that. It’s like I echo sing to them, like “Hello Johnny,” and then I point to them. And if they don’t respond, I move on. Then the next day I come back, and then the next day I come back.

Because if a kid is resistant to singing in the first place, it’s probably because first of all there’s other kids in the room, right? They need to see you sing more, and they need to watch their friends do it more, and they need to find it in a fun way, like through a game or just quick, quick, quick with your pacing where they don’t even have time to think about it and it’s just what you do.

So that’s sort of how I try to facilitate it in my class. The times that I notice that kids don’t want to sing it’s usually because I’m trying to make a correction, and so that’s a tricky thing. If I sing the “Hello Johnny” thing that I just did, it’s early so I won’t sing anymore, if I do that to Johnny and he sings back and he’s not singing on pitch, and then I say, “Oh, listen to my voice again,” and then do the same exercise again, and he shuts down because kids are intuitive, they know that’s like, ‘Oh, I didn’t do that right.” Then you still move on. They just need more time to explore, they need more time to experience what’s going on in the classroom.

So yes, I believe that every kid can sing, I think unless they have already had a horrible experience by the time that they’re five, very rarely do I have an issue with kids at that age resisting to sing. So much of what happens in the classroom is game based, the pacing is quick, quick, quick, and they’re down to party. They want to come in to play. If it means they can’t play the game because they’re not singing, they’re going to make sure that they’re singing.

Now I have been in situations where I’ve gone to a new school or a new campus and so the fourth graders and the fifth graders, who are very preteen and way too cool for school, come in and don’t want to participate. That’s when you have to start getting a little bit more creative, because a lot of things have happened in terms of them being really, really aware of their peers, really, really aware of what other people are thinking or what’s going to come up later. So trying to find ways to bring singing out of kids at that age is a little more difficult.

A lot of times what I do is I either use an activity that they want to do as a carrot that they’re more comfortable because older kids are more comfortable with instruments, right? A lot of times what I’ll say is like, “Okay, we’re going to move to the instruments, but first we have to learn this song.” A lot of times that will bring it out of them. So it’s just sort of finding ways to make it a regular part of what you do if you’re in a music teacher situation. If you are an adult musician listening today, and singing is just like, “I can’t even think about doing that, it’s just too much for me.” I think like anything else, it gets easier the more that you do it.

I’m a big proponent of stepping outside of your comfort zone. I care a lot about what people think because I’m a people pleaser, but when it comes to trying something new, I don’t care what people think because I’m going to try something new to better myself. It might work, it might not work, and if it doesn’t work I’m going to learn from the experience.

Christopher: Fantastic. I think you’ve painted a great picture in this conversation of your approach to music education and I think it will have given listeners a really sense of how rich, and creative, and enjoyable it can be in terms of singing first, understanding what you’re doing, not just pressing buttons robotically, using games and activities, and having fun with it, exploring before you’re worrying about transcribing, you know? I don’t want to put you on the spot too much, but you can be as brief or as lengthy as you like, but I’d love if you could just say from your perspective what is the difference in terms of the musical results and the musical life of doing early music childhood education this way versus if we just call it the traditional way where it’s very sheet music focused with recorders and singing from the staff.

Anne: Kind of the old guard way, right? To say this, so growing up, my music teacher, if for some reason she’s out there listening, obviously had some sort of impact on me because I remembered it. When people think about, “Oh, I played the recorder,” some people are like, “Oh, I loved that recorder, I took it every day, and I practiced,” you know what I mean? That was still a positive experience.

But I think that it’s important to build those positive experiences. I work and have worked in places where coming to school is sort of an escape for some kids, it’s maybe nerveracking for some kids, every kid’s different and I really like to think about the music room as a place where everybody can come in and just be a member of the community and really, really love what they’re doing. I mean, yes, they’re learning, but they’re learning through play like children should. They can’t just sit and read and sit and do this, that, or the other thing. The music room, it’s my hope that most places, the music room is a place where they come in and they can just feel like they belong and they feel like they really are musicians, and they’re doing things where they have a voice and where they can work with other people and have a voice.

I also think that if you approach music education from the standpoint that I’m going to give kids the opportunity to explore, and be their most musical selves, and find as many ways as possible to sort of uncover that and tap into that for kids, that not only gives them an appreciation for music, but hopefully gives them sort of that higher self efficacy, that higher self image for other things as well. Like, “Oh, I tried this thing and it went really well, and I really liked it, it makes me want to do more of this thing. So maybe that’ll happen in this part of my life too,” right? I mean, maybe that sounds a little too … Is altruistic the words? That everybody says, “Music makes everybody better.”

I think that it really does have that power because of the way that you approach it and the community that you build in a classroom. Music teachers are an interesting breed because music teachers become, I like to say that music teachers become music teachers not because they want to be teachers necessarily, but because they’re musicians who want to bring something that’s tapped into their lives to other people.

So we’re certainly not in it for the mad cash flow a lot of the time. Not to say you can’t make a living, I mean, that’s a different podcast too. But anyway, I think that that’s why we’re music teacher, it’s something that …. Musicians are an interesting breed too because what they do is often their hobby, right? It really melds those two worlds. What is the saying? If you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life, or whatever that is? That’s really and truly what I feel.

I’m going off the rails with your question, but I think that it’s important to build those communities and to really give kids the opportunity to just come in an be, and to create, and to just have the opportunity to be musicians instead of be parrots, I guess. To really put it bluntly. Which I think can unfortunately be a little bit of a trap sometimes depending on the approach.

Christopher: Absolutely. Wonderful. Well I think having heard you speak today our listeners won’t be shocked to hear that the tagline of your website is, “Purposeful, sequential, joyful.” I wonder if you could just tell us a bit about those three words, why you chose them, and what people can find on anacrusic.com, and the Anacrusic podcast?

Anne: Oh yeah. So the whole reason I came up with that was just because those were sort of the three things that I try to infuse in everything I do. So the whole idea is that first of all, I don’t see my kids very often, and so a lot of times I want to make sure that everything that I’m doing in my classroom is really, really intentional. So if I only see my kids twice a week for 30 minutes, or you only have a music lesson once a week for 30 minutes, you don’t want to waste a second of that.

That’s why I mentioned my pacing is always … Even my transition from one activity to another has a really distinctive purpose. In order to find that purpose there has to be a thoughtful sequence. So like what I was talking about with the micro and macro sequencing. That helps sort of streamline or align whatever my goals are for a classroom, or a workshop, or anything like that.

Then obviously it needs to be joyful. I don’t want teachers that I’m working with, or kids that I’m working with to come in and feel like it is such a drag, it’s the last thing they want to be doing. I want it to be the best part of their day. Whether I’m working with teachers or I’m working with kids, I great them at the door, I say, “I’m so happy that you’re here.” I mean, all of that is really, really important. So I always say, “Find the purpose, be thoughtful with the sequence, and choose joy.” Because I think all three of those things are really sort of in your control. Like my husband likes to say, “You are in charge of your own attitude.” I think that that’s really true and you’re also in charge of how you want your classroom to sort of unfold. Being purposeful, and sequential, and joyful is sort of the decision that I’ve made about how I want everything that I do to sort of work.

I have my website, and my podcast, and my blog, and some of the resources that I do. I really intended for music teachers who are in a classroom setting, and I work with teachers regularly with workshops here across the U.S., and then I do teach some summer courses as well. I am also always working with kids. I work with the area youth chorus here in my town and a lot of the resources and things that I talk about on the podcast or on my blog stems from my experience with my kiddos.

Christopher: Terrific. Well I’ve said it before on the show, but I’ll say it again, some of the best stuff online for learning music is where music teachers are talking to music teachers. So even if you, yourself as a listener are not a music teacher, definitely check out anacrusic.com and see what might be there that could help you in your own music learning journey. I’m sure you’re feeling inspired after listening to Anne today to find out more about her thoughts on these various topics.

All that remains is to say a big thank you, Anne. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you, and thank you for sharing so generously both of your own story and your expertise. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.

Anne: Thanks so much, really enjoyed it.

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The post Designing for Joyful Learning, with Anne Mileski appeared first on Musical U.

The Musical U team discusses the importance of taking it step by step in music – and breaking your practice down into “chunks” that make sense for you.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part One
• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part Two
• About the Message in the Music
• About Listening as the Route to Musicality
• About the Importance of Joy and Pleasure
• About Exploring Without Self-Judgement
• About You Being Musical Inside Already
• About Keeping it Simple

Transcript

Christopher: Hello, and welcome to the Musicality Podcast. My name is Christopher Sutton and I’m the Founder and Director of Musical U and I’m excited to be joined today by Stewart, Adam and Andrew from the Musical U team.
This is an episode following up on our 100th episode celebrations, where we asked 26 experts to share their answers to what’s one thing people can do to unlock their inner musicality?

There were several themes that ran through those answers. Even though each answer was interesting and different. There were a few things that came up time and again.

And so we wanted to take a few episodes to explore those themes and share some thoughts from the team on each of them.

In this episode we are going to be talking about taking it step by step. The importance of small chunks and making steady progress over time.

I’m really keen to dig into this one because I’ve seen the impact it can have for someone to shift their mindset including for myself, to shift your mindset from I must go big, I must hit that goal straight away, to, let’s break it down, let’s take small steps and work bit by bit towards that goal.

In our expert answers we had Casey Von Neuman talking about how it’s important to slow down and take things in small chunks.

Chris Owenby talked about how the great and accomplished musicians we admire all have a backstory and their expertise comes from the little things over time that add up and let them achieve those things.

Jeremy Fisher talked about stepped practice. The idea that when we’re struggling with a piece of music the trick is to take just that difficult moment, hone in on it and then gradually expand from there as you learn to play that part of the piece.

This is something that comes up in almost every context in learning music. It’s certainly something we remind members of regularly at Musical U and as I touched on there it’s come up for me, no shortage of times, in my own musical life.

Before we dive into this I’m gonna ask each of the team to introduce themselves incase you haven’t heard them on the podcast before.

Adam, why don’t you kick us off and say a little bit about yourself and your role at Musical U?

Adam: Hello everyone. My name is Adam Liette. I’m the Communications Manager at Musical U. I’m a trumpet player, guitar player and singer.

Andrew: Hello. I’m Andrew Bishko. I’m the Product Manager at Musical U. In charge of all the different contact and modules and things that we are doing there and I am the Content Manager on the Musical U blog. I’m also a music teacher, a songwriter and improvisor, a multi instrumentalist and a mariachi.

Stewart: Hello. My name is Stewart Hilton I am a Community Conductor. Most of you would know me as GtrStew777 inside the site and also I play guitar outside of Musical U I have a few different projects, a tribute one and the other one is a country thing. And there you go.

Christopher: Stewart, why don’t you start us off?

You play in a tribute band at the moment. You’ve played in other bands in the past and you also teach guitar. So I’d love to hear how you think about this topic or whether you think it’s important to break things down into small steps.

Stewart: Definitely. I hadn’t even thought about that until you just said it.

Yeah. With the tribute artist that’s a really good example. When he had contacted me. This guy does five different tribute acts so there’s a lot of music to learn. One of the things he would do and I was very thankful about is he said, learn these songs first, learn these second, don’t worry about these.

To take it up a level to of the tributes he does are Elton John and Billy Joel and for any guitar player who’s played or piano performers will know that piano guys love to write music much more deeper than just normal guitar stuff. There’s more chords, there’s more jazz chords, there’s more interesting rhythms they have. It makes it difficult.

My first goal was to just work through the rhythms and site out things and I had to chart em because there’s just so many chords. That you had to have the chart in front of you with words because you use words to cue off on the chords.

That was like my basic thing. At least get that, the rhythm and then build onto it, cos you have to get the signature lifts if there are any in and build on that.

When using that same idea, we always try and help that with the members. Most of us day to day even with the tribute guys. I heard it and I’m like, Oh God I gotta learn all this so much and in your head you build this huge mountain that you’re like, I gotta conquer this now, well you don’t really need to. You can piece it off one step at a time.

That really downplays the stress that you are currently going under and won’t help you lose a lot of hair from pulling it out of your head.

Yeah, so that’s definitely helped. In the long end of things.

Thankfully he would always tell me about shows coming up so I could work on one act, whereas just trying to learn em all I could just focus on this one show and then as another one would come up I could then focus in on that one.

Yeah. It’s definitely doing it in small chunks at a time is a huge thing and makes things much easier in the long run on ya.

Christopher: I think you touched on the major thing there which is overwhelm. We have a lot of material in Musical U about planning and goal setting and for a large extent it’s really about helping members avoid overwhelm.

We touched on this in our recent episode with Sarah Campbell and we were talking about keeping it simple, the importance of keeping it simple.

Likewise taking it step by step or breaking it into chunks is just critical if you’re not gonna get to that state where you like, oh my gosh, there’s just so much to do, I need to look at every website, do every exercise and I’m not gonna be ready until I’m done.

Anything you can do to simplify or to find the one piece of it that you can do today it’s so essential.

Stewart: Oh yeah. You just build onto things.

This year I took golf lessons at the beginning of the year. I like to play golf. I’m not that good. My wife got me three lessons at a real nice place that gave lessons.

He gave me first some tips and there was a lot of stuff he was going through. But there’s three I’m trying to remember and of course, at the end he goes, well you can pay for more lessons and we haven’t even got in the golf season and I’m like, I have enough to worry about right now.

