Musicality World

Christopher: What if every problem you encountered in your musical life was actually a gift? It’s a nice idea, but to see things that way? Not always so easy, right?

In this week’s Coaches Corner, Coach Andy reveals the two key ingredients you need to transform any problem into a gift.

So before we dive into this week’s Coaches Corner episode, a quick recap rundown of the week. It’s been another action-packed week here on Musicality Now!

We kicked things off with part two of my conversation with David Reed from Improvise For Real, looking at some of the quotes they had posted on Instagram taken from their improvisation book. And I love talking with David. I hope you enjoy the conversations, too. And I’m excited to share the subsequent parts of that conversation with you in due course, too.

Then we had our mini-interview with Alex Ostapenko, a konnakol and body percussion expert, and as well as a clip from his masterclass at Musical U, where he gives a kind of beginner’s tutorial to konnakol, the Indian rhythmic language which helps you be more creative and expressive, as well as understanding rhythm on a much deeper level. Super cool masterclass, I hope you enjoyed that clip, and I hope you took part and tried it as you went and it gave you a taste of what konnakol can do.

Then I did an episode on The 80% Rule, something that is integral to everything we do at Musical U, but I don’t think I’ve ever covered in an article or podcast episode or video before. So that was all about giving yourself the wiggle room you need to move forwards as quickly as possible.

And then our Inside The Book episode. For this week, I gave you a sneak peek of the tagline for the new Musicality book, and we unpacked it a little bit to look at why those bits are in there and what they mean. And most importantly, what is the goal of the book? What can actually do for you if you pick up a copy of the musicality book? What results can you expect?

Today we’re wrapping up the week up, as we like to, with a Coaches Corner episode where our Next Level coaches share little tidbits from inside their coaching to help you in your musical life.

This week we have Camilo sharing a major breakthrough one of his clients had on saxophone through singing, and a small tweak they made to those singing exercises which made all the difference.

Andy talks about the idea that every problem can be a gift, and he shares the two ingredients that actually help you make that shift, help you see problems as gifts turn them into gifts.

Zac talks about how to transform the sometimes-scary metronome into your best buddy.

And Andrew talks about connecting with different levels of rhythm, different layers of rhythm, through really getting in touch with your inner pulse.

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

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Christopher: Hey, welcome back to Coaches Corner. One of my favourite times of not every week, because we don’t do it every week, but every fortnight. One of my favourite times where I get together with our Next Level coaching team and ask them, I kind of peek behind the scenes of what’s going on in coaching and ask them to bring some insight or tip or trick or technique from their recent coaching that can be a benefit for you in your musical life.

I’m joined today by our Head Coach, Andrew Bishko, as well as coaches Zac Bailey, Camilo Suarez and Andy Portas. Thanks, guys, for joining me today.

So let’s kick things off with Camilo this week. What’s been going on in coaching?

Camilo: Well, this week I was happy about a major breakthrough that a client had with his voice.

He is a client who is interested in playing the saxophone, but also has been incorporating a lot of singing in order to develop his ear. Now, he realised in our conversation, realised that we were choosing songs that were too high for his register.

Then we moved to other songs that were in his register, and it was like magic the way that he could sing those melodies and then play them on his instrument with less effort. With less effort. So I think that’s a key component of our experience, helping clients feel that range where they feel comfortable, because they will see a lot of progress after doing that.

Christopher: That’s such a great tip. Yeah. We’ve been working just recently on the singing chapter of the Missing Manual, and it’s a great chance to go back to how we teach singing.

And a big part of it is that approach of finding your note and then finding your range and really factoring that in to what you then do with your voice.

And I was particularly aware of it this week, I’m working with one of my daughters on her pitch matching with her singing voice. And it’s funny, we found her note, her note is a B flat, and she can nail that pitch every time. But if we wander even a couple of tones away, she really struggles with it.

And it’s a really extreme example of that point that there’s going to be a comfortable range for your voice and for your ear, where everything just comes a bit more easily.

And when you know that, when you’re aware of it, it can really be a valuable way to get better results faster. Right?

Camilo: Yeah. And just to add that that brings so much joy to the experience.

I could see in his eyes and his expression of feeling much more confident when singing in his register.

