Musicality World

Christopher: When you improvise music, does it come from your head, your hands, your hearing, your heart?

If you know us at Musical U, you know, we have this 4 H model with Head, Hands, Hearing, and Heart. And when we’re teaching improvisation or creativity, that’s where we’re coming from, factoring in all of those things. But of course, that’s not the only way to think about improvising.

One of my favourite music educators, David Reed over at Improvise For Real, has his own methodology, his own perspective on it. And in today’s clip from our conversation that we started last week, I want to share with you a couple of quotes we discussed that touch on this topic.

Where does the improvisation come from? Where can it come from? Where should it come from? Because a lot of musicians find themselves trying to learn improv and getting stuck or frustrated or really not feeling the flow of it.

In the last episode, David had this lovely metaphor of riding a wave when you’re making music. And in the couple of quotes we discussed today, we pick apart some of these topics around, like, is it all about scales? Is it all about intellectual knowledge? Is it all about choosing rationally which notes to pick, or is it more of a free-flowing instinct? And how do you get to that place where you really feel like the music is flowing out from inside you?

So I hope you enjoy this next part of the conversation with David Reed. Let’s go!

———

Christopher: So let’s move on to the next one then, David. What’s next on the list?

David: Okay, so the next one here is… some of these are kind of controversial!

So this is a sentence we pulled out of a very late chapter in the book, and so without, out of context, it might be surprising. But the statement is:

Playing scales is not improvising, no matter how well you do it.

And with your permission, with something like this, I’d kind of like to throw it to you first and ask you what you can make of that. Does that make any sense at all? Can you imagine how it could make sense? Does it ring true? What is your first reaction to that rather bold claim?

Christopher: Yeah, well, my first reaction was “them’s fighting words”!

You know, looking to pick a fight with someone. I love it. No, I absolutely love it.

I was reminded also of that saying that, you know, “no-one goes to a concert to hear scales”. And it’s the trap we fall into, you know, in learning an instrument, there can be an overfocus on technique, but it goes so much more so in the context of improvisation.

And at Musical U, when we talk about improvising,
we distinguish our approach from two traditional methods or philosophies, which I would describe as kind of pattern or rule-based improv, and vocabulary based improv. So the latter is kind of the jazz approach of memorise all of these licks and riffs and runs, and know which ones you can use over a 2, 5, 1 and so on.

And then you kind of regurgitate that vocabulary. And because it’s the great jazz vocabulary, it’s gonna sound good. The other approach around patterns and rules is what comes into the picture here, talking about scales for me, which, you know, the epitome of this for me was trying to learn to improvise on guitar as a teenager.

And I asked my teacher having been learning guitar for a year or two, “can we do some improvising?” And he was like “sure, this is the minor pentatonic fretboard pattern. Let’s practice that”. And… that was it! Like that was kind of it. We did it week after week and he would give me kind of a blues backing track and then he’d be like “now the minor pentatonic!” And I would be like “okay”.

And I would kind of run up and down it and I would pick some notes at random from it. And as far as I could understand, that was what improvising was. And it, and you know it sounded okay because it matched the harmonic context, but it didn’t feel like I was improvising. It felt like I was guessing and hoping. And I’m guessing that’s what you’re talking about at this point in the book where, you know…

David: Yeah it could be. That’s why I wanted to ask you, because we could actually take it in several directions, and it’s a little different from the direction I had imagined, but let’s stay with your direction.

So you just said something really interesting, because superficially from outside, if I’ve seen you doing that, I wouldn’t necessarily know that you’re not having a deep and beautiful experience with improvisation. It’s a totally private experience. You said that it didn’t feel like improvising. It felt like guessing and hoping. And so that’s another example that calls up this metaphor of a surfer catching a wave. In those experiences, you know, I see Christopher on the water, I see a surfboard turned over in the water. There’s some waves crashing by, but you weren’t able to get up on the surfboard and really be riding the waves. Right?

