Author: musicalitywrld

Regardless of your level, it’s easy to get bogged down by the technicalities of your practice and fail to inject your own style and personality into the music.

This week at Musical U, we’re giving you three ways to avoid falling into this trap: not sweating the mistakes, learning to play by ear instead of relying on sheet music, and getting “off book” by putting the sheet music away once in a while.

Finally, we’re talking about the style of music that is all about feeling, groove, rhythm, and self-expression: ska.

Mistake to Masterpiece

We’ve all been there: performing a piece in front of an eager audience, sweaty hands moving over the suddenly-slippery keys or strings of your instrument, when suddenly… oops! Your hands slip, hitting a bum note and leaving you flustered and frozen.

Mistakes are an uncomfortable but unavoidable part of live performance. However, what may seem like a disaster in the moment is actually an opportunity to develop your improvisational skills and build your confidence as a musician, by recovering from your mistake!

In our podcast episode About Recovering from Mistakes, we go beyond the usual “just keep going!” advice, and give you four ways to gracefully bounce back from your musical mishap.

Bonus: mistakes often actually end up charming the audience, because they can see that you’re only human, too!

In this episode of the podcast, we shared a number of strategies that you can use when you make a mistake during a live performance. As musicians, we must accept that we will make mistakes, and learn ways to persevere through the performance and stay engaged with the music. For another approach to this, “The Power of 3” from The Curious Piano Teachers discusses a great way to build your musical acumen and overcome hesitation during performance.

Many times, the only person that will notice any type of mistake on stage is the performer. The audience may not be familiar with the piece of music, but also accept that live performances are inherently prone to wrong notes. Contrary to what we may think while performing, audiences are not sitting there just to judge us! Jen from Activate You describes the way many musicians see their performance as evaluation addiction – and describes how to overcome it.

Musicians are not only performing on stage, but frequently have to put on a different type of performance… interviewing with the media! While this is an exciting part of being an up-and-coming musician, it can be a bit disconcerting if you’ve had no experience doing so in the past. For some great tips to prepare for you media interviews, the folks at Wysidio have compiled a list of helpful tips.

Getting “Off Book”

Good music teachers know better than anybody else that mistakes play an important role in every musician’s development.

Great music teachers know that sometimes, the best performances aren’t about hitting all the right notes. They’re about making the listener feel. This is where getting “off book” comes in – it’s about beyond going simply the mechanics and technicalities of playing, and adding a human element to it.

So what does getting “off book” mean, specifically?

It’s a way of performing music, without needing all the notes right in front of you. Instead, the focus is on creating a musical, memorable, and moving performance. In Getting “Off Book”, with Melody Payne, she explains how she discovered this tool for musical freedom, and the ways in which she applies it to her teaching methods to give her students the ability to express themselves through their playing.

In her interview, Melody discusses how she had difficulty transitioning to performing in public, which is very common in musicians. Performance anxiety can be crippling to any musician, but there are steps that you can take to overcome it. Christy-Lyn has some great tips on getting through your stage fright.

Overcoming performance anxiety will allow you to express yourself musically in ways that you can only imagine! Taking deliberate steps to work through the fears that you may have requires hard work and dedication. The Liberated Performer discusses even more steps you can take that will transform you into the musician aspire to be.

Melody mentioned that she was terrified of making any mistakes during her first performances and as she moved into playing off lead sheets. Learning to let go and accept “mistakes” as part of musical performance is something that you can learn to do. And even come to really enjoy! One way of doing this is in Tip #1 from Piano in 21 days’ master list, in addition to other great suggestions to that will help you express yourself musically (no matter what instrument you are playing).

It was such a pleasure having Melody on The Musicality Podcast! If you haven’t heard the interview yet, make sure to listen here. After that interview, we can’t help but want to hear more advice that Melody has to offer. On her blog, she has recently published a piece on how to achieve a magical musical performance. Be sure to take a read.

Play It By Ear

Playing by ear is a challenge many will shy away from, often out of fear. On top of that, the amount of sheet music and tabs available online begs the question: why bother spending the time to learn to play by ear?

Because, simply put, it will make you a better musician. Finding the notes yourself is a major component of ear training, and will make you more confident and expressive with your instrument as you develop your ear and learn to recognize the melodies and progressions that work.

Ukulele Go!’s Dave Ellis discusses an excellent starting point for players in How To Play Ukulele By Ear, starting you off with the basics and taking you all the way to figuring out chord tones. Also included: valuable advice to deter you from “cheating” in the early stages of your playing-by-ear journey.

A practical method of tuning your new ukulele by ear is to use a reference pitch. Many musicians rely on reference pitches and use a variety of tools like tuning forks or pianos to do so. Another great way of always having reference pitches in your pocket is to keep a pitch pipe on hand. Cesar Blues Guitar demonstrates tuning his instrument using this handy little tool.

Using reference songs as a way to start playing by ear benefits many musicians. This helps to set you up for success as the melody is already well known in your mind and you just need to put it onto your instrument! For more great suggestions on further developing your musical ear, Piano Couture has the answers!

One common pitfall of ear training (referred to as the Ear Training Trap here at Musical U) is failing to apply your skills to your instrument. But once you learn a couple of tricks, you can put your musical ears to good use with any instrument. Tiffany Shaefer discusses how she applies ear training to the harp. Don’t let the instrument selection fool you, these are great tips that are useful to every musician!

Discovering Ska

Most people today know ska for its “skanking” dance, associated checkerboard fashions, and fusion with modern punk rock.

Few know that the same genre that rose to popularity in the 90’s thanks to bands such as Sublime, No Doubt, and Reel Big Fish actually had its beginnings in the streets of Jamaica, where radio waves carrying R&B from the United States were picked up by musicians who fused it with their own traditional music, creating an uptempo, highly danceable style of music that dominated Jamaica’s scene for much of the 60’s.

And of course, it’s impossible to talk about ska music without discussing the culture and instrumentation that are unique to the style. Combine the genre’s strong political statements with those irresistible, forward-driving horns, and it’s hard to imagine a more energetic, moving style of music.

This week at Musical U, we give you a history primer on the three waves of ska, and talk about the idiosyncratic culture that surrounds the genre and the instrumentation and rhythms you can expect to find in classic ska tunes. Get your skanking shoes on, pick it up, and head over to An Introduction to Ska Music to get schooled on ska!

A hallmark of ska music style is the walking bass line, which provides a foundation for the melody and harmonies. Learning how to “walk the bass” is a great exercise for any musician, regardless of their instrument. Music Protest kindly walks you through the fundamentals!

Much of ska music is played with the emphasis on the offbeat, or that tiny bit of silence between the main beats. Playing on the offbeat can be great fun! To master this part of your musicality, try to practice with a metronome to get your upstroke matched up with the offbeat, as recommended by I Will Teach You To Play Guitar.

Once More, With Feeling

Imperfections are not necessarily weaknesses.

Owning your mistakes and using them to connect with the audience is what a good performer does. Playing by ear requires a lot of work and some trial-and-error, but the freedom you gain in your playing is more than worth it. And of course, what better way to focus on style rather than nitpicky details than by putting your sheet music to the side? Nobody ever made a hard-hitting, unforgettable song by only worrying about the mechanics of the song; they felt the music.

The post Mistake to Masterpiece, Play It By Ear, Getting “Off Book”, and Discovering Ska appeared first on Musical U.

Though you may be tempted to panic or freeze up after playing a bad note during your performance, your mistake is not the end of the world – far from it! Learn four tips and tricks that will get you through those moments, with your audience being none the wiser.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Interview with Melody Payne
• Get Confident module preview
• Making Music with Ease, with Gerald Klickstein

Transcript

In our recent episode with Dr. Melody Payne, she shared an early music experience of performing in church, making a tiny mistake in the piece she’d prepared and just freezing up. In reality the situation wasn’t really high-pressure, but to her in that moment she found herself utterly unprepared for the possibility of making a mistake – and so she just stopped playing.

That was a big painful moment for her in her musical journey and maybe you’ve had similar experiences yourself. Melody explained that now she tries to help her students avoid that pain in two ways: by understanding that a mistake is not the end of the world and it’s okay to make mistakes – and by equipping them with practical techniques they can use in the moment to help them recover when they do make a mistake.

That’s what we’re going to be talking about on today’s episode. I wanted to share four big strategies that can help you recover from a musical mistake, and some practical tips for each.

This topic of recovering from mistakes is such an important one for musicians because it ties deeply into how confident you feel and how comfortable you are to perform your music and share it with others.

We actually have a whole module inside Musical U called “Get Confident”, dedicated to helping you build up your confidence in music in a practical step-by-step way. As well as helping with anxiety and stage fright it tackles this side of things: knowing that you don’t need to be 100% perfect because you’re equipped with skills to let you handle mistakes gracefully if they arise. I’ll put a link to more information about that module in the shownotes and I’m going to be sharing some tips from it in this episode.

