Musicality World

Even so, there is nothing quite so exhilarating and fulfilling as creating music with other people.

Lake Street Dive’s stripped-down covers showcase their ensemble interaction. The Kodály approach to music learning emphasizes making music together. And seasoned pro songwriter Cliff Goldmacher finds his greatest inspiration in collaboration.

But first, let’s have a look at the two most messily human musical instruments: the voice and the brain.

What’s in your head – and how to bring it out.

Imagine a time before you knew how to talk. When you couldn’t reach that cookie on the counter, you pointed and yelled to get someone’s attention. How much easier it became once you were able to form your desire into words!

Now we are very aware and conscious – even when thinking to ourselves – of forming our thoughts into language, whether we outwardly express them or not. So how do we “think music”?

So now imagine that your musical instrument was hardwired to your brain, and could directly “translate” the amazing sounds you are hearing in there into music we could all hear out here.

The process of hearing music in your head is called “audiation”. And you already do have a musical instrument hardwired to your brain – the amazing human voice.

Once you put your attention on audiation, you will be amazed at the powers of this hidden musical master tool.

You don’t have to become a great singer to put your voice to work in helping you both hear music more clearly in your head and translate it onto your instrument. This week our Musical U Resident Pros for bass, guitar, piano, and voice have all put together fantastic resource packs that detail the many uses and benefits for audiation and singing in becoming the musician of your dreams.

Learn more about what audiation and singing can do for you in Audiation and Singing: Resource Pack Preview.

Cover Collaborators

Do you remember (or look forward to) when your musical skills grew to the point where you could cover your favorite song? How you played that song over, and over, and over?

Once we’ve arrived at that point, we can be quite happy with a performance that comes closer and closer to the original that so inspired us.

Or we can take an old – and perhaps unlikely – song in a new direction.

Lake Street Dive is well known for their stripped-down acoustic covers, each of which features a tour-de-force of ensemble musicianship that would be the envy of any classical string quartet. Simply put: they love making music together and it shows!

Groove to Lake Street Dive’s soulful sidewalk version of the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” – and gain deep insights into the music-making process – in Before and After: Covering The Jackson 5.

There are many different ways that a musician can approach making great cover songs. But, what if you don’t have a band to work with? Joanne Cooper has a six-step process to making cover songs using Band in a Box that can help you get your creative juices going!

So, you had a great idea for a cover song. Made the arrangement and recorded it. Now what? Before unveiling your musical creation to the world, Stern will make sure that you know the legalities involved in releasing another band’s creative property.

One of the tricks that Lake Street Dive used in their cover version of this classic song was to opt for more vocal harmonies instead of call and response vocals. Where did the idea of harmonies come from in music… and how can you use them? Check out this introduction to an often misunderstood topic: counterpoint:

Now that you know a little more about how to write harmonies using these techniques, how can you approach this in your vocals? O & O has these three tips:

Collaborative Music Learning

While the deeper music education paradigm is still geared to one-on-one lessons, the potential for collaborative music learning has still hardly been tapped. Composer Zoltan Kodály believed that music was among the most important – if not the most – important subjects to learn in school classrooms.

He established music-centered schools and curriculum across his native Hungary, and together with teams of dedicated teachers established the collaborative, ear-focused Kodály approach.

For both children and adults, the highly intuitive rhythmic and solfege syllables and other Kodály-inspired musical tools can make a huge difference in their musical motion forward.

Read An Introduction to the Kodály Method to find out what Kodály is and what it can do for you.

The story of how Kodály developed his approach to music education is a fascinating story. To learn more about how this method was created, and why it is a very natural approach to learning music, watch this video from Jaak Sikk:

Being a musician is a continuous, fascinating journey. Jamie Iglesias had his eyes (and ears!) opened to the world of solfege while studying at Berklee. While Kodály relies on the moveable Do system, Jamie found ways to incorporate both fixed Do and moveable Do into his ear training.

Kodály incorporates hand signs for each of the syllables along the moveable Do scale, which makes it easy to visually show what pitch should be sung. Cantus Youth Choirs has a beautiful presentation of these hand signs, and catchy ways to remember them.

