from Musical U
http://www.facebook.com/pages/p/412254762289166
“Finally, after so long doing only the classical part, only the same thing every day, I got so incredibly bored that I finally decided to mix the classical and the aural, creative side. Terrifying! At first, I was scared to death. But I was so bored, I just had to try. Well, one of my best character traits is I have a high tolerance for looking foolish. So I thought “well, give it a shot. What the hell? See what happens”. And it was kind of a lifesaver in my musical life, in a way,” — Jeffrey Agrell, author of Improvisation Games For Classical Musicians
from Musical U
http://www.facebook.com/pages/p/412254762289166
WHY Every Musician Must Sing (Inside The Book)
We rarely use the word “should” or “must” at Musical U… but singing might just be an exception! If you don’t currently use singing as a tool on a daily basis in your music practice, you’re missing out. Here’s why.
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Links and Resources
- Musicality Now: Is THIS The Missing Piece For Your Musicality?
- MusicalityBook.com
- Why Every Musician Should Be A Singer Too
- How To Learn To Sing In Tune
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WHY Every Musician Must Sing (Inside The Book)
Transcript
“Every musician must be a singer, too”. Really?!
You might have heard this advice that every musician should sing. Certainly we say it a lot here at Musical U.
But why?
Especially if you’re not a singer already, it can seem like a weird and unappealing suggestion, but there are many highly powerful benefits to singing for anyone who’s involved in music-making.
In today’s episode, we’re going to peek inside the forthcoming Musicality book and share with you exactly how singing can help you to become more musical faster.
This is another “Inside The Book” episode of Musicality Now where I peek inside the Musicality book we’ve been working on and will be releasing soon, to give you a sneak peek into the material in there and share some of the ideas or insights or concepts or exercises that can help you in your musical life today.
We’re going to be continuing what we were looking at in the last episode in the singing chapter, and I’ll talk a bit more about the context for that in a moment. But just to say, this topic of singing is one we’ve become more and more passionate about here at Musical U.
And yet I’m always a little bit anxious about it – because I know how emotional it can be for people and how controversial it can be to say, you know, if you’re a guitar player or you’re a saxophone player or you’re completely devoted to the mountain dulcimer, “you should be singing”.
I always hate to say “should” at Musical U! But this is one of the rare cases where we do say “you should”, “you must”, “you really ought to”. Because we’ve just seen so clear cut the benefits it will bring. And so we feel it’s worth pushing you a little bit, nudging you a little bit through the emotional resistance that I know can come up, to get this tool into your hands.
I wrote an article back on our easyeartraining.com website back in the day, I think, called “why every musician should be a singer too”.
And we were talking at the time more about ear training specifically, and so the article was focused on this feedback loop between your ears and your voice. And so from early on, we were talking about the benefits of singing for ear training in particular. But over the years, singing really evolved here at Musical U.
The first big step forwards, I think, was with our Foundations course, which uses the Kodály approach, and I’m sure I’ll talk more about that on future episodes. But the crux of that approach is really using your singing voice as a way to develop your musicality.
And then we doubled down on that with the Living Music program, really making it almost a non-negotiable. And that was a bold step for us because, like I said, I know a lot of musicians hearing this will be like “I’m not a singer. I don’t want to sing. I just want to play my guitar”, or whatever the case may be.
But it’s a night-and-day difference if you can learn to leverage your voice as a tool. And in the last episode, we were looking at some of the blockers that can be in the way if you feel right now like you’re “tone deaf” or you “can’t sing”, or you’re “not a good singer”, check out that last episode., I’ll put a link in the shownotes for this one.
But we looked at the reasons – and actually, why don’t we jump over and we can recap that?
But just before we dive in, again, to say, it’s really rare for us to say “you should” or “you must” at Musical U, but if you’re on the fence, I hope this episode is going to lay out for you the concrete reasons why you’re massively missing out if you don’t currently sing in your musical life.
Let’s dive in.
So just to set the scene a little bit, if you’ve watched one of these “Inside The Book” episodes before, you’ll know where we’re at. But just to say, this is our forthcoming Musicality book. The book is split into three parts, and part two is building blocks of your instinct from music, your relative pitch and your rhythm.
