Musicality World

Christopher: How would you like to bring more light and clarity into your musical life?

I’ve got a great episode lined up to share with you today, but before we dive in, a couple of quick updates. Normally I do little bits and pieces of updates just for our live crew, and I chop it out when we publish the YouTube video and the podcast episode. So if you’re watching the replay on YouTube or listening to the audio podcast, you actually get the little behind-the-scenes update this time!

So the first is just to let you know, we’re going to be taking a short break from the show. I’m going to be going away on vacation, I’m spending time with family in Italy. And I’m secretly going to be putting the finishing touches on the musicality book while I’m there. So I’ll be away for a little bit.

So we’ll do a brief hiatus on new episodes. And speaking of the Musicality book… Sneaky early access for you! A treat for being part of our loyal Musicality Now audience.

We are about to, today, email our early interest list about the book.

But just between you and me, if you go to musicalitybook.com/preorder, that’s musicalitybook.com/preorder, you can sneak in and pre-order your copy of the new Musicality book today!

We’ve got a few exciting pre-order bonuses bundled in, including instant access to the first few chapters, which means you get to be the first to start reading the book. And we’ve also got some really exciting training bundled in so you have something to dive into right away.

There’s also an exclusive opportunity coming up in September just for book buyers, and some of the numbers for that are limited. So that’s another great reason to get in ahead of the crowd by pre-ordering today.

Anyway, so we’ll be taking a short pause from new episodes. But fret not! We have a huge back catalog. We’re up to 316 episodes of Musicality Now, and I actually only know a handful of people who have listened to every single one.

So the beauty of musicality is it’s perennial, it’s evergreen. What’s true is true forever. Which means that even episodes from way back in 2017 are still just as relevant and powerful today.

So even though we won’t have new episodes for a short bit, this is a great opportunity to go back and binge your way through those first few hundred episodes that you’ll find on the podcast or on our YouTube channel.

So on to today’s episode. It’s a Coaches Corner episode.

Today we have Camilo explaining the benefits of having a musical accountability partner. Andy gives tips on becoming more aware of what helps you to keep winning in music. And Andrew shares insights on musical goals, dreams, identity, and the relationship between each of those.

All that and more in this week’s episode of Coaches Corner. And as always, I encourage you to listen out for one little idea or insight or tip from everything that’s shared, something that clicks with you, and then go put it to use in your musical life. Here we go!

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Christopher: Hey, we are back with another round of Coaches Corner, where I get the intense pleasure of hanging out with our Next Level coaching team and picking their brains on your behalf – to draw out some of the juicy nuggets of wisdom and insight and new tips, tricks and techniques they’ve been developing inside coaching to help you in your musical life.

I’m joined today by our head coach, Andrew Bishko, and coaches Andy Portas and Camilo Suárez. Welcome, guys! Great to have you with us.

I’m going to pick on Camilo first this week. Camilo, what’s new in coaching lately?

Camilo: Lately, I’ve been talking with my clients about accountability.

We realise that many people in the Next Level program, they know what to do, they know how to practice better, but still, we find some obstacles in actually doing that.

So working as an accountability partner has been effective in helping them and helping myself to keep up with my practice.

We talked about that, we made plans. And it’s working well because they feel they are making more progress. Having an accountability partner is such a key part of this program.

Christopher: Fantastic. And for anyone who hasn’t heard of the idea of an accountability partner before, can you just explain a bit more how that works?

Camilo: Yeah, so we set common goals or we set a goal. It’s important to have someone know about the goal that you have. Once that you know that you will feel more encouraged to complete that objective that you have.

Christopher: Gotcha, yeah. And when we’ve kind of done a little bit of accountability partner match-making in Musical U a few times in the past and just encouraged people to do like a daily check-in, or each time they practice, they report to each other.

There was a period, actually, where Zac and I were doing it. I was trying to get more diligent about my daily drum practice, and so we would just message each other once a day and be like “did my practice today!” And it really does have an effect. Like, even if you consider yourself quite disciplined and quite consistent, just knowing that that other person is going to wonder whether you did it unless you tell them you did it definitely amps up that consistency, doesn’t it?

Camilo: Yes. And we are able to share wins and see how the other person is doing. So it’s a no-pressure environment in which you feel really encouraged to keep moving forward.

Christopher: Terrific. And Andy, how about you? What’s new in coaching lately?

Andy: Well, there’s plenty been new. The thing that I’d like to talk about today, though, is it’s about one of my clients who’s a sax player. Although the technique kind of really works with any instrument.

