Author: musicalitywrld

Learn how to choose the right headphones to level up your ears in this clip from the archive of live member Q&A calls at Musical U. Enjoy!

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• • Musicality Now – About the Ear Training Trap
  • Musicality Now – About Active Listening
  • Musicality Now – About Listening as the Route to Musicality
  • Musicality Now – What Is Ear Training? (and why does it normally fail?)
  • Wired For Sound Part 4: Headphones
  • What are the best headphones for ear training?

Transcript

So, the other question that’s been coming up several times on the site over the last month or so in direct messages and a couple of the discussions and progress journals is about headphones. And I think, based on time, this will probably be our last question unless anyone has any last minute shout outs. The question… The issue that keeps coming up is particularly around harmonic hearing, so when you’re trying to hear a harmonic interval, both notes play at once, or you’re working on chord ear training and you’re trying to figure out different types of chord from one another.

It can really help to use good headphones. And that’s because once you’re hearing more than one note at once, your brain has to listen very carefully to pick apart those notes. And sometimes what you’re trying to do is separate the notes and really hear one and the other. And sometimes what you’re trying to hear is their combination, but in quite an accurate way. But, either way, if you’re listening on terrible laptop speakers, you’re really doing yourself a disservice because you just won’t be able to hear the detail you need to to recognize what you’re trying to. And that can sound funny if you’re not used to audio quality and paying attention to how good speakers are and that kind of thing. You might think, well, I can hear it’s a piano. What more do I need? Or, I can hear there’s an interval, there’s a chord. Surely I should be able to recognize it.

Actually, the ear is very subtle and the more you dig into this area, the more you realize just how much detail the ear is capable of hearing. And I often recommend musicians practice active listening, and that’s probably a topic for another day. But, just to say, spending some time really listening carefully to music can reveal a whole world of detail that you’d been oblivious to when you were just enjoying it as a song for a song’s sake. So, if you’re not used to thinking about this, you might be surprised to hear how much of a difference headphones can make, but they really do. And there’s a number of reasons for that. The first is that good headphones will just reproduce the audio much more accurately. And that means you’ll be able to hear detail in the timbre and in the various notes present that you just couldn’t if you’re listening on tinny laptop speakers or some cheap-o speakers you’ve plugged into your computer.

And the second aspect is just that earphones are either on your ear or in your year, and either way they provide a much better listing environment. So, even if it seems quiet around you, if you’re listening on speakers or you’re listening in the car, there’s a lot of noise that you may not be thinking about, but is interfering with your listening. And that can be as simple as an echoey room, or it can be children playing outside the part of your brain is having to pay attention to. But, getting rid of those distractions by using headphones instead goes a long way to letting your ear really hear what it needs to for these exercises. So, they reproduce the sound more accurately typically, and they isolate you in an idealistic environment to focus on what you’re really trying to focus on.

So then, that naturally brings up the question of what is a good set of headphones. I said a couple of times there, “If you’re listening on good headphones”. And the reality is the headphones that came free with your mobile phone are probably not good headphones. And what I mean by good there isn’t about brand. It’s not necessarily about price. What it’s really about is accurately reproducing the sound. So, for example, your average person in the street might say, “My headphones are really good. They’ve got a lot of bass to them”, or, “My headphones are really good. They make the music sound so exciting”. Actually, that’s not really what we’re looking for. Obviously it can be great if all you’re doing is enjoying music and listening for the fun of it, but for ear training and for really developing your musical ear, you actually want them to be precise, not just sound good.

And there is a difference there. So, what I mean by precise is they are giving you exactly the sound that was originally recorded. They’re not boosting the bass. They’re not adding a reverb. They’re not doing clever effects. Bose, as a company, is particularly notorious for this. They’ll make speakers that sound fantastic, but actually completely distort the sound compared with what was intended by the artist. So, you need to be a bit careful to find good headphones. And there’re a few rules of thumb I can give you for that because I know when you go into your average shop, there’re so many brands and models to choose from. You’ve got a few things to think about. The first is choose the kind of headphones you prefer. So, the three main options are you can get what are called canalphones, where they go right into your ear canal.

And that’s great for sound isolation, but some people hate having something inside their ear. So, that’s personal preference. The next level out is just in ear earphones, like the kind you get with an iPhone or a mobile phone that just sit in this part of your ear. And the third type is what musicians often call cans, the big chunky ones that sit on your ears. These days you can get some smaller ones for sure. But, with those they can be good or bad. The bad is the 1980s Walkman style headphones where they just sit very loosely on top of your ear. Those aren’t so good. What you’re looking for is the ones with a bit of cushioned padding that really create a seal around your ear because that means you still get the isolation even though they’re not inside your ear.

So those are the three main types, and it’s really personal preference, but try and find some that fit snugly wherever they fit so that you do get that isolation from background noise. The second big thing is choose a good brand. So, that doesn’t necessarily mean expensive. And it doesn’t necessarily mean a very famous brand. And in particular here, you want to steer away from the fashionable brands. So, a couple of the big ones would be Skullcandy or Beats by Dre. They’re great if you’re into fashion. They’re not so great if you’re into audio fidelity. I think there is one model of Beats by Dre that are professional grade, but for the most part they would fall into the category of headphones that are more designed for style than substance. So, you want to steer clear of the fashion brands and you actually genuinely want to steer clear of electronics brands too.

So, people like Sony or Panasonic, they make decent headphones, earphones, but they’re not the best because they’re not audio companies, they’re electronics companies. What you really want to move towards is audio brands like Shure, S H U R E, or Sennheiser. And they do produce low end, low price point models too. So, you can pick up $30 headphones for sure. It doesn’t need to break the bank. But, if you go into that audio manufacturers range, you’ll be getting generally better headphones. So, pick an audio brand and you’ll find lots of information about those online if you look. And then, look for a model that doesn’t boast about its base response, or its amazing effects, or it doesn’t make claims about how it modifies the music. Some earphones are very much sold on, ‘We will make your music sound better’.

That’s not really what you’re looking for. So, generally mid price range is fine. So, if you’re paying upwards of $30, $40, you’ll probably be getting a good model if you factor in the other things I mentioned. So, an audio brand in that price range will do you just fine. You don’t need to go beyond that. If you go up to the hundred dollar price point, you can get some really nice… Getting into the professional grade there where they’re designed for studio use and that kind of thing. And really, if you want top end, you’re talking probably $200 for a serious pair of headphones that will last you the next 10 years.

But, it doesn’t have to be that. A $30 pair by Shure or Sennheiser will do you just fine. And, if you haven’t tried it, definitely factor that into your training. A, use headphones, and B, if you can buy some good headphones because you might find actually that lets you leap over the hurdles that have been holding you back. And it seems silly, but it just makes it so much easier on your ear when it’s not hearing a blurry sound, or a distorted sound, or a sound half drowned out by the noise around you. So, give that a try for sure.

The post Q&A: Why use headphones and what kind should I buy? appeared first on Musical U.

In this clip from the archive of live member Q&A calls at Musical U we share some practical tips to help you audiate. Enjoy!

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• Musicality Now – About Audiation
• Musicality Now – Audiation and Thinking Music, with Cynthia Crump Taggart
• Musicality Now – How to “Hear Like A Musician”
• The Secret Music Practice Skill: Audiation

Transcript

So, I wanted to dive in to a meaty one to begin with because as you all know, if you’ve been on these members Q&A calls before, we often struggle a bit to keep it to time, there’s always so much to talk about, but I thought we’d begin therefore with the meatiest one. So, the topic is audiation, and that may or may not be a familiar word to you.

It’s one that should really be a familiar word to any musician because it’s such a fundamental skill and such an important skill, but it’s one that a lot of musicians unfortunately neglect, and they find that it’s a relatively late discovery, that there is this whole skill of audiation that they can learn.

So, it’s one worth digging into a little bit and the question that came up this month was from Nathan Bowers, just recently. He’s one of our new joiners and definitely someone included in that shout out a moment ago, to members having great success. He’s been storming through the modules and I think really enjoying waking up his ears and polishing up his listening skills.

So, he was taking the Score to Sound with Solfa Module, and if you’re not familiar, this is a module that helps you look at printed music. So, the kind of sheet music you might play from piano or in a choir, and it helps you use the skill of Sulfur that are in your system, I talked about before, to look at that music and know how it should sound and be able to sing it directly.

So, this is particularly important for singers, but actually for any musician, you should be able ideally to look at a sheet of music and hear in your head how that music would sound if you were to play it. So, that’s what the Score to Sound Module is all about. And a key part of that process is audiation. So, when you look at the music, you figure out the notes, so in this case with Sulfur, you’d be figuring out, okay, that’s for example, do-mi-mi-so-re, and then you need to figure out what are those pictures?

So, because the whole point is to not have to pick up your instrument and play out the notes to hear how they should sound, what we’re really talking about is imagining them. So, what most musicians do is they imagine themselves singing it or humming it. You could imagine yourself playing it, but naturally, if you’re using the Sulfur system, it’s quite helpful to hear yourself singing the do-mi-mi-so-re, or whatever it may be.

So audiation, to put it simply, is just that process of imagining music in your mind. And this can be as simple as imagining yourself singing a short melody, or it can be as complicated as vividly recreating an entire Pink Floyd mix in your head of a song you wanted. So it’s, as you can imagine, a really powerful skill for musicians because we’re immersed in music because we learn it and play it and enjoy it, but to be able to internalize all of that and create it on demand in your mind is a really valuable skill.

So, Nathan was working on this module and digging into this idea of audiation and he said, “I’ve discovered that I have a problem with audiation, imagining in your head. Any suggestions?” And that’s all he said. So, I wasn’t sure quite what point he’d reached with it, whether he was having a problem just getting started or there was some level of advanced audiation ability that he wanted to have, and wasn’t quite there with.

But in any case, it was a good excuse on this call to just talk about the different levels of audiation and how you can develop each of them. So, the first thing to say is that audiation connects with so many different areas of your musicality. As I said before, it’s very powerful for sight reading music, because you want to look at it, imagine it, and then sing it.

It’s also really powerful for your sense of relative pitch, because when your ear is trying to figure out the distances between notes, a lot of what you end up doing is mental gymnastics and imagining, “Oh, is it this interval or that interval.” Or, “Is that this note from the scale or that type of chord.” And the, excuse me, the better you’re able to imagine those things and play around with different possibilities, the easier it’s going to be to get to the right answer.

So, it’s fundamental to those two areas, but the other one, which is what brings us to our first level of audiation is musical memory. And this isn’t something we talk about a lot inside Musical U because for most musicians, it comes up, to be honest, it comes up just in the exam context and that’s unfortunate, but it’s true. For me, for example, I know that when I was learning instruments back at school, I didn’t really need to think much about memory because I was always playing with the sheet music in front of me, and if I was memorizing a piece, we were really talking about longterm memories.

So, really storing something in your memory forever, more or less, so that you can memorize it this week and in three weeks time, stand up on stage and perform it without needing the sheet music, but actually what we’re talking about in the context of audiation is your short term musical memory. And this is where it comes up in exams, because I don’t know if you might have taken one of the ABRSM instrument exams, for example, but certainly early on, they have this exercise where the examiner will play a little melody on the piano and then ask you to sing it back.

And once you get past the hurdle for some musicians of just being able to sing back the melody, as you progress through the exams, that melody gets longer and longer, and soon you find that you can remember the first bit, but by the time they finish playing it, actually you’ve forgotten the first bit. And so this is where musicians, butt up against the idea of having a short term musical memory.

And it can be as simple as clapping back a rhythm. I remember that’s another exam exercise where the examiner claps a rhythm for you, and you have to clap it back. And when the rhythm is one or two bars long, that’s easy enough, but when it becomes eight bars long, that becomes a bit trickier. And a bit like audiation itself, this is a skill that’s unfortunately neglected because when you’re always relying on sheet music or longterm memorization, you don’t really need to polish up the short term memorization, but when you do, it has a powerful knock-on effect on everything else.

So, concrete example, when you get good at remembering that rhythmic pattern over eight bars, what you’ve done to be able to do that is create new constructs in your mind, new blocks of ideas about rhythm so that it’s not just trying to remember, “Okay, that was crotchet, crotchet, quaver, quaver, quaver.” You build up a pattern and you just imagine that whole sequence as that pattern of two crotchets followed by four quavers, and now you have just one thing to memorize instead of the whole note by note sequence.

So, excuse me, practicing that kind of short term musical memory is valuable because it builds up that ability to imagine bigger and bigger blocks, more and more meaningful blocks of music. And this is where it comes into audiation. So, the first level of audiation really is just about remembering music you’ve heard in a very simple way. So, if you take that clap back a rhythm example, when we say, “Can you remember it to clap it back?”

Really what we’re saying is, “Can you imagine it again in your mind?” And only on a short term basis, but they’re going to play it or you’re going to hear it, then you’re going to have to imagine it and store it somewhere in your mind temporarily, and then you’re going to clap it back to yourself, at which point you’re probably imagining it as you clap it to plan out what you clap, or in the singing example, what notes you sing.

So, that short term musical memory is, in some sense, reliant on audiation. If you want people to imagine music at all in your head, there isn’t really a meaning to saying, “Can you remember it?” Because you’re not going to be able to create it in your mind to clap it back or sing it back. So, when it comes to learning audiation that’s really the first level to crack because if you can’t remember a short melody or a short rhythmic pattern, the other stuff we’re going to talk about in a moment, you’ve got no chance.

Fortunately for most musicians, this isn’t a big problem. Most people who have been playing an instrument for a year or two willfully find they can memorize a bar or two. So, we’re talking about, 5 to 10 seconds of music fairly easily, and they can remember it for a minute or so, and you can then practice and extend that memory period, and like we talked about with the exam, so that now you can remember an eight bar pattern easily enough. But don’t worry too much about that.

The main thing to say is just, if someone says they have trouble with audiation, the first thing to check is, well, can you even remember what you’re trying to audiate or are you struggling with the memory side of it? So, they might, for example, be fine audiating 1 bar, but when it becomes 16 bars, they struggle and really that’s more of a problem of musical memory than it is audiation.

So, that would be the first level, is your musical memory up to the task of audiating. It’s the enabler for the other two things we’re going to talk about. Once you’ve got that basic musical memory working for you, the second level of audiation, which is where we really get into audiating is a simple melody. So, at the exam situation of, “Can you sing back this melody I just played in piano?” Or the sight reading example we talked about with the Score to Sound Module, where you’re looking at maybe some choir music and you’re trying to audiate it before you sing it out loud.

We’re talking about just a single note by note melody. Nothing more complex than that, we’re not worrying about what instrument it is, or the chords underneath, or the details of the recording. We’re really just thinking about what is the sequence of notes in that melody. And this is really the crux of audiation for most musicians, if you nail this, you’re winning. So, the suggestion I had for Nathan if he was getting stuck at this stage is, there’s a really simple exercise you can use to build up this ability bit-by-bit.

And it’s a very natural exercise. It’s an easy one to explain, compared with some of the more intricate training we have inside the modules at Musical U, this is something that any musician can do with any music they’re learning. And it’s simply this. You skip bars. So, supposing you’re playing a piece that’s, for the sake of example, say it’s eight bars long, and you can play this piece on your clarinet and you’re fairly comfortable playing it.

The exercise is next time, try skipping bar four. So, you play bar one through three, well, easy enough. And when you get to bar four, instead of playing it, you just imagine playing it in your head and then you come right back in on bar five through to eight. So, you’re just replacing one of the eight bars with imagining it instead of playing it out loud. And what you’ll probably find is, if you’re familiar with the piece and if you’re used to playing it, this is really easy to do because your fingers are used to doing it, your mind is so used to hearing it, actually switching from playing it out loud, to imagining playing it is very easy, and the slight challenge is can you keep time accurately?

So, for one bar, that’s probably fine, but the next step of the exercise is to try skipping two bars. So, maybe you stopped after bar two and you imagine playing bars three and four in your mind before continuing, and at that point, you start needing to worry a little bit more about timekeeping, and you might want to do this with a metronome to help you at first, because otherwise when you come in on bar five or wherever it is, particularly if you’re playing along with an accompaniment, you’ll find you’re a bit out of time.

