Author: musicalitywrld

It’s no coincidence that so many master musicians tell a story of coming from musical households – where a record was always spinning, a piano stood in the living room, and parents encouraged them to play, sing, and dance to music.

Through the right guidance, a love for music can be nurtured and will stay with kids for a lifetime. So how can you better surround your children with music and promote their natural enthusiasm for it? Let’s count the ways…

1. Actively Listen to Music Together

I don’t know about you, but any time a song comes on, I can’t help but sing along or move to it. Music stirs us down deep in our souls. When a child listens to music, it awakens feelings they’ve never experienced before – and this positive reaction is something that inspires them to listen to, learn, and play music.

Classical music is great starting point because it is truly a “universal language.” No matter what language a child speaks, where they live, or what their heritage is, every child can listen to the same piece of music and hear the same exact tones, harmonies, and instruments. Introduce kids to the music of the greats: Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin are a great place to start.

Going further, it’s a wonderful idea to open your child’s ears to a vast array of styles and genres of music. Listening to music from other cultures and traditions can start great discussions about the instruments, rhythms, and melodies they hear, and expose them to the different ways of approaching musicmaking.

Active listening is a fantastic activity to practice with your child. The Kodály Method and the Orff Approach are two music learning frameworks that emphasize active listening in music, and promote kinesthetic engagement with the music. In Kodály, students listen to a piece of music and count the rhythms they hear, while Orff encourages children to move to the beat and explore the ways their bodies can move. Try out both with your kids!

The Kodaly and Orff methods both teach folk songs.  One of my favorite folk songs to listen to, which is also a fun dance, is “Jump, Jim, Joe.”  It’s simple enough to listen to while following along to what the words say:

For music appreciation, one of my favorite listening activities is to listen to “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong, because it evokes a series of vivid images and accompanying emotions. Have your children listen to the song and draw and color what the music makes them feel. The pictures that they come up with will seriously impress you!

2. Read Musical Books

I love the Emilie Buchwald quote “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents”. Children love to read and to be read to. What better way to foster a love of music than by reading books about music to our kids?

When a child reads about the piano, for example, it may spark an excitement about the instrument. They might go from reading about it, to listening to a Beethoven sonata, to having a desire to learn to play the piano. “The Story of the Orchestra” by Robert Levine is a great book through which children can learn about different instruments of the orchestra.

The music your children are listening to can be supplemented with books about the composers. One of my favorite books is Barbara Nichol’s “Beethoven Lives Upstairs”, offering a unique and heartwarming perspective on the composer’s life, struggles, and successes

Music is highly kinesthetic – so encourage your kids to move to it! Get your hands on books that inspire the kids to move, like “Bumpus Rumpus Dinosaurumpus” by Tony Mitton. In this book, the dinosaurs are doing several things that involve action words like stomping, jumping, twirling, and dancing:

When you read these words, the kids will love to act out what you’ve just said.

“My First Classical Music Book” by Genevieve Helsby is a great book for introducing children to the wonderful world of Classical music. The author does a great job explaining what Classical music is all about, while breaking it down to a kids’ level.

There’s a plethora of great books available about instruments, composers, musical genres, musical artists, and basic music theory. Keep your eyes peeled for engaging and educational books that you and your child can explore together.

3. Talk About Music

Namely, your own relationship to music – what music did you listen to growing up? Kids love to learn what grown ups were like when they were kids. Anything adults listen to on the radio nowadays is considered an “oldie” – so make that introduction!

When that “oldie” comes on the radio, have a conversation about what big band, doo wop, Classical, or jazz are. Talk about the amazing artists and performers who performed these genres of music.

Talking about music is a simple and incredibly effective way to connect with your kids or students, allowing them to get to know you even better as a person. I remember hearing my dad tell me stories about learning to play the guitar and my mom telling me how she played saxophone in the high school marching band. As a high schooler who was playing piano and clarinet at the time, connecting over this shared experience was wonderful.

I remember my eyes lighting up the first time I went to The Nutcracker ballet. Watching the dancers moving around the stage and listening to the music made me realize what a live performance was really all about.

I’m sure you can close your eyes right now and remember similar experiences as a child. You were probably either taken to a concert, heard songs on the radio, or experienced watching your own parent play an instrument – and I’m guessing it was a very special, memorable moment! Your kids would love to share that same experience with you.

4. Explore Music Around You

Music is all around us. When you’re at a sports game, music is played over the loudspeakers.  When you’re watching a movie, the score and the soundtrack is what makes scenes come alive.  Even while walking a nature trail, the birds, wind, and leaves make music in the air.

When you’re out and about as a family, point out the ambient soundtrack of daily life to your kids – talk about background noises, elevator music in shopping malls, the soundtrack of that Disney movie you went to see together.

Are you an outdoorsy family? Explore music while camping! We’ve all been around a campfire, listening to the crickets and the crackle of the fire, and singing campfire songs. This experience of simultaneously singing and hearing nature’s soundtrack will truly stick with kids forever.

Kids may not even realize just how much music is a part of their daily lives. But, with each song they hear while they’re out and about, they experience an emotional reaction to the tune and a love for music continues to grow. Watch how many times you’re at home or outside and you catch yourself singing a song that’s stuck in your head. That, my friend, is the power of music.

5. Go To A Concert

Going to a live performance is one of the best ways children can truly experience music. Not only are they able to listen to music, but they are able to actively engage with it by watching the performers.

From traditional concerts like ballet, symphony, opera, and marching bands to contemporary options like modern dance performances, rock shows, and pop concerts, it’s easy to find a live performance that suits your family’s musical tastes.

Better yet, concerts serve as excellent motivation for kids learning instruments – there’s nothing like seeing a master musician show their incredible skill in person! If your child is in piano lessons, taking them to a concert of a professional pianist helps show them the rewards of practice and hard work – and of course, the excitement of being in the audience, giving a standing ovation, and practicing proper concert etiquette is also learned too.

6. Play Music Together

Maybe you’re musical yourself, and you love to sing or can play a musical instrument. Don’t be afraid to practice and perform with your children. Even if you’re a little rusty, they would love to share that experience of playing music with you.

Even if you aren’t musical at all, there are other ways you can play music together. Play music in your home on the radio or with Pandora or Spotify. Have a sing-along, make up some dance moves together, and perform a mini show for the rest of the family. Think of how many times you’re in the car together and can sing your favorite songs. Every time you do these things, you’re helping foster musical creativity in your child.

Think of the things you have laying around the house that can make music.  Put some popcorn kernels in an empty water bottle to make a shaker, tape two paper plates together and put coins in between them to make a tambourine, or even use a bucket as a drum. Then, while listening to music, you can explore different rhythms and steady beat. This is something I encourage music teachers to even do in their classrooms if they don’t have many instruments available to use.

A Musical Milieu

There is a lot going on in a child’s head – in particular, their curiosity about the world at large. Their interest in music is delightfully inherent, as what child doesn’t want to yell and sing and jump and dance? As parents, all you have to do is call their attention to the music present around them.

Besides helping hone your child’s musicality from a young age by filling their world with music as much as possible, it’s an excellent way to develop a bond with your child and develop another common language together – one that will strengthen over time as you continue to discover and explore music together.

Jessica Peresta is the blogger and podcaster at The Domestic Musician, providing teachers with the music education resources, lesson plans, teacher training, and community they’ve been looking for.

The post 6 Ways to Create A Musical Environment for Children appeared first on Musical U.

Elisa is the host of the Music Ed Mentor podcast, organiser of the International Music Education Summit and author of “The Music Educator’s Guide to Thrive”, and through these projects and more she is on a mission to help music teachers discover the non-musical skills that can empower them to succeed. As you’ll discover in this episode though, a lot of what Elisa has to share is just as applicable to the hobbyist or professional musician as it is a music teacher.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Elisa’s own musical upbringing and how she came to play a huge number of different instruments.
• The unique challenges of conducting an orchestra or band, and how you can actually learn to hear and follow dozens of different musical parts at once without needing to be born with some magical gift.
• The 8 aspects of wellness that you should be thinking about if you want to enjoy your musical life to its fullest

… And Elisa also shares how she came to not only take up playing the ukulele recently, but actually build one from scratch herself!

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Elisa Janson-Jones’ website
• International Music Education Summit
• The Music Ed Mentor podcast
• The Music Educator’s Guide to Thrive, by Elisa Janson-Jones
• The Miracle Morning, by Hal Elrod

Transcript

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

Elisa: Well, thanks for having me on.

Christopher: So I’m always curious when I talk to music teachers and particularly those who are, kind of, thought leaders and admired among music teachers such as yourself. I’m always curious to know, were you one of those kids that was just playing every instrument from the age of five and never needed to be taught a thing, or what did your own music education look like?

Elisa: Well, I have a mother who’s a vocalist and my dad was a band teacher for more than 40 years, a band and choir teacher. So it was always in my home. We were always hosting parties with the band students over because he was a collegiate band director for many years and of course my mother was into musical theater so I was singing from an extremely young age and of course music was just, it was just part of our life. It was what you did and when it came, but as far as structured lessons I didn’t really have anything until I got into our elementary band in the fifth or sixth grade. Yeah. That was the start of my instrumental career but, like I said, I’ve been a vocalist and a performer since, probably, three years old.

Christopher: Wow, great. And what were you playing in that band when you joined in fifth or sixth grade?

Elisa: You know, I wanted to play the flute because my older sister played the flute so my dad said, “What do you want to play?” and I said, “The flute,” and he said, “No. You can’t play the flute. Your older sister already plays the flute. You have to play something else,” and of course, I was, like, “I don’t — huh?” Right?

So he said to me, “Say, ‘Mary had a little lamb’,” so I said, “Mary had a little lamb.” I was like, ten years old, right? And he goes, “You know what? You look like you could have a good French horn embouchure. I’m going to start you on cornet for a year and then we’ll switch you to French horn,” and that’s what we did.

I played trumpet and cornet for a year which I was remarkably good at because I had done motorboats in the bathtub until I was four years old so the buzzing came easy for me and then, of course, I switched to French horn, which is the hardest instrument in the universe.

Christopher: Okay, that’s super interesting. I was listening to an episode of your podcast where u were talking with a guy, I think his name was Mr. D, all about sight singing, and he was noting that he as a horn player had pitch advantage in that you were used to pitching the notes mentally before u play them, and that would help with the vocal side of things. Where there any other things from the vocal world that helped you with the French horn, or vice versa?

Elisa: Yes, of course. The more, it really came into play more when I was in college and started sight-singing myself. That improved my French horn playing because once you learn how the interval should sound, how things should sound on the page then it’s much more easy.