Christopher: Fantastic. Thank you. Andy, what’s been new with coaching lately?

Andy: Well, we’ve been having a great time coaching, got clients moving on to various things and really enjoying the process.

But what I wanted to talk about today was I read a quote from Tony Robbins which says “every problem is a gift. Without them, we wouldn’t grow”.

So I got to thinking about this and how this relates to our clients and how we kind of get them through various issues. And it struck me that honesty was kind of a big thing within this because if we can be honest about what the problem actually is, we can then start to do something about that.

And then along with the honesty, it kind of dawned on me that vulnerability started being a really strong factor in this honesty. So this meant that if we can start being really honest about things in our practice and we can be vulnerable and have show a willingness to be curious, to play badly in practice, to experiment with things. And then as we’re building musicality, if we can again there be kind of more accepting of where we are.

So if we’re honest about the level we’re actually at rather than where we think we are, we can then start to build these really firm foundations and kind of build off those.

So it kind of struck me also that by having a coach, it kind of allows people to be vulnerable because they’ve got somebody to kind of bounce off. And in a sense, as coaches, we’re allowing people and being non-judgmental about what they’re doing.

We’re giving them permission to make mistakes, to kind of mess up in performances and all these things. By giving them the permission, by them being honest about this, this kind of builds confidence and they start seeing growth through this process.

And I suppose the same thing kind of applies if you’ve not got a coach. By recording what you’re doing and listening to what you practice, listening to the performance you’re doing, and being deadly honest about what you’re actually hearing, you can start and experience that very same kind of growth as well.

So that was my kind of my thought for the day. So progress and growth comes purely from honesty and being vulnerable.

Christopher: I love that. That’s such a great insight, Andy. Thank you.

And it’s funny, I was bragging on you guys last week to someone. I was telling them something about the coaching program, and I particularly called out how all of you, I think, are particularly good at creating that safe space for your clients.

And you’re right, like, it’s so powerful. And it’s counterintuitive, I think, that with the right person, it’s easier to be honest and vulnerable with them than when it’s just yourself in the practice room.

And you’re absolutely right that recording yourself can help you serve as your own coach, your own teacher. But it can be really painful to try and be honest with yourself and to listen back to those recordings and admit what’s going on! And I just really admire the way all of you create that safe space with your clients so that they can experience that growth and do so in a very comfortable and confident way.

I brag on you guys a lot!

Zac, what’s new with coaching in your world lately?

Zac: Hey, Christopher. Yeah, thank you.

I’ve noticed recently – it’s kind of over time, I’ve noticed it through a lot of clients and been thinking about it is a lot of our clients have a common fear, and it’s the fear of the metronome.

A lot of clients that are just afraid to use the metronome, they just don’t want to do it.

They’re like, it freaks them out. I’ve had clients say, recently a client said “the metronome is like this external dominator that is trying to control me”, and that’s like, oh, that’s an interesting way to think about it.

So I’ve come up with a way to really overcome this fear that’s really fun. So I had this client just close their eyes.

Just close their eyes and just listen to the metronome, and then just move their body, and they, they listen to the metronome. They listen, and then they just move their body, and then they felt the beat in their body, and they said, oh, I feel this. I feel it.

And when they able to feel that inside of their body, the metronome was no longer this external, dominating force. It was something that guided them to connect with themselves internally.

And they were able to feel the power of that steady beat, and then able to use that to enable their expression.

And I’ve noticed that whenever someone closes their eyes and taps into the steady beat, things just flow a lot easier. I’ve used that exact exercise when people were having struggles, repeating a melody back or trying to recall a solfa melody. I said, close your eyes, move your body.

Steady beat. Get that metronome, feel it, and then just flow with it. Just let it come out.

And things often come out much easier when people are connecting to the steady beat and just closing their eyes and feeling it.

And it’s not just the metronome, too. Whenever you feel something in music, that’s when you really understand it, and that’s when you take ownership of it and it’s no longer.

This external thing that you are feeling connected to is now an internal thing that you’re connected to, and you can use it however you like. It’s a fun thing.

Now it’s not an external dominating force that’s trying to control you. It’s a thing that you can tap into and just play with. And it’s pretty awesome.