But keeping things simple, really the heart of the exercise is just that. Take this piece really well, play it as normal, but then pick certain bars or certain lines or entire sections and instead of playing them, imagine them. Audiate them in your mind. It’s very easy to get started with, it quite quickly becomes more challenging, but the better you know the piece, the easier it will be.

And really the important thing to say is, don’t just roughly think, bah-boo-doo-bah-ba-ba-ba-ba, in your mind, try to really recreate precisely note-by-note bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah, or whatever the melody might be and be precise with your rhythm and be precise with your pitching and really imagine as vividly as you can, yourself playing that. So, that’s the simple exercise. You can do it for an instrument, or you can do it with singing and the more you do it, the easier it will be.

So, one recommendation I have is just slot it in as part of your normal instrument practice. Every time you’re learning a piece, make a habit of skipping bars like that at the end of your practice session, or at some point in your practice session, when you’ve nailed a section, try pulling out a bar or two and just imagining it instead.

The other thing I wanted to explain on this point is, you can actually get a lot of value from this very quickly by not just treating it as a way to practice audiation, but actually as a way to use audiation to practice your instrument. This is something I unfortunately discovered very late in my musical career, was the power of imagined practice for learning music and for becoming more fluid. We often think it’s only time spent at your instrument that counts as practice, but actually what you’ll find if you try out this audiation idea is, your brain can’t really tell the difference to a large extent.

So, if for example, you have a tricky chromatic run in the middle of a piece, and you’re struggling with the fingering, or there’s a bit of the piece where there’s an accidental that always throws you off and you play the natural when it’s meant to be a sharp, if you practice those with audiation, you’ll find that actually that works just as effectively, sometimes even more effectively than practicing it with your instrument, and the beautiful thing is, you can practice this anytime anywhere.

So take that bar with the accidental, for example, and just imagine yourself playing it and imagine yourself playing it correctly with your fingers on the instrument, hitting that accidental, the sharp, instead of the natural every time. You can practice that 50 or 100 times while waiting for the bus to come. Super easy, really surprisingly useful, and what I’ve found in my own experience was this was great in particular for piano.

So, when I was trying to integrate the left and right hand piano parts, I’d be playing hands separately and getting each of them fluid, but then when you came to play them together and you had to figure out how the notes fit together and how the timing fit together, it turned out audiation and mental practice was beautiful for this because I could do it any time, I could do it while listening to a recording of the piece, for example, just imagining myself playing it, and I found it really dramatically transformed the results, so that next time I sat down with the instrument practice, my brain had figured out all the wrinkly bits, and figured out how everything fit together and it all just flowed much more fluidly.

So, that’s one of my top tips for any instrument player is, use that mental play as a way to get extra practice time, and it works really well, and it’s a double win because you’re practicing your instrument, but of course, you’re also practicing up your audiation skills as we’ve been talking about. So, the more you use this as a tool in your toolkit for learning, the better you’ll get and the more benefit you’ll get from it. So, the final bit to talk about in the context of audiation is, once you’ve got very good at single melodies, there’s actually a whole other world of audiation that you can explore, which is audiating a whole piece of music.

And I don’t mean a whole piece in the sense of beginning to end, though that is useful too. I mean, a whole piece in the sense of the whole arrangement of a piece, the whole recording, not just the melody and this can be a slight danger if you try and take this on too soon, because it does rely on you having some basic audiation ability already. But the basic idea is, when you imagine, when you audiate a song, don’t just hear the melody, start trying to hear everything else in the song.

And again, this is one of those double wins because the better you get at audiating in more detail, the more aware you become in music, and the more you practice being aware in music, the better you get at that audiation. So, it’s a beautiful feedback cycle. And again, there’s a fairly basic exercise that any musician can do with any song, and in this case, it can be any song you like, not just a song you’re working on, on your instrument. And the basic idea is to practice active listening and to then practice audiation.

So, if you’ve been on previous Q&A calls, you’ll know the idea of active listening. What we mean is, you’re not just hearing music, you’re actually paying perfect attention and you’re really digging into what you’re hearing and you’re picking apart the music in your mind, and you’re dissecting it bit by bit. So this is dramatically different from how a lot of people experienced music. Your average person on the street, they hear a pop song on the radio, they just hear a blurry mix of sound, they hone in on the lyrics, maybe the melody, and the rest of it is just a blur to them that makes the song work.

But for you and I as musicians, we hear music in a slightly different way, and that’s an ability we can nurture and develop and extend, and the way we do that is through practicing active listening. So, here’s the basic exercise. You take a song you know and like, and you listen again and you pick something in particular to listen for. So, instead of just thinking, “Okay, I’m going to pay attention and listen really carefully.” You actually set yourself a little challenge like, “Okay, I’m going to listen entirely through the song and just pay attention as much as I can to the baseline.”

Or, “I’m going to just pay attention to that rhythm guitar part.” And it might be mixed off in the right hand channels, slightly in the background, so you have to really pay attention or it might come and go depending on the part or the section of the song it is, and you’ll find you have to really pay more attention than you’re used to paying to that song that you thought you knew really well. And of course you can do this with the different parts, so the vocals, the percussion, the harmony, or you can do it with, for example, the different rhythms being used.

So, really trying to hear, okay, the rhythmic pattern that each instrument is playing at each part of the song or the different harmonies being used, and when the chord progression changes, and whether it’s using major or minor tonality at different points. You can also listen to the instrument, so trying to hear, is this a standard drum, bass guitar and vocal rock band, or actually is there synthesizers and there’s the percussionist using a cow bell, or whatever it may be. Every song has a distinctive set of instruments that may change throughout and maybe very different or very similar to other songs you know.

So, that in itself can be a great one. And actually we had a good mini challenge recently on the website on a Beach Boys song. So, if you dig into the discussion boards and look at the mini challenges, that’s a great opportunity for you to put this into action in a concrete way and see what you can pick out in the instrumentation of that Beach Boys song. You can also pay attention, excuse me, to the lyrics and the way the singer is annunciating and delivering those lyrics with emotion, or if you’re into the audio production side of things, you can listen to the frequency mix or the audio effects being used.

So, those are half a dozen different aspects of a song you might choose to listen to, and of course you can do all of them one by one. So, each time you listen to the song, pick something new to listen out for and what you’re doing is, you’re building up your awareness of the rich detail in a music recording. And it doesn’t have to be an over the top Pink Floyd, as I mentioned before, I have some great mixes, or electronic music, often there’s just a lot going on.

It doesn’t have to be a song like that. You can pick a stripped down acoustic guitar, sing a song, write to type recording, and still you’ll be surprised how much there is to listen for once you really begin to dissect it in that way. This does take focus. It’s a lot like meditation in that you’ll find yourself getting distracted and you’ll find your attention wandering, and really the practice of it is to keep bringing your attention back, keep focusing back on the aspect of the music you’ve been trying to listen for and as you practice that, the better you’ll get the more stamina you’ll build up for paying attention.

And so you can do this again and again with the same song, and then you can introduce other songs, and over time you can start doing it with brand new songs, ones you don’t know well, and see the first time you listen to a song, how much can you be aware of? How many of these different aspects can you try and stay conscious of as you listen to the song? So, what does all of that have to do with audiation if you’re just listening?

Well, that’s step two really, is once you’re becoming more and more aware of the detail, you’re gradually nurturing that part of your musical brain that is able to imagine, and is able to vividly recreate all of this stuff you’ve been listening for, and so you can make it a concrete exercise by before or after doing that active listening, try audiating it. So, supposing it’s a song you know well, and you’ve just listened through doing active listening, pay attention to the baseline.

Once you’re finished with that spend 30 seconds trying to audiate that baseline, trying to audiate, what was it during the verse? What was it during the chorus? Did it change in the intro section or during the solos? And see how vividly you can recreate that one thing you’ve been paying attention to. Of course, you can do this before you practice the active listing. So, if you know the song really well, and you’re trying to actively listen for the instrumentation, well, take 30 seconds before hitting play and see if you can recreate that instrumental mix in some way in your brain.

See if you can kind of paint in, “Okay, there’s a base there, and I remember there’s an electric guitar playing a rhythm part, and the percussion is really symbol heavy. “And just try and recreate that in your mind’s ear as vividly as you can. So, you can do it before, you can do it after, and you can do it cumulatively. So, supposing today you listened to the song five times and you pick out five different things you’re listening for and you practice audiation after each one of those.

Finish up by trying to audiate the whole thing together. And this is what I mentioned to begin with. We talk about audiating an entire song, the entire arrangement. See if you can recreate as much detail as possible of the performance of the song, the recording of the song in your mind’s ear. And you can probably imagine doing it already and see how different this is from the simple kind of audiation we talked about to begin with.

So, going from a vocal sheet music and just trying to audiate, “What is the tenor part in this choir piece?” Compared with, “Can I recreate the breadth and complexity and rich detail of Michael Jackson’s Thriller in my mind’s ear without having to listen to it at all this week?” It’s a quite different ability, but of course they are both audiation, they’re both using your musical imagination to recreate music in your mind’s ear.

So, those are the three layers of audiation. First of all, just being able to remember in your short term memory, roughly how the music went. The second is being able to vividly recreate a melody in your mind’s ear, perhaps not having even heard it, just looking from the sheet music to begin with. And the third is recreating in rich, vivid detail, the entirety of a musical recording, or the entirety of an arrangement. And this, it pushes your rhythm skills, it pushes your harmonic abilities in terms of knowing the different notes present in a chord, it pushes your instrumental awareness and your audio production sophistication.

It extends you in all directions at once and as beautiful and varied as music is that’s as beautiful and varied does your audiation skill becomes. So, it’s great for stretching yourself as a musician. And the final thing I want to say on this is, it’s not worth doing just for the sake of it. When it comes to audiating a melody, the real reason for doing that is so that you can pick up sheet music and know how it should sound. It’s so that if someone at band practice sings a melody to you and says, “Hey, can you play that on your instrument?”

You know while at the very least you can remember it vividly for long enough to figure out on your instrument. It’s only useful for those practical purposes. So, it’s up to you to see how this fits in with your musical lives and where it would be useful. But the third layer, the rich, vivid detail, this is one that benefits you throughout your musical life because even if we’re talking just about listening to music and enjoying music, once you build up your audiation and the vividness of your musical imagination, the sophistication of your musical imagination, music comes to life in a new way so that Michael Jackson Thriller, for example, maybe before when you thought of that song and you tried to remember it, all you really heard was the, “Thriller, ba-ba-ba.”

Once you’ve been doing this kind of practice, actually what you start to hear in your head is akin to the recording. It’s the rich arrangement, it’s the rhythms, it’s the baseline pounding. You hear the song almost as if it’s playing. It also means when the song is playing, your brain can tune out all of the obvious stuff. It’s no longer just focused on the melody or the lyrics. It’s able to dive into the music and follow it from part to part and all of the different aspects we’ve just been talking about.

And what that means is you enjoy it a lot more, actually Thriller, that was a simple pop song before, you realize it actually is really, there’s a lot of rich detail there, and it brings so much more joy and awareness to your musical listing that, for me, that alone is worth the effort of practicing audiation and developing through active listening, that ability to have a vivid musical imagination. So in short, if you’re a musician, if you need to sometimes remember music or sight read music, or even if you’re just a music fan and you love music, and you enjoy listening to music, audiation is a skill not to be overlooked.

And I’m sorry to say, we don’t currently have a module about all of this inside Musical U is something that is on our development agenda, and we will be coming too soon. Unfortunately, it’s not top priority list for a lot of musicians, which is why it’s not top priority list for our development, but once we’ve got some of the new Solfa modules in place, and we’ve got the new songwriting and improvisation modules in place, audiation will certainly be getting to the top of that list because as hopefully I’ve made clear in this quite long answer to a short question, it’s a powerful skill.

It’s one that touches on all kinds of other things and it’s one that rewards you in all kinds of ways. So, I think Q&A call today has ended up being a little bit of a master class on audiation. I apologize if that wasn’t what you were expecting, but hopefully it’s been useful to you. I know it is a skill that could be useful to you, whatever instrument you play, whatever you’re working on at the moment. So, I don’t regret having spent the time on such an important topic.

The post Q&A: What can you do if you struggle to audiate (imagine music)? appeared first on Musical U.

Believe it or not, that may not be a bad thing! Find out why in this clip from the archive of live member Q&A calls at Musical U – stay tuned!

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• • Musicality Now – What Is Ear Training? (and why does it normally fail?)
  • Musicality Now – Boosting Musical Brainpower, with Josh Turknett (Brainjo)
  • Musicality Now – Intervals Versus Solfa: Which Is Best?
  • The Ultimate Guide to Interval Ear Training
  • Musicality Now – About the Ear Training Trap

Transcript

So we had one of the big question come up that I wanted to talk more about because I think it’s relevant to everyone, and we just covered it briefly on the site so far. Carol , in her progress journal, she’s been working on solfa and on intervals. She had a very interesting question that I think is probably going to be familiar to everyone listening on the call at the moment. She was asking about intuition and guessing. Essentially, her question was, is it okay to guess the answer when you’re working on these musical exercises? Often, skills like playing by ear or improvisation, they can seem like guessing the notes. You just know which notes to play. It seems like some people just magically guess right, and other people, maybe yourself included, certainly me when I started, tend to guess wrong. Guessing just doesn’t seem like a good way to do it.

When you start doing ear training, when you start doing the exercises we have at Musical U, you’re learning a very different approach. It’s not like guessing at all. It’s very methodical. It’s very logical. You’re learning about intervals and chord types and chord progressions in a very structured way. So you start using this methodical approach, and when you need to figure out the notes or you need to play something by ear, you use this methodology to, in a very thought through way, figure out what the right notes are. The thing is, there’s a gray area here, and this is what Carol was finding. Sometimes when you’re doing exercises or you’re starting to actually apply these skills in music, you feel the urge to guess.

You might be starting from a methodological approach where you’re using your interval recognition, for example, to carefully figure out what each note is. But then there are moments where you’re like, “Oh, I just know what that note is,” or, “Oh, I know what that chord is.” Carol was finding, she had the instinct to do that when she was … I think she was playing ear training games online, or she was doing exercises, and she felt guilty about this, I think. I know that’s something I’ve experienced when I was first learning, and perhaps you have too. You’ve been training in this step by step approach, this logical approach, and so you feel guilty if you try and guess the answer instead.

The thing is, this isn’t bad is the short answer. This is what I was explaining on Carol’s PJ. It’s natural, in fact. There is a gray area, and it’s not a gray area you should shy away from. So if you’ve taken the start playing by a module of Musical U, you’ll understand that learning these skills, these instinctive skills of music is a trial and error process or a trial and improvement process. It’s a lot like guesswork, but the trick is that you can do exercises. You can train yourself so that those guesses get better and better, faster and faster. So you’re not just blindly guessing the answer, you’re using the skills you’ve learned to make an educated guess about what the right notes are.

So if all you do is guess, if you imagine a musician who’s just starting out, they don’t do any exercises. They don’t do any training modules and nothing like that. They just always try and guess the notes, they’re going to end up very frustrated. Maybe you’ve experienced this. I know I did when I first started playing by ear, or trying to play my ear. If all you do is guess, it’s very frustrating. You don’t improve very quickly. To be honest, you feel a bit stupid because you’re always getting the answer wrong and it becomes very frustrating.

So you don’t want to do it that way, but at the same time, if you never allow yourself to act on instinct, if you completely block yourself off from that guessing approach, you can end up very trapped. In particular, this comes up a lot in jazz and blues improvisation. You find performers who have done the exercises and they’ve learned the theory, and when they come to solo, they solo in a very methodical way, a very logical way. It’s correct in the sense that the notes sound okay, but it’s not inspired. It doesn’t move the listener, and their solos all tend to sound the same. This can happen with playing by ear and improvisation and writing songs in particular too. If you’re working too methodologically, you get trapped and everything feels very rigid. Actually, it can end up being a bit frightening because it means you can never move beyond that framework.