The thing that’s challenging about French horn is the notes are so close together, okay? So for the layperson you have to have a really fine-tuned embouchure to be able to change the notes or to be able to hear the difference and so if you can kind of preemptively know what it’s supposed to sound like it makes it so much easier and it wasn’t until I took two full years of sight-singing in college that that really started to be solidified as part of my musical prowess.

Christopher: Interesting. Yeah. That’s something that comes up from time to time in Musical U when we’re talking about singing in tune, for sure, because the idea of taking aim at the note rather than just opening your mouth and then thinking about what note you’re trying to hit, that can go a really long way, right?

Elisa: Yeah. So, I don’t know how much the French horn playing helped my sight-singing but my sight-singing definitely helped improve my French horn playing.

Christopher: That’s great. And so you were playing cornet for a couple of years and then moved to French horn and was it horn all the way after that?

Elisa: It was. Through high school I did do choir in high school as well and then I, of course, knew from a very young age, probably, you know, about the time I picked up the French horn and got involved in band that I wanted to be a music teacher. It helped that my dad was a music teacher, too, but most people would point out, it’s going to go one way or the other. Either you see your parent as a music teacher and you think, “Yes. That’s what I want to do as a career,” or you think, “Why on earth would I want to do that as a career? That is insane. You don’t make any money, you guys.” You know? But, anyway, I digress.

So then when I got into university that’s when I started picking up other instruments. Of course, I did marching band, I played the mellophone, I did brass, like, a British brass ensemble, so I did, like, a euphonium, kind of, E flat alto horn, if anybody knows what that is. It’s a pretty rare instrument. So mainly it was brass until I got into college but I picked up the others extremely quickly, actually.

Christopher: Let’s talk a little bit about that, because I think a lot of our listeners probably play one instrument and I know that some of them will feel like they don’t even quite play one instrument yet, so maybe you could speak a bit to why that was easy and why you weren’t, just, you know, starting from scratch with each of those different instruments.

Elisa: Well, sure, I mean, brass instruments, it’s the same thing, like I said, about French horn. If you can, kind of, feel out and hear out where those partials are, where those notes should be then it’s quite easy. All of the wind instruments kind of, once you get the tonguing and the blowing down, then it’s just a matter of fingering and embouchure on all of them. If you spend , like, 80% of your time on technique then you’re going to be able to spend 20% of your time just playing and having so much fun and so it kind of comes down to that.

But there are some relationships that are very similar, so, for example, if you start on, like, the recorder, those fingerings are very similar to the flute, which are also very similar to the the saxophone, and if you can play the saxophone then clarinet’s actually pretty easy and vice versa because the top hand fingerings are the same. So once you’ve kind of developed those core skills, the tongue, the air, the fingers and the reading, of course, the note reading, then it all, just, kind of, falls into place. So it’s kind of the same thing with strings, too, because I, I did do extensive string study in college. My goal in college learning all these instruments was just to be the very best band and orchestra teacher I could and I knew that having those foundational skills was really, really vital. Do you want to know what was really hard for me?

Christopher: I do.

Elisa: Drum set.

Christopher: Interesting. I am learning drums at the moment and it is a very different thing.

Elisa: Yeah. Like, I can do a rock beat. I can sometimes do, like, a 3-4 rock beat, but, like, that hand-eye thing, nothing, I feel like nothing in music has come easy for me. Nothing.

Christopher: Really?

Elisa: I feel like I, and, you know, I grew up my whole life, especially once I got through college and people said, “Oh, you play all these instruments. Oh, you sing so beautifully,” and my response is always, “Well, I worked hard to become so,” you know, I, maybe I had a little natural ability but I was trained from a very young age, you know, but I really do feel like I have had to work at everything that I have learned and accomplished.

Christopher: Interesting. I’ve been thinking for a while about getting T-shirts made up for Musical U that say something like, “No, I’m not a natural. I’ve just worked really hard,” and I can’t quite get the wording right, but I think something in that direction is a shirt a lot of us would be proud to wear.

Elisa: Well, you know, I’m in all these music teacher groups on Facebook and sometimes it comes up, you know, what’s your response when somebody compliments you on your music performance and, you know, when somebody hears me sing, I often do some MC work, you know, where I host events, and whatever, and I might do a little mike check where I sing a little and people will go, “Oh, my gosh. Oh, you have such a beautiful voice,” and I go, “Well, I have a degree in music. I really should,” you know? Like, I took voice lessons, people.

Christopher: Yeah. I feel like we could have a whole conversation about singing, in particular and the talent myth around singing because I think it’s more acute there than with any other instrument, where people just think, you know, you were born with an amazing voice when in reality the great singers have worked really hard to make that happen.

Elisa: Yeah. I saw a video recently of a great singer, I think it was Celine Dion and she was being interviewed on a talk show and the talk show host said, “Well, what do you do before you go onstage?” and she said, “I don’t want to tell you. It’s really boring,” and they’re, like, “It can’t be boring. You’re Celine Dion. You are this fabulous diva,” and she said, “No. It’s, like, r-r-r-r-r,” you know, and she starts going through, and it’s the same exact exercises that any good voice teacher is going to teach you and here she is, this consummate professional, and, you know, she’s had this immense career and she’s still doing those same vocal warmups before she goes onstage.

Christopher: I love that. That’s great. And so for you over those years you were picking up the instruments and from the outside I am sure it looked like you were just, kind of, swanning through life, picking up new instruments, but what did it look like from your perspective? What were the difficult bits or what were the big breakthroughs for you along the way?

Elisa: Oh, boy. Let me think about that. In learning multiple instruments?

Christopher: Not specifically. No, it’s just in your musical journey. Or, I could put it a different way and say, you know, if it wasn’t coming easy and if there was a lot of hard work involved, what was it that kept you going? What was it that made it a joy rather than a chore?

Elisa: Playing fun stuff.

Christopher: Hm.

Elisa: You know, like, getting to the point where, I wanted to get to the point where I could play whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted and so finding those opportunities, not just in my own personal practice but finding opportunities to perform outside of my home and outside of my practice, which has been extremely rewarding. I’m currently the conductor of our community band but before I was the conductor I played French horn in it and I played French horn in it because I wanted to, because it was fun. So I think it’s finding that, you know, what’s fun for you.

So when I was learning the flute, for example, I opened up a hymn book because they were songs that I knew, they were songs that I loved, they were songs that I could learn and really push myself toward. So I think that’s the other thing, is, you know, finding opportunities to not only do songs that you enjoy but songs that challenge you because to find the flow, which is that happy place, right, it needs to be hard enough that you’re challenged but not so hard that you’re frustrated and when you find that kind of sweet spot then it doesn’t matter what you’re playing. It’s fun.

Christopher: That’s great advice. And you were talking a little bit there about the impression people might have had about you and the reality. Would you say, you know, what you just described is a very, kind of, scientific, analytical way of thinking about practice is, you know, I’m going to consider my boundaries and find something that’s just on that threshold. That’s not the kind of creative, artistic, flighty musician who just, kind of, wanders about playing amazing things that a lot of people assume goes along with being a music major and a music teacher. What would you say your personality was like in that spectrum of things?

Elisa: You know, you put music in front of me, I can play it. You take the music away and I feel scared. I was not raised as, like, a jazz musician. I did learn jazz I college and of course I’ve taught jazz and I’ve taught improvisation but I still feel, like, that security when it comes to having the music in front of me.

And the thing that, and stop me if I’m totally getting off track, but I did quit teaching public school for a short time when my children were very little and that’s when I really focused on my private lessons studio and I spent that last paycheck, not the whole thing, but a lot of it, on a really nice guitar and I had never been a guitar player before but I thought, “You know what, it’s time for me to get my face out of the instrument or the instrument out of my face and learn to play something just for fun,” because everything else was work at that point, right?

And so I started learning guitar. I took lessons. My stepmom is a fantastic guitar player and teacher so I started out there and that, more than anything else, just being able to sing and play at the same time started to get my eyes off the music, right? And it wasn’t until then and this is after a, you know, 20-year career in performing arts. It wasn’t until then that I took my eyes off the music and that’s when I started to really realize that the music didn’t have to be on the page, it was in me.

Christopher: Wow. That’s amazing to hear and I, for me, I read something in a, I was teaching myself piano in my 20’s or returning to piano and I read something in a book that was talking about the importance of memorizing and it said something like, you know, “You only begin making music when you stop reading it,” and that really stuck with me that, you know, if you learn it from the sheet music fine, but then memorizing it gives you this freedom when it comes to actually playing it and it sounds like that’s kind of the experience you had where you realized that, “Oh, I don’t need to be pinned to the sheet music. I can actually create music and not have anything in front of me.”

Elisa: Yeah. And I could truly create it, you know, I, maybe it’s because the tools were fewer, you know? I work really well in a construct. Like, you give me the parameters and I can create within that and I feel like that gave me freedom by tying me down, right?

So it was, like, I gave myself three chords, okay? B flat, D and G, let’s say. And I would just start to create patterns with those three chords. But you’re absolutely right. I think you can be a fine musician and read the music, I mean, any symphony is going to prove that but I think you’re right, too, that if you truly want to be free to express you need to get your eyes off the music.

I recently had this experience. I was conducting an outdoor concert and I had the score open in front of me and the wind picked up and so my score was blowing. I couldn’t watch the music, right? “What do I do? I can’t — how can I cue people if I can’t see where to cue them? I can’t follow along?” Right? And it was, I mean, it was, I was fine. I was fine, because I knew the music well enough but it was, again, that little fear of, “I can’t read it,” right?

I should also say I’m a big collector of books and a a total bibliophile, okay, so the reading thing’s big for me. So anyway, after that I was, like, “This is never going to happen to me again,” and I spent the next week memorizing every score for our next concert because I was, like, “Whether it’s the wind or weather, I just want to make eye contact with the people. I want to connect to the actual music instead of just the notes.” I really dedicated myself to that and that was just something that happened, you know, two weeks ago, so it’s a continuous lifelong learning process, I guess.

Christopher: And aside from the sheer practicality of, you know, not needing to worry if the wind picks up, do you find it makes a difference?

Elisa: Yes.

Christopher: I mean, conducting is a slightly different thing, I suppose, but if we’re thinking about playing music or performing, do you find it makes a difference to how expressive you can be?

Elisa: Well, yeah, because I may not be playing an instrument but I’m playing the band, right? They crescendo when I indicate a crescendo and they decrescendo when I indicate that so in a way I’m playing all the instruments at once and it absolutely made a difference because, again, not only was I connecting to my players on a more personal level because I had my eyes up, I was making eye contact, but I was more confident in what I was doing which, in turn, reflected to their confidence as players and I was able to be more expressive through that, as well.