And so that’s, goes back to the musicality. There’s a whole connection there, where you don’t have this beautiful, and perfect connection between what you’re hearing, and what you’re feeling and, what you’re imagining, and what you’re playing.

Now, in your case, I think in that situation, you just needed some other experiences or some help to get all of that together and to catch that wave. What I was actually talking about in the book is another phenomenon that happens more kind of in the jazz world. Which is, okay, so we give you the scale.

And then the next 20 years of your life are about playing that scale faster, and playing it in more clever, sort of, parsing it out mathematically, you know, like all these different, sort of abstract patterns and, you know, and that is one way to make music and it’s one way to live your life. And it’s a beautiful way to live your life and I don’t have any judgment for anybody who wants to do that.

I think it’s cool. I think it’s fascinating. I’m glad people are doing it. But it’s not the only definition of improvisation, and it’s not our definition of improvisation. To me, improvisation is simply the spontaneous creation of music. And what’s beautiful about it is that when it’s spontaneous, it can be collective.

So you and I can sit down together and compose something together, and our ideas are interacting in real time in the sounds. And so if you think of improvisation as composition, well then ask yourself, you know, is a Mozart composition gonna be better because somebody’s just playing the scale up and down faster and faster?

That’s not what compositions do. That’s not what music does. Music tells a story. Music expresses human emotion. And so I was saying all that in the context of, thinking of improvisation, or the kind of ideal of improvisation, the goal of improvising, is not to be able to play the scales faster.

It’s to be able to imagine a sound and know exactly where it is and how to express it on your instrument. That’s channeling your inner composer and making music. And if I could just address the one point about the fighting words, you know that it’s true they are fighting words, but we’re not fighting with anybody else.

The first thing to understand is like, what they tell you about dreams. When you have a dream, every character in the dream is actually you. And when I’m saying these things in my book, every character in the book, whether it’s the, you know, the mean-spirited music teacher who’s too strict when we’re children, or the kind of myopic, jazz instructors that just tell you the rules and formulas, or the perfectly-illuminated soul who’s just all transparency and love and joy. All those characters are me man. You know, I’m not fighting with anybody. I’m fighting with myself. And when you read the book, all the characters are you, so those fighting words, those are for you to say to yourself and to remind yourself.

And the beautiful thing is that you also get to decide what they mean to you, and how important they are to you. And that’s really the intention of everything in the book.

Christopher: Terrific. And I think there’s a lot more we could cover here in terms of the trade-offs and the advantages and where there is a place for scales and rules and having some structure around improvising.

But what you just said, I think leads on nicely to the next one. So let’s move on to that one.

David: Did you mean the one, the very minimalist one that just says “Feel, imagine, create”.

Christopher: I did.

David: Okay. Wow, I would love to get your take on this before I say anything too, but just in fairness…

So that was an illustration that appeared very late in my book as we start talking about, what some people call free improvisation, and how to think about that.

And how all the things that we’ve learned about harmony from our deep study of very simple, and very clear and precise beautiful things. How we take all of that with us, but we open it up and we use it in a more abstract way to even make music in a context where there are no written chord changes and we’re just freely improvising.

And those are words that kind of outline the thought process. So if you and I are improvising freely, meaning that we haven’t agreed on a song structure, you put a note into the air, I put a note into the air, you maybe play a chord. I play a chord. Now you’re playing a note. How is it that you are able to play another note that makes musical sense, that takes this music in a coherent direction that people can understand and feel and follow.

And what allows you to do that is this thought process of “feel, imagine, create”. Meaning first, you’re listening deeply to the last note you played, and through the skills that we develop and learn through Musical U and Improvise For Real, you’re able to situate that sound within whatever key of the music you are feeling in that moment.

So it doesn’t matter if we’re changing the key every half second. At any given moment, any note you play is gonna sound like one of the notes of the 12-tone octave, you know, relative to a tonal center. So let’s say to you, the last note you played just sounds like note six. Okay. Next step, imagine. Now what is the next sound you hear in your mind that would be beautiful? That would make sense.

