Author: musicalitywrld

To the uninitiated, this seems like the biggest headache.

Thus, many start learning a lot of scales and arpeggios so that they’re finally sure what notes to play in their solos.

What happens to many players (including myself, for a long period of time) is that they end up knowing a lot of scales and arpeggios without being able to improvise correctly on one.

They know what notes to play, but not how to play them.

Note: All examples I will use from now on are based on guitar improvisation. The general concepts on using rests creatively apply to any musical instrument, but anything related to technique applies specifically to guitar players.

There are many phrasing techniques that you can learn to make your guitar solos shine, the most notable being string-bending and vibrato. And there’s a lot of information on the Internet on how to execute them.

A phrasing aspect that is rarely discussed, however, is the use of silence.

Silence is Golden

There’s nothing to learn, no? You just don’t have to play anything.

True, technically there isn’t much to learn, though things like muting strings correctly on guitar do have a learning curve.

What happens to many guitar players is they think that since there isn’t a lot of technique involved, there isn’t much to learn in using silence.

Except that there is – you need to know where to put the silence, for how long, and why. You will get better at the first two by studying music theory, training your ear and gaining experience in improvisation.

In this lesson, we’ll deal more with the reasons for using rests as well as put them in different contexts through the examples. I will take it as given that you already know the symbols of rest values. If you don’t, give yourself a crash course and come back to this lesson.

Rests have numerous roles in music composition, and the examples below are just a few reasons for why and how you should use rests in your playing. Once you start seeing rests as an improvisation tool, you may discover different reasons for using rests and inserting them in different places to improve your improvisation.

For the purposes of this lesson, we’ll be exploring the following three reasons:

1. To add interest to melodies
2. To create interesting rhythms
3. To increase suspense

We’ll be looking at examples of melodies without and with rests, and dissecting how inserting a bit of silence here and there changes and enhances these melodies. Let’s dive in!

1. Using rests to add interest to melodies

While there is nothing wrong with the melody below, I find it rather uninteresting:

There are many alterations that can be done to make this melody more interesting, such as bending the last note of the first bar up a whole tone, adding vibrato to some of the quarter notes, or playing the first four notes of the second bar legato.

Alterations to the rhythm such as adding some sixteenth notes before the final note, or playing around with dots in front of the quarter and the eighth notes are all options you can use to make such a melody more interesting.

The other option, as you’ll see in the next lick, is to also play around with silence – short periods of silence in this case:

The melody in Example 2 is more appealing to the ear and sounds more fast-paced.

The only difference between the melody in Example 2 compared to Example 1 is that in the second melody, I’m changing half of the quarter notes into silence.

The first two quarter notes in the melody are stopped halfway and replaced by an eighth rest.

In the case of the third quarter, I’m starting with the silence (rest) on the beat and I introduce the eighth note on the second half of the beat.

Needless to say, rests can be used together with other phrasing techniques. In the next example, I’m using rests, a bent string, and an alteration in the rhythm at the beginning of the second bar to add even more flavor to Example 1, like so…

Once you start thinking of these techniques as options in your creativity palette which you can pick and choose at will, you will find that the opportunities to spice up a melody are endless.

For the purposes of this article, however, let’s stick to rests – and explore another possibility where they can be used creatively.

2. Using rests to create interesting rhythms

Before I fully realized the power of silence in rhythm guitar playing, I used to add as many rhythmic subdivisions as possible trying to make my rhythms stand out.

And sometimes they did stand out. Adding rhythmic subdivisions is a good way to add flavor to your rhythms.

Yet, it is when you add silence that your rhythm will start getting that choppy sound some rhythm guitar players are looking for.

I will show you a few examples to demonstrate this. The first is a reggae-style riff that would lose most of its effectiveness if it wasn’t for the silence on the first half of each beat:

                                Am                                                                 Bm    

The next, a punk-influenced power chord riff, is also made effective by the strategic use of rests:

Once again, there are other phrasing techniques that could be applied to this riff, such as palm muting. However, the rests are enough to break the monotony that can be created if you only play a succession of power chords.

The next example is a simple blues shuffle.

There are many variations of the blues shuffle, not all of which involve rests, but the rest in the middle of each triplet helps define that “chug-chu chug-chu chug” sound of the blues shuffle.

The ways you can use rests to add variety to your riffs is endless. The following are some great riffs in which rests play a significant role in making the riff stand out:

• Sails of Charon – Scorpions
• Satisfaction – Rolling Stones
• Foot tapper – Shadows
• N.I.B. – Black Sabbath
• Woman From Tokyo – Deep Purple
• Seven Nation Army – White Stripes
• Cocaine – Eric Clapton

The number of guitar riffs that include rests is next to infinite. The above are just a few iconic riffs that struck me for their brilliant use of silence.

If you’re playing rhythm on any instrument, think of rests as another option you can use to spice things up.

3. Using rests to increase suspense

The next lick I’m using has only one rest: an eighth rest before the final note.

The last note, an A, is the root note of the minor pentatonic scale I’m using. The note before the last creates suspense, accentuated more by the heavy use of vibrato, and wants to resolve to the last note.

Our ear is waiting to hear resolution to the root note and that short rest (which can be longer, depending on context) delays hearing the desired note, which in turn makes it sound more pleasant and satisfying when it is actually played.

Getting Creative with Silence

Though there are many reasons for using rests in music, the above should be enough to give you an idea on how you can use them in your improvisation.

However, “simply knowing” things about music is not enough to make you a great player. You also need to apply them.

The following are a guitar lick and a guitar riff you can use to experiment on. Use rests, as well as other phrasing techniques discussed above and try to make them more interesting.

First, learn the riff as is. Then – it’s time to play! Feel free to add or remove notes or chords, or change the note durations. You can change them to the extent that you wouldn’t say it’s the same lick or riff anymore!

The goal in improvisation is to create, not just to copy!

The lick in Example 8 could do with some silence, as well as some string bending and vibrato on the longer notes. Use your creativity to make it as melodic as you can.

For example, what would happen if you put a rest instead of a quarter note in beat 1 of measure 2? Or, how would the overall sound change if the eighth notes in measure 3 were consecutive sixteenth notes, with a quarter rest separating them from the last G note in the measure?

Remember: your options in using rests do not just include shortening notes to insert silence, but also to replace notes for rests completely.

The same counts for this power chord-based riff:

After you’ve played around with the above lick and riff, it’s time to create your own. Don’t focus on using too many notes – in most of the examples above, I’m using only the same few notes.

Focus on how you are playing the notes and chords you are using, always keeping in mind the role that silence can play in the whole thing!

Expanding Your Musical Palette

In this lesson, like in most of my other lessons, I frequently use terms like “palette of choices” or “options”.

The reason I love these phrases is that they reflect how I approach learning music nowadays.

In the early days, practicing guitar and learning music theory were just a means to an end. I wanted to become good as soon as possible, so practiced a lot to achieve my goal (to join a band and become a rock star!)

While approaching practicing like this can work, it’s very easy to kill your dream along the way.

Today, I see every new thing I learn as a new option. I don’t practice to reach some loosely defined dream (though I have clearly defined goals) but to add more options to my palette, every single time I practice my guitar (or learn music theory).

Whether you’re learning a scale, a chord, a technique, a concept, or a rhythm, think of it as a new option you didn’t have before you started practicing.

And what I’ve tried to show you in this lesson is that among your many options, you also have the right to remain silent, or rather, use silence to your convenience when improvising.

Robert Callus is a guitar player, music teacher, songwriter and blogger from the island of Malta, Europe. On his website Learn Guitar Malta, he does his best to convince you that learning music and getting hooked on the process is in fact a road to happiness and will teach you, not only how to play music, but also how to use it as a vehicle to happiness.

The post How to Use Rests Creatively When Improvising appeared first on Musical U.

In our first episode for improv month we talked about how to approach learning to improvise and how it’s something core and fundamental to any musician, it can take on many forms across many genres.

At the same time improvisation is something that is most commonly associated with jazz music in particular. And so, we were keen to kick off improv month talking to someone who’s expert in how you learn to improvise jazz.

Nick Mainella is the host of the “10 Minute Jazz Lesson” podcast which really lives up to its name! As jazz fans but not jazz musicians ourselves, we have been really enjoying listening to this show and we would highly recommend it for anyone who’s interested in learning to play jazz.

The way Nick discusses improv on his show was so well aligned with the way we teach it at Musical U we knew we had to have him on the show, and we wanted to start improv month with this interview because as you’ll hear, so much of learning jazz improv is in fact applicable to any genre and style of improvising.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Nick’s own upbringing and what he did to compensate for *not* having a natural ear for music.
• The specific exercises he finds most useful for learning to improvise.
• One powerful memory he has that helped set his mindset right for improvisation for years to come, and which he passes on to his students if they’re at all shy or nervous about improvising.
• And why someone who wants to play jazz might actually be best served by first studying the blues.

It was so much fun to talk to Nick about jazz and improv and he dropped several really valuable nuggets of wisdom in this conversation – simple things that you can go away and apply yourself and really benefit from.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• The 10 Minute Jazz Lesson podcast
• 60 Days to Crushing the Blues course
• The Riff Everyone Plays Wrong
• Donna Schwartz Music
• About Active Listening podcast episode
• About the Power of Solfa podcast episode
• The 10 Minute Jazz Lesson podcast: Learning Vocabulary

Transcript

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

Nick: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Christopher: So I’d love to start at the beginning and we know about your fantastic projects these days with the Ten Minute Jazz Lesson Podcast and the courses you’ve been developing, but where did it start for you as a musician? What were those early years like?

Nick: Yeah, I guess it’s a pretty standard story at least for people in the U.S. I actually grew up — my father is a great saxophone player, had been a music educator. Let’s see. He’s been teaching music in public schools for about forty years now so he was a huge inspiration, played with bands all over the area, went to Berklee in Boston in the 1970’s, always had an amazing record collection around the house and I just kind of grew up listening to him play music and kind of absorbing that culture so when it came time to choose an instrument of course everybody wants to be like their parents so I chose the saxophone because that was the instrument that I had kind of been hearing so that was about, you know, fourth grade and then I had the distinct opportunity of growing up with one of the best music programs in the area, probably the best music program in the area so I knew from a young age that I was diving into, first of all kind of a very serious program that had expectations from their students and just had a general culture of, you know, “If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do it to the maximum.”

So I took to the saxophone almost immediately. I think that was probably — had a lot to do with just listening to so much great music and having the sound in my ears growing up. I don’t think it was necessarily natural ability but an intense desire to do it well almost right from the very beginning and also, you know, there are so many great musicians around me and growing up with my father teaching in the same school system as I was going to I got to hear all the high school musicians and be sort of around the best of the best in my area so basically just took it from there and as I went through middle school and high school starting getting more and more serious about it and studying privately. That was a huge thing that my father had me do very early because he understand the value that comes along with having that one-on-one time with a great teacher. So I think, you know, right in sixth grade, probably I started studying privately with somebody and that was huge for me because I think you start to realize how deep music iswh you get that one-on-one time with a fantastic musician. And then, you know, when I got to high school it was just kind of the same but a little bit more full throttle, a lot more musical opportunities, chances to perform, different ensembles, doing things like the all-state festivals, honors bands and stuff like that. It just kind of got me more and more excited about it as I got older and older and more experienced and ended up deciding to go to school for music so I went to my undergrad at the University of New Hampshire here in the United States and majored in performance and then ended up taking a year off after that to do some gigging and teaching and just generally live the life of a musician which was really eye-opening for me and I’m actually very very glad that I did that, took that year in between undergrad and graduate school and then I headed out to the midwest to go to Western Michigan University to do my graduate work and that really I think was a turning point for me. Being a graduate student allows you a lot of time that I think undergraduate work doesn’t to just conentrate on your instrument.

When I’m in undergrad, you know, you’ve got all these classes, you’re running around, you’re taking all your general education requirements, it’s generally just a crazy time of life and unfortunately sometimes the instrument and music takes a back seat to just kind of being crazy like I said, you’re kind of running around trying to take care of all this extraneous stuff. So when I got to graduate school I really felt like, “Okay, I’ve got,” you know, “four to five hours of uninterrupted time and the time that is interrupted is to actually go and take classes that are very, very much related to your career after you get out of school.” So I truly believe that those two years that I spent in Michigan were someof the best of my life just in terms of really, really getting into what I was gonna be doing after school.

So that’s kind of it. And since I’ve gotten out of, you know, that was about eight, nine years ago that I graduated from Western Michigan and basically just been doing kind of the approach that I think most musicians have to do these days, a mix of teaching, performing, you know, very recently having gotten into the kind of entrepreneurship route, although I do think that all musicians are naturally entrepreneurs you won’t last very long if you don’t have that entrepreneurial spiritual to kind of make things happen for yourself. But yeah, that’s kind of it. I play with a bunch of bands here around the Boston area, do a lot of teaching both online and in person, and doing these podcasts and doing this kind of online education thing which I think is gonna open up a lot of doors for musicians of the future, this connectedness that we have that wasn’t around in the very recent past, you know, we didn’t have this. So yeah, that’s basically it. That’s kind of my story.

Christopher: Cool. And you mentioned that jazz was around you almost from the very beginning with your family and your father. Was it jazz, jazz, jazz all the way through that journey?