It’s knowing that, because a lot of people we are, we’re like well yeah lets continue. But, I don’t even have the other three things smooth yet. If I add anything more it’s just gonna get confusing. I even get on the golf course and golfers [inaudible 00:33:03]everybody has a tip for you when you have a bad swing. They are like, you know, you need to do this. And I have to calm them down, like look I have so many things going on in my head right now I have to focus on those little things.

The same things with music, we wanna just do it all and it’s like no, just focus on this, these two or three things or it’s just the whole book.

Christopher: Yeah. That’s a great observation. Not all small steps are created equal and chunking it down is great but it’s not a magic bullet. You can still end up overwhelmed, you can still end up going down the wrong path.
One thing I particularly wanted to touch on when we talk about this is that you can do it yourself but there are definitely cases and particularly in music education where it can be really valuable to have an expert show you the step by step.

I definitely feel like this is a valuable part of what we do at Musical U. Is with our modules and our road maps.
It’s not that you can’t find that information in other places, certainly some of what we do is unique but a lot of it isn’t. The value is in a clear, broken down, sensible step by step method for it.

Having someone who’s gone there before or ideally someone who’s helped other people do what you’re trying to do can save you a lot of time because chunking it down is not enough. If your chunks are wrong or they’re heading in the wrong direction. You are not gonna be any further along and as you point out there Stewart you need in yourself and in your teacher to be aware of the pacing of it and the chunk size and when you’re ready to move on.

In that case with the golf, him giving you another tip or doing another lesson, that would be another small chunk but that’s not the kind of chunk you needed right then. The chunk you need is to play 9 holes and see how it goes.

Stewart: Yeah. I think you wanna get to attainable goals.

I always like talking to people about celebrating things.

Find a goal. Hit it. Celebrate it. Then you can move on.

For me in golf I wanted the break 50 for my hole. That’s my attainable goal and I’ve done it a few times this year so I can celebrate that.

The same thing with music. Find some quicker attainable things and when you get there celebrate it, be joyful about it and then move on.

That makes it a lot more fun.

Christopher: Absolutely. That is huge for motivation and I think also it’s important in terms of avoiding getting totally stuck.

If you just have one big goal in mind. It’s so easy to get stuck and not even realize you’re stuck. Whereas when you’ve broken it down more and you’re taking small steps forward you really notice when you stop that momentum when you hit a sticking point.

You’re thinking about it in a level of detail that allows you to see, okay, it’s not that I’m rubbish at this topic, it’s not that I’m failing at my big goal it’s just that this step is causing me a problem.

Again I can’t help but think of it in the context of Musical U and the training we provide where hopefully. And I think in a lot of cases, when a member gets stuck, it’s very easy to say, this is why you’re stuck or this is what you’re stuck on and it’s even easy for them to self identify and not just say oh, I’m rubbish at your training or oh I can’t figure out what I hear.

They come to us and say, listen, I’m struggling with, you know, distinguishing and perfect fifth and perfect fourth when they’re harmonic and at that point it’s really easy to help them find a solution because the chunk size was small enough. They saw they got stuck. They knew why they were stuck and they could look for a solution.

I think that’s a huge part of the value of breaking it down into small steps like that.

Stewart: Well. I gotta say, you just reminded me of something and that is what the tribute artist, we had no rehearsals so there’s a term that we use and we had to use especially when I first started with him and that is, when in doubt, stay out.

There have been moments when I’ve gotten up and I don’t remember the song, but it was the first time I played with him, and I wrote the song out and I got up and I hit the first chord and I’m like, good Lord a cow just died somewhere, and I was like, what the heck’s going on. I’m looking at the guitar and I’m looking at the music and I’m like, this should be right, so I hit the second chord, still terrible and at that point I moseyed off the stage and let it go.

Afterwards he was like, you did the right thing.

So then the next week I got with that song and figured out. I can’t remember exactly what had happened. I may have come in on the wrong beat or the chords on the sheet weren’t lined up with the words which can create a mass of bad moments.

It helped me out and that’s kind of a good way of going at it.

Also not getting negative and beating yourself up if you do have a mistake and just go, okay I just need to take it back, figure out what happened, and then go forward.

Christopher: Yeah. I think that’s a great case where. By the sounds of it, because you had approached this is a step by step way I’m sure you were able to come away from that gig thinking oh, that one song, something was off.

Whereas if you’d psyched yourself up into, this is a job and I need to nail the whole job perfectly you probably would’ve come away from that thinking, oh *bleep*, I’m not good enough at that job.

Adam. How do you think about this or use it in your own musical life. The idea of taking it step by step?

Adam: Well to be honest I haven’t always been the best at it.

I think we all have those stories of going to the music store. For me it was Dream Theater. I was like, I wanna play like John Petrucci from Dream Theater. If you are listening to this and you haven’t heard John Petrucci yet, go listen to Dream Theater, they are incredible. Then after a couple of weeks, I threw the book away because I couldn’t do it.

I like to think of what Forrest Kenney in episode 100 talked about. We need to approach music like a child and I think about when you’re talking about step by step, small chunks. I think about learning the music language. The music language which has a lot of similarities to learning another language.

I’m bi-lingual, I know that several people on this team are. Probably a lot of our listeners. When we think about learning a new language. There’s a popular cartoon here in the States, Ni Hao Kai Lan and the kids that watch it are like, I can say Chinese, Ni Hao. Like that’s the only thing they can say in Chinese but they are like so excited by it.

That’s how we first start approaching learning a new language. I speak Indonesian and when the first time I could say [inaudible 00:40:10]good morning, how are you, I was like wow, I can say this, right!

I think, sometimes if we just find joy in that little moment and understand that great, I can speak this one phrase that doesn’t mean I’m ready to read a translation of Danté. Very high level stuff.

You are not gonna go from a simple major scale to Mozart. There’s a lot more along the way. Just like with a language, you have to learn the root words. You have to learn the prefixes, suffixes, male and female and proper chord structure and verb, oh my gosh, it’s a long, long process.

We are not learning those little bits as a means to get to that end point. We learn little bits cos it’s more fun along the way. We can put things together and before you know it we’re speaking full sentences and then we can tell a story. Yes we still might be using simple words, we’re not using complex words yet but we’re still able to tell a musical story with very simple parts, elements of musicality.

I think that’s a great way to approach learning a language cos if you went to go learn Chinese tomorrow you wouldn’t expect to listen to Chinese radio tomorrow or the day after and be able to understand it. You would understand it’s gonna take a long time to learn Chinese.

If we really think about that with our music training I think we’ll find more joy in the little things and we’ll be better well served for it.

Christopher: Absolutely yeah. That’s a great analogy.

I think part of the challenge and part of why this is worth covering on the musicality podcast is that in the case like learning a language or with a child learning to walk or most skills in life. We get that. It’s gonna be step by step. You need to take it slow.

With the inner skills of music we have these cultural assumptions about what it takes and I think that leads people to expect either they can do it already or they are gonna suddenly click and be able to do it.

We offer a masterclass occasionally called how to play by ear with zero talent required. In that I talk about playing notes or chords by ear and make the analogy to reading. I’m like, look, if you are learning to read, you don’t begin by taking War and Peace off the shelf and trying to read it. You don’t hand a kid War and Peace on day one of learning to read and expect them to do it. But, somehow with music we do, we’re like, I listened to a song, I couldn’t figure out the chords therefore, I can’t play by ear. The reality is it does need to be broken down. We start reading with the letters and a few simple words like ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ and eventually you work your way up to the literature.

It’s the same for these inner skills in music. You can and it needs to be broken down into small chunks and I think a neat example too of what we were talking about before about it needs to be the right chunks. If you are learning a language a foreign language that is, don’t open the dictionary and start by learning all the ‘A’ words one by one or whatever the first letter of that language is. That is not the way to master the language. Having a tutor book or a teacher to point you to the most important things to learn first and the sequencing of it is really critical.

It’s the same in music. It’s not a matter of I want to play chords by ear, therefore, I’m gonna start today by learning to play C Major by ear and tomorrow I’ll do C Minor and then I’ll do C Major.[inaudible 00:43:49]

I bought a book once that was pre porting to teach you to play by ear and it took that kind of approach. It was like, here are the eleven kinds of C Chord. Now let’s try playing them by ear. I was like, what, what, what, complete, almost gibberish to me anyway. Maybe it works for some people but I always have that in mind of an example of how breaking things down in small steps in itself doesn’t help you. There are wrong ways to do it and you need to choose your resources or your mentors or your teachers carefully.

How about you Andrew. What are your thoughts on breaking it down step by step?

Andrew: Well. I’m gonna start with something that seems contrary here.

In my teaching when I’m doing a piano lesson. A lot of times the first thing I do is say wave a pencil in the air and I say this is my magic pencil, and I point it at em and I say, you can now play anything you ever wanted to play on the piano. What is it?

They’ll pick a song and I’ll say, okay let’s start learning it now. You know and they are like, oooh, you know?

A lot of times the song is Fur Elise, Ludwig Van Beethoven you may have heard it before.

What we do is we take that song, that person might not be able to read a lick of music or anything like that or may not have played but we break it down for that particular person.

I have learned how to break it down into small little steps in a pattern. And, gosh, doing that I’ve discovered so much about these pieces of music myself.

The student is highly motivated because it’s a piece they really wanna play. Okay, they won’t know how to play the whole thing, we’re just gonna play the first little, deedle deedle deedle deedle dum, whatever but they’re really motivated.

We’ve figured out ways to do it and they have nothing to do with the standard piano technique or standard practices or anything like that. Picking out patterns, bringing out music, singing to…Using all these little techniques these little, step by step by step by step and suddenly the student realizes they can do it.

We become impatient with the process and we procrastinate on our musicality and playing music. We enjoy the process. We had a master class with Lisa McCormick it really encapsulated for me. She says, note to self. I love this, why are we doing music, why are we wasting out time with these ridiculous sounds when we could be mowing the lawn or something, right Stew?

It’s because we love it, we love it and learning to love the process. Learning to love the little learning steps like Adam was saying, appreciating that little step, really loving it really appreciating it.

I understood this on a certain level, but, I too have pieces of music where I feel like I’m banging my head against a brick wall. Trying to learn a certain part and I asked about this and Lisa’s class and she said do it because you love it and I realize this goes so much deeper so if I can [inaudible 00:47:33] this one passage and I can’t play it because there’s something going on with my fingers. Well then I have to learn how to re position my accordion and maybe I have to do some work on my muscles I have to take two years of yoga classes in order to play this passage to get my technique up or something, whatever it is but I love it and I wanna do it, I wanna make it happen.

It’s a voyage of self discovery. You learn things about yourself and you don’t know where it’s gonna take you. It might take you on a side journey that you weren’t really aware of.

One of the great things about Musical U is that we have such a variety of material. There’s so many ways to go at it. And the beautiful thing I tell so many members. They say, shall I do this or shall I do that? Should I do this? I say, do whichever one you want to do, whichever one stimulates your heart because it’s all going to the same place, just coming from a different perspective.

We all chunk things differently. In my teaching experience I’ve seen certain students can take things in big chunks. Understand something all the way and certain students have to have it broken down.

I’ve had to break things down in ways that I didn’t know that you could break it down so far. It’s like splitting the proton or something. But sometimes you break it down that far and sometimes its boop it’s all one chunk.

It’s similar with your own learning you discover these things about yourselves. With Musical U with all the different varieties of approaches and training and the vast quantity of material you have the opportunity to explore this and what’s more is you’ve got feedback and you’re being guided along the way.

You’ve got Stew in there. Rooting for you every step of the way, answering your questions and myself, sometimes.
It really is about learning to love the process. To enjoy the process and remember why we are doing this. We are doing this because we love it.

Christopher: Fantastic. There was a ton packed in there that was really insightful but I particularly love that you noted the need for it to be personal.

I mentioned you should have a teacher, make sure you are doing the right steps or the right chunks but you’re absolutely right that what’s sensible for one person is absolutely not for another.

Of course that’s why we are so personal about it at Musical U. Whether you are thinking about it musically or not I think this is something to keep in mind that just because something is step by step it may not be the right steps and that doesn’t mean they’re bad steps it just means they’re not right for you.

That’s why having a teacher, a mentor or a guide or even just a musical buddy to talk it through with can really help because you do need to find the method that suits you and you do need to be willing to pivot and change and observe when things are going off track and that is the beauty of having someone more expert or more advanced or even just along side of you to talk it through with.

Andrew: I was going to say teaching about the teacher issue. That one of the thing I would like to ask when a student starts is, what do you wanna do? What is your goal? Because not everybody wants to be a John Petrucci or an Aldi Miller or [inaudible 00:51:14]Some of them the one woman I have who just wanted to play chords with her kids so they can sing along.

There’s all these arrays of all these different goals that people wanna do with their musicality and tapping into that and adjusting how you wanna go about your journey and how you wanna go about it and learning it is so different from one person to another.

Christopher: Yeah. I wanna make sure we don’t end up this episode with the listener feeling like, you know, we started out by saying this about avoiding overwhelm and I think from some of what we’ve said you might be ending up feeling a bit overwhelmed in the sense that we’ve said there’s no one perfect method.

This isn’t a magic bullet and just chunking it down isn’t gonna solve all of your problems but I think there are some concrete things there that everyone can take away.

