Category: Uncategorized

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/pozzoli-and-the-spoken-solfeggio/
If you have been learning solfege but struggling to connect the syllables of each note with the score when singing or transcribing, I have good news for you.

There is a great way for you to internalise the name of each note on the score quickly and easily. There is an established way to gain an instinct for the syllables.

It is used in conservatoires and music schools around the world and called “Spoken and sung solfeggio”. It was developed by the great Italian pedagogue Ettore Pozzoli. Learn more ➡️ https://www.musical-u.com/learn/pozzoli-and-the-spoken-solfeggio/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-tune-your-guitar-by-ear/
A lot of discussion can be had over whether the guitar should be tuned by ear or with the help of an electronic device. As we’re about to see, tuning by ear has multiple benefits over the “easier” path of using a tuner.

By the end of this guide on how to tune a guitar for beginners, you’ll know how to tune your guitar with just your hands and ears, popular alternate tunings, and how to check that you’ve tuned correctly by using a piano. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-tune-your-guitar-by-ear/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/talking-rhythm-the-kodaly-method/
Are you struggling with counting out basic rhythm? Do you wish that you could understand a rhythm on sight? Take a moment to expore the Kodály Method, which uses simple syllables to represent key rhythms.

These exercises have been proven to work for half a century and now you too can use these simple principles to learn rhythm. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/talking-rhythm-the-kodaly-method/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/6-simple-steps-play-by-ear-solfa/
Playing music by ear can seem mysterious. If you want to learn, wouldn’t it be great if there was actually a clear and logical process to it, rather than seeming like a magic trick? The good news: there is!

Solfa is a system you can learn for quickly and reliably identifying the notes in music, allowing you to play by ear on your instrument. Catch this sneak peak of the 6 steps taught here at Musical U in our “Solfa Roadmap” https://www.musical-u.com/learn/6-simple-steps-play-by-ear-solfa/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/tension-and-release-part-2-scales-meet-chord-progressions/
Melody moves through its harmonic surroundings creating varying degrees of tension and release. As we train our ears to perceive tension and release, we gain deeper appreciation as we listen to music and greater mastery in composing, improvising, and playing by ear.

Today we will move past single chords and listen to how each scale degree sounds when we move from one chord to another in a chord progression. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/tension-and-release-part-2-scales-meet-chord-progressions/

However, if we can pinpoint exactly what frustrates us and impedes our creative process, we can discover some ways to get around these roadblocks.

This week, learn about what inspires one up-and-coming country singer to keep writing, discover how learning to play by ear in a group can help you hone this skill, and tune in to our podcast to explore the topic of learning music online – and how to avoid some common pitfalls to get the most out of your online education.

Music and Faith

What guides your musical journey?

Some of us set out with very specific goals in mind, creating roadmaps and long-term plans to hit our desired milestones.

For others, their faith also plays a significant role in their musical journey.

If you ask country singer-songwriter Jason V. Chapman where he sees his career going next, he’ll simply tell you, “Wherever God chooses to lead me”. From a chance meeting with his now-producer at a Halloween party to his music being played on national radio, his faith has certainly gotten him far – music itself seems to have been woven into Jason’s life into a divine way, complementing his work, his family life, and his values.

A Higher Musical Power, with Jason V. Chapman is a fascinating account of his journey thus far, and how his faith helps him find the balance between music, work, family, and health.

Jason spoke about the relationships that he has made with other musicians throughout his journey, and how valuable they have been to his growth as a musician. It may be tempting to “go it alone”, but there is so much value to meeting and collaborating with other musicians to broaden your perspective. Home Studio Corner gives some practical suggestions for collaborating online.

Despite his success, Jason, like many musicians, still relies on a day job as the primary means of supporting his family. While so many blogs and articles focus on how to make a living as a musician, music is a hobby and an outlet for the vast majority of musicians. Take a look at how Alabama’s musicians make a living while pursuing their passions.

Jason spoke about the inspiration that he feels when he writes a song, and where the motivation to be a better songwriter comes from. Perhaps the most dreaded thing that a songwriter can experience is writer’s block. Prolific songwriter Cliff Goldmacher gives advice for avoiding writer’s block on West Coast Songwriters.

How do you begin writing a song? For most of us, we need to have that inspiration, the creative spark that gets us started. Band Lab discusses how you can find the motivation and inspiration that will carry you through creating your song.

Committing to Music

Online music education works wonderfully for many musicians – the cost and convenience can’t be beat, and you have the freedom to sample as many as you like to decide what works for you.

However, the usual challenges that musicians encounter get amplified if you are an online learner. What happens if you get stuck? Or if you need feedback?

This week, Musical U interviews David Brown of PianoCub.com, a website that helps students navigate the usual trappings of online music education – lack of motivation and engagement – by providing step-by-step lessons and immediate feedback.