Nick: It wasn’t, actually and I think that’s one of the best things about it when I think back on my development as a musician. My father was very, very into like, a wide breadth of music. He was definitely into jazz, but, you know, bands like Tower of Power, Chicago. He was also very, very into, like, classic rock and then another thing, I came up with a group of musicians that I went through high school with that I still play with to this day a lot and they opened my eyes to so much different music. Like, I’ll never forget in I think it was ninth grade probably my freshman year, somebody — one of my friends handed me a Tribe Called Quest CD and this was like, it blew my mind, you know what I mean? I wasn’t on the hip hop radar at all, didn’t think that I would like it and then I got this record and I wore it out and to this day, like, one of the biggest genres of music that really gets me going is the hip hop side of things so it really allowed me to, you know, discover a lot about other forms of music and also not be kind of a jazz snob as some people tend to be. They think it’s, you know, the only music that’s worth playing, worth listening to and it’s — I really don’t think that’s the case, you know, we had a metal band in high school so really, we had a lot of different stuff going on and I really credit that to keeping my mind open when it comes to playing music.

Christopher: Hm. And I think you’ve neatly sidestepped a challenge that lot of musicians have around jazz which is it can seem very intimidating and like an advanced genre you will eventually be able to play and it sounds like because you had that taste from the beginning it was always part of the medley for you. It wasn’t that jazz was unreachable, that you would eventually get there. Is that right?

Nick: Exactly. And the thing about jazz is that, I mean, it is intimidating and that’s, I think that’s part of the allure, right, is that this is a type of music that you can go, you can study for your entire life and not get to the nexus of playing jazz. There’s always something new to learn. There’s always something that you can improve upon. So yeah, that kind of, it’s a double-sided thing, you know, where I think part of the reason that people play jazz is because it is inimidating and you can prove something to yourself if you can actually sound really good playing jazz but I do agree with you. I think that it is less intimidating to just start than a lot of people think it is. You can definitely just go for it and come out with a lot of great results without dedicating 12 hours a day to it, you know?

Christopher: So at Musical U when we cover the topic of improvisation, which is obviously at the heart of jazz, we come back again and again to your ear and the importance of understanding in your head what’s going on in the music not just intellectually from a theory perspective but orally understanding the notes. It sounds like you had a, I mean, the way you describe it it sounds like a very neat, straight line trajectory to career success but were there any problems for you along the way? Did you have a natural ear from day one that let you improvise jazz, or how was that journey for you?

Nick: Yeah, that’s a really good question because without a doubt the ear is the, sort of the key to unlocking everything when it comes to music and especially jazz because it’s such a, it has such an aural tradition to it, you know, real books and pieces of paper are a fairly new thing in jazz music, you know, if you look back to the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, there wasn’t any of this stuff, you know, you went to the gig and tried as hard a you could to remember what they were playing and you went home and you figured it out, right? But it definitely wasn’t a straight line trajectory to me. In fact, I definitely don’t have a natural ear and that was actually really tough for me when I was coming up because I was actually surrounded by people that had that very natural ability and at times it was very, very frustrating because I was working so hard to get better at this music and I was watching some of my peers get better a lot faster than I was and I think it didn’t really register with me until I was a little bit older that it was in fact my ear that was, kind of, holding me back so just like anything else in life, if you’re not naturally gifted in a certain skill you just have to work, work, work on it and even through my undergraduate work I was still very, very behind when it came to ears and to this day I still feel very, very behind when it comes to aural skills but it’s something that I work on every single day and it’s probably the most important part of my practice routine. In fact, I take care of it at the very, very beginning of my practice every day because I know that I’m gonna be the most on at the by beginning of my practice routine. My mind is gonna be the freshest, so I tend to reserve that for the thing I feel is the most important and without a doubt for me that’s ears, for sure.

So it hasn’t always been easy. It’s still not easy but, you know, I think the difference is today I realize just how important it is and that I’m trying to get better at it, you know, all the time.

Christopher: I’m sure that’s really reassuring and inspiring for a lot of our listeners to hear someone who is as established as a jazz educator as you are didn’t find that it came naturally from day one and did put in the work and was able to achieve what they’d hoped to in terms of improvisation.

Take us back, though, to when you were maybe starting to recognize that your ears might be an area for improvement. Where there any kind of milestones or lightbulb moments or concepts that made it easier for you to learn these skills and to develop your ear?

Nick: Yeah. I think that there was definitely one moment — I can distinctly remember this — where whenever I was playing tunes when I was younger the way that I would keep track of where I was in the tune was just simply to, like, count. So you can see how that could get in the way of fully expressing yourself when you’re improvising if your mind is caught up in, “Don’t get lost. Don’t get lost. Don’t get lost.” I mean, that’s a huge hindrance to feeling free when you’re improvising so I can distintly remember one day being in my jazz combo ensemble in college and we were playing a tune and all of a sudden I stopped paying attention to the counting and normally this would be a recipe for disaster. I would get totally lost and not be able to recover at all, finish my solo halfway through the form, something like that but I stopped counting, I let go, and all of a sudden I could just hear where the band was and that was, like, you know, the biggest lightbulb moment I had gotten to that point was, Okay, a lot of this work that I’ve been doing, it’s paying off, I can actually hear what the chord progression is,” and I immediately knew that this was gonna be huge for me, you know, it was gonna be thing that was gonna open a lot of doors for me. So that would be kind of my epiphany moment and the nice thing about it is, is I’ve found once you can develop that skill and do it one time you pretty much have that skill from then on, right?

Now, it’s not like I never, ever got lost in a tune ever again in my whole life. I wish it were like that but it was a moment where I could feel finally confident in my ears and learn to open my playing up a little bit more because of that confidence and not being tied to, “Okay, we’re in this measure, now we’re in this measure, now were at — oops, don’t — wait, are we in this measure or are we in that –” you know what I mean? Like, I’m sure almost everybody out there has gone through that feeling of barely hanging on to keeping your place. So just got to keep doing it and eventually it will happen. I think about playing music as a lifelong series of frustrations followed by epiphanies because you work, work, work for months, even years sometimes with no end in sight and it’s easy to get into that mindframe of, “This is never gonna happen for me. This is never gonna happen,” and then one day, boom, it clicks, and all of a sudden you have that skill for life, at that point.

Christopher: Hm. I think that ‘s a great way to think about it. So at Musical U one thing we often explain to people is that when it comes to ear training there are kind of two ways to do it and one of which we’d call active ear training when you are doing repetitive exercises, for example, to recognize different types of intervals and you’re specifically trying to develop that skill and the other is what we’d call passive ear training where you are working in music, you’re practicing, you’re using your instrument. You might be trying things like playing by ear or improvisation but you’re just kind of allowing your ear to develop passively along the way and it sounds like with that form understanding for you that was kind of a byproduct of passive ear training. You’d been playing and you’d been playing these forms and you’d been aware of them, but it was that kind of subconscious process that finally unlocked that for you.

What’s the balance been for you overall in terms of active versus passive? How have your ears developed over the years?

Nick: Yeah. I mean, I think the the first thing that comes to mind is that I’m just a huge music fan so I’m listening to music all the time so that’s kind of my passive ear training, right there, right, and then going into situations where I’m playing new music by a composer that I’ve never, ever heard before and of course you want your ears to latch on to that first, first and foremost. You’re trying to kind of feel out the landscape aurally, right? So that’s another form of passive ear training but you’re actively participating in it. And then I think the biggest things in terms of active ear training for me is sight singing. I can’t say enough about sight singing. I think that that is probably the biggest part of my develop in terms of active ear training because what you’re doing is you’re getting your natural instrument which is your voice to reproduce a series of intervals or a melody, you know, things like learning solfegge. And it’s kind of funny because a lot of jazz musicians will, “Well, I don’t need to know solfegge. I don’t need to know that stuff. That’s for, you know, vocalists or classical musicians or…” but it really is something for everybody, you know, if you have that skill down you can make sense of so much of the music you’re playing if you can sing it first, right? And solfegge is a great way to go about that. So sight singing, things like, there’s a very, very famous teacher who passed away a couple of years ago in the Boston area named Charlie Benackis and since I grew up in the Boston area a lot of my teachers had studied with him and he had this great, great, ear training system where he would play a little, you know, 1-1-5-1 progression and then play a note and you would have to identify that note and the beauty of the system was first of all you’re hearing the note against tonality so you’re hearing it against a cadence that you just heard. So you’re learning to relate that note to, like I said, a tonality but the beauty of this ear training system was that after you get really good at identifying one note then you move on to two notes, then you move on to three notes and so on and so forth until there is a couple of teachers that I had that you could play 11 notes and they could actually tell you what note weren’t playing.

Christopher: (Laughs)

Nick: So that’s a pretty amazing level of aural comprehension. So that was a big thing that I did and then just things, like, you know, having a friend play chords, identifying them, playing a root and singing up a chord, so a lot of it was very active for me just because I knew that I had a natural deficit when it came to ear training but of course the passive ear training is still happening every day just simply by listening to recordings and maybe singing along with them or listening to a recording so much that you know every single note in that recording. That’s definitely a huge part of it. So I would say it was pretty balanced for me in terms of active and passive, the passive being the really fun part and the active being the part that was a lot of hard work.

Christopher: Very cool. So what I love about that answer and I think the reason I’ve enjoyed listening to your podcast, The Ten Minute Jazz Lesson Podcasts so much is that you, I think are coming from a similar perspective to us on this topic, you know, you didn’t just give the stereotypical jazz educator’s response of to train your ears, just transcribe and repeat the vocab of the artists you admire. Clearly, to you it’s important to really understand and pick apart the notes you’re hearing and the chords you’re hearing and the relationships between them.

Nick: Yeah. Absolutely, and I mean, for jazz transcription is probably, you know, the most important thing that you can do, learning from the masters came before you. But yeah, there is a difference between, you know, taking a line and playing it verbatim. So let’s say you take a Charlie Parker lick and then you literally just insert that lick into your solo. That’s a great way to do it at first, and I highly suggest that everybody do that so that youknow what it feels like to play what the greats have played before us. But very, very quickly, if you want to kind of make your mark on music you’re gonna have to take a left turn from that and I fully believe, and this is something that we talk a lot about on the podcast, is, take a great lick from somebody that you love and then somehow make it your own. So it’s more about unpacking the concepts that they’re using rather than just learning the line verbatim, right? So that is a big thing and I think that that is, like, picture your favorite artist, right? So anybody listening out there, think about your favorite artist and why they’re your favorite artist and I think a big reason why they would be is because they’re unique. They don’t sound like anybody else, right? They have their own voice. So I think it’s important to develop that as quickly as possible but also jazz is a music where we have to pay homage to the people that came before us and we have to learn from them, right? It’s kind of awesome in jazz, and I guess it’s like this in a lot of fields, but I can take lessons from John Coltrane simply by sitting and learning the stuff that he played and, you know, I’m sure I don’t have the same thought processes he had, but I can interpret it in my own way, and, you know, in a sort of a once-removed kind of way I am taking lessons from the greats so I think that’s a fantastic way to go about it.

Christopher: Yeah. I really appreciated the way you explained it in your episode on learning vocabulary, which was you were immediately saying, “Yes, learn it. Yes, learn it in all twelve keys, but the way to learn it is to think about, you know, what notes are they picking? Are these the chord tones? Are these passing tones?” You were really saying, analyze it so you understand what makes that riff that riff and then obviously you have a much better ability to make it your own or to play it in any key. And I think that’s a subtlety that a lot of people miss out on when they hear team advice, learn vocab or study the greats, they just kind of learn it by rote and that’s that. So I really appreciate it that you went one level beneath and you really encourage people to pick it apart themselves.

Nick: Yeah. And it can be maddening, to tell you the truth to try to regurgitate vocabulary exactly because , I mean, think about what you’re doing at that point. You are trying to play something that you’ve in essense memorized, right? So if you get halfway through a line that you’ve memorized and you mess up, you’re done, right? You’re gonna, you’re falling apart at that point because you’re never gonna have thought about, “All right, if this line falls apart, what do I do? What do I do?” Right? So for a lot of years I actually did that. I would try to insert vocabulary verbatim and I mean, my solos were terrible because it really was, it was like trying to cobble together a whole bunch of disparate music and it didn’t sound like me and if I messed one of the lines up that was it for the next eight bars. I would just be so mortified that I couldn’t, you know, play that Charlie Parker line exactly like I memorized it and what’s wrong with me, and then at some point I realized, “Okay. I can’t do this anymore. It’s just not gonna be sustainable” and it’s, like, going back to the answer before, “it doesn’t really sound like me,” you know. So I think you can almost hear that when somebody’s just kind of regurgitating vocabulary and some people are really, really good at it and you can still tell that they’re kind of doing it but it sounds amazing. I’m definitely not one of those people.

Christopher: That’s interesting. It reminds me of Scott Devine from Scott’s Bass Lessons put out a great video last week called something like, “The Riff That Everyone Plays Wrong,’ and he had this bass line from Sissy Strutt where he put together, like, five YouTube videos of famous people misplaying this bass line and it’s funny because, you know, the point of video was to teach you how to play it right and kind of identify, like, this is the rhythym section, this is a bit of the rhythym that everyone plays a different way but I think the underlying message was interesting because it was “All of these famous people play it wrong. It doesn’t matter.” You know, they’re playing a good baseline and the fact that it’s not 100% true to the original really is beside the point. No one cares in the audience.

Nick: Definitely.

Christopher: I think that’s an important thing to remember when you’re approaching with admiration and respect these greats of jazz that doesn’t prohibit you from making it your own and feeling free to interpret it your own way.

