Surprising Musicality (Meet The Team, with Andy Portas)

Christopher: Welcome to our Meet The Team interview with Mr. Andy Portas. I’m very excited to have you with us today, Andy, to share a bit about your musical journey and what brought you to Musical U and the work you do here. Welcome to the show!

Andy: Thank you very much.

Christopher: Let’s dive in. So, Andy, I feel like it’s become almost a running joke in the team now that I always start my interviews with the same question, but this is no exception.

And I’d love to start out with the question, what does musicality mean to you?

Andy: And to be honest, I was dreading being asked this question!

It’s something that I’ve been kind of throwing around in my mind for quite a while, trying to get to an answer, never mind a perfect answer.

And my initial thoughts are always along the lines of, well, musicality is the ability to be able to pull a tune out of your head and instantly play it, or to be able to hear a piece of music and play it back.

But then I kind of realised that I know plenty of great musicians who don’t necessarily have that skill, but they’re awfully creative. So they can kind of conjure up wonderful tunes and fantastic pieces of music, really inventive. And they’ve got great musicality as well.

So you can kind of see, I’m kind of stuck between this idea of being a fantastic musician that can play anything they hear or being this kind of real creative force that does wonderful music without understanding what they’re doing.

So I suppose musicality, in that case, is probably about communicating whatever it is you are feeling, whatever emotion it is, whatever idea it is, and doing that in a musical way. Does that work?

Christopher: That works! I’ll take it.

Yeah, I think, you know, I was laughing to myself the other day because, as you know, we’re working on this book, the musicality book. And if anyone doesn’t know what I’m talking about, go to musicalitybook.com, you can pre-register, get all the info.

But in this book, we start out with a chapter on musicality. You know, if it’s a book on musicality, initially, when I sat down to write it, like 18 months ago, I felt a lot of pressure, just like you described.

I was like, it’s such a big question. What is our definition going to be? And it’s funny, like, I was remembering back when we started, we started Easy Ear Training, and I had the same problem with the phrase “ear training”. What is ear training? Because in different contexts it can mean very different things.

And we came up with a very generic answer, like “ear training is anything a musician does to develop their ears”. And I was like, yeah, nailed it!

And with the book, I actually found a similar out, in that when I was looking back at all the amazing answers that I’ve heard to this question over the last five or six years doing the podcast, I realized that was the answer.

It wasn’t for me to dictate the one definition to rule them all. It was to let the chapter really explore it and expand it and share a lot of these quotes from amazing musicians and educators. And you do just get such a breadth of perspective. And somehow there is a common thread, like, we all instinctively know what that word means and it has associations for each of us.

But I found that putting a lot of different answers into that chapter let me feel like, okay, cool, we’ve answered the question well.

Andy: Brilliant, brilliant.

Christopher: So, Andy, explain a little bit… You’ve given a glimpse there into some of the ways you think about music and some of the perspectives you might have, but share a bit of your own musical backstory. Where did you come from as a musician?

Andy: I suppose playing in bands as a late teenage. I started playing an instrument quite late, I think, or relatively late.

I think I was about 18 when I started playing bass. So I started playing in bands and things like that in my hometown and then kind of really got bitten by the music bug and decided to leave my job as a bricklayer and go to a college in a town that was about an hour away from where I was when I was kind of brought up. And it turns out this college was the first college in the UK to actually do a pop music course.

So I thought this was going to be ideal. So I packed up all my kind of belongings and moved to the town and started studying pop music.
There was no qualification attached to it. So it was more about just kind of playing with other musicians. And it was quite strange because the other musicians were from all around the UK, just coming to this tiny kind of Midlands town.

And what was really good about that was kind of meeting other people, like minded people who were, who were kind of keen on improving and getting out and gigging and stuff like that.

And from there, it was weird, I got a Blues Brothers tribute together, which was…

Christopher: That’s amazing! You know, we had that question on the team call the other day, “what are your top three favorite movies?” And after the call I was like, number four would be Blues Brothers for me.