It’s almost like an instant transformation when people just close your eyes and just feel it, whether it’s a metronome, if you’re scared of the metronome, close your eyes and feel it. Whatever you’re feeling, just close your eyes and feel it.

Got music playing, close your eyes and feel it and just flow. Things will come out, be open to unexpected, exciting things coming out of your body and your instrument.

When you close your eyes and just feel it, it’s pretty sweet.

Christopher: That’s awesome. That’s really cool.

It makes me think of a… I can’t remember if it was an article or a podcast episode I did once upon a time on how to make practicing scales less boring. And one of the suggestions was, like, practice with a drum beat rather than the metronome.

And I don’t think I would have realised it at the time, but I think part of what makes that work so well is exactly what you just described. That when you have a harsh click or a beep, it feels like this weird, unmusical thing. Whereas when you have a drum loop or something, instantly you’re like “oh, I’m making music with something”. And I think it’s that gateway into feeling it the way you just described.

And then I think if you can take that to a click or a beep or whatever it may be, even better. That’s really interesting. I love that.

Thanks. And Andrew Bishko, Head Coach, what’s new with you in coaching?

Andrew: Lately, I’ve been thinking about the idea of the inner pulse and actually how so many times it is about matching.

When we’re trying to do something, we’re trying to move forward and do something that seems external to us and is finding that reflection, that internal reflection that we have.

And so rhythm is a perfect example. I have a client who’s been working with the metronome and has made tremendous amount of progress, but has recently become stuck on a certain level of syncopation.

And so I was listening to the recordings, and it was like I said “like you and the metronome, you’re both riding on the same bus. You’re sitting next to each other, but you’re staring at your phones and pretending you don’t know each other”.

And I was racking my brains, and we’ve been doing a wonderful guest coaching, if I may mention that, today with Mister Dave Smith, an awesome drummer, and he’s been working with us on the internal pulse. And I was realising that’s what’s missing, is connecting with that internal pulse on that level.

So this person’s fine on connecting with quarter notes, but it was connecting with the 16th notes, it was not, they were not really placing them.

And so I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of finding that internal pulse, finding that internal pulse.

And we talked about finding your note. It’s just a very similar thing. They’re both frequencies of vibration and finding that internal pulse. And then once you find it inside, it’s much easier to then go ahead and match it with something else.

But if you can’t find it inside, it’s really hard to match it. It always feels like an alien, like Zac was saying.

So that’s what I had to offer for today.

Christopher: That’s really cool. I love how you somehow managed to tie it in with singing everything’s a vibration, right? Like Nikola Tesla. Fantastic.

Thank you. I always so love the variety that comes out in these conversations. I hope some of these ideas today on singing, on honesty and vulnerability, and on pulse and rhythm and metronome being your friend, not the – what was the word you used, Zac?

Zac: I didn’t make that up. My client said that. “An external dominating force”.

Christopher: Dominating force. Gosh.

Andrew: Like a tyrant.

Zac: Yeah. Like a tyrant.

Christopher: A tyrant. Yeah, getting away from the tyrant view and relationship with the metrome and making it your buddy.

Fantastic insights, as always. Thank you guys, for joining me today, and we’ll look forward to seeing you again soon on the next Coaches Corner.

Cheers!

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Would you like to learn music like a gifted prodigy? How about unlocking your instinct for music? And what if you could unleash an inner natural musician that’s just been waiting inside?

That’s the promise of our forthcoming Musicality book. But what exactly does all that mean? And is it even possible?

Welcome back to another “Inside The Book” episode of Musicality Now. And when talking about this book, I’ve been saying things like “we’ve taken all of our best stuff from the last 15 years and packed it into one hefty volume that you can have on your shelf. All our best frameworks and tools and techniques and methods, all of our best explanations”.

And if you’re a member of Musical U, that should be pretty exciting to you! But if not, I’ve realized you might be wondering “what’s the point of this book?” like, “packing all that stuff in there? Sure, great. But what’s in it for me? What results is it going to deliver if I buy a copy and dive in?”

So that’s what I want to share today by unpacking one particular part of the cover of the book. And if you’ve been following along with these episodes, you’ll know we held a cover design contest recently and had over 400 submissions for the cover of this book.

