Musicality World

To answer these big burning questions, we invited Gregg Goodhart, The Learning Coach, back on the show. Gregg is a leading expert on how to apply all of the latest scientific research and understanding of how the brain learns to skill acquisition, including in music. In this episode, we talk about what to do if you feel like there’s never enough time for practicing music.

After this episode, you may well find time that you didn’t even know existed, as well as ways to supercharge the time that you do have for practicing, and get better results faster.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• Learn Music Faster
• Gregg Goodhart – Learning Coach
• What is a Practiclass? Sax, cello, guitar, The Learn Like A Genius Institute
• Learn Like A Genius – Piano Practiclass (Full), Houston, TX with Gregg Goodhart
• Musicality Now – How to Learn Like a Genius, with Gregg Goodhart
• Musicality Now – The Truth About Talent, with Professor Anders Ericsson
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
• Carol S. Dweck – Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
• Barry J. Zimmerman – Dart Throwing Study

Transcript

Christopher: Hi, my name is Christopher. I’m the founder and director of Musical U and welcome to Musicality Now. Have you ever been frustrated or disappointed with your music practice? Maybe you felt like there is just never enough time or you don’t seem to make any progress even when you do find the time and put in the work.

Christopher: If you’ve ever wondered what lets some musicians achieve the highest levels of worldwide success while others remain forever a struggling hobbyist, it’s not down to talent and it’s not purely about putting in the work. Science has shown over the last few decades that so-called talent is almost entirely a myth and there are actually very specific practical things that can make a dramatic difference in how fast anybody learns a skill, including in music.

Christopher: Despite that research, almost no music learners are actually able to put that into practice and get the benefits. I’m joined today by The Learning Coach, Gregg Goodhart. Gregg has been a guest on the show before, so I won’t give a full intro here. You can find the link to his past interview in the show notes for this episode at MusicalityNow.com. Suffice it to say, I consider Gregg to be the world’s leading expert on how to apply all of the latest scientific research and understanding of how the brain learns to practical knowledge and skill acquisition including in music.

Christopher: Gregg, say a quick hi, if you would.

Gregg: Hi, it’s great to be here with you.

Christopher: We’ve been working with Gregg on a brand new and unique course designed to help any music learner shift into high gear in their learning simply by adjusting the way they practice. As part of preparing that course, we surveyed our audience to learn about their experiences with music practice, and across several hundred responses there were a handful of really common and painfully frustrating sticking points that came through. I read through each and every one of those responses personally and I can tell you I felt your pain on a visceral level.

Christopher: I can relate, from my own experience to that frustration, that struggle, and that feeling of self-doubt or even inadequacy that comes up when you feel like you’re just not seeing the results from your music practice that you expected to.

Christopher: So I’ve invited Gregg to come on the show today and share his insights on how to tackle each of these big sticking points.

Christopher: We’re going to talk about what to do if you feel like there’s just never enough time for practicing music. We’re going to talk about how to get the biggest bang for your buck, how to make the most of the music practice time you do have. We’re going to talk about how to break through any problem or sticking point you might encounter in your music learning. How to stay motivated and interested and keep up a consistent practice habit, and how to always feel clear about how you should be spending your practice time.

Christopher: If you’re like most music learners, then you are ready and willing to put in the time and energy required to improve, but at the same time, you probably wish there was a way to make sure you were doing it right and would get the maximum payoff from the effort you do put in.

Christopher: As you’re about to discover, that payoff can actually be several times greater than what you’ve probably seen in the past, even at your very best. Shifting your practicing into high gear like we’re going to be talking about today, you just might discover you have a lot more apparent talent than you ever thought possible. So without further ado, let’s dive into the big questions and challenges that came up in that survey and get some expert insights on what can do to get better results faster.