Andy: Absolutely.

Christopher: I love that I haven’t heard about this before! Tell us about your Blues Brothers tribute.

Andy: Yeah, and I believe. I mean, I don’t know how true this is, but we were told at the time we were the first tribute in the UK to the Blues Brothers.

Like I say, I’m not sure how true that was, but we started off just kind of in local bars around in the kind of East Midlands area, and then next thing you know, we’re kind of playing all around the UK, playing in universities and stuff like that, and even went out to the Middle East.

So it was a real kind of eye opener, for sure. We did a lot of clubs as well, kind of working men’s clubs, where you learn to kind of, I suppose, stare the audience out in a way, to kind of look at the audience as you’re playing, because it’s, you know, that was kind of part of the game, really. And being entertainers, I suppose, was the big thing.

But while I was doing that, I kind of had this real yearning to be kind of playing original music, really.

And so I was scouring the music press for bands that were looking for bass players, particularly bands that might have been signed, and then I kind of found, well, there’s a drummer mate of mine, they’ve got a couple of mates who’ve moved down to London, and they were signed with the management agency, who were looking after Rozalla, I don’t know if you remember her. They called her the “queen of rave” back in the nineties.

So they were kind of playing in her band and they actually did the Michael Jackson tour with her. So they were on the Bad tour doing that, which delayed us doing some recording.

So they got a record deal in Belgium so we ended up going over to Belgium to record an album there. That kind of went nowhere, unfortunately, and they got dropped by the label and I heard no more about them, to be fair, as well. So I don’t know what happened with those guys, but I’m sure they’re doing well.

But that was quite a nice little brush with near fame. And then from there, I joined another band that was a Celtic rock band, and we ended up doing a lot of touring with that around the UK and in Germany.

And that was the band that was, we were just about to sign to Cooking Vinyl, a record label. We’d actually recorded the album with the Levelers producer, Al Scott, a guy called Al Scott down at Swan Yard Studios, which was a studio down in London before it got bulldozed.

So Cooking Vinyl, we’re kind of signing us just on a licensing deal and rather annoyingly, the day before we signed the contract, our singer left the band! So that was one of those kind of tragic stories, tragic rock and roll stories that you hear. So that was another kind of near miss from there.

Sorry, I’ll speed up a little bit because this is perhaps going on a bit too long! From there I decided I really maybe teaching would be a thing I’d like to do.

So I ended up going to university and getting a degree in music and music technology and then got some work teaching and again happened to be at the college that I went to when I was in my early twenties that I talked about earlier and ended up working there, got a teaching qualification and then to my surprise, I ended up being the Head of Music there. So I ended up being the team leader for the music department that taught me as a youngster, which was quite crazy.

And then what happened was that the local city college took over that college. So I was made redundant and at the time I was, I’d started doing an MPhil in music composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire and my, the head of music tech at the conservatoire, knowing that I’ve just been kind of made redundant, said, do you want to come do a few hours here?

So I think I started doing a couple of hours a week and from there that kind of, over the years ended up being, I think I was maybe doing two days a week there teaching one to one in on the music technology course.

So that was quite an exciting time. And I think I was there ten or eleven, maybe twelve years, which I was quite shocked to realize. I just retired though this year from that job.

So I’ve got a bit more free time now to be kind of creating my own music and stuff. I didn’t mention there I’ve been releasing my old, my own albums as well of Hammond organ instrumentals.

So that was something else.

Christopher: These interviews are fantastic. I feel, you know, we talk so much on the team, but these little gems come out!

I didn’t know you played Hammond organ and let alone published albums.

Andy: Well, I was teaching myself. As I was kind of doing that the first couple of albums I had this mate, he plays with Hammond player and he kind of did the Hammond parts for me.

But as I was kind of writing it and because he was busy as well, he’s a kind of pro player with, I think he plays with The Selecter at the moment, but he was busy so I thought, well, I may as well have a go at this myself. I would never call myself an organist by any stretch, but I could cobble together a tune in, like, a 15-take solo, which kind of worked. Yeah.