How do you learn the skills to recognize and interact with music intuitively, instinctively, and be able to do all the amazing things that we think gifted musicians can do. Part three gets into the practical application of that. Things like improvising, playing by ear, songwriting, playing with expression, performing.
But part one is really the foundational concepts and skills. So we start out big picture, with mindset and with musicality. But then I want to highlight there are these four core skills that we consider foundational.
Audiation is the ability to imagine music in your mind and kind of pick it apart and analyze it in your head.
Singing and musicality. This is not a side note or an appendix or “just for singers”. This, to us, is a core skill, right alongside audiation, active listening, and the superlearning techniques that can accelerate the results you get from your music practice.
So I did just want to remind you of that if you saw the last episode, or share that with you before we dive into this chapter, just to explain: singing to us is a fundamental part of what it means to be musical and to express your musicality and to reach your full musical potential.
We have this Pillar Belief of “Musical Inside And Out”, and contrasting with a lot of the instrument-focused music lessons you’ll find out there, we really focus on making sure the music is coming from inside you and then empowering you to bring it out, whether it’s through your singing voice or an instrument or writing music or whatever you might like to do.
So singing is foundational. In the last episode, we knocked down some of the misconceptions around singing so that if you’re interested, but you’re not sure you can, you that episode should help you realise what’s holding you back and what you can do about it.
Just to very briefly recap what we covered, we talked about why people think they can’t sing. And these break down into four reasons corresponding to your Head, Hearing, Hands, and Heart. Our 4H Model Of Complete Musicality. And each of these has a simple solution. So do check out that episode if you didn’t already.
We talked also about tone deafness, how it’s a completely separate thing from whether you can sing or not, and it’s extremely rare. The actual clinical condition of tone deafness does exist, but it’s like 1% of people who actually suffer from it.
And so the last thing to say from the beginning of this chapter is just my goal today. Our goal in general, is not to transform you into the next X-Factor superstar in terms of singing. It’s really to get you to that basic, everyday type of singing.
So I compared it with, you know, not being Leonardo da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa, but painting your living room walls. Or singing to yourself in the shower. That kind of basic “I can do it” ability.
So with all that being said, today I wanted to continue on in this chapter and just share some of the concrete reasons why it’s worth exploring singing as a tool.
So let’s dive in from this point.
———
So what’s the value of getting to that basic level of singing ability if you’re not looking to perform as a singer? Singing is a foundational skill, like audiation, active listening, and superlearning, which will have positive effects throughout your musical life. Perhaps the simplest way to put it, though, is that singing is a way to bring musical ideas from your head out into the world directly, without the added complication of searching for the notes you want on an instrument.
If you don’t have singing as a tool, then it can feel like there’s always a big gulf between hearing something or imagining it in your mind’s ear and then playing it on your instrument. When you have a basic level of singing ability, you’re able to bridge that gap or even remove the need for the instrument step entirely, depending on your task.
Let’s go through some specific benefits and applications of singing as a tool.
First benefit we’ll talk about: An improved sense of pitch.
Learning to sing in tune is one of the best ways to train your sense of pitch. Singing in tune requires two major components, not just controlling your vocal pitch, but also being able to very clearly and accurately hear and imagine the pitch you’re aiming for.
So as you learn to sing in tune, you’ll be training your ears to hear better whether notes are sharp, flat, or perfectly on pitch.
This is something that you might never have had to do before, depending on the instrument you play, and it’s such a fundamental skill that you absolutely do not want to overlook it.
It is possible to do ears-only exercises to hone your pitch accuracy, too, but learning to sing in tune is an easy, natural, and useful way to do it.
Another benefit is improved audiation.
As well as that real-world pitch training, you’ll also be training your mind’s ear, your ability to audiate (meaning imagine music) with accurate pitch.
Just as active listening practice helps increase the richness and detail of your audition, learning to sing in tune develops the accuracy with which you can pitch notes in your mind easier.
Ear training singing is also an enormous help for ear training. This is something we really emphasise at Musical U. When you use your voice as part of ear training exercises, you can progress a lot faster.
You’ll learn more on this in the chapter on Integrated Ear Training, but as a preview here, these are some specific ways it helps.
Learning to sing also helps you sing in your mind so that when you’re trying to do ear training exercises and recognize notes, chords, and so on, you have a more powerful musical imagination to bring to the task.