Christopher: So if I had to name the number one point of frustration for people that came through in our survey it was, “I don’t have enough time. I can’t find enough time. I can’t seem to make the time. I can’t keep up putting in the time.”, and one fascinating thing was that we also asked people how much time they were spending, and I was shocked to see just how consistent it is, and keep in mind, we have some teachers, we have some pros in the survey responses, but for the most part they’re amateurs of one stripe or another, hobbyists, people who are passionate about music, but it’s not their full time gig.

Christopher: We had answers across the spectrum from five minutes a day to 5 minutes a week, to two hours a day and no matter how much time people were spending they were saying they did not have enough time. So Gregg, how is this possible, that however much time we seem to put into music practice, it always feels like there’s not enough time or we’re not getting the results we thought we would from that time?

Gregg: Well, it’s natural to feel that way when you have lots of things that are putting demands on your time, your mind has all these open loops that it’s trying to close and we don’t particularly close them.

Gregg: One helpful way for me. I thought private Catholic school for many years and there were kids on the football team, and they were on the debate team, and they were in AP classes, and they would tell me they didn’t have time to practice. And I’d say just allot a time inventory, not with specifics of what you’re doing, I go to school here, I do football here, just black all that stuff out. Black everything half hour that you’re obligated, even if it’s just meeting my friends down at the park every Saturday to shoot some hoops.

Gregg: And inevitably, what we found is you start closing that open loop of scheduling and you see your schedule from afar. And we’d always find, no matter how busy they were, we’d always find these white spots.

Gregg: Now, I was dealing with high school kids, but when I’d say, “Geez, what are you doing with those white spots there? That’s a couple hours. And we’re not even looking at the weekend. There’s a couple hours.” And the answer was almost always, “I don’t know. Texting?”

Gregg: And the truth is is that we do have more windows in which, and no, it’s not, “I’m going to find 15 minutes between the other 12, 15 hours that I’m working.”, it’s not that. We do have little windows so that’s the first thing.

Gregg: The second is, how are you using that time? There should definitely be no one who is practicing two hours a day who is not making progress and it’s what you’re doing in that time, but even short little bursts of practice, and I think most people would be amazed, if you manage it right, if you put the right things into your practice, starting with just 10 minutes, finding that 10 minute time, will get you much better at things within five days or so. That’s usually the plan that I use.

Gregg: And that will create motivation to do more. One of the reasons we think we don’t have time when we practice is we tend to think, especially if we’re older and dedicated and really want to do something, “I’ve got to find 30, 60, 90 minutes here because I’m going to buckle down and get it done.”

Gregg: That’s very hard to get started. What we’re talking about there is something in your brain called orienting selective attention. Going from what you were doing to what you are doing. And the harder the task it is that you’re going to undertake, the harder it is to actually do that.

Gregg: So if you reduce the time and say, “I will be perfectly satisfied with five minutes of practice five days a week.”, or 10 minutes of practice, that itself won’t be enough. And your natural reaction is going to be, “Oh, that’s not going to work. I’m not even going to start.

Gregg: However, if you put the right things in that time and really manage the way the brain learns, you will begin to notice improvement which will make you look forward, and there’s science on this, make you look forward to doing more practicing. So it really, I think finding the time might not be as hard as people think. It’s not being willing to put in five or 10 minutes because we think it’s worthless.

Gregg: You can really, and this isn’t, “Well, if you do it for a month you’ll get it.” Within a matter of days, you will notice how much better you get if you apply things like deliberate practice.

The post Practice Q&A [1/5] How To Find More Music Practice Time, with Gregg Goodhart appeared first on Musical U.

Laura shares the inspiring story of how she learned to combine improvisation and classical violin – and how improvisation has impacted her teaching.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Laura’s upbringing learning violin with the Suzuki method – and some of the myths and misconceptions people have about Suzuki’s ear-based approach.
• How Laura didn’t realize until later in life that she had learned a lot about improvisation growing up with a jazz-pianist father.
• The Creative Ability Development framework which empowers learners to improvise from the outset, and in a way that focuses on listening and personal expression.