Now, this is not a number, this is not a letter. This is not theory. This is a sound that you just imagined. So now you’ve got the sound in your mind. And so then the next step is the same way you recognize that the note you were playing sounded like note six, I think I said, now you’re recognizing that the next note you’re hearing in your mind sounds like flat three. That’s what we create. We play the flat three.

So the skills, the musical skills involved, are about orienting ourself relative to whatever key we’re feeling and recognising the next sound we’re imagining in our mind. But we don’t need any of those skills or knowledge in order to know what to play next.

That idea comes to us in the form of a sound. And that’s how free improvisation is possible, and it can be every bit as melodic and harmonious as a song that people have written out and agreed to play together.

Christopher: Yeah, and I think the reason I felt this led on directly is that it’s kind of the other end of the spectrum from what we just talked about in terms of strict scale-based improvising, where, to me anyway, that it falls into the trap of being purely intellectual and rational, and I’m gonna think about what the next note should be.

And what you just described clearly is driven by the feeling and the instinct and the inner hearing of “what is it I want to create?”.

And, you know, I think, for me it reminded me a lot of, one of the components of our improv method, which our Head Educator, Andrew, calls the Play-Listen/Listen-Play loop.

Where so much of what is taught in improv, or what people stumble around trying to learn to improvise, is just play. So they have a rule or something and they play it. And like I described for myself on guitar, I have my minor pentatonic. I’m gonna pick notes at random, I’m gonna play them. And what’s missing is that listen, and what we would describe as that feedback loop, where you play something, you hear how it sounds, it feeds back into your awareness.

You hear in your head what you want to play next. And you know, that can be describing the moment to moment experience of improvising, but it’s also this bigger picture description of how you’re learning to improvise. You know, you are trying things, you are internalising that instinct and that feeling for where the notes are, what their character is in the scale, and all of that stuff.

And to me that really encapsulates the sweet spot or the middle ground between having some intellectual understanding of what’s normal or what’s possible in music. And like you just described there, it can be helpful to know that the note you are hearing is the “six” in some sense, right? And you have an idea of what the options might be, but then you’re also bringing in this listening and this instinct and this feeling for what the music sounds like and what you want it to sound like.

David: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the problems with improvisation is that it’s actually two things and we don’t really see that clearly. It’s a way of certainly expressing music, it’s a way of creating music. But it’s also the way we study music.

I mean, in any other activity in life, the only, and a huge part of your learning would be to get your hands on the thing and get to examine and explore it for yourself and, you know, look at it from all different angles and check it out and play with it and see what it does. In music that’s called improvising, right?

So when I tell you, all right, we have this particular scale and these are what the notes are. That’s not the end of your learning. That’s the very beginning of your learning. That’s day one of the classroom. The rest of the of the semester is you all by yourself, exploring and discovering the melodic possibilities of those sounds, and that’s improvising, which starts out as an attitude of exploration and learning and discovery. “Let me just check these sounds out”.

But through that process, you’re also becoming an amazing improviser, right? Because you’ve discovered all of this beauty and all of this ability to tell musical stories with those sounds. And so that ability to improvise has kind of, it’s almost like it sneaks up on us. It’s a natural result of the way that this is just how we study music in the first place.

Christopher: Yeah, and this is something we’ll come back to, I think in due course with one of the other quotes, definitely that role of improvising in the learning journey.

———

Christopher: Awesome.

I hope you enjoyed that part two of the conversation with David Reed from Improvise For Real. If you’re not familiar with their stuff, hurry over to improviseforreal.com, we’ll have a link in the show notes, of course, and you can find the full set of quotes we’re using for the basis of this conversation over on their Instagram. We’ll have a link to that, too. If you missed part one, I’ll put a link in the shownotes, it’s one of last week’s episodes. And we will be continuing with part three of this conversation very soon.