So you know you’ll get the answers right if you do it in the logical way, but you’re restricted to that very strict comfort zone, and so you don’t want to go that way either. You don’t want complete guesswork, but you don’t want complete logic either. So this is the gray area I mentioned before, and this is where Carol was finding herself where what you want is to use the methodological approach. You want to think it through. You want to use the skills you’ve been practicing, but when you get that instinct, when you get that moment of just knowing what the answer is, don’t be afraid to go with it. At first, you probably will still get it wrong a bit of the time. But the thing to understand is that the reason we do these exercises and the reason you do the careful training and the reason we teach things in a very methodological, logical, structured way in Musical U, is that the more you practice in that way, the more you internalize those logical skills and those specific skills. That feeds into your instinct.

It builds your musical instinct, and it means that when you do come to guess, you get in a much more educated way. You don’t need to think that through, and you don’t even need to be conscious of it. You just naturally get better and better at guessing. The only way you’ll take advantage of that is if you allow yourself to. So don’t be afraid to guess occasionally, try and find the right balance between doing it in the careful practiced way and the more instinctive way, and don’t be afraid. You don’t need to feel guilty for guessing. You don’t need to feel bad if you get the guess wrong. As long as you’re doing that core training to give you the structured instinct, to give you the more methodological skills inside, you can be confident that your guesswork is going to get better and better, and you’re going to improve.

You don’t want to lock yourself off from that because really that’s what we’re all working towards. That’s what Musical U is all about. It’s not about training you to be a perfect robot who knows the skills and knows the theory and always gets every note right. It’s about using that training to give you the natural feeling for music, to give you the natural instinct and the ability to relax and guess once in a while and go where your creativity takes you, knowing that you’ve done the training so that your guesswork is going to be maybe 95% correct, maybe 99% correct. But you can combine that instinctive freedom with the core skills that let you get the answers right. So I hope that clears things up a bit for you, Carol, and for anyone who’s listening, who’s wondered about this. The bottom line is don’t be afraid to guess, but do put in the training to make sure that those guesses are getting better and better every day and every week.

The post Q&A: Sometimes I feel like I’m just guessing – is that wrong? appeared first on Musical U.

You’re about to hear Dylan’s unlikely journey to becoming a highly-successful session player, concert performer, and French horn teacher.

In this conversation Dylan shares:

• The importance of “getting out of your own way” when playing – and how to do that.
• His unexpected advice on how to sight read at the extremely high level required of session players.
• Why we must look for the root cause of problems rather than just treating symptoms – and how that applies to practicing off your instrument, sight-reading, and performing at your best under pressure.

In everything he does and teaches, Dylan has a focus on the inner instinct for music and a deep connection with your instrument. You’re going to love this inspiring conversation packed with thought-provoking ideas.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• Dylan Skye Hart Online
• Annie Bosler Online
• Norman Doidge – The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
• Daniel Coyle – The Talent Code
• Daniel Coyle – The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills
• Dr. Bob Rotella – Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect
• Sam Pilafian and Patrick Sheridan – The Breathing Gym
• Sam Pilafian and Patrick Sheridan – The Brass Gym: A Comprehensive Daily Workout for Brass Players
• Jaume Rosset Llobet – A tono: Ejercicios para mejorar el rendimiento del músico
• Alexander Technique
• California State University Long Beach
• Musicality Now – How The Best Play Their Best, with Annie Bosler
• Musicality Now – Your Peak Performance Toolkit, with Mark Morley-Fletcher (Play In The Zone)
• Musicality Now – The Keys to Performance Success, with Dr. Don Greene (Winning On Stage)

Transcript

Dylan: Hi, this is Dylan Hart, recording musician, amateur chef and father of one so far, and you’re listening to Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Dylan. Thank you for joining us today.

Dylan: It’s a pleasure to be here. I appreciate you inviting me on.

Christopher: You have a really fascinating career these days, but I know only the littlest bit of your backstory, so I’d love if we could begin right at the beginning of your musical story. How did you get started in music and when did French horn enter the picture?

Dylan: Okay. Well, my first memory is I was four years old, sitting in the backyard drinking a cup of tea and my mom was playing guitar, singing a song. My mom is a singer-songwriter. She’s a folk singer and music was … Acting was part of my long history and my mom went towards the musical side instead of the acting side. And so, my oldest brother was in love with movie soundtracks and my other brother was rock and roll, tried to get into some bands as a guitar player and he currently is … You can look him up, Gideon Prior. David Britton Prior is the oldest brother who’s now a director. Gideon Prior is recording music for himself and putting out EPs and whatnot. I was a singer my whole life. I sang in choirs and I actually went to St. Thomas Aquinas choir school in New York state for a year to be one of the boy countertenors at St. Thomas Aquinas Church.

Dylan: I ended up somehow in band. I don’t know how. The feeder schools in the school system that I was in, you signed up for your electives in sixth grade and then in seventh grade you had your electives. I signed up for Spanish and for soccer and I ended up in band. I told my band director, “I shouldn’t be here,” and she was like, “Oh, just pick an instrument and sit down.” I was like, “Oh, how about the trumpet?” and she said, “No. We have too many trumpet players,” and I was like, “How about the drums?” She was like, “Fine. Whatever.” So, I played the drums for a couple of days and then she kicked me off the drums and she gave me a saxophone, an alto saxophone and it was the most dilapidated alto saxophone. It was falling apart. I ended up having to put it all back together, re-glue the pads, take it apart and re-put it back together.

Dylan: I had some sort of musical proclivity and I worked my way up from last chair to first chair in a year and then I went to Idlewild Music Festival and was playing jazz and really got into the saxophone and was jamming with my brother. He would play guitar, I’d play the saxophone. And then she said, “You’re too poor to go to college. You can’t play saxophone. You can play oboe, bassoon or French horn, because you need a scholarship.” And I said, “How about bassoon?” She said, “You can’t afford the instrument.” I said, “How about the oboe?” and she said, “You can’t afford the lessons.” She says, “I play French horn. I’ll teach you French horn.” I said, “You didn’t even hear me play saxophone. I worked really hard.” She said, “Just get a horn and sit down,” and yeah, that was history.

Christopher: Okay, so not quite the fairy tale beginning, but you found your way to your instrument, as it turned out to be.

Dylan: Well, the interesting thing is I’ve always really, really loved classical music and I always knew that I wanted to play classical music in an orchestra. I used to … I bought a little smoking jacket and a pipe and I would sit in my room like Masterpiece Theatre and listen. My grandma would buy me CDs and I would listen to Beethoven 6 or some Chopin preludes or something like that.

Dylan: So, when she moved me to French horn, I thought in my brain, I was like, “Oh, well, I mean, I guess I have a better chance of playing in an orchestra with a French horn. I mean, I guess there’s maybe six or seven pieces for alto sax in the orchestra, which is fine, but I’ll give it a shot.” So, here we are.

Christopher: And how did those lessons go? Did you find that the music you’d been doing so far let you get off to a quick start with it?

Dylan: As a singer, I had a natural ability, because the French horn is so similar to voice and the normal range of the instrument is so high and the overtone series that all the partials are very close together. You have to have a good ear to hear what you’re doing. I mean, you have to have a good ear to play any instrument at a high level, but it helped in the beginning stages because a lot of people when they start on an instrument like that, it’s very difficult for them to hear the pitches and to pick them out because your fingers don’t necessarily mean what you think they mean. So, that helped a lot.

Dylan: We didn’t have a whole lot of lessons between me and her. To be honest, I really didn’t start studying privately until midway into my junior year when I was like, “Oh, I need a teacher because I need to get into college,” and so then I started taking lessons.

Christopher: Got you. And so did you get that vital scholarship to go to college? I presume you did.

Dylan: I did. I applied to … Let’s see. It wasn’t a great way to do it and none of my story should be followed by anybody. My life is a horrible, horrible series of advice that happened to end up in fantastic style and success and I’m very fortunate. But I applied to Eastman, Rice, and USC and I applied to ASU as a backup school. I flew out to Eastman and I took my audition and I was waitlisted. I flew out to Rice. I took my audition. I didn’t get in. ASU accepted me without me auditioning. And then I went to USC.

Dylan: And the interesting thing is that the first lesson I ever took was with Rick Todd, who was a studio musician, and he was like, “You’re not quite ready to study with me. You’re kind of a beginner. I’m going to give you the name of somebody who’s good with these types of people.” He gave me to his colleague in the LA Chamber Orchestra, Kristy Morrell. He was first in the LA chamber orchestra. Kristy was second. I started studying with Kristy and I was going to music camps over the summers every … That’s where I would get my instruction over the summers.

Dylan: The summer between my junior and senior year, I went to Boden Summer Music Festival, which is a chamber music camp six weeks, which was an unbelievable experience. I don’t think they have horns anymore. I was the … We were the only brass instrument. We had woodwind quintets and the horn was able to play with all the strings, but normally it’s just a string chamber music camp. So, I went there and I met Peter Kurau who taught at Eastman and I met Jim Thatcher and I met Charles Kavaloski.

Dylan: Finally, taking my audition at Eastman, Peter Kurau loved the improvement that I made so he waitlisted me. But when I finally audition at USC, Rick Todd, with the improvement from the first lesson I took from him to my audition, he saw that there was some prospect and so he went to bat for me and he really, really pushed for me to get into the school.

Dylan: I didn’t have the grades for it. I didn’t … I was … I think my GPA in high school at the time was like 2. something. It was pretty bad. But I had a 1300 on my SAT, which back then was pretty good. I mean, so I was able to work a deal where if I went to two semesters of a community college, and prove that I was okay, they would allow me to come to the school and I would be under academic probation. And so, yeah, so I ended up at Pasadena City College for a year. I went a summer and fall and then I started at USC in the spring. That was the only school I got into out of all the schools aside from my backup school, which I didn’t even audition for.

Christopher: Got you. I can spin a story in my head a couple of different ways for that journey and one of them is you came from a very musical family. You tried one or two instruments, you found your instrument and you just went on to success in college, even if it was a bit rocky to get in.

Christopher: Another is it was really down to your effort and your practice and your persistence that you got to that level and you got the chance to study in a full degree program. What was that psychological or mental journey for you? Were you’re going through it being like, “I’m destined for music. This is the career path I’m on. I’m going to find my way,” or was it less certain than that?

Dylan: I’m also a little odd in the sense that I’ve wanted to be a father since I was very young. And so around 15, I had taken a couple lessons at the Whiteman Airport in Los Angeles for learning how to fly a plane. My mom happened to know somebody who worked there and I went on some banner tows and I started learning how to fly. And I thought to myself when I was 15, I said, “Well, I can either become a commercial pilot …” I wanted to be in the Air Force and fly actual planes, but I’m six one and from what I understood at the time … I had did no research, but from what I understood at the time, you had to be shorter than six feet in order to get in like an F-14 or something like that, which I’m pretty sure is not true.

Dylan: But I thought to myself, “Well, I can be a commercial pilot or I can be a musician.” And I thought if I was a commercial pilot I was going to be away from my family for extended periods of time and I wouldn’t see my kids. And then, so I was like, “Oh, I’ll be a musician. I’ll be home a lot more,” and I was so wrong. But it was … That was the decision that led me to putting my effort towards being a musician.

Christopher: I see. That’s really interesting. And how did those college years go? Was it a matter of now you were there, everything was smooth sailing or was it still twists and turns and challenges?

Dylan: Woo.

Christopher: I don’t ask to put words in your mouth, but because genuinely, sometimes we have guests on the show where it is kind of a straight line. There’s one or two little swerves, but it’s basically like, “I set my intention and I went and I got it,” and others where it’s a lot more twists and turns and a lot more uncertain. So, I’m genuinely curious.

Dylan: Yeah, so I ended up dropping out between my sophomore and junior year. I took a year of mental health and I ended up quitting horn for over a year. I stopped in May of 2000 and I didn’t pick it up until the fall of 2001. Spring of 2000, the fall of 2001, I worked at grocery stores and I worked at restaurants and I took … My dad is a firefighter. He’s a captain for … He was a captain for Pasadena Fire Department and so I took a test to be a fireman and I got placed in the Forest Rangers at Angeles National Forest.

Dylan: My mom and my dad weren’t together when I was growing up, so my mom kind of single-parent raised me, but every once in a while I would talk to my dad. During this time I told him about that and he said he was an actor actually, as well and he was on that show, Greatest American Hero and he was the cholo boy. That was kind of funny. I’m actually half Mexican. That’s my Mexican side. But, so he was, he told me, “You’re too young to give up on your dreams. Go finish your undergrad.” And I said, “Okay.”

Dylan: And during that whole time I was off, I was doing lots of drugs. Again, you shouldn’t follow anything that I’m saying or doing or did. But I was hanging out with very unsavory people and I got arrested a couple times. I was homeless at a certain time and living in a car. I just kept asking and asking, asking, “What am I supposed to be doing? Should I be playing horn? What am I supposed to be doing?” I remember driving one day down the 2 freeway from Glendale to downtown LA. I just got a very clear answer in my head, “Play the horn.” I said, “Okay.” And so I went back to school … Oh, I guess this was actually 2001 to 2002, because I went back to school in 2003, yeah, end of 2002, 2003. The Olympics were on. So, 2002 Olympics? 2004 Olympics?

Christopher: Sounds about right.

Dylan: 2004 Olympics. Anyway, it’s not really important. What’s important is the Olympics were on and Michael Phelps was winning all of those gold medals for swimming. I remember seeing the Olympics and just being like, “Wow”. All of these people talk about the sacrifice and the hard work that they put in to be there and how grateful they were. I thought to myself, “I don’t think I’ve ever sacrificed anything in my whole life. I don’t think …”

Dylan: When I was in high school, I used to keep a practice journal and I would write down the minutes per day that I would practice. Sometimes, I would skip out on watching TV with my family and go practice because I had a lesson the next day and I was going to get kicked out of my lesson if I didn’t. And they never understood, but that’s okay. But I never really put in a lot of time.

Dylan: And so after seeing that, I was like, “Okay, well, I feel like the most common story in history is unrealized talent, somebody who’s talented, who just didn’t make it because they didn’t work. I knew I had seen over and over a lot of people who I didn’t necessarily think had a lot of innate ability work really hard and become very successful. And I thought, “Well, the people who, the Yo-Yo Mas and the Winton Marcellus’s and the great people of the world had talent and work effort, so if I want to be any kind of successful, whether I have ability or not, I need to work really hard.” And so, I just took the Olympics as my inspiration and started practicing really hard my junior year and just went from there.

Christopher: And what did that look like, if you could give what practicing was before that attitude change and what practicing was afterwards?

Dylan: Practicing before that was just I had a little bit of a routine, a little bit of fundamentals, a little bit of etudes, a little … Nothing really. I mean, I still am woefully under prepared in solo repertoire. I have not played many of the major pieces that are out there and I have not gone through many of the etude books and I’m … I just didn’t do that because I just didn’t have a lot of time to do it or I didn’t spend a lot of time to do it. And then afterwards I was so focused on practicing. I actually failed a couple of classes because I practiced through a midterm or I would skip classes to play because I was like, “Ah, I don’t need to go to that class. I’m fine. I’m just going to practice.” Yeah.

Dylan: But the other thing is that I was really, really fortunate in that when I started at USC, Vince DeRosa, he taught five time slots per week and he only had two recurring students and so the rest of the time slots were up every single week. Somebody would put it up on the office door and we could go sign up. And so I signed up for a couple of lessons and then I was like, “Oh, wow. This is unbelievable. I need to study with this guy.” So, I switched to him. He welcomed me with open arms and really took me on as his last project at USC and told me that he was going to retire when I graduated and he did.

Dylan: Yeah, and then the following year after he was gone, I skipped music theory every Wednesday and went up to his house and took lessons still. He would make me a sandwich and then he’d kick my butt and tell me I sounded terrible. And then his parrot would laugh at me every time I missed a note. That was … But, he really cared about me and when I would play, he never let me be less than amazing. I would say, “Well, you know …” He’s like, “I don’t want it to sound good. I want it to sound great.” He said, “There’s plenty of people out there who sound good.” He’s like, “You can sound phenomenal. You have to keep going.”

Christopher: That’s quite striking that expectation and I’m sure that really brought out your own ambition or your own standards. It leveled up your standards, I’m sure. But thinking back to those first couple of lessons, can you think what it was that was so striking that made you think, “I must study with this guy”?