And we whittled them down, and I invited you guys to vote on it. We picked a cover, and we’re very close to unveiling it. I can’t wait to share it with you.

And today I’m going to share just one little tidbit. Because to get the cover designed, I had to provide all kinds of info about the book, what’s in it, who it’s for, what kind of style we want, all of that stuff.

And I also had to provide any text that was going to go on the front and the back cover. And in particular, one piece of it that I thought was going to be really hard and then turned out not to be, was the tagline.

So what’s a tagline? Well, I just before hitting record, hitting broadcast, I grabbed a bunch of random books from my shelf to illustrate this point. So these are really random, I apologise, but…

So this book, for example, Positive Intelligence is the title, and the tagline is “why only 20% of teams and individuals achieve their true potential and how you can achieve yours”.

Or this one, Draw To Win, which is a great, fun book about better creative thinking through sketching things. Draw to win, “a crash course on how to lead, sell, and innovate with your visual mind”.

And this one, a music one, Kodály’s Principles In Practice. Sorry, I’m trying not to mess up my camera’s autofocus. Here we go.

“An approach to music education through the Kodály method”

And finally “Write Useful Books”. I’ve been relying on this one, “a modern approach to designing and refining recommendable non-fiction”.

So you can see not all books have this, but a lot of non-fiction books do.

And with a one word title like “Musicality”, and particularly when it’s such a broad word like that, having the right tagline really matters. And you can imagine if we didn’t, then you might see a book on the shelf called “musicality” and it could be a novel with that title, it could be a scientific literature review of all of the scientific research on musicality, it could be a guitar method book that just happened to pick that title.

So I knew it was going to be really important to get the tagline right for this book, to make sure it had instant appeal to the right people and explained what the book was all about and why it was unique.

And I honestly, I thought I would have to wrestle with this and carefully tweak and refine it and get every word just right. And then one day, a couple of days before we launched the cover design contest, I sat down and I just wrote it. And turned out I was pretty, pretty happy with how it came out, which shocked me, but it didn’t seem to need tweaking.

And so here’s how it came out. Let me share this with you:

“How you too can learn music like a gifted prodigy, unlock your instinct for music, and unleash your inner natural.”

And on today’s episode, I just wanted to unpack that a little bit and share with you why I, that is the tagline and what this book can do for you.

And one of the biggest challenges we face at Musical U is how to inspire without being overly hype-y or promising things we can’t deliver. Because what we do, what we specialise in, is really distinctive and unique, and we do produce some pretty incredible life-changing transformations.

And the kind of skills we teach are things people think are beyond their wildest dreams. So it can be really hard to get the balance right, where we get that across to people who meet us for the first time without it seeming too good to be true.

And so, clearly with this tagline “how you too can learn music like a gifted prodigy, unlock your instinct for music and unleash your inner natural”. That’s a big, bold promise! So that’s why I wanted to unpack it a little bit on today’s episode.

So let’s take it bit by bit.

First off, “how you too can”, and this is really important, it’s not just “how you can”, because we’ve done this before with tens of thousands of musicians of all kinds. And, you know, without that word “too”, it might seem like this is just kind of speculation. You know, “this could be possible”, “we hope this will work for you”.

But this is literally about inviting you to join all of those who are already doing this day in, day out at Musical U. So it’s very much how you “too” can come join us doing this incredible thing in music.

“Learn music like a gifted prodigy”. Honestly, I flinched a little when I wrote that, because “gifted” and “prodigy” and “talent” are words we’re always really careful with at Musical U, because culturally, they have so much baggage, and that makes them really powerful. But it also risks people assuming completely the wrong thing.

And I wanted to use them here because, really, a gifted prodigy, that captures two things, I think. One is that when we think of a gifted prodigy in music, like the seven year old virtuoso violinist or the 13 year old rock guitarist shredding away on YouTube or whatever it may be, or indeed that rock superstar that you admire and go see on stage, in an arena, at a concert, we think of gifted prodigies as A. learning much faster than everyone else, and B. accomplishing things that the regular mere mortals never could. And that’s really the spirit of this book.