And what was happening was she was having problems playing at the high D and high E flat, and so she was kind of fluffing these notes, and they weren’t coming out very strong.

So I suggested to her, okay, right, slow down, take your time, and have a few attempts at hitting the high D. So we used that as the target note.

And then I sort of said to her, well, when you feel you’ve got as close as you can to getting a good high D out, stop and just consider how your hands feel, how your mouth feels, and how the whole kind of sound of this feels in your body.

So she did that, and she played a good high D. And she then kind of thought about exactly how it felt. And she was like “oh, I’ve got three fingers on these keys, and I’ve got these fingers on these keys”.

So it was really clear that she’d not really taken the time to kind of slow down and consider exactly what it takes to play this specific note. And from then on, I got her to play a few more Ds, and she hit it spot-on every time.

I was taken aback by it, to be fair! It worked so, so well.

And there was a kind of bonus to this as well. Everything else you played during our meeting, her tone for everything was really crisp. It was crazy.

At the start of the meeting, things sounded a little bit blurred. There didn’t seem to be much front end on the sound. But after we’d kind of done this little exercise, everything was lovely. There was a real kind of transient to the front of the sound, and it was bonkers how it worked, to be fair.

But like I say, this works on other instruments as well. So this is not kind of just for the sax or other wind instruments, but you can do it on guitar, piano. Just notice how your hands are on the instrument.

Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that’s a really beautiful example of what comes up a lot with the superlearning stuff, right?

Where that reflection step, we so often skip over it, we don’t even think to pause. And when something does go right, think about what’s going on. And it’s that interplay between the instinctive, subconscious mind and the body wisdom that somewhere, somehow, sometimes knows how to do the thing.

And then bringing in your conscious mind so that you can replicate it more easily in future. I think that’s a gorgeous example.

Andy: Yeah. It’s about slowing right down and being very, very deliberate about what you’re doing because I don’t think we ever practice as slowly as we really should be doing. And I don’t think we’re ever as deliberate as we really should be.

Christopher: Yeah, that was a really interesting point, actually, in Dr. Molly Gebrian’s masterclass this past weekend.

She was kind of “preaching to the choir”, in that a lot of the people there were familiar with some of, if not all of, what she was covering. But multiple people in the chat were like “yeah, I know this is right… but I never do it!”

And it kind of comes back to the accountability too, right? Like, we know we should practice slowly, but do we? We know we should pause and reflect, but do we?

And really, you know, that’s the benefit of having a coach, obviously, but even just for yourself in, in solo practice, to be disciplined about taking that moment, to pause, reflect, give your brain a chance to connect the dots.

Very cool. And, Andrew, what’s new in coaching lately? What can you share?

Andrew: Well, I was working with a client recently who was contemplating his musical identity. And again, he was actually really stimulated by that recent workshop that you did.

But it was interesting how he took it and wherever he was taking it and using it as a way, like having this musical identity, what is my musical identity? And focusing on a lot about what he wasn’t rather than what he was.

And I realised that what he was actually doing, he was using his goals as a way to whip himself. And we all do this.

We have a goal that we want, and we see that goal, that view, that desire that we have, and that’s wonderful. Then we compare ourselves, our current situation to where we want to go, and it’s like, I’m not there… I’m not going to… How am I ever going to get there?

And when we get to that place where we’re just using that goal to whip ourselves, then it seems like the goal gets further away rather than closer. No matter what we do, no matter how hard we practice, no matter all the steps that we take, it never seems to come. And that just fulfills our prophecy that we’re never going to make it there. We’re never going to have that.

And I think that there’s a couple of things that can really help with this.

First of all, we talk about dreaming big. We talk about having a “Big Picture Vision”. But I want to emphasize the word dream, okay? This is a dream.

And if you think about dreams, dreams are kind of floaty and fuzzy, and we’re not really sure what’s going on? We wake up and we try to describe, and it’s like “well, you know, this creature walked in, and it was kind of like my ex-wife and kind of like a baboon, and kind of like, and then it resembled somewhat of a algebraic equation”!

So we have all these things that sort of come together in this very fuzzy way. Which is great in terms of helping us move.

So if we think about our musical goals as more like dreams and that the finishing pictures, what’s going to make it concrete is something that we’re going to develop and grow along the way, rather than always comparing ourselves to a fixed picture. Let that picture be a fuzzy picture. Let it be a moving picture.