The first is that you should chunk it down. It’s almost never right to just try and leap straight for your goal. It’s almost always valuable to try and chunk it down. Take it step by step. Doing so gives you the opportunity to see your progress. It helps keep you motivated. It helps you observe when a sticking point is coming up and be specific about what you’re stuck on.

The other major thing is those steps may or may not be right for you and you can try different methods. That is something you can do all by yourself. Just try different courses, or different approaches or just keep changing tack until you find your way forwards.

Or you can take advice from and expert in whatever you’re trying to study so that they can help you skip some of that experimentation. Ideally with some human involvement. We have a past episode of this podcast about choosing and succeeding with online music courses and one of the points made there is that there is a human factor required. There is no perfect one sized fits all course.

A big part of that is that a human can talk about it with you, they can understand why you are getting stuck and they can recommend a new step by step path that’s gonna get you where you wanna go.

I hope that that’s sending people away with a bit of encouragement that this is not a simple thing but it is an essential thing and it is a powerful thing.

Whatever you are working on in music do just take the time to think through, alright what are my steps? How can I chunk this down and how am I gonna do my best to ensure those are sensible steps or the right chunks for me and keep monitoring that over time?

A big thank you to Stewart, Andrew and Adam for sharing your thoughts on this episode.

It’s been great to have the chance to chat through this topic with you.

Thank you to everyone to listening and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Musicality Podcast!

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Behind almost every successful musician is a dedicated arranger and producer – someone who does everything from deciding the individual instrumental parts that will comprise the song, ensuring that the song is well-harmonized, coaching the musicians in-studio, and generally overseeing the creative process behind putting a song out into the world.

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Marti Amado, an arranger and producer with over 25 years of experience under her belt – creating music for TV, film, and advertising, as well as working with countless songwriters and performers to translate their musical ideas into the finished product.

In this insightful interview, Marti talks about her early musical life, the internship that opened her eyes to her dream job, the process of building her own studio, and the lessons she’s learned from a long, rich career of bringing musicians’ dreams to life. Aspiring producers, lean in – Marti shares the skills that you’ll need to succeed as a producer in the industry – giving the lowdown on marketing yourself, the importance of ear training, and the dogged determination needed to make it in an ever-changing, dynamic field.

Both my parents were musical so there was always a lot of music in my house growing up. My mom has a master’s degree in choral conducting and led choirs, and her father was a trumpet player and big band leader in the 30s and 40s. My dad played piano by ear and sang bass in the choir. I started classical piano lessons at the age of 7.

I was a very high-anxiety kid and teen, but when I was playing the piano, it took me to this other place where everything made sense and felt right. I felt spiritual connection – I just didn’t know that’s what it was at the time!

As a young teen, I joined a local singing group – an off-shoot of Up With People. That’s when I discovered that I could play along with their songs on the records after hearing them once, without ever having seen the charts. That group also was the first place I felt social camaraderie and I loved it.

I wrote my first song when I was 13 years old. I wrote it on the piano, singing the melody and lyrics. Not coincidentally, it was in the same key and had many of the same harmonic structures as a Brahms Intermezzo in A Major I was learning to play and had fallen in love with:

Because I played classical music and was a pretty good technical pianist and had a lot of ear training and theory, I was able to come up with fairly intricate things harmonically on the piano when I was writing – which proved to be detrimental when I started trying to write pop songs!

That revelation happened when I was in college. I started music school at Northwestern University as a classical piano performance major. After spending one semester locked in a practice room, I knew that wasn’t the life for me; I enjoy people too much and wanted a more social career in music – and also, I had horrible stage fright.

I started changing majors like crazy, but finally landed back in the School of Music with a degree in Commercial Music. My senior year of college, I had this amazing internship in downtown Chicago with one of the largest commercial music houses, ComTrack, that produced original music for national advertising campaigns – McDonald’s, United Airlines, Busch, and Miller Beer. Five days a week I sat in the back of these huge downtown studios and watched the producer and arrangers work with these incredible singers and studio musicians (including many Chicago Symphony players). That was it for me. I knew then that was what I wanted to do.

I have a Bachelor of Music Degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA, with an Ad Hoc concentration in Commercial Music – which essentially meant I designed my own degree program, taking music basics like theory, ear training, music history, and music business, but also taking classes in advertising and journalism and marketing from the NU School of Journalism, communications, orchestration and big band arranging, and psycho-acoustics (the science of why we hear things the way we do).

I also continued piano and voice as applied instruments. As I mentioned above, one of the most educational experiences was an internship my senior year of college with a commercial music company in downtown Chicago. A huge amount of my training after I finished school was just diving in and learning how to use computers and the recording equipment hands-on.

When I was starting out, the combination of being young and a woman made it hard for people to take me seriously in the studio. I was producing people 10-15 years older than I was, and a few men who weren’t that thrilled to have a 25 year old woman telling them what to do (and granted, I was pretty green for awhile too!). I got comments from players like, “Ok lady, where do you want the couch?” after asking someone to try a guitar part a few different ways, and, “Is that your real hair color?” from a recording engineer I had just met in the studio at my session!  

I think at the time I went home and cried about it. But ultimately, I loved being in the studio and creating music so much, I just persisted in working at my craft, tried to learn from seasoned producers, and just kept at it. When I turned 40, I finally kind of grew into my job.

Now, my style in the studio and with artists is nurturing and “mamma hen”-like, or so I’ve been told. At 40, I was comfortable in my own skin, and could be seen as more motherly, I suppose. I also stopped taking myself so seriously and my confidence grew a lot, which made me more relaxed. Today, I really feel that I am respected in my job because of my skill and the fact that I am a woman is incidental.

Ha! Yes, when I first moved to San Diego, my former husband and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and it had a tiny washer-dryer closet in the kitchen with sliding panel doors. We had no washer or dryer, but put shelves inside the closet – which held my first keyboard (a Yamaha DX7), an Alessis drum machine, and and awkward hard-to-use Alessis sequencer.

If I am remembering right (this was awhile ago!) I recorded everything playing off the Alessis sequencer directly into a two-track digital audio tape machine. Or worse yet, I might’ve been recording to a cassette player! I had been using a higher end eight-track reel to reel tape machine to record at my prior job in Chicago but we couldn’t afford anything that fancy.

I was very fortunate to get a staff producer job with a big music company in San Diego for a few years, but ultimately really wanted to be my own boss and determine my own schedule and the kind of work I did. So I became an independent in the summer of 1993. My business has had several names over the years when I was working as a sole proprietor. In 2009, I formed an LLC and became Amado Music, LLC.

I see my role as a musical translator – it’s my job to bring every artist and client’s musical vision to life in the studio, and communicate their vision with the musicians, engineers, and singers who help to create the final recordings. Often an artist comes to me with an idea of how they want their music to sound, but if not, I also help artists to explore and find a sound that is unique and right for them and shows their talents in the best light.

Ultimately it’s also my job to create an environment in the studio that’s comfortable and fun, that makes it easy for everyone to relax and give their best to the recording process.

A favorite production technique is layering. Layering two or more different sounds (with acoustic or virtual instruments) playing the exact same thing can create a totally new color.  

Production attitude depends on who I’m working with, the personalities involved and what’s most effective.

Some artists respond best to a very nurturing and supportive approach and others respond better to a challenge, “I bet in the next take you can’t _____!”

Truly there isn’t one, and that’s one of the many things I love about my job.

Monday I may be in my home studio producing and recording vocals on a co-written pop song with a young artist for a publisher or production music company. Tuesday I might be in a big commercial studio with heavyweight jazz players producing tracks for an artist’s original project. Wednesday I might be editing tracks for hours. Thursday – working on my website and bookkeeping, and Friday driving up to Los Angeles to have lunch with clients, many of whom have become friends.

My physical studio has very nice equipment – Genelec monitors, a Neumann vocal mic, Allen & Heath board, virtual instruments by IK Multimedia, Spectrasonics, MOTU and more – but it’s currently in a modest spare room in our house.

I’ve had this same setup in many different spaces, both commercial and non-commercial, over the years. When I think of “my studio”, I think of it in the metaphorical sense – it’s really me, as I am a one-person company. My brand has been built over the years, mainly by my becoming more focused on what I’m best at and not trying to do everything. For instance, big rock and orchestral film trailers are something I suck at! So I don’t bother.

About 50% of my work is arranging and producing independent artists’ songs and helping them to record and release their music. 40% of my work is creating original music for Production Music Libraries in the US and abroad. I currently have about 260 songs in my catalog that are in production music libraries. This is something I have worked to build over the past 15 years. My catalog generates passive income (royalties) for me when my music is placed in TV, film, and advertising around the world. About 10% of my work is creating original music production for corporate clients or advertising directly.

Some of the songs are solo writes, and some are co-writes with artists or other producers. I create some instrumental music, but a tremendous amount of the music I work on is vocal songs. I love working with singers and I love the emotion the human voice communicates. I also have worked as a lyricist quite a bit with younger writers as well. I specialize in retro genres like French Gyspy Swing Music, and other acoustic genres like Bluegrass, Celtic Music, and Jazz.

Here is a tune written, arranged, and produced myself, sung by Allison Adams Tucker:

Living! Walking and hiking in nature, listening to good music, watching films, reading good books, eating great food, prayer and meditation, spending time with my son and husband, and trying to be of service and give something back.

A song I co-wrote with artist Christine Parker, “Magic With You,” for Killer Tracks (under the Universal Music Publishing Group umbrella) in LA was placed in a national TV and Internet ad for Mitsubishi in Taiwan. The ad, with sweet funny visuals about a little girl and her dad who’s afraid she will grow up too soon, resonated with people – the YouTube version of the ad got over 4 million hits! Fittingly, the lyrics I contributed to the song (which was performed by Parker and arranged and produced by me) came into my head while spending time with our son, who was 2 years old at the time:

I think now even more than when I started 25 years ago, being a producer also means being an engineer at some level and being comfortable with the technology. I have always considered myself more of an arranger/producer than a producer/engineer. But because of the necessity of making demos with shrinking budgets, I have had to learn how to work with the technology.

I still love having enough budget in a project to hire an engineer who’s a real master and let them do their thing, but this is one of the areas where I am now challenging myself – to not shy away from the trickier technical stuff in the writing and programming, especially since I’ve been starting to work on more EDM-type songs. Being willing to continue to grow, never getting too comfortable, and never sitting back on your accomplishments are a big part of being able to evolve with the industry.

When I sit down to arrange or compose a piece of music, it’s a very intuitive, in-the-moment thing for me. I love the spontaneity of it. I always go with my gut impressions of what adjustments to make, what sounds to use, and where to take the melody or the arrangement.

I believe my intuition is a direct connection with the ultimate creator, God, and that’s why I feel so good when I’m creating music. It’s a spiritual high. And I have finally learned that the ideas don’t come from me – rather, they just come through me. I just have to show up and be willing to listen. Music is healing for people, music is therapy. I can’t imagine being in a more gratifying field of work.

A number of years ago, I was working on a piece of original music for a corporate client, Qualcomm, to use in a live performance for a conference of young programmers from around the world who made apps for their platform. With a collaborator, I created the music, which was a hybrid of rock and rap.

We hired a young black rapper out of Long Beach, Mark Jones, to rap in the studio. He took the basic messaging that I had put into a dummy rhyme, and on the spot in the studio, improvised and performed a rap with street language. Because the piece had to be presented to the suits at Qualcomm for approval, we had to type up a lyric sheet with the rap and “translations” below, since they didn’t have a clue what any of the rap slang actually meant!

It was pretty amusing at the time. It was the moment I gained a tremendous respect and admiration for rappers, and how improvisational their work is. The rhythms that Mark Jones came up with spontaneously were incredibly intricate, rhyming, and just sounded so cool. In a million years I could never do that!

I have been so blessed to get to work with so many talented musicians, artists, engineers, producers, studio singers, collaborators, and clients over the years. I really try to lead with love and respect for the people I’m working with, leave my ego at the door, and have mostly learned when to keep my mouth shut!

My advice? Always hire the very best talent that you can possibly afford, and always look for opportunities to work with people who are better than you. You will learn so much from them.

I don’t know the classical music career path very well – my sense is that it’s a more traditional, conventional road, with emphasis on performance. It seems like there’s lots of practice and auditions required, but once you have an orchestra or teaching position, you have a sense of security.

Working as a composer and producer in the pop music world is unconventional, to say the least.  There’s about an 80-90% chance that you will be self-employed and need to know how to get clients and gigs, so be prepared for that. Also, you must be willing and able to embrace technology as it changes. Understand it and learn how to make it work for you.

Actually, I was fortunate in being blessed with a good ear, which I got from my dad, but I learned to be a great sight reader by playing classical piano. Playing and singing in a music group as a young teen, I had lots of practice learning songs by ear from records, and also had formal ear training in my classical piano lessons – I had to identify intervals after hearing them, for example.

In music school, I actually was able to place out of my ear training classes because of ability and early training. Needless to say, ear training is incredibly important and I recommend that people find courses in ear training if it’s an area of weakness. Beyond interval training, theory, and sight singing, as a young producer, I also had to listen to lots and lots of different genres of music and analyze how the arrangements and production were put together.

When an artist or a client asks for something to sound “Bluesy Rock,” it’s a producer’s job to know how to create that. For this reason, I frequently work with musical references as a starting point, because it helps make things more concrete. As an exercise, I would sometimes listen to a pop song and using stick notation (rhythmic stems without note-heads), write out each instrument and what they were playing rhythmically as a tool for my analysis. Over the years as a producer, I’ve learned to listen at different levels – listen to the song as a whole, listen to just the drums, listen to the pitch of the lead vocal, listen to the time and feel of the rhythm section, and so on.