Singing gives you a way to experiment out loud during ear training. For example, if you’re trying to recognise an interval, you might sing the start of a reference song to see if it matches up. If you’re trying to recognize a chord progression, you might sing along with the root notes of the chord or the bassline to see how those pitches could reveal the chords that are being used.
You can also do some nifty vocal acrobatics. For example, if you were trying to identify a harmonic interval, meaning two notes played at once, being able to sing those two notes back individually transforms it into an ascending or descending interval that you might find much easier to recognize as you improve.
Over time, you’ll do these things in your head or skip them entirely as they become subconscious instinct. But until then, it’s really helpful to be able to experiment out loud by singing.
Singing lets you test whether you heard what you think you heard. In fact, we might even say that if you can’t sing back what you heard, then you haven’t really understood it by ear. One example would be recognising a chord as major or minor.
You can listen for the overall sound of the chord, but that’s prone to mistakes, especially in a rich musical context. It also gets harder as you try more ambitious chords, like seventh or extended chords. If you’re able to sing back each note of the chord that both tests you truly heard what was going on and gives you a clear set of notes to explore and evaluate to identify the chord type. For example, identifying the solfa name of each note or the intervals between them.
If you find yourself struggling with a pitch-related ear training task, it’s likely that you aren’t actually hearing clearly enough yet to be able to sing back each of the notes. Once you practice that and use singing as a tool in this way, the actual task tends to become much easier. In the chapter on solfa, you’ll learn the solfege or do-re-mi system for recognising pitches by ear.
We found this is by far the easiest and fastest way to start recognizing notes, to play by ear, to improvise, to transcribe music, and more. It’s a sung system, meaning you learn it most effectively by singing notes with their solfa names.
The basic level of singing ability we’ve been talking about so far is plenty sufficient to enable full speed solfasuccess. In fact, many Musical U members inside the Living Music program find that learning solfa is a really great way to gradually develop a confident and reliable ability to sing, even if they had previously thought they couldn’t sing.
Another benefit is that singing enables easier and freer experimentation and creativity in music.
Yes, you can sit with an instrument and noodle around with scales or patterns and try to create something, but that’s both more complicated and more limiting compared with doing it with your voice. Your singing voice is the most direct path to bring musical ideas you imagine into the world.
You have total freedom of pitch, so you’re not trapped in memorised patterns or strict rules or limited by your level of instrument technique. You can immediately express what you want to and then analyze it during or after to transfer it onto an instrument or write it down.
You may have noticed legendary improvisers like Keith Jarrett or Oscar Peterson singing along as they improvise for this very reason. The musical ideas are born inside and then simultaneously expressed directly with their voice and their instrument.
Singing is the most natural and direct form of musical expression available to us. It may seem intimidating at the outset, but once you break past that little barrier, it is enormously natural and liberating to be able to create music directly with your voice. Singing, especially with solfa, allows us to practice and explore music anywhere, at any time.
Another benefit is easier communication. Being able to express musical ideas with your voice isn’t just helpful for creating privately by yourself. It also makes a huge difference when collaborating with other musicians.
If you don’t feel able to express your ideas with your voice, it can be very frustrating in a band or other group to have to try to translate what you’re thinking onto your instrument to communicate it. If instead you can just quickly and easily sing the idea you have in mind, you skip or all the instrument specifics and complications, and you can bounce ideas back and forth immediately and directly.
Then this final section, just a side note:
When I originally drafted this chapter, it was very factual. It was very concrete and literal. And I actually, I remember I attended the funeral of a friend’s father, and the singing in that service was just so moving. And on the walk home, I had just been working on this chapter that week, and on the walk home I realised I had to say something about that. I couldn’t let it be a pure, dry tool, because as powerful as it is in that sense, it would be inaccurate and unfair to present it as a dry tool.
So I must end this section with a slightly more romantic take on singing.
I’ll keep it short because I could wax lyrical about the emotional and spiritual and psychological benefits of singing all day long! Not to mention the scientifically proven social and physical benefits of singing, especially when you do it as part of a group with others.
Instead, I will just share my personal experience. There is nothing as emotionally cathartic, deeply healing, and spiritually moving as as singing yourself the music which is most meaningful to you.