Nick: Exactly. Exactly, and, you know, just one last thought on this. If you’re trying to sound as good as somebody like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane, it’s gonna make you feel bad because I don’t know about you but I have no delusions of grandeur that I’m ever going to be the musician that John Coltrane was so I think the most that I can hope to do is develop my own sound and not compare it to somebody like that and not say, “Wow, you know, John Coltrane was playing all of these sixteenth note lines and he was doing all these different substitutions and, wow, it’s so amazing. I need to do exactly that. It’s just not gonna happen, so it’s better for me to kind of take my own path while continuing to try to be as skilled as I can and as good as I can on my instrument and my music. I find it really kind of toxic for myself to try to compare myself to somebody like that.

Christopher: Mm-hm. So we’ve gone deep there into a few aspects of ear training and improvisation but I’d love to step back if we could and talk a bit about how you would approach improvising with a student, you know, if someone came to you and let’s pretend they’re an adult saxophone player who has a few years of technique under their belt. They’ve got the basics of playing their way through a jazz standard but they are, you know, on step zero when it comes to improvisation. If they come to you and say, “Hey, Nick, can you teach me to improvise?” what would that look like?

Nick: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that a lot of it has to do with the individual. I think that would be the most important thing to me is I would kind of like to hear them play first to see what some of their strengths and weaknesses are but I think a couple of things that I give to all students would be knowledge of chord symbols. That’s one thing that I think turns a lot of people off from the very beginning because if you think about it, this system we have of writing chord changes and what they infer it’s akin to learning a different language and obviously we’d know how intimidating that is to learn a completely different language so I think knowledge of chord symbols and trying to simplify that as much as possible is usually pretty close to the beginning for me so that somebody can confidently look at something like the blues or a basic jazz standard that has pretty tame chords in it and be able to make sense of that, know what the scale that goes along with that chord symbol is, know what the chord tones are that go along with that chord symbol.

Chord tones are really important to me as well because they’re kind of the safe zone. You know that if you’re playing a chord tone it’s going to sound good no matter what, so that’s a really, really important thing to give people almost right away because they feel like, “All right, at least I can get through this and I know that these four notes will sound good over every single chord.”

So that’s a big thing in my book and that goes more to like the analytical side and then a second thing would be, like, almost immediately will give somebody an extremely, extremely easy solo to start transcribing. Lately I’ve been giving all my students, like, a Chet Baker vocal melody to actually transcribe because he’s so clear in the way that he sings and he tends to be very simple but beautiful and effective. So, you know, knowledge of chords symbols and immediately getting the ear going, immediately getting it to assimilate stuff into your ears and then reproduce it on your instrument I think would be the two biggest things, and then, of course, you can branch out into the thousand other skills you need shortly after. That’s a good kind of place to start that doesn’t, like you said, intimidate people too much.

Christopher: Very cool. I think those are two really valuable, practical starting points. One thing we’ve found is that like jazz itself, improvisation can be really intimidating to people and particularly if you come from the classical world you’re taught to not play your own notes and you’re taught to only play notes if you’re confident they’re right. Do you have any kind of mindset approaches or kind of philosophy of improv that you impart to your students if they come to you with that kind of rigid concern about making mistakes in improv?

Nick: Yeah. I think what I would do at first is just kind of play free as kind of out there as that sounds. It’s a great way to just kind of let go on the instrument and I make it clear to my students that, “Okay this is not an exercise where we’re really trying to accomplish anything. Let’s just play,” right, and it might sound, well, it will definitely sound horrible at times. It will definitely sound beautiful at times but the important part here is that we’re just kind of connecting with our instrument, connecting with our ears and just kind of going for it and you’d be amazed at how nervous this makes people, especially, like you said, people coming from a world where everything is very, very rigid and you only play the, you know, the most difficult repertoire and you, you know, at all times, when you pick up your instrument you need to be sounding amazing and you can never let anybody see the weaker sides of your playing. That’s a very militant way of thinking about music but it’s pervasive in a lot of music so I like to just —

I’ll never forget this. I had a great combo instructor in my undergraduate work and one of the first days that we came into combo he turned off the lights and he said, “All right, we’re not turning them on for the next 40 minutes and we’re just gonna play. We’re just gonna play.” And it was huge for me, I mean, if the lights had been on, you would have seen the panic written all over my face but it was really, really beautiful what he did. He turned off the lights to take away any of that self-conscious feeling you might have. You can’t see the people you’re playing with so there’s no visual communication and it really, I think it dropped everybody’s guard. It opened everybody’s ears up and it provided for this amazing way to connect with this new ensemble that I was playing with and it kind of set the tone for the rest of the year because one of the first days we had had this connection that we all made through our ears and this dropping of ego and dropping of self-consciousness and we just kind of went for it.

So I would say that, like, if you are somebody who gets caught up in feeling tied to a certain way of playing or feeling married to the aspect of, like, “I can never let anybody hear me sound anything less but my best,” you know, just get into a room with your instrument and just play, you know, just play whatever comes into your mind. Just let it come out of the instrument and don’t judge yourself, you know. That has a great way of really opening up your connection with the instrument and your connection with music in general. So I don’t know if that’s too, like, woo-woo, out there, but —

Christopher: No, I love that and I think it’s fantastic because just play is advice you do sometimes hear in the improv world, you know, the jazz greats, “Oh, they just picked up a trumpet and they played.”

Nick: Right.

Christopher: But what you just explained is 100% practical. It’s saying, you know, “Strip off your inhibitions. Strip off your, you know, judgmental voice inside and just get back to connecting with your instrument and your ears and making music for the sake of making music.” I think that’s a lovely way to approach improvising.

Nick: Because, I mean, when we were kids and we first picked up our instrument, I mean, we sounded horrible but it was the funnest thing in the world to do, right, was to pick up your instrument, make some interesting sounds. You didn’t know what you were doing but you didn’t care. It was kind of the wonder of that instrument and going, “Wow, I can actually make a sound on this. This is really cool.” So I try to get back to that not always super successful at it because I can get caught up in my own stuff just as anybody else can but I try to do it on a semi-regular basis.

Christopher: Mm-hm. That’s interesting. That’s something that’s come up a few times on the podcast is that concept of beginner’s mind and how actually the beginner can have a huge advantage in terms of experimenting and being open to new ways of doing things but of course we all get caught in the trap of expertise and those adult inhibitions. It can be really hard to reconnect, so I love that exercise to just kind of, maybe even turn off the lights yourself and get back to just playing.

Nick: Yeah, and I get, some of my youngest students are the most inspiring to me and I’ll steal stuff from them all of the time, whether it be just their attitude about the instrument, I’ll start thinking, “Wow. I need to have more of that kind of attitude, just having fun,” or whether it be something really interesting they do on the instrument that because we’re studied musicians that have an expectation about the way we play we would never do. So I’ve stolen stuff from elementary school kids a lot (laughs) because they just think about it in such a different way than we do.

Christopher: Very cool. So we’ve talked a lot there and said almost nothing that’s specific to the saxophone but you are a saxophonist. That is your primary instrument and I believe you even have a new podcast coming out, “All About Sax,” is that right?

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. So myself and a colleague of mine, Donna Schwartz, she lives out in California, she’s very, very connected with the saxophone world, saxophone industry. He’s a marvelous educator and saxophone player. So we had an idea to start a podcast and we’re going to call it, “Everything Saxophone,” and what we’re really gonna try to do is just cover every aspect of playing the instrument. It’s going to be based around interviews with some of our collective favorite saxophone players just trying to get into the minds of some of the most talented people in the world and then, you know, doing stuff like reviewing equipment. Equipment’s a big thing for saxophone players. You can go down that rabbit hole very, very easily so maybe starting to talk about some of the better equipment out there, reviewing albums. I think it’s just gonna be generally a place for the saxophone community to kind of rally around but certainly if you don’t play saxophone I would recommend tuning into the interviews because, as we all know, regardless of what instrument you play there’s just brilliant people playing every instrument and that’s one of the things that I enjoy the most is hearing interviews with my heroes and getting into their thought process a little bit. So we’re really excited about it. We’re gonna launch sometime in March and hopefully bring a brand new episode of interviews and reviews and all of that kind of stuff every week.

Christopher: That’s amazing. I’m a big fan of Donna’s so I’m excited to hear that you guys are teaming up on that one.

Nick: Oh, great, yeah, she’s amazing.

Christopher: So that is, as you say, applicable and interesting even if you don’t play sax and one thing that jumped out to me on your website was you offer Skype lessons and you say on your website, you know, even if you don’t play saxophone, drop me a line and let’s talk because maybe I can still help you with jazz with improv. Tell me how that works, number one, how the Skype lesson thing is working, because I know a lot of our listeners are probably interested but haven’t tried it and aren’t sure if it is as good as an in-person lesson and secondly, you know, specifically if you’re teaching someone who doesn’t play sax, how does that work?

Nick: So I’m not gonna lie and say that Skype lessons are exactly the same as being in the same room with somebody. I mean, it’s definitely a different experience, right? So there are some things, you know, subtlety of tone, things like that that aren’t quite the same when you’re teaching over Skype but I still think that it’s an extremely valuable tool and I’ll use myself as an example.

I regularly take lessons with people all over the country that normally I would have to get on a plane or get in my car and drive six hours to New York City or something like that. So I’m currently using them myself and they’ve been invaluable to me. I can take lessons with my heroes from this room that I’m sitting, you know, talking to you in today.

So I take a bit of a different approach to Skype lessons where a lot of it is based on Sibelius, so I’ll fire up Sibelius and that’s actually one of the beautiful things about Skype lessons is that you can share your screen with the person you’re having a lesson with and I can literally write out exercises to my heart’s content or illustrate any points that I’m making and I find that students really, really like that and in fact I have a lot of students that come into the Skype lessons really unsure of whether they’re gonna like t or not and then at the end of the lesson I’ll say, “Wow,” you know, “that was really great the way that we can share this Sibelius screen and anything you’re talking to me about that you can immediately illustrate and we can listen to it together.” So I think that that’s one of the greatest aspects of it and that makes it something that surprises a lot of people.

And then going to your point about, you know, instructing people not just on the saxophone, jazz is such a deep topic that, you know, we don’t need to be playing the same instrument to get a lot out of our time together because there’s a million things that we can talk about as relates to just harmony to ear training. In fact, I have a lot of guitar students, I have flute students, I have students of every different instrument and we’re not, obviously I can’t instruct a guitar player on how to, you know, what’s the best hand position for this chord or instrument-specific things but we can certainly get very, very deep in, “Okay, how do we play over the blues?” “How do we start to approach bebop?” “How do we solidify an ear training routine that works for you?”

So I find Skype to be really, really great for that kind of stuff. While I would love to be in the same room as all of my students it’s just not possible and it’s really, really great these days that if you find somebody who you really really enjoy their approach to teaching and their way of thinking about music you can email them and be virtually in the same room as them the next day if you want to. So I think the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks and I’ve gotten so much out of taking lessons and teaching over Skype that I think it’s one of the best technologies out there.

Christopher: I 100% agree and the advice I give when people ask is that if you’re at day one of learning an instrument it might be good to do it in person just because there’s the physicality that you might want some pointers on, but after, you know, a month or two of playing you’re absolutely as good doing Skype lessons as in person and to me you’re much better off with an excellent teacher you get on really well with on Skype than a mediocre teacher who just happens to live down the road and no dispespect to music teachers. I have huge admiration for all music teachers even the mediocre ones but I just think that, as you say to be able to to connect with someone who truly gets what you you’re trying to do and teaches in the right way for you is a really powerful thing.

Nick: It is. It’s invaluable and without a doubt the comment I hear the most from these, you know, some of the best jazz players in the world that I’ve been lucky enough to study with over Skype, they always say, “All of my most serious students are Skype students.”

Christopher: Oh. That’s interesting.

Nick: Because it’s true, I mean, if, like, you’re willing to, you know, do, kind of the distance learning thing, generally you’re pretty serious about music and you’re definitely seeking to take lessons with the best people possible even if they don’t happen to be in your immediate area.

Christopher: So one last thing I wanted to touch on before we wrap up was if someone went to The Ten Minute Jazz Lesson Podcast website what they might expect to see is a course on learning jazz but in fact what they’d find is a video course called, “Sixty Days to Crushing the Blues,” and if you’re not immersed in the world of jazz yet that might strike you as pretty odd because to a lot of people blues is a separate genre to jazz. Tell us about that course. Where did that come from and why is it blues that you teach in the course?

Nick: Yeah, so blues is probably one of the most important tools for jazz musicians that can open them up to the rest of the world of jazz and you only need to think about kind of the linear history of this music, right, I mean, it started in the fields with spirituals and then shortly after that it morphed into the blues and then it morphed into this thing called jazz and then it morphed into, obviously a lot of other things but jazz really did come from the blues so every jazz musician is expected to be able to play over the blues and in fact that is one of the first things. If you were to look around the United States and you were to take a peek at all of the different states like jazz all-state, that’s what we call it here, like the honors bands, generally what you’re going to find is the audition requirement is play over blues, all right, so this is one of the most important things and it’s really nice because the blues is very accessible, you know, generally it’s a twelve-bar form, so you’re not caught up in these 32-bar forms that you can get lost in very easily, generally they’re comprised of anywhere from three to seven chords, right, so you’re not dealing with a million different chords coming, flying at you as fast as possible and it really opens — there’s a lot of the essential chord progressions that we see in a lot of the other jazz standards or other forms of jazz. They’re represented in the blues, right, you know, playing over the one chord, playing over the four chord, playing a 2-5-1 progression.