Don’t miss Finding, Recovering, and Maintaining Motivation, with David Brown to learn about David’s personal musical journey, the lessons he’s learned along the way, and how he has used his knowledge to create such an effective online learning tool.

David talked about the importance of practicing music consistently, and why it’s preferable to sporadic bursts of intense practice. While this may be obvious, the trouble is, many musicians have trouble staying engaged and motivated in their practice. Music Oomph shares some tricks for optimizing your practice.

The feeling of “not being good enough” during a performance is something that plagues new musicians and seasoned pros alike. Building your confidence as a musician and a performer is one of the most rewarding things you can do – and we’ve found these helpful tips from Gaia at Musiview on how to start!

David founded Piano Cub to help musicians become more competent and comfortable on the piano. Looking for more general ways that you can improve your musical abilities? Pianist Musings shares ten ways to become a better musician.

Playing by Ear Together

Playing by ear is a skill anyone can learn – but it will take many attempts and some trial and error.

Thankfully, this skill can be honed in a group setting, adding motivation and fun to the process, and cutting down on the frustration factor.

In Introduction to Playing by Ear in A Group, Steve Giddings of Steve’s Music Room takes you through the steps of learning to play by ear in a group, giving practical tips on using physical movement, repetition, and specific listening skills to internalize the song you’re trying to learn.

Playing by ear in a group isn’t something that we often think of doing. If you are in a band or other performing group, normally you learn the parts before coming to rehearsal and then put everything together there. However, if you have ever jammed with another musician, then you have been playing by ear more than you’ve realized! Check out Active Melody’s video tutorial on jamming with others on the guitar.

Do we learn music by ear only because we don’t have the sheet music? Or is there another reason? Not needing sheet music is a great benefit to playing by ear, but it’s far from being the only one. Guitar Adventures discusses how playing songs by ear makes you a better musician.

What if you’re interested in playing by ear in a group, but don’t have a group to play with yet? After reading Steve’s post, we found ourselves wanting to hear more about how he approaches music in a collaborative way – so we found this interview that he did on the Smart Music Podcast about how to start a rock band. Find your musical partners and get rocking now!

Learning Music Online

Going down the rabbit hole of online music learning can leave you feeling frustrated, disoriented, and discouraged – many end up spending a lot of time and a lot of money on a course, only to find that it’s not a good fit.

So, how can you be pragmatic and smart about choosing a music course online?

In About Choosing an Online Music Course, we discuss the three main criteria you’ll want to keep in mind when making the big decision – to ensure that the material serves you and your musical goals, and that your time and energy (and your money!) is going to the right place.

We discussed the importance on knowing what your musical goals are before committing to an online music course. In Musical U, we teach the importance of having SMART goals to help you reach your destination. Orchestra Central discusses how you can use SMART goals to help shape your practice sessions.

Nearly all musicians need some type of support during their musical journey. When you’re learning a new skill, the importance of knowing how long and often you should practice can’t be understated. Spencer Welch provides guidance on the length and frequency of effective singing practice.

There is no “one size fits all” approach to learning music, especially when you are learning as an adult. Rather than bemoan the challenges that adult learners can face, why not celebrate the experiences that you bring to the table, and learn how to use them to your advantage? Liberty Park Music discusses eight things that you should do when learning music as an adult.

Getting Out of A Musical Rut

Experiencing a creative block or a lapse in motivation is a completely normal part of any musical journey, and so, knowing how to navigate these roadblocks and generate ways to overcome them is as important to your musical success as your instrument technique and aural skills.

Different musicians will find this motivation in different places; for some, the answer may lie in collaboration with others, while others may find that shifting gears by trying a different instrument or learning approach.

Are you in a musical rut? Honing your ear training skills, whether through lessons or online education, is a great way to get past that block. You’ll be amazed at what some new aural tricks can do for your songwriting, improvising, rhythm, singing, and even your understanding of music theory.

The post Music and Faith, Committing to Music, Playing By Ear Together, and Learning Music Online appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/3-singing-exercises-to-improve-your-vocal-pitching/
There are probably few things more painful to listen to than a singer who is out of tune. So what can you do if you have trouble singing in tune? T

oday we’ll look at 3 simple exercises you can use to refine your vocal pitch control and practice singing in tune. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/3-singing-exercises-to-improve-your-vocal-pitching/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/twelve-tips-for-learning-to-improvise-music/
To become a great improviser you need to unleash your inner musical instinct and then learn to control it.

Learning to improvise is a long-term mission, one which will push you to your musical limits and then beyond. You’ll need to be armed with some tips, tricks and strategies to help ensure you continually improve.