Strategy Number 1: Keep going

This is maybe the only strategy taught to most students in instrument lessons: if you make a mistake, just keep going. If you haven’t taken lessons recently you might have forgotten about this crucial musical rule, and although it sounds simple it does take practice.

Fundamental to any piece of music is the pulse, or beat. That steady progression of musical time that lets the listener tune in and follow what’s happening in the music.

Playing the wrong note isn’t such a big deal and many listeners won’t even notice – but mess with that steady beat and the listener is going to feel like something’s gone wrong.

So the number one strategy is to learn to keep to tempo even if you fumble. Don’t pause and start again – just keep your internal metronome going and try to pick up the beat and keep playing.

As the saying goes, “The show must go on”, and that’s certainly true when you make a musical mistake.

This does require practice. In our recent episode with Gerald Klickstein, author of The Musician’s Way, he recommended practicing performing. Even if you don’t have an audience, make sure that your practice sessions include giving a “performance” of each piece you’re working on. This is the perfect opportunity to practice keeping going if a mistake arises. In your normal practice time, by all means do stop and correct the mistake and maybe spend some time working to fix it. But when performing, or practicing performing, don’t let a mistake trip you up – keep the music going.

Strategy Number 2: Keep it musical

Building on the idea of keeping the beat going, you also want to keep the music going.

Suppose you’re halfway through a song and you forget how the next part is meant to go or lose your place in the sheet music. It’s hard to keep the beat going if you don’t know what to play!

Often the audience won’t even know if you play a wrong note or two – but if you start playing completely random notes at random times, they’ll notice that things suddenly don’t sound very musical…!

Keeping it musical can be simple – like knowing that it will probably work fine to loop back and play the last section again. Or it can be more advanced, drawing on your musicality to tell you what notes will work, musically.

When you study ear training for playing by ear and improvisation like we teach at Musical U you gain a real understanding of the notes you’re playing, even when playing from memory or sheet music. That means that if suddenly your memory or sheet music fail you, you aren’t left with a totally blank canvas. You understand which notes and rhythms will fit with the music you’ve just been playing and you’re able to make something up on the spot – which the audience might not even realise wasn’t the official right notes!

In our Get Confident module one member shared this experience. He said:

“At times, I’ve had “brain freeze” or forgetting the musical passage while playing in front of people. Instead of stopping or stumbling, I will shift to improvising until I can mentally reconnect with the memorized theme of the music.”

By equipping yourself with some play-by-ear or improvisation skills you can be prepared to patch over any mistakes or problem spots with something that sounds musical and keeps the music going in a way the audience will enjoy.

Strategy Number 3: Embrace your mistakes

If you’ve ever been to a concert and the performer makes a glaring error, you probably saw the audience perk up, smile, or even clap for them. That’s because in the moment, the audience felt like they were truly connecting on a human level with their favorite performer. They are now “insiders”! They are seeing the musician’s vulnerable side.

Confident musicians know that they are free to make mistakes when they perform and that it will probably even endear the audience to them. As a result, these musicians likely make fewer mistakes, which makes them more confident.

Try practicing what you will do if you make a mistake.

You can:

• Do nothing. Don’t draw attention to the error at all, just keep going and keep it musical
• Just give a little smile. Then, as Taylor Swift would put it: Shake it off.
• If things go more seriously off track you can:
• Make a joke, or laugh with the audience.
• Or even invite the audience to sing along to “help you”.

Inside the Get Confident module in Musical U we invited members to share how they’ve embraced mistakes in the past or decided to handle them in future. Here are a few things they said.

“I give a smile, being amused by the things that happen in performance even if they never happened in practice. If it is a practice performance, these slips are valuable hints for the next practice session.”

“Before we start a performance, I try to connect with someone in the audience and get a read on how the whole audience is feeling. Then based on the error and audience, I use one of the strategies.”

“I smile and play. If the song ends well no one really cares”

Strategy Number 4: Keep a positive attitude

We all know the power of a positive attitude in life but it’s particularly vital as a musician – and particularly vulnerable to the negative impact that mistakes can have.

We talked about keeping it going – that’s much harder to do if part of your brain is occupied with kicking yourself for the mistake for the next five minutes!

If you let your attitude be impacted it will come through on your face and in your playing. The audience will know whether you’re still in the moment, passionate and engaged – or you’re frustrated, disappointed and distracted.

The most valuable tip I can give you here is to remember this fact: Live music is meant to be imperfect – that’s what people are there for!

These days more than ever before we have immediate access to pretty much all music ever recorded – and great sound systems that can practically replicate the experience of hearing it live. So when people bother to go to a live performance they are there to support the musicians and to experience something different. Not the carefully-prepared studio-recorded perfection and not the record they’ve heard a thousand times before.

They are there for the unique experience of that concert. Mistakes and imperfections are part of that experience, even if they’re not part of the “official, perfect” version of the music.

As we talked about before, making a mistake can actually create a powerful moment of connection with the audience, enhancing the experience for them rather than being a negative.

Remembering that live music is about the experience more than it’s about the exact perfection of each note can make it much easier to keep a positive attitude when mistakes arise.

So far we’ve been talking about recovering about mistakes “in the moment” while you’re performing. But this last point really applies in the longer term too. It’s vital that once the performance is done you keep a positive attitude and don’t dwell on the mistake.

Yes, mistakes can be valuable opportunities to learn and improve – that’s one of the good things about mistakes! But once you’ve asked yourself what you could learn and made plans to avoid that kind of mistake or handle it better in future, move on. Don’t waste time and energy in regret and don’t let that one mistake or disappointing performance slow you down or throw you off course. Get back to practice, look towards the next performance and keep moving forwards.

I’ll leave you with one more quote from our Get Confident module inside Musical U where a member shared a story of one performance that seemed to have gone badly due to mistakes…

“Part way into our performance two of us realized we couldn’t hear many of the others and we were playing too fast compared to many of the others. We felt we were doing terrible but couldn’t hear well enough to get back on track. We persevered and finished the number expecting to hear silence or even some booing at the end … but were completely surprised at the thunderous applause. We later heard a video of what we did and could hear our mistakes – but they were far from obvious. That experience made us realize that the audience enjoys live performance and does not make the critical judgement that we do.”

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The post About Recovering From Mistakes appeared first on Musical U.

We use digital tuners that give visual feedback, use chord boxes to learn new chords, and seek out detailed explanations of strumming patterns. The problem here is that by using these techniques we’re able to almost entirely bypass using our ears, which ultimately slows down our ability to learn to play.

When it comes to progress and development, feedback is crucial, and your ears give you the most immediate kind. You can instantly gauge whether you’re playing a piece of music accurately or not. All you need to do is spend some time developing your aural skills – then sit back and let your ears do the work!

Leave The Tuner Alone

The first thing that I would recommend is to stop using your tuner to get your ukulele in tune. Yes, it’s fast, but it’s a shortcut that robs you of the opportunity to use and develop your ears.

Personally, I try and use a tuning fork. A tuning fork will give you a reference note, but the rest comes down to your ears. If you don’t have a tuning fork, use a reference note from another source – this could be from another ukulele or an online tool that plays you the relevant notes. Ukulele Go! gives some handy tips on how to tune your ukulele using only your ears.

Start With A Familiar Tune

When it comes to working out songs by ear, I always recommend starting with the same song: Happy Birthday. The reasons for this are pretty obvious – it’s a song that we all know very well, we’ve all heard it many times, and we’ve sung it unaccompanied lots of times too.

Start with a single note and play it a few times to become familiar with it. Then, work out the next note: is it higher or lower than the previous note? Play the first note again and try to follow it up with the next. You might find this difficult, but it’s a process of elimination. There are a limited number of notes available to you (12 in an octave), and it has to be one of them.

It’s a slow process in the beginning, but you should find that even on a song like Happy Birthday, you will have drastically improved in working it out by ear before the end of the song.

Rinse And Repeat

Once you’ve got Happy Birthday all worked out, it’s time to move on to another song.

Nursery rhymes are good options here. Again, you’ll have a level of familiarity with the songs that will help you out. Repeat your technique from before. Take it a note at a time, and set realistic targets – maybe it’s just four notes a day to begin with, before progressing to trying to get a whole song in a day.

Here Come The Chords

Once you find yourself becoming confident working out melodies by ear, it’s time to move onto chords. Chords bring a new challenge, as they consist of multiple notes played simultaneously. It’s definitely more challenging but still well within reach.

Start out nice and simple. Pick a song with two or three chords in it – that will be plenty to begin with. If you’re just starting out, I’d also recommend looking up what those chords are. Here are a few songs that are a great starting point (plus the chords used in the song):

• La Bamba – Ritchie Valens (C, F, G)
• Sloop John B – The Beach Boys (C, F, G)
• Free Falling – Tom Petty (G, C, D)
• Barbara Ann – The Beach Boys (G, C, D)
• Ring Of Fire – Johnny Cash (G, C, D)
• Love Me Do – The Beatles (G, C, D)
• Cecilia – Simon & Garfunkel (G, C, D)
• All You Need Is Love – The Beatles (G, A, D)
• Sweet Home Alabama – Lynyrd Skynyrd (D, C, G)
• Bad Moon Rising – Creedence Clearwater Revival (D, A, G)

Find a recording of the song and listen to it. But not like you’d normally listen – I want you to focus your listening on the chord changes. When do they happen?

