The “Sweet Spot” Repertoire That Unlocks Easier Musical Progress (Coaches Corner, Episode 5)

Christopher: Tell me, have you ever done this? You perform a piece of music and you make a mistake, or maybe two, and afterwards you’re like “oh, I ruined it. I really wish I hadn’t made those mistakes”. If so, you are going to love something that’s shared in today’s episode.

So it’s been another fantastic week here on Musicality Now. Quick recap in case you missed anything…

We kicked off the week with our mini interview with Dr. Molly Gebrian, a specialist in the neuroscience of music learning, and it was fascinating to hear her fascination with the world of neuroscience applied to music. It was a really great little interview and gave a glimpse into how those two worlds came together for her.

Then on Tuesday, we had an excerpt from her masterclass at Musical U, sharing a really juicy section about the power of taking breaks. Definitely go back and watch that if you haven’t already.

Then we had an episode on the five big mistakes that adult music learners make, and we had some really great response to this, some great comments, people really relating to those five big mistakes.

And I think it’s, I hesitate to say it because it sounds very, what’s the word? Very boastful, I guess, or arrogant to say it, but I feel like it should be required watching for every adult music learner! Or at least in whatever way, shape, or form, I would love every adult music learner to know about these five mistakes. Because as soon as you know about them, you’re able to do something about them. If you didn’t see that episode, highly recommend checking it out to see are you sabotaging yourself in one of these five ways.

Then we had another Inside The Book episode, a lot of fun looking at the singing chapter, just the first part on “If you think you can’t sing… you’re wrong!” And we’ll be following that up with the next Inside The Book episode, we’ll be going on to the next section where we talk about the concrete benefits of singing for musicians. Whether or not you want to ever become a singer, why you need to be using your singing voice to develop your musicality.

And then we had our Meet The Team interview with Mr. Andy Portas, which was a lot of fun. I learned a thing or two about him I hadn’t known before, so that was awesome and really cool to get a glimpse into his musical backstory and the work he does on the Musical U team as a Next Level coach.

Coming up today we have, speaking of Next Level coaches, Coaches Corner, episode five.

In this episode, you’re going to hear from Zac talking about what I opened with – the power of performance, and in particular, a big mindset shift that can make performing more easy and joyful, and make you a lot more resilient to those inevitable mistakes that come up from time to time.

Andy shares how to instantly see how far you’ve really come in your music learning so that anytime you’re getting down about your progress, you’re able to do what he recommends and be like “oh, I really have made a lot of progress!”

Camilo talks about choosing “sweet spot” repertoire, just the right level so that you can make fast progress with it and it still drives you forwards.

And then Andrew shares a great example of leveraging your childhood music for playing by ear, as well as the the pitfalls of looking up the chords online and jumping to the sheet music too soon.

So a lot of juicy goodness for you, as always in Coaches Corner. Let’s dive in.

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Hey, hey!

We’re back with another round of Coaches Corner, where I get the absolute pleasure of getting together with our Next Level coaches, so that they can share some of the awesome things that have been going on in coaching lately, things that can be valuable for you in your musical life, too.

Today I’m joined by our head coach, Andrew Bishko, as well as coaches Andy Portas, Camilo Suarez, and Zac Bailey. Welcome, guys, good to see you!

I’m gonna kick things off this time with Zac. What’s been going on in coaching lately?

Zac: Hey, Christopher.

Yeah. Excited to be here. Another Coaches Corner, always fun.

We’ve recently had a really beautiful insight about mistakes and the power of performance from one of our members.

We have these monthly Next Level “Open Mic” calls where, for some of our members, it’s their first time performing in front of someone else – which is a big deal! For those of you that have performed in front of someone else for the first time, you know how much of a big deal that is.

It’s a big step, and a lot of people are really nervous, and they’re nervous because they’re afraid to make mistakes in front of other people. And I think everyone who joins these Open Mic calls feels that way.

And we had a member on one of the calls recently who noticed that when she was performing, the mistakes felt like the worst thing that had ever happened. She was performing, she went and she performed, and after she was done, she noticed the mistakes, and I was like “oh, that was so terrible. That was the worst thing ever”.

But when she was watching someone else perform, she noticed how beautiful it was and how powerful it was to receive a musical performance from someone else.

And that other person that was performing, when they were done performing, they had the same experience as the first person. They were done performing. They had made mistakes, and they’re thinking it was the worst performance ever. It was terrible. How could anyone possibly like this? But for the other members watching, it was just a beautiful musical experience that was really important. And the member even said “this is so important for us to share our music with each other”.

And it’s just a beautiful thing to receive music. It’s all a collection. Every time we perform, it’s a collection of things we intended to do and things we didn’t intend to do, and we can learn a lot from all of those things.

But at the end of the day, for everyone watching the performance, it’s just a beautiful musical experience, and it’s very enjoyable. So I think that is, I was like, wow, that’s really deep. It’s really insightful.

When they said that, how beautiful the performance is, no matter what the mistakes are, I was like, that is so cool and so powerful.

Christopher: That’s fantastic. And I love that she had the openness to have that perspective shift, right?

Like, I’m reminded of something we covered in the Supernatural Performance course about receiving compliments, where we can all be in this mode of someone says “that was great!” and you’re like “oh, no, I made 17 mistakes”. And actually, clearly this Next Level client was open to realising that it genuinely can be a beautiful experience for the listener, even if you make a mistake or two or it’s not quite what you hoped for. So that’s really wonderful.

Awesome. How about you, Andy? What’s one cool thing that’s happened in coaching recently?

Andy: Yeah, coaching’s going great. We’re getting some brilliant results. It really is wonderful.