Be comfortable (or get comfortable) with marketing. Be an extrovert who genuinely enjoys people (or hire someone like that!), and be willing to constantly reinvent yourself as the music industry changes. “Music Producer” is a very fluid job description, and it doesn’t hurt to have another skill outside of music that you can do part time or as a contractor to help support yourself while you grow your music business. I did PR and media relations part-time for years to support my music career, and ironically, that was ultimately how I learned to most effectively market myself objectively – by doing it for others.

Ultimately, to take this journey, you have to love creating music so much and have such passion for it that you are willing to hang in there as long as it takes to start having a financially lucrative career – which never happens for some people. Making music has to be its own reward.

Taking Control of Your Musical Path

Incredible, right? It’s abundantly clear that Marti’s persistence, work ethic, creativity, and unmatched enthusiasm for her line of work has paid off, allowing her to open a studio that is entirely her own – where she can work with whoever she likes, whenever she likes, however she likes.

There is certainly a lot to be learned from music mentors, coaches, teachers, and employers. However, taking control of the direction of your musical path and branching out to create something where you call the shots – that’s an even more valuable learning experience.

For the ultimate challenge, take a page directly from Marti’s book, and try your hand at being your own producer. Learn your way around a simple digital audio workstation, upload recordings of your tracks, and experiment with using software to make them sound polished and impactful.

The post Bringing Musical Visions to Life, with Marti Amado appeared first on Musical U.

In this conversation we cover a ton of interesting topics, including sight-reading, improvisation, what makes for effective practicing, and the entrepreneurial requirements of being a professional musician today. Jeff shares:

• How many hours a day he practiced growing up, one activity that was central, and the one thing he thinks is essential to practice effectively
• One resource he’s found really useful to help him balance his creativity with the desire to make a living as a musician
• And several punchy tips on improvisation, sight reading, jazz and rhythm.

We know you’ll enjoy this one and it’ll inspire you to check out Jeff’s website and sign up for his email list – and don’t miss the unforgettable name that email list has, we talk about it towards the end of the interview.

Listen to the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• Jeff Schneider’s website
• Jeff’s YouTube channel
• 7 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing Music
• How to Practice Effectively
• Learning to Sing in Tune, with George Bevan
• About Finding Your Note
• About Your Voice Sounding Weird
• About Singing as a Tool
• About Mindfulness for Musicians
• Learning, Playing, and Thriving, with Elisa Janson-Jones
• 1,000 True Fans, by Kevin Kelly

Transcript

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

Jeff: Thanks so much, Christopher. Great to be here.

Christopher: I have a sense of who you are as a musician these days from your fantastic YouTube channel, but I don’t know all that much about your backstory. I’d love to know what was your early music education like. How did you get started and become the saxophonist and pianist and educator that you are today?

Jeff: Well, if we go to the very beginning, my family’s a very musical family. Both my parents played classical piano and my sister’s into musical theater. My brother plays classical piano and guitar. I was sort of the one that was like very interested in just learning how to play by ear, so I didn’t have that traditional sort of grow up with the piano, doing classical lessons. I never really took to that. Just kind of figuring out how to play movie themes on the piano. We’d watch a movie as a family and then I’d go over to the piano and figure out how to play that by ear. My dad taught me about basic chords and inversions and how to make that work.

From the very beginning, I was really interested, “Okay, how do I get my ear stronger.” Whereas a lot of kids they grew up just running through scales and playing classical pieces. I think there’s a lot of merit to that as well, but that wasn’t really my early background. Going on from there, I started playing saxophone in middle school, which is a little bit later than some of the other kids. I think most of the students were starting in fourth grade, but I was in seventh grade. It was fun. I was again kind of just messing around, noodling, figuring out how to play things by ear.
Then in high school is when I really started to get obsessed with practicing and playing music. From there on out, it was just like really my obsessions. That’s all I wanted to do was make music all the time.

Christopher: That’s really interesting. I don’t think there are many high schools students who would say they were obsessed with practicing. That sounds unusual. Tell us where the attitude came from.

Jeff: Well, you know, it was a combination of … There were some musicians that were older than me in school that I really looked up to. Actually there’s this moment where I read this interview. It was with Charlie Parker and I think Paul Desmond was conducting the interview. In it, Charlie Parker talks about how he practiced for like 15 hours a day for three years, and I just thought that was ridiculous, but I was like wow. That kind of made something click in my head and that was if I just work hard enough, I’ll be able to get to that level. I started putting in as many hours as I could.

There was like a summer I remember distinctly after I think freshman year in high school or sophomore year in high school and I practiced like eight hours a day all summer. It was clear when I came back to school the following semester, there was such an improvement in my playing. It was just a real affirmation that the practicing paid off and that the hard work paid off.

Christopher: I have a couple of questions there. I guess the first is whether you have any observations on the environment you’d grown up in or your school’s attitude to music that let you be so positive about the idea of practicing so much, you know? I’m sure there’s a personality aspect to it, but I know there’s also a lot of music education where the practicing is so dull and the payoff’s so intangible that people really struggle. Like even if they’re excited to get to the end goal, there’s very few who actually follow through and do a lot of practice at that age.

Jeff: Yeah. After teaching for a long time too, I’ve kind of gotten to see both sides of the coin there of how some students are just so engaged in getting better and have the drive to sit through the more boring exercises because they know that on the other end of that they’re going to see some real results. Whereas there’s plenty of kids out there who just don’t want to go through the hard times to get to the good times, which is understandable. That’s sort of human nature. A lot of it, like you said, I think is personality, but everything just kind of excited me.

I was just so into it at the time and still am for that mater, but at a young age I was so into that, like I said, I was able to kind of push through exercises that would make some people go crazy. I’m sure it made my parents go crazy when I was practicing all hours of the night. But to me, it was just like so much fun and awesome. I do think it’s a personality thing, but there are also … Like you were kind of alluding to, the school system that I was in, music was very much supported. We had a good music program in my high school. My band director gave me a lot of opportunity and encouraged me. I think that does have a lot to do with it as well, and my parents of course.
The same kind of thing, very supportive. They would let me practice when I wanted to, which oftentimes was in the middle of the night. I had the right environment to put that kind of work into it.

Christopher: Terrific. You touched a couple of times there on the second thing I wanted to ask you about in that which was what that practicing looked like. You made that reference there to boring exercises and endless drills and maybe we could just take that sum of where you were practicing eight hours a day. If you can cross your mind back, what did that look like and how did you know how to spend eight hours or did you know how to spend eight hours fruitfully?

Jeff: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think boring is in the eyes of the beholder, right? Something’s are going to be exciting to some people and others will find it boring. I had this distinct memory of taking this Charlie Parker licks because I had just gotten the Omnibook, the transcriptions of many of Charlie Parker’s solos. I would take lines in the Omnibook and just transpose them into all 12 keys. Just little Bebop licks. I would force myself to see how fast I could do it. Like go from one key to the next and do it up to tempo. Those were the types of exercises that I practiced, a lot of transposition.

That was just something that I heard from random people at like a music store. I had a great teacher in my sophomore year of high school. Will Vincent is this alto saxophonist. Amazing player and a fantastic teacher. He would tell me to do things in other keys as well. I just took whatever I could find and transposed it and that made a big difference.

Christopher: Got you. That’s really interesting. I think it fills in a little bit because I think you talked to people who kind of taught themselves by ear and you talked to people in the jazz world who are like, “Of course, you should play everything at all 12 keys,” but somewhere along the line you need to wrap your head around what that means. Particularly I think if you are more an ear player than a sheet music player, that’s not always easy to do. It’s interesting to hear that was a big part of your practice there.

Jeff: Yeah. That was probably one of the things that got my understanding of scales and chords. That theory knowledge, that’s what got it together because as I said, I was sort of coming up as an ear player. The act of transposing forces you to really know your scales well, to really know your chords well. I think what it also does is it helps you internalize on an oral level whatever it is you’re working on. Because whenever you hear something so many times in different keys, I think it helps you internalize whatever it is that you’re playing. It does come out both on sort of a left brain and a right brain side.

Christopher: It sounds like sax was your main focus at that point. Were you still playing some piano?

Jeff: I was always playing piano. Just kind of messing around. I would compose on the piano. I was also playing guitar quite a bit. I had the sort of Stevie Ray Vaughan blues phase a little bit before I started really getting into saxophone. Genre wise I was spread a little bit out there, but yeah. By that time when I was doing the epic saxophone practicing sessions, it was definitely primarily sax at that point.

Christopher: Got you. You clearly had some inspiration about the kind of music you wanted to play or the kind of musician you wanted to be. During that period, were there any kind of rewards or kind of results of your labor that kind of kept you motivated? Because for our listeners, motivation is often a big thing. It’s one thing to get really psyched about learning a new skill and put in a week or two, but to keep you going over time, often having some kind of outlet or some kind of event or some kind of sub goal can really help keep you passionate.

I was just wondering, for you, was it like, “Okay, now I’m going to work for 10 years and become a professional,” or were you kind of seeing some payoff from all of that hard work along the way?

Jeff: I definitely noticed results in terms of how the practicing was paying off, but at the same time, I would play concerts at school and just be so self-critical that I would want to quit. I was really self-critical at the same time. Actually what motivated me the most was getting the opportunity to play with other people, especially people who were close to my age. Because if I was playing with somebody who was around my age whose playing I really thought was great, that would push me to want to get my playing better because you can kind of see what’s possible.

It’s like if you hear a great player who’s 30 years older than you, yeah, that’s fun to listen to, but at the same time it’s like, “Oh yeah. That guy’s or gal’s 30 years older me. It makes a lot of sense that they can play like that.” Whereas if you go to hear someone or play with somebody who’s closer to your age, you know where I’m going with this, and they actually have those skills that you want, you’re like, “Wow. I really got to get it together here because I could be doing more.” That was real big motivation for me.

Going to like music camps during the summer and regional, whatever they call them, like all state, all that kind of stuff, local competitions. That sort of thing.

Christopher: Cool. Did you have a sense of what you wanted to do after high school and if so, was that what panned out?

Jeff: Yeah. I think by the time I started doing those epic practice sessions, I was convinced that I was going to just go to music school and music conservatory and just become a professional musician. My parents were amazingly supportive with that, even though I’m sure they were sort of scared quite a bit. I have a very obsessive personality and they were … I don’t even know what the word is. I just had my son. I don’t know if I would send him to music school. They agreed to have me go and it all worked out. I love what I do now. I get to be a professional musician, whatever that means. It all worked out.

Christopher: Nice. You say, “Be a professional musician, whatever that means.” It’s something that’s come up a few times on the podcast that whatever realm of music you’re in, it’s not a clearcut job description, right?

Jeff: Exactly. Exactly.

Christopher: It’s very few musicians who just do one thing to support themselves through music. I’d love if you could share a little bit about what that journey has looked like for you and how you’ve approached becoming a professional musician from the point of okay, now I’m a good player. How do you then get to the point where you’re like, “Great. I’m paying my bills. This is my living. I am a musician.”

Jeff: Yeah. Well, I’m glad you pointed that out. I intentionally wanted to try to keep that open-ended in terms of not defining what it is to be a professional musician. Because as you said, the word journey, that’s so key. In my case and I think just about everybody’s case, rarely is there a point where things are static and you’re just doing the same thing over and over and over again in this field. My job and my way of making a living has been constantly evolving over time. I’ve taught little kids. I’ve taught older people. I’ve taught beginners and more advanced players. I’ve composed for commercials and advertising and television.

It’s been such a wide variety of work that I’ve sort of shifted in and out of. It’s been a journey. I think one of the I guess secrets there is just to keep your eyes open and keep thinking about ways of evolving. If you get too comfortable, it’s really possible. This happened recently with the job market. I don’t know how recently, but right where a lot of people started losing their jobs because everything was changing so much. I guess what I’m trying to say is the model of getting a gig and then having it for 40 to 60 years or whatever and then retiring is just not the way it is anymore.

Especially if you’re going to be a musician where you’re essentially an entrepreneur and a business owner, in order to do that successfully, you need to think like an entrepreneur and a business owner and not just like, “Oh, I got to go get a job.” That’s not the way to be successful.

Christopher: Interesting. I want to circle back and talk in a moment about the mindset of an entrepreneur and what you’ve learned on that side, but if you don’t mind first, one thing that I think is really notable about you and the career you have built for yourself is creativity is still at the heart of it. I think a lot of people go the educational route and they maybe extremely good teachers, but they lose that opportunity to perform or compose or arrange or create in their own musical life. I’d love if you could talk a little bit about how you’ve approached… I guess what you want your creative output to look like and how you factor that into this need to also pay the bills in some way, shape or form.

Jeff: That’s another great question. It really resonates with me because I can always tell when I feel like my creative output is not great enough in terms of like quantity with the amount of creativity I’m putting forth. For instance, on my YouTube channel last year, I started this series called Loop of the Day. It was just a way of forcing myself to actually make music as opposed to just teach people how to make it. It was a nice way of combining the educational aspects of this is how this chord works or this chord progression, but doing it in the context of me actually making something. I got to get the best of both worlds there.