If you really want to get this skill down I’d grab a pen and paper and write the lyrics down. Leave a little room above each line and as you hear the chord changes, put a mark above the lyric that the change occurs over. We’re not looking for the actual chords yet, just the changes.

Once you’ve marked all the changes, the next step is to try and work out the chords. If you’ve started with a song that just contains three chords, it won’t be too difficult. What’s the first chord you hear? Listen again and again. Try playing your chords over the song, one at a time, until you find the right one. Note it down.

The good news is that it gets easier. And, when you think about it, it’s also just a process of elimination. Bob Egan provides a list of three-chord and four-chord songs that you can try to work out, for an extra challenge!

Sticking With It

Because it can be quite slow-going, a lot of people give in when it comes to working songs out by ear alone. When the internet is there in all its glory, it’s very easy to use an app or website to get the information you need. However, this is cheating your own development, and should only be used as a last resort for when your ear is really stumped.

Commit to doing a little bit of playing by ear every day, it’s such an important skill that it’s worth working on it daily. I’ll never forget the first time I played along with a song I’d never heard before: it’s an incredible feeling.

Dave Ellis is a ukulele enthusiast, blogging about his adventures with the little four-stringed uke. He runs Ukulele Go!, a treasure trove of resources for players that covers everything from buying your first uke to learning advanced licks and strumming patterns.

The post How To Play Ukulele By Ear appeared first on Musical U.

In this conversation, we talk a lot about getting “off book” – meaning being able to play even without the note-by-note sheet music in front of you.

Melody shares an impactful early experience with a performance that went wrong and how she eventually learned to handle musical mistakes with grace.

She found a great way to get started playing by ear and improvising with a friend, and that led on to wanting to equip her students with the tools needed to feel that freedom.

Melody teaches two particular skills and uses a special app to help her young students quickly start playing the songs they love in their own way without needing to learn them note-by-note.

One thing a lot of musicians struggle with is how to make their performances actually sound good – not just hitting the right notes at the right time, but actually moving the listener. Melody shares insights on her “Three Rules for a Magical, Musical, Moving, Performance”.

If you’ve ever felt limited to playing just the notes that are put in front of you, you’re going to love this episode. Melody shares so openly and has real insights on getting “off book”.

Listen to the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• MelodyPayne.com
• iReal Pro app
• 3 Rules for a Magical, Musical, Moving Performance
• Accompanying 101: 10 Tips for Beginning Accompanists

Transcript

Melody Payne: Okay. Alright. Hi, this is Melody Payne of MelodyPayne.com and you are listening to the Musicality podcast.

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

Melody Payne: Thank you so much, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Christopher: So let’s start at the beginning, I’d love to hear how did you first get started making music? Were you someone who took to it really easily or did it take a bit more work when you were early on in your music education?

Melody Payne: I grew up in a household with both parents who were hobbyist musicians. So having a piano in our home was something that had been part of our home for my entire life. My mom played the piano, and as a matter of fact she used to play this song when my sister and I were really, really small and we would dance, and dance, and dance, until we got so tired that we fell asleep and took a nap. So having music in our house was just a normal way of life on a day to day basis. My dad sang in the choir at church and my sister and I we both sang in the children’s choir at church so we had a lot of musical opportunities from day one.

Christopher: Great and how did you feel about music? Was it just kind of a natural and normal part of your life then?

Melody Payne: It really was and at some point when I was around six years old I believe, I started going over to the piano and asking my mom to teach me things. That lasted for a little while but I know a lot of parents would agree that the parent-child, teacher-student relationship doesn’t always work out, and that’s how it went with my mom and I. So they found a local teacher for me. My first teacher was 17 years old and I was seven. And I-

Christopher: Wow and how did that go for you?

Melody Payne: It actually, it went really, really well. I was just such a little sponge I wanted to learn everything I could and soak it all in just any kind of music, any kind of … Well not any kind of performance opportunity. I was a very timid performer but any kind of music that I could practice at home by myself made me very happy.

Christopher: And what do you think made you a timid performer?

Melody Payne: My personality probably. I have a huge tendency towards perfectionism and I have a Type A personality and I’m also a very tender, sensitive, person. So when you combine all those things together, it makes performing in public pretty terrifying at times because I don’t like to make mistakes in front of other people. To me it’s still a very scary thing. Although at this point in my life as an adult I have learned how to gracefully get past it, and not make a big deal about it, like I did when I was a child, but making a mistake in a recital just felt like the end of the world at that point.

Christopher: Are there any experiences that particularly stand out?

Melody Payne: One time when I was, I think about eight or nine years old. I don’t remember exactly how old I was. My piano teacher had been helping me learn lots of different types of music. I was assigned a very special book that was not just a method book, it was actually a hymn arrangement book. She chose one of the songs in it for me to play in church for the first time. Of course, I was scared to death. My hands were shaking. I was just terrified, even though the church was really, really small. I think we probably had about maybe between 60 and 80 members. Most of whom I was related to on top of that, but I was still scared to death.

So I go up to the piano bench, in the middle of the service when it was my turn to play and I had practiced, and practiced, and practiced. I had pretty much memorized the entire song and about a minute into the performance I made some really little, tiny little, error. I don’t even remember what happened specifically but I froze. I absolutely froze and I couldn’t figure out how to get past that moment of just being terrified.

I looked over at my parents. I remember clearly sitting there on the piano bench, looking over at my parents like, “Please help me, I don’t know what to do.” So they kind of motioned for me, “Okay, come sit down, you can come sit down, it’s okay.” And after that experience I was just so traumatized, I didn’t wanna play in public ever again. You know quite honestly, that was a pivotal moment for me and I highly doubt anyone else who was there that day has any recollection of it whatsoever. But for me it was a very, very, pivotal moment in my musical life.

Christopher: I feel your pain. You know I could look back on not that quite dramatic but similar experience of just suddenly realizing I didn’t have the control I thought I did over the music I was playing and I guess I was raised in the very kind of note by note system where you memorize your repertoire and then you stand up on stage and you perform it.

Melody Payne: Yes.

Christopher: And it sounds like you were in a similar situation where you hadn’t necessarily been prepared either for how to gracefully handle a mistake or how to have the inner instinct for music that lets you actually make up a solution even if it’s not the exact right notes.

Melody Payne: Right, I hadn’t been trained in either one of those areas and I was trained on the page. I didn’t have any experience doing anything off of the page, at all, whatsoever. I didn’t even have the faintest idea how to begin improvising or making up a solution on the spot as you mentioned or just getting out of the mistake or getting out of the moment of being frozen solid. That is something that I try my best to help my own students to be able to do because for me it was such an experience that I remember so clearly even 30 plus years later.

Christopher: It can leave scars. You know when we work with adults, musicians at Musical U, we have a whole module dedicated to getting musical confidence and a lot of it is about, kind of visualizing and remembering, and thinking through what happens if you do make a mistake and how can you be prepared and how can you be okay with the fact that you’ve made mistakes in the past and so it’s great to hear that’s a part of what you work on with your students.

Melody Payne: Absolutely, and to hear that you’re actually working and teaching people that it’s okay that you made a mistake; that is okay. That’s part of the learning process. That’s … I do try to help my students understand that it is okay. A lot of people especially, like myself who have the perfectionistic tendencies, have a very difficult time admitting that we made a mistake. That is a very, very, difficult thing to do. So actually being able to help these kids to work through that sometimes, it’s so rewarding to me because I can see myself in them so much from when I was that age. To help them to be able to work through some of these things just feels like, it feels like an honor.

Christopher: Fantastic. So tell us how did your musical life develop from there? You had this pivotal moment and realized maybe that you weren’t equipped in the way you could be or should be to handle that performance situation. How did things go over the next few years?

Melody Payne: I would not play in front of anyone. I was-

Christopher: Oh, gosh.

Melody Payne: …I just did not want to play in front of anyone because I was just so scared, that I would find myself in that situation again and again I wouldn’t know how to get out of it, or how to recover. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as recovering from mistakes. In my mind, you practiced it until it was perfect and then when you played it in front of people, it should still be perfect, but obviously that is not how music works.

So it took me a little while to be encouraged by my parents enough to be willing to play in front of people again. It wasn’t because I wasn’t encouraged by my parents. They were constantly saying, “Hey, play this for uncle so-and-so” or “Play this for cousin so-and-so” and we would be at family reunions and things like that but I didn’t want any part of that whatsoever. I was still too scared.