In this article we share some universal tips for developing your skills as an improvising musician. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/twelve-tips-for-learning-to-improvise-music/

The world of online music learning is ripe with opportunity for a musician interested in self-directed learning. In this episode, we explore the factors that should go into choosing an online course that is compatible with your musical goals and vision.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Interview with David Asher Brown
• Interview with Jeremy Burns and Matthew Scott Phillips
• Interview with Chris Owenby
• Interview with Prof. Anders Ericsson
• Interview with David Isaacs
• Christopher’s interview on the Learn Jazz Standards podcast
• Musical U Roadmaps

Transcript

In our previous episode with David Asher Brown we talked a bit about the advantages and drawbacks of learning an instrument online. And this has been a frequent theme here on the podcast because so many of our guests are doing really terrific work in online music education – off the top of my head I can remember discussing it in our episodes with Jeremy Burns and Matthew Scott Phillips from Music Student 101, with Chris Owenby from Practice Habits, with Professor Anders Ericsson, author of Peak, Dave Isaacs, the “Guitar Guru of Nashville”, and certainly several more.

As was probably clear from my conversations with them all, and the very fact that I myself run Musical U, an online musicality training provider, I really believe in the enormous potential and value in online training for music.

The trouble is that online music education – and online education in general – is still at a very early stage. It’s only really in the last five or ten years that someone wanting to learn an instrument or develop their musical ear or study up on music theory has had the option not just to learn in person, or self-study with books – but to go online for live 1-to-1 video lessons, or use extensive multimedia and interactive training material.

There’s a massive opportunity – but if you’ve ever explored this yourself you’ll know that it’s all too easy to spend a lot of time and even a lot of money – and have very little to show for it after.

Have you ever bought a course online – and then not finished it? Maybe you only ever looked at the first few lessons, or maybe you watched it all but never actually put it into practice. I know I’ve certainly done that more than a few times. Or maybe you’ve tried to stick to free stuff and spent hours researching and finding and gathering all these great webpages and resources – but then your enthusiasm fizzles out because it all seems too overwhelming and jumbled. I’m guilty of that one too.

You know there’s an opportunity there. But how do you turn the incredible availability of great learning resources into a learning process that actually happens and actually delivers you the results you’ve been craving?

In this episode I’m going to make some suggestions, based on our experience at Musical U. You won’t be surprised to hear these are all things we’ve baked into our training system at Musical U – and if you’re looking for musicality training like playing by ear, improvising, singing in tune, tightening up your rhythm, and so on – then please do consider Musical U. But what I’m going to be talking about applies to any kind of online music learning, including for learning to play an instrument. And actually it pretty much all goes for any online course, not just music.

We’re going to talk a bit about how to choose a suitable course to maximise your odds of success. Then in a future episode we’ll discuss how to make the most of the course – and actually get results.

Choosing a course

So with the incredible range of options available to you online, how do you pick the right course? Specifically, how do you pick one which is most likely to actually get you results – rather than just seeming flashy and exciting but not actually delivering a good learning experience.

Here are three important criteria I think you should keep in mind.

Aligned with your musical goal

First things first: Make sure that the course is really well aligned with your true musical goal. That might sound obvious, but we’ve all had that experience where we start looking for something online, and a few hours later we’ve explored and unpacked the topic in so many directions, and heard so many opinions about the right way to learn it or what you want to learn first, and so on – that it can be easy to end up thinking you “should” go off and learn X even though it was really Y that had you excited to begin with.

That’s not to say you can’t learn valuable things about how best to pursue your goal by doing research. A lot of the guidance we provide to members at Musical U is helping them unpack what we call your “Big Picture Vision” and then figure out what concrete training is going to get them there. But what I want to suggest is that you make sure you don’t get side-tracked. Don’t end up with a laundry list of skills and topics and essential prerequisites that actually end up sapping your enthusiasm and making the whole thing feel untenable. And don’t get tempted by a course that looks shiny and useful – but isn’t actually what you set out to look for.

If you want to know more about goal setting and planning I’m going to link in the shownotes to an interview I did on Brent Vaartstra’s Learn Jazz Standards podcast where we talk all about that, and I think it would be a helpful framework for you to have in mind before setting out to find a course.

So that’s the first criterion: make sure the course is aligned with your real musical goal.

Flexible

The second criterion is to find a course that’s flexible. I could spend a whole episode or three ranting about the problems with the “course” model for online learning, and I hesitated to even use the word “course” in this episode. Because in learning music, and doubly-so in musicality training, having a single one-size-fits-all straight line “course” where you have to go lesson by lesson in a certain strict order, almost never works. And I think this is a huge part of why course completion rates are so low. People are coming in with wildly varying backgrounds and goals and abilities, and trying to force everyone to follow the same strict path is just a recipe for frustration.

So you want to find a course that’s flexible. Ideally one which is modular, meaning that learning a skill involves a combination of different modules and you have some control to choose the ones which ones best match to your needs and desires, and assemble them in a way that makes most sense for you.