Christopher: Very cool. So I would love to pause on this for a moment because I think you’re the first guest we’ve had who has talked about conducting a band or an orchestra and I’d love for you to explain a little bit how that works and what it’s like, because I think it’s a, you know, if you think about the recorder as a fairly simple instrument where you are playing a melody line and your two hands are working together and, okay, your mouth is doing something but that’s fairly, kind of, clear cut.

And then maybe a guitar and piano are a bit more complex. You’ve got some left hand, right hand stuff and maybe your feet are involved and then, you know, something like, organ, you’ve got all kinds of stuff going on but at the far end of that I think is the conductor who is, as you say, playing all of the instruments at once in some sense and, in particular, what I’d love to hear about is the mental or aural skills that go into that because you need to be aware of everything that’s going on musically, not just a single melody line, not just melody in chords but, you know, dozens of parts. How does that work? How do you learn to do that and what does it take?

Elisa: It takes practice, like all good musical skills and just like I said before, I have had to work at every single thing that I’ve learned, including conducting. I was very fortunate to have three fabulous conducting instructors in college and so through that year and a half of private, nearly private instruction I was able to learn how to read. I actually have a score sitting here next to me so bear with me. This is “The Symphonic Suite for Star Trek.”

Christopher: Very cool.

Elisa: And I’m going to count the number of musical lines we have. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one, twenty two, twenty three lines of music, all on one page, all different instruments.

So part of the skill is the same skill, and I’m going to lead into sight reading, here, okay, is pattern recognition. You start learning it in kindergarten. I know this because I teach kindergarten, right? And first grade and second, up to eighth grade. So the key is really recognizing those patterns that happen in the music, not just patterns of repetition but which instruments tend to be paired together, you know, what the beings look like, what scale patterns look like.

So the thing that makes me a strong sight reader is the same thing that makes me a strong conductor, is being able to look for those patterns, see them and be able to look ahead and then it comes back to the sight-singing thing.
You see how everything’s connected, here? Okay. Because if you can sight-sing, I can look at this music and go, “You know what? I know how that should sound and that’s not how it did sound,” and so in rehearsal I can go, “You know what, guys? You actually played that incorrectly,” and I know that because of my sight-singing skills.

Christopher: That’s a beautiful example, because, you know, to the layperson sitting in on that orchestral rehearsal or band practice they’re going to notice you being, like, “Wait, you played an E flat instead of an E back there in the horn section,” and they’re going to be, like, “What? What? How did she possibly know that?”

Elisa: Oh, I love playing that trick on my middle school kids, too, because, they’re, like, or I’ll have a choir of, like, 50 kids, right, and I’ll be able to pick out the one kid who’s not fitting in, right, who’s vowel is not correct and so it’s pulling them flat, right? Because their tongue isn’t curling up in the back enough and they’re, like, “But Ms. Jones, how did you know?” I’m like, “Years of experience. You’re singing it wrong and I can actually, like, hear that,” and they’re, like, “But how did you know it was me?” So it’s a good trick.

Christopher: So I don’t talk a lot about my opinions on teaching music on this podcast because although I have a viewpoint on what’s important in music education and not, I’m not a music teacher and I have a huge respect for those who do it, in person, day in and day out. At the same time I think it’s fair to say that there are teachers who just, kind of, show up and deliver a lesson plan and leave it at that and there are teachers who, and it sounds like you’re certainly one of them, who are really passionate and mindful and thoughtful about what they’re doing and who they are as a music teacher and that really came across in your book. You wrote a book called, “The Music Educator’s Guide to Thrive,” and I absolutely loved it, not least because although in the title it says it’s about music educators, so much of what’s in there is super useful and kind of mind-expanding for anyone in their profession, in their hobby, whatever it may be, and so if it’s all right I’d love to talk a little bit about that because this is kind of your guide for music teachers to, in my own words, to become the, kind of, fully-fledged music teacher rather than just someone who shows up and tries to tick the boxes and keep a salary coming in.

Elisa: Sure. Well, I’m thrilled that you want to talk about my book, of course.

Christopher: So, you, in the book you present kind of a mental model for thinking about your wellness as a music educator and you break it into eight different aspects. Can you think what those are and why there are as many as eight that people should be thinking about?

Elisa: Well, sure, but we have to backtrack just a tad, which is the impetus for the book. Teacher burnout, especially with music teachers, is incredibly high. The last figure I read was 50% won’t last seven years and that’s not a career, that’s a job, right? And so I started delving into why are teachers not thriving in this profession when I have these fabulous examples in my own family and in my life and in my own mentors who have lived this career for 40 years and have been successful, so that’s kind of where it started and, you know, I was going to be presenting at the national music educator’s conference, as well, so that was kind of an impetus, but really it comes down to if you have a well-rounded life, if you have a holistic approach to your own life then you’re going to eventually drive success.
The true issue comes when you neglect certain areas of your wellness, be it financial wellness or social wellness or your physical wellbeing, any one of those things, if it’s neglected you will suffer and so the idea is to minimize suffering by focusing holistically on your own wellbeing. So, for example, you said you want to talk about physical wellbeing, right? I mean, it’s impossible, let me give a story, here.

I was in high school and I had this fabulous band teacher, adored her, Mrs. Leyvah, I’m going to say her name because she’s retired now but she was fabulous. She got sick a lot and so it was great for me because I was the student conductor, okay, so I was teaching band in high school, if we’re technical about it, right? But it also was detrimental to the program that she was gone so often because of health issues. I don’t know what those health issues were or anything but that’s a frequent complaint among music teachers. We’re around small children all the time just as most of us who go to work at any kind of place outside of our own home, we’re around people who are sick, we could get sick ourselves and not only is that destructive to our mental and emotional wellbeing but it could hurt our finances, it could hurt any number of things so if we just think the time to focus on our physical wellness and not just through diet but also through exercise, which in turn helps our emotional wellbeing, it helps us to have a clarity of thought.

I was not active as a young child, unless you count marching band, which you should count marching band because it’s hard, okay? But I lived a very sedentary life all through college and it wasn’t until I was pushing 30 and my mother and father both got diagnosed with diabetes that I was, like, “Oh, boy. I really need to focus on my health,” and I started riding my bike and I started racing triathlons and it wasn’t until I started to feel truly good that I realized how good I could feel or how good I should feel and even still on the days when I ride my bike to work, because, yes, I do bike commute pretty frequently, gets me about 20 miles in on the bike. I get to school, I change my clothes in the bathroom, right, or in my office, and I teach that day with a much more calm and centered demeanor just because of that little bit of physical activity, just because of that little bit of connection to nature. So that kind of is the physical wellbeing part. It’s really nurturing ourselves physically.

So then you go to, like, cognitive wellbeing, which I think is another one that you mentioned that stood out for you and that’s the continuous development of our mind. So taking time to delve into challenging things and it could be reading self-help books like mine. I recommend it. You know, but it doesn’t have to be just that. You could watch a TED talk, you could read a book about astronomy but as long as, the idea of being a lifelong learner. You could take up a new instrument, which is something that I recently did, actually, as if there are any more instruments for me left to learn to play, you know, and then your emotional wellbeing. If you take time to practice your emotional wellbeing through meditation and mindful practices and, you know, guided meditation, affirmations, I know that for some people that sounds like super, super frou-frou, but if you think about it, it’s something we’re doing all the time. We are constantly telling ourselves what we are and that’s all affirmations are. We can choose to say, “I’m beautiful. I’m fabulous. I’m talented. I’m picking up this instrument so easily. I’m playing guitar so well. Look at how much I’ve improved from last week,” or we can just be out of control with those thoughts and then it could be, “Wow, guitar is so frustrating. Why is this so hard for me?”

So if you think about it in terms of it’s stuff you’re already doing only now, instead of letting that happen to you, you’re going to take charge of that happening and you get to be the boss of what happens and for somebody like me, I might be standing in the classroom of 50 fourth-graders, okay? These are eight and nine-year-old kids and they love to talk, they love to be belligerent, they love to joke around and sometimes it does get out of control and it’s in those moments when I can invoke this potential that I’ve created in myself because I’ve practiced, right, to take a deep breath and be mindful and reset that situation and that could be the case for any stressful situation, you know, if you’ve practiced how to be centered, how to be mindful, how to live in the moment and be able to take a deep breath and think clearly and be emotionally centered then life does not enact itself upon you, you enact yourself upon life. Sorry, was that really deep and [Unintelligible [00:29:56]?

Christopher: That was beautiful. No, I’m 100% on board and I love that this is all inspired by the desire to help more music teachers have the career they hope to rather than burning out, fizzling out, getting frustrated. That’s wonderful. I think, at the same time, hearing you talk about it, it’s probably clear to everyone listening that this is not advice that only applies to music teachers, you know, this is good life advice for anyone, I think, and I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a second because I think what you just, kind of, painted a picture of is clearly a really rich existence, you know, it’s not, “I’m pigeon-holed in my job. I’m doing it day-to-day. I’m just, kind of, getting through the day,” this is a life that’s rich emotionally, physically, spiritually and you’re learning all the time. It sounds amazing. How is there enough time for all of that?

Elisa: So when I first started it, I had a friend turn me on to a book called, “The Miracle Morning,” and it’s a great book. If you want to read it a lot of the same concepts are talked about in my book as well.

So I started with ten minutes in the morning. I woke up ten minutes earlier and I had a list of six things that I wanted to do, right? So meditation, affirmations, visualization, journal writing, reading and exercise, okay? So I set a timer because I was, like, “I’ve only got ten minutes, friends. I’ve got three kids, two part-time jobs, I’m trying to be an entrepreneur, I’ve got lessons to teach this afternoon. I’ve got to get it done,” right? So I did, like, two minutes per each thing and then, like, one minute of visualization, one minute of affirmations and that was it.

And so it started with ten minutes per day and then I realized I wanted more and so then it went to 20 and then it went to 30 and now I dedicate an hour or so of time every morning. I start with yoga to wake my body up, I, don’t get me into lifestyle practices, because I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing and you’ll think I’m insane, so, we’re not going to go there, but, you know, if it’s truly a priority, you’ll make time for it, and I learned that from a TED talk, actually.
You know, if your house floods then what does your schedule look like, then? It looks like you’re dealing with your house flooding, right? And so it’s just a matter of making it that big of a priority and I didn’t want to be just living life anymore, you know? I didn’t want to be just going to a job and so if you really want to improve your life you can start with as little as five minutes a day, six minutes a day and you’re not going to see immediate improvement.

I mean, just like with everything and especially with learning a musical instrument you’re not going to see immediate improvement. You’re not going to be on book two after the second week of playing or, you know, lesson six. It takes time and after a month of that practice then you start to realize, “Wow, I’m getting along better with people at work,” you know, “Wow, I have a little more money in my checking account than I usually do this time of the month.” So if you’re actually looking at improving your life in a very significant way, with those baby steps, it does have to be consistent.