As I got into high school, I had a really good friend, well we’re still really good friends to this day. His name is Brad and he only played by ear. He didn’t know how to read music or if he did it was very minimally. I played only on the page. I didn’t know how to play by ear or improvise. So in high school, the two of us would get together, wherever we came across a piano. It didn’t matter where it was. We would get together and we would sit down at this piano and we would just jam duets. So he was teaching me how to play by ear and how to understand that you know what, it’s okay if you didn’t play the correct harmony there. That is no big deal. The big thing that’s important is that we’re having fun. We’re learning how to express ourselves as musicians. We are stepping outside the box so to speak of only reading music and to me that began a time in my life of being okay with who I was as a musician and not feeling like I had to be so scared anymore of making a mistake. So for me, it was very freeing at that time.

Christopher: That’s wonderful and before we go on and talk about how your music life was different after that, I’d love to just pause for a minute and dive in because I think the idea of sitting down with a friend who can play by ear and just having a jam session. I know to a lot of our audience that sounds amazing and incredibly hard to do. So would you mind, can you take us back to one of those jam sessions and what it was like, like when you sat down with Brad and you were at the keyboard, what did that look like? What were you talking about and how did he help you to break free of those notes on the page?

Melody Payne: One of the main things, well there are really two main things I remember happening. One of the main things was that he would sit down on the bass end of the piano and he would start to play … I guess sometimes it was maybe a pop song or hymn or something like that that just centered around just a few chords. It wasn’t classical music or anything like that. It was something more, chord progression, very simple chord progression that repeated itself quite frequently throughout the music. He would sit down and play the piece and then he would have me sit down at the treble end and just start trying to match what he was doing.

Of course the first time he asked me to do that, it completely blew my mind. I had no idea where to start. It was a monumental moment, the first time that I just started paying attention to what chords he was playing, okay, he’s playing a C chord and an F and a G, and maybe an A minor. I did know enough about chords at that point that I could at least recognize what he was playing and then using my ear, I started picking up on what the progression was. Then I just started mimicking what he was doing. Then a little while after I got used to doing that, he said, “Okay, now start playing the melody.” And I went, “Uh-oh.” Mind blown again. But after, he kept encouraging me and we kept trying and trying and rehearsing it over and over again.

After quite a few attempts, it started to feel a little bit easier and I started to feel like, “Oh, this is what improvising is. This is what playing by ear is.” Because up until that point, I really didn’t understand what those two things meant. It was a really big moment right there when he would just sit down at the bass end, and then we would switch places and then he would say, “Okay, now you play the chord progression and octaves and chords or whatever, and I’m going to improvise the treble notes.” So we would switch back and forth, back and forth and then eventually, things just started falling into place and it started to become a really fun activity.

Christopher: Fantastic. So it sounds like you really learned in a practical way. You were training your ears, you were doing it, you were learning by doing, really.

Melody Payne: Yes, absolutely. I had not had any type of ear training at that point in my life specifically. So this was all brand new to me but yes, the hands on experience for me I don’t think could have come at a better time and I don’t think it could’ve been any better of an experience. It was really that important for me.

Christopher: Great and how did your musical journey continue? Was that an area that you really focused on in the years to come or were you more taking that confidence back to the sheet music and the more traditional repertoire based approach?

Melody Payne: I didn’t specifically focus on playing by ear or improvising so much because to me that was just the fun thing that we did when we hung out together. So I wasn’t quite making that connection yet, but I went on to major in music and then I went on to get my masters in music. Here’s where the next part of the puzzle fits in.

In my master’s degree I was a graduate assistant or a teaching assistant or a lot of different universities call them different things but one part of my job was to teach beginning piano class. A couple of the aspects of that class, a couple of the items that the students had to prepare for their piano proficiency were playing by ear and different styles, harmonizing melodies, and reading lead sheets. So at that point I actually learned the musicals, well not musical but I guess the technical side, here’s what a lead sheet looks like. Here’s what a chord chart looks like. Here are come actual steps to playing by ear so the fact that I had to actually teach those things to these young music majors. When I myself still wasn’t very comfortable with them; made me study them a tremendous amount before I would go in the class room and attempt to say, “Okay, here’s what we do, step one, step two, step three.” So that was sort of the next part of the puzzle and then since that point, was when I started working with my students on the lead sheets and the chord charts and I just really believe that that is as fundamental of a pert of music study as anything else.

Christopher: That sounds like such a wonderful beginner’s piano curriculum. It sounds like it was fortunate as a part of your own musical journey because so many beginner piano courses would be just notes on a page and they wouldn’t even think of introducing the student to a lead sheet early on.

Melody Payne: Right and this was the Alfred group piano for adults piano course for undergraduate music majors who were not piano majors and I just thought it was fabulous. It had so many things. I was actually a little bit jealous that they were getting to learn all these things and I had not learned them earlier in my life. So it was really great.

Christopher: Wonderful, and so you went on to teach piano yourself.

Melody Payne: Yes.

Christopher: And it sounds like you really incorporated this into your own methodology.

Melody Payne: Yes especially right now. I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia and in this region we have a lot of blue grass music and a lot of Appalachian folk music and jam sessions are huge. Knowing how to read a chart or play a lead sheet or play by ear, those things are incredibly important skills to have in this area especially for young musicians. Especially in the last seven years since I’ve lived here has become a huge part of what I teach in my piano lessons for my students.

As a matter of fact, I have one little girl, she’s 12 years old and a couple of years into her piano lessons, she’s been taking lessons for four years. This will be year number five. A couple of years into her piano lessons, as soon as she got comfortable and coordinated enough to play chords, I started introducing her to chord charts. She immediately became successful at playing chord charts because to her, in her mind, her brain understood reading a letter on a page and being able to do something on a piano with that much better than reading the notes on the page and being able to do something with that.

So we’ve taken it and run with it. She actually plays keyboard and sings lead in church every Sunday now and she’s 12 years old. I mean her-

Christopher: Wow.

Melody Payne: …It’s just wonderful. It’s fabulous. That’s sort of what I want all my students to be able to do is take whatever these tools are that we do in their piano lessons and just go out into the world and have fun.

Christopher: That’s such a great attitude and it’s funny I think that piano is maybe the one of if not the most extreme instrument for showing that different perspective. Because I think  people imagine classical piano and very complex pieces, a lot of notes on the page and the constant pianist is juggling so much mentally. at the same time it’s also a beautiful instrument for thinking in terms of chords and the groups of notes are played together based on just a lead sheet or just a chord chart. It’s wonderful that you’re equipping your students to understand both perspectives.

Melody Payne: Thank you I really feel that it’s so important and as a matter of fact I have two new students. They’ve had lessons just during the summer and their ages 10 and 12, they’re sisters. I started with time in their separate method books so we’ve been going through the information and they’ve been practicing and we’ve been doing all this. I also started them playing five note scales or pentascales depending on how you phrase it. I showed them, I sat down and played a song by Adele just using chords, something that I’ve memorized, the chord progression and I started playing a little bit of it and I said, learning those five note scales is step one to being able to do what I just did, and their eyes got so big. They were so excited about being able to play all their favorite pop songs really, really soon.

So I sort of use it as little bit of a teaser to say, “Okay, if you learn all your scales and chords, then we can start learning all these fun songs, and it will be amazing.” So they love it.

Christopher: That’s great. I mean you are officially in fact Dr. Melody Payne. You have a doctorate in music education and I think to some people it would be shocking to hear a doctor of music education talk in such glowing and passionate and creative terms about the process of learning piano and but I suppose in your doctorate studies you just went so deep you understood what really mattered. Would that be the right way to put it?

Melody Payne: I think that’s a great way to put it. For me going all the way through school for 10 years to get my doctorate was what I knew I needed to do because I wanted a college teaching position and I did that for several years. I was in music faculty for several years. Then when I met my husband and we got married and he got relocated to southwest Virginia where we are now, there wasn’t a place for me to be a music faculty member anymore.

So I had to sort of carve out my own business, I guess. Become an independent piano teacher once again which I had not been in quite a while. I think it was actually such a huge gift to be able to do that here because I learned all the technical aspects of things and all the book knowledge and all of that all the way through school. But even though I’m not currently teaching at a university, I feel like right now being able to put into practice all of those things that I’ve learned and being able to get to know each student as an individual and figure out exactly where they are on any given day and go from there and teach them the musical tools that will give each student the best success possible, which yes, I learned how to do that during my years of graduate school but I’ve really learned how to do that since I’ve been an independent piano teacher again. That’s actually put a lot of the glow back into my voice because I get to spend my afternoons with these wonderful children. There’s nothing like it. There is nothing like it.

Christopher: Fantastic. So you mentioned that lead sheets and chord charts and I think for a lot of people in our audience, that would be quite unfamiliar to them they may be used to more notes on a page and I’d love for you to share a little bit about how you help your students kind of familiarize themself with what it means to play from a lead sheet or a chord chart.

