Diagnosing And Solving The True Causes Of Musical Struggles (Coaches Corner, Episode 9)

2024-06-22T13:47:42+00:00

When you get stuck or frustrated in music… how sure are you that you know what the real problem is? It can be pretty surprising what the solution turns out to be, and in today’s Coaches Corner we have three perfect examples of that.

Join Christopher and the Next Level coaching team to discover the latest tips, tricks and techniques you can use to advance in your own musical life.

In this episode:

• Andrew shares an illustration of the power of musicality to fix even seemingly-unrelated problems with technique
• Zac gives a beautiful example of how active listening can dramatically simplify your learning tasks in music
• Andy explains how to get out of the “I should” and “I’ll never” head trash and focus on what’s really true in practice and performance
• And Camilo shares the power of self-recording to demonstrate with certainty the progress you’ve really made!

All that and more in this week’s Coaches Corner!

Tip: find just ONE idea from everything that’s shared, and take it to your next music practice session or apply it in YOUR musical life.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• Musicality Now: Can You Learn Perfect Pitch? Should You? (Inside The Book)
• The Musicality Book
• Musicality Now: Creating, Listening, Understanding (with Tony Parlapiano of popMATICS)
• Musicality Now: Classical vs. Rock/Pop vs. Jazz Harmony (with Tony Parlapiano)
• Musicality Now: Unlocking Harmony
• Musicality Now: Be Yourself And Discover Your Own Music (with David Reed, Improvise For Real)
• Improvise For Real
• How To Write Songs
• Next Level Coaching

Transcript

Christopher: If you’re struggling to play something, are you sure the problem is what you think it is?

In this week’s Coaches Corner, we have three beautiful examples where musicality, active listening and addressing mental self-talk actually proved to be the solution to what had been, apparently, instrument challenges.

It has been another jam-packed week here on Musicality Now!

A quick recap in case you missed anything…

This week we kicked things off with an “Inside The Book” episode, looking at a section of the Relative Pitch chapter from the new Musicality book, on Absolute Pitch or Perfect Pitch, which is often super confusing for musicians. And hopefully that episode sheds some light on the truth and the opportunity – or lack of opportunity! – in trying to learn perfect pitch.

Then we had our mini-interview with Tony Parlapiano of popMATICS. Really great little interview getting his perspective on musicality and some of the behind-the-scenes perspective on how the popmatics approach works and why he designed it the way he did. And then we had a little clip from Tony’s masterclass where he was comparing and contrasting classical harmony with rock and pop harmony and jazz harmony.

And a little bit because of that, and a little bit because we’ve been refining the chord regressions chapter of the Musicality book, I did an episode then on two epiphanies I had back in my own musical journey that really unlocked harmony for me and hopefully shed some light for you, too.

Then we switched things up a bit. Instead of a Meet The Team interview this week, I shared part one of a really fantastic conversation I had a little while back with David Reed from Improvise For Real, where we were looking at this series of quotes they had published on Instagram, and it was just the first little section of that conversation. But I’m looking forward to sharing the rest with you because he’s one of my favorite people to talk to about all this stuff, and I think you’ll really enjoy the back and forth and the discussion and his insights and perspective on all of it today.

Later on today we have our masterclass with Benny Romalis from the popular YouTube channel “How To Write Songs” and howtowritesongs.org, I’m really looking forward to that. And just to say, if you are a premium member or a Next Level member, I’m excited to see you there live with us a bit later today for our monthly masterclass.

And to wrap up the week on Musicality Now, today we have another Coaches Corner episode where Andrew kindly stepped in to host for me.

So in this one, you’ll hear Andrew sharing an illustration of the power of musicality to fix even seemingly-unrelated problems with instrument technique.

Then Zac gives a beautiful example of how active listening can dramatically simplify your learning in music.

Andy explains how to get away from the “I should” and “I’ll never” head trash and focus on what’s really true.

And then Camilo shares the power of self-recording to demonstrate with certainty the progress you’ve really made.