I’m creating, but I’m also teaching. Doing and teaching, right? I have a keen sense of awareness as to when I need to be more creative and when I’ve sort of become too stale for my own liking.

Christopher: I don’t want to go too far down the kind of business side of things, but we had an interview recently with Elisa Janson Jones of the Music Ed Mentor Podcast. One really interesting element that came out of that conversation was how valuable the entrepreneurial skillset can be to any musician. You touched on it yourself there where if you want to make a living with music, you are essentially saying I’m starting a business, even if that’s not how culturally we’re raised to think about it. I’d love to hear any resources or lessons or attitudes or philosophies you’ve kind of incorporated to help you adopt that business persona, as well as I am a creative musician.

Jeff: I think the number one thing for me was at some point I realized, “Okay, if I’m going to think of this as running a business, then I have to look at how other businesses are run.”

So what I started thinking about was how do businesses run? You have a CEO. You have the CFO, the CMO. I’ll do it one more time. What I started thinking about was how are businesses run. You have the chief executive officer. You have the chief marketing officer. You have the head of sales. You have a creative director. All these different positions. If you’re running your own business, you have to basically fill those different chairs. That’s how I approached it. I decided okay, I got to learn a little bit about marketing. I got to learn a little bit about sales. I already had the creative officer sort of role figured out because that’s what my education was.

It was how to be creative in music, but those other positions, learning how to handle your finances. Yes at some point you can hire people to do this, but if you’re a one man show, you need to at least have a little bit of knowhow to get by and to be successful.

Christopher: Is there any clash between you playing the role of chief marketing officer and you playing the role of chief creative officer? There’s really varied opinions out there about whether this is the best or the worst time to try and succeed in music in terms of finding listeners and making a living with it. How do you think about that in getting your music out there and getting paid for it versus I’ll make the music I want to make?

Jeff: Well, one thing that I read a while back that stuck with me for a long time is this article that was referred to me from Tim Ferriss. It’s this guy Kevin Kelly wrote this article called “1,000 True Fans.” In a nutshell, he talks about how if you can get 1,000 true fans, like 1,000 super fans who are willing to actually spend money on you, whether it’d be let’s say a hundred bucks a month or a year, right? If you got a thousand fans who are spending $100 a year on you, whether that be for courses or for music that you’re making or for merchandise, whatever it is, then you’re making $100,000 by the end of the year, which is a respectable living.

More than respectable. I guess the point there is if you can get a thousand true fans, then you’re good to go. Now maybe 20 years ago this would be very difficult to do for a lot of people when the record companies are controlling the industry and so forth, but now you have so much independence. You can put music out on the internet, wow, where you have three billion people online and you have access to them. At some point, I was like really discouraged because a lot of people at, like I said, these camps that I was going to or in music school, you hear a lot of discouraging things like it’s really difficult to make a living in music.

Nobody likes jazz anymore. When you think about the fact that there three billion people online and you only have to get a thousand of them to support you, the odds are in your favor. If you know how to leverage things like the internet, which I pretty much grew up with, it’s very possible to make a living doing anything really. I mean even something as obscure as high level jazz theory, it’s possible to do that because of the access you have to the whole world.

Christopher: Terrific. I wonder if you could give an example or two of where that’s influenced you in terms of projects or decisions you’ve made? When has that idea of a thousand true fans helped you make a decision?

Jeff: I think it helped me make decisions about not needing to pander to what I think is going to be like a popular way of thinking or a popular sound. It can be really easy to try to people please and make stuff only for the reason that you think other people might like it. When you realize that there are so many people out there who … If you like something and if you do it well, somebody else is going to like it too. If you do enough work when it comes to getting your music out there, doing some promoting, learning a little bit about marketing and sales, you’re going to find a thousand people out there who like what you do.

It might not happen overnight, but it can certainly happen. There’s a lot to be said for staying true to what you like and what you feel is good and the kind of art that you want to make or whatever it is that you want to do even if it’s super, super unique. Oftentimes it’s the unique stuff that goes the furthest. That concept of niching down where you really get specific and that way maybe there’s going to be a lot of people out there who hate it, but if you try to … What is the expression? If you try to please everybody, you’re not going to please anybody. I think the same thing goes for music and for most things in life really.

Christopher: We’ve talked a bit about creativity there. I know that some of our listeners who are songwriters or composers or starting a band, that will have really resonated with them, and they’ll really have appreciated your perspective. At the same time, I know there are some listeners who don’t consider themselves creative. One thing we often talk about here on the show is how improvisation is not an out of reach skill only for the expert jazz musicians for example. You as a jazz specialist yourself and a sax player have a ton of experience with improvisation, and I’ve particularly enjoyed some of your YouTube videos talking about how to approach improvisation.

I’d love if we could talk a little bit about creativity in that context and maybe some of the more practical side of being creative in music.

Jeff: Absolutely.

Christopher: So I’ll begin by asking just the simple question of how do you think about improvisation in music? You can answer that as a teacher or as a musician or as both.

Jeff: Yeah. I’ll answer as both. The way I think about improvisation is basically just like any language where when you speak, you don’t have an exact idea of what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. You just start talking and you say something that kind of gets at what you mean hopefully. Improvisation is the same thing. You have an idea in your head. Because you’ve practiced speaking so much previously to continue the analogy, you’re able to communicate what it is you want to say musically. To get a little bit less esoteric there and talk about this is a more practical way, let’s say you learn…

I’ll continue the analogy here with language because I do think it’s helpful. Let’s say you learn a bunch of vocabulary words and the metaphor there is vocabulary words means like a lick let’s say. You learn a bunch of licks and you start to integrate the language of music into your subconscious mind by maybe you’re doing transcriptions, so you’re transcribing these licks. Maybe you’re doing transposition exercises like I was discussing before where you’re really internalizing these licks. After a while, just like when you learn a new vocabulary word, you force yourself to use it in a sentence. You force yourself to write it down and use it in your writing, in your everyday speech.

When you do that with you musical ideas, when you do that with licks, you force yourself to use them in a solo. You force yourself to use them in a composition. Eventually those lines that you practiced so much in so many different keys, in so many different contexts, even if you’ve been forcing it, eventually those ideas come out organically. That is when improvisation really starts to feel effortless and that you’re just speaking like I’m speaking right now where I don’t have to think about every single word and every single grammar rule or whatever. It’s just coming out naturally. The same is possible for improvisation.

It takes a lot of time. A lot of the struggles and the challenges arise because well, when we learned language, when we learned to speak our native language, it was at a very young age when we just kind of soak up the information and we don’t need to think about grammar or spelling or anything like that. We just kind of learned to speak by figuring it out. When most people learn to improvise, it’s later on in life when they don’t have that same neuroplasticity or whatever you want to call it. You do need to really spend a little bit more learning how to improvise.

Just like when you’re learning any language, any second language, you need to … They say the best way to learn a language is to put yourself in the country of where that language is spoken and that’s because that immersion is so effective. If you immerse yourself in music, if you’re always practicing, if you’re always transposing, if you’re always listening and transcribing and playing with other people, the music will start to come out of you organically. That’s an amazing feeling when you just suddenly have musical ideas kind of come to the surface out of nowhere it seems, and then you’re able to play them because you have that connection with your instrument.

I’ll say one more thing. Improvisation is just composition, but you do it spontaneously. Just like to improve your speaking, you can practice writing. To improve your improvisation, you can practice composing. Spontaneous composition is also a very I think useful way of thinking about improvisation.

Christopher: Terrific. That was a really well-put explanation. I wonder if I could ask you a bit more on something you touched on there, which is kind of you’re internalizing all of this vocab and now it’s in you in some sense. When the time comes to improvise, you bring it out. Can you shed any light on what for you or what you think should be the mental process for making that happen? Like is it an ear thing? Is it a music theory intellectual thing? Is it pure instinct? What does that look like once you’ve internalized this vocab?

Jeff: Ideally it’s an ear thing. However, in order for it to become an ear thing, sometimes we need to rely on theory to help us get there. When I was talking before about transposing exercises and how that helps internalize something in your ear, that’s kind of what I’m talking about now where if you use theory to help you get there, eventually it’s going to make whatever it is you’re practicing, it’s going to make its way into your ear. Another thing you can do to help that process along is by actually singing. Even if you’re not a singer, if you’re just an instrumentalist, by singing, you also help internalize musical ideas in your ear.

You also make it clear when you’re not actually hearing something accurately. Because it’s easy enough to put your fingers down on the piano or on the guitar or press keys on a saxophone and just kind of blow air and the notes come out, but it’s a lot like … I was thinking about this yesterday actually talking about how if you were to … Sure. You can say words that you don’t understand and people are going to know you don’t really understand them. It’s a similar thing. If you just push down your fingers and hope that it sounds good, maybe it might work if you’re lucky some of the time, but most of the time it’s going to sound like you’re BS-ing.

Just like if you were to go to France, speak with a French accent, but just speak a lot of gibberish in a French accent, it’s not going to make any sense to anybody. The same is true for music. In order to really understand whether or not you are hearing something clearly, if you can sing it accurately, if you can sing each note very accurately, get the center of the pitch, then you can really confirm, “Okay, I do have this idea and I can execute it clearly and accurately.” If you cannot do that, then you need to slow down. You need to make sure you can sing your ideas, and then you’ll have a much better chance at having those ideas pop up organically.

There’s a really excellent video with Bill Evans. It’s on YouTube. You can just search for like Bill Evans lesson or something like that. It’s an interview where he’s sitting down at the piano and he’s being asked these questions. He does this demonstration of how if you approximate your improvisation, it’s very clear that you’re just basically BS-ing and it’s not anything of substance. Then you play much more simple, but it’s much more clear and substantial and the difference is clear. He probably talks about the same idea in a much more eloquent and succinct way than I just did, so I highly recommend checking out the Bill Evans video that’s out there.

Christopher: Nice. We will put a link to that in the show notes. I love, love, love that you recommended singing like that. It’s such a powerful thing and I 100% agree that if you can’t sing it, you haven’t really understood it by ear. I’d almost wrap up the interview here just to make sure we sent everyone away to think carefully about that. If anyone is thinking, “Oh, but I can’t sing,” we’ll have links in the show notes to past episodes where we’ve gone deep on that and shown you some ways you can get going with singing and singing in tune. I won’t wrap up the interview though because Jeff, there were a couple more things I wanted to pick your brains on.

One was this fantastic blog post you wrote, which we’ll link to in the show notes, called “7 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing Music.” I won’t put you on the spot and ask you to read the full seven, but there were a few that jumped out of me. We can refer people to the full blog post for more, but I wonder if you could just speak to a few of these. One was that time matters more than pitches.

Jeff: Yes. I saw this video with the bassist Victor Wooten. It was an instructional DVD. He does this little example, this demonstration, where he plays every wrong note. It was almost random in terms of the pitches, but he plays with such good rhythm and feel and phrasing that it sounds amazing. If anybody’s heard Victor Wooten, you know he’s got an amazing feel and amazing phrasing and great rhythm. That really kind of drove the point home that if you have good time and good phrasing and good rhythm, you can get away with playing wrong notes.

Unfortunately, especially the way music and jazz and improvisation is taught in a lot of places, the emphasis is placed on the notes, the pitches, the scales, the arpeggios, all that harmonic analysis. That stuff is important. Don’t get me wrong. However, you can play all the right notes you want. If your time and your phrasing and your feel and your rhythm suck, it’s going to sound bad. It doesn’t go both ways. You can play the wrong notes with the good time and the good feel and the good phrasing and get away with it. It’s going to sound pretty good, but you can’t go the other way.

You can’t expect to play all the right scales and arpeggios and have bad time and phrasing and expect it to sound good. It doesn’t work that way. I think of playing music or improvisation or whatever in terms of a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid, the biggest section, that’s where the time and the phrasing and the rhythm are. Then above that later on in the pyramid is where I put those pitches and the scales and the arpeggios and all that.

Christopher: Such a powerful point. Yeah. That’s something we emphasize in our approach to improvisation at Musical U, but you’re 100% right that when someone’s learning to improvise, they go so quickly to, “Oh, what scale should I use, or what do I play over this chord?” If you’re playing whole notes every bar, no one’s going to be listening. As you say, if you play the single pitch but an awesome groove, you’re going to catch people’s attention. The second one was anticipate the chord changes. What do you mean by that?

Jeff: I learned about anticipating chord changes from one of my teachers in music school Jerry Bergonzi, this tenor saxophonist. Amazing educator. Amazing player. What he had me do was anticipate chord changes. Basically let’s say you’re playing a blues in B flat. You have a B flat 7 for four bars and then you have the E flat 7. The idea is to start playing a line that would fit on E flat 7 before the E flat 7 hits. This has a really cool musical effect where there’s a little bit of tension, and then once the harmony catches up, everything kind of resolves and it sounds really good because you have that tension and release.

But another effect I found is that when you are thinking ahead, not just for a musical advantage, but you’re also preparing your mind to be able to execute the chord accurately and appropriately. Even if you don’t start musically anticipating the chord, you’ll have an idea, “Okay, I know this chord’s coming up. It’s not going to catch me off guard when it does hit, so that when E flat 7, to use that blues example, comes up, I’ll be ready for it and I won’t be caught off guard.” That’s sort of the crux of the issue. Especially when you’re playing a fast tune with difficult changes, by the time the next chord comes up, it’s already gone and you lost your chance to nail it.