So that’s what I’ve been doing and that’s my story, I think, up to now, other than I then got work with Musical U, which has been absolutely wonderful.

Christopher: And before we move on to that, share a little bit about your work at the conservatory, because I remember when you applied for the position here, I was really fascinated to hear the kind of stuff you’ve been up to with the young musicians there.

Andy: Yeah, well, it was surprising, really, that I was probably the least technically-minded tutor in the music tech department, really.

But my thing was always getting students to kind of finish their work. How it worked was if you were a violin player or an oboe player or something like that, you would get through 30 hours a year tuition, I think, as a first study instrument.

So the music technology students, they would get 30 hours, one to one with a visiting tutor. So I kind of took it upon myself to be the tutor that looked at things like mindset and, kind of, finding ways of finishing music, because that was always the biggest issue. Still is, I think, with a lot of young producers and composers. They come up with great ideas and then spend the next three weeks trying to finish it. And it never happens.

And what they end up doing is getting to the point where they think they can’t do it and they’ll never be able to kind of finish any music or they’ll never be a decent producer.

And all that’s essentially happened is they’ve listened over and over and over again to this great idea, to the point where they’ve got bored with it. And though they don’t realize this, their understanding is “I’m rubbish. That bit of music I just did then is rubbish as well, and I just can’t do it”.

So my thing with the students was always to say “Hang on a minute. Well, how about you don’t listen to that idea so much? Listen to it enough to kind of then get an idea of what you might want to do next. That way you won’t get bored with it. That way you will not start thinking that you’re rubbish”.

Because, as I was kind of saying there, that the music’s not changed. It’s the perception of the music that’s changed.

The music’s still a great idea. You now think it’s a rubbish idea because you’re bored of it. So don’t over-listen to it. Listen to it, come up with the idea, then maybe leave it for a week, come back to it, have a listen to it, and then before you open your Logic or Live or whatever you use. Have a think about the music, have a think about what it wants to do.

Because the other issue is that we dive straight back into the DAW and think we can start kind of forcing ideas to come out.

Whereas if we take five minutes and say, okay, then, so this bit, this bit of music is doing this, how can I change it? Does it want to retain the same rhythm? Does it want to change the chords?

So if you think about it intelligently like that, rather than try and kind of wait for inspiration to sit on your shoulder and say, you should do this next, which is never going to happen, you can come up with the idea.

If it doesn’t work, scrap it. You’ve not ruined the track, you’ve just, that second idea just didn’t work with it.

So that was the kind of thing that I was doing with students and the other thing I was doing was insisting that they released their music. And you could see the look of horror on the face! And I’d be saying, no, your music is great. It really is good. It’s good quality music. And they made it. “Oh, I don’t think it is”. “Do it!”

And I kind of essentially forced them to release their music on Spotify and other platforms. And once they’d done it, there was kind of no stopping them because they kind of got over that perceived hurdle of releasing the music and being judged. And in reality, nobody’s really judging it, only whether they like it or not, which is fine.

But the argument I often use was, I would say, like, imagine your favourite artist. This is if they were saying “my music’s not good enough to be released”, imagine your favourite artist, how would you like to be able to go back to their back catalogue and hear the very first pieces of music they were writing?

How great would that be to be able to do that?

So I used to use that as a bit of a lever as well, that, as a fan, we’d all love to be able to hear those first pieces of music that our kind of heroes were releasing, if only to kind of understand what they were doing or to gauge ourselves against where they were, where they are now and where we are, you know? Does that sound right, then where they are now? Against where they were and where we are now?

Christopher: Yeah.

Andy: So, yes, so that was the kind of thing that I helped with, really, with the students.

Christopher: Fantastic, yeah. I got to go see my favorite band, the Mountain Goats this week. And John Darnielle was introducing one of the songs.