Even if you’ve never improvised, or you’re an avid improviser keen to learn more, you’re going to love this conversation.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• • Laura Nerenberg – Rideau Falls Violins
  • Laura Nerenberg with Triptych Piano Trio – Facebook
  • Shinichi Suzuki – Nurtured By Love
  • Suzuki Association
  • Alice Kanack – Kanack School Of Musical Artistry
  • Art of Improvisation Workshops
  • David Darling

Transcript

Laura: Hi, I’m Laura Nerenberg from Rideau Falls Violins and this is Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Laura, thank you for joining us today.

Laura:

Thank you. It’s my pleasure.

Christopher: I’ve been so looking forward to this one because you got in touch after hearing our interview with Diane Allen. And what you have in common with Diane is that you are a violinist and a violin teacher with a particular interest in improvisation. But actually, I think that’s maybe where the commonality ends in that you have very different backgrounds and very different ways of approaching things. And I’m super interested to unpack this with you, and hear some of your insights on improvisation and classical music and violin and how all of those things can go together. So before we dive into all of that, let’s start out at the very beginning, if we could with your own background as a violinist, when did you get started? And what kind of violin learning did you do?

Laura: So, I started violin when I was three and a half, using the Suzuki method. And the reason for that was we were living, my parents and I, I was an only child at the time, we were living in Canada’s Arctic, and there was a fiddler in our village. I was a toddler at the time, and my mother was really entranced with fiddle music. And simultaneously she heard an item on the radio about Suzuki violin. So when we moved to the big city after that, she signed us both up. And she quit soon after, but I obviously kept playing and the Suzuki method was a good fit for me. We moved cities a lot, and then I was no longer a Suzuki students after a few years just because we moved cities and found a different teacher.

Christopher: Got you. And longtime listeners and viewers of the show will have heard us mention Suzuki in passing, but it’s not something we’ve really covered in depth before. So I wonder if you wouldn’t mind taking a minute or two just to explain what is that particular approach to learning violin in particular, but I believe other instruments too.

Laura: So Suzuki method actually started with a violin. Shinichi Suzuki himself was a violinist and a violin teacher. And the basic premise that the core philosophy is that every child can learn. And so given the right environment created by the teacher, and by the parents at home, that every child can learn to play their instrument to a very high ability. Going along with that is the idea following the way we learn language, the idea that young children learn to speak before they learn to read, and so young musicians using the Suzuki approach, learn to play their instrument before they learn to read the music off the page.

Laura: Now, this has so many misconceptions because unfortunately, many stereotypes became attached to Suzuki trained individuals, especially concerning reading. My students learn the names of the notes on the instrument and the real names of the strings from the very start, the first few lessons, the first few lessons where they get the instrument. And in fact we’re singing the A Major scale with real note names from the first lesson. So the only thing is because the children are so young when they start, my beginners are age three to six, that it’s important for them to get comfortable on the instrument, learning music by ear by listening to recordings at home and developing a sense of the inherent logic of the instruments.

Laura: So they figure out the pieces by ear, we may give them a starting note the parent or I may give them a starting note. And then they experiment and they listen, is this, does it go up or down? Does it go to the next string? Does it skip or does it use stepwise motion? So we talk a lot about the building blocks of melodies while they are figuring out that logic in the instrument, and then I introduced reading using other materials. I don’t use the Suzuki books for reading. They weren’t intended to teach reading. It’s not a step by step approach for reading. It’s a step by step approach for the technique of that specific instrument.

Laura: I found it a really great fit for me now as a teacher, because during graduate school, I studied in performance. But I also took Suzuki pedagogy courses for two years, covering the beginning stages all the way through the end of book eight and there are 10 books for violin. And then I went and got teaching jobs after grad school. And I found that it gave me such a solid sense of how to start a beginner, but also how to transition through the different phases of a developing violinist.

Christopher: Got you. And one of the myths and misconceptions, or at least fuzzy topics when it comes to Suzuki that I’ve encountered is, I think often it’s associated with these very serious high level virtuoso musicians. And if you put your kid into Suzuki class, it’s because you expect them to become a concert master. And other people saying, because it’s ear based it’s all about perfect pitch and they have to have perfect pitch or it doesn’t work and there’s a lot of confusion about those two topics, but from your description just then, it doesn’t really sound like either of those things is particularly the case.