And instead, let’s focus on what we did today, to take a step, what we’re doing right now in this moment, to take a step.

So if your goal is to, you want to be performing on stage and you want to be shredding and you want the audience screaming, alright. Focus on what it’s like to play your instrument, what it feels like to play that.

Like, a lot of the body awareness that Andy’s been talking about and what it feels like to play that scale, or what it feels like to play that like. Or what is my learning in this moment?

I had another client this week who was telling me that he really, truly looks forward to mistakes. He’s arrived at that point where he’s like “I’m really happy when I make a mistake because I know that’s something I can work on, that’s something I can learn, that’s something I can do something about”. Because the mistake gives us the information. It’s our greatest teacher.

So this idea of keeping our goals fuzzy and dreamy, the big goals, and then narrowing on down on what is this step today, and creating a practice of satisfaction and enjoyment in our musical practice today in what the task is before us that may lead to another place, that may lead to another thing. And the end goal is going to be even richer and fuller and more wonderful than the original one that we started with.

Christopher: I love that, yeah.

I think I’ve been… I’ve had reason to go back to various times I’ve taught that Big Picture Vision exercise in the past, recently, and it made me want to stick a post-it note on my computer monitor, which is like “any time you talk about Big Picture Vision, tell them it’s not goal setting!”

Because you’re right. There is a huge gulf between a vision and a goal. And at Musical U, we talk about this idea of “the Gap and the Gain” that comes from Dan Sullivan, which is like, you know, you’re always moving towards that horizon. You’re never going to get there. So stop beating yourself up for how far you are from it, and reflect on how far you’ve come and how far you’re going.

And that is really valuable. But I think also what you just touched on there, really understanding the dream-like nature of that vision and letting it inspire you and morph and be very motivational, almost completely separate from your concrete goal-setting and all of the planning and the nitty-gritty. And then making sure that in the moment you’ve got that ease and joy going on.

I think that’s a really beautiful perspective. Really wonderful.

Andrew: Thank you. And may I add, there’s one picture that always sticks in my mind.

I don’t play video games, sorry, but I was watching some people play a video game, and this was maybe around 2006, so an older video game. And in this game, it was a series of rooms in a building, and all the rooms were dark.

But when your character stepped into that room, there would be a little light that came out. And as the character took steps, the room would become more and more illuminated until you could see everything that was in their room.

But it didn’t happen until the steps were taken, alright? So if all your attention is on trying to see that what’s around there and get to this one place, but you’re not taking the steps, you’re missing out on all the wonderful things that could be hiding in that room or terrible things that could be hiding in that room. So it’s really important. It’s always a picture I have in my mind of terms of taking the steps.

Each step I take is bringing a little bit more light, a little bit more clarity, helping things to become more clear and more and filling in the picture, like taking the outlines of a picture and then painting it in with paint and texture and all that.

Christopher: Perfect. Yeah.

And it’s definitely one of the bugbears we see with adult learners, isn’t it? That intellectual need to know every step of the process. They come to Musical U and they’re like “you will teach me musicality stuff!”

And then they’re like “Tell me the 27 steps between here and there. And THEN I will take step one”.

And we’re like “well, it doesn’t quite work like that!”

And I’m also reminded there’s that analogy they often use in personal development of a rocket launch – where you launch your rocket towards the moon or the orbit or the planet or wherever you want to get it to. Or even a plane in flight. And then there are literally thousands of course corrections all along the way.

And you know the destination. You point in the right direction to begin with. But you still need to be in the moment making those choices, seeing what comes up as that fog disappears.

Yeah, I’m going to have that video game illustration in mind in future. I think that’s a really great one. Awesome.

Well, as always, total pleasure getting together with you guys, and thank you for sharing those ideas.

I hope everyone watching and listening will grab on to just one little tidbit from today and take it away, apply in your music practice to have more ease, more joy, and more success.

Cheers, guys! See you again soon.

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I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but: Don’t Give Up. You can become the musician you’ve been dreaming of, even if right now, all the evidence seems to point to the contrary.

Now I’ve been there! If you’re feeling like that right now, if you’re close to giving up, just know I can relate. In fact, this episode is kind of like the message I would love to be able to send back in time to my past self and share the things I now know could help.

So please know if you’ve been thinking of giving up, if your motivation for music just seems to be totally depleted, that is normal to have happen, but it doesn’t have to.