So what we do at Musical U and what we focus on in this book is those two things. One is how can you transform your learning speed through the whole superlearning toolkit and adopting these different practice methodologies that deliver two times, five times, ten times the normal learning speed. And what we would call “musicality training”, which is all about the ear side of things, the instinct side of things, the creative side of things, which enables you to do things that regular people can’t.

So the spirit of the book is very much those two things that people typically associate with a “gifted prodigy”. And through going through the chapters of the book, you’ll learn exactly how they do it.

So it’s not some weird, magical, mystical thing. It’s like “oh, okay, they learn much faster because they’re doing this stuff, and they can improvise and play by ear and jam and write music because they’re doing this stuff”.

Next up, “unlock your instinct for music”.

So that word “instinct”, again, it comes with a bit of baggage, and it can seem overly hypey, particularly if you currently don’t feel at all instinctive in music.

But what makes it powerful and relevant here is that this is the end goal of musicality training at Musical U. And if you think about traditional “ear training”, it always feels a little bit abstract and scientific and like a test where you’re trying to get the answers right. And really what we want to get to as musicians is the music just flowing out of us, and we just instinctively know what to play, when or how to perform.

And this is a big part of what makes our approach very unique. It’s not easy to make it work in a book, to be honest, because so much of what we’ve done over the last 15 years has been multimedia and interactive and very human-supported inside Musical U membership and our courses and so on.

And so to translate that into a book form and still get to this point of instinct was not an easy task. But I’m really happy with how it’s turned out. It’s turned out really great. I’m excited to get it into people’s hands, because the real value of it is even when you’re at the beginner level, it can start to feel instinctive.

It’s not “I’m going to slog away on this stuff for ten years, then maybe it will feel like instinct”. It’s like “oh, no, it can be instinct from the very beginning”.

And that’s why I wanted to use this word “unlock”, too, because part of why it’s possible is really 90% of the work has already been done in your subconscious.

And so we want to leverage that genuine existing instinct for music. When we listen to music and we respond to it, or when we hear something and we can judge, does it sound right or not? Does it sound good or not? That is all our musical instinct and musicality training is just about building that little translation between the instinct that’s there and the stuff we want to do out in the world.

And actually, on Zac’s meet the team interview, I remember he described it as building a “musicality bridge”. And that’s a great way of putting it, because the instinct is in there. You’ve got it. You love music because you have that instinct. All we need to do is show you how to bring that out into the real world through the music making activities you want to do. So it’s about unlocking the instinct that’s there.

And finally, “unleash your inner natural”. So you may know we have a vision at Musical U. Everything we do is in support of this vision of “a world of natural musicians”.

And it’s a funny one because music is so natural, right? Like anyone who loves music, and particularly if you are a musician or a music learner, however you consider yourself, it does in some sense feel really natural to us, right? Like it’s a natural part of being human.

And yet most musicians don’t feel all that natural in their musical activities. Often there’s a lot of thinking going on, there’s a lot of self doubt, there’s a lot of anxiety, and it can feel very unnatural to try and operate your instrument when you’re challenging yourself and when you’re pushing yourself.

But our goal is really to help you feel utterly natural in music. And again, it’s not about that being the eventual end goal. It’s about designing the whole process so that the journey of becoming the musician you want to be has you feeling very natural in music throughout.

And that word “unleash” can seem overly hypey to some people, I know, but it’s just the perfect word for this because it really conveys that freedom that runs through everything we do and everything that’s packed into this book.

And we hear that so much from our members, that sense of freedom. And “finally, finally, I’ve escaped into the world of music-making I always suspected was there”. And sometimes they say it explicitly, where it’s just like “oh, this, you know, this improvising. I suddenly feel so free.” Or, you know, playing by ear. “I feel like I’ve been set free from the sheet music”.

And often not explicitly, just implicitly, the way they talk about the new skills they’re getting and the new things they can do, you hear that joy of freedom and breaking free coming through.

So it really does feel like something has been unleashed inside you. And, you know, it’s not about the bolting on some awkward skills. And “maybe I can add this onto my music practice”.

It’s really about bringing all of the natural musicality you already have inside out and setting that inner natural free.

And even if right now you don’t feel like you have an inner natural or you don’t feel like you have that instinct, we know from 15 plus years of experience, probably 100 or 200 years of collective experience on the Musical U team, and from tens of thousands of musicians, we know it is in there. It is inside you. And all we need to do with this book is help you unlock it and unleash it.