By anticipating the chord changes, by thinking ahead, you’re going to be better able to execute and be able to navigate those changes in a way that is musical and effective.

Christopher: Super cool. I love that for a few reasons. The first is that I think it’s one of those really simple concepts that can actually really kind of give you a little leap forwards in how good your improv sounds. I think it’s also because it kind of blends those two worlds of rhythm and pitch and creates a looser feel of what should I play over this chord. You’re still thinking that through, but you’re not feeling like, “And now it’s this chord, I’ll just do these notes, and now it’s this chord, I’ll just do these notes.” I think it gives you one step more sophisticated and appreciation of the melody-harmony interplay, but it’s such an easy thing for people to try out.

If you’re used to playing over the chord changes, just try stretching that boundary a little like Jeff recommends.

Jeff: Sorry to cut you off, but you are making me think like one other benefit of doing that anticipation is especially on tunes where the changes are a little bit unusual, maybe like a jazz tune like Moment’s Notice or Stable Mates where you have two fives that are moving chromatically. Where if you do, like you were saying, play in a very vertical fashion where you’re playing, “Okay. I’m playing on this key and this two five here, and I’m switching abruptly to this key and this two five,” there’s nothing connecting. It’s very vertical as opposed to horizontal.

When you anticipate chord changes, it doesn’t sound so abrupt when you go to the next chord change. It’s like voice leaning in a way. it’s like there’s some common tones between within the two chords. Even if they’re not technically notes that would work on the previous chord, by forcing it, it does connect the two harmonic areas in a way that makes it feel really natural when you go from one key to the next. If you have difficult changes, try anticipating those chord changes so that it feels much more horizontal as opposed to just vertical.

Christopher: Awesome. The third one that jumped out of me that I couldn’t not ask about because it’s such a great heading was secrets of sight reading. That’s a hot topic for a lot of our listeners who maybe struggle with traditional notation or feel like they just can’t get fast enough. What would be your recommendations there?

Jeff: There’s a lot that goes into a good sight reading. I didn’t learn these lessons or a lot of them I just kind of figured them out out of some trial and error, but sight reading is always a real challenge especially for me. What I think helps quite a bit are a few things. One, again, the time is going to be more important than the notes. Get into the habit of if you make a mistake, don’t just stop and restart that measure or go back to the beginning. Because in a real life situation, if you’re sight reading a tune or a chart with a band and you make a mistake, they’re not going to stop for you if you make a mistake. You have to keep going.

You want to get into the habit of not losing the time. A nice exercise to help you get into the habit of this is playing a measure and then resting a measure. Playing a measure and then resting a measure. This will get you in the habit of letting the time go forward regardless of whether you’re playing or not. It keeps your eyes moving along the page. Because if you make that mistake and your eyes are suddenly locked on where you made the mistake, you’re going to have a lot of trouble getting back to where everyone else is. You want to get in the habit of keeping that forward momentum. The other thing …

Christopher: Sorry to interrupt, but just to clarify, you’re talking about playing a bar and then letting the music continue as it were, but you’re maybe imagining in your head before you come back in?

Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Christopher: Got you.

Jeff: You can sing it in your head where you’re resting or you can just let the time go by. It’s just to get into the habit of not feeling like you need to be getting every single note right. Because in fact, the time and keeping the time going is more important than nailing every single note.

Christopher: Right. The beat moves on with or without you.

Jeff: Exactly. Yeah. Well said. Another thing that is really effective when it comes to sight reading is chunking information. This concept of chunking is pretty popular in how to learn. It’s the concept of taking little bits of information and combining them into larger chunks so that your brain has a little bit more free space to process things. For instance, if you have a G, a B, a D and an F in succession, rather than seeing four different notes, four different pieces of information, you can say, “Okay. Look, it’s G-B-D-F. That’s a G7 arpeggio.” Suddenly your brain is able to chunk four pieces of information into one and that’s just going to free up your mind space to look at the next phrase.

What I do oftentimes is if I’m handed a new piece of sheet music is I’ll just take a look through. If I can find any patterns right off the bat, any sort of arpeggios or scales, maybe I’ll circle them just to kind of remind myself, “Okay. This here is an arpeggio for this chord or this here is a scale.” This is where knowing theory can be really helpful because the more scales you can recognize, like if you see oh, it’s a pentatonic scale or oh, it’s an augmented scale or a diminished scale, like if you can put those labels on it, that’s going to really help you organize the information in a way where it’s chunked together and it’s not just going to be a million notes on the page.

Last but not least, just practicing like anything else. You have to be familiar with just like those arpeggios that I was talking about. Rhythms. You see the same rhythms come up again and again. The more you practice sight reading, the more you’re going to recognize those rhythms. It does take time. It’s difficult, but I hope that those tips are helpful in some way.

Christopher: Yeah, fantastic.

Jeff: They are for me at least. They did help me.

Christopher: Fantastic advice on sight reading. You mentioned practicing. I’d love if we may to wrap up by talking again about practicing and in particular, you have a piece of advice in an article on your blog about how to practice effectively that I just thought was so important for people to factor in. I wonder if you could share with us what is the secret to practicing effectively?

Jeff: One of the best ways to approach practicing is to think of it like … I like to think of a balance beam. You have a gymnast on a balance beam. If they fall off the balance beam, everyone knows. It’s very, very clear. Where am I going with this? Well, I like to create exercises for myself and for my students where it’s very, very clear when they fall off the balance beam. The reason for that is I want them to know when they’ve made a mistake.

Instead of falling into the trap of just kind of noodling around, sort of aimlessly playing, maybe they’re working on an exercise, but then they kind of get distracted and they start going onto something else, if you have focus to the point where you’re able to realize when your attention has wandered or to go back to my balance beam analogy, to the point where you fall off the balance beam.

Focus is the most important thing, right? If you lose focus on an exercise that you’re working on, you’re not going to be making the most out of your time. One thing you can do to improve focus is thinking about practicing like meditation where basically with meditation in a nutshell, you are focusing on your breath. As soon as you realize your focus wonders away from your breath, you bring your focus back to your breath. It’s as simple as that. It’s like you realize you’re not thinking about what you’re supposed to be thinking about, so you bring your attention back to where you’re supposed to be thinking.

It doesn’t have to be anything more complicated than that. You don’t have to bring emotion into it. You don’t have to like beat yourself up over the fact that you started thinking about what you want for lunch later in the day. It’s just, “Okay. I got distracted. Now I’m coming back.” But if you don’t realize that you got distracted, you’re never going to be able to bring yourself back. That’s why the practice of meditation is actually really useful for practicing music. Because if you’re able to become aware of the fact that you’re thinking about lunch, then you can stop thinking about lunch and start thinking about your exercise that you’re supposed to be working on.

Now what I was talking before about the exercises and the balance beam and all that, I’m trying to think of an example here. Let’s say you’re doing something with a metronome. You’re practicing something with the metronome. You have the metronome on beats two and four. It’s like one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. You’re working on this time exercise let’s say. It’s kind of tricky. Sometimes you might mess up and now the metronome suddenly shifted to beats one and three. You flip the beat in your head so now it’s one, two, three, four.
What happens is the metronome let’s you know, “Oh, I’ve done something. I flipped the beat. I’ve fallen off the balance beam. Now I could get back on it and practice this exercise and try to do it correctly next time.” If you don’t have that awareness of the fact that you have either made a mistake or your mind has wondered off, then you’re basically wasting a lot of time. It’s basically like spinning your wheels. To wrap that up, stay focused on what you’re working on. Be aware of whether or not you’re focused or not. If you realized that you’ve lost focus, no big deal.

Just bring your focus back to what you’re supposed to be working on and get on with practicing. That’s all there is to it there.

Christopher: Awesome advice. That is something that can make such a transformational difference in the results people get I think. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are in the situation, I have been myself, where you set aside the time for music practice, but if you really stopped and looked at how you are spending that time, it’s more like just playing around than practicing. I think you’re absolutely right that focus is such a critical part of that and setting yourself up in a way that you can really answer the question, was I focused or not?

Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Christopher: I’m sure for anyone listening it’s clear at this point how much wisdom and insight is packed into Jeff’s head and how generous he is with it. I wanted to point you to something in particular on his website that you must go check out. Jeff, could you tell us what are Musical Truth Nuggets?

Jeff: Well, Musical Truth Nuggets are just a fun name for basically my newsletter in which I include some videos that I’ve made, blog posts that I’ve written. It’s just an easy way to get notified when I come out with new material and new teaching so that it gets delivered directly to your inbox and you don’t have to worry about searching it out. That can be found on my website. There’s a sign up form right on the homepage of jeffschneidermusic.com. Those are the weekly Musical Truth Nuggets that I try share with people.

Christopher: Nice. Well, it’s more than just myself on the team who has been enjoying those Musical Truth Nuggets for a while now. I would definitely recommend going to jeffschneidermusic.com and signing up. Could you give people an idea of what else they’ll find on your website and your YouTube channel?

Jeff: Yeah. My YouTube channel, I talk a lot about the stuff that we talked about today. Fortunately, I’m able to edit myself a bit more so I don’t come off as long-winded. The YouTube videos, as I said, cover a lot of different musical concepts and topics. I try to get involved with different visual representations of those concepts and topics so it can be very clear and easy to understand. Also on my website I have some courses, some guides that supplement and support the YouTube videos. For instance, I have this chord scale chart.

I call it “The Last Chord Scale Chart You’ll Ever Need” because it has everything, and its laid out in such a way where it’s super easy to understand. It’s the kind of thing that I wish that I had when I was learning different scales and modes and arpeggios and all that kind of stuff. I have some piano voicing that I call “Sick Voicings Volume One.” Volume two is coming out soon. In that I include really hip voicings for piano that are amazing for jazz and for gospel and neo-soul and R&B. Again those are laid out in such a way that’s kind of unique. It will help you when it comes to composing and reharmonizing. It’s all the voicings that I love to use in my own playing.

Christopher: Fantastic. I hope Jeff is going to forgive me for saying something rude, which is that these courses on his website are massively under priced for the value you get.

Jeff: They probably are.

Christopher: If you’re imagining spending a ton of money here, do check out his website. See if any of those courses appeal and then pick up a few because they are going to give you more Musical Truth Nuggets and more insights and wisdom like Jeff’s been kind enough to share today. All that remains is to say a big thank you, Jeff. That’s been such a pleasure talking through these topics with you, and I really encourage everyone to check out your website, your YouTube channel, and learn more.

Jeff: Thank you so much, Christopher. It’s been a pleasure talking with you as well.

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The post Focusing on What Matters, with Jeff Schneider appeared first on Musical U.

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Links and Resources

• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part One
• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part Two
• Adam Liette’s performance at the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series
• About Listening as the Route to Musicality
• About the Importance of Joy and Pleasure
• About Exploring Without Self-Judgement
• About You Being Musical Inside Already
• About Keeping It Simple

Transcript

Christopher: Hello, and welcome to the Musicality Podcast. My name’s Christopher Sutton, I am the founder and director of Musical U and this is one in a series of episodes we’re doing, following up on our Episode 100 celebration, where we asked 26 of our past podcasts guests a particular question: what’s one thing you’ve learned that could help people tap in to their inner musicality.

The answers we got back were fantastic and inspiring and everyone on the team here really enjoyed hearing the variety of ideas and suggestions that came out in those episodes.

We decided we’d love to do some follow up episodes on the common themes because, although each guest’s answer was different and unique, there were definitely a few things that kept coming up.

Today, I’m very happy to be joined by, pretty much, the full Musical U team, in fact. We’re missing Sara Campbell and our other Resident Pros unfortunately, but we do have Stewart Hilton, Adam Liette, Andrew Bishko and Anastasia Voitinskaia and I’ll ask each of them to say a quick hello so you know who you’ll be listening to.

Stewart, why don’t you kick us off.

Stewart: Hello, I’m Stewart Hilton, the community conductor at Musical U. You’ve probably seen me in emails and on the members website quite a bit. My name pops up all over the place. [inaudible 00:13:26] Outside Musical U, I play guitar in a few different groups, play golf, just have a good time with my wife, and dogs.

Adam: Hi, my name is Adam Liette. I’m the communications manager here at Musical U. I am a trumpet player and a guitar player.

Andrew: I’m Andrew Bishko. I am the project manager and content manager of the Musical U. I play several instruments. My current, most active project is playing accordion in a mariachi band with my wife.

Anastasia: Hi, my name is Anastasia Voitinskaia. My last name is very difficult to pronounce so don’t even try. I am the assistant content editor at Musical U. In my personal life, I play the piano, guitar, bass, synthesizer and, occasionally, sing.

Christopher: Rarely at the same time, I presume.

Anastasia: Always at the same time.

Christopher: That’s who we’ve got joining us today. We’re just gonna talk through this topic and what jumps out at each of us in thinking about the message in the music and inspiring your listener to feel something.

Depending on how you look at it, this is either a niche topic or something that really is fundamental and universal in music.

I’m excited to hear everyone’s different perspective on it.

This is something that Judy Rodman mentioned in her answer, talking about how all art, including musical expression, is about creating messages.

Andy Wasserman talked about the internal treasure hunt for musical gold and looking for your own, individual, unique sound.

We had Bill Hilton, David Wellerman and Forest Kinney all talking about exploring, improvisation and creating and finding your own message or finding something you want to express through your instrument.