It’s all there in the blues so I like to start a lot of my students off, in fact, that’s probably about 90% of my students, that’s the first thing we work on is the blues and if you can develop a skill set over the blues you can transfer that skill set to so many other things you’re gonna do in jazz so when I developed this video course I thought it would be great to do kind of a reflection of what it would be like if you were studying with me. I would give you a certain assignment to do over this week and then that would progress into these next assignments and that would progress into these next assignments and one of the tough things is that, like, if I’m teaching an adult student or an extremely busy high school student they don’t always get to complete that stuff every single week so with a video course it’s really great because whether you have 20 minutes a day or whether you have eight hours a day it’s kind of a self-guided course of study so you could spend three weeks on the first week, right, and that’s totally fine but I’ve basically called it “Sixty Days of Crushing the Blues” because it is laid out and it’s an eight-week course, right, and it really will bring you from, like, your very, very basic knowledge, “What do these chord symbols mean? How do I get around them?” to towards the end of the course you’re really playing some bebop material and really starting to understand how some of the greats approach the blues to get that sound that we kind of all want to achieve.

So I highly suggest it if you’re looking for an easy way to get into improvisation. That can be a great way to start and it’s great because you can, like I said, you can really just take yourself through it without anybody kind of breathing down your neck and I tried to make it as accessible as possible, kind of, make it as high-quality as possible, so.

Christopher: Very cool, and given everything we’ve been talking about I’m guessing this is not just something for sax players.

Nick: Right. Exactly. In fact, it comes with PDFs and concert pitch, B flat, E flat and even bass clef so it’s really accessible to anybody out there.

Christopher: Very cool. Well, it’s been such a pleasure to get to talk to you, Nick. I’m a big fan of the Ten Minute Jazz Lesson Podcast and anyone listening who’s enjoyed hearing us talk about improv and how Nick approaches it, I highly recommend checking out that podcast. There’s a huge back catalog of really valuable episodes touching on every aspect jazz including the kind of improvi ideas we’ve been talking about today. Also that Sixty Days to Crushing the Blues course I agree that’s a fantastic place to start if you’re interested in jazz but feel it might be a bit overwhelming or intimidating. I think the way you’ve structured that is really elegant and of course if you’re interested in Skype lessons do check out Nick’s website and we’ll have the links to that and everything mentioned in the show notes. Thank you again, Nick, for joining us today. It’s been such a pleasure.

Nick: Oh, yeah. Thank you so much. It’s been great talking to you and congratulations on your podcast. It’s really one of my favorite ones out there. I definitely tune in as much as I possibly can and you’re doing great stuff over there so keep it going.

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The post How to “Just Play”, with Nick Mainella appeared first on Musical U.

From jazz music and mind boggling drum solos to rock guitar jams and vocal gymnastics, some of the greatest music of all is created on the spot and in the moment. With technical prowess that blows away the audience, the greatest musicians are masters of improvising memorable solos.

Watch Slipknot’s Joey Jordison concoct a mindbending drum solo on the band’s 2002 release Disasterpieces:

The musicians that live on in the annals of music continue to amaze us with their incredible ability to create unforgettable music in the moment.

But improvisation isn’t just for the musical legends. Anyone from beginner to pro can enjoy the creativity and excitement of improvising a solo.

What is Improvisation?

“Composing will always be a memory of inspiration; improvising is live inspiration, something happening at that very moment. Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” – Miles Davis

In the most general sense, when a musician improvises a solo, they are making up a new melody or drum solo that is not written down and hasn’t been played before that moment. The best improvisers create on-the-spot compositions that are both musical and technically challenging, while also fitting within the context of the entire tune.

Mastering improvisation takes more than a good ear. Musicians that improvise solos will work within the established harmonic framework, borrow rhythmic and melodic snippets, and give these elements their own original twist. They make it look easy, like they are just “winging it” in performance.

Here’s trumpet master Wynton Marsalis playing around with rhythm and melody in an exciting solo:

While nearly every genre of music has some sort of improvisation, many of the best improvised solos can be found in rock and jazz music. The very foundations of jazz were built up on the blues and the oral traditions of the African diaspora. A great jazz musician can improvise everything from sassy slow solos to dizzyingly fast flurries of notes that make your head spin.

Improv in Jazz

In this clip, James Carter of the World Saxophone Quartet rips his sax to shreds with an improvised solo that is both musical and rhythmic:

The solo goes by lightning-quick, with notes so crazily high that the sax ceases to sound like a woodwind and instead sounds like some lunatic mechanical beast, drawing some laughter from Carter’s awestruck fans.

Want to develop the coveted skill of jazz improv? Check out Learning Jazz Improvisation, with Bob Habersat and Paul Levy. In this great resource, you will learn some practical skills to help your overall musicianship as you learn how to improvise.

Improv in Rock

Rock music has its own share of improv legends and is rife with guitar and drum solos that take music to an eleven. In this clip, Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses shows us how it’s done with an incredible guitar solo:

Want to learn a little bit more about great rock improvisers? Check out They Carved Their Names in Rock: 5 Giants of Rock Improvisation at Musical U.

Vocal Improvisation

It isn’t just instrumentalists that know how to improvise a great solo. Vocalists throughout the globe stretch their vocal chords with improvised solos. You can find singers from opera to pop to blues proving that vocalists are just as awe-inspiring as instrumentalists when they perform solos. Listen to Ella Fitzgerald show off some scat singing as she jams out to “It Don’t Mean a Thing”:

Why Improvise?

What is the value in improvising music, especially if you can read music? There are many reasons why you should learn how to improvise, not just for solos, but for other musical situations.

Improve Your Musicianship

Great musical improvisers have great musicianship.

What does that mean?

It means that they are well-versed in ear training and aural theory, they understand harmony and rhythm, they understand musical form, and they have spent countless hours in the practice rooms perfecting their craft.

While the best musical solos might seem like they are quickly and easily made in that very instant, the reality is that it takes a lot of preparation to be able to create great music at a split second. And that takes real musicianship.

Improve Your Listening Skills

When you improvise a solo, you are forced to really listen.

You have to listen to the music around you and incorporate that into your solo. You need to listen for harmonies and the band playing behind you. Even as you zip through dozens of quick musical riffs, one after the other, you need to listen to everything around you and to yourself, too, to make sure that your solo doesn’t only showcase your talents but the talents of the other musicians around you.

Make Yourself More Marketable

Goes without saying: being a great improviser makes you much more marketable both in live and recorded sessions.

Why?

As an improviser, you can work around any bizarre musical snafus that might happen in the studio, performance hall, or stage. In a recording session you won’t waste time (or money) because your level of musicianship is so high that you will know exactly what to play and when to play it. Playing alongside you will be a good experience for fellow musicians because they know that you can hold your own and are reliable in any pinch.

Improve As A Performer

We’ve already mentioned it, but being a good improviser means that you are not easily frustrated when live performances or a recording situation go awry.

Instead, you can quickly work around it when the drummer misses a beat, someone misses their entrance, the director makes a mistake, or the vocalist forgets their lines. Because you are a trained improviser, you already have at your fingertips (or vocal chords) the key to musical success in a tight situation.

Become More Confident

As you become more adept at improvising solos, your confidence will build. If someone asks you to take the lead or to fill in on the fly, you aren’t stressed because you have done this dozens of times before.

This will manifest as confident playing, no matter the musical situation. You will know exactly what to do and when to do it. And others will notice, especially your fans.

How to Develop Your Improvisation Skills

Is it easy to develop good improvisation talents? What if you have never improvised a solo before or have just begun your musical journey? Can it be too late to learn how to improvise?

These questions, among others, can cause anxiety in aspiring improvisers. Here are five tips to help you put any self-doubt in the back of your mind, and as Nike declares, “Just Do It”…

1. Use Online Resources

There might not be any better time to be a musician. Besides being able to create music quickly with contemporary audio technology and then share it quickly throughout the world via the internet, you also have access to millions and millions of articles, videos, and other resources to help you develop your musicality.

Below is just a small sampling of online resources to help you develop improvisation skills:

• For the jazz musicians out there, check out Improve Your Improv: Listen to the Rhythm Section with Stefan Hall
• Guitarists the world over can learn the basics of improvising a great solo with How to Freestyle a Guitar Solo
• Learn the basics of playing by ear from talented singer and pianist Sara Campbell in Finding the Notes Yourself
• Patterns and Playgrounds by Christopher Sutton gives you four unique ways to develop your improvisation skills

2. Practice, then Practice More

Being great at musical improvisation takes a lot of practice, practice, practice. And this means more than playing along with your favorite jam by yourself in an isolated room.

This means learning scales, drum rudiments, singing in tune, and playing with good harmonies. This means an understanding of musical structure and music theory, developing your overall ear training and musicianship, and spending time developing the skills you will need in performance.

3. Play Live

While you can practice playing along with your favorite artist’s track, you will learn more if you jam with other musicians. This can be in performance or just at a rehearsal, but learn how to play with other musicians in a live setting.

This will build your skills as well as your confidence – your fellow musicians can offer you both encouragement and helpful criticism, and if you improvise a solo live, your fans’ responses will be all you need to know if you have nailed that solo.

4. Play with Recordings

We can’t all grab a live band every day, so take the time to find recordings of some of the legends in your musical niche and play along with them. Learn their instrumental or vocal riffs and play along. What scales are they using? What rhythms? How did they improvise solos that worked within the entire song?

There are plenty of tracks online that have just backing chords, giving you a chance to play along.

For example, if you are a drummer, you can play along with this drumless Heavy Rock backing track and create your own original drum beat.

For guitarists and other instrumentalists, use a simple backing track in A minor and C major to practice simple solos and harmonization.

5. Be Confident

After you have practiced for the gig, feel confident in your improv skills. And don’t worry if what comes out of your instrument isn’t exactly what you expected – the beauty of improvisation is that it is different every time, and fitted exactly to the circumstances.

Sometimes you’ll get a high energy vibe from the audience and will feel like you are on fire, and sometimes a musical solo a bit more nuanced is needed. But in all cases, be confident in your playing. Your audience will love you for it!

How To Improvise a Solo

We’ve talked about how you can develop good improvisation skills in the practice room, about some great online resources, and even listened to some great improv examples. But how do you actually improvise a solo?

1. Practice

Yes, it was already mentioned, but to play on the fly, you need to be prepared. Your fingers need to be able to run up and down scales without a flaw, your singing should be in tune, and your drumming should be on time. You need to be a prepared musician, no matter what your skill level.

2. Know the tune

It helps if you know the tune. This can’t always be the case, and for some musicians like percussionists, it is possible to improvise a decent solo without having any idea where the song is going. But the best bet is to know the tune inside and out.

3. Take cues

You don’t want to be the person that gets so carried away with their solo that they wreck the song for everyone else or just get lost. While fans are forgiving, your bandmates or manager might not be.

The solution? Watch for cues. This could be a musical cue that signals the end of the solo, a simple nod of the head from another musician, or just something as simple as “your fingers are about to fall off and you need to move on”. Bottom line: be mentally present during your solo.

4. Timing is everything

One of the most important things to remember when you are improvising a solo is to keep time. Are you supposed to jam for eight bars? Make sure it is just eight bars. Did you just play the conga solo of the century? Then be sure that when beat 1 hits that you are also on beat 1, ready to go with the rest of the band. Don’t get lost, and if you do, just watch for cues from the band.

If you don’t, you run the risk of becoming the overbearing show-off that nobody wants in their band, à la Animal from the Muppets in his accompaniment during Rita Moreno’s “Fever”:

5. Listen

Improvising is really just taking what you have practiced and playing it in creative ways in a live setting.

Yes, you might have never put these particular notes or rhythms together before, but in some ways they are familiar, and you will find that certain riffs will become your go-to favorites.

While you are improvising, be sure to really listen to what happened before and what is going on. Connecting melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material from the song in your solo will show expertise, even if your audience doesn’t realize it.

6. Experiment

Always be ready to experiment with something new when you improvise. This doesn’t mean practicing that extended technique that you only got right once in the practice room, but it does mean going out on a limb with your material.

An easy way to start is with a riff from the song itself then let it naturally evolve as you play. Add in some notes or new harmonies, and change up the rhythm some. Mix in a string of notes or some new timbres that weren’t there before.

Keep experimenting, moving onward, until you have journeyed far from the starting point. But keep it musical.

Cultivating Musical Spontaneity

Now that we’ve looked at why you should learn to improvise, how to do it, and the skills involved, you are ready to start your journey of improvisation. Musical U has an incredible community of musicians, students, teachers, and professionals to help you develop your improvisation skills. In fact, there’s even a slew of dedicated improvisation modules!

The spontaneity involved in improvisation is not random or “guesswork” – it comes from knowing what to play and when to play it, and being confident in doing so!

The post Musicality Means: Improvising A Solo appeared first on Musical U.

This means fresh articles, podcasts, tutorials, modules, and even a masterclass to get you improvising!

Meanwhile, we’ve taken the last bit of February to release some content that reminds us to celebrate music, and especially our own musical journeys: an incredibly positive and insightful interview with songwriter Vincent James, and a spotlight on a Musical U member whose impressive progress is an inspiration to behold.

But first, a moment of celebration…

Best Piano Resource!

Online music tutor platform Tuterful has placed us on their list of Best Piano Resources! We are delighted, and would like to thank them for their kind words:

“Why we love Musical U:

What inspires people to take up piano? It’s that exciting dream of being able to sit down at the keyboard and just play. To play by ear, improvise, arrange on the fly, or simply play learned repertoire with a level of expression that moves the listener.