Christopher: Well, I think you have a similar nature to me in that you tend to be quite, kind of, logical and methodical and I think that comes across in this framework you’ve put together, but for me growing up, self-help books and things like affirmations, I was always highly skeptical, you know, I’m a scientist by background. That stuff seemed super woo-woo, wasn’t on board but the more I got into —

Elisa: My first degree is in science, by the way.

Christopher: Well there you go.

Elisa: Science, music, and business are what my degrees are in. But anyway, go on.

Christopher: Well, you know, for me what made me give it a chance and explore that stuff was more and more the people I admired and particularly in the world of entrepreneurship were talking about this stuff. These weren’t flimsy people, these weren’t, kind of, hopeless people who were kind of looking for any opportunity to feel good about themselves. These were people that were really accomplishing things and they were talking about visualization and affirmations and goal-setting and planning and all of this stuff from the self-help books and I think you’re a perfect example yourself.

You know, you are not the average music teacher and for someone who’s studied self-help and that whole, kind of, self-management and self-development it would come as no surprise that you are out there achieving great things and so you’re not just a music teacher, you’ve also written this book and you’re the host of a very popular podcast, “The Music and Mentor Podcast.” You’ve put together this amazing online summit for music educators to learn from the best in the business and you also have a great collaboration with one of the leading, kind of, music education platforms, Smart Music, so I don’t want to sell you short by blitzing through all of those amazing accomplishments but I did just want to note that, you know, you’re not someone who is making these recommendations because you hope they’ll work or because they sound like a good idea. These are things that you have applied and have seen great results from.

Elisa: Yeah. And you just touched on my own personal mission, I mean, I’ve decided to help music teachers because I am a music teacher, because I was raised by music teachers but the true mission is teaching entrepreneurship to music teachers, right, because, like you said, as entrepreneurs, we’ve learned so much from these people that we admire about the metaphysical world, let’s say, and yet as teachers we’re struggling because we don’t have that training, right? Most teachers have never heard of how to do a SWOT analysis, which you didn’t mention. I do have an MBA and I’m a business consultant as well. So I do SWOT analysis all the time but it’s something that you say that to a music teacher and they’re like, “What?” and you’re, like, “Dude, it’s an essential tool that can be utilized to improve your program or improve yourself or improve anything in your life,” and so my personal mission is to take these business skills, these entrepreneurial skills and slide them into the career of music education.

Christopher: Awesome. Well, I’m having to hold myself back because I feel like you and I could talk for another several hours just about this topic.

Elisa: Well, we have to talk about ukelele.

Christopher: Exactly. We have to talk about ukelele.

Elisa: We have to talk about the ukelele.

Christopher: And I think what we’ll have to do is invite you to come and give a masterclass at Musical U and share some of these entrepreneurship skills with our members there because, as you say, it is hugely powerful stuff that’s often relegated to the world of business and left out of reach of people who would really benefit. So all I’m going to do is direct people to your book and for anyone listening do not be put off for a moment by it being “The Music Educator’s Guide.” Just think of it as “The Human’s Guide to Thrive,” and you’ll get an awful lot out of it and we will certainly have links in the show notes to the Music Ed Mentor Podcast and to the Music Education Summit and to make sure people can find out more about those, but let’s wrap up by talking about the ukelele, which is one of my own favorite instruments. Where did ukelele come into the picture for you?

Elisa: Okay. So a couple of years ago I bought a ukelele for my son, right? And it just kind of sat on the shelf because he was nine and not that into it, okay? Of my three kids, he’s the only one who’s not, like, super gung-ho into the music thing yet, all right? Meanwhile, last spring, it was just a few months ago, I was interviewing another elementary music teacher for my podcast and we were talking about how neither one of us have, like, super-amazing piano skills, right? And he said, “You know, what works for me is I play the ukelele. That gives me the background chords where I can pluck out the notes and it’s small, it’s helpful,” and I had originally tried doing guitar.

As I mentioned, I took up guitar and that was just too big, too bulky to work with little kids so this idea of, like, something small that I can hold in my hands and it’s okay if the kids touch it. And then it helps that my husband has a ukelele and has been playing ukelele for a years so I was, like, ‘You know what? Maybe over spring break I’ll pick up the ukelele,” right? And I am not a young woman and I have played almost every other instrument and I became obsessed with the ukelele because it was just so much fun and it opened my eyes to, you know, getting out of the music. It was the first time I truly, like, became, I was improvising. Like, he was playing chords and I was playing the melody and it was just mind-blowingly fun for someone who, as you said, is pretty musical, it was a new thing for me and no, it has not been easy, just like everything else, I’ve had to work at it and then of course I built my own ukelele.

Christopher: Of course. That’s the obvious next step. You’re going to have to fill in a little more of that story.

Elisa: Well, I wanted to, I started playing with the little one that I had bought for my son, you know, and it was painted and it sounded okay but my husband has this beautiful Gretsch ukulele and I was, like, “Oh, man, I want something nicer. I deserve something nicer. I’m a music educator,” right? And so I went around to all the music stores in our town and, just, they were all out of my price range or I didn’t, the cheap ones just didn’t sound as good to me and then I got thinking, “You know what? I between I could build my own,” and so I found a kit. It wasn’t, just, glue the pieces together. It was in-depth building and, you know, I’ve built websites, I’ve built businesses, I’ve built music programs, I’ve built concert bands, I’ve built non-profits, I’ve built, you know, all these things but I’ve never built something to hold in my hands like that and it took this whole other side of my brain, I would say, almost the artsy side, right, the creative side, the side that can see the way pieces come together and that was extremely hard for me. And then, of course, if I drill it here, I can’t take that back. Measure three times. But, anyway, now it’s done and it’s a beautiful, mahogany ukulele and it was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. Now I play it every night and I love it.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, Elisa, I don’t know how you find the time for all of that, even if it’s, you know, ten minutes or 60 minutes in the morning to cram everything in, you manage an incredible amount and it’s certainly an inspiration. All that remains is to say a big thank you for joining us on the show today. There was a ton of really interesting stuff in there that I’m going to go away and think more about and I know our listeners will be inspired and encouraged to explore a little bit more of what their musical life could offer for them.

Elisa: Good, well, thank you so much for having me on and best of luck to everybody. Lifelong learning.

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The post Learning, Playing and Thriving with Elisa Janson-Jones appeared first on Musical U.

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Links and Resources

• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part One
• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part Two
• About Keeping It Simple

Transcript

Christopher: Hello, and welcome to the Musicality Podcast. My name is Christopher Sutton. I’m the founder and director of Musical U. It’s my pleasure to be joined today by our Musical U team. We don’t have our Resident Pros with us but we have the full line up we normally have on our Monday morning team calls. Monday morning, depending on which country you’re in. For me, it’s generally afternoon.

It is myself, Stewart, Adam, Andrew and Anastasia and we are going to be picking up on one of the common themes that came across in our Episode 100 Celebration Roundup, where we had 26 fascinating music educators sharing their one top tip for unlocking your inner musicality. The theme we’re gonna be picking up on today is the idea is that we are all musical inside already.

I’m excited on this one because, as I jokingly said to my team before we kicked off recording, this is our mission statement, more or less, at Musical U. This is our brand, this is our message, this is what we’re all about, is trying to help musicians feel and be equipped like they are truly musical in a natural, creative, confident way.

So, of course, I was delighted when this came up with lots of our contributing guests. We had Andy Wasserman talking about the musical gold inside you and how when you enjoy music you hear, it’s because it’s resonating with the music you have inside. We had Bill Hilton, David Reed and Forest Kinney talking about how you can be creative from day one and you have that inside you, even if you don’t yet have phenomenal instrument technique, you do have the ability to create and express.

We had David Andrew Wiebe talking about, specifically, you already have musicality inside and you just need to tap into it. David Wellerman talked about how sometimes we need to put down our instrument to realize what we have inside and what we can express musically. And Jimmy Rotherham expressed the kind of could I philosophy, which is that we are all musical, we can all use our voice, we can all express musical idea and for him, that comes through in his work in inclusivity in school music and helping kids to all feel like they are musical, that they can sing, that they can take part in musical activities.

This is kind of near and dear to our hearts at Musical U and I’m excited to have the chance because, you know, I think we all take it for granted at this stage, having been working in musicality training for one to ten years, depending on the team member. It’s rare that we sit down and actually really talk about it except in a very specific way when we are developing new material.

Broadly speaking, why don’t we kick off with Stewart. What does it mean to you Stewart, this idea that we are all musical inside already?

Stewart: Well, I think all of us listen to music in some way. I would like the think if you can listen to the radio, tap your foot, whistle along, hum along, you can do something musical. I don’t think many people think like that. It’s a shame, really. I got to know a little bit more about this and how deep it goes. I’ve written about it but I also taught guitar and it always bummed me out when I see people come in who were told, for one reason or another, you can’t play guitar. I’d be like, “Well, why?” Luckily, thankfully, whoever was with my parents said, “Let’s try one more teacher.”

One came in, it was a woman who was about 5′, real short but she had tiny hands. The guitar, her first instructor was like, “Your hands are too small to play guitar, so you shouldn’t play guitar.” She was about kind of ready to give up, so she came in. I talked to her and I said, “Well, let’s move your hand around a little bit.” Next thing you know, we were doing lessons for a few years. Her big goal was to play music with her kids so they could sing and she could play and she was able to do that. Thankfully, she moved on. It’s kind of like not believing the lies that others will say.
That happens especially when we’re young and that stuff sticks with you, I think, through time. I had stuff, when I was young, that was said to me. I know other people who had the same thing. Just negative little comments from teachers or other students like, “Oh you can’t sing,” or “Oh, you can’t do that.” No, no, no, you can.

To me, as a community conductor on Musical U, I get to see a lot of people come through that, I don’t know what you want to say, like the opening of their mind, like I can do it and they get excited. That’s one of the best days. That’s like a huge, great moment of my day when I see someone go, “Man, I’m getting this, this is really good.” See, you can do it. Don’t believe the other stuff. It’s great to be part of something that does that.

Christopher: Nice, yeah. I think we all enjoy seeing that with members and we’ve had, for sure, some dramatic cases where people have come in and you almost wonder why they joined because they seem so determined to fail and so determined that they don’t have what it takes. When that turns around and they start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and they start seeing themselves do this things in music that they thought were beyond them, I think we all get a massive kick out of that.

Stewart: Yeah, sometimes it just takes a little extra time. I had, you know the students, and I’m sure Andrew probably has some examples of this also, I had one student also, she was mentally handicapped. She could work. Her mom brought her and once again, they had a teacher and he was just like, “Oh, she can’t do it.” She came in and I worked with her. She ended up having a blast. She was doing it and the mom came in, this was like a few years after and she said, “Thank you. You took the time with her and worked with her and she’s doing music and she loves doing this.”