Fiona Jane Weston, a cabaret expert, talks specifically about interpreting a song, and how to take a piece that you’re working on and really ask yourself, line by line, what is the message, what is the emotion, what am I trying to convey to my audience.

Stewart, why don’t you start us off. How have you thought about this topic of finding the message in the music and inspiring your listener to feel something?

Stewart: Well, I have kind of a good history on this, or a good bit of history. In the 90s I joined a Christian metal group because of the fact of wanting to have a message in the music. That’s kind of always stayed with me since that time. I guess I started seeing it in the 80s and how lyrics and other things would influence an audience in their life and decisions and all that. It kind of brought me full circle in to what I did through the 80s and even further. There was always something in the lyrics that always stood out to me, to make sure that you’re doing something that puts people on a good path versus a bad path or so and so.

I’ve always felt it’s had a great power. I’ve seen it even watching other places, reading history. You read about elections, there’s always music being played before a candidate gets up because they’re trying to create an emotion and get people riled up. It’s happened through even Hitler, the dictator, I forget what composer it was, but the music kind of was, I guess, kind of crazy like, maybe like a metal band, I don’t know. They said it would rile the crowd up and that’s when he would hit the stage, as soon as they were at this peak, he would come out and deliver that emotional diatribe that he wanted to say.

It’s meant a lot. I even got us to go and play music, the one group I played in, we played at a homeless shelter. I have to say, out of all the places that I have ever played, playing there probably meant the most to me than anywhere else I’ve ever played doing music. You see people at their life’s worst moment, they’re kind of at the bottom, they’re trying to build up again, they’ve lost everything. You see these guys coming in with their head down and everything like that and you would play five or six songs and you could see as we’re getting into it, they start smiling, they kind of take a break from what’s going on in life. It was really good, I enjoyed going out and talking to them a little bit. They were so thankful of just getting that break from that current situation.

It means quite a bit to me. Also, I was just thinking, we interviewed Dave Cousins. I was remembering how he talked about some of the music that they’ve done had affect on people. He discussed some woman who was going through … she was in the hospital, had 11 electroshock therapy sessions, I’m not sure exactly what for. This woman searched him out because she had been playing their music to get her through all of the sessions. That’s pretty cool. Then they went on to also talk about weddings, and you hear that a lot. It’s always neat to think you are a song that’s being played at weddings all the time. It’s kind of cool the effect and how that can influence people.

Christopher: For sure and I think there’s two sides to this topic in a way. There’s the explicit message of music and I really enjoyed interviewing Fiona J Weston because she was very much about that caberet design and lyrical interpretation and so on. I think when you have a song with lyrics, it can be fairly clear cut, this song is about falling in love, this song is about [inaudible 00:24:46], not saying that all songs are. I think it’s really interesting with this topic to think about it from both sides.

There’s the clear message in a song with lyrics and what does it mean to take music without lyrics, maybe music you’re improvising and try to find some way to communicate a message to your audience.

Anastasia, you’re someone who writes your own music as well as performing on instruments and singing, what’s your perspective on this, find a message in the music?

Anastasia: Well, when you’re writing your own music, typically what I write, at least … and I know a lot of previous podcasts guests have echoed this is, what I write is deeply dependent on how I’m feeling. It’s quite easy to communicate whatever emotion you’re feeling behind the song into the music itself.

Also, I wanted to add something in terms of playing other people’s music too and finding the message within that. I think Christopher it was you that brought up an interesting point about a piece that you were playing that was about a painting and you’re playing it and playing it but it had never occurred to you to just go and look at the painting. I found that really brilliant and that really echoed with me because I think that, even for music that’s not yours, you can either construct your own narrative or imagine, perhaps, what the piece was about. Or you can do a little bit of your own research and find out what exactly was in the songwriter or the composer’s head when they wrote the piece and you can go from there. It gives you a lot of good ideas.

My piano teacher used to do that with me. For example, I was playing a piece called Puck one time and she said, “Okay, it’s based off of this Shakespeare character. He’s kind of playful and mischievous so play like that.” I was like, “Okay, brilliant, that’s great, that’s so helpful.” Now I know the feeling that the song should have. I think you can do that for pretty much anything that you play, whether you write it yourself or not.

Christopher: Yeah, and it can be a good creative exercise. If you had chosen to try and play that piece as if it was all about hockey puck, you might have come up with a slightly different rendition.

Anastasia: Totally.

Christopher: We talk about it in our improv stuff where the idea you have in your head can express itself through various technique. What do you think on that Andrew, as a prolific improvisor?

Andrew: Well, what I wanted to point out is that there’s meaning in a vibration and Puck is a vibration. I had some friends, they named their child Puck. It was a big mistake, big mistake.

Anastasia: Oh no. Oh no.

Andrew: He’s lived up to his name and not a very good way.

Christopher: Well, a useful reminder there that we do need to be careful as Stewart’s pointing out that we do need to be mindful of the message we might be communicating intentionally or inadvertently. Aside from that Andrew, what are your thoughts on this topic as a teacher, as a performer, you must have had to think a lot about this question of finding the message in the music.

Andrew: Well, music is dynamic. It happens in the moment. When you make music, when you play a note, you can’t take it back. You can’t go retract it, you can’t erase it. It’s there and it’s done and you’re moving on. Every moment, there’s an opportunity to put meaning in to your music. One of the wonderful privileges and opportunities I’ve had is to be a teacher. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about things that I do where I can understand and explain them.

I had an experience, I was teaching, I was coaching a middle school band. They had this thing where they had three repeated notes, ba ba ba. I said, “Now, are those the same notes?” I explained to them that each one of those notes, they might have been the same pitch, but each one was different, it was a new moment in time. It was a new interaction, it was driving forward, you were moving forward into something. Ba. Ba! Ba!! It wasn’t just ba ba ba.

Every opportunity [inaudible 00:29:27] something into your music, to be present. I’m going to demonstrate. I have my native American flute. I’m going to play three notes. Okay, three notes. I can play them just bland or I can put some meaning into them. I didn’t change the rhythm. I didn’t change the pitches but by using dynamics, articulation, [inaudible 00:30:03] what have you, I don’t know if you could hear it, but for me, it was a huge difference. We have these opportunities to put meaning into our music every time.

You know, we talk about music, we’re on this, we have 100 plus episodes of the Musicality podcast. We have thousands of articles talking about music. We talk and talk and talk about music but we’re still making music. You can’t replace music with talking. There’s something in music, there’s something there that says things that we can’t say any other way. For me, the important thing is to be there, to be present.

A lot of times, we want the music to flow out of us, like it’s going to be this big, bubbling fountain and sometimes that happens. But many times, just as when we’re speaking, we’re aware of what just happened, what was just said. We’re aware of where the conversation is going to. When we make music, having this awareness: where was I, where am I, and where am I going, this interplay while you’re thinking about the music, it’s so pleasurable to be there. It feels so good, it’s so much fun and you’re audience is going to connect with that because you’re connecting with that.

Christopher: That was a beautiful demonstration and I always love the way you talk about improvisation and creativity in musical expression. We work together on our improv modules and learning improv road map and I had been reaching for this way of explaining improvisation that was about this, about finding a message, about finding a way to express yourself. I had struggled a bit because I’m a scientist, an engineer by background. To me, on the face of it, this idea was always a little bit, woo woo, it sounded a bit pretentious. It’s a bit like I feel about modern art where, okay I can understand people enjoy it, but until you can do a double blind test where everyone agrees the same thing about a piece of art, I’m not convinced it’s actually communicated what people say it does.

As I was touching on before, when there are lyrics or something, it’s clear cut and there can be an obvious message. When it’s instrumental music, I’ve always found it hard to go beyond the specifics. What I loved about your work on that improv road map was you combined the specifics, which in our case we talk about constraints and dimensions, things like rhythm and articulation and phrasing and dynamics, with this really deep idea about expressing something and about being in the moment and about finding something you are trying to use all of those specifics for. That to me was really nice to bring those two worlds together. That has stayed with me as a really useful step forwards in my own thinking about what it means to communicate a message in music.

Andrew: Thank you very much. It doesn’t just apply to improvisation. I have a lot of classical training and when we’re doing classical music, we played the same piece over and over and over and over and over again. If we’re doing it right, each time it’s different. Each time, we are discovering something new, another nuance, another articulation, another this, another that. You carry that forward into all your music making, it just makes it so much more meaningful.

Christopher: Nice.

Adam, we haven’t heard from you yet. You have, I think it’s fair to say, quite a different musical career than the rest of us on the team. You’ve had a very specific position in the U.S. military. Can you tell us a bit about that and what it’s meant to you to try to communicate a message with your music.

Adam: Absolutely. When I first graduated university, I joined the Unites States army, the band specifically. I arrived in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the 82nd Airborne, and I was assigned as the Division Bugler. At this time, this was 2007, the war was at its peak. We had a lot of casualties from the 82nd. The entire division, all 20,000 were deployed at the time between Iraq and Afghanistan. It was my job to play Taps at military funerals. I did this all across the country, over about 18 months, I played right around 600 funerals for both active duty and retirees. That experience and what I had to put in those performances, it stayed with me for a very long time.

At its core, Taps, it’s a very easy piece of music. It’s only 21 notes over four different pitches, a Concert B flat, major scale, second inversion. Each note that you play has so much meaning. I believe it’s one of the most heartfelt pieces of music in the entire literature. It’s very different from, when we typically think of music motivating people and bringing joy to people, this simply powerful piece of music is sending someone’s loved one off. It’s the final goodbye from a grateful nation to this service member that died in the line of duty.

Some things that really I had done as a performer really embraced was the performance environment. It wasn’t a hall. There was no acoustics. We were playing in open cemeteries. I always positioned myself behind the family. They could never see me and that was the purpose. We should never be seen, just be the sound in the background. You really had to play with the acoustics of this very open field and get a feel for it, for what your sound was gonna do. The tone had to be just incredibly warm. You couldn’t have that typically bright tone of the trumpet, you had to just think of the warmest sound you could possibly do. There’s nothing biological that changes that. It’s entirely in your presence, in the moment, and how you’re pushing yourself through the instrument and expressing the sorrow of that moment, all the way down to just the way you’re releasing the note.

A lot of instruments, the note stop has a definitive starting point and ending point. When you’re playing Taps, you almost have to let each individual note kind of have its own fall off. Very difficult to master but it was truly one of the most, as I look back on my career, one of the most things I am most proud of is playing for so many funerals. I actually played a couple great, awesome public events, and we can link to one of them in the show notes, I played in front of, I think there were 5 million televised. It was a NASCAR race. That did make its way on to YouTube. I can share that one. I wouldn’t share any of these very, very private moments with anyone.

That has always stuck with me, just that moment in those cemeteries.

Christopher: Wow. Thanks for sharing that experience. It’s moving to even hear about. I think it’s such a powerful encapsulation of what we’ve been talking about. There is something ineffable about music. You can talk about the message and the meaning of lyrics and the very obvious theme of a song but you can also talk about the message and are you communicating an emotion that might be quite complex and quite sophisticated and quite dramatic even to your audience. That’s not something that’s easy to put into words. On this podcast, we talk about musical expression and some of the things you can do to feel free and creative and confident in music. There’s still a bit of a gap there between knowing those skills and being able to stand up with your instrument and convey what you want to convey.

I think it’s a really interesting case also because it’s not improvisational. You have a lot of freedom of expression in how you perform that piece. There is so much that you can put into it that is not about, oh, what will I play next. I think that’s a really useful example of listeners to think about. Whether it’s a single note or a few notes like Andrew was talking about, or it’s something purely improvisational, like some of our guests, Bill Hilton and David Wellman were talking about or Forest Kinney. Or it’s something that you know their composer had an intended meaning with, like Stewart talking about Christian music and Anastasia with her own music. I think we can’t afford to forget that there is a message or there should be. That desire to get away from robotic playing and playing mindlessly, that’s really the heart of what this podcast is all about.

I hope some of the discussion here has been interesting and provoked some new ideas for everyone listening. I think it’s something we can apply each and every day in our musical life and the exact way it comes across in your practice and your playing is gonna be different for every person. It’s something we should all, I think, have taped to our practice stand. What am I trying to get across here, not least in a performance situation, where your audience, it’s not just you and the cat.

Any final thoughts before we wrap things up on this topic?

Anastasia: I have one to share, actually. Something that Andrew said that reminded me of something that I’ve kind of always kept in the back of my mind. Especially when performing and also when writing, which is the simple fact that music will often mimic speech, whether it’s lyrical or instrumental.

Again, these things like phrasing and inflection and dynamics, these can be expressed on pretty much any instrument. If you just think about things like breathing patterns and the start of a new sentence or a new idea, I think it can bring a lot to your music. Or at the very, very, very least, prevent you from playing kind of rigidly and robotically. That’s what’s always helped me both in song writing and in playing other people’s music. Just thinking in terms of maybe words and the note being the most basic unit and what is a phrase, what is a bar? So, that’s helped me a lot for sure.

Christopher: Nice. Yeah, that’s a really great point. I think we talked a little bit about some of that in a previous episode on playing like singing, I think we called it. Why don’t we wrap up then with a few suggestions for people. That’s one really great thing people can do to experiment with expressing something through their playing.
We touched on another earlier, which is having a particular theme or character or emotion in your mind. Anastasia, you had the example of Puck, where it’s a very particularly Shakespearean character and personality and you can adopt that persona, as it were. Or like you referencing that example with Mussorgsky’s exhibition where there’s a vivid image of a castle. An image in your head can totally transform your playing.