All that and more coming up in this Coaches Corner! And remember, just try to latch onto one little tip, trick technique, nugget. Something that resonates with you and seems like it could connect with your musical life. Take it away, apply it, and see the results you get.

I’ll be back next week for more Musicality Now. Until then, here’s Coaches Corner, with Andrew hosting.

———

Andrew: Welcome today to our Coaches Corner. I’m Andrew Bishko, I’m head educator at Musical U. I’m also the Head Coach for the Next Level coaching program that we have here.

And today we’re meeting with our marvelous coaches. Hello, Zac, hello, Camilo, hello, Andy, and also myself.

And we’re going to talk about some of our coaching experiences and what we’ve learned recently as weve been working with our clients.

So today, I’m going to go first, and I wanted to talk about just the power of musicality.

And so I had a client who began her coaching, and she plays the saxophone, and we just completed six months of coaching. We hardly talked about the saxophone at all this whole time.

I mean, yes, she did exercises on the saxophone and everything like that, but it was all about musicality.

First, there was a huge focus on rhythm, understanding rhythm, internalising rhythm into the body, understanding rhythmic notation and how to interpret it, how to feel rhythm.

And then once that was, she was also focusing on our Spring Season in Living Music, and then she went on to Summer Season with improvisation, and she just loved improvisation.

And it was amazing that once she got the rhythm under her belt, she was able to create and with so much structure. One of the things I noted is I have clients that are, have been improvising for a while, and a lot of times they’re into jazz and their improvisations… They have a lot of skill, a lot of facility. They can play a lot of scales, they can play a lot of licks, but there’s not an overall sense of structure and musicality.

And here she came in knowing just a few scales. Actually, we only start with a few notes with Summer Season! Just a few scales. And here she was able to create the most beautiful stories with her improvisation and structures. And the amazing thing was, is that her saxophone tone just exploded.

Her dynamic range, her facility on the instrument, all kinds of things that have been technical problems or issues that she thought she was going to have to address, just took care of themselves. Because she was expressing and creating with her saxophone, and all these sounds started to come out, all these really beautiful sounds.

So a real testament to the power of creativity in really solving a lot of what we think of as technical problems.

So very good, Andrew. Thanks for that wonderful insight. You’re welcome, Andrew.

All right. Okay, so now we’re going to move on to Zac. Coach Zac has a wonderful insight for you today.

Zac: Yes, thank you, Andrew. Wow. I’m excited for this because we’re going to talk about the power of active listening, especially to reduce overwhelm.

We had a client, and she brought me this song, and the bassline on it was so cool, and she really wanted to figure out the bassline, and it seemed really crazy. Like, it’s sort of this jazz, funk, R’n’B thing where there’s a lot of fancy little bass things going on in there.

And at first, it seems like, how could we possibly learn this by ear? And we started active listening.

We started asking questions about repeating patterns. We said, what can we notice that repeats and what stays the same? And we noticed that there was a pattern that repeated. The bass player played it slightly different in different sections of the song.

So there was this one kind of hook we found out, oh, this guy’s got a hook. There’s this bass hook in there. And she noticed it throughout the different sections as well.

It’s a little bit different in the verse than it was in the chorus. A little bit different rhythmic feel to it, a little bit different type of expression, but it was the same order of notes, and it was basically the same musical phrase. And then he kind of, like, had a little call-and-response with that phrase.

So we figured out, if you figured out this one hook phrase, you got, like, 50% of this bassline figured out, because that’s mostly what he’s doing, is he’s riffing on one hook, he’s playing a little. Playing the hook, and then kind of doing a little bit of improv after the hook, and then playing the hook and do a little bit improv.

So you don’t have to figure out all the little bass things, you figure out the hook, and then you can be creative and add in your own things in between. And so it was really awesome to be able to say. At first it went in, like, ten minutes, we went from, I’ll never be able to figure out this baseline to, oh, this is actually pretty easy, and we can do something creative with this, and this can be pretty fun.

And now, now we’re excited to go grab the bass and figure this thing out. Just have fun.