Laura: What I neglected to mention is Suzuki’s goal, his goal for himself and I believe that’s my goal as well, is not so much about producing top level players, but it’s about developing beautiful heart and about helping children through the study of whatever instrument is chosen, developing a noble sense of humanity. And I think a lot of this comes from Suzuki’s reaction coming out of World War Two, we kind of have to look at it from a historical context because he was Japanese and World War II decimated Japan.

Laura: And when he developed his theory about using a nurturing approach and praising every small step a child makes, but also practicing in a disciplined daily fashion. This was met with resistance among Japanese parents, especially mothers because of course at that time, it was mainly the mothers bringing their children to lessons and practicing with the children at home. Because the idea of pairing a very high respect for the teacher, which was already there in Japan, with showing sincere love and nurturing care for your child, and praising each of their small accomplishments was new, new to Japanese culture.

Laura: And in fact, I think that aspect really has been one of the ones that has made it so appealing for North American and Western culture is I think we typically already had this nurturing attitude toward children. I’m sure I’m throwing in such broad generalizations it’s almost illegal. But this is my perception and having spent time talking with many Suzuki teachers and teacher trainers over the years that I think it can be easy, in fact, in the Suzuki world, to get so nurturing that we kind of forget that we also have to have high standards, and ask our students and our children to repeat things many times which is required to acquire a skill.

Laura: I teach my own daughter, and I’ve been teaching her since she was two and now she’s 10. And even though we practice every day, I can’t say it always go smoothly. You still have to remind them to stay on track, and you still have to guide them. But to do it with love and sincere appreciation for those small steps is a cornerstone of the Suzuki approach.

Christopher: Terrific. Yeah, I have this really vivid memory and you’ll have to forgive me I forget the name of the book, but I read Suzuki’s own book on kind of the philosophy of the approach not one of the method books, but the short volume he wrote that kind of introduced-

Laura: Natured by Love.

Christopher: Yes, thank you.

Laura: I’m sorry. Natured by Love.

Christopher: Natured by Love. I remember it, probably eight, nine years ago, reading that book on a holiday and I have such a vivid memory because it was so striking the kind of language he uses and the kind of way he presents the whole journey of learning music. And it’s not at all what I was expecting from these little tidbits I gleaned about Suzuki method over the years. So I’m glad we unpacked that a little bit for those who are new to the area. And having heard my introduction, talking about improvisation and then I heard you talk a little bit about this ear start that the Suzuki method focuses on. Probably some people are like, “Oh, so they just naturally improvise from day one?” I don’t think that’s the case, though. So can you talk a little bit about your own experience, you were learning you use this ear base approach, but were you improvising back then in the early years?

Laura: Well, that’s a fairly interesting question, because I think my upbringing, musically speaking was a typical. I mean, I was a Suzuki trained student, but my parents had this approach of not having TV in the house at least till I was a bit older. And I only had records vinyl records. And my father is an amateur jazz pianist. So the concept of improvising was there in the house, I fell asleep to him improvising on the piano for his own relaxation every night for over a decade.

Laura: And so even though I didn’t improvise on my violin, I was aware of improvisation. In fact, I started improvising vocally when I was really young and I don’t even think I was aware, except that I have very vivid memories of my parents asking me to stop singing sometimes because I think it just drove them crazy. And I would listen to Vivaldi’s four seasons so often, this was one of my favorite LPs. And I have memories of singing it and singing one of the concertos I think spring and then deviating and kind of inventing my own melodies, but not really differentiating the two, not really packing Vivaldi and Laura. And that was probably the first time I’ve ever improvised.