We opened this chapter with the statement that the singing voice is every human’s first instrument. And so even if our focus is to develop that basic, functional, everyday form of “singing as a tool”, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention to you how deeply rewarding it can be to really adopt singing as an instrument and explore all the rich wonders it can bring to your musical life.
So I hope that your first steps in this chapter may well lead to walking, running and taking flight, and that singing may one day prove as meaningful and rewarding to you as it has to me.
Give it a try! I know at this point from extensive experience how personal and sensitive a topic singing can be amongst musicians. So I’m not going to ask you to commit to making singing part of your musical toolkit.
However, I am going to ask you to commit to giving it a try. Again, you needn’t see it as “becoming a singer” or taking on some big new challenge.
Just play along with us for this chapter and see how you get on. Start trying to use singing as you go through the material in other chapters of the book.
It might feel weird. You might experience some negative emotions or emotional resistance. You might feel extremely self-conscious even if there’s nobody else around to hear you.
Do your best to not get discouraged. Nobody is going to judge you or ask you to sing in front of a crowd. This is 100% about you and equipping yourself with a powerful tool to unlock your musicality. Even if you never sing a note in front of anybody else in your life, I guarantee you this will be well worth it and you will be very glad that you added this powerful tool to your toolkit.
There is nothing like your own singing voice for expressing yourself in music, and I think you will be surprised and delighted about what you can achieve.
———
So that’s a little peek into the next section of the singing chapter! I would love to hear in the comments which of these benefits resonated with you.
You know, we covered a lot there in terms of ear training benefits and creativity benefits and communication benefits. And hopefully it painted a good picture for you of how different your musical life can be and how different your music practice and in particular your musicality training can become when it’s just easy and natural for you to bring music out from inside you using your singing voice.
And as we mentioned a couple of times there, this doesn’t require, you know, three years of learning to be a singer. It certainly doesn’t require having grown up being a good singer.
All it requires is these two core skills of Matching Pitch and Vocal Control. We cover them in the rest of that chapter. We’ve got various materials on them at Musical U, and I’ll put a link in the shownotes to a free resource online that can help you with them. But the main thing to know is just that level of skill can be put in place very quickly.
And I hope this little peek into the next bit of the chapter sparked a little bit of excitement with you as to what singing could do for you if you added it as a tool in your musical toolkit.
Do please leave a comment wherever you’re watching, whether it’s YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or indeed, if you’re listening to the audio podcast, I always welcome emails to hello@musicalitynow.com.
Let me know which of these got you a little bit excited. And if you’re eager to start learning to use singing as a tool, please do share that too.
That’s it for today’s episode. We have some really great stuff lined up for you the rest of the week, so please do keep tuning in live if you’re part of our live crew and enjoy the episodes we have coming up this week.
Cheers! And go make some music!
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The post WHY Every Musician Must Sing (Inside The Book) appeared first on Musical U.
We rarely use the word “should” or “must” at Musical U… but singing might just be an exception! If you don’t currently use singing as a tool on a daily basis in your music practice, you’re missing out. Here’s why.
from Musical U
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from Musical U
http://www.facebook.com/pages/p/412254762289166
Can you really improve by making… BAD sounds?! Coaches’ Corner, with Next Level Coach Zac Bailey ZSonic Learn more → https://secure.musical-u.com/nextlevel
from Musical U
http://www.facebook.com/pages/p/412254762289166
“When I do a one or two hour improv concert, where I have no idea what I’m going to play, I am not only calm, I’m just laughing and having fun the whole time. I’m not worried at all. So I love the feeling, I could just do it all night. In classical, I do a recital, I go “boy, I’m glad that’s over! Survived some more high dose of perfection.” And it’s not like we’re trying to make mistakes, but we’re allowing ourselves to investigate and experiment and see what happens. And when you do that, you discover new things. Your heart opens up, your musical world opens up.” — Jeffrey Agrell, author of Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians
from Musical U
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The “Sweet Spot” Repertoire That Unlocks Easier Musical Progress (Coaches Corner, Episode 5)
Have you ever done this? You perform a piece of music and you make a mistake (or maybe two!) and afterwards you’re like “oh, I ruined it. I really wish I hadn’t made those mistakes”. If so, you are going to love something that’s shared in today’s episode.