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

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | YouTube | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

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

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

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

A quick recap in case you missed anything…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, very good, Andy?

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

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

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

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

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

So this is where “maybe” came in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll see you next time!

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | YouTube | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Christopher: Ever feel like you’re trying to be someone else in music? You’re playing what other people wrote. You’re trying to be as good as the musical heroes you admire.

That’s all good stuff. But when do you finally get to be yourself?

That’s just one thing I discuss in this conversation I want to share with you, something from a little while back, I got together with David Reed from Improvise For Real, one of my favourite people in music education, to talk through some really punchy quotes they had published on Instagram.

You’ll hear me introduce things a little bit more in a moment, so I won’t say more for now, but just so that you know, today’s episode is going to be part one of that longer conversation, with more to follow soon!

———

Christopher: I’m excited to have David Reed with me today. David’s the founder of Improvise For Real, and has been a guest on the show before, as well as having come in and presented a masterclass for our members inside Musical U. Welcome back, David!

David: Thank you very much. I’m really happy to be here with you.

Christopher: So we’ve known each other for a number of years now, and I’ve always loved the Improvise For Real approach because it kind of, it shares the same spirit, the same philosophy about music and music learning as we have at Musical U. But at the same time, I feel like we each do things in a slightly different distinct way, which makes it a lot of fun to compare and contrast and get together to talk about these things.

And a lot of our members at Musical U end up using the Improvise For Real materials as well and vice versa because it all just kind of goes well together. I invited David back onto the show today because I saw some really fantastic posts over on their Instagram where David was sharing these little insights into their philosophy and their approach, kind of advice or tips for musicians who were wanting greater freedom and fulfillment in their music making.

And I really wanted to get together with him and chat about them because so many of them really resonated with me and with what we do at Musical U and I thought, why not just record the conversation?

So that’s what this is today, we’re gonna be looking at some of those little nuggets they were sharing on their Instagram, and just unpacking each one a little bit to see what we can learn.

Before we do, I’d love to open with a question, which I particularly love to ask musicians and music educators, and I’m not sure I’ve ever asked you before David, in quite this way, but: What does musicality mean to you?

David: Yeah, that’s such a great question and it is funny that we haven’t talked about it, given that, you know, it’s part of your mission statement and it’s part of your name.

But okay, so What musicality means to me is that it’s really a connection. I think it’s a connection between a person’s ear and a person’s imagination and the person’s instrument. And it can, and it, and you know, it’s regardless of the style of music, it doesn’t even have to be very advanced. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of listening to somebody playing music that could be quite simple, but there’s something magical happening there. There’s a groove there. There’s a naturalness to it that makes us all instantly say, okay, that person’s musical. That person has musical talent.

But I don’t think it’s talent at all. I think it’s a connection. I think it’s like a surfer trying to catch a wave.

And I think that when you’re playing music in a musical way, it feels very much like surfing a wave. And I think that in music, we sometimes prevent ourselves from catching that wave, you know, for a lot of reasons. But one of them is just playing music that’s just simply too hard for us.

You know, we can’t groove with the music and really enjoy it and express ourselves unless the music is easy and natural for us. And so, you know, instead of thinking of musicality as something out there, like a goal, like I wanna be more musical. I think musicality is a choice. I think it’s something that we choose and that choice starts with the song we’re gonna play in the first place.

And that’s a test of our sincerity as well, right there. I mean, are we doing this to impress people or are we doing this to touch people’s hearts? Or are we doing this just for the sheer enjoyment of it? And I think that if you can answer that question and if you can allow yourself to play music, that you truly understand and feel, and you can be relaxed with it, and you can just purely enjoy it.

I think what that translates to for the listener, you know, are all these things that we call musicality.

Christopher: Wow. I love that answer. And already, I feel myself having to hold back from picking up on all kinds of things you mentioned there, each of which could be a three hour conversation. And I’m sure some of the themes will be coming up again as we continue talking today.