Laura: Absolutely I never… I didn’t have a lot of facility on the violin. And this comes as a surprise to some of my students, but I found violin extremely difficult as a child and as a team. And I think it was only through sheer force of will and the fact that I loved making music so much that I ended up pursuing it in university because it never would have occurred to me to improvise on my violin. Now, I think if I had had a teacher who had introduced it to me in a way that made it approachable and doable, I would have done it because I was a pretty beautiful student.

Laura: But I did improvise on the piano. I studied piano starting at the age of six or seven. And when I was a young teenager, a little bit full of angst I’d come home from school and just sit at the piano when I was supposed to be practicing, and I would start my practices by improvising, again, not fully aware that that’s what I was doing, not labeling it. And I had invented a little chaconne, and I didn’t actually know what a chaconne was. But now in retrospect, I remember having done that I’d created a little baseline for myself. And I think it was in D Dorian again, not knowing modes. And I would play the bass in the left hand and just improvising the right over and over. And it was just a way to funnel whatever the stuff from the day when you’re 14, 13 and you have emotion to process. And then I would get into my practice, usually with a little prodding from my mom.

Christopher: Got you. And so how did you get from there to where you are now? Where did an improvisation on the violin enter the picture? Was it a natural extension of what you were doing on piano?

Laura: It was absolutely not a natural extension of what I was doing on the piano. At the end of graduate school, I had had some colleagues who had participated in a program in the US, I, of course live in Canada. And it was a program that specialized in improvisation jazz and fill music. And I thought this would be so great. Plus it was free. If you could send an audition and they accepted you, all you have to pay was airfare. And you had four weeks in sunny California, which really appealed to me.

Laura: And so back in 2001, I was accepted to this four week program. And I went so excited to dip my toes into improvisation. I could play a few jazz standards just by ear with my dad, but I never improvised, I would just play the melody, and then he would improvise. And then I play the melody again at the end. So I was really excited to learn about this. And I went there with huge high expectations. And it turned out to be a really interesting program in that we had a big chunk of our time devoted to just being in an orchestra rehearsal, which after years of youth orchestra and university orchestra that was really familiar, only we played jazz arrangements, but still you’re not improvising, you’re reading the part.

Laura: And then there were these jazz classes for the newbies because this program had very seasoned improvisers, and also straight classical musicians, which I was a part of. And I remember going to… There were some jazz swing classes, which basically just consisted of us playing a descending mixolydian scale over and over to a swung beat, it didn’t really feel like we were learning anything. And then we would just watch really good players play but not really play ourselves. And then there was a blues class and I was so excited because I really liked the blues. And I was like, “I think I could do this if weren’t a key that weren’t too crazy,” because improvising in harder keys on your instrument is harder even if you’re a good player.

Laura: And I got there and there was a Grammy Award winning coach, I think this is going to be so great. And they had some great backup players playing a groove for us. And they explained the blues and they put it up on the board and what the notes were that we could play. And then they went around the room to the newbies, then I realized I was about fifth, and there were about 10 of us, that this so called wonderful coach was yelling. If he perceived that you didn’t quite know what to do, if you were searching and you didn’t quite have a confident approach from the start, he would just yell a note at you and tell you to play that note.

Laura: And when he came to me, because I hadn’t quite decided what note I was going to play, and perhaps I looked a little hesitant. He just yelled a note. “That wasn’t really the note I want to play, but just give me a second. I have a few notes to choose from. I’m just looking and I’m listening and you’re interfering with that process.” Now, hindsight it’s 2020 and I realized now what was happening that he interfered with my process, not only because he was being aggressive about it and truly yelling to cut through the sound of the band, but also he didn’t give me a chance to just listen, see what my options were. Or not even see my options were, so just use my ear and see what it was I chose to play.

Laura: And so I left that class so dis-heartened. And I mean, I had looked forward to it so much and so it was like plummeting, an emotional plummeting, and a musical plummeting and thinking there must be a different way. And I think I probably just went and got a coffee and read a book for while to try to put it out of my mind. And that evening, came back to the practice rooms to practice as one does in these summer music programs, and one of my colleagues who was actually there to study violin, but was also a really fine pianist. He was in a practice room, playing piano, and I think heard a while and I knocked on his door and we started chatting about the day and I just told him about this experience that I found very disappointing. And he said, “Just a second, just a second. I’m developing a new system. I’m actually a jazz pianist. I know I’m here for violin but jazz piano is my main thing.”