Kodály is principally used for early childhood music education, although it can be applied to all age ranges. But, there is something to consider about how children are able to learn music at a very young age, and the impact that this can have on their overall development. The Improving Musician shares important information about when music education begins.

Collaborative Songwriting

It’s one thing to be in love and find ready inspiration for a song. But, as Cliff Goldmacher says, you can’t just fall in love every time you want to write a song.

Now how do you find inspiration after writing more than 1000 songs? For Cliff – a long time Nashville insider pro – the answer is collaboration.

Cliff loves listening to others muse about what they want to express, and shaping those musings into finished songs. His clients include everyone from up-and-coming newbies to vets like Ke$ha and the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart. Cliff also produces major label cuts and reaches out to all songwriters with his educational programs. Learn more about his process and how he can help you in yours with Songwriting: Inspiration and Collaboration, with Cliff Goldmacher.

Cliff left a sure track to a law career to pursue his dreams as a musician. While he found a niche as a songwriter in Nashville, there are many different ways to make a living in the music industry. Careers in Music explores the many types of jobs in the complex world of the music business.

The music industry can be an incredibly difficult market to make a living… but there are opportunities for aspiring musicians all over. How do you go about trying to break into the scene? Tom Hess has compiled seven things that musicians do out of order when trying to make their way into the industry.

Many musicians struggle when starting their journey as an aspiring songwriter. They often just don’t know where to begin when trying to write a song. But, fear not! Indie International shares their thoughts on how to learn to write a song.

There are many tools available to the modern musician that can aid in their songwriting. With so many choices, where should you begin? Learn How to Write Songs offers 10 resources for creative songwriting.

Put some “collaborate” on your plate

Are you aching to sit down with another living breathing human being and learn music, make a cover together, create a new song? Perhaps you’re just trying to get your brain, voice, and instrument to work together.

The post Learn Together, Write Songs Together, Cover Together, and What is Audiation? appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-musicians-should-spend-their-10000-hours/
Exactly the right plan for your 10,000 Hours will depend on many factors, including your current background in music, the instrument you play, the genres of music you love, the particular goals you have for your musical life, the learning style you prefer, and so on.

How can you use this tactic in your learning? https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-musicians-should-spend-their-10000-hours/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/playing-piano-success/
Playing the piano is a fun and rewarding experience. The benefits for your health and brain have been proven by many scientific studies. However, beginners occasionally struggle with the mental and physical pursuit of getting started. Here are 5 tips to help you improve.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/playing-piano-success/

Audiation may be a strange and unfamiliar word, but it means something you probably do every day: hear music in your head. Learning to harness this skill and develop it can benefit you in a wide variety of ways on your instrument. Taken a step further, learning to sing what you hear or audiate creates a valuable bridge between your mind’s ear and what you play.

In this month’s Instrument Packs our Pros introduce a range of ways audiation and singing can benefit you in music, along with simple exercises you can start using today to hone your audiation and use your voice to transform your playing.

Guitar

Building on his teaching in the Beginning Improvisation and Major Pentatonic Resource Packs, Resident Pro for guitar Dylan Welsh explains the usefulness of audiation and singing for a range of tasks you’re already doing in your guitar playing:

Including:

• Why singing and audiation are important for guitarists, even if you don’t feel confident in your voice.
• How to use audiation and singing to learn new melodies by ear.
• How to use the same technique for playing chords by ear.
• How audiation can help you memorise new songs faster.
• Using audiation and singing to improvise in a way that breaks free of fretboard patterns.
• Practice MP3s for playing melodies and chords by ear, and improvising.

As Dylan puts it: this is a powerful tool for pretty much anything you’re doing on guitar, so if you want better results faster, it’s time to audiate and use your voice.

Bass

If there’s a bassist who’s truly free of the improvisation-by-numbers that traps many musicians it’s Steve Lawson, and in this month’s video tutorial he explains how singing can be the key to getting there yourself:

Including:

• Why sing every exercise you do on bass.
• Different ways to practice singing and audiation using scales, including a Dorian mode example.
• How this leads to you improvising in a whole new way.
• Example songs and basslines you can practice with.
• Using your voice to help you figure things out by ear.