Another guy, it was kind of funny, it reminded me of Mr. Holland’s Opus, I think, that movie. It was a scene where this one guy has a really hard time with tempo. Mr. Holland, he puts a helmet on his head and starts tapping on his head with a drumstick so the guy feels [01:01:17]. I had a guitar player and he came in and we tried everything, he just could not get that steady beat. I’m like, “I know this guy has it.”

I took a drum … I didn’t start whacking him over the head … but I did tap on his knee with a drumstick. Eventually, it started really catching on and he got it. It’s like finding those neat ways to help people in.

Christopher: Yeah. That’s a nice example where clapping in time is something that people really, I think clapping in time and singing in tune are the big two where everyone feels like everyone should be able to do this. But if you haven’t learned or you haven’t happened to kind of absorb it passively, it can be tricky. It’s been fun and interesting for us at Musical U figuring out how do we actually teach those skills in a step by step way while helping people pass the emotional and psychological baggage that may have been holding them back.

Stewart, you thankfully solved this for me. I forgot to ask everyone to introduce themselves. I think what came across in your answer is you’re a guitar teacher and community conductor at Musical U. Before we go ahead, I should just ask Adam, Andrew and Anastasia to please give a quick intro for anyone listening who hasn’t heard you on the podcast before.

Adam, why don’t you go first.

Adam: Hi everyone, I’m Adam Liette. I’m communications manager at Musical U. In addition to being a trumpet player and a guitar player, I’m a veteran of the United States Army Band.

Andrew: Hi, I’m Andrew Bishko. I’m the product manager on the Musical U site and content manager on the Musical U blog. I play many instruments. Currently, my big project is playing mariachi music with my wife in a wonderful mariachi band.

Anastasia: Hey, my name is Anastasia Voitinskaia. I’m the assistant content editor here at Musical U. I’ve been a pianist since the age of three, a guitar player since the age of 10 and more recently, I picked up the bass and the synthesizer. I also occasionally sing. I currently play bass and sing in a band and I have my own experimental electronic project that is going to be my focus for the next little while in my musical life.

Christopher: Very nice.

Why don’t you continue for us Anastasia and share a bit about your thought on what it means that we are all musical inside already.

Anastasia: For sure.

I think the most basic thing to remember that people forget and that I forget sometimes when I’m in the throws of, “Oh, I’m not satisfied with what I’m making,” is if you can enjoy music, you are, in fact, musical. It means that you have an ear for music. It means that you have a taste in music and you know what sounds good to you, at least.
Unless you are completely tone deaf, which is so, so rare, or you’re just not paying attention. Also, you can hear music, you can appreciate it, you can [inaudible 01:04:29] out the dynamics, the phrasing, the articulation: for example, the guitar effects that someone is using, the different tones of the synthesizer. For example, you could try active listening to some of your favorite music and, chances are, you’re very capable of perceiving what about it you like. What makes it musical? Is it the melody? Is it the chord progression? Is it the way that it slows down and speeds up, for example?

All of this to say, also I think a core component of simply being human is also being musical because we are human and we do have feelings and they have to be expressed somehow. What better avenue to express them then through music, right?

Christopher: Nice. I think there’s an important point there, which I try not to over [inaudible 01:05:34] because it is simplification. A lot of the kind of ear training stuff that we talk about and train people on at Musical U is fundamentally about equipping you with words and mental frameworks for things your ears are already doing. Yes, there are some skills where you need to go deep and really get into the nitty gritty. It’s remarkable who often we have musicians join the members website, who’ve been playing music for 10 years and they feel like they have a terrible musical ear. In just few weeks, they can totally transform because, actually, they just lacked a few of these kind of mental structures or ways of thinking about what they were hearing or words to put on things that, once you put those things in place, they realize, “Oh, actually, I was understanding my ear, what was going on. I just didn’t have a way to grasp it.”

I think you’re exactly right, Anastasia, that we can see in anyone who’s enjoying music, that they have some kind of musicality inside them, so it must just be a matter of bringing that out.

Anastasia: I find for me, at least, from a very young age, and I saw this in other people that are just starting out on their instruments. When we play naturally, we tend to play pretty musically. We don’t sit there and plunk out note by note by note unless someone tells us to do so.

For example, when I was taking piano lessons, once I had learned everything, once I had gotten the notes under my fingers, once I had gotten the technique down, once I was comfortable with the material, essentially, I wasn’t playing robotically. I was playing pretty naturally. There were some lulls. Again, not really changes in pitch or rhythm, obviously, I was still playing the same notes. But something was changing. I was kind of injecting myself into the music, so, of course it would change. I’m gonna play a piece differently than how you would play a piece or how Andrew would play a piece.

Technique is obviously so, so important but I find sometimes it almost gets in the way because you’re thinking too much about the technique and you’re saying, “Oh, I’m not musical, I can’t get this.” When, in fact, if you just had the technique already under your fingers, and you were comfortable with what you were playing, you would in fact be playing musically. You wouldn’t be playing robotically. You would be thinking about other things, such as how the piece makes you feel, how you can express yourself through it. What is the emotion behind it to begin with?
Bottom line, I think our default is playing musically, not playing robotically. We are all capable of it.

Christopher: Yeah, fantastic. That’s really well put. In a way, it’s a parallel barrier. We talked just them about how one of the barriers is you don’t have the words or the mental frameworks to understand by ear. You are exactly right that the same thing happens in performance where is technique is a barrier and the person sitting there feeling unmusical, they might just not have got good enough with the technique to reach that nice, green field of exploring it musically.

Anastasia: Exactly.

Christopher: For me, that’s one of the big things was learning how much of an impact it had if I memorized things. I was a big sheet music reader and, as long as I was looking at the notes on the page, I always would be playing a bit robotically and kind of intellectually. When I bothered to sit down and memorize, it gave me a completely different opportunity to explore that music and express something with it. I think it’s that question of technique and of how much you’re needing to pay attention to getting the notes right. Once you move beyond that, you have the ability to let that musicality out.

Anastasia: For sure. As your confidence increases, so does your musicality, really, obviously, because you’re more comfortable.

Christopher: Yeah, it’s a two way street isn’t it? The more you’ve got these skills under your belt, the more confident you are. The more confident you are in them, the easier it is to express something.

How about you Adam, how do you think about the subject about everyone being musical?

Adam: You know, for the past 100 and some episodes of the musicality podcast, there’s these moments that just stick out in my head. I keep a file of these great quotes. One thing that Andy Wasserman said, he said, “I believe that every, single person is already am musical master, they just don’t know it.” I just love that quote and I think that speaks so much to what we do.

I really found, that both as a performer and as a teacher, we get shoved in this perception that this is music. What is music? It’s just a very … perhaps it’s a result of modern music education or just the mindset of “Well, now I’m making music.” Whatever that means. I often wonder, if we come in at music with that perception, does it shut us off from these new, exciting learning experiences? As we explore this really wide world of music that’s becoming more and more transparent and open to us with modern technology.

I’d just like to expand upon a very unique set of circumstances I had while I was serving overseas in Afghanistan. I was a member of the 82nd Airborne Division Band. In 2008, we got deployed to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. We had two jobs. The first job was just to play music. We played for soldiers, we played for dignitaries. I got to play for President Obama and the governor of Texas, you know, really high ranking people in our government, which is cool.
We also had a job to train the Afghan National Army. That’s actually, at the time, was the biggest job of ISAP was training the Afghans so that they could guard there own country. The Afghan National Army has a band, much like western armies do. A big part of our job was to train their band. We did this both at their equivalent of West Point, which is the American Military Academy in Kabul, Afghanistan. In addition, we would host them in our camp at Bagram Airfield.

I’m a bit ashamed to say, at the time, I really dreaded having to teach the Afghani’s. They had no concept of western tonality. They were playing on these instruments, western instruments, trumpets, french horns, trombones and the like, that they had just been given by NATO in the past eighteen months. For the first time in their life, they’re holding a clarinet and trying to make a sound.

They didn’t even know how to play their own instruments, let alone any concept of John Phillip Sousa, Henry Fillmore, Holst, Carl King, all these very standard, military march composers. We were even getting down to the root basics of reading western notation. It was very, very painful to try to teach them, even with translators.

Then one night, what we typically did is, on Friday nights, we would all get a bon fire going and we would all sit out there drinking tea and smoking cigars and the Afghani’s came out of their tent, they heard us all talking. They just bring out this collection of just these ragtag, beat up old instruments. It was their native instruments, it wasn’t our western instruments. They started playing, out there in the middle of nowhere. I was completely blown away.
All week long, we had struggled with these musicians, struggling with the mechanics and tonality and just basic musicianship of what we were trying to teach them. They were moving effortlessly throughout their songs, playing entirely by ear. This went on for over three hours, we sat outside there, jaws dropped listening to them play and eventually joining in. They weren’t just jamming, they weren’t improvising, they were playing songs. These were folks songs that had been passed down for generations. Those that weren’t playing would sing, sing in Pashtu. Complete command of notes, rhythms and the lyrics of their native songs.

They, indeed, had musical inside of them, but we were approaching it from the wrong aspect. I think that has so much to do with what code I taught, using the folk songs from your native tongue to begin to teach music, I think that really speaks to that, this very real experience with adult musicians
As I look back on that, what surprised me the most in all of this has to do with context in history. These musicians had lived through the oppression of the Taliban, two decades where music was strictly forbidden and was punishable by either corporal punishment or death. Yet, though all this oppression, music lived on. Even in the very youngest musicians, who were born into this oppression, music found a way to reach through the generations into them. That continues to inspire me to this day because it inside all of us and it’s multi-generational. I think part of our job as musicians is to continue to pass this wonderful gift of music to the next generation and to everyone, indeed, that we meet.

Christopher: Wow, that’s an amazing story. I love it too as an example or a symbol of tapping in to your musicality. Even Stewart touched on an aspiring guitarist who had been told her hands were too small and I think we fully all encounter people who tried an instrument, struggled and decided music wasn’t for them and the less common people who tried an instrument, struggled, tried another instrument, struggled, tried another instrument, found they loved it. The choice of instrument or genre or cultural, musical heritage, it’s so powerful for our success in music. I love how some of our guests talked about tapping in to your inner musicality and we have to talk about unlocking it. It’s not about creating something that isn’t there. It really is about being willing to explore in music, until you find the thing that resonates with you. Until you find the instrument or the style of music or the opportunity to actually find out what you’re capable of.