Musical U specialises in making it fun and easy to quickly train your brain and ear for the skills which empower you as a musician: to play freely and with confidence all the music you hear, remember or imagine. It doesn’t take “talent” or a gift to become an incredible pianist – but you do need musicality training and that’s what the expert team at Musical U are proud and delighted to provide.”

Check out their full list of resources for the beginner pianist!

Improv Month

Musical U is incredibly proud and excited to announce our first-ever themed month.

March will be dedicated to the topic of improvisation, and how you can use this tool to be free and creative in your musicmaking.

From interviews with improvisation pros to a fresh batch of articles and tutorials teaching you to play freely and spontaneously, you won’t want to miss a moment of March. We’re also going to be finishing off the month with a live, online training session on improvisation – open to all!

Can’t wait for the month ahead? Neither can we! Read more about what’s in store over at What’s New in Musical U: February 2018.

Keeping Music Alive

With the day-in, day-out routine of practice, music lessons, learning theory, and training your ear, we sometimes forget how amazing it is that we’re making music in the first place!

Fear not: our interview with musician, songwriter, and author Vincent James is the perfect reminder. Brimming with enthusiasm for music and the will to share it with as many people as possible, Vincent is the man behind nationwide events Teach Music Week and Kids Music Day, and the author of 88+ Ways Music Can Change Your Life, a collection of stories about the transformative power of music.

In Unleashing Inspiration, with Vincent James, he shares inspiring advice for songwriting, musical collaboration, and making music community-based – the way it should be.

Vincent has an amazing story that many of us can relate to. One thing that stuck out was the story he told in which he and his friends started a fictitious rock band while school was closed for weather. This opened up his ears to new music and experiences that would stay with him for years to come. Steve’s Music Room agrees that starting a rock band can be greatly beneficial, and has compiled 5 reasons you should start one at your school!

A common thread throughout the interview was the impact that being a musician has made on Vincent’s life. We can all agree that learning music, and the experience of sharing our musicality with others, is one reason why we are so passionate about it! Read about how learning the Ukulele has changed one musician’s life on Ukulele Music Info.

In between all of Vincent’s other projects, he even finds the time to teach guitar lessons to one student – who happens to be 83 years old! This is a great reminder that it is never too late to begin making music. Nancy on the Home Front further explores this subject on her blog.

The centerpiece of Vincent’s work is to keep music in our schools and inspire the next generation to pick up the arts as well. A world without music is truly difficult to imagine, and it would be terrible to rob future would-be musicians of the art. The Inspired Classroom discusses the other benefits that music education provides to students.

Musical Revelations

Musical U members never cease to amaze us with their dedication, progress, and enthusiasm.

This month, we’re spotlighting Ashley Sherman, a member who had a lightbulb moment when she connected the music theory she’d known for years with her real-life goal of being able to play by ear.

Now, with the help of Musical U, she’s developing this skill further, and has moved onto composing her own music, complete with arrangements!

To read more about her fascinating journey and how she uses Musical U’s resources to help her build her musicality, check out Musical U Member Spotlight: Ashley Sherman.

Ashley’s journey to playing music by ear was inspiring and should give hope to anyone who feels like they will never get it. The myth that playing by ear is a natural talent and cannot be learned is so damaging to many musicians – anyone can develop well-trained ears is if they set their mind to it, as discussed by Treblemakers.

All musicians should find a way to incorporate goal setting into their practice. It really helps to focus your efforts and give yourself little victories to celebrate along the way! The Happy Musician discusses six steps to meeting your musical goals that will have you there in no time.

Using the Musical U Roadmaps, Ashley was able to quickly begin learning to recognize chord progressions and intervals as she practiced her music. Learning intervals can be a tedious exercise, but there are many benefits that can come from your study. Kate from Musical Intervals Tutor talks about how learning intervals will help you further develop your musicality.

Part of being a music student is to have a “big picture”, or your mission statement for wanting to learn music. It’s something that we encourage for all Musical U members! For example, Ashley wanted to better understand melodies and all the little details that go into making them memorable. Greg Howlett offers his insights and opinion on what makes a melody good (or bad).

Intro to Improv

To kick off improvisation month and our improv-themed podcast episodes, we’re releasing an episode giving you an overview of improv: why you should learn to improvise, how it will enhance your musicality, and the steps you can take today to start learning.

This skill is not about “guessing” or trying random note combinations and seeing what sticks – our approach to helping you learn to improvise is all about developing your musical ear to the point where anything you imagine in your head is effortlessly translated to your instrument!

Learn how to get started by tuning into the Musicality Podcast episode About Improvisation!

Improvising is a great skill to have as a musician. You will unlock a door to hours of musical enjoyment and collaboration with other musicians just by getting started – and Trumpetland has some tips to show you how! Non-trumpeters, don’t sleep on this one, as there are some great suggestions for every musician!

Christopher talked about how many musicians approach improvising by learning licks and repeating them. While this isn’t the only way you should be learning improv, there are many iconic licks that can inspire you and expand your vocabulary. Here are 10 dominant licks from Jazz Guitar Licks to get you started.

Developing and using your audiation and listening skills will help you on your way to becoming an improvisation master. Here at Musical U, we often talk about how singing your music can take your listening skills to the next level. And we’re not the only ones – Yankee Collection discusses how singing music can help you play it!

Any musician can learn to improvise. Graham Mann from the Kent Youth Jazz Orchestra teaches improvisation to young learners, as you will see in the this TEDx Talk. No matter your age, you will be both inspired by, and learn from, this fantastic lesson.

Dive Into Improv!

With March underway, look forward to a heaping spoonful of improvisation content that will have you playing freely and expressively in no time.

Tune into podcast episodes to learn improv tricks from the pros, use our modules and articles to get yourself playing, and join us at the end of the month for our online improvisational masterclass!

The post Improv Month, Keeping Music Alive, Musical Revelations, and Intro to Improv appeared first on Musical U.

March is Improvisation Month here at Musical U, and what better way to kick off than with a crash course in the subject? In this episode of the Musicality Podcast, we share how to (and how not to!) improvise, the far-reaching benefits of this skill, and how it ties into the creative essence of being a musician.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• About Transcribing Music
• About Chord Tones
• Improvisational Playgrounds

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the first of a series of episodes on the topic of improvisation. We are celebrating Improvisation Month here at Musical U with the release of new training modules and a full Roadmap to help our members learn to improvise music and here on the podcast we have some terrific interviews lined up with artists and educators who can share deep insights on the topic of improvisation.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while and the team has been hard at work pulling it all together for a fantastic improv-focused month. We’ve actually been helping members learn to improvise in various ways since the start of Musical U – and that’s because whether or not you intend to improvise in the traditional sense, learning improvisation skills is central to all your musicality.

So don’t tune out if you’re thinking that improvising is just for jazz musicians, or that you never intend to play a solo on stage.

Improvising is fundamentally just about having creative freedom in music. Being able to come up with a musical idea in your head and bring it out into the world. And what musician doesn’t want to have the freedom and confidence to do that?

Today I wanted to kick off our improv-themed podcast episodes by talking about how to think about improvisation – because there are various schools of thought and approaches you’ll find out there, and if you follow the wrong approach then learning to improvise can be pretty frustrating. And it can reinforce a lot of those wrong assumptions about what improvising means, pulling you away from that true essence: that improvising is about bringing your own musical ideas out into the world, simple as that.

How not to learn to improvise

So I’d like to share with you the way we explain improvisation in our “Approaching Improvisation” module inside Musical U. First though, let’s talk briefly about the three most common approaches to improvising and why they typically don’t work well.

The first way is what I’d call “learning vocabulary”. This is particularly popular in the jazz world, and the idea is that you learn to improvise by mimicking the licks, riffs and runs of famous jazz musicians. You learn their phrases and build up your stock of improv vocabulary. You have a set of licks you know work over a dominant chord, ones which follow a ii-V-I progression, ones that work in a bebop style, and so on. When the time comes to improvise you pick a phrase or two from your learned vocabulary and that’s your solo.

Well, from the way I’ve described it and the way I talked about the essence of improvising a moment ago you can probably see the downside here: you’re not really coming up with your own musical ideas. It’s a bit like just memorising a phrasebook when you visit a foreign country versus actually learning to speak the language. Now don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely value in studying the greats, and we’ve talked previously on this podcast about the benefits of transcribing solos by ear. But if this is the only way you approach improvising you will ultimately feel very limited and not really experience any of the true creative freedom which improv should be about.

Okay, so the second common method then is a notch better. This one is particularly popular with blues, rock and jazz guitarists because of the easy connection to fretboard scale patterns. And the method is to learn some rules about what notes work when and then essentially choose your notes at random. With the right scale to match the chord progression and a bit of expressive playing like string bends and good use of dynamics, this can actually sound pretty good. And if you learn to connect with the underlying chords, something we’ll be talking about later in improv month, it can sound quite musical.

The drawback of this method is that it’s “improvisation by numbers”. You are kind of an improvisation robot, pairing a set of rules with a random number generator and hoping the result sounds good. This is the way I improvised back when I was playing guitar, and it was exciting because I was creating something myself – but I always felt a bit fraudulent with it because I never knew how it would sound until I played it. So I didn’t really feel like it was truly my creation. So this method works, and you can go quite far with it. But again, it kind of cheats you of the true essence of improvising, where you imagine what you want to create and then bring it out into the world for others to hear.

The final method worth mentioning is the brute force “do it and do it until it works” approach. Jazz musicians would call this “shedding”, where you go to the woodshed and you just play and play and play until gradually your brain mysteriously learns a deep connection with your instrument and then you can improvise on instinct. This is the romantic story of how great jazz musicians learned to improvise and it sounds a lot cooler than saying they studied the theory, memorised phrases and made careful use of scales and patterns! But clearly there are two big problems here. The first is that it’s a recipe for boredom and frustration. With no structured path to follow you have no idea if you’re making progress or if you’re learning as effectively as you could be. And once you do gain some ability to improvise on instinct it’s an incredibly risky endeavour. If you don’t understand how you do what you do it’s always going to be quite nerve-wracking to improvise because you’re trusting an instinctive ability that could fail at any moment.

So those are the three most common methods for trying to learn to improvise. To memorise vocabulary, to follow strict rules and patterns, or to just play and play and hope you mysteriously gain the instinct for improv. Each of these gets you some way towards true improvisation and each can be useful as part of learning to improvise. But hopefully you’ll agree that none of them sound exactly in line with what improvisation is truly all about.

How to learn to improvise

So how do you learn to improvise freely?

At Musical U we teach that true improvisation is essentially “playing by ear what you imagine in your mind”.

The idea being that you can at any time imagine something you’d like to create in music, and then you have the play-by-ear skills to take that sound you imagine in your mind and play it on your instrument for others to hear. And so the process of learning to improvise is at its core very similar to the process of learning to play by ear.

That’s why we’ve already been able to help our members with improvising, even though it’s only this month we’re launching our full Improv Roadmap – because we’ve had a solid and extensive set of play-by-ear training since day one.

That said, there are definitely some things which make improvising different to playing by ear, hence the need for some new training modules and a Roadmap. And I’d like to share a few of them with you now, so you have a sense of how this approach to learning to improvise can work.

The first core concept is the one I just mentioned: Improvisation is about connecting three things:

1. audiation (meaning imagining music in your mind)
2. listening, and
3. playing.

It’s the combination of those three that create a free improviser, and although in time you won’t need to consciously think through what you want to play before you play it, while you’re learning it’s really helpful to be mindful of these three separate components and work on each of them.

The second big concept is to use constraints and dimensions to create musical playgrounds for practicing improvisation. A constraint might be something like the scale you’re going to use, or a particular rhythmic pattern. The dimensions are then everything else you’re free to vary and experiment with. And the combination of constraints and dimensions creates a little playground where you can freely try things out in the safe knowledge that whatever you play will sound pretty good. We’ve found this provides a really great way for beginners to start improvising in a truly free and ear-guided way without it sounding like a random mess of notes or being so tightly rule-based that there’s no real creativity.

The third big concept is our framework of “Play/Listen” and “Listen/Play”. This is a great way to start building up those brain/ear/instrument connections in a creative way. It’s too much to really go into now – but maybe we’ll invite Andrew from the team on to a future episode to share a bit more about how this works. Or of course you can check out the Approaching Improvisation module inside Musical U for full details on everything I’ve been talking about.

Improvisation is about freedom

So that’s how we recommend thinking about improvisation. It’s not about memorising other people’s phrases, it’s not about strictly and carefully following music theory rules, and it’s not about blindly playing at random and hoping that years later something will click and you’ll have a magical instinct for improv.

Improvisation is about developing your musical ear to the point where you can take anything you imagine or want to create from your mind’s ear out into the world. It’s the heart of creative freedom in music and whether you use it for traditional on-the-spot improvisation like a rock guitar or jazz saxophone solo, or you use it as the basis to start writing songs or composing, or you become a fully-fledged improvisational artist like Steve Lawson, our Resident Pro for bass, whose entire career is based on improv – however you want to make use of improvisation, it is an ability that every musician deserves to enjoy as part of their musical life.

I hope this episode has given you some fresh ideas for what learning improv could look like for you, and stay tuned for our next episodes in Improv Month for plenty more inspiration and guidance for your improvisational journey!

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The post About Improvisation appeared first on Musical U.

For Ashley Sherman, one of these triumphant moments came when she realized all the theory she’d learned in childhood piano lessons contained the perfect tools for learning to play by ear.