Finding the right notes by ear becomes much easier when you use audiating and singing as stepping-stones and the more you practice with the exercises Steve teaches, the sooner you’ll be able to play the right notes first time, every time.

Piano

As Resident Pro for piano Sara Campbell points out in her video, pianists sometimes struggle because their fingers are so far from their ears! Bridging the gap through audiation and singing can help you gain the “instinct” for which notes your fingers should be playing.

Including:

• Audiation: What is it? How can you do it? And most importantly, how can audiation be useful for pianists?
• Audiation and singing exercises that you can use to sharpen your skills.
• Demonstration of specific ways to use your voice while learning to play a song by ear on the piano.
• Tips, tricks and cool stuff you can do with singing and audiation.
• MP3 Practice Tracks for singing exercises based on scales and tunes.

From simple scale-based exercises to more advanced song-based practice, Sara explains a step-by-step method to make singing and audiation an easy and natural part of your piano practice and gradually build that inner sense of where the right notes live on the keyboard.

Singing

Audiation is essential for singers in a number of ways, as Resident Pro for singing Clare Wheeler explains.

Including:

• Audiation lets you bring theory to life, judge and match pitch, stay in tune,
  and harmonise by ear.
• How audiation can be the difference between an amateur and a professional choir starting a piece.
• One simple exercise and a valuable insight to practice matching pitch dead-on, first time.
• How to stay in key and not drift during a piece.
• The usefulness of memorising a single reference pitch.
• How to start learning to harmonise by ear when singing

As musicians and music lovers we all audiate in one way or another, even if it’s just when an annoying song gets stuck in our head! Clare shows how even this is an opportunity to improve as a singer, and the myriad other ways audiation can transform your accuracy, confidence and creativity when singing.

Coming up next month…

Next month our pros will be tackling scale degree recognition and sharing ways to develop your solfege note-recognition skills using your instrument.

Interested in getting access to these resources and much more, with an Instrument Pack membership? Just choose that option during checkout when you join Musical U, or upgrade your existing membership to get instant access!

The post Audiation and Singing: Resource Pack Preview appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-play-chords-by-ear-roadmap/
Have you wished you could hear a song and instantly know what the chords are? To be able to pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano and play along – or maybe improvise a solo over the top? It is possible to learn to recognise chords by ear, and if you take the right approach you might be surprised how quickly you can start doing it. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-play-chords-by-ear-roadmap/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/improve-your-musicality-with-audiation/
Being able to analyze music aurally and process everything you hear at once is a very important skill for a musician. Learning to hear more parts at once and comprehend what is happening in each of those parts simultaneously can be done with what’s called “audiation”.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/improve-your-musicality-with-audiation/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/compose-creatively-breaking-rules/
Composing music in a classical style can put restrictions on your creativity, especially if you are looking to create your own sound. Thankfully, in the age of technology, there are many ways to create new sounds – and even new instruments! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/compose-creatively-breaking-rules/

We were thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Cliff about his musical beginnings and how his songwriting process, and career have grown.

First of all, thank you, Adam, for doing some homework.

You know, my beginning in all of this was sort of accidental. I began with a degree in political science, I took the law school entrance exam, and decided to take a year off.  I thought it was going to be a time of applying to law schools, then going to law school and joining polite society.

I had been classically trained at piano for about ten years, from 8 to 18, then I quit when I went to college. Then I taught myself to play guitar and found that I loved it. Just found that I loved it and couldn’t get enough of it and just wanted to do it more and more. A lot of the stuff from the engineering side to the guitar side is just self-taught, but I did have a musical background, for which I’m very grateful but it’s not essential. I have some friends who are serious hit songwriters that don’t know a lick of theory, but I am grateful that I have it.

So in that “year off”, I lived in France and got a little gig in a French café and played six nights a week. I thought, “Huh, I like this. If I go to law school now, I will probably not go back to music. However, if I try music and it doesn’t pan out or doesn’t make me happy the way I think it will, law school will still be there.” That was 25 years ago.