So it went from being, like, the mindset of ”oh, I’m hearing this song, this is crazy. I can never do this” to being like “hey, I have a way to approach this and even make it my own and be creative and have fun with it”. And I think that is just really powerful.

So just active listening and noticing patterns, noticing things that repeat is a super powerful way to approach learning a new song.

Andrew: That’s fantastic. It’s so wonderful when you can see how simple music can be, and even the most complex things.

I think it comes back to your idea about rhythm. When we start to see patterns, we start to see structures, we start to see forms. When we understand these kinds of things, it’s much easier to comprehend and take it all in and realise that it’s not beyond us, you know, that we can.

We can do things that we never thought we would be able to do. And, I mean, we see that all the time, right in Next Level, people doing things like “what? I didn’t know I could do that!”

So, very good, Andy?

Andy: Just recently I’ve been working with a client because she’s been feeling performances aren’t going as well as she’d like. So she’s been feeling really quite disappointed about this.

But she has been playing the old “I should” mind game. “I should be better. I should be able to play it”.

And the thing to remember here is that our minds are essentially meaning-making machines, and more often than not, they tend to come up with the wrong meaning.

And for her, it was the meaning of “I’ll never”. “I’ll never be a great musician”. “I’ll never get this piece right” which led on to “I’ll never be able to perform”.

So with a little bit of kind of thinking about her situation and what was actually really going on, we could start and consider some right meanings that were being made.

So this is where “maybe” came in.

Maybe she was playing a piece that was a little bit above her ability at the moment, which is the old cognitive bias where we think we’re better than we really are. The other thing was maybe she needed to get some more fundamental skills in place, which, again, kind of leads into this. We’re a little bit better than we think we are. Sorry, the other way around, we’re not quite as good as we think we are.

So this can be cured, really, by choosing pieces of music to play that are at an appropriate level, so things that are maybe technically less demanding. Another thing that we considered was that the piece just wasn’t practiced enough, or it hadn’t been taken through the recall process well enough, so it wasn’t kind of coming from a memory through her fingers and into the wide open space quite as well as it could do.

I mean, another thing to consider as we’re just kind of talking about this, is maybe the piece hadn’t been taken through performance preparation. Performance is a completely different thing to practice, and we can practice in our practice rooms and get things right, but as soon as we’re in another venue, things can go horribly wrong simply because it’s a, it’s a different location. So there’s things to actually kind of think about.

I suppose a final thing to say is that in a situation where things aren’t going right, maybe it’s just that day when the performance isn’t going right. But in my client’s case, what we discovered really was that there were certain parts of the piece she was playing that she just didn’t know that well. So by actually kind of thinking about this and focusing on what was really happening, rather than making up the “shoulds” and going with the “l nevers”, we actually got to the root of the problem, root of the issue, which was a simple thing of the piece hadn’t been kind of deconstructed, practiced, reconstructed and taken through that performance process.

So rather than kind of getting down about a particular performance that’s not going well or any other kind of issues with, with practice and, well, whether practice or performance is to just kind of look at the data in front of you, really, and kind of focus on why the issue really is, rather than making incorrect meanings out of what’s happening. So use the data and move forward.

Andrew: That was really cool. Andy, thank you so much for sharing that. And now we’re going to talk to Coach Camilo.

Coach Camilo, what did you learn this week from your Next Level experiences?

Camilo: Something cool that happened this week was seeing how clients start to realise how far they have come in their progress. And this is not happening because I tell them that they are having great wins, but because actually they go back and they listen to their own recordings again.

Here’s the place where the power of recording, of self-recording comes alive. Because that’s the best testimony that you can have about your own progress.

Clients were motivated about seeing and hearing how they are playing, how they can learn from themselves by listening to their own recordings.

Andrew: Awesome, Camilo, that’s wonderful. Thank you all so very, very much for sharing your wisdom.

I have to say, as Head Coach, it is an honor and a privilege to be working with such a fantastic team of dynamic and wise and wonderful coaches.

And I’m looking forward to next week, to our next time we do Coaches Corner. We’re going to head off to our meeting now, so thanks, everyone, for tuning in.

We’ll see you next time!