Melody Payne: The first thing I do, like I mentioned a few minutes ago is help them to become familiar with their five note scales, and then broken and block chords, and as soon as they are comfortable with a few of those, then we start moving into chord charts and I like the app iReal Pro. That is a fantastic app because it contains a huge library of chord charts and of course it has the backing tracks so that you can play along.

Usually what I try to do is find one that’s very, very simple, that only has four or five different chords in it, so that they can be successful from the start and maybe has one unfamiliar chord in it so that I can start to teach them things like what a slash chord is or a seventh chord or suspended chord; different things like that.

So I actually use the chord charts as teaching tools as well but I have the students first of all just play basic chords with their right hand or their left hand. To me it doesn’t matter what hand they use as long as they’re now starting to get the picture that their hand is going to have to move around on the piano. Because for a lot of them, this is the first experience they’ve had with that skill so it might be a little timid, “Oh, I have to move my hand? What are you talking about?” So yes you have to move your hand and it’s going to be okay. No worries. Just look at the letter and then play the chord that you see. Then I start to explain that each letter gets a certain number of beats and we just kind of go from there and start layering. Maybe they play a single note with their left hand and the chord with their right hand to create an accompaniment and that way I teach them that they can sing along, which most of them are like I was when I was a child and they don’t want to sing out loud in front of me, which is okay. So I sing out loud in front of them, help them feel a little better. We all have to be vulnerable sometimes right?

So I just use those chord charts as teaching tools and then eventually when their reading skills have caught up with their chord skills, then I start to introduce lead sheets. Then I tell them they can just go on different sheet music websites and they can Google the name of the song lead sheet, or just find a pop song that they like, that has the chords above the staff and we go from there.

Christopher: Wonderful, and that must give them so much of a sense of confidence and freedom compared with just saying here is the two staff sheet music for a classical piece, let us learn it note by note.

Melody Payne: It does and it’s really amazing. Some of the parents come to the lessons in my studio. Not all of them do. The kids make them stay outside but some of the little ones still are okay if their parents come in and take pictures and listen and enjoy.

I have a particular piano mom, her name is Laura, and she is one of the most supportive and kind piano moms. Her little girl, Hope, just turned eight years old this summer and we have started doing chord charts and lead sheets together and I have looked over on the couch in my studio where the parents sit and have seen the mom wiping a tear or looking like she’s about to burst with joy and seeing these little children playing chords and doing things with both hands when they have not done that yet, is a huge boost for the parents. At that moment I think the parents kind of think, “Oh my goodness, my kid can really do this.” It’s a huge, huge self-esteem boost for the kids too.

Christopher: That’s such a great insight and it reminds me back when I learned piano I started out with a jazz piano curriculum and I learned a few instruments so I was kind of familiar with sheet music and music theory but it was still fairly note by note and then a few years later, I discovered this thing called chord piano which was kind of let’s learn the triad chords and use those as our building blocks. Like you say it just, it’s not a shortcut but it does allow you to leap forwards in what you can create musically. The sound of the music you’re creating is suddenly so much more fuller, and richer, and more flexible, compared with going through the more and more complex note reading.

Melody Payne: Yes, absolutely. It is, definitely.

Christopher: So you’ve integrated this into your own teaching but it would be a huge understatement to say you are just running a very successful piano studio now. In fact, you’re known worldwide as one of the most prominent music teacher bloggers online and I hesitate to use the word blogger because it doesn’t seem like it does it justice. I’d love to give just a couple of examples of what you publish at MelodyPayne.com.

Melody Payne: Certainly.

Christopher: Because you’re sharing such valuable insights there both for music teachers and individual music learners.

Melody Payne: Alright.

Christopher: Would that be okay?

Melody Payne: Absolutely.

Christopher: So one post that really stood out to me was one called, “Three Rules for a Magical, Musical, Moving, Performance” and just from the title, I was excited because we often focus so much on the instrument technique we forget about making it sound musical and moving and even creating a bit of magic with it. So could you share a little bit about that post and what you were communicating there?

Melody Payne: Absolutely. That post, a little bit of that post stemmed back from when I was younger. Like I said I was very Type A. I was very perfectionist so I wanted to do exactly what my teachers asked me to do. But when they said things like, “play musically”, or “play from your heart”, or “play with feeling” I didn’t know what that meant. I had too concrete of a personality. I needed black and white instructions. How do you play musically? But I didn’t quite understand that it was okay if I asked that question, I just thought I wasn’t getting it. But like I said, I went through grad school, went through college, kept playing piano as a high school student and eventually I understood what it meant when the teacher was saying play with feeling or play from your heart. I started putting it together that, well there is actually a step by step process I can use, thank goodness, this is so much easier.

So that’s why I came up with this blog post, is because I break it down to the very simplest form of learning how to play musically and this is how I teach all my little ones. From early on in their piano lessons, how to play musically. From the very first lesson, I teach them, I call them the music rules, and I tell them this is what music wants to do. When you help the music do what it wants to do, it makes your playing sound so amazing and obviously make a big deal about it when you’re telling these little kids. They’ll try anything because they have much less inhibition. They’re less self-conscious so they’ll try it and it’s wonderful. I’ve actually as I’ve said in this particular blog post, I’ve had a mom during the interview be moved to tears because her child played musically in the interview. All because I introduced what I call the very first rule of music, which is usually the last note of a piece of music is the softest. And I say now if the last note is fireworks, we do not play the last note the softest, but if the piece of music is about a kitten or if it’s about, whatever it’s about. If the last, generally speaking, if the last note is the softest, so I teach them a piece of music I wrote, we’d play the duet, and I help them to understand that if you get softer at the end it makes the piece of music you’re playing sound finished.

That’s the first basic concrete step that I use to teach my students to play musically. It works great for older students as well. It doesn’t have to be just for eight year olds. Anyone, doesn’t matter what age, eight years old through 80 years old can use that rule to make their playing sound more musical. And then from there, I begin to move on into a couple of other rules and we build from there and eventually incorporating those concrete rules of musicality, begins to feel natural. It’s a that point that the real music making starts to happen I think.

Christopher: That’s wonderful and I think what I particularly loved about that post was that you weren’t afraid to simplify and generalize. I think a lot of music teachers, they would hesitate to give that kind of advice because they know that there are times where it won’t be the quietest note in the piece that’s at the end. The reality is that a set of rules like that is a huge, a huge headstart in finding your own musicality and understanding how do you make something sound more musical. So I love that you were willing to step out there and say, “Look, these three rules are a really great place to start.”

Melody Payne: Well thank you. They actually helped me as I was going through the process myself of figuring out my own musicality. Because up until that point, well I’m going to use a very strong word here but up until that point, I felt like an imposter. I did not feel like a real musician because I did not understand what it meant to play musically or to play with feeling or to play from the heart. So now I never want any of my own students to feel like an imposter. So giving them these tools that they can use in the lesson or at home or wherever they are, they’re simple enough and they are basic enough but they pack a huge punch.

Christopher: That’s so empowering. 


So the other post I wanted to touch on is one of the kind of hot topics for pianists because we’re often called upon to step up and accompany someone or equally we might be a singer as well and we want to be able to just sit down at the keyboard and play as we sing. You wrote a terrific post called, “Accompanying 101: Ten Tips for Beginning Accompanists.” Could you tell us a bit about that one and where it came from and what you share in that post?

Melody Payne: Yes absolutely. I have myself been an accompanist in one fashion or another since high school. A lot of the tips that I present in this post are things that I’ve just learned and figured out on my own along the way. When I was in undergrad, I accompanied for a lot of people’s voice lessons. So I wasn’t only in my own piano lessons learning from my teacher, I was in voice lessons and trumpet lessons and clarinet lessons and anything else and I was paying attention to what all of their professors were saying as well. So when the professor told me, “Okay, we need you to do this here.” I took it to heart and I said okay, well I’m not only going to do that here, I’m going to do it everywhere the music does that. So as I continued though undergrad and continued accompanying, it wasn’t really occurring to me that I was learning things about being an accompanist that I might one day be able to offer to other people. A few years ago one of my high school students was asked to accompany her high school choir’s Christmas concert. She had never done that before but she’s a fantastic pianist. She’s actually starting her junior year majoring in music right now so I’m very proud of her but she brought her music that the choir director at her high school had given to her and she said, “What do I do? I’m practicing it but I’m sure that just practicing these songs will not be enough.” So we focused on accompanying skills for about a month in her piano lessons.

The first five things on the lists were on my original blog and I had originally blogged about that after working with my student Rebecca. Then I recently updated it and moved it to my new blog at MelodyPayne.com and added five more tips. I just feel like if you’re as prepared as you can be as an accompanist and you’ve put a lot of these tips into practice, then you’re going to have the most successful first experience accompanying that you can. So, if you are following these tips then I feel like you won’t go in there not knowing what to expect at all. I feel like it at least can help you prepare a little bit for what’s going on at the first rehearsal.