Dylan: He was all about production. Vince DeRosa was all about how to play the instrument. And again, another … He wasn’t really about a lot of rep, which is fine. It was very self-study with him, although he did tell me, gather all of the… He’s had several musicians go out and win jobs and things like that over his career. And he told me to gather all of the audition lists and start going through audition lists and bringing them to him. But there would be lessons where I would spend an hour on one or two notes and he was just, “No, no, no, no,” and he would just yell at me and tell me how to produce a proper sound and how to really play the instrument. And my goal was just to get him to say yes. And he didn’t give a lot of really detailed instruction. He wasn’t like, “This is what happens in your body and this is how you do this or this.”

Dylan: He was just like, “Get into the sound and lift,” and, “This is all it takes to make a sound.” Very simple instructions but very, very specific and very detailed in how he doesn’t allow you to not be correct. And so I just tried to figure out how to have them say yes and I had learned all sorts of stuff around my body to try and, “Okay, what if I do this?” “No.” “Okay, let me try this.” “No.” “Okay, let me try this.” “Yes.” And I’m like, “Oh, I could not hear a difference at all, but I’m going to believe him. And so I’m going to follow this. The more he says yes, the more I’m doing it right.”

Dylan: And it’s because my ears weren’t developed enough to really hear the nuance between the sound difference. And I think that’s really an interesting fact is that I can hear stuff in my students now where I’m like, “That’s not right. That’s right.” And they’re like, “I can’t tell the difference.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay, good,” because I couldn’t tell the difference when Vince was telling me. Not to say that my ears are anywhere near the level of his, but there’s, I always talk about how there’s kind of this dual improvement that occurs with your physicality and your ear.

Dylan: And sometimes you make a huge jump in your physical improvement and you’re like, “Oh my goodness, I’m amazing. I’ve never been better.” And then your ear catches up and you’re like, “Oh, I completely lost it.” But you haven’t lost that. You’re just more onerous of your own mistakes and detailed and able to see the finer problems. And then your ear jumps and you’re like, “Oh man, I’m terrible. I’m worse than I used to be,” and then your physical catches up with your ear and it’s just kind of this cat and mouse between your physical ability and your ability to hear the details of your sound.

Christopher: That’s a really interesting way of looking at it. And I’m sure it’s all the more applicable with French horn, where, as you say, you are so much responsible for the tone production and the pitching. When you work with your students, apart from explaining that phenomenon, do you do particular ear training exercises or anything to help them keep those two progressing and lockstep?

Dylan: We do a lot of trying to learn how to get out of the way. I mean, that’s been my whole goal as a musician and my goal as a teacher is to help somebody get out of the way of them playing. We all have this kind of innate programmed ability to play instruments. I mean, our bodies are programmed to do anything. If you look at sports or if you look at whatever, and allow your body to play and allow your body to do all these things, then you’re much better off than if you’re trying to make your body do all of these things. And I sometimes I liken it to learning how to throw a ball.

Dylan: So if you’re learning how to throw a ball, you throw the ball and then it doesn’t go where you want it to go. So you throw it again, and then it doesn’t go, and you throw it again, and you just keep doing it and you allow your body an opportunity to coordinate itself. Every time you throw the ball and it doesn’t go where you want it to go, you don’t be like… Sorry, terrible English. But you don’t change your shoulder rotation or the way that your tricep is flexed or your ulnar nerve or the way that your wrist turns or your fingers or anything like that. You just throw it again.

Dylan: And when we play music, because we have some sort of control over what we’re doing, whether it’s your lips or your hands or your air or whatever, we tend to make a mistake and then try and fix the mistake right then and there. And so we do something different. We’re like, “Okay, well that didn’t work, so I got to do something different this time to make sure that doesn’t happen again.” And we don’t just allow ourselves to just make the mistake and then try again, and make the mistake and then try again, and make the mistake and allow the body an opportunity to achieve the intention that’s in your mind, right?

Dylan: If you have an intention and you let your body try and figure out how to achieve that intention, because that’s all your body wants to do. It wants to please your mind. It wants to make sure that it does what you can do. And so we just have to get out of the way and allow our body that opportunity to do it without trying to control it too much.

Christopher: I love that. And that’s a really reassuring way of looking at it, I think, rather than, how can I figure out how to make my body do this? To trust that your body or your mind in some sense, knows where it’s trying to get to and if you’re just patient with it and relax into it and get out of your own way, you’ll find your way to that solution. That’s really interesting.

Dylan: Yeah, I think there’s a certain amount of mapping that goes on in your brain. So there’s the Alexander technique and Feldenkrais and a couple of the different things, but one of the things that I really, really appreciated when I started studying with Pat Sheridan, a tuba soloist at UCLA, when I went in to get my master’s later in life, he taught me about body mapping. And body mapping is based on the idea that your body moves based on how your brain perceives your body to move, not based on how your body is actually supposed to move.

Dylan: So there was a study with cashiers who are getting carpal tunnel because they were pressing their number pads like this. And when they went, took the cashiers away who had all this carpal tunnel and they retrained them that their arm actually moves like this from this joint right here, and it’s not at this motion, it’s at this motion to get to the number pads, over 90% of them recovered and didn’t have to have any surgery and were fine and could go back to work.

Dylan: So there’s a lot that if you can just train your brain how your body’s supposed to move. How is my ankle supposed to move? How is my elbow and my shoulder and all of this? And you give yourself a good map, whether it’s subconscious or conscious, you give yourself a good map, then your body can more easily attain the things that your mind sets it out to do.

Christopher: Got you. And I can’t help but be reminded of an interview and a masterclass we did with a chap called Mark Morley-Fletcher who talked about what I think is a slightly similar thing in a different context, which is in the performance context. That tricky fine line between relying on your autopilot and being very conscious about controlling what you’re doing.

Christopher: And he was making the point that you need to find the balance such that you have a clear intention of what you’re trying to accomplish and put out musically, but you’re not so tuned out that you can’t allow in the input from the world and give your body a chance to respond to what’s going on and react in the moment. And I’d love to hear your own thoughts on how that same kind of getting out of your way applies in a performance situation outside of the kind of practice room where you’re trying to master the technique.

Dylan: Yeah. Well, it’s exactly the same thing because when you’ve given your body an opportunity to coordinate itself, you’re laying groundwork in your subconscious, right? We talk about how we only use 10% of our brain, right? But that’s, from what I understand, that’s really only a part of the conscious mind use the 10% of your brain. The rest of your brain is being used on a subconscious level to keep us breathing, all of our cells moving, our nervous system, everything is being run through our brain. So having intentions of what you want to do is the number one way to accomplish what you want to do.

Dylan: If you have clear intentions, if you know exactly what you want to sound like, if you know exactly what you want it to be, if you know exactly how you want the articulation to go or the phrase or the musicality or anything like that, you can then allow your subconscious to move your body the way that you’ve trained your body to move. And so I’ve thought that the key to unlimited mastery is a very coordinated body and a very well trained mind. So if you can keep your mind from trying to control your body and keep your mind focused on intention of what you’re doing and you’re surrendering to allowing your body to do this and to perform the way that you need to perform, then that’s really how you achieve the greatest performances.

Dylan: One of the things went that when I was working on performance psychology that kind of led me to that after studying at UCLA and working on learning how to coordinate the mind and things like that. I read a book called The Brain that Changes Itself by Dr. Norman Doidge and it was about neuroplasticity. It was really, really fascinating. It really shows how the brain is a use it or lose it kind of mechanism. It’s plastic. We used to think that after nine years old it when atrophy occurred and you would lose all the extra connections, then it started to harden and then after 25 it was hard and set, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks or something like that. But what they found is that your brain, it reduces plasticity, but it stays plastic, so it stays able to change and adjust all the way up until you pass.

Dylan: So one of the things that I learned is that your brain doesn’t think in terms of negatives. And I learned this from studying at UCLA with Pat and also from this book where if I tell you don’t think about pretzels, you’re thinking about pretzels because there’s no such thing as don’t in your brain. There’s only electrical impulses that are either on or off. So that’s why they say you can’t undo a bad habit, you can only replace it with a new one. So if you have a section of your brain has this bad habit, every time you say don’t, it sends an electrical impulse to the section and the section grows. So you just have to not use that section, and then this section will grow and take over this section and this section will shrink and go away.

Dylan: So that plasticity kind of led me to some other books that I read. One of them was called The Talent Code by, man, I always want to say Doyle, but I know that’s Arthur Conan Doyle from Sherlock Holmes. But anyway, Daniel something. And it’s another phenomenal book about how talent is actually created and these little hotbeds of talent throughout the world and why are so many amazing soccer players coming out of Brazil and why are so many amazing women golfers coming out of South Korea and why are there so many amazing gymnast coming out of this one gym in Texas like why are there so many talented people there. And it talks about the different aspects of what creates a talent and how to do that. And then he also talked a lot about different master teachers and what they would say and how they would get their students to do what they needed.

Dylan: And he put out this little pamphlet called The Little Book of Talent, which is a really small book that has just the master teachers saying how to learn faster, how to learn better, how to improve and how to be better at what you’re doing. And that was really, really helpful. And then that kind of primed me to study with… And then I read a book called Golf is Not a Game of Perfect, which is another great book. And the guy who wrote that also wrote Golf is a Game of Confidence. And that really is about how just because you make a mistake doesn’t mean that you failed. Because it’s not about being perfect, it’s about accomplishing your goal overall. And it’s about how to not allow the imperfections to have your brain say, “Ah, I’m failing at this. I messed up,” and create more imperfections.

Dylan: So one imperfection doesn’t mean to create 20 imperfections just because you’re thinking about that one imperfection. You just have to accept that if I’m a 80% freethrow shooter, I’m going to miss 20% of the shots but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take the next shot. Because if I miss three shots in a row, my chances of making the next shot are really high because I’m an 80% shooter, and there’s some like magical thinking in that. And then I started studying with Dr. Greene and he sent me through a litany of books about the performance psychology and the brain and how thinking really affects you in a physical manner and how to change the way that you approach something and change the way you think about something so that you can have the best performance possible. Because as I’ve said, unlimited mastery comes from a very coordinated body and a well-trained mind. And part of your well-trained mind is learning how to think or how to not think. And these books have been incredibly helpful and really, really changed my life.

Christopher: And so did you graduate and go straight into a successful career as an LA studio session musician or what was the next stage of your own journey?

Dylan: I won a job at a summer festival called the Pageant of The Masters and started working there over the summers. And I was working at a instrument selling shop and so I sold instruments and lots of trombones, lots of trombone mouthpieces and lead pipes. And I was very good at… I’m a very good salesman. And then I started their French horn department, because it was called Ferguson Music, which is now called Horn Guys. And they have a whole branding now. But I was gigging, I had a job at a Korean church in Orange County that I would drive to every Sunday. I had a couple of students here and there. I had some gigs I would do.

Dylan: My first movie I did was in 2007. I did Horton Hears a Who!. I had actually drove up to Fresno from Los Angeles to take the audition. The first and second horn were open. And I advanced from the prelims, but the second round didn’t start until like 2:00 PM, or yeah, afternoon, and then my downbeat in on the Westside in Santa Monica was at 7:00 PM, 7:30 PM for Horton Hears a Who!, and I was my very first session. And there was a horrible snow storm and the 5 was closed and so I had to go around on the 14 which was going to take me six hours. So after I advanced, I just left and I just went to my session.

Dylan: And I mean after that it was really few and far between. I didn’t even start my master’s until 2013? Or no, 2011. So I took time between my undergrad. So I did my undergrad and then I did a graduate certificate and then I took about four years, three, four years, and then I started my master’s. And in that three or four years, I was doing some gigs and some work, but I was teaching at a college and they told me they wanted me to teach like a music appreciation and a music kind of theory class. And I said, “Yeah, great.” And they’re like, “Great, we just need to see a copy of your master’s.” And I said, “Oh, okay, I’ll be right there.” And so I went and got my master’s and by the time I finished my master’s, I had learned so much that my career had taken off and I didn’t even teach at the college by the end of it.

Christopher: Unpack that a little bit. What had you learned that had such an impact on your career?

Dylan: Well, so like I said, I was studying with Pat Sheridan, and I also studied with Chris Cooper who’s a great horn player in the Bay Area. But I played with Pat Sheridan a lot. He was doing our band program and I took some private lessons with him and I spent a lot of time with him. And he did this book called The Brass Gym and The Breathing Gym with Sam Pilafian, or the late Sam Pilafian who recently passed away. And his ideas on focus and how the body works and how to get out of our way. I mean, he was a phenom. I mean, Pat Sheridan is still, and so is Sam Pilafian.

Dylan: But Pat Sheridan absolutely made me… He played Flight Of The Bumblebee on the tuba. He inspired me to play Flight Of The Bumblebee on the horn, which I have a YouTube video out of Flight Of The Bumblebee. And it’s just his ideas of using your air to make the sound and things like that, which is what Vince taught me and what Jim Thatcher taught me and what all my teachers taught me. But the control of breath and the control of air that Pat brought to me, and that’s where I had my… He was all about coordinating the body and practicing off of the instruments.

Dylan: You don’t necessarily need to play on your instrument all the time. You can do your finger patterns and you can do everything like that off of the instrument. And he was also huge, huge, huge on ear. You know, “If you can hear it, you can play it,” kind of thing, which is a very Arnold Jacobs thing, who I absolutely love Arnold Jacobs, who was the principal to Chicago Symphony for 40, 50 years with Bud Herseth, who was the principal trumpet, for those of you who don’t know.

Dylan: But it was… We were playing some brass bands, like British brass band stuff and it’s really, really difficult. And the finger technique was so hard and I was really struggling with a couple of sections. And then I realized that I wasn’t hearing it properly and so I went to the piano and I plunked it out and I figured out what it was and I sung it and then I went to play it again and I had no finger problems. I thought it was a finger issue, and I realized it was an ear issue.

Dylan: And then from there I realized that there’s lots of times when we’re sight-reading through something or playing something and a passage comes up with a lot of 16th notes or something very fast and our eyes go blurry over those notes. And I correlated that to, “Oh, that’s actually my ears not hearing it, so I actually can’t see it.” So when you can actually hear it very clearly, I don’t get blurry vision over these fast notes, and that was a kind of big aha moment of how to play anything.

Christopher: Fascinating, yeah. I think that rough idea has come up a few times on the show before often relating to slow practice. You know, you’re trying to get something up to speed and seemingly paradoxically the way to do it is to slow everything right down and really give your brain a chance to kind of pick apart each and every note, and then suddenly all of the problems disappear and you can play it at speed. You mentioned something in passing there that I’d love to circle back to for those who’ve never really come across the idea before, which is practicing off your instrument. You mentioned doing finger patterns, but I wonder if you could talk a bit more about how you can productively improve on your instrument while you’re not physically using it.

Dylan: Yeah. So I stumbled upon this when I was studying with Vince, and this was right before I took my time off. So things were going really downhill in my life, and I was practicing maybe 45 minutes total a week. But Vince told me, “Put your hand out and blow against your hand or blow through this hole.” And so I would do this constantly trying to feel the air properly on my hand in front of me trying to focus airstream while I was driving everything, and I was improving like crazy. And people are like, “Oh my gosh, you’re improving. How much are you practicing?” And I was like, “You don’t want to know. I can’t tell you.”

Dylan: And I really think that there’s a certain amount of… I mean, man, this can go on a lot of different ways. But to really improve off your instrument, you just figure out what technical things you struggle with on your instrument and you do it somewhere else. You can do it in the car. Or you can, if you’re struggling with articulation, you do it in a car, you set a metronome and just get your tongue coordinated faster and faster and faster. And then if you’re struggling with finger patterns, do your finger patterns off your instrument and really hearing things and singing things, if you can sing, but not sing sloppy.

Dylan: I know not everybody can sing with this beautiful Pavarotti voice, but if you can at least be really, really, really specific in your pitch. Don’t let yourself be sharp or flat. Be very, very pitch specific in your singing and it’ll translate into your instrument. And I think that’s one of the things that has helped me improve more than anything, is that kind of practice off my instrument. Holding myself to the same standard or a higher standard than I would on my instrument. And when I go back to my instrument, I have that same high standard.

Christopher: Awesome. And you mentioned that first film music session for Horton Hears a Who!, and these days, film music is a particularly big part of your performing repertoire in your career. How did that grow? How did it expand? And was it natural that as you became a better player during your master’s that career just kind of sprang into fruition? Or were there particular things you needed to figure out and work on or?