So I actually had a completely different episode planned for today. So bear with me, I’m winging it a bit! But my intuition told me that somebody out there needed to hear this. Don’t give up.

And if you don’t feel that way right now, if you’re in good musical momentum, awesome. Maybe just stash this episode away for a future day. Because we all go through peaks and troughs in our enthusiasm and our motivation and our faith in ourselves along that musical journey.

I want to lend you my faith today. I want to let you borrow some of the certainty I have that you can succeed.

Now, I may not know you, I don’t know the details of your musical life, but I do know that every single day inside Musical U, we see people having a breakthrough, big or small, that flips them from “oh, I’ll never do this” to “wow, I can really do this after all!”

So the most important thing I want to tell you is that it’s never too late for things to click for you.

And to clue you into the fact that your biggest enemy actually isn’t the slow progress that might be frustrating you. The biggest problem, the biggest challenge, is those times where you walk away completely. And taking a few days off from music practice becomes a few weeks… a few months… Suddenly, your instrument is gathering dust in the corner, sometimes for years or even decades. That is the biggest obstacle to your success.

So I wanted to offer you a few concrete suggestions. If you’re feeling stuck or disheartened or frustrated right now, these are things that I know can really move the needle for you and help you get back into thriving in music.

So, first of all, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention your Big Picture Vision.

This is an exercise we encourage really firmly at Musical U. Because if you don’t know where you’re trying to get to. If you don’t know what success looks like for you in music, if you’ve been working away but you don’t really know where you’re trying to get to or what you’re trying to accomplish, you are really susceptible to that rollercoaster of motivation where you get a bit of enthusiasm, you get into some good momentum, you get into a good practice routine, and then it just kind of peters out.

When you are 100% crystal clear on your goal and where you’re trying to get to as a musician, the kind of musician you want to become, motivation becomes so much easier.

So I’ve done a whole episode on this quite recently. I’ll put a link in the shownotes that walks you through that exercise. But when you’re crystal clear on your Big Picture Vision in music, you’re much less susceptible to those motivation lows that can cause you to want to give up.

Then the two biggies I should mention are really the two things we specialize in at Musical U. Not coincidentally! Often, one or the other really is the missing piece for musicians. You might be working really diligently at learning your instrument, learning songs or pieces, putting in the daily practice, but if you’re not doing both of these two things, you are making a fraction of the progress you could be. And it’s kind of no wonder you might be getting disheartened with the results you’re getting.

So the first one is musicality training, and the second is superlearning. You can slave away with all of the books, courses, memberships, teachers, lessons you can imagine, but unless you’re doing those two things, you’re just not going to get the results you’ve probably been dreaming of.

Without superlearning, you are literally wasting 90% of your practice time, even when you’re trying really hard. And without musicality training, you’re kind of doomed to being a note reproducing robot, to put it bluntly. If you’ve felt like you lack that spark of musical instinct, musicality training is what puts that in place for you.

So let’s talk a little bit about each of those.

First of all, superlearning. If you haven’t heard about this concept before, the nutshell summary is the science of accelerated learning has come a really long way in the last 20-30 years, and the results of all of the academic research are really clear.

Everyone we think, is a “gifted virtuoso” actually just practices in a fundamentally different way. And still, almost all of mainstream music education is using the same techniques that date back hundreds of years. You know, playing the piece through again and again. If you have a tricky section, focus in on that bit and do it again and again.

It’s a lot of kind of brute-force repetition, and the research shows that that unfortunately flips your brain into really turning off most of the time, even if you think you’re concentrating.

So what we call “superlearning”, it’s this whole suite of tools and techniques you can use during music practice to keep your brain in that ultra-fast learning mode and make sure you’re really getting every ounce of possible progress out of every minute you spend practicing.

So this is something we’ve come to specialize in at Musical U, really, because it makes the difference between feeling talented on your instrument and feeling like you’re always struggling for every tiny inch of progress.

If you want to study it with us, I’ll put links in the shownotes. We’ve got a few great options, but otherwise, I just really encourage you to dive into this wherever you want to.

So other really notable people would be Gregg Goodhart. He’s the guy we collaborated with originally for our first super learning course, and he really pioneered a lot of the techniques. Dr. Molly Gebrian is another great option. Sarah Niblack of SPARK practice. I’ll put links in the shownotes to those. Whoever you choose to learn it from.

Don’t go another day without adopting super learning as part of your practice methodology, because you’re cheating yourself out of 90% of the results you could be getting. There really is no better use of your time than truly learning how to learn.