But I’d like to tell you about a couple of clients, and what happened with those this week is they were feeling a little bit like they weren’t really progressing very much and one particular client was getting quite down about it. Fortunately, I tend to get my clients to record themselves regularly and post their recordings in their Practice Spaces.

And this means that if ever they’re kind of feeling a little bit down about their progress and things like that, I get them to go and look back at their early recordings and just see where they were when they first started with Next Level and they’ll instantly see how far they’ve really come.

The problem is, when we’re learning any skill is we tend to chase the horizon. So we’ve got where we are now and then we have this kind of ideal of where we think we should be.

And the problem is, the more we improve, the farther away that horizon goes. So the more we improve, the better we want to be and the more we understand where we could actually be. So, and essentially what we start doing is we measure the gap between where we want to be rather than the gain from where we’ve come.

But by videoing yourself, it works in two wonderful ways. The first way is you watch the video and you can see exactly what you need to focus on the next week for your practice. It will kind of really shine a spotlight on bits you need to focus on.

And then it’s a wonderful tool for just seeing how far you’ve come. So it directly shows distance traveled because we’ve got no real concept of how far we’ve come in reality. So that’s been really useful.

Christopher: That is super cool. Thanks for sharing that, Andy. Camilo, what’s happened when you’re coaching recently? What’s great to share?

Camilo: Well, it’s been a week of personal discoveries and transformations, and those discoveries have been related to repertoire. How to choose the right repertoire to continue your journey forward and to feel motivated.

It’s very common that at the beginning when you join the program, you want to play things that are very challenging, technical. But finding the right repertoire with music that feels exciting, it’s beautiful music and that is within your reach, meaning that you can make serious progress in one week or two weeks’ time has been transformational for some of my clients.

I can particularly say about someone working very hard on their inner abilities and then finding the music of Mozart and finding how it all comes together in a nice way and being able to play it without the music in front of her.

That was a wonderful win for the week.

Christopher: I love that. Yeah.

And it’s often the benefit of working on those inner skills, isn’t it, that, you know, if you’re purely focused on the instrument, on the Hands, all you can really see in terms of repertoire possibilities are like “I’ve got to play something more complex and then more complex and then more complex”.

And actually when you’re appreciating the whole thing, the Heads, Hands, Hearing and Heart, you can see that actually you could pick something simpler than you’re used to playing and it will still be a great step forwards with you, to play it with intention, to play it with expression, and to really bring your own musicality to it. So I love that your clients have been experiencing that. That’s wonderful.

Andrew, what’s something you’d like to share from your recent coaching?

Andrew: Well, I had a very interesting progression of experiences with one of my clients this week, where, first of all, I thought this was an awesome choice: She decided to play something by ear out of her memory.

It was a song from her childhood and it was a popular song on the radio, but she didn’t go listen to it again. She didn’t look up the sheet music. She just tried to pull it out of her head and then figure out not just the melody, which came very quickly, but also the chords.

Before she did this, looked at the sheet music, she looked it up on a popular chord website and she said, okay, well, there’s a bunch of chords here. But she wasn’t able to see the relationship between the chords.

And I realised how all these websites with all these chords on them and we think they’re so great and it’s so helpful. “I could just look up the chords for a song, and I could play the song”, and yet all we’re learning is a bunch of random chords, really.

We’re not learning how they’re related, their relationship, and how they fit together, which enables us to understand the music, to transpose it, to really even to feel it, because when we understand these relationships, we can feel the music on a deeper level and we can be more expressive with it.

And so it was just a big “aha” moment for me. It’s like, wow, these sites are really a lot more useless than I even thought they were!

And, like, where’s the site that talks about the relationships, the chord numbers, how they fit in the key? You know, where’s that site?

And then the other thing was just to watch this client progression where at first she felt very frustrated with herself about, you know, what she thought was not, you know, her lack of ability. But actually it was, it was really wonderful that she challenged herself to learn in this way.

And she learned a lot more from this experience than if she would have just gone and looked it up and played through the sheet music right off the bat.

And, you know, part of our coaching experience was to unpack the whole thing and to see, you know, really what she had done that was much more useful for her learning, whether she quote unquote, succeeded or not.

Christopher: That’s fantastic, yeah, I love that.

I do have to give a tip-of-the-hat to hooktheory.com, it’s the one site I know of that really approaches chord progressions in that meaningful way, and I love them for that.

But you’re right. Yeah. And I remember back when I was buying a lot of sheet music, one time in five, you’d get this thing that was probably a correct transcription of what was played on the album.

But you look at it and you’re like “that’s not what I’m hearing! What I’m hearing is much more simple and beautiful than that”.

And if you have some skills and knowledge, you can kind of distill out what matters and what doesn’t and figure out what’s going on harmonically or which notes are just embellishments.

But you can otherwise look at the sheet music and be like “unless I play every note on this page, I’m not playing it correctly”, not realising that you could do an incredible rendition with a fraction of the notes.

So I love that idea.

And I think playing something from your memory is such a powerful shortcut to that because you’re going to remember what matters.

You’re going to remember the mood. You’re going to remember the main melody notes, you’re not going to remember all the intricate details that yes, may be technically the correct answer, but really aren’t all of that musicality that you’d have inside you when you remember it.

That’s terrific. Thank you, Andrew. Awesome.

Well, as always, it has been an absolute pleasure to get together with you guys. I have to let you get on with your coaches meeting that’s starting imminently. But thank you for taking the time to hang out and share these insights that can be useful for everyone watching and listening.

I will see you on the next Coaches Corner. Cheers!

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Awesome, I hope you enjoyed that and got a lot out of it.

Remember, as always with these Coaches Corner episodes, I really encourage you to just grab one idea or one tip that was shared and actually use it. Do something with it in your musical life.

That’s it for this one.

Cheers! And go make some music!

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