Or, as I like to call it, playing guitar for drunk people.

Oh, my. You really did do your homework! I didn’t know that I ever discussed that. Yes.

Adam, for most people – when you’re beginning as a songwriter – your creative process is completely haphazard and entirely inspiration based. I had gone to study on the east coast, I went to school in California, but I had an internship in Washington D.C. and I took the guitar with me.

I was missing my girlfriend, which is why we do anything. I was in love and I was moved to write her a song, so I wrote this song and it really came out of nowhere. It wasn’t something I had planned to do, it just kind of happened.

It was a gift… I’m a thousand plus songs in now and I still really do think of songs as gifts.

This one was just a gift to me that then I was able to give to someone else.

That’s how it started. If I’ve learned anything over the years it’s that you cannot count on making a living at this. You can’t count on falling in love every time you need to write a song. You actually have to learn how to make your inspiration and there are a lot of devices that you can use to become consistently creative – but back then it was just raw inspiration.

That’s a great question because the more that you write, the more that becomes an issue.

I started out writing songs by myself, for myself. After I moved to Nashville, I started writing with other songwriters. We were songwriters, not artists, so we were writing songs in the hopes we could find an artist to record the song that we had written.

At this stage in my evolution, I write with artists who are also songwriters – for their records.

Early on, inspiration was strictly based on what I was feeling. Then when I sat down with a co-writer our inspiration was either whatever was in the room that day – or was there an artist that we were hoping to write something for, and how we could craft it for that artist.

But the greatest part about writing with an artist and for an artist is that my inspiration comes from being a very good listener: my job when I sit down with an artist is to shut up. Just get a sense from them, “What is it that they’re interested in? What moves them?”

It’s amazing to me. It’s constantly humbling what someone I have never met will trust me with in terms of their life story. Anything from the loss of a loved one to the deepest love they’ve ever felt – you just never know what you’re going to get.

On the other hand, it could be something quite simple. I’ll give you an example. I had a collaborator once sit down, and she said to me, “Look. I’m a little bit tired of singing about love.” I looked at her and I said, “That is the first line of your song.” And it was.

An inspiration can be exactly that simple. It can be as simple as an offhand comment in the course of the first 20 minutes that you sit down and chat before you dig into writing. Or it can be sort of more of an evolved thought that they bring in. But one of the things that I very rarely do anymore, is come in with any preconceived notions of how the song is going to go because ultimately, since I’m a songwriter and not an artist, it’s really up to the person that I’m writing the song with and for to guide that conversation. Now, I will make suggestions, I will listen to what’s being said and help form those thoughts, but it’s very rare that I come in with a thought that, “This will be the song for today.”

That’s a very long answer to your short question. Inspiration has a lot to do with the process of collaborating.

Well, it’s a joyful process for me – I really do love the active collaboration. It’s something that I came to a little bit slowly. I was/am a little bit of a control freak, and so when I initially started writing songs I could not imagine including anyone else in that process. But one of the benefits of writing many, many songs is that you start to learn what you’re good at and what not so much.

One of the things I’ve learned is that I write melodies kind of like I sing: fine. My melodies are fine, and when I sit down with someone who has a real gift for melody not only does the melody sound better, but the lyrics sound better. That is the benefit of knowing what your strengths are and knowing where you should defer to your collaborator.

Every artist is different. I’ll give you an example because, apparently, I want you to like me and I’m going to name drop now, but I had an opportunity to sit down with Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead and write some songs with him for his project.

Now, this is a guy who has been full time in music for 50 years, 5-0 years. The thing that was the most surprising to me – for people who don’t know what his creative process is like – is how actively engaged and how passionate he is about this 50 years down the road. It’s like it was his first experience sitting down to write. He was focused, he was interested, he was completely immersed in the process, and this is a guy who’s almost 70. That, for me, that was deeply inspiring, and something that most people might not expect.

I think there’s this image of the industry as a bunch of people who do a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, and then trying to find inspiration in that. This guy was all business and really, really focused, and really joyful in his process. It was great.