In this interview, Ashley talks about her musical revelations, her substantial achievements in her short time using Musical U, and what she plans to do with her newfound skills…

I started taking traditional piano lessons when I was eight years old. I had an outstanding university teacher and was well-grounded in classical music theory.

The problem was, that theory meant nothing to me. I was not taught any practical application for it.

I loved listening to people who could play by ear, and my fingers would just itch to be able to do the same. I instinctively wanted to be able to express myself musically, but I was always made to believe that I would never be able to play by ear because only those who are born with a natural ability could do so. At the time, I had no choice but to believe what I was told – however, something in me would never give up trying.

The story of how I got from there to here is too long to record here. It was years later before I came to the full realization that playing by ear is a skill that can actually be learned through the practical application of theory and ear training.

When I did, I was ecstatic!

A friend introduced me to some resources that taught me how to begin learning to play by ear. I dove in and in a matter of months, I was beginning to understand how music works, create my own arrangements, and compose my own music.

The musician that had been simmering inside of me all those years was finally beginning to be released. My lifelong dream was becoming a reality. Music was no longer a mysterious and magical combination of notes. I was blown away by its simple structure, and by how all that “meaningless” theory suddenly came to life.

I have been involved in church music, to one degree or another, as a pianist for about fifteen years. I have learned how important these skills are to be a competent, effective, and confident church musician. I am also now working towards publishing my arrangements, something else I never imagined possible.

In addition to playing piano, I play a little bit of guitar and violin, played clarinet for a year in grade school band, and sang in choirs during grade school.

I don’t really have a favorite music track, but a new CD I’ve been enjoying listening to is Through High Places by Calvin Jones. My favorite track is “Brown Eyes”:

I was introduced to Musical U through Music Matters Blog. I didn’t know anything about Musical U at the time, but you were giving away free memberships in a raffle, so why not? I’m game for trying anything that might help me learn more. I didn’t win a membership, but I got on Christopher’s email list and started reading the emails he sent. Through those, I learned what Musical U is all about. I also gained more insight into skills that could be learned through Musical U – skills that I had never thought about.

I decided to try it because I was very interested in the systematic way of setting clear goals, planning, and achieving those goals through the tools provided. I also liked that I would have a place to ask real musicians questions, and have personal help through the process.

I was on my own and felt like I wasn’t progressing with my ear training as fast as I would have liked to. I felt I wanted some more structured and personal help.

I recently completed the full Chords by Ear Roadmap and am continuing to work on hearing chord progressions and intervals in real music. I am also beginning to work through the Melodies by Ear Solfa Roadmap, now that I understand how empowering solfa can be.

I have been surprised at how quickly I’ve been able to recognize chord progressions and intervals in the exercises and in real life. I had minimal ear training in these things prior to Musical U, but I am surprised how quickly the exercises have enabled me to progress. I can now much more easily figure out the notes of a melody in my head by recognizing intervals, and I am hearing common chord progressions in music everywhere.

I’ve also been surprised by how much those seemingly meaningless theory exercises from piano lessons, such as scales, arpeggios, and chords, have accelerated my ear training, and, in fact, had already completed a lot of ear training for me.

Lastly, I’ve learned how much more there is to learn, which I consider to be a good thing!

I have definitely had my musical horizons expanded – I’ve learned a lot of interesting facts and have been exposed to some great resources.

Musical U has helped move me closer to my goal of being able to quickly and easily translate what I hear in my head to the piano, and be able to play an arrangement by ear without requiring hours or weeks to figure it out, or worse, not be able to figure it out at all.

It has also helped me to understand what makes a melody: the emotional impact different components have, such as the intervals and scale degrees. This is part of my Big Picture Vision:

If this sounds to you like an impossible goal, I would have thought the same thing a few years ago. But now, I know it is possible and achievable. Musical U has helped me find and put together more of the pieces that will make it happen.

Well, the more I learn about what there is to learn, and how powerful certain skills such as solfa can be, the more I want to learn!

I have not been a member very long, but I have already completed all the ear training there is related to chords, so I am moving onto other things, and expanding my musical skillset even further!

Over The Rainbow?

Ashley Sherman had a desire for musical freedom. Even though she was led to believe that her vision depended on a mysterious “talent” that she somehow didn’t have, she held on to her dream until she found that there were steps she could take, and people that could help her along the path to her musical dreams.

The post Musical U Member Spotlight: Ashley Sherman appeared first on Musical U.

In 2017 they partnered with over 600 music school and retail locations to help celebrate Teach Music Week and Kids Music Day by offering free music lessons and holding other community events including open houses, student performances and instrument donation drives.

Vincent and his wife Joann are also authors of a book called “88+ Ways Music Can Change Your Life” which features over 100 inspirational music stories from around the world, including a number of celebrities.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Vincent is also the man behind LoveSongs.com, writing custom love songs on request.

In this conversation, we was keen to find out more about the musician behind these three fascinating and impressive projects. We talk about:

• The book “88+ Ways…” – what inspired him to take on such an ambitious project and how it came about. I also ask Vincent to share two of his favourite stories from the book.
• His experience writing custom love songs for couples and his advice to all budding songwriters.
• The two nationwide events he’s organised, partnering with over 600 music schools and stores across the US, to promote music learning.

And Vincent shares the biggest lesson that comes through all of these projects and successes which you can apply to your own musical life.

We’ve really loved reading a story or two from 88+ Ways each day recently, it’s a great way to stay aware of and inspired by the incredible power of music in our world. Between the stories Vincent shares in this conversation and the events he has coming up in 2018 that you can get involved in, you’re going to come away from this one feeling uplifted and inspired too.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• KeepMusicAlive.org
• KidsMusicDay.org
• TeachMusicWeek.org
• “So Many Things“, by Vincent James
• 88+ Ways Music Can Change Your Life
• Interview with Sara Campbell

Transcript

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

Vincent: Thanks, Christopher. It’s great to be here.

Christopher: So you are a man of many interesting projects but one of them that I particularly love is the book that you put together, 88+ Ways Music Can Change Your Life. I wonder if you’d set the mood for us by sharing one of the stories from that book.

Vincent: Sure. I would love to. The story comes to us from a songwriter who got involved in music more seriously later in life and the title of the story is called simply, “Thanks, Mom.”

(Reads)

Strangely enough, she had always wanted me to play more music. My mom, that is. It had been in a band in college and had also done some solo work after that. We were always very close but then I got a business career and that was followed by having three children in three years. Yeah, life was really busy and I just couldn’t fit music into my days. And then she died. I sat there looking at her three grandchildren under the age of five. They would never know their sweet grandmother and she would never see them grow up.

I didn’t know how to grieve. There wasn’t a lot of time for that, either. That very night, it started. Music and lyrics came to me while I was sleeping. It happened over and over again, often waking me up. Original music. I had never written original music before. I started to think I was cracking up. I decided to make a therapy appointment. Although the therapist gave me validation for my sadness, I left without anything else that was very helpful and then a friend of mine suggested I visit a producer friend of his to try to make sense of the music I was hearing in the middle of the night.

Even though I still cried every morning, that was the beginning of my new life. I now had some place to put my emotions. I took the money set aside for therapy and booked studio time instead. And that was 22 years ago. My mother’s legacy? I love my musical life every single minute of every single day. Not a day goes by when I don’t imagine my mother’s smiling face. I’m forever grateful to her for so many things. Even in passing she is still with me, giving me a reason to wake up every day, to create music.

This story is dedicated to the lasting memory of Beatrice Bradford Greenfield, always and forever a dear supporter of the arts.

And this comes to us by a Bonnie Warren, who is basically a Nashville songwriter now who travels back and forth from Philadelphia to Nashville regularly to write songs. She’s had several songs published, won songwriting contests and this is just something that developed, you know, later in her life and she decided, you know, based upon this, you know, tragic occurrence with her mom passing, you know, when her grandchildren were so little, to really jump back into music. You know, she was feeling it in here, in her heart.

Christopher: Wow. Fantastic. I love that story and that’s one of those from the “Inspiration and Motivation” section of the book, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s just one of 88+ terrific stories that you and your wife together in this wonderful book. Before we go on and talk more about that book as we will, I’d love to just get a bit of background on you. Who is the man that with his wife put together such an inspiring book of musical stories? How did you get started in music?

Vincent: Well, Christopher, I’m a nut from early on. (Laughs) Let’s see, way back in elementary school, you know, I have, my memory isn’t so great but I have certain memories that stick with me. I can remember being sick home from school. I probably had the flu because I was home for two or three days in a row and I can remember being drawn to the a.m. clock radio on my beside listening to, you know, to the pop music of the early 70’s, you know, when there was, you know, the John Denvers, the Bread, the Carpenters, Barry Manilow, Stills and Crofts, you know, all these, you know, what they call soft rock hits and then just, the melodies just drew me in and I’ve really never let go of melodies since that time.

Around the fourth grade, I think, is in elementary school where they allowed us to start learning how to play an instrument, you know, we had band in school. We were very fortunate that we could choose an instrument if we wanted to play in band and so, you know, I came home one day from school and I said, you know, to my parents, “Hey, I’d like to, you know, really love to learn how to play the guitar.” I don’t even think that was a band instrument at the time, but I just had my idea, you know, “If they’re teaching instruments, I want to play the guitar, ” and my parents said, “No, I don’t think so,” you know. So I went back to school the next day and I came home and I’m like, “How about the drums? Can I play the drums? That’s a band instrument,” and they said no even louder. I don’t think they wanted the noise. So I went back a third time and they came back and said, “How about the trombone?” and, you know, we were sold on that. The trombone, the slide instrument. It was very cool and I had a lot of fond memories playing, you know, all the way from fourth grade to senior year of high school and marching band, concert band, stage band, which was like a jazz, you know, type band. Fond memories of everything from early, you know, Mr. Don Ramos, the band teacher in elementary school with a little baton thing, you know, whacking you when you’re hitting the wrong note, you know. This is old school days, right?

But, you know, he was great and all the way to a senior in high school in the marching band competitions and just the camaraderie with the other musicians and students and really band was kind of my life, you know. If it wasn’t for band and music I probably wouldn’t have had any friends in high school and in high school I also started, you know, learning to play the guitar and I think I skipped a little part where probably around middle school, junior high school it was back then, my mom had always wanted play the piano and so my dad, you know, agreed to, you know, “Let’s get a piano and bring it in the house,” and my mom started thinking classical piano lessons and I was, like, you know, a bee drawn to honey. I’m like, “Well, what is this thing?” you know? I just started pounding on a single notes on the piano and I’m like, you know, “When can I start?” you know, “Can I get lessons?” And I was very fortunate that, you know, not long after I was able to along with my sister start taking piano lessons and then learning, you know, the classics, everything from, you know, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and that was kind of my real, I guess my initial musicality connection where, you know, trombone, you’re just playing off the bass clef, single notes at a time, and the piano you’re doing both hands, and, you know, reading all this music in front of you and I got into it pretty well for three or four years and really enjoyed it and then at one point, you know, the pop radio kind of pulled my ear again and I got interested in, you know, a lot more popular songs, you know, everything from, you know, the Beatles — which I discovered after they broke up, sad to say.

Christopher: That’s okay. I did too, by 30 or 40 years.

Vincent: Right, and the rock bands, you know, everything from Kiss to Queen to Led Zeppelin, you know. I started to really enjoy lots of different types of music, whether it was soft music, hard music, classical music, jazz music, I really had an affinity for anything that I felt was done well and so I started playing in a rock band with my friends.
I can remember the very first song that I wrote. I’m struggling to remember the name of the song but I could sit there at the piano and play it for you, now.

But we had gone further — I can’t remember the reason — to another high school and met up with some other kids and there was a kid there who had a song, lyrics for a song and he needed someone to write music. “Words for a Friend” was the name of the song and it was very Jackson Browne-ish type of lyrics he had written. So I wrote a song that went with that and then our band eventually started playing the song out. So that was kind of my first experience of writing and playing a song, you know, it was originally created, out.

Christopher: And coming from trombone and classical piano, it’s not an obvious next step to join a band and start writing songs. That’s a bit of a creative leap that I think a lot of musicians don’t make. Did that come easily to you?

Vincent: I think it was, I don’t want to say, peer pressure, but your peers, you know, I had friends, it’s funny, you know, just us talking is bringing back memories. When we were in junior high school there was a deep freeze, like it is right now here in January, actually the pipes at the junior high froze. I guess the heating had a problem, and they had to close the school for a couple of days and I had a friend two doors up who was a budding drummer and so I went up and hung out at his house for, like, two days and we basically created an imaginary rock band called “Atomic Power,” and then we had a notebook with all these ideas and he would play drums. I think he had drumsticks. I don’t think he actually had drums at that time and I played air guitar and we just got this inspiration of an idea that we wanted to play in a rock band. We were starting to discover bands like KISS and Led Zeppelin and at that time Led Zeppelin would have been way too impossible for us to attempt to play but the KISS songs were fairly easy, you know, rudimentary for us to start playing so eventually we hooked up with another friend who had a guitar. My buddy Mark the drummer got a set of drums and we would go out in a backyard and play, you know, one note songs, you know, one note at a time, melodies on the guitar as I was struggling to learn with him playing on drums and that was kind of the beginning. I think it was just the sheer joy and excitement of being able to play something. Maybe it was because it was loud versus the classical but to play songs that we heard on the radio that were popular amongst us and our friends I think that’s kind of what drew us in.