And what you just said now really reminded me of it because he is someone who has been prolific, like, has written, literally written and released hundreds of songs, back to the days where you could listen to those early tape recordings where he, by his own acknowledgement, could barely play the guitar.

And so he was introducing this song and saying, you know, I wrote this a few years ago and I used the little guitar riff I had written 20 years earlier, back when I couldn’t actually play the riff properly.

And, like, by contrast with Prince, I heard recently that there were literally hundreds of unreleased prince songs in his vault that no one has ever heard. And, you know, you can debate it either way, but there’s huge value in publishing your work in that way and getting it out there, isn’t there?

Andy: Stevie Wonder’s another one. I saw something the other day where he used to introduce himself as “I am Stevie, I write a song every day”.

And that was what he kind of did, that was his thing.

But yeah, but that’s the other thing as well, is taking too long over producing a piece of music. If you can, what I used to do was, was kind of write every day for half an hour and come up with a musical idea every day.

And the thing is, you write a lot of rubbish, but there’s also a few diamonds in there that you can use and expand into full pieces of music.

And the great thing about kind of writing every day like this is the fact that you become less attached to the music, which is another really important part of being successful as a producer or composer is the idea that it doesn’t matter if the music doesn’t sound great and the bulk of the music you will write will sound a bit rubbish.

And that’s fine as well. You know, it’s, the idea is to pull out the really nice sounding things.

So the percentage of good to bad is there’s probably heaps and heaps and heaps of rubbish music, but you’ve got these lovely, shining examples of authentic you that you can then release. So that’s the kind of philosophy around that as well.

Christopher: Yeah, yeah. I’m a big believer in that idea, that you can only get to the good ideas by going through a lot of bad ideas, right?

And I also think of that quote, I think it’s often attributed to da Vinci, but I don’t think it was, that “Art is never finished, only abandoned”.

You kind of have to accept that and learn when to draw the line.

Andy: Yeah, I always like the idea of once you’ve finished a piece of music and it’s released, it’s no longer yours. I really like that idea. It’s then it’s just out in the wild.

So, yeah, it’s good. It’s kind of quite freeing to know that it’s not yours anymore, it’s theirs. I like that.

Christopher: So I think probably from what you’ve said about musicality and your work with young musicians on mindset and creativity, people probably have a good sense now of why when you showed up, we were like “oh, he does look like a Next Level coach!”

Talk a little bit about coming to Musical U and your work on the team here.

Andy: Yeah, it’s been fantastic. It’s been really eye-opening from a learning how to coach standpoint and learning how to teach, but also it’s been wonderful. In my own education, I’d always believed my ears were rubbish, but it turns out it was the way I was being, it was the way I was taught that wasn’t great.

So like many people, I was taught to use the “recognise intervals by using songs” and things like that. And I think it back to university. I used to get, I used to get 100% – but I couldn’t play by ear. So it was kind of a technique that wasn’t really useful in a musical situation.

But going through the Living Music modules has completely kind of opened my ear up and made me realize that my ears are fine. My ears are absolutely fine, they’re not perfect, but they’re absolutely fine. Still a lot of work to do there, but I now know that I can do that.

So it’s been a real wonderful experience personally for kind of my own musical growth and for my growth as a coach and being surrounded by such wonderful people as well from all around the world. It’s quite a crazy thing.

Christopher: That’s really exciting, awesome. And you’ve been such a, I hesitate to say, such a popular coach because it makes it sound like a popularity contest or disparaging our other coaches!

But you’ve been such a hit with your clients, and I’m sure people can get a sense of your personality and the kind of mindset you bring to it and the way you nurture people you work with.

What would be your favourite thing to do at Musical U?

Andy: One of my favourite things is getting people to realize that their ears are fine.

The very same story I was just telling about myself. And I think that what I find most joyful about that is I understand how they feel when they say that they can’t hear things, kind of demonstrating to a client how to find where “do” is or the home note of a piece of music, and then letting them discover that they can actually do that themselves. And from there, they can then start to transcribe melodies by ear using solfa.