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…
- Zac shares the power of performance – and a big mindset shift that can make performing more easy and joyful, even if you make a mistake or two!
- Andy gives a way to instantly see how far you’ve really come, any time you’re getting down about your musical progress.
- Camilo explains choosing the right “sweet spot” level of repertoire for fast and satisfying progress.
- And Andrew discusses leveraging your childhood music for playing by ear – and trusting your own ears over look-up-the-chord websites.
All that and more, in this episode of Coaches Corner!
Watch the episode:
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Links and Resources
- Musicality Now: Someone Should Have Told Me This When I Was A Kid! With Dr. Molly Gebrian
- Musicality Now: Learn Music Faster… By Doing LESS?! (with Dr. Molly Gebrian)
- Musicality Now: 5 BIG Mistakes Adult Music Learners Make – And How To Fix Them
- Musicality Now: Is This The Missing Piece For Your Musicality? (Inside The Book)
- Musicality Now: Surprising Musicality (Meet The Team, with Andy Portas)
- Next Level Coaching
- HookTheory.com
- Meet The Team: Andrew Bishko
- Meet The Team: Zac Bailey
- Meet The Team: Camilo Suárez
- Meet The Team: Andy Portas
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The “Sweet Spot” Repertoire That Unlocks Easier Musical Progress (Coaches Corner, Episode 5)
Transcript
Christopher: Tell me, have you ever done this? You perform a piece of music and you make a mistake, or maybe two, and afterwards you’re like “oh, I ruined it. I really wish I hadn’t made those mistakes”. If so, you are going to love something that’s shared in today’s episode.
So it’s been another fantastic week here on Musicality Now. Quick recap in case you missed anything…
We kicked off the week with our mini interview with Dr. Molly Gebrian, a specialist in the neuroscience of music learning, and it was fascinating to hear her fascination with the world of neuroscience applied to music. It was a really great little interview and gave a glimpse into how those two worlds came together for her.
Then on Tuesday, we had an excerpt from her masterclass at Musical U, sharing a really juicy section about the power of taking breaks. Definitely go back and watch that if you haven’t already.
Then we had an episode on the five big mistakes that adult music learners make, and we had some really great response to this, some great comments, people really relating to those five big mistakes.
And I think it’s, I hesitate to say it because it sounds very, what’s the word? Very boastful, I guess, or arrogant to say it, but I feel like it should be required watching for every adult music learner! Or at least in whatever way, shape, or form, I would love every adult music learner to know about these five mistakes. Because as soon as you know about them, you’re able to do something about them. If you didn’t see that episode, highly recommend checking it out to see are you sabotaging yourself in one of these five ways.
Then we had another Inside The Book episode, a lot of fun looking at the singing chapter, just the first part on “If you think you can’t sing… you’re wrong!” And we’ll be following that up with the next Inside The Book episode, we’ll be going on to the next section where we talk about the concrete benefits of singing for musicians. Whether or not you want to ever become a singer, why you need to be using your singing voice to develop your musicality.
And then we had our Meet The Team interview with Mr. Andy Portas, which was a lot of fun. I learned a thing or two about him I hadn’t known before, so that was awesome and really cool to get a glimpse into his musical backstory and the work he does on the Musical U team as a Next Level coach.
Coming up today we have, speaking of Next Level coaches, Coaches Corner, episode five.
In this episode, you’re going to hear from Zac talking about what I opened with – the power of performance, and in particular, a big mindset shift that can make performing more easy and joyful, and make you a lot more resilient to those inevitable mistakes that come up from time to time.
Andy shares how to instantly see how far you’ve really come in your music learning so that anytime you’re getting down about your progress, you’re able to do what he recommends and be like “oh, I really have made a lot of progress!”
Camilo talks about choosing “sweet spot” repertoire, just the right level so that you can make fast progress with it and it still drives you forwards.
And then Andrew shares a great example of leveraging your childhood music for playing by ear, as well as the the pitfalls of looking up the chords online and jumping to the sheet music too soon.
So a lot of juicy goodness for you, as always in Coaches Corner. Let’s dive in.
———
Hey, hey!
We’re back with another round of Coaches Corner, where I get the absolute pleasure of getting together with our Next Level coaches, so that they can share some of the awesome things that have been going on in coaching lately, things that can be valuable for you in your musical life, too.