I hope that comes across in pretty much every episode of this podcast. Any time you’re struggling or feeling unmusical, you’re probably just not quite pointed in the right direction. I love your story, Adam, because it’s such a clear cut example of how people in one context can seem totally unmusical but put them in another context and they’ll blow your socks off. It’s amazing.

How about you Andrew? I so enjoyed interviewing you for the podcast in the past because of your kind of philosophy of music making. I think that’s probably what brought you to Musical U in the first place and why you fit in so well in the team here. So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and what it means that we all have music inside.

Andrew: Well, music is natural, as nature is musical. When we think about the rhythm of the seasons, the rhythm of the wind and the rain and the rhythm of our own heartbeat. The melodies of the voices that move in and out of our lives, everything is musical. We are immersed in this. We are part of this. I think a big thing that’s happened since the advent of recording and the available prerecorded music is that people get used to seeing the end product. They don’t experience the process. They don’t hear other people learning music. I know there is this one video about African talking drum player where he’s talking about how he learns music. They said, “How did you learn to play the talking drum?” He said, “Oh, you know it’s from when we were kids, when we were three years old. You pick up a drum and we talk like this.” It was learned naturally, like speaking.

I remember when I was studying Klezmer music and listening to anecdotes about what it was like in the villages in Eastern Europe and they said that people only stopped singing in order to talk to each other. They were always singing, they always had a little tune going. Everything was musical.

A friend of mine in Italy, who went to Naples, first moved to Naples in the 50s, he said you would walk through the street and everybody was singing. Singing songs, flowing out of the windows and the rooftops and all the vendors were singing, where music is a part of everybody’s life. The learning process of being a child and allowing yourself to express musically is a natural part of your growing.

I look at my own children and I see my children are musicians, they’re sheep herders, they’re dishwashers, they’re mathematicians, they’re scientists. There’s not that segmentation. But in our society, we have this thing of specialists. What are you going to be? We ask a child, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” How could you segment that? Limit that, limit your possibilities. That disconnects us and so we think, “Oh, well that person’s going to be a scientist, that person’s going to be a musician, that person’s going to be this, that person’s going to be that.”
We give up our innate musical, or we’re talked out of it. The truth about music is that it’s always about the music. I have a masters degree in music but I can listen to somebody who knows three chords and sings a song that they wrote with envy of their musicality and their expression. It doesn’t matter how much education you have, it doesn’t matter how many notes you can play, it doesn’t matter how much training you have or what you can do. It’s about the music, it’s about the sound that’s happening in the moment. Not to put all that other stuff down because it’s wonderful. It’s part of our nature and it’s been, with our culture of specialization, we’re separated from that.

Another thing is that people think they have to wait until … I have to have this skill before I can do that. I have to have this skill before I can do that. I’ve talked to members, doing discussions on Musical U site, on working towards improvisation, I’m doing this, this, and this and then I’ll start improvisation. It’s totally backwards. Improvisation, creating music, songwriting, can be part of your expression from day one. In fact, you’ll learn faster through that. That’s what it’s all about. Everything else is procrastination. It’s like, you want to make music, make music now. Skills are something that you’re adding to it. Skills are also developed in that way.

You play a scale, why do people hate playing scales so much? Because you go up and down and up and down and it doesn’t happen in music. Maybe a couple of Mozart pieces they will play a scale. Otherwise, you don’t even play scales in music. Play with the scale, don’t play the scale, play with the scale. Play up and down and inside out and play with the notes and play here. If you have a little technical part, you work it out, make a little melody, make it creative. Improvise with it, allowing us to express our inner musicality every step of the way where music is not the goal but music is the process. It’s something that we’re doing all the time. Then we’re adding skills to that and adding to our toolbox.

Christopher: Lovely. That is something I’d just like to underline. If I could go back to myself as a 12 year old and share that, it would have had a dramatic impact. That idea that whether or not you aspire to be a songwriter, or whether or not you aspire to be an improviser, those are things which completely transform your relationship with music and your enjoyment of the learning process.

If I could just go back and kind of open my eyes to the fact that improvising could be my way of learning the pieces, my way of learning dynamics and phrasing and technique, whether or not I had any interest in being an improviser, that would have been a massive gift.

For anyone listening who’s never tried to improvise and kind of tunes out when hearing about improvisation, I hope you’ll think a bit about this idea that it is simply a word we put on the idea that you can express your own inner musicality and that technique doesn’t need to be a barrier. Learning the words and the mental frameworks and the ear training skills doesn’t need to be a barrier. We all have some way of expressing ourselves in music from day one, the first time we pick up an instrument.

I have so enjoyed talking to you guys, I knew I would and I was curious to hear what would come out because as I touched on at the beginning, this is something that we are all immersed in day in day out and something we are often trying to communicate but something we rarely actually discuss in the team.

I’ve really enjoyed this, I hope our listeners have enjoyed the conversation as much as I have.

Well I want to say a big thank you to Stewart, Adam, Andrew and Anastasia for joining me on this episode. Thanks to everyone for listening and we’ll see you on the next one!

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These voicings aren’t limited to traditionally chording instruments like guitar or piano – you can even learn cool chord shapes for your bass.

Let’s take, for example, a C major chord. The three notes that spell that chord are C, E, and G. Now here’s the magic: no matter what order or where you play those notes on your fretboard or keyboard, if you’re playing those same three notes it’s still a C chord!

E-G-C? Still a C chord. G-E-G-C? Still a C chord.

There are endless possibilities and combinations that you can devise – even for just three little notes.

So what are these different chord voicings good for?

• easier and smoother transitions from one chord to another
• harmonizing melodies while keeping the melody note on top
• avoiding clashing notes with singers or other instruments
• creating fuller and/or more sparse sounds
• creating cool riffs that link up with other players
• creating special sonic atmospheres – from light and airy to dark and crunchy (and everything in between
• and more!

When you learn to play chord voicings, you’ll also gain more mastery over your keyboard or fretboard.

In this month’s Instrument Packs, you’ll see how each of Musical U’s Resident Pros approaches the topic of chord voicing, and how you can explore the possibilities on your instrument.

Piano

Spanning 88 pitches, the piano presents a huge canvas for painting chord voicing effects. But it all starts with getting the special close voicings known as “inversions” under your fingers. Resident Pro for piano, Sara Campbell, makes inversion exercises fun, beautiful, and musical, and then expands on them with lovely two-handed voicings leading to a surprisingly sophisticated harmonization of a very familiar little tune:

Including:

• Lovely exercises for practicing your inversions for triads and seventh chords that actually sound like music.
• Simple examples that transform these inversions into more beautiful voicings.
• Finding hidden beauty in a simple tune through harmonization with chord voicing.
• MP3 backing tracks for each exercise that will raise your enjoyment up to the next level.

With ten fingers and 88 keys, piano chord voicing can be very lush and satisfying without being all that difficult. Sara will guide you as you delve into the possibilities.

Guitar

Resident Pro Dylan Welsh confesses that he is a chord voicing nerd. Dylan first shows you how the principle of chord voicing works and provides practical exercises. A very actively gigging professional, Dylan has heaps of wisdom to share on how to deploy chord voicing in a band context:

Including:

• The theory and practice of chord voicing.
• Exercises for finding and practicing new chord shapes on your fretboard.
• How to harmonize a melody.
• A myriad of practical applications for chord voicing.

With Dylan’s chord voicing guidance, you’ll open your mind and fingers to a world of chordal bliss.

Bass

Typically, bass players tend to play one note at a time. But Resident Bass Pro Steve Lawson‘ demonstrates that with a few simple chord shapes, you can expand your harmonic expression whether playing alone or with a group. Plus, learning chords on the bass deepens your harmonic understanding of the fretboard when you do go back to single notes:

Including:

• The one shape you need to start playing chords over any major or minor chord.
• Explore both closed and open voicing for triads – both major and minor chords.
• Harmonize the C Major scale so you can start using major and minor thirds around the neck of the bass!
• Three MP3 tracks demonstrate how to play the chords in a musical context, and double as backing tracks for your own chords and improv.

Watch, learn and practice as Steve demonstrates how to expand your bass playing into the chord zone.

Coming Up Next Month…

Ever hear a recording of yourself and thought, “That’s not quite what it sounded like in my head…” You may have been feeling it, but somehow something gets lost in the translation when you put it all on your instrument.

Play it with feeling! Each of our resident pros will show you how to take the music inside you and translate that emotion into moving performances on your instrument. Yes, there are specific instrumental techniques that will help you to access the expressiveness you have always desired in your playing.

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

The post Chord Voicing: Resource Pack Preview appeared first on Musical U.

The approach we teach is based on taking advantage of the fact that there are certain theory concepts and rules which mean that certain chords go together, and certain sequences of chords are more common than others in the music we hear each day. That, coupled with the fact that the ear doesn’t much care what key it’s hearing music in, allows you to very rapidly learn to recognise the chords in a large number of songs by ear, without needing to master each and every possible chord and combination.

So it’s no surprise that this idea, of the “one, four, five and six” chords and how powerful they can be, has come up several times on the show before – and we’ve even dedicated a whole episode to it, we’ll put a link to that in the shownotes.

Today we’re joined by Austin Brentley, the man behind a fantastic new website which, among other things, allows you to immediately find out what songs use certain chords. There are a bunch of cool applications of this idea, including:

• Taking the set of chords you know already, and finding a bunch more songs you’ll be able to play right away
• Figuring out what one chord you should learn next to open up even more songs for you, and
• Providing an easy middle step to learning to recognise chord progressions by ear, using songs you know and love.

It was really cool to get to talk with Austin and learn where this project came from and how people are using it and aside from those ideas we just mentioned, we’re sure you’re going to come away inspired with some ways it could be useful in your own musical life.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• ChordGenome.com
• 1,576 Easy Ukulele Songs That All Use the Same Beginner Chords
• About the I, IV, V, and vi Chords

Transcript

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

Austin: Thanks for having me, Christopher.

Christopher: So I have been in enamored with The Chord Genome Project ever since our team came across it and I’m really looking forward to talking to you about that but I want to begin at the beginning and understand where this project came from and, for yourself, what what was the journey of learning music like?

Austin: Oh, okay. Well, the project originally began as just a tool to help me find easy three-chord songs. I was basically tired of playing “Three Little Birds,” and “Knock on Heaven’s Door” and the ones you keep singing again and again when you search online.

And then somewhere along the way, I think, Axis of Awesome came out with the four-chord song. It was a viral video where they stitched together all these pop tunes and so I realized that there are tons of tunes out there and it’s just a matter of finding them and so I started on creating a search engine that could help me easily find, at that time, three-chord songs.

Christopher: Nice. And let’s rewind the clock a little bit. What were you playing these three-chord songs on and what had you been doing up until this point to know that three-chord songs were even a thing?