Christopher: That’s great and I think it is really close to a running theme here which is you specialize in helping people get off the book and going beyond just the notes on the page are telling them to do. I think maybe the trap a lot of people fall into with accompanying is they think, “As long as I play the accompaniment perfectly according to the score, I’ve done my part.” I think in that article you’re showing that actually it’s a skill in itself.

Melody Payne: Yes absolutely it is. For me particularly one thing I’d like to mention is that there was a particular piece of music that I was given to play for our high school choir. I accompany our high school choir here in my town and the accompaniment in the left hand had huge four note chords. Well I have a tendency to get tendonitis in my left thumb and in my left wrist if I’m playing too many big chords and the piece is very fast which this particular one was. So I had to come up with ways to protect the health of my wrist and my thumb so that meant leaving out a few notes. That meant maybe playing the octaves or maybe just playing a three note triad instead of a four note huge chord. Being a good accompanist also encompasses being able to make the changes that you need to make for your own physical health but still be able to provide the music that is necessary to support the singers or other musicians that you’re accompanying.

Christopher: Absolutely and that’s a beautiful example because it shows the importance of the skills we were talking about earlier, understanding piano in terms of chords and understanding to find the right notes and to change the notes. Having practiced that more creative and improvisational and play by ear side of things, I think you’re much more empowered as an accompanist to say, “Okay, I’m not gonna play exactly what’s written because that’s not the best for this situation.”

Melody Payne: Absolutely and another example of that is if there is a very difficult passage. I know a lot of times a lot of the more modern choral arrangements there might be a pause in the singing and then the piano just goes off and does all of this fancy stuff. But it might also occur in the middle of a page turn. Well all of that is not possible unless you memorize everything and you turn your page four measures early or four measures late. So sometimes what I do if I encounter a situation like that is I use chord symbols. If it’s an arpeggio, I don’t worry about memorizing the arpeggio, I just see my different chord symbols as I’m turning the page with the opposite hand and I just play somethings that is in those chords. The harmonies are there and it’s okay if I as an accompanist don’t play every single note that’s written into the piano score.

It took me a while to get to that point because there is a fear of, “Oh my goodness. We can’t leave notes out. Someone composed those notes. We cannot leave them out.” But someone who arranged the music on the page might not have put the page turn in the best spot so we have to do what we have to do in order to still be able to accompany the musicians and not get left behind because we’re fumbling around in our page turn in the middle of the big arpeggio section.

Christopher: For sure. I think if you’re listening to this and you’re feeling inspired, I know a lot of people listening will be in that situation of feeling constrained in playing the notes that to play and craving that ability to go beyond the notes on the page and take ownership of which notes they choose to play and when to perfectly suit the musical situation.
If you’re feeling inspired and interested and all of that resonates with you, I’d highly encourage checking out MelodyPayne.com. Those are just two examples of blog posts she wrote there and there’s a vast treasure trove of information about these kinds of skills and how to learn them. Even how to teach them and of course there’s also a whole store of resources for music teachers in particular if you want to introduce this kind of thing into your own music teaching.
So thank you so much Melody for joining us today and sharing about your own experiences and also these insights on what can transform someone I think from a robotic player who feels terrified in performance situations because they don’t know what to do if they don’t play exactly the right notes into someone who feels relaxed and confident and capable as you explained to even move the audience to tears their own musicality. So I’m so happy to have you with us on the show today. Thank you for sharing so openly. Do you have any final words of advice or maybe you can tell the audience where to head if they want to know more about your approach and dig more into all of these concepts.

Melody Payne: Well my website is MelodyPayne.com and my blog is located there. Actually the MelodyPayne.com website is the hub of everything that I do so if you go there you will be able to see any branch of whatever is going on for me musically or professionally in anyway. I feel that it’s important to meet the students where they are and to be able to take them from that point and any given lesson on any given day, to the next step. Whether that point is learning music rule number one or whether that point is figuring out how to analyze a Beethoven sonata or whether that point is learning how to play a chord chart for the first time, to play a favorite pop song. So being able to break things down into the easiest digestible form is something that I believe that is necessary for not just piano teachers but for music teachers or for any kind of teacher for that matter. I’m just grateful for the opportunity to be able to share that with everyone. So thank you so much for having me here today.

Christopher: Our pleasure, and we’ll have links to Melody’s website and her music resources store and everything we’ve mentioned in this episode in the show notes. Thank you again Melody.

Melody Payne: Thank you. Have a great day.

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The post Getting “Off Book”, with Melody Payne appeared first on Musical U.

Birthed in the streets of Jamaica, ska spread to the rest of the world, seeing two waves of revival, decades of success, and no sign of becoming obsolete.

This fascinating style is extremely rich in its history, evolution, and culture. Many questions arise: What are the origins of ska music? What did ska music sound like in the 60’s compared to the 90’s? What is dancing to ska music called?

Read on to learn about the three waves of ska music, the instrumentation and rhythms that make it unique, how it compares to reggae, and of course, the identity of this mysterious “Rudy” character mentioned in an overwhelming number of ska songs.

Table of Contents

1. The Evolution of Ska

2. Musical Hallmarks of Ska

3. Ska Culture

4. Ska vs. Rocksteady vs. Reggae

5. Ska Today

The Evolution of Ska

From its origin as a fusion of American R&B and traditional Jamaican styles to its current unique place in modern music, the history of ska music spans three continents and several decades.

First Wave: The Original Jamaican Scene

Post-World War II, Jamaicans were able to listen to American music on the radio through stations in New Orleans and Miami, meaning that there was a high volume of popular R&B tunes coming into the country. A particularly famous one was American blues artist Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame”:

Jamaican producers eventually started recording local artists’ versions of the genre. While still in the style of R&B, these songs showed influences from traditional styles such as mento, also known as Jamaican folk music, and calypso, an Afro-Caribbean style. This attempt to replicate American music resulted in an unexpected surprise: the music took on a new form, straying further from R&B and becoming a new genre entirely: ska.

By the early 1960’s, ska was the most popular genre in Jamaica, and groups combining disc jockeys, MCs, and engineers (known as sound systems) were rapidly producing new singles in this new style, and playing them at lively street parties for the public’s enjoyment.

Second Wave: 2 Tone

Thanks to a wave of Jamaican immigration to Britain a decade previously, ska experienced a second surge of popularity in the late 1970’s, in the form of “2 Tone”. Rhythms and melodies from first wave Jamaican ska were combined with elements of punk rock to yield music that had a different attitude, and was more uptempo and high-energy than first wave ska.

This wave of ska revival was spearheaded by Jerry Dammers and his band, The Specials. The name “2 Tone” itself came from the group – both because of Dammers’ record label, 2 Tone Records, and the fact that the band was racially integrated (a rarity for the time). With its political leanings, ska 2 Tone music aimed to fight racism in Thatcher-era Britain. With an instantly recognizable sound and aesthetic, 2 Tone brought ska to mainstream audiences in the UK.

Other notable ska music from this epoch was Madness, the Selecter, Bad Manners, and the Bodysnatchers. UK 2 Tone even extended its influence across the pond, resulting in the formation of a Canadian 2 Tone-inspired band called The Villains, who became arguably the country’s most important ska band.

Third Wave: Ska Across the Atlantic

It wasn’t long before bands in America picked up on 2 Tone, and started incorporating ska into their sound. Punk bands in particular absorbed ska influences, fusing the two genres for a new style known as ska punk music. Most American third wave ska music is quite far removed from the original Jamaican ska, instead favouring punchy guitar riffs and other hallmarks of punk rock.

The mid-nineties saw ska punk explode in popularity, with artists such as No Doubt, Sublime, Reel Big Fish, and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones receiving mainstream attention and even appearing on the Billboard 200. This is the ska music you’ll most likely find on modern playlists.

Third wave ska punk band Less Than Jake’s frontman Chris DeMakes discusses how they combined punk, ska, and pop influences for their unique sound, providing insight into the musical climate of the 90’s and how it influenced the rise of the genre. Their song “All My Best Friends Are Metalheads” beautifully showcases the understated guitar and the very present horns that Chris discusses in the interview:

Musical Hallmarks of Ska

Though diverse in itself because of its numerous revivals and fusion with other genres, there are distinct rhythms and instrumentation found across the board in ska music.

Throughout its varied history, instruments used in ska music have been quite consistent. Apart from the standard bass, guitar, drums, keyboard, and vocal lineup shared with most popular music from the 1950s to today, a strong horn section features prominently in many bands.

Let’s take a closer look at the specific roles these instruments play in ska, and how these roles have shifted over the decades:

Guitar: The Ska Upstroke

Most ska music is played in 4/4 time, and a big part of getting the ska groove right is playing on the off- beats – this creates that bouncing rhythm that ska is famous for. This rhythmic pattern is also known as the ska upstroke, as demonstrated by the Secret guitar teacher:

This rhythm involves emphasizing beats 2 and 4 in 4/4 time with a quick, almost percussive guitar strum.