Today I’m joined by our head coach, Andrew Bishko, as well as coaches Andy Portas, Camilo Suarez, and Zac Bailey. Welcome, guys, good to see you!
I’m gonna kick things off this time with Zac. What’s been going on in coaching lately?
Zac: Hey, Christopher.
Yeah. Excited to be here. Another Coaches Corner, always fun.
We’ve recently had a really beautiful insight about mistakes and the power of performance from one of our members.
We have these monthly Next Level “Open Mic” calls where, for some of our members, it’s their first time performing in front of someone else – which is a big deal! For those of you that have performed in front of someone else for the first time, you know how much of a big deal that is.
It’s a big step, and a lot of people are really nervous, and they’re nervous because they’re afraid to make mistakes in front of other people. And I think everyone who joins these Open Mic calls feels that way.
And we had a member on one of the calls recently who noticed that when she was performing, the mistakes felt like the worst thing that had ever happened. She was performing, she went and she performed, and after she was done, she noticed the mistakes, and I was like “oh, that was so terrible. That was the worst thing ever”.
But when she was watching someone else perform, she noticed how beautiful it was and how powerful it was to receive a musical performance from someone else.
And that other person that was performing, when they were done performing, they had the same experience as the first person. They were done performing. They had made mistakes, and they’re thinking it was the worst performance ever. It was terrible. How could anyone possibly like this? But for the other members watching, it was just a beautiful musical experience that was really important. And the member even said “this is so important for us to share our music with each other”.
And it’s just a beautiful thing to receive music. It’s all a collection. Every time we perform, it’s a collection of things we intended to do and things we didn’t intend to do, and we can learn a lot from all of those things.
But at the end of the day, for everyone watching the performance, it’s just a beautiful musical experience, and it’s very enjoyable. So I think that is, I was like, wow, that’s really deep. It’s really insightful.
When they said that, how beautiful the performance is, no matter what the mistakes are, I was like, that is so cool and so powerful.
Christopher: That’s fantastic. And I love that she had the openness to have that perspective shift, right?
Like, I’m reminded of something we covered in the Supernatural Performance course about receiving compliments, where we can all be in this mode of someone says “that was great!” and you’re like “oh, no, I made 17 mistakes”. And actually, clearly this Next Level client was open to realising that it genuinely can be a beautiful experience for the listener, even if you make a mistake or two or it’s not quite what you hoped for. So that’s really wonderful.
Awesome. How about you, Andy? What’s one cool thing that’s happened in coaching recently?
Andy: Yeah, coaching’s going great. We’re getting some brilliant results. It really is wonderful.
But I’d like to tell you about a couple of clients, and what happened with those this week is they were feeling a little bit like they weren’t really progressing very much and one particular client was getting quite down about it. Fortunately, I tend to get my clients to record themselves regularly and post their recordings in their Practice Spaces.
And this means that if ever they’re kind of feeling a little bit down about their progress and things like that, I get them to go and look back at their early recordings and just see where they were when they first started with Next Level and they’ll instantly see how far they’ve really come.
The problem is, when we’re learning any skill is we tend to chase the horizon. So we’ve got where we are now and then we have this kind of ideal of where we think we should be.
And the problem is, the more we improve, the farther away that horizon goes. So the more we improve, the better we want to be and the more we understand where we could actually be. So, and essentially what we start doing is we measure the gap between where we want to be rather than the gain from where we’ve come.
But by videoing yourself, it works in two wonderful ways. The first way is you watch the video and you can see exactly what you need to focus on the next week for your practice. It will kind of really shine a spotlight on bits you need to focus on.
And then it’s a wonderful tool for just seeing how far you’ve come. So it directly shows distance traveled because we’ve got no real concept of how far we’ve come in reality. So that’s been really useful.
Christopher: That is super cool. Thanks for sharing that, Andy. Camilo, what’s happened when you’re coaching recently? What’s great to share?
Camilo: Well, it’s been a week of personal discoveries and transformations, and those discoveries have been related to repertoire. How to choose the right repertoire to continue your journey forward and to feel motivated.