So that’s the tagline: “how you two can learn music like a gifted prodigy, unlock your instinct for music and unleash your inner natural”.

It’s a big, bold promise, and I won’t pretend it didn’t feel a little bit intimidating to commit to that and hand it to the designers and say, this is what’s going to go on the front of the book. But it felt right. And again, it’s how you, too, can, because it’s based on real, concrete experience.

And the stuff in this book isn’t kind of new guesswork that we hope might deliver results. It’s the stuff that’s been proven day in, day out over years and with so many musicians of all kinds to really deliver that promise, really live up to that promise.

So if hearing about this got you a little bit excited, if any or all of that tagline appeals to you, I’d encourage you to go to musicalitybook.com. And depending on when you watch this, you can either register your early interest or you can go ahead and pre-order your copy. I can’t wait to get this into your hands. We’ll be unveiling the cover very soon and opening up for pre-orders soon, so look out for that coming up very soon.

That’s it for this one. Coming up next on the show, we have our next coaches corner episode. I will be back with that one tomorrow.

Until then, cheers. And go make some.

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How do you know when to move on in ear training? This can be one of the most frustrating areas of learning for musicians. So much so that a lot of musicians don’t even do any ear training, which is heartbreaking!

Let me ask you, have you ever slogged away at an ear training exercise day after day and found your improvement lessening and lessening, progress just getting slower and slower?

It’s not unusual, and it can be maddening when you’re trying to ace a quiz or you’re trying to make your skills rock solid, but you just can’t seem to hit that 100% mark.

Today, I want to share with you a simple rule that is a highly effective antidote to this common frustration.

I’m really looking forward to diving into this today because I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this publicly. And it’s maybe because it’s something we take so much for granted inside Musical U.

And if you don’t know, Musical U, we focus on musicality, developing your natural musicianship, your natural instinct for music, your natural ability to bring music out from inside you.

And a big part of that is what’s traditionally called “ear training”. So just developing your ear to be able to recognise notes, chords, rhythms and empower you to do things like playing by ear and improvising and writing music and jamming.

And it’s a topic where even the name… it’s funny, we had Lorin Cohen in as a Guest Expert recently, and one comment he made was that that phrase “ear training” can be triggering for people. Ear training and music theory, they come with so much baggage.

And so we actually talk a lot less about ear training these days, partly for that reason. But the activity of developing your musical ear is still core to almost everything we do at Musical U.

And in ear training, there are two really big risks. One is completionism and the other is perfectionism.

Completionism means I need to do every bit of a topic, and I can’t move on until I’ve covered every part of it.

So in online learning, for example, that means I need to have covered every lesson, passed every quiz, done every module before I can consider myself a success. Perfectionism is about not making mistakes. It’s “I need to get everything correct or it’s not good enough”.

And with completionism, the antidote is something we call Convergent Learning at Musical U. And I’ll talk more about that another time because it’s its own whole topic. For perfectionism, the antidote is something I’ve come to call “the 80% rule”.

And like I said, it’s central to everything we do inside Musical U. But I was realising this week as I was revising some of the part two material in the musicality book, part two is all about ear training. And I kept coming back to this point and realised I hadn’t actually explained the 80% rule anywhere, and it made me realise I should really do an episode about that.

So the 80% rule is a rule in the sense of “rule of thumb”, not a law. It’s not like a hard, fast rule you must obey. It’s more just a rule of thumb, but it’s a really powerful one.

And simply put, it means once you can do something 80% correctly, it’s probably time to move on.

And I do want to say at the outset, this is just about ear training. So when it comes to playing music, you often hear people talk about how unforgiving music is as an activity!

Because in a lot of disciplines, 80% correct or 90% correct is really good. You know, if you take an exam in pretty much any topic and you get 95% on that exam, you’re like “amazing, nailed it!”

But if you play a piece of music and get 95% of the notes right, you’re getting one in 20 notes wrong. That could be like a wrong note every couple of measures. That’s not going to sound great!