Austin: Well, I’ve had a guitar pretty much my entire adult life. Every time I change countries I get a new guitar, well, old guitar from the pawn shop and consistently, it’s just languages there because I’d pick out a tune. I really did enjoy, like, bossa nova music or early rock and roll. Bossa nova was way out of my league, like, “One Note Samba,” do you know that?

Christopher: Mm-hm. By Ella Fitzgerald. Yeah.

Austin: Yeah. So that’s, you know, I was always punching above my weight but even with early rock and roll songs the progress just didn’t materialize because you’re trying to bring together all these unfamiliar chords all at once and if you stop early before you finish that song you don’t get anything, so a lot of wasted effort and then, you know, you feel, I don’t know, defeated, or I felt defeated and so, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Christopher: I can certainly relate to that, you know, I think the traditional methods for learning guitar are very much “Let’s throw all of the chords at you as quickly as possible,” you know, whether you’re learning from a teacher or from a method book and I think that chord overwhelm hits a lot of early guitar players. Were you teaching yourself? Were you studying with a teacher? When did you begin guitar?

Austin: I probably began around 18. I’m 40 now. There weren’t a whole lot of online resources at the time but that really wasn’t the problem. Like, it, there were books and if I’d been more dedicated I could have done it but what often happens is that the songs that inspire you to rush out and get a guitar are usually out of your league or out of my league, anyway, and so it was the same cycle again and again and I said, “Okay. I’m gonna do it this time. I’m gonna sit down with a guitar,” and a week or two I’d give up in frustration.

Christopher: Gotcha. And what kind of family background did you grow up with? Were you someone who was expected to learn an instrument? Was this a total tangent for you compared with what your family were expecting, or…?

Austin: My family’s a very musical family. My parents met at conservatory. My grandparents taught violin, viola, piano for years in the DC metro area which is where I am from. My brother’s a performer. So everybody was expected to study an instrument. I studied flute and piano. You know, like, I did okay but I, it didn’t really click. But when I started to travel more the guitar just made a lot more sense and that really didn’t click.

Christopher: (Laughs)

Austin: I thought it would be easier because I’m not soloing, I’m just strumming chords. I was wrong.

Christopher: Mm-hm. Well, this is something I want to definitely dig into in this episode because I think it’s kind of crazy that piano and guitar are thought of as kind of the default instruments for people to learn in a lot of cases because they are two of the hardest instruments for a beginner to learn if you ask me and, you know, guitar, yes, you sit there and strum but that’s a lot of independent left-hand, right-hand stuff going on and, as we’ve touched on, there, often the method you’re following or the songs that you want to play are expecting an awful lot of expertise from you quite early on in the journey.

Austin: Right.

Christopher: So I’m sure a lot of our listeners who have tried guitar or even struggled through and become guitar players can relate to what you’ve been describing there.

Austin: Yeah. I think it’s, yeah. Like, there are some people who are just naturals and they really don’t understand what I’m talking about but I would suspect that the majority of people out there have tried the guitar, you know, just a friend’s guitar lying around, and the majority of those people are not playing a year later, so yeah.

Christopher: I’ve often thought that if learning guitar wasn’t about learning one new chord every week and one song for each new chord but instead was about learning three chords and then a hundred songs using those chords we might have a lot more continued guitar playing than we do and a lot fewer people giving up in the first six months.

Austin: Yeah.

Christopher: So on that note, how did things change for you? You were, it sounds like you were pretty consistent, you know, buying a guitar each place you moved and strumming away, having these bursts of enthusiasm. Were there any insights or breakthroughs that let you get away from that frustration?

Austin: Well, it, in building this platform, just, basically I kept discovering more and more three-chord songs, even songs that aren’t, like, normally considered three-chord tunes are playable with three simple chords, like, “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” or “I’m a Believer,” by the Monkees, which is, like, the first tune that I could call my own and basically I kept building a larger and larger repertoire and once you have those three chords it’s just a matter of polishing off these new tunes because the slightly different tempos and melodies but still fundamentally the same song, well, not the same songs but they use the same chords and it was just a much easier journey.

Christopher: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about that because the idea of three-chord songs has come up on the show several times before as a really neat way in to playing chords by ear, in particular and when we say three-chord song often we’re kind of assuming it’s gonna be the I, IV, and V chords but I believe with Chord Genome Project you’re not necessarily assuming that, right? When you say three-chord song you literally mean just a song that uses three different chords.

Austin: Correct. Like, the greatest number of songs are going to be, like, ones that use C, G and D or C, F and G, like, the same relationship but there are thousands of chords in the database. Just so we’re clear, like, when you click on a song in the search engine you’re directed to an off-site location, Ultimate Guitar, for example. So it’s really just indexing the songs that are out there in the world, you know, they’re not hosted locally but there are three-chord songs that use minors, seventh chords and the platform is flexible enough that any chords you type in you’re probably going to see results.

Christopher: So why was this important for your learning? I think people listening can probably understand that, you know, if it’s just three chords that’s a relatively easy song but was there more to it than that? Was there more to this idea of thinking really about the chords used in the songs and picking your next song to learn?

Austin: Well, actually, what kept me going is that the more people I told about this idea to, like, they were, like, “That actually makes a lot of sense. There should be a search engine like that,” and so that kept me going at a time when, you know, I wasn’t, you know, I was pouring money and time in but not getting anything back yet. In fact, every hour spent building this was an hour of not playing, so it really was kind of a big investment but that kept me going. Like, the feedback that I got from friends and family.

Christopher: Cool. And so let’s pause for a moment and think about that decision point. So you’ve been learning guitar, you’d been doing these bursts of enthusiasm, it had been a bit frustrating because it felt like every new song that you were kind of trying to take on the world and you gradually realized that actually you could leverage the fact that often there were chords in common across songs and you started to pick songs based on that, right?

Austin: Right.

Christopher: And at some point you thought, “I could build something to figure out these songs for me,” or at what point did you think, you know, this way of learning guitar is really working a lot better?

Austin: Well, so at the time it wasn’t actually for learning, it was just for growing my repertoire and then a buddy asked me, “Well, I’m starting from scratch. I don’t want to do three chords. If I just learned one chord what chord should that be?” and from that came a new feature. So, basically, we had all these songs indexed, organized by the chords they used and with that data you can determine what chord to add next no matter what your level is and that chord should be whatever one allows you to play the most new music, the most new songs and so we built this tool. It’s called “The Next Best Chord Feature” and it looks at what you know, the chords you know, and then it recommends. So if you know G-C-D, for example, it would recommend that you learn E minor next because adding that one chord allows you to play, I mean, we’re talking about going from about 4,000 songs to 12,000 songs just by adding a new chord.

Christopher: Amazing. And that comes back to what we were mentioning there, the 1-4-5 and the 1-4-5-6. You’re adding that six chord and because so many songs use these kinds of progressions your database knows easily 8,000 extra songs that suddenly you can play.

Austin: Exactly and if your starting point is C, F and G then A minor would almost certainly be the next best chord to learn so it’s adaptive, like, no matter what chords you know, including zero, it can tell you, “Well, if you’re gonna learn one chord, learn this one.”

Christopher: Very cool. So that is a really practical way to take what was, kind of, a search engine in the database and turn it into a learning tool, something that can really help people enjoy learning guitar, or, I guess, any instrument that plays chords, faster. Is that right?

Austin: Yes. That’s, basically, once we had these two components built that was the natural leap. Basically, starting from zero, you keep adding one chord at a time, which is much easier than trying to assemble five unfamiliar chords. It just, with that one chord, once you get it down, an entire universe of new songs become available. In fact, you use those new songs to get better at that one chord, which is tough in the very beginning but with practice gets easier and easier and then you’re ready for the next new chord.

Christopher: Nice. So I’m going to ask a couple of questions that I think might be on our listeners’ minds at this point and the first is, can you really play any songs with just one chord, when you were telling your friend what one chord to learn?

Austin: Yeah. Basically any song that you can, well, don’t quote me on this, but any song you can sing in the round, like, “Row Your Boat,” or “Frere Jacques,” probably is playable with one chord. So those are two songs that you can definitely play with a single chord and there is a song that they aired called, “The One Chord Song,” by Keith Irvin but I’ve never heard of it, all playable with any major chord that you want.

Christopher: Very cool, and so the other question they might have been thinking was at the other end of things, supposing you’ve got three or four chords under your belt or maybe half a dozen and this search engine is telling you thousands and thousands of songs you can play with those chords. That’s exciting but it’s also a bit overwhelming, right?

Austin: It is.

Christopher: So how do you turn that into something manageable and something that actually gives you a clear next step?

Austin: Okay. Well, so it’s not an elegant solution, partly because it’s so hard to find information out there, but the site comes with genre and decade filters so if you like rock music from the 50’s and 60’s you would apply those filters and you’d get a list of maybe 100 or so songs that use G, C and D from that. But it’s still highly experimental because songs get re-released every single year and so trying to find the earliest release date is not easy and trying to find, like, the most popular genre assigned, so, like, “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, it’s been on soundtracks probably Christmas albums, pop albums, rock albums even though it’s undeniably a country song so anybody who uses the platform, like, understands that those filters are super, duper beta but they do help because thousands of songs is overwhelming.

Christopher: For sure, and, you know, from my background in digital music and kind of combining science and music I have friends who have worked for Last FM and Musicbrainz and the BBC and I’ve kind of seen a glimpse behind the curtains of how hellish that metadata problem can be.

Austin: Yes.

Christopher: You know, taking a single song and, you know, it’s, what’s obvious to a human that “Ring of Fire” is a country track by Johhny Cash actually can be incredibly hard to pull out from the haystack of data you find online. So —

Austin: Yeah. In fact, I’ve used both The Last FM and Musicbrainz and it’s tough to navigate but until I find a better solution those filters are here to stay.

Christopher: Nice. Well, it certainly does the trick and there were a couple of reasons I and the others on the Musical U team were really excited to discover this project and I think for me it was partly just that geeky appreciation of the challenge you’ve taken on and how simple you’ve made it for the user because behind the scenes I know there’s a crazy amount of implementation and analysis and, kind of, problem-solving that needs to happen but from the user’s perspective it’s as simple as you’ve described it. You know, you type in the chords, you hit search, you do some filtering if you want and you get back the answers.

Austin: Yeah.