Christopher: That’s great. We had a great piano teacher called Sara Campbell on the show recently and we were talking about how as an adult we often have hangups about making mistakes in music and actually it can be really valuable to remember that childlike willingness to just try stuff out, you know, you dabble around, you find the right note. It sounds like that’s the kind of approach you guys had, you know, you weren’t embarrassed or self-conscious. You were just kind of figuring it out by ear and enjoying collaborating with them.

Vincent: Oh, absolutely, and that’s a great point, you know, we do, as adults, often, you know, have a hangup of being afraid to try something new in particular with, you know, if it’s around other people. I think that’s something we can all learn from, you know, from different activities that we’re interested in. It’s just sometimes you just need to try it and have some fun with it and you’ll be surprised at how enjoyable the experience will be.

Christopher: And so did you continue with classical piano or at that point did you kind of take a detour into, you know, creativity and improv and different styles?

Vincent: I think at that point I took a permanent detour. I never stopped liking classical music but as far as playing it I don’t know that I ever really played it seriously again. A little side note, earlier this past year I volunteered to a friend that was giving a TEDx talk. He wanted to have a classical piece played as part of it, you know, just a short little snippet, so I’m thinking, “Oh, well, I’ll give it a try,” and I practiced for several weeks and I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t gonna get to where it needed to be in time for his live TEDx event so we did use a present-recorded piece for that time but for me it was a great experience. It kind of reconnected with my classical roots just a couple of months ago, you know, where I really tried to get it up, you know. I got a lot better in those several weeks but I couldn’t get it to the point where I thought — it’s not so much how I would be embarrassed, because I wanted to give him the best possible presentation for his TEDx talk. It was about Einstein and the power of music and I felt, you know, it really needed to be up to a level that, you know, matched what he was talking about and I just wasn’t there yet.

Christopher: Sure.

Vincent: But I totally enjoyed reconnecting with classical music and I probably will because of that experience kind of get back into it again just for fun, not for serious because I enjoyed reconnecting with, you know, reading the music and getting better at stuff more complicated than pop music.

Christopher: Mm-hm. So tell us about the detour you did go on, then, because you continued to play and you continued to perform I believe and become a performer.

Vincent: Yes. Yes. So I continued playing, you know, in high school with bands and then, you know, my musical career kind of went through all different incarnations, everything from, at one point I decided I wanted to just be a songwriter and I spent time working on that, writing songs, doing demos and pitching them and then I wrote a song called the “Rock and Roll and Wrestling Connection” and I don’t know if our listeners remember back in the middle 80’s there was this pop culture thing going on with the wrestling, World Wrestling Federation and pop music with Cyndi Lauper. It was just this pop culture thing going on and so I wrote this song and basically it’s a tribute to that.
So there was a local cable TV station that created a video using all the people in the lyrics, you know, from their footage that they had from these wrestling events and Cyndi Lauper and they were able to put it all together to match the lyrics and from that experience I ended up, we ended up, creating a band that I wasn’t in but ended up helping to manage the band and, that got me in a whole different direction for a couple years and managing other bands. Then I got into the direction of managing a recording studio and co-owning a recording studio for a while helping to produce and arrange for artists and bands and then I finally got back to performing a while later initially a solo playing piano and singing and then I had my own band for a while and then I’ve kind of gone back now to just playing and singing on my own just as time permits.

It’s hard to keep a band thing going with everything else going on but, you know, I’ve never really stopped playing. I would take pauses along the way and in, as you can tell, a lot of different directions. Focus wasn’t always my best attribute but I learned a lot from the different experiences that I was in and with that experience I’m able to, I think, give guidance and ideas and feedback to, you know, budding musicians or even adult musicians that are, you know, trying to learn more about music and how they can fit in and how best to use their talents and how to grow what they’re doing.

Christopher: Mm-hm. So you mentioned songwriting, there. How big a part is that of the musician you are?

Vincent: I think it’s probably the biggest part. I mean, I play, you know, I have played three instruments in my life, four if you count the ukulele that I played, you know, briefly for a TV taping that I needed to do but I haven’t played the trombone in many years. I play the guitar. I actually teach guitar just to beginner students. A quick side note, my one and only student is 83 years old, didn’t start playing the guitar until he was 80 years old.

Christopher: Wow.

Vincent: So I’ve been teaching him for three years and it’s a wonderful experience and, you know, you can “Oh, it’s never too late,” you tell people, “to learn how to play an instrument,” especially guitar. You would think it would be difficult, with the calluses and all, trying to build them up, and it was for him but he stuck with it and now he’s enjoying playing and singing some of his favorite songs on the guitar at 83 years old. But I don’t play guitar much other than to teach my one student. I’m not very good on the guitar these days. Piano is kind of my main instrument. I sing fairly well but the songwriting, I think, is my strength where I have probably the best skills set, you know, just been, because songwriting is something I’ve been doing more consistently over the years and I just think I have a better knack for it and I love creating a song, whether it’s something that I write, you know, for me, or I write for someone else or whatever it is. Just having that creation coming, giving birth to this piece that — you know, before you came up with it never existed. To me that’s a beautiful thing.

Christopher: So in a minute I want to ask you about how you got started with songwriting and any advice you’d have but first I want to pick up on something you said, there, which was writing songs for other people. You have a fascinating project at Lovesongs.com. Can you tell us about that?

Vincent: Sure. Sure. Probably about 15 years ago or so I realized that, you know, I was writing all these different songs and I kind of had this kind of eureka moment where, you know, love songs is kind of like my thing, you know? I kind of just gravitate toward writing love songs even though I appreciate all kinds of music but it’s just the soft love songs that when I write in that vein it just seems to come out much better. So I just happened to notice, I don’t know how I stumbled upon it, but Lovesongs.com. The URL was for sale so I jumped at the chance to purchase that at the time and since then have been writing custom love songs for weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and other special events, for couples and families, really all around the world, thanks to the internet. People with come and find me and ask me to write a song for their special occasion and sometimes I get to go actually perform it live at the event and to see the recipient, you know, who’s hearing the song for the very first time, hear the song that was written for them, you know, their eyes light up, the tears come down. To me, there’s nothing more beautiful than that, than being able to give a song to someone, you know, to be able to perform it for someone for the very first time, a song that was written, you know, for them.

Christopher: That’s lovely. Are there any songs or experiences that particularly stand out?

Vincent: It’s funny. There are many, but there’s one in particular that was actually done as a contest for a radio station here in the U.S. There was a radio station that wanted to give away a song as a part of a contest so I signed on with them to do this for them for free, just something, it just felt like an interesting project and I hadn’t done much work for the radio stations at the time so they — I figured, all right. The winner of this contest — and I don’t remember what the contest was, what the parameters were to enter, but I’m thinking, the winner is going to be somebody who wants a song for their wife, husband, fiance, the children, the parents, you know, the typical song that I would write and then I got the call the next day that the winner for the contest was a mother who had recently given up their child for adoption and they wanted a song that they could play for them some day if they ever got the chance.

As a parent myself with four children, my heart just totally went out to this mother so, and the thing about this contest was I had agreed to write a song, do a quick demo and they were going to play it the next day on the air. So I sat at the piano, really, and you can’t see me but I’m looking up just, you know, for inspiration from above, just, the song just came down from the heavens and a song called, “So Many Things” came out of it and I did a quick demo, a piano vocal demo and maybe a little bit of percussion and just strings. It was a very quick turnaround and they played it on the air the next day and to me that was the most, probably the most special song that I’ve ever written for anyone for any reason because it really touched me, you know. I’m gonna tear up now (laughs) talking about it.
And then eventually I did a real studio recording of the song and it’s on my full-length CD and it’s out there in the world on iTunes. If you search “So Many Things” you can find it in here, the song I wrote for that mom who had just given up their child for adoption.

Christopher: Wow. Well, we’ll definitely put a link to that in the show notes for anyone who wants to listen. That’s really a touching story. To write songs as requested like that is a particular talent, I think, as a songwriter, a particular skill and, compared with, you know, just — I don’t want to belittle writing for yourself but compared with writing in a more ad hoc manner when an idea comes to you to have someone come to you and say, “I need a song X-Y-Z,” that really requires, I think, quite accomplished songwriting skills. Can you tell us a bit about how you learned to write songs, if there were any particular resources or teachers or ideas that helped you along the way?
Vincent: There were some books that I read. There was a successful songwriter named Jason Blume who has a book. I can’t remember the name of the book but if you google Jason Blume, B-L-U-M-E, to me it was kind of, like, my Bible at the time and I believe, you know, everything he taught back then would still stand today, you know, other than maybe promoting songs with, you know, going for publishing deals might be a little dated, but the mechanics parts of writing songs, that was kind of my Bible at the time and a lot of it is just experiences, getting, you know, practice. It’s just like anything else. You learn to play the guitar, you learn to play the piano, you have to practice songwriting. You have to write a lot of bad songs, sorry to say, to get to the good ones. I listened back to some of the early songs I wrote and I’m like, “These are horrible.”

Christopher: (Laughs)

Vincent: Like, if I never put myself out there to write them and to go through the process to actually go from start to finish to create those songs I never would have become the songwriter I am today without that and it’s funny, you mentioned about custom songs, thinking that that might be harder. In a way, that was actually easier because I was given the topic and I would create a questionnaire, so, you know, eight, ten questions to ask the person who wanted to give the song, my client, just, different things that they, you know, who is the song for, where did you meet? What do you guys like to do together? Do you have any special memories, fond memories, of things, you know, what do you see in your future, just, kind of, basic, general questions but from that at least the story of the song was easier for me because a lot of the times what we struggle with as songwriters is, what do we write about?

So one of the things they teach in songwriting is to look at the newspaper, you know, whether it’s online or the physical paper. Look at the headlines. Look at the stories underneath the headlines. See what’s going on in the world and you’ll find situations going on in the world, some happy, some not so happy that you’re gonna feel drawn to, inspired by, to create a song and to me, once you have that inspiration to create the song, then the song is going almost create itself because you’re gonna be drawn to write something with the lyrics and the music that kind of fit the tone of the lyrics of what you’re writing, so because I when know my own life is not really that interesting, which is often, I struggle to write songs, like, for myself, like, “What am I gonna write about? I just don’t feel like my life is that interesting.” Occasionally I would come up with something like, “Okay, there’s something worthwhile to write about,” but often, you know, we have to go outside ourselves as songwriters to discover a topic that we can write about that would be meaningful for others because if it’s out there in the world or if one person’s experienced it other people are gonna have had that experience and they’re gonna relate to whatever you’re writing.

Christopher: I think that’s great advice. Do you have any other words of wisdom for the budding songwriters in our audience, maybe those who are too nervous to get started and those who have made a start but they’re not quite sure if they’re on the right path?

Vincent: Sure. Some of the other tricks I remember is taking an existing song, take the music from an existing song and, you know, play that on your guitar, piano, whatever it is, and write new lyrics for it. So this is a great way to practice writing lyrics and then you can take lyrics from an existing song and write new music for it. Just sit there with the lyrics sheet in front of you from some famous song you really like and force yourself to write something different. It’s a great, I think, exercise just to help force you to practice writing music.

You can put together songs in a lot of different ways. I often recommend co-writing with someone. Let’s say that you’re a lyrics kind of a person. You’re really great at coming up with lyrics but the music part you’re just not happy with. Find someone out there through open mikes or other community, you know, music experiences or online through Musical U where you can connect with someone who maybe their strength is music and they just, the whole lyric thing has just got them bogged down and you connect with someone, you know, either in person or online where you can collaborate together and you’re both going to create something that’s gonna benefit both of you because you’re going to benefit from their music, you know, if you’re the lyric person you’re gonna benefit from the music they bring to the table and seeing how they do it and vice versa. You’re the music person struggling with the lyrics, you know, you’re gonna benefit from the other person coming up with the lyrics and their process and you might find yourself especially if you’re doing this in person with someone where you’re going back and forth where you think that, you know, lyrics were your thing but you’re coming up with musical ideas because you’ve got the other musician in the room with you and it’s kind of like brainstorming, right? Songwriting by collaboration and co-writing is brainstorming and together you’re gonna come up with something that’s much better than either one of you could come up with alone so I highly recommend collaborating, co-writing and with different people, you know, write a song with this person, write a song with this other person, you know, you may eventually hook on the one person where you both have, you know, Lennon and McCartney, you know, what kind of jewel was that for all of us for all time? But in the meantime, you know, connect with other people. I’m sure Paul and John both wrote with many other people before they hit upon their magic match. And because music is such a community I think activity where you feel something so much more inside when you’re doing it with other people. Whether you’re performing for other people, sharing music or co-writing, you know, when you’re in the room with someone or online by Skype or other means, co-writing or collaborating with someone, you’re gonna have more fun creating music than you will sitting in your room by yourself. You’re gonna enjoy the process and you’re gonna want to do it more.

Christopher: I 100% agree with that and I’m reminded of you as a teenager with your friend on the drums, you know. If you can cast aside that self-consciousness or nervousness there’s nothing better than just hanging out and exploring music with a friend, right?

Vincent: Yes. Yes, because you know the feeling you get from listening to music, you know. How many times can you listen to a song and you get that high, you know? I think almost any musician or someone who’s interested in playing music and even people that don’t care about actually playing music, you know, you hear certain pieces, certain songs, certain melodies it just gives you this high, you know, it’s the dopamine being released in your brain, literally. It’s the chemicals in your brain that are making you feel high and you can enhance that experience by doing it with other people.

Christopher: So you were having a terrific career as a performer and songwriter but around 2014 you took a change in direction. Tell us about that. Where did that come from?