Laura: And he said, “You’re good player. You know E major, you know how to play an E major. Mendelssohn Concerto last movement. I know you know that.” So he just started arpeggiating and he would record with no really perceptible sense of time and no change. It was just E major and here he is on the keyboard. And I unpacked my violin and I started to play and time stood still, or time went by really fast, I lost complete sense of time, which I didn’t know what goes on in the brain when we improvise, and we’re in that flow. I know that’s because the prefrontal cortex shuts down and the medial frontal cortex lights up and so we do lose a sense of time. And also I felt an overwhelming sense of calm and bliss and capacity to do this.

Laura: So we finished playing and again, I have no idea how long we played for. It felt like no time at all and it felt like hours and I’m sure I had a huge smile on my face and maybe I even welled up a bit. And I thanked him and we talked some more and then I just went on my day, I probably didn’t even go and practice I probably went back to the dorm just to revel in that. And that experience sat with me for years. After that California four weeks intensive program, I participated in some jazz camps, pure jazz camps outside of Ottawa, which is where I live.

Laura: And they were really focused on jazz, and we would be in a combo and that experience of just knowing that I can access that freedom, that that was available to me, given the environment. So there is a link, of course with Suzuki that the environment shaped the outcome. Knowing that that was accessible to me, really made everything else possible. It made it possible for me to be in a jazz combo, not be too sure of the chords because they’re going by fast and deciding not to let that worry me too much. And just using my ear and listening and finding notes I could and I took lots of lessons and participated in these camps, that that first experience with that colleague, sowed the seeds for seeing that capability in myself, and I’m sure it sowed the seeds for seeing that capability in all my students.

Christopher: Fantastic. Yeah, I think it can’t be underestimated how important that mindset is when it comes to improvisation. It depends on your background for sure. But we literally, we call our first improvisation module inside musical you approaching improvisation. And it’s mostly just about mindset and about thinking about making mistakes and about taking some ownership and agency of the sounds you’re going to make on your instrument, because I think until you flip that switch, and you say I can improvise, there’s no point learning all the scales and the rules and the vocab is there.

Laura: No.

Christopher: So I think it’s so interesting to hear you had that critical, pivotal experience. And what I’d like to know most is you mentioned those ongoing jazz workshops, but could you tell us a bit more about how you built on that, once that gateway had been opened for you? I’m sure people listening and watching they’re like, so was she just magically a great sounding improviser after that or did she still have to learn how to improvise or how does that work?

Laura: So I think that all of us as musicians, and I think this is regardless of level, I think there’s a lot that we can access that we don’t access when we play. And I think that experience of feeling that I could with that colleague in that practice room, then gave me this courage, but also allowed me in circumstances that followed being in a jazz combo at a camp or because of the experience at the camp, a musician hearing the play and saying, “Oh, she’s kind of good. She plays jazz violin, but it’s not like Stephane Grappelli. It’s her own thing,” and then asking me to come play. I started playing for these brunch, jazz brunches at this little restaurant in Ottawa. So very small audience, very small band and I play on just a few tunes.

Laura: And what that did was, because I had grown up listening jazz I already knew the language without knowing I knew the language. It had already been sown. Those other seeds, the seeds of understanding the jazz language had been sown. And my father had never formally taught us very much, but he did explain a little bit how jazz works. At first we play the tune through and that’s called the head, and then each player in the band might do a solo over the chord progression or the chord changes of that. So I knew that again, these are things he had mentioned when I was young. And sometimes with parents you selectively listen even when they can be just brilliant lessons and things you’re going to use later on.