For a faster groove, such as those often found in high-energy styles like ska punk, an eighth-note skank rhythm may be used. The rhythm is then read as 1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and:

This upstroke can be played on other stringed instruments to add even more interest to ska; Live Ukulele details how to skank on your ukulele with ease!

Vocals:

The vocal section of first wave Jamaican ska was quite diverse. The R&B influence is heard in much first wave ska, with soulful, melodic delivery used by artists such as Derrick Morgan. Some groups, such as the Skatalites, used vocals quite sparsely. Others incorporated a singing style known as “toasting” (one of the forebears of rap), where the vocalist makes use of shouts, chants, interjections, and rhyming.

2 Tone featured more melodic, energetic vocals, with themes of unity, racial integration, street culture, and tolerance.

As for third wave ska music, you only have to compare bands like Sublime and No Doubt to hear the lyrical diversity; while the former sang about drug addiction and California living, Gwen Stefani wrote ska music of love, relationships, and life on the road. A unifying factor in third wave, however, is the punk influence on vocal delivery – lyrics were sung quickly, with shouts (Oi!) and spoken word interspersed throughout. This is heard in the music of bands such as the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, and Rancid.

Brass section:

A typical horn section for ska music consists of trumpets, trombones, and alto saxophones. This brass section can either follow the guitar and vocals directly, hit and accent the offbeats, or provide a nice countermelody.

In much of first wave Jamaican ska, the horns provided the backbone of the melody, freestyling over the steady beat and the guitar upstrokes. 2 Tone kept the horns, but minimized their role slightly for a more guitar-driven sound. Third wave, however, tended to embrace the horn section fully. Check out how Reel Big Fish’s cover of A-ha’s “Take On Me” carries the main musical motif on the brass section:

Bass:

A walking bassline is another trademark of ska instrumentation, most often found in first wave Jamaican ska, which used either the bass guitar or the double bass in the rhythm section. These step-wise basslines provided the perfect support for the fast tempo and high energy of ska songs.

The more punk-oriented third wave ska saw bass players veering away from walking basslines and towards more rapid, filled-out parts.

Percussion:

First wave Jamaican ska stayed true to its cultural roots by combining the use of traditional and modern instruments – shakers and tambourines were often used alongside drum kits.

With the use of a full drum kit, the classic ska rhythm involves the bass drum on beats 2 and 4, to emphasize the guitar upstroke. Further supplementing the backbeat is the use of cross-stick (a technique in which the drumstick is hit against the rim of the snare drum) on beats 2 and 4. Meanwhile, the drum head of the snare is hit on beat 4, and eighth notes are played on the hi-hat to round out the beat:

This beat is demonstrated in Hudson Music’s instructional DVD “Wicked Beats”:

However, ska drumming certainly wasn’t limited to this back-beat oriented rhythm. Drumming teacher Dex Star gives a tutorial on other common ska beats for drummers that want to try their hand at playing a ska groove.

Keyboards:

First wave ska incorporates piano and especially organ instrumentation that would either follow the bassline or bubble along with the guitar. Keyboards come and go in 2 Tone and third wave, though these later bands reach for the organ when they want a retro sound.

Ska Culture

That checkerboard pattern came from somewhere… right? What is that ska music dancing all about? What’s with the suits?

All About Skanking

Wondering how to dance to The Specials, The Villains, and all your other favourite ska music? Look no further.

Skanking originated in the 1950’s in Jamaican dance halls, and evolved over time to better suit the speed and style of later revivals of ska. For example, ska punk calls for a slightly more aggressive dance style, with faster movements than conventional skanking.

Here’s a quick crash course: bend your arms at the elbow, punching the air with your arm while kicking the opposite leg out as if you’re running. Alternate your arms and legs, and you’re good to go!

Who Is “Rudy” in Ska Music?

It takes only a brief dip into the ocean of ska to realize that an overwhelming amount of songs make a reference to somebody named “Rudy”. So, who is this elusive character?

Back in the days of first wave Jamaican ska, frustrated youth in poorer areas of Kingston, Jamaica turned to petty crime. Known as “rude boys”, these youth sported aesthetics and attitudes inspired by American jazz musicians and gangster films, wearing suits and porkpie hats, and behaving rambunctiously and rebelliously.

Many of these rude boys were hired by soundsystems (organizations of disc jockeys, engineers, and MCs) to gatecrash their competitors’ street parties. Such disruptions became so commonplace that artists started addressing rude boys in their lyrics, often shortening the moniker to “rudy”.

A decade later, 2 Tone took the name and ran with it, with fans referring to themselves as “rude boys” or “rude girls”. The Specials’ famous tune “A Message To You, Rudy” references the popular subculture:

Since then, the term “rude boy” has also become associated with jungle, grime, drum ‘n’ bass, and garage. Third wave ska punk tunes such as Sublime’s “Jailhouse” also mention the name:

Ska vs. Rocksteady vs. Reggae

Though ska is very much its own unique style, there is quite a lot of genre crossover with other Jamaican styles, and definite comparisons can be made. It’s often even compared to spouge music, though the two genres come from two different Caribbean countries!

Ska itself has two direct descendants: rocksteady and reggae. Let’s look at the evolution.

From Ska to Rocksteady…

Rocksteady was ska’s immediate successor, gaining popularity in the mid-1960’s just as ska’s heyday was ending. The styles are rhythmically similar, as rocksteady retains the offbeat rhythm. In fact, you could play a ska rhythm at around 80 bpm to create a rocksteady groove!

This leads us to the most noticeable difference between ska and rocksteady: the speed. Rocksteady’s significantly slower speed lends it a more laid-back feel than ska.

This spaced-out tempo gave more room for experimentation. Guitar and piano players started going beyond the simple offbeat, adding other accents besides the classic 2 and 4 for more complex syncopated rhythms. Bass players, rather than being confined to writing walking basslines to keep up with ska’s tempo, also started experimenting with syncopation. Meanwhile, the brass section took a backseat, with horns playing a supportive role.

… and Rocksteady to Reggae!

Though extremely popular in Jamaica for a period of time, rocksteady was soon replaced by reggae. Like rocksteady, reggae is considerably slower than ska, with a slow backbeat that lends a “laid-back” feel to the music.

Reggae is distinguishable from ska by its minimal use of horns; instead, it favours the classic rock band setup of drums, guitar, bass, and drums. The bass is much, much more prominent in reggae than in ska, and often carries the signature riff of the song. The guitar, meanwhile, often features a double strum on the upbeat that gives reggae its steady, “chugging” rhythm.

Ska Today

Three triumphant waves and countless evolutions after its inception on the streets of Jamaica, ska is still going strong. The third wave ska punk scene spawned countless bands that are still active today, such as Reel Big Fish, Rancid, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

The post An Introduction to Ska Music appeared first on Musical U.

We deconstruct the myth that jazz is an advanced genre requiring a perfect ear and perfect chops, clue you into the secret of making music sound spooky (it’s not nearly as complicated as you think!), and guide you around that gaping, unseen hole in the ground known as the ear training trap.

But first, let’s see what we’ve added to our already-towering stack of musical resources…

October’s Offerings

It’s been a busy month here at Musical U. Besides our regularly-scheduled programming of ear training tips, podcasts, and musicality advice from the pros, October has seen the addition of three resources for you to sink your teeth into!

First off, we’re releasing a new module to make mastering scales easier than ever. Our new Scale Degree Recognition module will enable you to identify notes of the major scale simply by singing them in solfa (a.k.a. solfege).

Our Instrument Packs have been updated with a lesson in rhythmic precision, teaching you how to hone your inner metronome. Our pros for singing, guitar, bass, and piano all offered up some amazing advice (both general and instrument-specific) on how you can better feel the beat.

And last but absolutely not least, the imminent return of Halloween calls for some scary studies in spookifying your sound! This time around, our resident piano pro Sara Campbell shares the secret of turning upbeat, happy songs into something nicely suited for…  a horror movie soundtrack.

Head over to What’s New in Musical U: October 2017 for more details on these new offerings!

Jazz is for Everyone

This week, we interviewed Learn Jazz Standards founder Brent Vaartstra about how the foundations of jazz can be of value to any musician, whether or not they’re interested in jazz itself.

Ear training is an invaluable skill for jazz musicians; this is the foundation of improvisation, playing and singing around the beat while still staying in time, and expressing yourself musically! These lessons benefit musicians of all backgrounds – nobody wants to play robotically.

Brent’s website is a goldmine of resources for any kind of musician, with lessons on chord progressions, intervals, playing by ear, and more. Most importantly, he bridges the gap between learning music theory and actually applying it to your instrument.

Tune into our podcast episode An Ear for Jazz, with Brent Vaartstra to learn about Brent’s musical background, what led him to start Learn Jazz Standards, his teaching philosophy for ear training, and a wonderful freebie he has kindly provided to our listeners to get started with developing their ear!