Then the second area, musicality training.

Instrument skills are great. They’re essential. You know, if you want to express anything musically on an instrument, you’re going to need the technique, and superlearning is fantastic for that.

But the risk is you end up still trapped on the sheet music, always having to look up the chord charts or tab or get the big book of music out to learn something new.

And it leads a lot of musicians, even if they succeed on their instrument, to feeling still quite unmusical. Because they don’t have the instinct, they can’t bring the music out from inside them. They feel like they’re just kind of “operating their instrument” rather than truly expressing their own musicality.

So “musicality training” is what we call anything you do to develop that natural musicality.

If you’re not already doing it, start today. And I do want to make clear, this is not just “ear training”. So ear training is one small piece of the whole range of musicality training you can do.

And if you just go off and search for “ear training” or grab an “ear training” app or something. It’s good. It’s better than nothing. But the traditional ear training methods are really like the traditional practice methods. They leave a lot to be desired. And if you make slow progress with them, it’s not your fault. It’s just that those methods are not that effective. It’s a lot of brute-force repetition, and it’s not very musical.

So I’ve had the chance to ask dozens, if not hundreds, of incredible musicians and music educators “What is musicality? What does musicality mean to you?” And the range of answers is incredible.

I’ll put a link in the shownotes to some of the episodes we’ve done on that topic, because it is a really broad term and it’s a very personal thing. What “you becoming more musical” might mean is really dependent on that Big Picture Vision I mentioned, and what you naturally are inclined to dream of in music.

One way to describe it is in terms of all the things it enables. So, for example, playing by ear, improvising, jamming, having great rhythm, singing in tune, performing with confidence. All of those things people associate with having a gift or a talent in music, we would put under that umbrella of “musicality”.

Another way to describe it would be in terms of the model we use at Musical U for teaching it, which is the H4 model of: Head, Hands, Hearing, and Heart.

So Head is about your intellectual understanding of musical concepts. Hands is operating an instrument, including your singing voice. Heart is the emotional and psychological aspects of music-making. And then Hearing is the ability to instinctively recognise and understand all the musical sounds you hear.

And so, in a very rough sense, instrument practice is “just Hands”, and traditional ear training is “just Hearing”.

We really teach an integrated, holistic approach that has all four of those H’s included at all times.

So if you think at the moment about what your music practice session looks like, I’m willing to bet it’s very Hands-heavy. Maybe there’s a little bit of music theory taking the Head into account, maybe there’s a little bit of ear training taking the Hearing into account.

But what musicality looks like at its best is really a lot of activities that integrate all four of those and develop all four of them in tandem, which is really true to the spirit of what music is. And that’s why it’s so powerful for letting you develop that instinct for music, develop your natural ability to express your own musical ideas and really feel connected to the music you’re making.

If you are already doing some form of musicality training, awesome! Fantastic. And I just want to say, you might still be in that spot of being disheartened or frustrated.

Sometimes a small addition or tweak is all it takes, and that can be really encouraging and inspiring to keep in mind.

We see this all the time in the membership where, you know, for example, someone’s been working away at interval recognition because they want to play by ear, and then they switch to solfa and it just clicks. And now they can suddenly recognise notes and they can play by ear, and it really transforms what they realise they’re capable of in music.

Another example would be when someone comes to us and they’ve been diligently developing their ear and trying to integrate these musicality ideas, but they’ve never used their singing voice. And we introduce this idea of using singing as a tool and expressing yourself musically with your singing voice even before your instrument, or as part of how you develop your instrument skills. And that is such a massive amplifier. Again, it can just be a kind of night-and-day difference in the results you get.

A third example would be creativity, where a lot of musicians aren’t really thinking about wanting to be creative, or they don’t consider themselves creative. But we really take an approach of creativity being the vehicle, not the destination. So even if you don’t want to “be creative”, actually incorporating creative exercises and developing your musical creativity again provides this massive amplifier or accelerator to your musical development.

And so, again, that can just be the difference-maker, where this one little ingredient suddenly empowers the person to feel musical and be musical and really accelerate their journey forwards.

So in both of those cases, superlearning and musicality, we see musicians transform almost in an instant. Yes, the skills take time to learn and the results come over time.

But again and again, we see these lightbulb moments where there’s kind of a fundamental belief shift that happens, and they go from, again, feeling like “oh, I’ll never crack this, I’ll never do it, I don’t have what it takes. I’m not talented, I’m not gifted, I’m wasting my time. Why do I bother doing the practice every day? I’m never going to be like my musical heroes”.