Vincent: Well, there were some training programs that I would listen to on a regular basis, just free webcasts that people that I know would put out and I would listen to it and one of them was always about how you should, you know, everyone should write a book. Everyone has a book in them to write and I always thought, “Okay, I write songs. I don’t write books. What would I write about?” you know. The thing I knew the best is songwriting and those sort of books don’t fly off the shelf unless you’re, you know, an established, known, you know, successful songwriter but I thought this one day I just had this idea, “Well, why don’t we just listen to this one training program and just,” you know, “for the heck of it?” and it was actually during that call I was listening to, the webcast, where it just came from somewhere from above and I’m like, “What about writing a book that includes stories from other people about how music affected them and changed their lives?” It literally just came to me in an instant and I, you know, I got goosebumps. I got all excited. I’m like, “Wow. This is awesome. This is something that I can do that’s not about me, it’s not about my music but it’s gonna share everyone else’s musical experiences and how we’ve all benefitted as a society from having music in our lives,” and I just got really excited and that’s how our whole organization was started, Keep Music Alive, back then and the book series was born, 88+ Ways Music Can Change Your Life, and, you know, it’s grown and evolved since then but it’s just, to me, that was the beginning of where it started.

Christopher: Writing a book, I think, is daunting to a lot of people. That’s a big project to take on but writing a book that draws in 88 different people or more to contribute stories is a whole other kind of a project. How did you go about that? How did you find the people? How did you get them to contribute their stories? How did it all work? It must have been a huge amount of work.

Vincent: Yes. Yes, well, what we did was we literally reached out to over 6,000 musicians over a six-month period, both famous and non-famous, you know, anyone we could find online who was a musician, amateur, or professional, we reached out and explained to them what we were doing, what the concept was about and we were just very fortunate that we had literally over 150, 160 responses that came back that we felt were usable that we could include and actually we ended up using all of those original stories in the first edition that came out of the book, initially, in 2015 and just so grateful and particularly with the celebrity contributors who included a story in the book, because, you know, they didn’t know us from Adam. We didn’t have any track record, you know. The first book, you know, who are these Keep Music Alive people? But they were so gracious in contributing a story because music was that important to them even after all the success that they’ve had that they really wanted to share how it started and these different experiences that they had that they feel would benefit other people.

Christopher: And tell us more about the mission of Keep Music Alive that inspired this book project.

Vincent: So the book project kind of spawned Keep Music Alive, kind of together at the same time and interestingly enough, in the past year, just last year, we kind of had to split the book as a separate thing from Keep Music Alive in that over the last couple of years we’ve created two music holidays, Teach Music Week, and Kid’s Music Day and these are holidays where we partner with hundreds of music schools and music retail and soon public and charter schools all around the world to offer free music lessons for the week for Teach Music Week, hold different community events, student performances, open houses at their facility, instrument donation drives, instrument petting zoos, all different kinds of things where, to try to celebrate more music in the community and obviously Kid’s Music Day focuses on kids, you know, more kids playing music and enjoying playing music and Teach Music Week is about all ages because the free lessons that are offered by the participating locations are, whether it’s for kids or for adults, because we want to see as many people from all ages enjoying the benefits of playing music. So when we created the two music holidays at some point we needed to split that away from the book so that the Keep Music Alive is a non-profit enterprise now as of last year so Kid’s Music Day falls under that umbrella. Teach Music Week falls under that umbrella but the 88 Ways Music Can Change Your Life, you know, is still an ongoing book series but that’s separate from the non-profit.

Christopher: It sounds like the emotional drive is still common between the two, right? You clearly have a real desire in you to help spread music and help increase the joy of music in the world.

Vincent: Oh, absolutely, and mentally it was kind of hard to split because for two, three years it was all together and, you know, and we donate, actually, 50% of the proceeds from the book to music education to — there’s three organizations. There’s Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation, Guitars in the Classroom, and Spirit of Harmony are all three organizations, non-profits out there, that put more music instruments and musical instruction in the schools and communities that need it both here in the U.S. and some of them do work outside of the U.S., across the pond, as they say and so, yeah, creating more music opportunities, more music instruments available for kids that want to play and adults, you know, that’s central to everything that we do. Just, we needed to kind of split what we’re doing as authors and speakers on one side which we continue to donate much of what we generate to the non-profit but these other organizations and to what we’re doing on the non-profit side for Kid’s Music Day and Teach Music Week.

Christopher: Wonderful. I think like the book, organizing those two, they’re national, right? They’re U.S.-wide.

Vincent: Yeah, so, you know, this past year in 2017 we had the third annual Teach Music Week in March. It always occurs the third week in March and up until last year we were calling it Teach Music America Week because we started it here in the U.S. and have realized it’s growing beyond that so we kind of needed to update the name to make more sense so Teach Music Week and last year we actually partnered with over 600 music schools and retail locations in all 50 states and Canada and in October we partnered with, I think, over 400 music schools and retail locations for the second annual Kid’s Music Day and each of those are, like, four, five hundred percent growths over the previous year.

Christopher: That’s incredible.

Vincent: So we’re hoping to grow this so eventually, you know, long past when I’m walking on this earth, you know, Kid’s Music Day and Teach Music Week will be celebrated as international holidays that will benefit musicians of all ages for the many reasons, the many benefits that we get from playing and listening to music.

Christopher: Amazing, what I was going to say was about, like, the book. That’s a huge amount of work to organize something on that scale and if it’s growing like that year by year it’s clear there’s a real demand for it or there’s a real need for it. Was there something in particular that drove you to start these two holidays when you looked around? Was there a particular lack or a particular opportunity? What was it that gave you the drive to put so much effort in?

Vincent: You know, it’s funny. That’s a great question and I’m thinking back. I’m trying to remember. The holiday that came first was Teach Music Week, you know, starting with Teach Music America in the year 2015 and I don’t know where the idea came from. I just had this idea that came to me and then that first year we actually weren’t partnering with anyone. I just had this idea, “Hey, why don’t we take a whole week in March?” which, March happens to be Music in Our Schools month, at least here in the U.S. and possibly everywhere, and “Let’s take a week in March and let’s encourage musicians everywhere to find someone to give a free lesson to, you know, your friend, your cousin, your nephew, your child, your parent, you know, you’re really having fun on your instrument and they’ve kind of been eyeing it up a little bit but for whatever reason they’re just, you know, afraid to take that step, you know? Well, let’s encourage them and get them started on playing an instrument, show them how fun it can be.

So let’s just take a week, put it out there into the world and see if we can get musicians helping other non-musicians start to learn how to play an instrument, whatever it is,” and so that was the first year, when we weren’t really partnering with anyone. I was just putting it out there into social media, just spreading the word all by my lonesome (laughs).

And then the next year I went to do that again and it was, interestingly enough, a media person said, “Well, who else is doing this?” and then I kind of like, “Oh, there’s a great idea. I should be involving other,” you know, “music schools and retail that already teach people, teach music, to try to get them involved in offering free lessons,” so that’s kind of where that started and then it just grew year after year and then for Kid’s Music Day it was actually another holiday that got me inspired. We have a friend who created something called Kids Yoga Day which happens — it might be the first Friday in April and I’m thinking, “Kids Yoga Day. Well, what about Kid’s Music Day? Is there such a thing?” So, you know, we pulled out the handy-dandy Google and we looked it up and it was, like, “Wait a minute. There’s nothing going on like that,” so it was born at that moment and I think the first year we partnered with, in 2016, about 85 music schools in 23 states, in 2016, and went up to 420-some in 2017 in, like, 40-some states so you get these ideas from various places and sometimes we don’t even remember where or why we got the idea but I think the important thing to learn is to — sometimes when you get an idea you just need to actually put it into action and to run with it because a lot of times we get ideas whether it’s, you know, it can just be for songwriting. You get an idea and you, just, kind of like, “Oh, okay,” and you just walk away and, you know, you don’t write it down, you know, you don’t push a little recorder in your phone to capture it, you know.

When you get an idea, you know, I think we need to as any kind of creator whether it’s a musician or otherwise, you need to just record it somehow even if — so that we can go back to it and, you know, kind of go into an idea a little bit further and see if it can be something even bigger because as humans we’re bombarded with ideas, you know, we’re bombarded, you know, from the outside, you know, from the news and all these different outside places of things going on, but we also through those things that we’re getting, you know, we can come up with these different ideas and I think it’s really important and valuable to the world and to ourselves to sometimes act on those ideas and maybe it’s not something we can do by ourselves and maybe we need to partner with someone or, you know, give the idea to someone else who you think would be really good at running with it but the world, I think, is a better place when we have what we think is a really good idea, if we share it somehow with the world.

Christopher: That’s excellent advice. So I applaud you highly for all of your efforts from these two holidays. I think Keep Music Alive is a wonderful project and these two holidays you organize are a fantastic idea. This year in 2018 Teach Music Week will be March 19th to 25th and Kid’s Music Day will be the first Friday in October, that’s the 5th of October. If people listening, Vincent, want to get involved or learn more about these, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Vincent: Probably the best way is through our central website, which is keepmusicalive.org and from there that’ll take you to teachmusicweek.org or kidsmusicday.org and on those two holiday websites you’ll see a map currently, just a U.S. and Canada map but we’ll be expanding that to have maps in areas for other countries where you can click to see who’s participating in your area and maybe you can get involved, you know, maybe you’re already part of a music school or you’re already, you know, you know someone who could be involved and just by seeing what is already going on in your area or maybe there’s nothing going on in your area and you want to start something in your area.

Christopher: Perfect. Well, that’s an easy way for people to learn more and see how they can get involved. I’m definitely going to be hanging on to you for a minute after this interview ends to see if there’s some way Musical U can contribute or collaborate with you in one or both of those events. I don’t want to guess and guess wrongly, but to me it makes perfect sense that you wrote the book before starting those two holidays, because I myself have been reading and enjoying the book over the last several weeks, just kind of dosing myself a couple of stories a day and it’s incredibly uplifting and inspiring. I think it makes perfect sense that after immersing yourself in those 88 stories you had the drive to put together two such phenomenal music boosting projects like you did. I wonder, would you mind wrapping things up for us by sharing another story from the book, maybe one of your favorites?
Vincent: Sure, sure. One of our favorites comes to us from a very famous drummer. If anyone remembers the hit rock song from way back called, “All Right Now,” by the band, Free, and later members of Free evolved into Bad Company which had many classic rock hits in the 70’s and in the band back then and still today is a drummer named Simon Kirke and we were literally blown away when we got the story from Simon and in the story he talks about he was participating in a drum clinic over in the U.K. several years back and as part of the clinic he’s up onstage in a large auditorium and he’s demonstrating different drum techniques and cymbals and trying different things and showing the audience how all these different things work and trying different techniques and, you know, the sticks, the brushes, and so the stage is all lit up but the auditorium is dark. You know, you’re at an event, you know, the house lights are down but you have the stage lights on so the audience can see you but you can’t really see what’s going on out there.

And as he’s starting to play these different techniques and show these techniques to the audience, every time he’s hitting a drum or a cymbal or something he’s hearing a little clicking sound going on from somewhere out in the auditorium. He can’t tell where it is, he can’t tell what it is, it’s just, like, what is that? In the beginning it’s mildly distracting, you know, he’s obviously played with lots of different distractions in his career so it’s not a big deal but he’s continuing. He’s pulling out different drums. He’s pulling out different cymbals and demonstrating different techniques and, again, continuing.

The clicking sound keeps going on and after a while he’s actually starting to get a little annoyed, like, you know, “Who is making this racket while I’m trying to,” you know, “I’m doing this clinic for all these people in the audience? I just don’t get it,” you know. So, but he just carried on and, you know, he just tried to chuck his emotions to the side but it was definitely starting to affect him. So, you know, he finished up and at the very end, you know, when you’re done, you know, the house lights go up. So for the very first time you can see what’s going on in the auditorium, and in the very back of the auditorium there’s a row of wheelchairs with kids sitting with muscular dystrophy holding drumsticks and they had been playing with him the whole time. So the clicking sound was the children playing.

You know, you just, I’m gonna cry now, when I retell the story. It’s just, his heart just about dropped out at that moment. He just, you know, couldn’t believe, you know, what he was thinking and what he saw that these kids were, you know, he was providing music therapy for these children in the back of the room. He went back to the back of the auditorium, he knelt down and he shook very one of their hands and said, “Thank you. Thank you so much for playing with me today. I really appreciate it,” and I think in his heart he was changed, you know, from that experience and even today he lives here in the U.S. and Simon helps kids that have had, you know, different drug and addiction problems and just trying to give back, you know, for all the benefits he’s had as a musician over the years and to me, just, that story just demonstrates the power of music.

You have these kids that are, have an extreme disability, you know. They’re in a wheelchair, they can do hardly anything but they can hold drumsticks and they can play along with whatever music’s going on and they are benefitting from that, you know. It’s an outlet for them that they wouldn’t have otherwise without music, so to me that kind of, that story kind of just sums up why we do this, why music is so important to us, for children and adults of all ages and all abilities, why I feel the more people that can play music and enjoy the benefits of playing music, whether it’s the educational benefits, or therapeutic benefits or just putting a smile on our face, you know, music is so powerful and the more we can play and enjoy it, I think, the better.

Christopher: Wonderful. That was another story from 88+ Ways Music Can Change Your Life. You can find that on Amazon but we’ll have a direct link to it in the show notes if you want to read more of these incredible stories. Thank you so much, Vincent, for joining us today.

Vincent: Oh, you’re very welcome, Christopher, and thank you so very much.

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The post Unleashing Inspiration, with Vincent James appeared first on Musical U.