Dylan: I mean constantly. But you know, I was initially brought in by my teacher at the time, Jim Thatcher. He’s the one who called me up and said, “What are you doing Thursday night?” And knew I was going to be up in Fresno taking the audition. I was like, “Oh nothing. Now what do you need?” He said, “Show up to Fox at 7:30.” And I just said, “Okay.” Or at 7:00 or whatever. And so that was my first session. And the way that it works here is actually through word of mouth and recommendations. And so I would just try and show up and not ruin everything. Sometimes what’s the phrase we use is, “An error of omission is always better than an error of commission. And sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.” And I learned that a lot when I was really coming up is because if you miss something a couple of times you just leave it out the next time.

Dylan: If everybody else has hitting it then you’re fine. Now I can’t do that because I’m sitting in the hot seat and I have to make sure that to set an example. But it was very helpful to not lose my jobs early on by ruining takes. Help when I can and get out of the way when I can’t. But it was a long time I didn’t get my first real principal gig until 2014 when I was recommended by somebody they had not been happy with their previous people and somebody recommended to try me. And so I was called for SpongeBob with John Debney and I had the audacity… I was say 2014 still in my 20s I think. I can’t even remember what year it is anymore. No, I must’ve been like 29 or 30. It was at the end of my master’s.

Dylan: And I was like, “Well, if you want me to do it then you need to let me pick my horn section.” And I said, “Well that’s kind of a jerk thing to say, but all right, fine.” And so we went in with a phenomenal section and everybody was … It was just a really amazing time. And I don’t do that. I’m not like, “Oh you have to let me pick the section.” That was just that one time because I knew this was going to be my shot. I needed to be able to have everybody on board.

Dylan: And so everybody kept being like, “Oh my God, you sound so amazing.” I’m like, “No, no, no, no I sound okay. But everybody sounds amazing. This is a group effort.” And I really feel like that’s what we have right now because things are going and everybody sounds phenomenal. If you listen to some of the soundtracks that are coming out that we’ve done recently, Star Wars or Call of the Wild, or Jumanji or Ready Player One, or I need the big stuff that’s come out. You hear a phenomenal horn section, it’s not just one person, it’s everybody.

Christopher: And that must have taken a bit of gumption to say, “This is my shot but I’m going to put a big requirement on it. My right is I get to pick all the other players.” That’s quite a big deal. Was that coming from a general bravado that you naturally have? Do you generally, are you a confident performer? Or are you someone who was always happy going out in front regardless of anxiety and that kind of thing? Or was this a rare exception where you’re like, “I’m just going to go for it?”

Dylan: Well, so I come from a background of actors and when I was younger and singing, I spent a lot of time in musical theater. I was a singer, dancer, actor, triple threat. But no, I didn’t like acting as much. I did like a PSA and some other acting auditions, whatnot. And I felt so kind of naked. And one of the reasons why I chose music is because I really appreciated the fact that there was an instrument in between me and the audience and I felt protected. But I’ve always been a ham, so I don’t mind overdoing everything, which has helped me be an okay soloist. And I think at the time I just knew … I don’t carry myself with a lot of bravado. I just carry myself with a lot of innocent stupidity. I don’t know.

Dylan: I was born and raised in California and I just have a very relaxed sense of authority where I’ve never called anybody Mr or Mrs. I’ve always called people by their first name. When I was younger, which is not very polite, but it’s just how I’ve always been. So I just would get really comfortable in situations really quickly that I probably shouldn’t be comfortable in. And so I was just like, “Yeah, this is how it’s got to be. I know you had problem as you said, you want to do this right? Let’s do this right.” But yeah, I’m not, I hate conflict. I avoid it at all costs. I’m not a beat my chest kind of guy. I’m very demure when it comes to that kind of thing.

Christopher: And you mentioned gigging along the way, I’d be curious to know in terms of bravado and competence, is that sitting in the principal horn, that seat for a recording session, is that analogous to being front and center on stage in a classical music concert? Do you need the same kind of present moment awareness that we were talking before or the same kind of in a mastery to overcome nerves or have that kind of control of your playing in the best possible sense?

Dylan: Absolutely. But it’s a different skillset because in a performance you know exactly what you’re going to play. You’ve practiced it 1,000 times. You know exactly how it’s going to go. You know exactly where the notes are, you know exactly where your rests are, you know exactly where your high points are and where your low points are. And where you can manage your energy. And that’s not to say that there’s not a lot of improvisation and spontaneity that occurs in and something like that. But in the studio world you don’t know what you’re going to play, more it’s becoming a little bit more common for really big movies to send out parts ahead of time so you can take a look at it. But I mean the most you look at it as you open a piece, you scan through it, you’re like, “Okay, that’s fine.” You scan through it. Okay, that’s fine. Okay, that’s fine. And then that’s it.

Dylan: If there’s something really, really, really difficult, you may take a look at it, play it a couple times and be like, “Okay, we’ll get there.” But you don’t know what you’re going to play. You don’t know how long you’re going to play, you don’t know what order they’re going to go in if you’re going to hit hard piece after hard piece after hard piece, and then play some light delicate solos. And then be tacit for three hours while they work on the strings. It’s a different type of concentration because your concentration has to be so singular, but it’s for smaller spurts of time.

Dylan: So it has to be a pure concentration and you have to give everything you have. You can’t pace yourself because there’s no part of the movie that you’re going to listen to this you’re going to say, “Oh, okay, he’s pacing himself for this.” It’s, you have to give everything you have at all times. If it says fortissimo, then you’re giving fortissimo right at 10:00 AM all the way until 5:00 PM if that’s what it says. And you hurt, and it hurt. It’s you go home and you ice your face and you drink lots of water and you put vitamin E on and you try and go to sleep early so that you can wake up tomorrow and do the same thing. And then the next day you show up and it’s all fortissimo. And then for the last hour, they’re like, “All right, we’re going to let everybody else go and we’re going to have horn solos. Or everybody just stay in your seat, we’re got to do the couple horn solos.” And you are just like, “Oh my goodness.” But there’s a lot of downtime, right?

Dylan: So we’ll record and then we’ll stop recording and they’ll be talking to, they want to change some articulations in the strings and want to change bowings and want to change some notes and fix some stuff when they talk and blah blah blah. And then you go again and you’re completely singularly focused for a couple of minutes, 30 seconds to three, four or five minutes and then you’re off. So it’s a real on and off thing and it’s its own skill. But it does require the same type of, in the moment presence.

Dylan: And I think that if we want to get into some kind of performance psychology and how to combat nerves, one of my biggest tips and piece of advice for being less nervous is two things. Number one, is playing from your heart. Which I know is a strange thing, but I remember learning this when I was playing and I was trying to come in on a soft entrance and I was shaking in my head and I couldn’t understand why. I was like, “I know how to make sound and I know this and that.” But it was coming from a place of fear.

Dylan: So if I came from a place of love where I can actually feel it in my heart and this applied to a tied whole note where I was just playing one note for eight beats. But if I gave everything I could emotionally and musically, then everything came out better and everything came out easier. And I know that seems kind of cheesy, but we’re musicians, It’s part of who we are. And the other part of the best piece of advice really is that trying to take yourself out of the player standpoint. So when I played, one of my first big principle sessions for John Williams was for this movie called The Post with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks about the Washington Post and I think the Watergate scandal. And it was usually you have one hour of solos or some other stuff and you rest. This was five out of the six hours that we played were massive solos or playing really delicate with the strings or with the woodwinds.

Dylan: And I was just broken mentally. I was like, “I can’t do this in the normal way. So I have to figure out another way to do it.” And what I figured out is that if I really listens to everything else that was going on and I heard the orchestra and I listened to the winds, I listened to everything and I didn’t take myself as, this is my entrance, I have to play this note. I have to play this thing. I took it as, okay, there’s this piece of music and I’m adding my sound to this piece of music. So basically it’s not about me, it’s about everything. It’s about the whole, it’s about the overall piece of music that nobody’s listening to the French horn player, they’re just listening to the sound that’s being added to the other sounds. And so I took myself as part of the sound and I took the personal out of it and allowed me to step away from the control aspect of it and really get into the hearing and the musical aspect of it.

Christopher: Wow. Those are really deep and fascinating tips. A lot more than I might’ve expected on how do you overcome nerves on both of those. Thank you.

Dylan: Yeah. Absolutely.

Christopher: I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about the other part of what we just said, session work requires, which is seemingly incredible sight reading skills. And I’d love to hear how you prepare your students for sight reading maybe or if there are any tips or practice approaches you pass on to them that helped you get to the level you are where you can as you say, you just skim through and be like, “Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah, that’s fine.”

Dylan: I mean singing, take voice lessons, learn how to use your voice and learn how to sight read. And I sang in choirs all through high school. So I would sightsing what I was… I could read music as a vocalist. And doing that, being able to read music and sing it when you see it is the greatest thing you could possibly do towards learning how to sight read on your instrument. Because sight reading on your instrument is nothing different, right? It’s actually easier because, and there’s another subject we can get into about my philosophy on playing is that your instrument has been designed to play all of these notes. And all you have to do is you just have to excite the instrument in the proper way so that that note comes out. You’re not actually making the sound, the instrument is making the sound, right?

Dylan: If you play a string instrument, you’re strumming your bow across the string and sorry, for better technique, you’re running your bow across the string and vibrating and swinging the wood and the sound is coming out of the instrument. You’re playing a wind instrument, you’re putting air through the instrument, which is creating some vibration, which is exciting a standing wave, which is the instrument is then making a sound. So by doing that, then you take yourself out of it again. And so if you can just focus on being able to hear what you’re about to play and singing what you’re about to play, then your instrument just does whatever your mind intends it to do.

Christopher: Got you. Again, not the answer people might have been expecting they are really valuable. And I think for people to understand how you approached that and how you think about it. And it beautifully comes back to what you were talking about earlier in terms of getting out of your own way.

Dylan: Yeah. I know that a lot of people are looking for, oh, play this book of Etudes or play these exercises or sight read something every single day or something like that. But I mean there’s only so much music out there and there’s only so much stuff to sight read and yeah, that’s valuable and that’s something that you should probably do. But I’m really not here to teach you your repertoire on your instrument. And I’m sure you all have people who can give you that advice. And I find that, a lot of the problems that occur in music and teaching is that people address the symptoms and not the causes of problems. It’s like saying, “Oh, I have chickenpox.” And they’re like, “Okay, here’s this cream for chickenpox.” And it’s like, well, that’s just addressing the symptom of chickenpox. You need a pill to get rid of the cause.

Dylan: And so trying to get down to the root problem of what your problem is on your instrument is really interesting. And it’s something that a lot of people have a hard time with. Because one of the problems with on a horn is getting to a high note from a low note, right? And 90% of the time it’s not the high note that’s the problem. It’s the low note. It’s not the note that you miss, it’s the note before the note that you miss. Something else is causing a systemic problem that is creating decay somewhere else. If there’s a problem in a tree, it’s not the spot on the tree, it’s somewhere else, right? Some systemic issue. So if you can find the root cause of your problem, you’ll be better off than just treating the symptoms.

Christopher: So that may or may not lead naturally to my next question, which is something that you mentioned before we hit record, which is that you’ve been working on this fascinating translation/localization of a book or rather translation/localization of a fascinating book. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Dylan: Yes. So we came across this book some years ago when a colleague of ours got injured, had a chop injury. And he was from Spain and he brought this book back and there’s exercises for your face, which most people don’t get into. Music medicine and music psychology were 50, 60 years behind sports, right? How long has sports medicine, sports performance psychology, things like that been around. It’s been around forever. And in music we’re like, “Oh, we don’t want to talk about being hurt because that shows a sign of weakness.” Especially in the freelance world. Nobody wants to talk about being uncomfortable or being in pain or anything like that. Or nobody wants to talk about. And I’ve heard so many people say you don’t want to talk about stage fright or nerves or performance anxiety because that’s just going to give somebody performance anxiety.

Dylan: And I just think that’s such a ridiculous statement. That’s to say is if you don’t have performance anxiety, you’re not really excited about what you’re doing. Similarly, so you should be comfortable talking about it and you should figure out a way to go about it as opposed to trying to avoid it. And similarly, if you’re hurt or if you’re in pain or if you’re … Something like that, don’t avoid it because you think that you’re going to show up as weak. It’s actually stronger to say, “You know what, it really hurts. I’m having a problem with my arm, or a problem with my neck or a problem with here and there. Problem with my face and I want to fix it. I want to learn how to get better.” And so he brought this book back and he was working on his face and we looked at the book and Annie started making lectures for brass instrumentalist based on the stretches for the face in the book.

Dylan: And then we reached out to the author and talked about a translation for the book. And so we started on that because it’s something that our music community so sorely needs and is just not there. I mean, I don’t know another book, I know lots of books about, oh, the Chops, or Playing Less Hurt, or there’s some different books on that kind of thing. But this book is really interesting in the sense that it’s organized in postural playing. So there’s different sets of exercises for each posture, right? There’s small winds, there’s wind fronts, there’s brass, there’s boweds, large bowed string, there’s piano, there’s drums. Any way that you kind of hold your body to play an instrument, there’s a set of exercises to offset the stresses from the asymmetrical nature. Because when we play an instrument, we’re not perfectly symmetrical. Like okay, this is it. Everything in our body is the same. We’re usually like ugh something kind of messed up in our body. We’re not sitting in a way that seems comfortable. So doing the opposite or doing exercises to make sure that those muscles that you specifically use are healthy seems the obvious way to go and it’s just not out there. So we figured it needed to be out there for the another population. And I hope it gets translated in other languages. I’m not the person to do it, but there’ll be an English version very soon. It’s at the formatter. We’ve done all our final edits. We’re just putting the pictures in and how it sits in on the pages. And then it’ll go to print and it should be out hopefully by the end of a quarantine.

Christopher: Terrific, and the title?

Dylan: The title is In Tune. The title of the original Spanish book is A tono: Ejercicios para mejorar el rendimiento del músico, which roughly translates to In Tune Exercises for the Improvements of Performance of Musicians. And we have a better more finely translated title because the thing about translations is nothing goes directly translated. It’s the sentence structure and the way that you would say something, and this book is from Spain which is… Spain Spanish is different from Mexican Spanish, which is what I grew up learning how to speak. And so it was its own struggle. And so basically the big part about translation is the localization where you turn it into something that doesn’t seem awkward for a native speaker to read. And that’s really where the struggle was because this book is so technical where it shows you all the different muscles that you would use and it tries to show what the levator scapular and crestia ulnaris and all this ilia kind of biological or musculoskeletal tagging and trying to make that into an English literate thing was very challenging to do to not lose what the actual meaning is.

Dylan: And I find that that’s really one of the hardest things to do. I’m actually working on writing my own book on brass playing. And I believe that the first chapter of my book is going to be devoted on how difficult it is to and how it’s more important to write what you don’t mean than it is to write what you actually mean. Because it’s so easy, and in history, I’ve seen this a lot where people who’ve studied with great teachers are like, “Oh, well they said this.” And it’s yes, they said that to you because you needed to hear this and it specifically addressed this problem. This is not a universal like everybody needs to do this this way, but it kind of addressed this general issue. And so if I’m saying something, I’m like, “Okay, that doesn’t mean this, and that doesn’t mean this. And that doesn’t mean this. I’m trying to specifically say this and don’t take it like this and don’t take it like this.”

Dylan: Which it’s kind of a bummer to do but you also don’t want to end up generations down the road and they’re like, “Oh well Dylan said this and it was really screwing me up and now I’m injured.” I feel if I’m going to put something out there, I want to be responsible with how it goes.

Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah, I know that’s something we’ve certainly seen inside Musical U where if you’re sitting at home in a room, you can write what you think is very clear instructional material to explain intervals or the major scale or whatever it may be. And then you put it out into the wild where you’ve got a community of a thousand musicians and music learners and you very quickly realize what you didn’t say and what you should have said and how you could have phrased things differently. So I can only imagine the pressure of doing that in a print book where you need to really nail it first time or as you say, leave yourself open to confusion down the road. So In Tune is coming out very soon by the sounds of it. Is there a website or somewhere we can point people to? Is it coming out through traditional publishers or Amazon? How can people get their hands on it?