And then this little thing shifts for them, this little extra ingredient, or they add in musicality where it wasn’t there before, or add in superlearning, and suddenly you can just see, like, their whole identity has changed as a result. And they have that belief now that they can achieve what they’ve been dreaming of in music.

This is nowhere clearer than in our Next Level program, I think. Some people come into it in great musical momentum, but many others are in that spot of feeling stuck and frustrated, maybe close to giving up, but they decide to give it one last big swing. And in that program, they just, you know, they blast forwards. It’s so exciting to see.

And in other cases, they actually did give up. We’ve had so many people join Next Level that gave up music decades ago and are now kind of circling back and wishing they’d never stopped and wanting to make up for lost time by finally moving forwards as fast as possible.

And when you put those two pieces in place, the musicality and the superlearning, it’s actually not hard to keep up motivation and enthusiasm. I know it might be hard to imagine right now if you’re in that spot of feeling low, feeling like you want to give up.

But when you know that every time you sit down to practice, you’re going to see results and you’re going to make progress and you’re going to improve and you’re going to feel naturally musical… it’s not that hard to be motivated to show up for practice each day!

And knowing deep down with certainty that you will achieve your musical dreams, it makes all the difference. I have that certainty for you. So even if you’ve been teetering on the edge of giving up, even if you woke up this morning and you’re like “what am I doing with this music stuff? I’ll never get there”. Just know, please borrow a bit of my faith in you. I know it is possible for you.

Try something new, even if it’s just a new book or a course or a YouTube video or something that sparks excitement and joy again and gets you back into some momentum.

Ideally, though, add in these two ingredients, they’re almost magical. If you’re not doing one or both, you will be astonished by how adding musicality training and/or superlearning just completely transforms the results you get to the point where your musical life can be a thing of continual joy and fulfillment.

So if you’d like our help, I’ll put some options in the shownotes along with this episode. We would be honored and delighted to take you by the hand and get you back into momentum and help you stay there.

But even if not, keep moving forwards, keep trying new things. Keep the faith that your musical life, the thing you’ve been dreaming of, the thing that motivated you to pick up an instrument in the first place, will be possible for you.

You’re not alone. I’m cheering for you. I hope you can tell! I’m enthusiastic for your success.

The whole Musical U team and community are rooting for you.

So let your love of music drive you forwards. You can do this.

Just… don’t give up.

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Christopher: I’m betting you know what “verse” and “chorus” mean, when it comes to songs. And you probably understand how they work together to make the song musically effective.

But what about the intro? Or the hook? What about a pre-chorus or post-chorus? What about a bridge? Any solos? Maybe there’s an interlude or an outro.

Could you explain what each of these parts are and the purpose they serve in a song? If not, Benny Romalis from How To Write Songs is about to lay it all out for you!

In our last episode I did our mini-interview with Benny, and you learned a bit about his backstory and the amazing work he and Keppie Coutts do over at How To Write Songs. Today I’m back to share a section from the beginning of his Musical U masterclass, which had the amazing title of “Songwriting: Thinking Like A Car Mechanic”.

In this section I want to share with you, he introduces and explains that idea of thinking like a car mechanic, why it’s so useful to a songwriter or someone who wants to understand songs on a deeper level. And then he shares one huge idea that I think can totally transform how you write songs, or even just how you hear and perform music.

So without further ado, here we go into a section of Benny Romalis’ Musical U masterclass!

———

So this idea of deconstructing songs and thinking like a car mechanic, this is the image I want you to have in mind as we go through this material.

I love this image. This is what my dad – I was saying to Christopher – my dad is someone who always really wanted me to get into cars. And I never did, but he used to show me how he pulled apart car engines and sort of laid them out on the ground when I was a kid.

And I always thought that was cool, but I was so uninterested in cars that I was off doing other things! But he’s one of those people who, from a young age, pulled apart cars and put all the pieces out on the ground sort of like this, and then started to put it back together.

And when Keppie and I were working on How To Write Songs, I started to think about these analogies for all these different disciplines where people actually get to know the inside of the thing they’re studying by deconstructing, constructing it, and pulling it apart.

And I do believe there’s something so powerful in this idea that when you look at a car put together, it’s hard to know what’s going on.

You know, it’s interesting to see it all working, but we really don’t learn much. As soon as you lay all of these components out on the ground, suddenly we understand what each of these parts is there to do. We understand not only what it’s there to do in isolation, but what it’s there to do in combination with the other bits that it then gets connected with.