Christopher: Super cool. So that geeky appreciation was definitely there but also it really scratched an itch for us because we teach a lot about how to recognize chords by ear and we talk about three-chord songs and four-chord songs and describe it as kind of the shortcut method where, you know, if you learn to recognize just a handful of chords or chord progressions by ear it opens up all of these songs to you compared with if you’re trying to take on all of the major and minor chords at once and so part of the challenge for us is always how can we give people practice tracks or practice examples to work with and so your website is a fantastic resource for that and I would certainly encourage any listeners aside from using it as intended and clicking through to see the chord chart on ultimateguitar.com or wherever it comes from, just that initial search can really be a useful training tool. So if you know you can play C, F and G, do the search, skim down the list of songs, find one you know and then just sit down and try and figure out the chord progression by ear, you know, where do the chords change? Which, is the change in the four, the five? That’s a really fantastic exercise and you’ve skipped that really, I was about to say, dangerous, that’s overstating it, but that potential pitfall of trying to figure out your random song on the radio and not realizing it’s using all kinds of weird chords that you’ve got no chance of recognizing by ear. So that selection process is a really helpful thing for ear training, I think.

Austin: Yeah. I can actually speak to that. Like, the more that I play, like, sometimes the song will come on the radio, like, I have a two-and-a-half-year-old and “Under the Sea,” the Disney tune from Little Mermaid, it’s like, “You know that, I think I can play that with three chords,” and it’s not an official version, like, Disney would not pay me money to perform it but it’s playable with the three chords and I’ve heard that song a thousand times. It never occurred to me and I think just as a result of playing more and more I’m making those connections that you’re talking about.

Christopher: That’s great, and you, we were talking a little bit before we started recording and you were saying how you’d kind of brushed up on music theory along the way to build this project and I think what you just described we should dwell on for a second because I think everyone knows the guitar player who has memorized 300 songs and played for a decade but can’t play by ear at all. So it’s certainly possible to immerse yourself and not develop your ear in that way but you, I think because you have the theory knowledge and this appreciation of what’s going on musically you have be able to kind of leverage that immersion to actually develop the ear skills, it sounds like.

Austin: It’s, you know, it’s an organic and slow process but I’m getting there. Like, I’m picking up music theory tidbits along the way and, like, you know, I wouldn’t hold me up as an example to the world but where I was and where I am now, for me, is a huge difference.

Christopher: And I had assumed, when encountering this project and discovering that you were the guy behind it, I had assumed you must be a programmer and amateur musician like myself who had kind of put this together in his spare time and it was growing into something bigger, but that’s not the case. Tell us a bit about what it took to build the Chord Genome Project.

Austin: Well, I mean, an endless search of developers around the globe, like, this is in year four now, but I’m not a coder at all and trying to explain what it is I want to do to the developer who, you know, is a genius at code but doesn’t know music theory, necessarily, it’s been a struggle but I’ve actually found one who admittedly doesn’t know much music theory, necessarily, but we’ve done some, we’ve covered a lot of ground together and so I explain what new feature I want to add and he’s able to implement it and I’m happy now.

Christopher: And have there been any particular challenges along the way apart from trying to communicate this to coders who maybe don’t get the music theory or quite understand where you’re coming from? Have there been any hurdles to overcome?

Austin: Every day. Every day there’s, like, a new challenge that I didn’t see in advance but, like, one of the big ones early on was the need to standardize chords in the back end. So you can spell, for example, A major many different ways. Just by itself, a capital A, or A with a big m, A major, A major with and without spaces but all those are fundamentally the same chord and so they have to be stored as one value so that a user who searches any of those spellings will see any of those songs use any of those spellings and then we have to do the same thing with all the other chord families to minors, diminished, etc. and also with harmonics.

So once we had indexed most of the songs we were going to use they were probably, I think, 50,000 different chords but after standardization there were 2,000 unique chords, 2,100 or so and as a result of standardization.

Christopher: Interesting. I guess that comes back a bit to that point that what seems obvious to a human is actually quite complex from a machine’s point of view, you know, a human who’s studied a bit of theory knows that a capital A means the same thing as A with a capital m next to it. That’s how chord charts work but to a machine those are two completely different things.

Austin: Yes. I have other challenges, like, I could fill up an entire podcast with — so we’re still in beta and probably for a while. Like, another thing that the songs that we index to, they’re on user-submitted websites like Ultimate Guitar which are fantastic resources but anybody can edit or remove songs so the, what we’ve indexed today won’t necessarily be how the song looks tomorrow, so it’s a constantly moving target and so I’d like to figure out a way to show users more accurate results and you can sometimes, I guess, resuscitate a song. Are you familiar with Archive.org?

Christopher: Mm-hm.

Austin: Yeah. It takes snapshots of the internet but I really don’t want to use that approach. I want to send the traffic to these websites because they put together amazing resources. So that’s another challenge right there.

Christopher: Fantastic. So you mentioned there how there are 2,000 or 2,100 unique chords that your database knows about and, again, I think the listener might be thinking that sounds crazy. (Laughs)

Austin: Yes.

Christopher: You know, “I’ve just learned my first three chords. How do I get from there to 2,000?” Can you speak to that at all, and, you know, if and how someone needs to learn those 2,000 chords?

Austin: Okay. So there are about 350,000 songs in the current index and you need 2,000 chords to be able to play all of those songs and we actually ran a process starting from the first chord and with each new chord you’re able to play a slightly higher percentage of the database. But what we’ve discovered is once you’re at chord number 23 you can play 50% of the songs in this database, which just blew my mind.

Christopher: Wow.

Austin: Thousands of songs, thousands of chords needed to play everything, but with just 23 chords you can play the majority of songs and, like, this index is no slouch. It’s a pretty representative cross-section of songs from genres all over the globe and users from around the world submitting songs they like. So there’s pop, rock, jazz and folk from all different decades. So by extension, in theory you could play roughly 50% of all English-language popular music with, it might not be exactly 23 chords but it would be absurdly low.

Christopher: Amazing. And, to be clear, we’re not even talking about transposing things into a convenient key, are we? Like, you’re talking about playing these songs in the key they were written in.

Austin: Well, yes. And, like, once you land on the page, as written, without any transposing, if you did transpose, I mean, it would probably be 80, 90% if you transposed all of those 23 chords up and down, well, I guess, 11 times. But with 23 you could do a lot of damage. Just 23 chords and so, like, I actually wrote a blog post, “The 23-Chord Challenge,” where, it’s ambitious if you learn one chord a week. I don’t know if I could do that one chord a week on the guitar but if you learn one chord a week then in less than six months you would be able to play roughly 50% of the songs out there, which is kind of a cool concept.

Christopher: Yeah. That’s super interesting and we’ll definitely put a link to that post in the show notes because I think whether or not you want to embark on this challenge or, indeed, use the database to guide you in it, I think that analysis alone is super-fascinating because, you know, we talked a bit about how guitar method books often just throw everything at you and I don’t want to overstate it, but I think often they’re a bit misguided in their choice of chords and, you know, a lot of musicians are left thinking, “Okay, first I have to learn all the major chords and then all the minor chords,” and that’s 24 chords, right there.

Austin: Right.

Christopher: And, you know, it’s not the case that the 23 chords you just mentioned are all of the major and minor chords, by any stretch, so I think if nothing else then everyone listening to this should go check out that blog post and see for yourself, what are those 23 chords that unlock half of the music to you and do a little bit of theory work yourself. If you’re familiar with the idea of 1-4-5 or 1-4-5-6, just look at that chart that Austin’s put together and ask yourself, why are they these chords? Why are these the ones that artists and musicians and songwriters have used again and again?

Austin: Yeah. There are a lot of seven chords. Yeah, if you just did majors and minors, which is an intuitive approach, but you’re leaving a lot of songs on the table.

Christopher: Mm-hm. So that’s a great exercise. Austin, you are a really interesting blend of music and tech with this project and I certainly am a big believer in how technology can make it fun and easy to learn music in a way that’s never been possible before. Aside from the Chord Genome Project, have you come across anything that can help our listeners learn faster or enjoy learning more compared with the traditional approaches?

Austin: Yeah, actually. Like, the purists out there, might hate this. My Dad, a flute teacher, definitely hates this idea but I use this, it’s a metronome. My phone is turned off for the podcast but it’s a metronome that speeds up imperceptibly but it’s, like, it slowly speeds up with time, forcing you to play faster and faster but, like, you don’t really notice it and then every now and then, like, I’ll stop the metronome and then go back 50% of the way, make it 50% slower than where I stopped and then I start it again so, like, because I’m taking a step back, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is unbelievably slow,” but it’s much faster than where I started so that has helped me a lot.

Again, my Dad hates it. He’s all about standard time and, but I would definitely check that out. There are apps like that for Apple and Android, as well.

Christopher: Teriffic. I love that tip. I’m kind of half-heartedly, well, enthusiastically but without a lot of practice time, learning drums at the moment. I have a pair of drumsticks on my desk and I’ve been following a few tutorials that are, like, “Try it at 60 bpm,” and “Try it at 70,” and blah, blah, blah, which is fine but it’s kind of tedious to stop and start like that. So I love that idea of, you know, speeding, both the idea of gradually speeding up and having a metronome that will do it automatically for you and that reset to 50% of the speed so you can enjoy that moment of, “Oh, this is kind of easy, now.”

Austin: Exactly. It kind of reminds me of the mood lighting that restaurants use where over the course of 15 minutes or half an hour the lights become a little bit brighter, a little bit brighter and then all of a sudden it gets dark and romantic, but, you know, it just goes on an infinite cycle, doing that again and again.

Christopher: Is that true?

Austin: Yes.

Christopher: Ha. I have never noticed. I mean, I’ve noticed it getting suddenly darker but I’ve never known they were doing a cycle.

Austin: Yep.

Christopher: That’s fascinating. I’m gonna watch for that next time I eat out. That’s very cool. Wonderful, Austin. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you. Can you tell people where they should go to try out the Chord Genome Project?

Austin: Oh, okay. So thechordgenome.com or you can go to thechordgenomeproject.com. I think by the time this podcast airs we’ll have a search page up that doesn’t require any login. Just head over to the search page then if you’d like to see even more results there are paid versions, obviously, but try before you buy and, you know, I hope it helps the listeners out there.

Christopher: Amazing. I’m sure it will. I think, you know, we talked about checking out that blog post purely for a great insight into chord progression theory and the most useful chords. We talked about using it as a way to guide you in learning guitar or piano and what chords to learn next and also purely to get more fun and repertoire out of the chords you already know and I definitely recommend that ear training exercise, too, where you look up what songs use a certain set of chords and then you just sit down with your instrument and try and figure out for yourself how the progression goes.

So this is an amazing tool to have at your disposal. A big thank you and commendations to Austin for putting it together because I know it can’t have been easy and I think this is going to become a widely used and valuable tool for musicians.

Austin: If anybody does use this site, please do not be shy with feedback, like, if you ever face a problem others might, as well and so it helps me make it better and better, so.

Christopher: Wonderful. So Austin, a big thank you for coming on the show.

Austin: Thank you very much, Christopher. It was a pleasure.

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The post Exploring the Chord Genome, with Austin Brentley appeared first on Musical U.