It’s very common that at the beginning when you join the program, you want to play things that are very challenging, technical. But finding the right repertoire with music that feels exciting, it’s beautiful music and that is within your reach, meaning that you can make serious progress in one week or two weeks’ time has been transformational for some of my clients.
I can particularly say about someone working very hard on their inner abilities and then finding the music of Mozart and finding how it all comes together in a nice way and being able to play it without the music in front of her.
That was a wonderful win for the week.
Christopher: I love that. Yeah.
And it’s often the benefit of working on those inner skills, isn’t it, that, you know, if you’re purely focused on the instrument, on the Hands, all you can really see in terms of repertoire possibilities are like “I’ve got to play something more complex and then more complex and then more complex”.
And actually when you’re appreciating the whole thing, the Heads, Hands, Hearing and Heart, you can see that actually you could pick something simpler than you’re used to playing and it will still be a great step forwards with you, to play it with intention, to play it with expression, and to really bring your own musicality to it. So I love that your clients have been experiencing that. That’s wonderful.
Andrew, what’s something you’d like to share from your recent coaching?
Andrew: Well, I had a very interesting progression of experiences with one of my clients this week, where, first of all, I thought this was an awesome choice: She decided to play something by ear out of her memory.
It was a song from her childhood and it was a popular song on the radio, but she didn’t go listen to it again. She didn’t look up the sheet music. She just tried to pull it out of her head and then figure out not just the melody, which came very quickly, but also the chords.
Before she did this, looked at the sheet music, she looked it up on a popular chord website and she said, okay, well, there’s a bunch of chords here. But she wasn’t able to see the relationship between the chords.
And I realised how all these websites with all these chords on them and we think they’re so great and it’s so helpful. “I could just look up the chords for a song, and I could play the song”, and yet all we’re learning is a bunch of random chords, really.
We’re not learning how they’re related, their relationship, and how they fit together, which enables us to understand the music, to transpose it, to really even to feel it, because when we understand these relationships, we can feel the music on a deeper level and we can be more expressive with it.
And so it was just a big “aha” moment for me. It’s like, wow, these sites are really a lot more useless than I even thought they were!
And, like, where’s the site that talks about the relationships, the chord numbers, how they fit in the key? You know, where’s that site?
And then the other thing was just to watch this client progression where at first she felt very frustrated with herself about, you know, what she thought was not, you know, her lack of ability. But actually it was, it was really wonderful that she challenged herself to learn in this way.
And she learned a lot more from this experience than if she would have just gone and looked it up and played through the sheet music right off the bat.
And, you know, part of our coaching experience was to unpack the whole thing and to see, you know, really what she had done that was much more useful for her learning, whether she quote unquote, succeeded or not.
Christopher: That’s fantastic, yeah, I love that.
I do have to give a tip-of-the-hat to hooktheory.com, it’s the one site I know of that really approaches chord progressions in that meaningful way, and I love them for that.
But you’re right. Yeah. And I remember back when I was buying a lot of sheet music, one time in five, you’d get this thing that was probably a correct transcription of what was played on the album.
But you look at it and you’re like “that’s not what I’m hearing! What I’m hearing is much more simple and beautiful than that”.
And if you have some skills and knowledge, you can kind of distill out what matters and what doesn’t and figure out what’s going on harmonically or which notes are just embellishments.
But you can otherwise look at the sheet music and be like “unless I play every note on this page, I’m not playing it correctly”, not realising that you could do an incredible rendition with a fraction of the notes.
So I love that idea.
And I think playing something from your memory is such a powerful shortcut to that because you’re going to remember what matters.
You’re going to remember the mood. You’re going to remember the main melody notes, you’re not going to remember all the intricate details that yes, may be technically the correct answer, but really aren’t all of that musicality that you’d have inside you when you remember it.
That’s terrific. Thank you, Andrew. Awesome.
Well, as always, it has been an absolute pleasure to get together with you guys. I have to let you get on with your coaches meeting that’s starting imminently. But thank you for taking the time to hang out and share these insights that can be useful for everyone watching and listening.
I will see you on the next Coaches Corner. Cheers!
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Awesome, I hope you enjoyed that and got a lot out of it.
Remember, as always with these Coaches Corner episodes, I really encourage you to just grab one idea or one tip that was shared and actually use it. Do something with it in your musical life.
That’s it for this one.
Cheers! And go make some music!
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