So if we look at songs in the same way, it helps us do something that’s really important, I think, with songwriting, which is to demystify songwriting and to demystify creativity as something that you either have or you don’t.

Because when you pull apart songs and you look at it in this way, you realise that that’s what a lot of great songwriters did. They just started pulling them apart early on and understanding how they work from the inside.

So what I want to focus on is this idea of song sections to begin with, because song sections are really the “car parts” of song form. Song sections are how we break up a song.

So when you hear a song and it’s just this beautiful, layered composition that you hear entering your ears, you go “wow, it’s beautiful”. There’s all of these different things going on, but if we start to break it up into sections, that’s the first way in to songcraft. By actually looking at the sections.

So the song sections. Just a couple of notes here. On song sections, naming will vary between genres. So the song section names that I’m using are pretty true for most genres, but some genres, there is some variation.

As listeners, we actually don’t need to know or care about song sections. We don’t need to know how songs are constructed in order to enjoy them.

This is really a big point for anyone who wants to get good at songwriting, because as songwriters, we very much need to think the opposite. We very much need to care and understand how songs are constructed.

And the reason is so that we can make deliberate choices. A lot of the songwriters in our cohort, and we’ve experienced this recently with the six-week program. One of their biggest complaints at the beginning of the program was they just felt like it was random. If a good song came out, they didn’t know how the song came out. And even though they were excited that a good song came out, they felt terrible that they couldn’t repeat it or didn’t know how to even begin repeating the process.

So when we can look at making deliberate choices, we can then start developing a little more consistency and a little more repeatability. It doesn’t guarantee a great song, but it does help you feel more in control of the process.

Okay, so song sections. Here are the main sections that we’re going to be looking at here.

Here are the main parts. Think of these, like the hood panel and the door, and these are the parts of the chassis, the big parts.

We have the verse. We have pre-choruses. We have the chorus, bridge, and solo.

Now, I’ve got solo in there because solo is an interesting one, where in some genres of music, the solo is actually an incredibly important part of song form. So if you write songs in the blues genre, if you write songs in jazz, if you write bluegrass music or a lot of country music, all of those genres have solos as an integral part of the form.

And you would say jazz is essentially, you know, a lot of jazz music is there to create a form that simply allows the artist to improvise. It’s all about the improvisation and the solo. So solos, there is one of the main sections.

Then we have the supporting sections: the intro, the interlude, the post-chorus, and the outro. And again, there are other little sections that exist, but these are the main ones we’re going to focus on to keep it simple.

So these are our car parts that we’re going to be moving around now.

A really big part of being able to make deliberate choices is to ask this question of what is the function of each of these sections? What is the job that each of these sections is performing?

And if we can really understand the job that each section is performing or that we need to perform, then it helps us learn, or it helps us understand how to best structure our song form and what order to basically put these parts how to put these parts together in the most suitable order.

So if we just do a quick breakdown of the functions of these sections…

The verse really is there to give the backstory. It’s there for context. It’s there for character development. That’s its job.

Pre-chorus… If Keppie was here, she gets very excited about pre-choruses! She gets very excited about saying that the pre chorus is not the part that comes before the chorus, or it’s not just the part that comes before the chorus. Because to say it’s just the part that comes before the chorus is to ignore the very important function that it performs. And that is it actually delays the chorus. It builds tension and it creates contrast. And all of those things are really important.

Our job is making music of really any kind is to create tension so that we can release that tension. You can’t release it if you don’t build it first. If you don’t create it first.

And the tension and release back-and-forth is so important when it comes to creating a musical experience that is enjoyable and immersive for the listener. So the pre-chorus is there to create this buffer between the verse and the chorus, to delay that chorus coming in and really build that tension so that when the chorus lands, it feels satisfying and it releases that tension.

The chorus is, of course, it’s simple. It’s there to deliver the central message or theme. That’s its job. That’s why we have the chorus.

The bridge is an interesting one, and the bridge is possibly one of, it’s probably my favorite section in songwriting because it is so versatile. It’s the opportunity to create this perspective shift or have a little twist, or it’s there to provide extra information that isn’t able to go into the verses or the choruses.

The bridge is also fascinating because it’s so versatile in where it can appear. It can appear very early in the song form. If we think about songs like “Somebody To Love” by Queen, it comes in a third of the way through the song form. “Every Breath You Take” by Sting, same thing. It can be used traditionally at the end of the second chorus, but that’s just the traditional way of using it.