And of course, you know, a “wrong note”, we have a whole philosophy on it, Musical U, and we don’t want to get into that very hardcore mentality about never making mistakes. But the point remains that if you’re trying to play a piece of music a certain way, you really need it close to 100%, and 95% isn’t good enough. 80% certainly isn’t going to make you happy.

Fortunately, we’ve got all of these superlearning techniques to help you on the repertoire side. If you’re trying to “get the notes right”, there’s a whole wealth of techniques and interestingly, some of them are a little bit like the 80% rule I’m about to talk about, but it is its own thing.

So just to say at the outset, we’re not talking about playing music and getting 80% correct – just for ear training.

And ear training is tricky for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s a very fuzzy skill, and it’s a vast skill.

So fuzzy in the sense that a lot of it happens subconsciously or instinctively. And even though you’re consciously working to develop your musical ear, it’s not like a quiz where you get facts right or wrong. And it is vast. So, you know, all of the wide world of music in terms of styles and instruments and arrangements, you want to bring your musical ear to all of that, but it’s kind of an endless journey to develop your musical ear for that reason.

And the other thing that makes it tricky is that it’s often presented as some kind of a quiz. So when you approach ear training from a music theory perspective, or you go to an online ear training quiz, or you get an ear training app, it’s presented a bit like a factual quiz. Here is a question, do you get it right or wrong?

But ear training isn’t like learning facts. And quizzes and apps are valuable. We make use of them. You know, we have ear training quizzes throughout Musical U, and they can be highly effective.

But the tricky part is supposing you’re working on interval recognition. For example, you’re trying to distinguish perfect fourth from perfect fifth.

You can take a quiz and get the answers right, and you feel like you’ve got that skill. But then what about if it’s played on a different instrument? Or what about if it’s played in a really high or a really low register? What about if it’s part of a flurry of notes that make up a melody, or it’s part of the harmony? If it’s, you know, an interval within a chord. What about when you hear a song on the radio? Can you still tell if it’s a perfect fourth or a perfect fifth?

And again, that’s a whole topic in itself. And we have an Integrated Ear Training method that helps with a lot of that. But the bottom line is, ear training is not a factual quiz.

And at the same time, there’s always some way we’re measuring ourselves, right? Whether it’s in a quiz and you get a number, a percentage, right or wrong, or it’s just the broader idea of, like “I’m trying to do this ear based task. Most of the time I get it right” or “I almost never get it right”, we’re always evaluating ourselves.

And of course, we need to, to learn and to know when to move on. But this is where the 80% rule comes in, because naturally, we do want to get the answers right.

And it’s good to aim for 100%.

You know, we talk a lot at Musical U about aiming for… “shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars”, right? You want to aim high, but it’s not good to require it of yourself. That perfectionism, that requiring yourself to hit 100% before moving on, that’s what gets people stuck and frustrated.

And so this principle is: once you can get it about 80% right, it’s probably time to move on.

And you might wonder, like, where does that number 80 come from? Why is it 80% and not 76% or 50%? And I didn’t just pull that number out of thin air. Actually, I kind of did! But it’s since been validated by tens of thousands of musicians over the last 15 years.

And just to give you a bit of the origin story, you may or may not know any of my backstory, but I started ear training very late. I’d been doing music for probably 20 years before I really discovered ear training was possible. And as a hobby project, I started making these iPhone apps to help me with my ear training. And then I released them for other people to use.

And so when I was making that app, I had to decide, if we’re going to move on from level one to level two, what should be the pass mark? What do you need to accomplish before we allow you to move on to the next difficulty level or the next level of the app. And I picked 80% because that was what I had found in my own experience was helpful.

I had started out very perfectionist, and I had realised over the months that actually, I didn’t need to be rock-solid on a certain set of interval types or chord types. Actually, it was much more helpful to allow myself a bit of leniency and move on and then come back to that thing.

Or actually, often what happened in this touches on Convergent Learning, I would switch to another topic or another set of whatever I was working on, and actually my brain or my ear would develop for the thing I’d been stuck on in the meantime.

And so it was clear to me that you didn’t need to hit 100%. And I had found that, you know, 80%, getting things right four times out of five, or, I think in the first app I made, it was 16 out of 20 was the pass mark.