I think you do need to equip yourself with some, what we call dimensions at Musical U, some idea of what you can do to explore. With the singing voice, it kind of comes instinctively to us to a large extent, to convey emotion. If you’re sitting down at the piano keyboard or putting a trumpet to your lips, it’s bit trickier. I don’t know, Stewart, Adam, Andrew, you all play different instruments, maybe you could share a bit about how you’ve explored ways you can express the message.

Adam, you there?

Adam: I remember when I was first learning jazz and I had this Charlie Parker [inaudible 00:42:56] book and I was trying to play Charlie Parker on the trumpet, which is just a horrible idea, it’s terribly difficult. I couldn’t quite get it right and then I had this wonderful professor, he’s like “You just gotta sing it, man! You’ve just gotta sing it. That’s how Charlie Parker did it, that’s how it named it Bebop.”

I’m like, “What?”

He’s like, “Yeah, baabebaabedop bebop bebop bebop.”

I was like, “Oh.” Literally the name Bebop came from their vocalization of their melodies. I still am not a jazz guy but I could conceptualize music a little better after that. This is an interesting point. Even Charlie Parker, one of the greats, his entire style was developed through vocalization, his melodies.

Christopher: Nice. That’s so interesting isn’t it, how that kind of bridges the gap between the two things we’ve been talking about. That’s the very explicit, singing words, and there’s this more ineffable instrumental thing. You can still use your voice to kind of connect those dots and use your instinct for how to express things on your instrument, that’s great.

How about you Stewart, on guitar, how do you think about this, if you want to convey a certain emotion?

Stewart: I hadn’t thought about it like that but I mean it’s very much right. I go through a lot of, with one band I’m in, we sometimes will take an old song, because we aren’t writing originals yet, even though we would love to start getting back into that. Using different things like, maybe I’ll strum your normal first area chords but then maybe that’s not right, maybe you want to finger pick it. Or maybe you want to do an inversion up the neck. There’s also things like, a couple times I’ve actually pulled out a slide because it just seemed like, “Oh, a slide would work much better here to create an emotion.”

Then of course, there is the lovely word, distortion, to add to things and different effects, the delay, reverb. There’s a lot of different little things but it still has to have that underlining thing. I got to see an interview with Les Paul in person once. He made a good statement. He said he’d been with, I forget who it was, but he guy had … oh, I think it was Al [inaudible 00:45:10], he’s a phenomenal player, but I’ll play him this one thing and Les Paul said he had so many effects on it, then he told Al, “Take all the effects off your guitar right now.” Al did. He goes, “Now play the same thing.” Al looked at him and goes, “That isn’t really that great.” Les Paul’s thing was start off with a great idea, then add the effects to it. Then it’ll just bring it out even more. It’s kind of a neat way of kind of looking at that, building on to those emotions.

Christopher: For sure. I was a bit concerned when you started going down that effects street because of the road often leads guitarists down, that I think you’ve hit on the key thing, which is if you start with a message or start with something that’s fundamentally musically meaningful, those can really help you shape it the way you want to shape it. That is, I think, how they should be used.

Stewart: Yeah.

Christopher: How about yourself Andrew?

Andrew: One thing, I began as a melody player and so when I’d gone to pull a [inaudible 00:46:26] instruments or accompaniment roles on the accordion or keyboard, there’s so much you can do to interact, rather than just being robot playing a groove. Where you are listening to the melody, you’re adding dynamics. You don’t have to change the notes or the rhythm of what you’re playing, although sometimes that happens. We have a recording of an older mariachi band and they’re not really that great in terms of high artistry and all that stuff but their rhythm section breathes with the melody. Having that idea that they come in and they come out and they breathe with the melody and it’s so beautiful to listen to.

I’ve added that to my rhythm in my accompaniment playing. Have always the sense that you’re always playing a melody. You’re always moving with that stream, whether you’re playing rhythm, where you’re hitting a drum, or whatever. I think that adds so much to the musicality [inaudible 00:47:37] it also adds so much to your interactivity and ability to play together and listen to other people.

Christopher: Nice. I think you’ve touched on a topic there that we will have to save for another day, which is how do you approach all of this when you’re collaborating, when it’s not just you sitting with your instrument. I think that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

I think there’s plenty there for people to take away and start playing in their own musical lives. I’ll just wrap things up with a simple kind of call to action. If nothing else, just be asking yourself this day by day. I think that’s what came across in the Episode 100 roundup, the guests you mentioned this and touched on this that it should just be a core part of how you think about music. What is the message I’m trying to convey, what am I trying to have my listener experience.

On that note, I will wrap things up. Thank you very much Stewart, Adam, Andrew and Anastasia for joining me on this one. Thanks to everyone for listening and we will see you on the next one!

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The post About the Message in the Music appeared first on Musical U.

The harmonica is, by nature, a very expressive instrument – with hundreds of possible techniques at your disposal, you can make the harmonica sound shrill, bright, warm, melancholy, tense, jubilant, or anything in between. In fact, it’s even possible to “speak” through your harmonica, by enunciating syllables at the start of a musical phrase.

But before you can put all the possible techniques to use to create your sound, you need to have an ear that can recognize these techniques, hear how they’re used together, where they sound good, and how to incorporate them into your playing in a way that is deliberate and musical.

So let’s talk listening skills – and how they are the key for any harmonica player to develop the sound they desire. By understanding what your favorite harmonica players do, you can use their style as a starting point for developing your own style, incorporating the best aspects of your heroes.

What makes a harmonica player’s sound unique?

If you are like most people, you most likely think of sound as a product of the equipment a specific harmonica player is using – I find that this view is especially common among beginner harmonica players.

Although equipment does play a role in shaping your sound, it’s far less important than you might think. Don’t get me wrong – harmonicas, amps, and microphones in different combinations all contribute to the final sound, but unless the initial acoustic sound is good, you will only amplify bad sound. Also, don’t you want to sound good in a purely acoustic setup?

So what’s the key ingredient that really shapes the sound of the harmonica?

It’s really all about the harmonica player’s unique style – how they use note presentation, phrasing, rhythm, embouchure, and structure to build up a song. And these skills are equally useful for both amplified and acoustic playing.

Unfocused Development vs. Focused Development

As you develop as a harmonica player, you will be continuously listening to harmonica players you admire. By doing so, you are subconsciously internalizing what they are doing, and some of it will make it into your own playing style and harmonica sound. I call this unfocused development. The drawback of this approach is that you will have no control over what you incorporate, or if it is technically correct.

Shifting your approach from unfocused to focused development, and learning to control your sound, starts with ear training.

Ear training is the perfect tool to sharpen your listening skills so that you can distinguish between the different sounds you hear and break down how they are produced. By doing this, you can actively choose what you incorporate, and even tweak to fit the sound you want. The first level is to really hear the different sounds and nuances, the second step is to understand how the sounds are produced and the final step is to be able to produce the sound and compare it to the original. You cannot play what you cannot hear – it is as simple as that.

What To Listen For

Now that we know the “what” of listening to harmonica playing, let’s look at the “how”.

Earlier, I mentioned a number of musical building blocks that make up the sound of a harmonica player: embouchure, phrasing, rhythm, and so on. To really go deep with your active listening and ear training, you need to listen to a lot of songs by the player you are analyzing and make notes on what you hear.

A great way of doing this is to use a worksheet that makes it easy to take these notes, where you list out the techniques being employed. What you need to note is if a technique or building block is used “always”, “sometimes”, or “never” – but you might also notice some nuances to make a note of. The worksheet can also be downloaded as a free PDF.

To get you started, here are some building blocks you should listen for, and some factors to think about and note down in your worksheet. As you advance, you’ll notice more of your own and your ear will learn to tell the difference!

Embouchure

Most great harmonica players use the tongue blocking embouchure most of the time. It may be interesting to notice if and when the player switches to puckering instead. If the player mostly uses puckering, then how are chords incorporated?

Note Presentation

Clean notes are single notes played without any air being blown into the adjacent holes, creating a monophonic, “clean” sound. In contrast, dirty notes are a main note played with a smaller amount of the adjacent holes played simultaneously. Learn to hear the difference between the two, and the feeling that each lends to the music being played.

Chords, meanwhile, are a set of three notes (or more!) sounded at the same time. Remember that there is a fine line between a chord where holes 2, 3, and 4 are played simultaneously, and a dirty note where hole 3 is the major note being played with some degree of holes 2 and 4 played as well.

Octave splits describes two notes that are three holes apart being played simultaneously to form an octave, for example holes 5 and 8. If the harmonica is very well in tune you really have to listen deeply to spot that it is an octave split and not just one hole played stronger.

Fake splits, meanwhile, are splits that are not true octaves. For example, holes 2 and 5 played simultaneously is a minor seventh.

Musical Effects

Flutter is a technique where the tongue lets part of the chord sound below the note being played.

Tongue slap describes a technique where the full chord is played very briefly before being shut off by the tongue so that only the melody note is played.

Pull slap, similar to a tongue slap, describes a technique where all notes are first blocked before a very sharp tongue slap is performed.

Articulations are notes or chords started by articulating syllables such as “ka”, “ha”, “do”, “yah” or similar.

Tremolo lends a “trembling” effect to the music. On the harmonica, it can be done by either by the throat or by the hand.

Vibrato, or the alteration of pitch by pulses, can be done by gut, throat, or hand.

Phrasing

Musical phrasing is the art of grouping notes in different ways to add interest to the music you’re playing. It’s often inexact and highly instinctive, making it a big part of what makes your harmonica playing sound expressive.

When listening to the music, note the short phrases, long phrases, and everything in between. On which beat is a phrase started? Is it always on beat one?

Rhythm

Take notice of whether there is a steady rhythm, or if the notes dance around the beat. Are notes played on the beat? Or are they swinging? Are chords used to create a rhythm with the melody?

Tension

Tension and release play a big role in music – and there’s various ways that harmonica players achieve this. Picking out the individual notes that create this tension is a more advanced skill that will come with time – but as you hear more and more chords and scales, it will slowly become second nature.

Chord tones are the notes present within certain chords, used in conjunction with chords to create this tension. Take note of how chord tones are used in harmonica playing.

Scale tones, similarly, are the notes present in a specific scale, which all have a distinctive relationship to the tonic. Take note of how these scale tones are used for tension and resolution.

Blue notes are notes played at a non-standard pitch, usually pitched a semitone or a quartertone off the usual pitch. This gives them their “worried” feel.

Structure and Repetition

Phrases are put together in sequences to create passages of music. Listen for how phrases are repeated. Common patterns are AAA, AAB, and ABAC.

Backup Playing vs. Solos and Fills

Is the harmonica playing during vocal phrases? How is that done? Are fills (riffs between vocal phrases) used?

Analyzing the Greats

Let’s look at some famous harmonica players’ styles. Keep the techniques discussed above in mind, and listen carefully for their appearance.

Sonny Terry

Sonny’s characteristic, expressive playing uses a myriad of techniques. Here are some that you’ll encounter in “Whoopin’ the Blues”:

• A lot of rhythmic phrases with whoopin vocalizations
• Often uses partial chords and dirty notes
• Often use 3-hole splits (actually a partial chord)
• Never uses octave splits
• Uses many hand effects

Sonny Boy Williamson II

Listen to “Eyesight to the Blind” and take note of Sonny Boy’s style:

• Tongue block player
• Squeezes the tone to make a sharper, thinner tone than usually associated with tongue blocking
• Often uses pull slapping in triplet phrases

Little Walter

“My Babe” showcases the player’s technique at its finest:

• Tongue block player
• Start phrases on beat 2 more often than most players
• Plays repetitively and rhythmically as backing under vocal phrases combined with fills between vocal phrases

Developing Your Harmonica Sound

To develop your harmonica sound you must first understand what it is that you like – is it rhythmic playing, long phrases, fast tongue slap phrases, or something else? When you know what you like, you can start developing that technique yourself and incorporating it into your playing.

Here’s how:

1. Break the technique down into its components, so that you understand how to perform it.
2. Form an ideal sound in your head of how the technique should sound.
3. Play the technique, and compare it to the sound you have imagined. When repeated over time, you will be able to perform the technique better and better.
4. When you can perform the technique in isolation, put into context. That is, use it in a song or phrase you know well, and experiment with how you use it.

All of these steps are, of course, then done for each of the techniques you have identified to be included in your sound. Start with one or two, and let them sink into your playing. Try to overuse them in the beginning, until they are a part of what you normally do.

Sharpening Your Listening Skills

The bottom line: In order to understand, replicate, and build on what you hear your favorite players do, you need good listening skills. What I described above for learning new techniques is a good way of building your mental model of the harmonica while you start understanding how different techniques sound. 

In particular, ear training for recognizing intervals is very valuable. It will help you understand the layout of the harmonica and the sound you can expect to hear with various hole combinations. It makes it easier for you to make the connection between the sound of a root note and any note above or below. And best of all, it’ll get you on the fast track to learning your favourite songs, improvising, and even composing your own music.

So get those ears in tune and make them work in your favor!

Fredrik Hertzberg is an engineering manager from the south of Sweden. Fredrik started playing blues harmonica in 1987 at the age of 14. Since 2014, Fredrik has been teaching blues harmonica online, in private lessons, group lessons and in workshops.

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