It can be also used so many other ways. “Karma Police” by Radiohead has it at the very end of the song, and it actually creates the outro. It’s the most anthemic part of the song. So the bridge is a powerful section.

And then, of course, we have the solo. It is not just an interlude, a solo, really, depending on the genre, is there to demonstrate improvisation, but it is an instrumental break, and that’s an important thing to consider.

So we’ll come back and talk about these supporting sections in a second. But here’s one of the big considerations, and if anyone’s seen any of our YouTube videos, you’ve probably heard us say this word many times. But contrast really is such a big consideration.

And the question is, how do we create contrast, and why do we need to.

Let’s just talk about that for a second. Let’s just in the chat, why do we need to create contrast? Let’s not worry about how. Let’s just talk about why.

Why is contrast important?

“Listener interest”.

“Because the song can never be boring”. Ideally, yes. Because the song can never be boring.

“To keep listeners’ attention”. Great.

“Prevent boredom”. Great.

So contrast, you’re all latching onto the same idea.

“Sets boundaries and expectations”. Great.

“Ties in with tension and release”. Yes.

“Humans crave variety”. Love it.

“For development”. Great.

So you’re all onto this idea that without contrast, it all just feels same.

Let me just stop there and make this point, though, that this is the beautiful tension that exists in music, that the only reason that music works is because of repetition.

If you have a drum groove laid down, if you had one bar of a drum groove and then it switched to a different groove and then a different groove every half bar, you would sound, it would be horrific!

It would be like, you know, the worst versions of jazz are when everyone’s soloing all the time in the band.

I took my wife to a jazz festival, and she’s not a lover of jazz. She was such a good sport about it. I love jazz music. And I took her to this jazz festival before we had kids, and we were having the best time.

But the first concert we saw, we went in and it was experimental jazz, and they all started soloing at the same time, and no one was really holding the pulse. It was just… And my wife looked at me and said “can we go?” I said “totally, we’ll go after the end of the first song. You can’t leave halfway through the first song. We’ll wait till the end of first song”.

The first song was 32 minutes long! So after 32 minutes of rambling improvisation, we sheepishly left.

But really, that’s an example of maybe too much contrast for some people’s ears! You know, some people love it, but there is obviously, you know, there are boundaries, so we need repetition. We need, you know, we need parts of a melody to be repeatable so that we can latch onto the pattern.

The problem for us as songwriters is how much repetition is too much repetition. How often can we repeat something before it gets boring? And that’s sometimes difficult to know when you’re the songwriter in the songwriting process. That’s sometimes why feedback is so valuable, because you’re in the moment. You go, I love this melody, I’m going to keep using it. And then you play it for someone. They say you’ve just repeated the same melody in the verses and the chorus, like, eight times. It’s too much. Go back. Let’s find a moment where we can break the pattern.

So setting up patterns to create a sense of repetition so that people can latch on to the song is important. Breaking the pattern is then the next most important consideration.

So that’s the tension we’re always grappling with.

———

Christopher: Awesome. So I hope you caught the big idea there: to really think about not just what sections are in a song or a piece of music, but what’s the function of each section? What’s the job that each section is performing?

And particularly in terms of this idea of contrast, how does it create contrast? How does it create tension and release it, or keep things interesting and varied?

Such a cool insight, because I think it’s easy to think about how a song is put together with different sections, or when you’re listening to music, to recognise there are different sections in the piece. But how much have you really thought about the purpose of each section and why it’s so important to the song as a whole?

So that was just the beginning of Benny’s masterclass. After that, we went through a couple of song examples and he showed how the structure of the song broke down in terms of those building blocks. And it was really fascinating to dive into this question of how each section was playing a role in the song and how without that section, or if that section would be different, the whole song might fall apart.

Really powerful stuff. So I hope you enjoyed that section. If you are a member of Musical U, that whole masterclass is waiting for you inside the Masterclass Library. Definitely a recommended watch.

I’m going to go jump over for today’s live masterclass, in fact. Today I have our guest expert this month, Linor Oren, presenting on “Practice Magic”. I’m really excited. I’m going to be doing her mini-interview shortly, and we’ll be sharing that on a future episode of the show.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you take away this idea of thinking like a mechanic and analysing the job being done by each part of a song. And I hope you play around with it in your own music-making, too.

Cheers! And go make some music!

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