But I do just wanna really highlight what you said there about simplicity, and I think that’s something that’s so often overlooked, isn’t it? The idea that actually, you may be trying to run before you can walk or you may be trying so hard to play more and more advanced stuff that you are kind of missing out on the point of it a lot of the time.

David: Yeah. Not only are you trying to run before you walk, but maybe you don’t even need to run! Maybe walking is exactly where the groove is and the magic.

Christopher: Love it. So share with us the first of these quotes we’re gonna be talking about today.

David: So if we just go through them in order. The very first one that we published on our Instagram is a quote directly from the book, Improvise For Real, it’s on the very first page of the book and it kind of ends the first page chapter, which is, “life is too short to waste time imitating others. Be yourself and discover your own music.”.

And what that’s about, and what that means to me is that, you know, in music, for a lot of reasons, a lot of us find kind of a learning model, which is based on taking apart existing music. And that makes sense. You know, if we’re fascinated by that music, we find it beautiful, it’s natural to want to understand it.

I mean, first just to understand it, just for the simple joy of understanding what those beautiful sounds are. But then also we have this idea that I could grow from that and I’ll become a more capable musician if I understand what all those people have done. But what happens is as you learn about that existing music, whether it’s a song or maybe a solo that somebody has transcribed note for note, you know, who’s teaching that to you?

If you really, you know, if you think about it, when you’re looking for information on this beautiful music that’s been made, whether you’re on YouTube or whatever, the person who’s gonna be teaching it to you is gonna be somebody who’s passionate about that music. And so there’s all this talking around it, which is also about how great it is and how brilliant the composer is and how clever it was that they did this thing in their solo, and why it’s so special and why it’s so unique.

And so something starts to happen, which is as you’re gaining these experiences, there’s also this growing kind of unconscious belief, that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do music. And it’s almost like, you know, those traps where like a fly can get in, but it’s very, very hard to get out and it’s insidious because you don’t notice it happening.

But this is why you can go through years of that kind of learning and find yourself less able to make music, than a child on day one who’s just given an instrument with no instruction whatsoever. All children start out as just infinite creativity. And we are all unique. We’re all original cause we don’t know what else to do, right?

And so I think, you know, that’s one of the challenges, if we wanna make music with some of the sounds that we hear on the radio. And so we wanna learn about harmony, we wanna use notes and chords. I think the mission is, how do we put those raw materials in the hands of the student without putting that box around them or destroying their creativity?

And I think you do have to understand it as a trade off. That all the learning, in some way, damages or interferes with, the infinite creativity that the child would bring to this activity, in the very first moment. And so, you know, those are some of the ideas around that quote.

Christopher: Fantastic. Yeah, and when I read it I was immediately reminded of one of our Pillar Beliefs at Musical U, we have four, and one is Universal Potential. And we really put it there, front and center, to remind people that they have what it takes and that everybody has what it takes to be an incredible musician because like you say, so much of the

establishment or tradition or norms around how do you learn music is about reproducing other people’s music to a large extent. And revering those who have gone before you and accomplished great things. And I think you’re right to highlight that trade off or that balance it’s not as simple as just make your own music, ignore everything else, right?

Because what gets us into music in the first place is often the music we know and love, you know, it is that artist or that album or that song that inspires us to pick up an instrument for the first time and we can’t be blind to that. And of course, we also have this absorbed heritage of musical awareness.

This is something we talk about a lot in some of our material at Musical U, around improv, but also around active listening and music appreciation, that whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent years, decades, [00:09:00] your whole life absorbing all of this amazing musical material. And it’s in there. And we want to leverage that.

We want to respect it and acknowledge it and make use of it. And at the same time, we don’t want it to box us in as it so often does, to thinking if I can’t do it exactly like that recording or exactly like that composer intended it, then I’m getting it wrong.