Dylan: It should be out through Amazon and I’m sure Annie and I will have it out on our own websites anniebosler.com and dylanskyehart.com. That’s D-Y-L-A-N-S-K-Y-E H-A-R-T. I’m sure you’ll have some sort of link. We’ll have it available for purchase, but I’m sure you’ll be able to find it on Amazon. We’ve been struggling with trying to figure out how to put an ebook version out where you can click on something and exercises come up, but that’s… We’ll see. That’s a whole another can of worms. We’re just trying to get the book out because it needs to get out as quickly as possible.

Christopher: Absolutely. Well, as you say, we’ll definitely have links to all that in the show notes and when the book is out we’ll be sure to notify our audience because as you say, it’s something that is not talked about enough and aren’t enough good resources on, so I think that’s going to be a fantastic addition to the literature. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today, Dylan.

Dylan: Well, thank you for having me. I really had a wonderful time and I hope everybody enjoyed themselves and learned something and if you have any other questions or if you are confused about something I said, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll do my best to answer everybody that that does.

Dylan: If you’re a French horn player out there and you’re interested in possibly studying with me, I teach at Cal State Long Beach and we have a pretty fantastic program growing there. Myself and Jenny Kim, who is the third horn player of the LA opera, and she is a phenomenal teacher as well, and we have a really great set of students. So if you’re interested in coming, look up Cal State Long Beach and we’d be great, we’d be happy to have you.

The post Getting Out Of Your Own Way, with Dylan Hart appeared first on Musical U.

Oli started learning piano and trombone in the last three years to play the music he loves to dance to. He’s eager to try new things and happy to risk failure. You’ll hear how his attitude has really payed off for his music learning and the richness of his musical life.

In this conversation Oli shares:

• Why it was easy for him to start joining jam sessions despite being only a beginner-to-intermediate player – and a few specific tips for how you can make it easy for yourself.
• How learning trombone was relatively simple after piano, and why he realised the importance of a good musical ear.
• How he discovered the power of community support as part of his online learning.

Enjoy this episode and be inspired to be more bold and risk new endeavours in your own musical journey.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• • Swingstep Online Courses
  • Mad Oli Facebook
  • Oliver Fuhrmann Facebook
  • Mad Oli Instagram
  • Musicality Now – Pathways: Nick Cheetham
  • Musicality Now – Pathways: Sharilynn Horhota
  • Musicality Now – The Truth About Talent, with Professor Anders Ericsson

Have you picked up useful ideas or techniques in your own musical journey so far that you think could inspire or help others on their path of exploring their musicality? Get in touch by dropping an email to hello@musicalitynow.com! We are always looking for new guests for Pathways and would love to share your story next.

Transcript

Oli: Hi, my name is Oli. I’m a swing dancer from Berlin, Germany. Also, now I’m a musician, music learner and this is Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Oli, thanks for joining us today.

Oli: I’m very delighted to be here.

Christopher: I’ve been looking forward to this one because you share so much inside Musical U, particularly on your progress journal Mad Oli’s PJ, Save the Rainforest, Play Music by Ear, is the title and you have such an interesting journey and you’re so open about sharing your learning along the way that I’ve been looking forward to the chance to unpack this and share some of it with our Musicality Now audience. Before diving into all the interesting stuff you’ve been up to recently, I wonder if we could backtrack and share a little bit about where you’ve come from as a dancer and as a musician. How did it all start for you?

Oli: So my journey began very early. I’m 34 years old now and I think already as a child I was always drawn to creative things. I liked writing, so in school the most interesting part for me was always when I could write a story myself and just get super crazy and creative. Then I went into skateboarding because that was the only sport that was creative enough for me and dangerous enough. And then I liked to play a little bit of theater in school, only very little. But then when I moved to Berlin, I explored improv theater at one point, which I found really cool. So that was more this spontaneous creativity I think really sparked me not to have to look into a sheet what to do, but just create it in the moment.

Oli: And one point I also tried out clown, not the dance, but the guy with the red nose or the lady with the red nose, so that was really fun because it’s very honest and it brings the comic from very deep inside. Some of my realest moments was when I was exploring my clown. Then at one point I wanted to start dancing and I wanted to start partner dancing because I thought solo dancing is fun, but dancing with a partner is much more connective. I like finding connections. And then I found swing dancing because I didn’t want to go through these standard dances. And that was 10 years ago and it stuck, I think swing dancing stuck. Really, it was the first thing that I started and didn’t stop until now. I became very engaged in swing dancing, did a lot of classes, learned a lot.

Oli: And then at one point I’d made it my professions, so now I’m actually since five years a swing dance teacher and performer, and this also brought me to swing music. I always liked music. Always when I found a style of music I really dug into it deep. First it was punk as a child, then it was reggae and dancehall and hip hop a lot. I was also a rapper as a little boy. What? 16 years, I was a rapper. Then I just found swing and jazz music, which I really started loving through the dance and I listened to a lot. I started becoming a DJ also for the music for the swing parties. I think three years ago I was like, “I really want to learn more about that music.” Also, I wanted to work on my back posture, so I was writing on Facebook, “Hey, I need a good way to work on my back.”

Oli: And then a guy who was a pianist, he answered me, “Learn the piano, it’s the best way to work on your back.” And I was like, “Oh, why not? Let’s learn the piano.” And that was day zero. And day one I had a piano in my room because I found a friend, she had a piano that she was not using, a digital one, and she said, “Yeah, come by, take it.” I took a car, brought it here and then I started learning my first song on a piano. That was three years ago, a little bit more. And since then I’m also a musician. And that’s the second thing that I started that I never stopped. That’s very, very shortly how I got into music and since then I’ve been just exploring it. It was really, really cool. I love music. It’s the best thing I think that ever happened in my life activity wise.

Christopher: Amazing. Well, that’s quite a statement given all of the creative endeavors you mentioned there from skateboarding to rapping to dancing and now music. So am I right in thinking you didn’t start playing music until you were in your thirties?

Oli: Well basically, yes. I was as a little child, I don’t know what age I was, I started playing the flute, recorder I think it’s called it English, blokfluit in Deutch, that little wooden one. And I still remember one C, I think it’s called, the first C, that’s all I remember. Our neighbor, he was a flute teacher so I learned a little bit, but it didn’t stick. Back then I thought it was, I don’t know. It just didn’t stick. Maybe I thought it was boring, it was not exciting enough for me.

Oli: Also, I had music in school. In high school we had music class two hours a week. I remember actually some stuff now. And I thought just that it was boring, and then I needed to learn the flute again there because everyone was forced to learn the flute. I was like, “No, I don’t want to. I tried it, I don’t like it.” So I was really rebelling all that music. I don’t know why, maybe because I had to do it. Now I feel like I am such an idiot. I should have stuck with it back then, but maybe not because it’s so much fun to learn it now from scratch that I think I’m happy that I am a late learner, late starter, late bloomer you call it. Because now I can can go through the whole process from scratch with an active mind, because I guess when you learn it as a child it’s a longer process and it’s more in the background and you don’t reflect so much about it. But I like to reflect.

Christopher: Very good. And so what did it look like? You said day zero you decided, day one you had a piano. How did you go about learning to play the piano?

Oli: Well, at first I thought “What do I actually want to learn?” Because there’s so much you can learn. And I there’s a lot of classical music, but I’m like, “No, actually why do I want to learn the piano? Of course not because I want to strengthen my back.” It was just a stupid excuse to get a piano. But I want to learn swing music, so I was thinking, “Okay, I need to learn to play swing songs.” So my first song that I picked was Sunny Side Of The Street, which is not the hardest swing song in the world, but also not the easiest. So instead of starting with some really simple song I started with Sunny Side Of The Street.

Oli: So I found a YouTube video. I looked a lot of YouTube videos, find an easy version, but then mostly the easy versions I didn’t like, they were too dull. But then I found one that was very easy, but it also had that swing ragtime feel. And it was actually, maybe I shouldn’t say that, but it was like just a preview for some online class, and I didn’t want to take the online class so I I just watched the preview over and over again. It was just a little snippet and I slowed it down and I just tried to copy that guy was doing. So it was just me copying what I see for basically the first half a year.

Oli: That was what I did most of the times; watching videos, trying to copy what people doing. Started getting a little bit an idea of the theory and everything behind it. And then I got my first piano lesson which I think was really good because the piano teacher, he gave me some more ideas on what to work on that are not just learning songs, but actually understanding what’s behind the songs. So since then most of my focus is to learn music and being musical and all the different chords and stuff.

Christopher: Gotcha. And I believe you had a number of teachers on the piano, is that right? You didn’t stick with that one, you tried a few different ones.

Oli: No, exactly. Actually, I got as a birthday present after playing piano for a month or two. Of course I told everyone, “Hey, I’m playing the piano now. Support me because else I’m not going to stick to it. I need people poking me to continue it.” That’s a good way actually to keep yourself motivated is to include other people. So then I got a voucher, I think I still have it somewhere but I’m not going to look for it now, that was for my first piano lesson. So that I got for my birthday. And of course I didn’t know any piano teachers so I got a recommendation from a friend. She said, “Yeah, this is a really good jazz pianist.”

Oli: And it’s like, “Oh, I’m just going to split. I’m going to take it.” And I took a few lessons with him, maybe five or six to give it a chance. And he’s a great piano player and also he’s a good teacher, so I’m not at all stopped with him because I didn’t believe in his capabilities, but I just realized that it’s not exactly what I want because I had it in my head already from the beginning this very concrete goal; I want to play swing music for dancers. So I want to play jazz but I want to play it in the style of the ’20s, the ’30s, the ’40s, and this pianist, he was very modern. So the first song we started with was Autumn Leaves, which I think most of the times people start with Autumn Leaves when they learn jazz because it’s such a great song to explore many assets of jazz.

Oli: I still don’t know it because I decided “No, I don’t want to learn Autumn leaves, it’s too modern.” So instead I looked for pianists that play in the bands that I like to hear from Berlin. So I found a pianist who was also a great teacher and he started with a song with me, that was Dinah, which is I think actually written in the ’20s or even in the 1910s, I can’t remember. So also very nice song and much more the style I want to go. So that was my first song and also now the first song that I’ve started learning in all the keys, because that’s what you should do. I’m very slow with that, but now I can play it in at least two or three keys somewhat. So I tried out a few teachers to see.

Oli: I also believe that teachers are great. They give you good ideas on what to work on, but most of the time it should be you working when I’m working, so I decided I’m only going to take a new lesson once I feel stuck. So right now I have a lot of stuff to do so I don’t take lessons, but the moment I feel stuck I will take a lesson. Or if I just want some new inspiration, I’ll take a lesson. I do have a plan to take more classic piano lessons at one point. I was actually wanting to start it already, but then came corona so now I’m like, “No, let’s wait a little bit.” Because I realize I know a lot of little things on a piano, but my technique probably is not the best, so while I’m still young I want to give my technique the chance to become proper. Yes.

Christopher: Gotcha. I think that’s such an interesting point about mastering one thing before going back for more. I remember Steve Lawson who I took bass lessons with for a while, definitely viewed it in those terms. For me coming in as a fairly experienced musician and music learner, he didn’t need to be there every week telling me to do my homework, and if I hadn’t had time to practice it wasn’t going to be that productive for us to sit there and him watch me practice, which I think is what happens a lot of the time in weekly music lessons. So it was much more, “Here’s some stuff, come back in a couple of months when you’ve really kind of figured this out and explored it and have questions about it.” And then each lesson becomes this really intense focused master class almost, and it’s up to you in between to follow through on all of that.

Christopher: And I think there’s value in both. If you’re not self-motivated or you are just at the very beginning of learning music, I think it can be really valuable to have that weekly reliable check-in so that you at least know you’re going to have that session and do some work in that session. But as you say, otherwise if you have a handle on your own practicing and your own learning, and particularly as an adult learner you have the where with all to go away, figure all that stuff out, get your fingers to do what they’re meant to do and then come back to the teacher so they can be most productive in that lesson with you.

Oli: Yes, I agree. It’s good sometimes to practice with the teacher because the teacher can tell you if you’re doing it right or not. And especially I often have a hard time focusing on little details, so I play an exercise but I play it half good and then if I at least in the beginning have the teacher tell me, “No, no, but you need to move your hands more like a wave,” or whatever, then it drills a little bit in my head and then I have an easier time to practice it. And this is also when I appreciate when the teacher tells like, “Yeah, even if you’re not coming to class, send me a video so I can feedback you.” So that’s what I like to do sometimes, I just film the progress and get just a short reminder of what I could be doing better that doesn’t need to be a one hour class.

Oli: I think everyone should basically find their own mix of what works for them. Of course, if they have a lot of money and they like having a teacher standing there telling them what to do, probably super effective, also it just costs a lot. But if I would have infinite money, I would pay the best piano teacher just to stand next to me playing all the time and telling me what to.

Christopher: So I think so far, Oli, your story probably sounds fairly normal for people. You had an interest in music that you picked up fairly late, you got an instrument, you took some lessons, you tried one teacher, you tried another, you made some progress. But I think where your story starts to get particularly interesting and different is the actually jamming and jam sessions became a part of your music learning fairly early on I would say, compared to most people who would stay in that kind of private bedroom phase for years before they felt able to go out there and play. Could you tell us a little bit about how you got involved in that?

Oli: Yes, that’s a good question. How did I get involved in that? I mean, from the beginning, but before I started playing music, I saw a lot of music happening. In swing dancing, I think compared to most of the other dance styles, there’s a big focus on live music and it gets even bigger all the time. So, you always see on the big parties and the big workshop events, there’s always several live bands and there’s some dance camps that attract the musicians and the dancers that also really like to jam.

Oli: There’s this one big camp in Sweden every year, it’s called Herräng, it’s five weeks in the summer, and they have a lot of live music on stage. But what also happens is they have three or four pianos around the camp. So in the nights at 4:00, 5:00 AM, people start jamming. It’s many dancers that are also musicians that just decide like, “Oh, we’re too tired to dance, let’s play a bit.” So they get together with music. So, already some years ago I really got excited too. “Oh my, this is so cool. I just want to do that too, dance a while and then join the jams.” Actually I think once or twice I sang there and I’m a bad singer, but back then I didn’t even know anything about music, but I was like just because I don’t care. I’m just like, “Yeah, let me sing.” It’s probably going to be not in key, or in the wrong key, or whatever, but people always loved it because it’s more comedy than singing. But I enjoyed it too.

Oli: So I really got drawn into this like, “When I start an instrument, this is what I want to do, I want to jam.” So when I started an instrument, I started immediately to seek out ways to jam. So in the beginning I was super bad, so I was like, “Hey, maybe I’ll find just one or two people that want to play with me because they’re kind.” So I got together with one or two friends that were already musician, and said, “Here play with me. Here, this is the only song I can play. I can play Sunny Side of the Street and Z, so play it with me.” So we played a little bit, so I started to learn that it’s much harder to play with someone else because you need to listen to them too.

Oli: Also, then I started to realize how important it is to practice with the metronome because then it’s almost like playing with someone else, except the metronome was always perfect, but no one is perfect. I started finding a few friends to play with. Then I think that was probably the second year of my music journey. The first birthday I got a private lesson. The second birthday I got a jam session. That was really cool. It was actually super fun because a friend of mine and also a dance colleague, she was like, “Yeah, I’m having a little gathering together in the dance school. Come by, we’re just going to hang out a little bit.” So like, “Okay, sure, I’m going to come by.” And I come by and there was a surprise party for me. And they have a piano, a real piano, which I was not expecting at all because it was my friend’s piano. She had it in Stuttgart. I knew that she has this piano and I told her, “Bring it to Berlin, bring it to Berlin, it’s just standing around there not being used.” And she’s like, “Yeah, maybe eventually.” And then secretly she brought it to Berlin and then it just stood there, the piano and then like, “Yeah.” And then there was, I think maybe it was not my first jam session, but one of the first jam sessions and it was organized just for me. So then I was like super excited and we celebrated my birthday and we also jammed to music.