Brent has such a fascinating story about how he came to be the musician he is today. One interesting aspect was that he was forced, with the mysterious disappearance of his  teacher, to begin playing by ear at a very early age. While this is not the path that many of us take, it begs the question, when is the right time to begin playing by ear? Key-notes explores this question.

While most piano players begin with learning by sheet music, guitar players tend to pick up sheet music later. But, what if piano players started the same way that guitar players do? Piano Picnic explains how pianists could benefit from starting without sheet music.

Jazz players often think of music in terms of the chord changes that the chart is built around. This requires an additional step in the ear training process to be able to recognize the chords and anticipate where the music is heading. Jazz Advice has a great guide on anticipating chord transitions!

Jazz is one of the most aurally intensive forms of popular music, in regards to the amount of listening that musicians in this genre tend to do. Today’s jazz musician still looks to the many classics like Miles Davis, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, and Charlie Parker.

But does that mean that good jazz hasn’t been made since back in the day? Absolutely not! Brent Vaartstra compiled this list of 92 modern jazz albums on his blog for you to expand your repertoire.

Spookify Your Songs!

What gives horror movie soundtracks their visceral, hair-raising effect? Why are some melodies so unsettling to the ear? How do different chords and chord progressions lend completely different character to songs?

The answers to these questions are complex, but can be be boiled down to one thing: transposition.

Musical U’s resident piano pro Sara Campbell works her magic on   nursery rhymes and other simple, innocent happy notes, and shows how changing just a fewl notes can transforms the song from upbeat and cheery to creepy and foreboding.

Throw your own malicious mix into Sara’s cauldron as you learn to Transpose and Terrify!

Transposition is certainly a valuable skill that any musician will benefit from mastering. For our guitar players, Guitar Trance details how to easily transpose in only four steps.

Transposing into a minor key is just one way that you can make music sound scarier and fit in with your Halloween adventures. Beyond minor, there are many other elements in music that help to create scary music. 12tone shows you the key components of scary music and how you can create your own!

Aside from these types of special effects, there is an interval that is traditionally labeled as the “Devil’s Interval”: the dreaded tri-tone. The tri-tone is a perfect fourth interval, raised by a half step. This essentially splits the diatonic scale in half, creating a sound that you will never forget! Learn more about this staple in horror music from the Sync Project.

During the course of this mini-lesson, three distinctly different minor scales were discussed, which can all be used to make your music more Halloween-y. Rich from Trumpet Planet explores the different types of minor scales, and the key characteristics of each one.

Escaping the Trap

The ear training journey is not without some speed bumps and roadblocks along the way.

It’s easy to do the exercises, but some musicians find themselves in a rut when it comes time to play. Let’s say a guitarist can recognize intervals by ear with no problems, but has a hard time strumming out a perfect fifth when they pick up their instrument.

What’s going on?

Check out About the Ear Training Trap to learn how Musical U can help you avoid this pitfall, and how to best combine ear training and instrumental practice to get the results you want.

Taking all that you are learning in your musical studies -whether it be aural training, music theory, or other bits of instruction – and applying it to your music makingis the missing element to achieving the musical freedom that you are seeking. For another look at this, Todd from Liquidrum describes the importance of learning your instrument and not just your pieces.

There was a fascinating moment in the interview where Brent discussed that the greatest musicians are not just “playing an instrument”, but that the instrument is a vessel for their musical expression. This is particularly enlightening (and inspiring!), and a big reason that we stress singing so much within Musical U. Jay Friedman, principal trombonist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, has a very similar philosophy.

Singing is a such an important part of ear training, even though most of us are not singers! Don’t be frightened!ou don’t have to be a vocalist to be able to sing through your intervals. If you are uncomfortable with letting your voice free, it will be helpful to start out with some exercises that have reference pitches for you to build on. Let Verba Voice Technique help you on your way:

Apart from applying ear training exercises directly to your instrument, you could take another approach and incorporate the music you are trying to learn. By taking one song, and using sight singing, you willmake great progress in applying your newfound ear training success to real music. The process is really quite simple, as laid out by the School of Popular Music.

Still scared of the dark?

Even with a lantern in hand, the dark places won’t light up until we step inside.

The post October’s Offerings, Jazz is for Everyone, Spookify Your Songs, and Escaping the Trap appeared first on Musical U.

The ear training journey is a long, yet immensely rewarding one. Along the way, there’s a trap that 90% of students will fall into, leading them to think they aren’t making progress and causing them to lose focus and motivation to develop their ear. Thankfully, one simple tip will prevent you from falling into this trap and will help you make the most out of your ear training practice.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• An Ear for Jazz, with Brent Vaartstra
• Learn Jazz Standards
• Instrument Packs at Musical U

Transcript

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of musicians make a lot of mistakes with ear training.

There are a few of them that come up a lot more than others, and one of those really common ones is what I call the ear training trap.

In our recent episode with Brent Vaartstra from Learn Jazz Standards we talked about his new ear training course and one of the things I highlighted was that he’s cleverly designed it to avoid this trap.

Before we dive in and talk about the trap and how you can avoid it, let’s take a quick moment to define what ear training is.

At Musical U we define ear training as “any activity you do to improve your ears for music”. That is a very broad definition, as it should be. But what we’re going to be talking about today is the traditional definition of ear training that most musicians associate with the phrase, and that’s doing dedicated exercises, drills, to recognise different elements in music by ear. Examples would be practicing recognising the interval between a pair of notes, or listening to a sequence of chords and trying to identify the progression.

There are loads of different areas where you can do useful ear training exercises, but with all of them you’re in danger of falling into the same trap…

Let’s start with an example. Jeff is a saxophone player who wants to improvise jazz. He’s heard that intervals are really important for having a good jazz ear so he grabs an interval training app or maybe some practice MP3s, and he spends a few weeks dedicatedly putting in 20 minutes a day practicing. He makes some progress, after a few weeks he can recognise a handful of interval types, ascending and descending.

But Jeff’s losing enthusiasm. He’s glad to have made progress, but when he picks up his sax he doesn’t really feel any different about improvising.

Jeff has fallen into the ear training trap. What’s gone wrong?

Well, he has treated ear training as an isolated activity. He’s done well with the ear training itself, but he has been doing drills that aren’t connected with his instrument or the music he loves, and he hasn’t had any way to make that connection.

If you never relate ear training exercises to your actual musical life, ear training can quickly feel pointless and it becomes incredibly hard to keep up your motivation – and that’s fair enough! You’re not really seeing any benefit from all your efforts!

So what’s the solution? Well, naturally, it’s to make sure your ear training efforts *are* connected to your musical life.

In the new ear training course from Learn Jazz Standards there is a section all about applying your new ear skills on your instrument. At Musical U, in our ear training Roadmaps we provide the dedicated training modules with the core ear training exercises – but then we always accompany them with recommended exercises you can do directly on your instrument to put it all into action. We also have a set of modules specifically about applying ear training to real musical tasks like playing by ear and improvising. And our Instrument Packs provide tutorial videos showing you exactly how to apply ear training on your specific instrument.

The ear training trap is simple – and once you know about it, it’s easy to avoid. Unfortunately the traditional ear training courses and methods leave you totally prone to falling into the trap, and in my experience 90% of musicians who pursue ear training do fall into the trap and it leaves them thinking that ear training is difficult and pointless.

Don’t fall into the trap yourself. Now you know about it, you can find ways to make sure you always connect your ear training to your real musical life, and of course if you need guidance on doing that we’re always happy to help at Musical U.

Before I wrap up I do want to mention one other thing.

Some musicians actually try so hard to avoid the trap they end up falling into another one. I was talking just the other day to a professional bassist who runs a popular website teaching bass guitar, and he was telling me how after years of gigging he had a really good ear and could happily sit in with a band and pick things up by ear. But he hadn’t really done any ear training exercises, he’d just learned it gradually by repeated trial and error playing his instrument year after year.

Now that’s good, and clearly it served him okay. But I found myself wishing he’d been shown a good way to do ear training. Because while the brute force instrument-only approach does work, it really does take years of playing, probably at a semi-professional level, before you get a really solid ear.

The beauty of ear training exercises is that they can dramatically accelerate that process by quickly giving you the building blocks required to do all the practical musical tasks. If you don’t give yourself those building blocks it’s a much slower journey.

So that’s another trap to be avoided: thinking that instrument practice alone will get you a good ear fast.

Ear training is a powerful and efficient way to get good ears. But you mustn’t fall into the trap of doing it isolated from your instrument and your real musical life. And you should also try not to swing too far in the other direction and miss out on the fast progress that dedicated exercises and ear training practice can provide.

I hope that whether you’ve never tried ear training before, or you’ve tried it and fallen into the trap of doing it in isolation, this quick episode has helped show you this dangerous trap and how you can make sure you avoid it in future.

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The post About the Ear Training Trap appeared first on Musical U.