Totally my pleasure. Not something I ever expected. That’s the benefit of being in the industry long enough to have relationships with people who have relationships. I was brought in on this project because I happened to have a piece that they were missing, and so I got included. It was great. It was very flattering.

It’s a reasonable question and it’s totally impossible. Instead, let me tell you my favorite story around one of my favorite songs.

I was put together with an artist who had just signed what they call a “development deal”. What that means is that the label likes what they’re hearing, but they’re not ready to commit to a fully funded album project. They’re willing to put this artist together with some other writers and maybe try a couple of recordings and see how it all works out. That’s what a development deal essentially is.

Through a mutual friend, I was put together with this artist, a guy named Spencer Day, and Spencer had signed a development deal with Universal Records and we sat down and we chatted for about 20 minutes, and we wrote a song. I’ve done this, by now, literally over a thousand times. We both felt good about this song, but you know, I feel good about a lot of songs.

Spencer brought it back to the label, the label liked it, he did it in his showcase for the label, everything looked like it was going great, and then Spencer called me and said, “Listen, I have some bad news. It turns out that the label is no longer interested and they dropped me.” And he said, “And I would fully understand if you didn’t want to write with me anymore now that I don’t have a record deal.”

To which I replied, “First of all, that’s not how this works. We’re going to write together because I think we’re doing good work. Period. End of discussion.”

Spencer has the quality that artists have to have if they’re going to have any success at all: he picked himself back up after receiving a devastating blow.

When you think you’re that far in and then the label says “no”, that’s devastating. He decided he would make the record himself, which is brave. He recorded our song, but here’s my favorite part: while he was making the record in the studio next door was a record exec from another record company, from Concord Jazz, and this particular exec, a good friend of mine now named Nick Philips, said to Spencer, “I love what you’re doing. Would you consider signing with our label?”

From “I lost my deal” to “I’m going to make the record myself” to “I signed a record deal with Concord, they released our song as a single, and it went to number one on the jazz charts.”

We wrote it for the right reason. We did this because we were moved to do it and karma decided to give us a little nod this time, but it’s totally unpredictable. The industry is completely unpredictable and given that that’s the case, you better be doing this because you love it.

I think the hardest thing to remember when you’re starting out – because you’re so passionate about what you’re doing – is what a long road this is. If you’re lucky, you’re going to be doing this for a long time.

Now, that’s a blessing and a curse. Because what that means on one level is, “Hey, you get to do this and you’re passionate about it for a long time.” But the flip side of that and the thing they don’t talk to you all that much when you’re starting out is, “It’s going to be a long time before any of your stuff starts to land.”

The piece of advice that I would have given to myself is, “The success will come if you stick with it and you’re patient.” Because there are kind of milestones … This is something we’d talk about a lot when I lived in Nashville full time, but there are milestones in a songwriter’s career and about two years into living in a major music city, whether that’s Nashville or New York or Los Angeles, that’s when it hits the fan. That’s the moment where you realize, “Okay, I moved here because I was a hero in my town and everybody thought I should move to one of the big cities to do music.”

And then you realize what your place in line is. At about two years, you realize exactly how much more you have to learn and how much better your craft has to become before you can get anywhere. That’s devastating. That’s really hard because you’re excited about this thing and you’re beginning to realize just how long it’s going to take.

The next moment is in about five years when good things start to happen. Where you’ve gotten to the point where you’re actually writing consistently better songs, maybe all of a sudden a publisher gets interested in your writing, or any number of things will start to happen that are encouraging. That’s a long time to wait before things start to get good, so to speak. I only halfway joke when I say that the first 20 some odd years in the industry are the hardest.

The piece of advice that I would give is to be patient – and, really, it’s a lot easier to be patient when you love what you’re doing.

Transform your own music career

These days, Cliff Goldmacher is reaching out beyond music industry circles to help anyone who’s ready to transform their songwriting. We especially love his free no-nonsense tip sheet “A Dozen Quick Fixes to Instantly Improve Your Songs“.

The post Songwriting: Inspiration and Collaboration, with Cliff Goldmacher appeared first on Musical U.