Oli: Since then I think I’m just trying to go to all the jam sessions that I can find. And in Berlin it’s pretty great because there is a few jam sessions for this old jazz music, which I think is already pretty cool. I was also in modern jazz jam sessions, but it’s much more fun to play the old music. And I know most of the musicians that play here already since I’m a dancer, so they play for us all the time. And I started talking with them before and also since I’m working in a dance school, I organized artists. So, I booked some of them before. So I think that’s quite good for me because they know me and they are like, “Yeah, sure, play with us. Come little Oliver, play with us, we know you’re bad, but just play with us.” And I was like, “Yeah, I know I’m bad, but I’ll play with you.

Oli: so I think just helped me a lot because even though I can’t play, I started playing with other people and this took a lot of my fear to play with other people. And I found out that actually people are very kind to you. If they see that you’re trying and that you’re honestly trying, then they’re very happy to include you in their circles even though you’re a beginner musician. I can just recommend everyone find musicians, find friendly musicians, because I think you see if there’s like the super high level jam session where everyone is super like, “Oh, we’re going to flame everyone that is not good.” Then maybe it’s not the best jam session to start. But if you think the musicians look friendly, and they’re sympathetic, friendly, if they look friendly, just ask them if you can play your song with them and they’ll be happy to have you play with them. And even if you play one note only that works.

Oli: I listened to a lot of your podcasts and there was one, several episodes, that point out that rhythm is the most important thing. It’s much more important than playing the right notes. So if you just find one note or just always play the bass note of the court that is played and you just play rhythms. That’s enough, and people will love it more than if you play as a solo.

Oli: One musician who I played with a lot, he told me, “Oliver, it’s amazing. Your rhythm is always very good. I don’t know what you do, but your rhythm is always great. You got to work on your pitch because sometimes not a single note that you’re playing is inside the harmony. But you know what also the last note you’re playing is always right on the spot. So maybe you’re just this super advanced, modern jazzer that makes fun of all of us. Are you?” He didn’t say it exactly like that, but yeah, I don’t know, it was a funny quote.

Christopher: I think there’s a couple of really valuable lessons there for people. The first, or the second being what you just said about rhythm, that a lot of music learners have better rhythm than they realize and they almost certainly have a better ability to improvise or play rhythm by ear than they do the pitch side of things. And when you’re in an improv or a jam session context, that’s really helpful to focus on that and be like, “Okay, I may not play every note in the scale and do far out jazz harmony, but I’m just going to make sure my rhythm is rock solid and really tight and that will make sure you don’t stand out like a sore thumb.”

Christopher: But the first lesson in there that I wanted to highlight was your tip of finding a friendly jam session and not being afraid to dive in. And I wonder if we could just focus on that for a little bit longer because this is really intimidating for a lot of music learners and I think you’ve probably de-stigmatized a little bit and removed some of the fear factor by sharing your own story there. But I wonder if we could go back to some of those first jam sessions and just talk a little bit about was it intimidating for you or not? If so, why? Or if not, why not? And what literally were you doing? Like when you say there was a birthday jam session for you, I’m sure that sounds great to everyone, but I’m sure there’s also a lot of people watching or listening who are like, “What does that mean? What was he playing? How did he know what the songs were? Did he need sheet music? How did that work?” I wonder if we could just unpack that a little bit for people so that they understand what that’s like.

Oli: Yes, I think to be honest, one big advantage I have is that I’m very comfortable being on stage already. So that’s maybe why it was easier for me to do it. But also I think that’s not an excuse for other people to say like, “No, I’m not going to do it because I’m not already an improv theater person.” I think being on stage you can do a very good job hiding. So I think even if you feel not so comfortable, somehow you can play more in the back in the beginning so people will not recognize you so much. So I think you can create your own safe space on stage. I mean, that’s of course it’s good to know a few songs. Like if you know melodies of songs, that’s very safe because then you don’t need to improvise. But you say like you’ll go into a jam session, you say for example, I know the song Dinah in F, I can play the hat. So let me just play the hat and then afterwards I’m going to be quiet. And that’s the safe, but it’s also very prominent, because if you’re playing the hat, maybe to clarify, playing the hat means you are going to start a song playing the melody, not alone but probably with the whole rhythm section behind you, but you’re going to basically be the first person they hear, and it needs to be at least decent I guess for the song to start in a good way.

Oli: But since you know the melody and you can play it, it’s going to be simpler than improvising. So, that’s one start, I think, that’s what I do sometimes. There’s a few songs where I know to play the melody but I don’t know the harmony, so improvising will be super hard for me, but I can pay the middle. And even if I would play a solo, I would probably play something along the melody. The other thing that is really good, is to start reading chord sheets. I have, this is maybe just for the video version, for example, this is a chord sheet. It’s a song I found on your baby and you see that, for example, it starts in the A part with the C minor and the A seven and D minor, D seven and so on. So, if you can play arpeggios with your instrument, for example, you play a D minor arpeggio, you can play it as a D, F and A. D, F and A, yes. D major would be D/F sharp and A.

Oli: So if you can play those in your instrument and then for simple songs, it’s quite easy to follow the structure of the song if you just have a sheet like this. You can have it printed out or there’s this super great app iReal Pro, which I think you’ve talked a lot already in podcasts, where you can get basically for most of the jazz standards you get the course in some version. So you have this and you just play along. You put it somewhere and then you can already play very simple solos, plus just playing the bass notes. That’s when I, I mean, I didn’t say that yet, but I play also the trombone. So when I started playing with the trombone and jam sessions, that’s what I did. I have the sheet and I only played D minor for one bar and I played A seven and I played D minor, then I played D seven. So it’s still what I’m doing most of the time when I’m playing a song I never played, I just played the root notes. So then you have different pitches lower or higher. But basically with this you can’t go wrong because it always will fit and if you played in a nice rhythm it will always sound nice too. And if you listen a little bit to what the others are playing, you can find a good way to blend with the rest of the band without bothering them. And actually you will contribute maybe only a little bit, but you will contribute and people will be like, “Hey, you’re really cool, you’re playing very nice. Nice accompaniment”.

Oli: So I think this is a really simple way to start, just playing good notes. And then if you start learning the whole arpeggios, you can decide which notes to play. This is theoretically for me much easier than practically. But for example, if you have a D minor, a D minor is D, A and F. I wrote it down here, and then next comes an A seven which is an A, then comes a C sharp and then comes an E and then comes a G. So what you see there is for example, the A is in all the notes, the home first four bars, you could basically just play A all the time and it would fit.

Oli: But you could also find a nice line. For example, you play in the D minor, you start with an A. Then when the A seven comes, you play a G, because the G is the seventh of the A seven. Then comes the D minor again, you play an F and then comes the D seven, you’d go up to the F sharp, so have a nice line. You play, A, G, F, F sharp. And it fits perfectly with the harmony and you need to change only a little bit. And then you use a bit of rhythm. So there’s some very simple ways where once you explore these, and this is what I’m working on right now, I’m not really good at it, but I think once you understand connecting these dots, you can do a lot in jam sessions without knowing a lot.

Christopher: Fantastic. I think that was a lovely illustration of the step-by-step progression you can go through in terms of the complexity of what you contribute in the jam session. And I think it just really makes clear that point, that you can sit in and just play root notes or sit in and just contribute the melody because you know the melody, and start from there and get comfortable. And then maybe next week you’ve done your homework, so you know this other song you’ve figured out some way to play a little solo or something, and you can do the preparation beforehand to keep moving yourselves forward. It sounds like that’s the kind of approach you’ve been taking.

Oli: Yes, that’s a lot of the times what I’m doing, yeah.

Christopher: And so, when, why, and how did trombone enter the picture too? You mentioned that there, but we hadn’t really talked about it.

Oli: I started with the piano because I always was impressed by pianists and by the piano, especially like if you see this grand piano, it’s such a huge instrument and you can do so much stuff. So I was like, “Oh yeah, if I’m going to learn an instrument, it’s going to be the piano.” And I didn’t consider that it’s really hard to carry up the armor with you. But most of the times there is a piano in a venue where there’s a jam session. So, actually I think pianists are lucky, bass players are not so lucky, because bass is almost as hard to carry as a piano, especially if you’re talking about playing an upright bass. But there never are any basses in a jam session except if you bring one or if there’s a bass player already. So, I think piano is lucky because it’s often there.

Oli: But also I realized it’s easy to start on the piano but it soon gets very complex. So of course, if you just play one note at a time melodies, probably piano’s the easiest instrument to play one melody line at a time because you just need to press the buttons, you don’t even need a good ear if someone tells you which notes to play. But it doesn’t stop there because you’re expected when you play the piano, you’re expected to use both hands and then there’s already like … I mean, if you play on another instrument, in trombone you only use one hand. The second hand you hold the trombone and the first hand you move, I guess if you play a saxophone or clarinet, you need to use both hands but still you use them in a very similar fashion. While as in the piano, you use the hand one to hit chords and it’s totally … And I’m playing now since three years the piano, and I really have a hard time getting quick enough somewhere where I feel I can go into a jam session and shine on a level that a pianist would shine on. Because of course, I can sit there, I have my chords and I can play all the chords with two handed voicings and block chords and a steady rhythm, which is fortunately what you’re expected to do in old jazz. Just hammering on the keys, which I like. And then one point, you learn the stride, so you go… That’s what I’m learning now. But as soon as I… Ah, piano solo, I’m going back from this to… Because that’s all I can do. I cannot even improvise with chords properly.

Oli: So I want to become a pianist on a level where I can actually freely improvise with two hands, but long way. And a year ago, a friend of mine, he left his trombone in Berlin. Because he’s from Belgium, and he was like, “Yeah, I’m going to come every now and then to play, but I don’t want to carry my trombone.” So he bought a second trombone, and he left it in Berlin. I said, “Ah, here’s a trombone. How does it work?”

Oli: And then I figured out, “Ah, I can make a sound.” And then I started learning the trombone. And this really opened me into much more possibilities, because the trombone is… I love it. It’s a really nice instrument. And you can only play one note at a time, which is a limitation. But because of that it is much more freedom because you can express yourself in much simpler ways. You can alternate how you play the note.

Oli: So you can make a lot with like how you blow into the instrument, which in the piano, the only thing you can do is you can press more or less hard. That’s simplified I guess. I mean, great pianists, they can do a lot of stuff. And also, I don’t want to say that trombone is an easier instrument to learn, but I think since I already knew a lot of the music theory then, I mainly needed to figure out how the instrument works technically.

Oli: And yeah, so I think I made much quicker progress with the trombone. So after playing one year I feel much more confident playing in a jam session with a trombone than I play with the piano. Also there’s mostly no trombone players in jam sessions because somehow people don’t like to learn the trombone. I don’t know why. It’s the best instrument. I’m always the underdog with the trombone and I love it.

Oli: Also, I think that’s probably the most important thing that the trombone adds. I really needed to start listening and being able to also produce the sound because in the piano you don’t need to produce the sound. You know that the C is here now. You know that the C is here. So you press the C and it comes.

Oli: But in the trombone, you know that the C is there, but there’s also five other notes there. So you need to actually play the pitch that you want. This is the mouthpiece and you should be able to play a song only on the mouthpiece.

Oli: So you have one pitch and then you can change the pitch. Then you can play all of this. And then if you play a song you could… I’m going to mess it up so much. But my favorite song, Dinah.

Oli: So you can play the whole song just on the mouthpiece and then the trombone is basically just like a speaker that makes it louder. And then of course, you need to know where each note is because that’s how the instrument works. That a C sounds only if you’re in a certain position, but so yeah, with the trombone, I started really paying attention to also listening to what I’m playing.

Christopher: Absolutely. And you’ve made some really great progress with your ear over the last year or two. Could you talk about some of the dedicated ear training stuff you’ve been doing?

Oli: Yes, definitely. So I don’t know when I realized, but at one point I realized to be a musician, you need to be a good person with your ears. That’s how you saids that term. A good person with your ears. So, first I just started with apps. I looked what apps are there out there. And I don’t know if I tried all the apps out there, but I tried a lot of ear training apps. Most of them are focusing on hearing pitch… How you say?

Christopher: Intervals.

Oli: Intervals. So you need to hear a major third, a minor third and this stuff, which I think is super hard. I’m still very bad at this. I found one app which I think is my favorite app. And it’s called functional ear trainer. Probably you know it, right? And I think what’s great with this app is that it doesn’t focus on learning intervals, but it focuses on recognizing notes in a key center. That’s how you call it.

Oli: So for example, the app, it plays you a progression in a C major scale. So you can change the progression it plays. In the beginning, like the easiest is you start with a 1–4–5-1 progression. So you hear the chord, tonic chord, subdominant chord, dominant chord, tonic, which is a C major, F major, G major, C major.

Oli: And afterwards it plays you a note, just a single note and your task then is to tell which note it is. And in the beginning you’re thinking, “How do you know after hearing this, how do you know what note this is?” But actually you get progress quite quickly with that one, I feel like. Especially with the diatonic notes, after using the app for some weeks, I could already hear clearer in random keys.

Oli: So there’s levels. First you start only with C, only with the lower half of the scale, the upper half, then the full. Then you start with random octaves. So the progression is always the same, but it might play a C very low or very high. So you need to start listening to the pitch relatively outside of the box of this one octave. And then, the most challenging level is when they randomize. So each progression that comes is a totally different key. So your brain always needs to switch. Okay, now we’re in C major, now we’re in F major, now we’re in B-sharp major.

Oli: So yeah. And then you do the same with minors. All of this is super easy after a while. When it gets super challenging is when you add chromatic notes because that’s what I am now and I’m failing all the time. Because once you hear a note that is not in the key in the diatonic frame of the key, it totally confuses me. Now I cannot even hear anymore this notes that are in this scale because this one note blew me off.

Oli: So yeah, that’s where I’m right now with the app. I don’t use it so much anymore but this is I think my favorite app and the only app I’m going to recommend here outside of Musical U obviously. And I think once I started with Musical U, this helped me a lot because there I started to move from thinking about intervals to thinking about solfege, solfa. Because I was like okay I’m going to do this first roadmap that is learn to play by ear.

Oli: Oh, interval or solfa? What? I don’t know. What is solfa? And then I read, we recommend solfa. And I’m a very naive person, so when people recommend me to do something, I’m, “Okay.” So I started understanding solfa and I’m still trying to figure it out, but in the beginning it was totally… How you say? I didn’t make these connections as to how should singing the notes in solfa help me with anything, but I was just like, I don’t care. I’m just going to try it out. Everyone says it works.

Oli: So I just believed them and slowly, slowly, sometimes I actually hear the notes in solfa but I still have a lot of work to do, but it helps just as a tool also. For example, singing a melody in solfa to start connecting the dots. For example, when we’re having Dinah again, is if you’re thinking of Dinah, if you learn it in C. Let me think. It’s G A G A C D E G E C D E C D E G E D E G E D C A G G G.

Oli: And so now you need to learn this in all the keys. Why? I mean, yeah, of course. But it’s so hard. But if you learn it in solfa, you learn it’s So, La, So, La, Do, Re, Mi, So, Mi, Do, Re, Mi, Do, Re, Mi, So, Mi, Re, Mi, So, Mi, Re, Do, La, So, So, So. So now you know it in all the keys because you just need to think of what is the key of F for example. You know the So in F is C. So you can sing C E C E F G A E… C A F G A F G A C A G A C A G F D C C C.

Oli: Something like that. I hope it was correct. So yeah. And then you can start translating it in all the different keys and solfa is a great tool to remember. You can also use numbers so you can just 5-6-5-6-1-2-3-5-3. But yeah, I guess solfa is good because it stays almost the same in every language. So if you talk to someone in French, you can still use solfa and you don’t need to do cinq-six. Because who knows French, Right?

Christopher: French would be a dangerous one. They like to use fixed do over in France and that can get confusing.

Oli: True. True. And the Spanish too. Yeah. Yeah. I had a few funny encounters with this because I knew some musicians that’s learned in fixed do, so I’m always discussing with them about it.

Christopher: Well that’s very cool. And obviously the solfa approach is very compatible with the functional ear training. They’re both working in terms of scale degrees rather than intervals.

Christopher: And you made a comment, before we hit record too, about online learning and the value of community and that was something you were thinking about for your online swing stuff that we’ll talk about in a minute. How was that useful? If we compare say the app learning and the Musical U learning you were doing?

Oli: Yes, that’s one thing I realized that helps a lot. I mean I started with the apps, but with the apps you only get very little support. I mean you get technical support if you need to, but probably also you could reach out to them and ask blahblahblah. And some app producers will maybe be more helpful than others.