And whether it’s modular or not, you want it to be flexible in the sense of not restricting your progress. If you’re too advanced for certain sections you shouldn’t have to plod through them getting bored, and if you’re struggling in a certain area you shouldn’t be forced to master it before being able to move on in some way. You’ll probably want a course that’s self-paced, meaning you don’t have to complete a certain lesson by a certain date – or, if you’re someone who really thrives on deadlines, you might actually prefer a week-by-week course that helps you keep moving forwards.

To give a few examples from Musical U, we have almost no prerequisites on our modules, so while we recommend certain sequences that make sense, if you want or need to leave out a module, or you haven’t quite mastered it, you can still move on with your overall training. All our quizzes have a passmark not of 100% but of 80%, showing that you’ve got the hang of the skill even if you haven’t pushed your learning to the point of perfection (which for most people also equals the point of total boredom in your training!) And of course the whole system is modular, so while our Roadmaps mimic the straight-line course to give you a nice clear route, how you choose to follow that path is entirely flexible and personalisable.

So you want to look for a course where you can be confident that if things don’t magically go 100% perfectly and easily throughout you won’t feel stuck, limited, bored or frustrated. You’ll have some flexibility to continue your learning and maintain your enthusiasm and success.

Great support

The third criterion I’d suggest is that you want a course which provides great support. Again, this might seem like a no-brainer – not least because almost all courses will make a point of offering some form of support. But you might be surprised.

For a start, there are still a ton which provide only technical support. For example most mobile apps are like this. If something’s broken then they might respond and help you, but if you’re stuck with your training, there’s really no way to get help.

Or many online courses will offer a way to contact the course creator if you have questions. But frankly, that’s just not good enough. Because in my experience, most adult learners are really hesitant to make use of that.

For myself, I’m not a particularly shy person, I’m happy posting online and so on. But if I get stuck in an online course, am I going to write an email to the course creator asking for help? Probably not. I like to think of myself as independent, I think in honesty I’d be a bit embarrassed to admit I hadn’t managed to learn the thing myself, I would assume that the course probably works well for everyone else so it’s my fault not the course’s, and so on. I’ve found that most of us are like that – we’ve been preconditioned by the educational system to think that if we’re not learning, it’s our fault and we need to try harder. Which means we’re not going to really make use of an on-demand support option like that.

So what does great support look like? It’s more proactive than that. It’s about providing a way for you to receive help without needing to summon up the courage and have the self-awareness and confidence to actually ask for help. And I should mention there that often the problem is we don’t even know how to ask for help! We know we’re stuck but sometimes the very problem is we’re not sure what’s gone wrong. So that can make it really hard to send a message asking for help too.

The kind of proactive support I’m talking about means that you’re part of a community in some way. You’re visible to the course instructor without needing to consciously step forwards with a question. At Musical U we do this very much through having an online community with discussion boards and a way to post updates about your training, and it means our team can essentially keep an eye on our members. Not in a creepy way and not in an annoying way. Just for example so that if someone is clearly making great progress and then goes quiet for a week, or is posting updates but sounding increasingly frustrated, we can step in and help them solve the problem – often before they’d even realised there was really a problem there.

I know that people considering Musical U are often confused why we make a fuss about the community stuff when it’s the training they’re really interested in. But the truth is that the community is the secret sauce that helps us offer fantastic support and help our members get results in their training. It’s not a distraction from training, it’s an accelerator for it.

So that’s one way to provide great support, and I’d encourage you to really ask yourself when considering an online course: What will I do when I get stuck? Because if the answer is “I’ll probably just stay quiet and give up”, or “I’ll send a message and hope to get a reply”, then I would say the support on offer is not really enough to help you succeed with that course.

Other factors

So those are the big three I wanted to suggest: Choose a course that’s well-aligned with your real musical goals, is flexible in the way you move forwards in your learning, and which provides great support, not just an email address or a way to send a message.

Now there are of course a ton of other things to consider, but I think you’re probably already aware of these. Things like price, convenience, the format of the material, the trustworthiness and expertise of the provider, and so on.

It’s not an easy choice to make – and so if you can find a provider that ticks all the boxes and provides a range of training not just a single course, that’s a really big advantage too.

I hope that helps you to choose your online music courses in a way that leads to greater success in the future. And in a part two episode we’re going to address just that: once you’ve selected a course, what can you do to maximise your chances of succeeding with it?

The post About Choosing an Online Music Course appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/discovering-pentatonic-solfa-part-1-exercises/
Have you been looking for a magical tool to transfer the music you hear to the music you play on your instrument?

Solfa (aka solfège, or solfeggio) can be that secret weapon that helps you hear exactly what note is being played. Get started with these exercises from the Musical U team https://www.musical-u.com/learn/discovering-pentatonic-solfa-part-1-exercises/