David: Right, exactly. That’s so important, what you mentioned about our subconscious musical mind and all the musical learning that is already inside of us, just from listening to music and what that, you know, to me, the way I see that is that our job is to illuminate the raw materials.

So okay, you want the one chord? I’ll give you the one chord. You want the two chord? I’ll give you the two chord. You know, you want the notes? I’ll give you the notes. But then I have to just walk away. My next role, the next best thing I can do for you is to get out of your way. Nobody needs to tell you how to make music with those sounds.

Everybody needs a little bit of help getting into the activity, right? But as soon as you’ve caught that wave, as soon as you’ve found your groove, then any other comments or judgments about the quality of your music I think are harmful. I think it’s violence. I think it destroys the magic and the creative freedom.

And I think it’s up to students to decide for themselves what it is they would like to express, and to move closer to that in whatever way feels right to them. But I just don’t even think it’s within our competence to judge their music. Because if you think about it, they’re an awful lot of opera singers trained, you know, lyrical singers in the world, who would say that Billy Holiday was not a proper singer.

And there are an awful lot of guitar players who would say that John Lennon wasn’t much of a guitar player. And I don’t know, I mean, I think they did pretty well, and I think they touched a lot of hearts. And so I think that it’s kind of like, you know, like I live in a city, right? And there are places you want to go that are interesting, but you gotta walk past a whole bunch of like junk food and dangerous things and all kinds of things you’re not interested in, right?

So it’s fine to walk towards the music teaching and get the raw materials from it, get the notes, get the chords. But there’s just a lot of attitudes and values that you need to shield yourself from. And you know, namely this idea of judging music and that some people’s music is better than other people’s music, because I think that is what kills the infinite creativity that all children bring to an activity for the first time.

Christopher: Perfect. Yeah, and I had in mind to ask you a question about this one, which is, you know, what would you say to someone who reads, “Be Yourself And Discover Your Own Music” there and thinks, I’m not sure I have my own music. What do you mean my own music? But I think you really eloquently unpacked that. You know it is so intrinsic to us, and yes, society might give us that false impression that it’s something to aspire to or that only the greats can do. But of course it is fundamentally so simple and so natural. Anyone who enjoys music is capable of creating their own.

David: Yeah, and I think you bring up the other part of that which really completes it and makes it possible for the student. Which is, that we’re not saying that we’re just gonna lock you into a room and expect you to come out with your whole set, you know, worked out for your band and your first concert. Although many people do that, and that would be just fine, and that would probably be better and more interesting than what you’re going to produce with all the stuff we’re gonna give you.

And so that’s the point, is that we’ll give you as much stuff as you want. We’ll give you the raw materials. So it’s not, when I say be yourself and discover your own music. That is not a challenge to not expose yourself to anything, to not ever learn anything, or think deeply about other people’s music.

It’s a reminder of an attitude. Okay? So it’s not an action plan, it’s an attitude, and the attitude is based in the understanding that inside you is already all the musical instinct, all of the taste, all of the sensitivity, and really all of the musical ideas that you need for a lifetime. And so what we wanna do is just put some raw materials in your hands, but then we’re asking you to trust in the process of being playful with those resources and combining them together in whatever way is pleasing to you, and trust that that is interesting and valuable and beautiful to other people as well.

———

Christopher: I hope you enjoyed that “part one” clip! There is so much more we covered, and it was one of my favourite conversations of the last three to five years, for sure.

There is a lot more to share, I’m excited to share those other parts with you soon.

For now, be sure to head over to improviseforreal.com and look up “Improvise For Real” on Instagram and on Facebook. We’ll have links, of course, in the shownotes to all of those.

If you like what we do here at Musical U then Improvise For Real should absolutely be on your radar. Like you heard me say there, so many of our members make great use of their materials alongside ours, so definitely do check them out if you haven’t already.

That’s it for this one. I’ll be back tomorrow with our next Coaches Corner episode to wrap up the week.

Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | YouTube | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!