It’s a slow process, but the fact that they’re able to do that and just kind of seeing the look in their eyes when they do it, it’s fantastic. It’s, that can kind of feed me for a week, almost!

That kind of that wonderful thing when you get the realisation, you’re like, hang on, I’ve just done that!

And you’re like “yeah, I told you. I told you you’d be able to do it”. Yeah.

So I think that’s my biggest.

And the other one is when they’re kind of, when they can play something that they were really struggling with and that kind of wide-open-eyed thing, when they kind of go “oh! I did it”.

You’re like, yep, there you go. We sorted that little problem out for you as well.

Christopher: That’s fantastic. You’ve covered our two strands there. The musicality side and the superlearning side.

Andy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, the superlearning is kind of. It’s like, yeah. It’s like, how does this work? It just does.

Christopher: It just does. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, what you said about playing by ear, it’s probably my favourite thing about the way we’ve come to teach it over the years.

Like, we’ve done a lot in that area, but I forget when… I think probably in Ear Training For Beginners, we first codified the Play By Ear Process, and we really took that stance, that playing by ear is a really sped up, instinctive version of figuring it out by ear.

And once you have that perspective, then, like you say, you know, that first experience of figuring something out by ear, you’re like “oh! I can do it. Cool. From here, it’s just a matter of getting more accurate and getting quicker with it”. And you’re away.

Andy: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.

And it’s genuinely a wonderful sensation. When you first it was for me, you know, and I thought, what? I just did that.

Christopher: Awesome.

So, Andy, I love to wrap up these Meet The Team interviews with a question, which is, what is a weird or unusual or slightly out of mainstream technique for developing your musicality? That you found just really works.

Andy: I’m not really sure how unusual this is, but visualisation seems to be something that works really well. I found certainly more recently, there’ve been a few clients that have been struggling to kind of do things.

One example was a lady who plays saxophone. And then typically guitarists who struggle with power chords and things like that have found that by getting them to visualize where their fingers are going first, that has been quite remarkable, to be fair. And then playing what it is they were struggling with. And while I know that’s not necessarily a kind of strict musicality thing, it’s more of a technique thing, but it still kind of comes under that kind of, I suppose it does come under musicality, doesn’t it, really?

Christopher: I would definitely put it in the superlearning category, if not musicality. Yeah. So Dr. Molly Gebrian, who did our masterclass, recently touched on that in her masterclass, that power of visualisation and the astounding brain science of how similar the effect is of visualising it to actually doing it.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher: And it can just, it can fix problems that just doing it again and again never will, right?

Andy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And especially with something that’s quite physical. So I suppose guitar is a great example because often people will try and use too much force in the fretting hand to try and get the barre chord to work. So that can be quite tiring, and it can be damaging as well, I suppose, if you’re kind of spending too much time doing that. So the visualisation kind of allows you to be, you know, not as not strain your hand, I suppose, is what I’m trying to say there.

Christopher: Awesome, I love that tip. And, yeah, it’s like the first question, it brings out such a range of answers from people, it’s always a good one.

Thank you so much, Andy.

It’s been a real pleasure to get to share a little bit of your background with our audience, with our members. I know a lot of them have been curious to know more about this Andy guy that’s supporting them in the discussion boards. So it’s fantastic to have the chance to jump on.

Any parting words of wisdom for our audience today?

Andy: Yes. Sing more and practice your rhythm more. They are the two main things that I have, I think, many people in Musical U are aware of. The team, certainly.

But there’s something that’s become more and more obvious to me as I’ve been here at Musical U: use your voice and practice rhythm.

Andy: Very good advice. Advice to live by, and a beautiful tie-in, yesterday’s episode was all about why you should sing and get past that hurdle of thinking you can’t.

Awesome, thank you so much, Andy.

Christopher: Coming up tomorrow, we have our next Coaches Corner episode, which I’m very excited about.

Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

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