That was the sweet spot. And that’s the spirit of this rule, this rule of thumb of the 80%. It’s that sweet spot where you’ve got it reliable enough that you can kind of set it aside and move on, but you’re not getting into the diminishing returns of 81%, 82%, Oh, I finally got 83%, which can lead to a lot of frustration and a lot of musicians giving up on ear training, to be honest.

So I had to make some decision. I made that decision, and the feedback from those apps really validated it. People loved how they could kind of zigzag their way forwards, and they were often coming from other apps or other quizzes where they had to hit 100% before they could move on, or the app didn’t require anything. And so they were just assuming they needed 100% before they moved on.

And so it felt like a very straight line, and they would get stuck and blocked and not be able to move forwards. And the 80% rule in those apps meant they could kind of do a bit of this and then move on to the next thing and then come back to that thing, and it just allowed that leniency in a really powerful way.

And so that then informed the design of Musical U. When we launched the membership site in 2015, all of our quizzes took that same pass mark of 16 out of 20 or 80%. And it was really core to how we built everything since, the idea that you can’t put everyone on a fixed straight line, assuming that one size fits all and you must perfect each thing before moving on.

We had that same 80% principle going throughout. And over the years, this has proven to be so effective, and members are often really relieved when they realise it’s not just acceptable, it’s actually good to move on once they hit that 80% spot.

And it is a sweet spot. Like, it’s not a cop-out. It’s not that we’re saying “oh, don’t worry about perfection. Don’t worry about hitting 100%”.

It’s because going beyond 80% tends to waste your time, because you will actually make much faster progress overall if you move on to the next thing.

And if you don’t get as far as 80%, like, if you cop out of 50%, you can still move on, and sometimes that’s the right choice. But for the most part, that 80% is a sweet spot where it’s kind of firm. Like you’ve pretty much got it. And you may not nail it every single time, but you’ve pretty much got it, and it’s kind of safe to let your brain move on to a new challenge.

So, again, that 80%, it could be a pass mark in a quiz, a very tangible numerical thing, but it also just represents I I pretty much get it right. You know, “when I try and do this thing, whether it’s recognising a chord progression or spotting a certain type of interval, or singing a solfa note and hitting the right pitch, I pretty much always get it right. Not always, but pretty much”.

So it’s not a precise scientific thing. And if you want to roll with 75% or 85% or 90%, that’s okay, too.

The real principle here is to allow yourself a little bit of leniency and to recognise that that’s not a cop-out, that’s not being good enough to get 100%. It’s just that the fastest route forwards often is a zigzagging route, and you need that flexibility to make fastest progress.

Now, the really powerful part comes when you combine it with Convergent Learning. And that’s what I was talking about in that chapter of the book was how the two together become really powerful, because then any time you get stuck with an ear training topic or an exercise or a lesson or an activity, you can either relax your target – so, okay, I’m not quite at 80%, but maybe for now I’ll just go with 70% on this one and move on – or you can switch topic to something else that’s complementary.

So, for example, going from some interval stuff to some solfa stuff, or from harmonic intervals to ascending intervals, or from I-IV-V chord progressions to I-IV-V-vi chord progressions. Switching a little bit differently to another topic that’s still building the same sense of relative pitch is a really reliable way to make sure you can always keep moving forwards fast.

Again, I’ll talk more about convergent learning on another episode because it’s a whole topic, but hopefully that kind of gives you a sense of how this zigzagging forwards is the fastest line between two points. We think it should be a straight line, but with ear training, it’s so fuzzy, it’s so vast, and it can vary even day to day, let alone instrument to instrument or music to music. You have to allow yourself that wiggle room to be able to zigzag forwards and move quickly towards your goal.

So, more on Convergent Learning another day. For now, I hope this idea of 80% correct resonates with you. I hope the 80% rule is something you can take and run with.

And again, just remember, it’s not about saying I’m not good enough to hit 100% or I shouldn’t aim for 100%. It’s just about recognising that actually getting a certain thing 80% right and then moving on to the next thing is actually often the optimal thing to aim for. It’s what’s going to produce fastest results for you and eventually get to you being 100% in everything, just not in a 1-2-3 straight line sequence.

Hopefully that’s helpful. Let me know in the comments.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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