Oli: But out of the box, the app works like this, that they give you a structure, you work through the structure. Sometimes it’s well explained, sometimes not so well explained, but it’s very static. So there’s no interaction. Also I learned a lot with YouTube videos, which is basically the same. You watch the video, you try it out a few times. And I think if you’re a very good person to self-motivate yourself and self-structure yourself, then this can work great because you can make your own training plan and you stick to something.

Oli: But I’m a very curious person, but I’m also a very easily distracted person. So often I do an exercise, I do it as long as I find something better or something different, then I move. And that is actually what I thought in the beginning when we talked about mastering something. I’m really terrible at mastering something. Because I do something until I get bored and then I do something else.

Oli: So that’s why I was very hesitant to decide for any online program in the beginning. Because I was like, yeah, I mean I get all those online videos for free. And why should I pay for something like this? And how can I make sure I’m going to stick to it? Because I know I’m really bad at sticking to things, which is, I think, one of the good things to have a real teacher because the teacher that can kick your butt and makes you stick to it.

Oli: And so it’s like, “No, we’ve got to do this exercise one more month because you’re still not good at it.” So who tells me that in an online course? But at the same time I love listening to stuff. So I found the Musicality Now podcast and I also like doing stuff from the start. So I listened to it from episode one. And I think now I’m episode 120 or something.

Oli: So I still have a lot to go and I don’t make any exceptions. I did make now two exceptions because I really wanted to listen to some Pathway episodes before I do this. But I listen to the first Pathway episodes, the Nick Cheetham, right?

Christopher: Yeah.

Oli: And the other one I’m listening to right now, Sharilynn Horhota. And I decided to listen to them because I wanted to know what’s happening here, so I’m a little bit prepared. And also was super interesting, both of them.

Oli: But basically, yeah, from the start I really loved the podcast because everything you covered there is right down my alley. The whole notion of that there is no such thing as talent. Or the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset is all stuff that I encountered before because I was through my swing dance career, I started digging a lot into learning and practicing. And so I actually read a lot of the books that are also covered in Musicality Now. Like how’s it called? The one where they talk about talent.

Christopher: Talent is overrated, maybe.

Oli: Yeah. Yeah. No, it was… What’s it called? I don’t know. I’m bad with names, but you had the guy in the interview then who talks about, I think one of the things they observe those chess girls, they learn chess. And so basically everything is about learning. And ah, it’s with the deliberate practice and stuff.

Christopher: Is it Professor Anderson?

Oli: Yes, yes.

Christopher: Sorry, Anders Erikson.

Oli: Erikson. Yes. So I listened to that one and I was like, “Wow, that’s such a great book.” And then a few months later you cover it. And I was like, yeah. So there was a few of those instances where you had very inspiring people there and also basically the whole mindset that I felt through Musical U was really appealing to me. Also the idea of learning the music, learning by ear and all of that stuff. So I was like, “Okay, I’m just going to give it a shot.”

Oli: So at one point, I just signed up to Musical U membership. I was like, “Oh, they don’t even have a free trials.” So I was, “What the heck, I’m just going to sign up.” And then there was like, “Oh yeah, and when you signed up for a month, but you save so much if you sign up for a year.” And so, “Oh, what the heck, I’m just going to sign up for a year.”

Oli: So yeah, I don’t know when it was, I think maybe some months ago. So I started Musical U. And then I realized what I really love is the friendly community around it. So of course I’m also like the structure’s very nice, so you have these roadmaps. And I was like, “Okay, I actually have a plan what that I can go through. So I don’t need to make a plan from scratch, but I’m also flexible to change it.”

Oli: So of course, instead of doing one roadmap, I started with two roadmaps because I want to learn to play melodies by ear and chords. So I decided to take both roadmaps at the same time. And from the start, what I really loved was the interaction with, for example, Guitar Stew, who is answering all the time. Then I also quickly met, WeeHaukTaw. What’s his name? I’m sorry.

Christopher: WeeHaukTaw, yeah, Andrew.

Oli: Andrew. Yeah, Andrew and Stew. And then at one point I met Adam because he interviewed me. And there’s just a lot of support coming and just I was like I stopped, I was like I never wrote a journal from a practicing. But then they recommended a Musical U. So I was like, “Okay, I’m going to start writing journal.” Then as my first post I already get a feedback, “Oh great to have you here and so nice to hear about your journey.” One thing is really nice is the encouragement you get because, yeah. So they actually take the time, you actually take the time to read what I’m going through to, listen to examples when I record them and give me advice and point me out to new things.

Oli: So this really helped me motivating for a long time to stick with Musical U. Basically do it every day, right? Even though it’s just a little bit, I just write something. So, and I think this is what makes it very valuable next to the content that is also very good. But just having this interaction, like having coaches. Which is more like the experience you get from a real teacher than, that you would get from a static online course.

Christopher: Yeah. I don’t want this to turn into an ad for Musical U. You’re very kind to explain so much there. But I think it’s important to highlight that point about community. Because learning in isolation with an app can be really frustrating for people. I think whether it’s at Musical U or elsewhere, that environment that you learn in is so important.

Christopher: I also wanted to highlight one other thing there which is, you did your part. You’re sharing in your progress journal. You also post videos on Facebook and Instagram with what you’ve been working on lately or little demonstrations with trombone and [sulfur 00:58:46] little videos. That is what allows you to get the feedback and support you need.

Oli: Yeah.

Christopher: I’m sure you take the same attitude at jam sessions or with your local musicians. Where you tell them what you’re up to and how you’re getting on and that gives them the chance to help you. I just wants to highlight that because I know a lot of music learners are reticent to do that. Because until I’m really good, I shouldn’t talk about what I’m doing. Until I really know everything, I shouldn’t have a conversation about jazz harmony. When actually that’s what gives you the opportunity to learn.

Oli: Yes, exactly. I think am, yeah, just can encourage people to put themselves out there. Share the progress, not share the results. I mean, sharing the result is great too. Because then you get the admiration like, but if you work at it in secret and then you show it. A, it takes much longer because you don’t get any support. I think also people appreciate what you’re doing, if they know the progress. So, if they seeing you from the start. That’s like, I mean from day one I started posting on Facebook my progress videos. Now people tell me, “Oh man, it’s so great! How much you’ve progressed from three years ago and I’ve watched your videos all the time.” Even professional musicians tell me that they’re watching my videos.

Oli: I mean, it’s friends of mine or like, there’s this band leader from London. They have a band Shirt Tail Stompers. They are really great band. I know him a little bit because we had them in Berlin for a concert for workshop for a while. But I’m not besties with him. So I wouldn’t expect him to follow me up for what I’m doing. But last year in October we were talking and he was like, “Oh, yeah by the way, I’m always delighted to see your posts on Facebook. It’s so great to see that you’re progressing in the music.” Just so great to hear that from a professional musician. Is also a great to hear from your friends. But you’re sort of expecting your friends to be interested in what you’re doing. But you don’t expect some role model you’re having to be interested in what you’re doing. So I think putting yourself out there, it’s scary, but it also has a lot of unexpected benefits.

Christopher: For sure. I want to finish up by talking about what you’re up to at the moment. We already mentioned your Instagram account and your Facebook page. Where you’re sharing some of these progress videos. But I think you’re also organizing your own jam sessions these days. Is that right?

Oli: Yes, I do. I mean right now it’s a bit difficult, but-

Christopher: For sure. So, if you’re not watching this when it is being recorded. We’re in the midst of the Corona virus lockdown at the moment. So everything in person is a bit on hold. But in theory up until recently.

Oli: Yes, I think this was from the very beginning, a very important thing for me. That I bring together the people that I like to play with. I think it was also covered in one episode or some somewhere I hear it, “If there’s no possibilities for you to go out and play you have make the possibilities.” So I knew there was possibilities, but I also was scared to, I cannot go to all the pro jam sessions. So I want to create the possibilities.

Oli: So, fortunately I have a good network of friends and musicians and dancers. So I first, what I did, I started organizing a jam session to play for dancers. So I actually talked with a musician. He was interested and we organized once a month, a jam session with good musicians, with professional musicians and they played at our social dance parties once a month.

Oli: But this was already, for me it was a low barrier. Because I felt more comfortable jumping in there jamming. Because people know me and people know that I’m organizing the jam sessions. So they’re like, “Where should I do it, If not there?” I paid those people to play so I can also play with them. Actually even do this with bands these days when we book bands. I pay them to play. So I’m like, “Hey, I can play with you?” That sounds weird. But yeah-

Christopher: No, I think it’s fantastic. I think it highlights the importance of what we talked about earlier. Which is remembering you don’t have to do something incredible whizzbang complex. You can sit in with a band and do something very simple to contribute. That means any opportunity, even if the musicians are amazing. Even if you’re paying them to play, you can sit in and do something. It doesn’t need to be the top of the game.

Oli: Yeah. Yes, exactly. But so this was just the start. I organized this jam session. Through that I get contact to more musicians and then I, they also encouraged me, “Hey, we have a jam session here, so come to this jam session.” So through organizing my own Jen session. I got also more invited to join other jam sessions. Which was great.

Oli: But this was still very much like, I organized good musicians, I play with them to put my own level higher. But I also wanted to have a playground for like-minded people on my level. So I started organizing more training, practice jam sessions. Where I invite musicians that I know that are play on my level and encourage them also to play. I’m in one band project and it’s called Oakland Swing Orchestra in Berlin and this is like a… It’s a very nice project with amateur musicians coming together.

Oli: So, I knew a lot of musicians through there. So I invite them, “Hey, come jam with me.” Try to get more just because in the orchestra, it’s a lot about. We have simple lead sheets, but we play very structured. We tried to decide before we play a song, with structure we are going to play. But I’m like, more like, “No, we need to decide it on the spot.” That’s just our plan. Let’s not discuss 10 minutes before a song because that’s not going to work in a jam session. You’re just going to say, “I’m going to start, going to play at F, I’m going to play the hat, follow me.” That’s what we’re practicing in those little jam sessions.

Oli: Then at one point I was like, “Yeah!” I talked to Daniel, to Spiva who is a musician I work with most. I do the jam sessions with him too. I told him, “I want you to have a workshop for jamming.” She’s like, “Yeah, I’m up for it. Let’s do it!” So we did a workshop and people loved it. Then I say, “let’s do a course.” So we organized a six week course. Which, with him.

Oli: So six weeks long we focused on learning how to jam music, swing music with simple methods. So, and it was so, I was like, “Yeah, if we get together seven, eight people, it’s enough to do it. Let’s try make a lot of promotion. Get seven, eight people to get it.” In the end, we had so many signups that we needed to do two groups. So we had in the first round, we had 30 beginner and amateur musicians that want to learn to jam jazz music.

Oli: So yeah, now this is the third, it was the third course round. So we’re doing this a since four and a half months now. Now we’re having a little break because of the Corona. But hopefully soon afterwards we going to continue. So this is a really cool project. Where we have a teacher that teaches us how to jam. Then of course we organize a lot of practice jam sessions.

Oli: So yeah, just bringing a lot of people together. For me, my big vision is. I’m working as a dance teacher for swing dancing and as our school focuses a lot the dancing. But we also more and more feeling connected with musicians. So one of my dreams is to bring this so close together that it’s sort of intertwined. I want to start a house band for the school with the musicians that come out of those classes.

Oli: So it’s going to be an amateur band. Maybe we have a few more experienced musicians to make sure that we always drive a good swing. But the idea is not to have a professional band playing for dancers. But to have both scenes grow at the same time. So then at one point hopefully, we will have… In the dance classes we can have live music. Because we are so many tiny musicians that we can put three of them in a class and they can play for the dancers.

Oli: So yeah, now since everything is sort of on hold. I’m thinking of course, ways to do this online. So one very dedicated friend of mine, Andrea. She’s started as part of this jam session course. I mean, I know her from being a dancer. But at one point she’s like, “Hey, I played the guitar as a young person for many years. I don’t do it so much anymore. But I actually want to try play swing.” So in the beginning she was very hesitant, but then she joined a group and now she practices more than I do. Which is crazy! She plays five or six hours a day and she’s going.

Oli: She also started an online initiative now because the jam course, it cannot happen. But she’s like, “Yeah, let’s have a, That’s My Online Jam.” So we have this group where we can just share progress with each other. We start having a little project. I don’t know, probably you know it, where one musician plays different instruments and pats them all together. So we think, we can do that with several people. So we decide on a song each plays their part and then we cut it together. So we have a little online jam. So, yeah, so a lot of stuff happening.

Christopher: Fantastic! Yeah, and I love the idea of bringing together the music education and the dance education in that swing genre. Having that everyone kind of grow up together or improve together. That’s very cool. Given the current circumstances, your swing school has been focusing more online. You have a website at swingstep.tv, is that right?

Oli: Exactly! Yes, we actually, I mean we’re focusing since a long time on local classes of two cities in Berlin and in Hyderabad. Also, on workshops, we have several big workshops internationally. So we’re reaching quite a big crowd of dancers. But it still like, we reach either local dancers in the cities are or we reach international dancers through the big workshops that happen once or twice a year.

Oli: All of this is shutdown now because of the social distancing that is very important. But we have of course, a running business. We have 10 employees or more and we need to keep going. So it’s like, “Let’s do online classes.” So now everyone is working really hard. I think within three days we set up a completely new platform online for online classes. Now the teachers are recording the classes. So on Monday, our first online course round we’ll start.

Oli: The good thing is that now everybody can join. Not only if they’re in Berlin or Hyderabad. So yeah, on swingstep.tv, you can learn swing dancing online. It’s still very in the beginning, of course. We just setting up the basics. But we’re actually trying to get, I’m trying to bring in inspiration from Musical U. Because I’m taking the Musical U memberships. So, sorry for stealing your awesomeness.

Christopher: Please do.

Oli: But also, I mean we do have a lot of experience through the offline classes with giving feedback and giving advice to students. So our courses are built in a way that you have once a week, you get a video, it’s a full lesson like you would get it offline in a class. But of course you cannot interact with the teachers. But it’s just 60 to 90 minutes, where we show you what to dance to. Then there’s going to be music where you can dance and watch us dance. But basically it’s a lot of watching by doing, learning by watching and doing.

Oli: But then also there’s going to be our teachers takes time. Where every student can reach out to us and ask for advice personally. So it’s like, not really just happens during class where go to the teacher, “Hey can you help me with this? Now it helps, it happens basically when you have time you can reach out to us and we’re like, “Yeah, okay, work on this.” Then you can continue working. So it’s like we’re trying to find a good combination of online material that you can just work through on your own. But also giving possibilities to get guided advice, personal feedback. We’ve never done it. So, it’s going to be a super exciting, how it works out. But everyone so far is very excited. So on Monday we’ll see how the first round goes.

Christopher: Wonderful! Well, I’ll be watching that with interest and particularly if you start bringing in some of the music education side of things there too. Oli thank you so much for joining us today. I think we’ve talked about some really fascinating things that will be helpful for people. We’re going to put links to your Instagram and Facebook pages in the show notes for this episode along with swingstep.tv. Any parting pieces of wisdom or advice for those watching or listening.

Oli: Advice, just do it! Do it like Nike says it, right? Just do it! If you’re scared about it, it’s an indication that you should do it, I think. I mean there’s two parts, there’s of course, sometimes you’re scared and you know that you’re scared because it’s dangerous. But if there’s a tiger in front of you. It’s probably not a good idea to do it. It’s also not a good idea to run away, I think. But I don’t have advice for how to deal with tiger.

Oli: But I have idea how to deal with the Tiger Wreck. It’s a very good swing song. But yeah, sorry. But yeah, if you feel you’re scare but also excited about something. You realize you’re just scared because you’re thinking you cannot do it. Just try it out and you will fail but it’s great. You’ll learn through failure. The more often you fail, the more fun you will have.

Christopher: Wonderful! A good message to leave people with. Thank you Oli.

Oli: Thank you, Christopher. It was a real honor to be on this podcast. I’m going to enjoy listening to myself.

Christopher: About a 100 episodes from now.

Oli: Yes, yeah, maybe I skipped to that one once it’s out.

The post Pathways: Oli Fuhrmann appeared first on Musical U.