Laura: So he had said these things and then it was like a part of my brain opened up and these ideas came back, reinforced by my experiences at these jazz camps, and then playing with actual jazz colleagues. And I started going to jam sessions in Ottawa. And it’s not like New York City. I mean, there’s some great players, but there’s also room for less experienced players at the jam sessions, and definitely I was a very experienced classical player, but definitely less experienced. And I had a good friend who was a bass player and we would go up and do totally experimental stuff at the end of the jam session when people were not really paying attention and enjoying a few drinks.

Laura: And that was, again, that was great, because it just gave me the chance to play. And so I think it’s a combination of luck, because there’s luck involved, but also having had the early experiences of being exposed to jazz. Now, that doesn’t say that if you didn’t have the early experiences of being exposed to jazz, that you can’t compensate for that I had them all accidentally because I thought to play jazz and play jazz albums in-house. You can certainly do that intentionally and listen to jazz on your own and go to shows and listen to recordings and nourish your understanding of jazz harmony that way. And then through listening it will inform the choices you make when you play.

Christopher: Cool. Well, I knew we were kindred spirits to begin with. But so much of what you just said is perfectly aligned with the kind of philosophy we take at Musical U, where we really encourage people to believe that they have a lot more musical knowledge dormant inside them than they realize. And with the right tools in the right approaches, they can really leverage that to sound good quickly, rather than needing to study everything from scratch. But I want to make sure we clarify something for those following along and you emphasize jazz there and the importance of that early jazz education. Were you doing that because jazz is particularly important for improvising in general, or is it because in those years, your improv was in a jazz context?

Laura: More the latter. In those years, my improv was more in a jazz context, in part because that’s what was available to me. In the early 2000s, it was jazz that was available to me and it didn’t occur to me to introduce improvisation to my students until I was invited to participate as a teacher to a teacher workshop. There was a guest teacher. Her name is Dr. Sarah Smolin and she’s based in Ithaca, New York. And she came up to Ottawa to give a workshop to one of the big Suzuki schools in town and I’m an independent teacher, and they very graciously invited me to participate.

Laura: And she talked about this philosophy called creative ability development, which focuses on teaching improvisation to classically trained string and piano students. And I stat with… I mean, I don’t think I breathed for the whole workshop, it was so in line with what I was doing with jazz, and it was the perfect timing for that. And so right away, she and I really hit it off and I invited her to come listen to some jazz with me. I had a friend who was playing and we went and we talked so much and she encouraged me to nourish my own creative voice by attending a wall-to-wall five day improvisation workshop not focused exclusively on jazz, but really focused on the gamut, called the art of improvisation.

Laura: And I did that in the summer of 2003. And that made it so that I wasn’t able to just improvise in jazz, but because I had all these classical chops when we go to school and learn all our concertos, I was able to improvise in a classical setting, or put down my violin and play the drums. I mean, it was such a magical five days and it left me feeling like I was even more capable than before. And so much so that I kept looking at the calendar every year to see the next time I could go and I did end up going again in 2007. And having an even better time because by then I’d already been teaching improvisation to my students more regularly, I’d been performing more, and I was more confident in my abilities as an improviser.

Christopher: So something we’ve covered a fair bit on this show before is the apparent mystery of improvising, because for those who don’t do it, it can seem so mysterious, so magical. And when you look around, there are various schools of thought on how one learns to improvise. And I won’t take us down a rabbit hole there, but it prompts me to want to ask, thinking of that art of improvisation workshop you attended. You mentioned that five days back-to-back all improv focus different genres, but what were they teaching? What were they equipping you with to take you from, I’m doing improv to I’m now better at doing improv?

Laura: So I have a confession to make. I peeked at one of the instructors notebooks, I think we were laying our cases down on a table and I saw some open notebooks, and I saw my name and of course, anyone who sees their name is drawn to it. It’s possible not to be I think that’s psychological. And somehow, I don’t know if they still run the the workshop this way because there must have been 50 of us or 70 of us participating, it seemed quite large. There were notes about what my goals were because when I’d registered, I’d said, one of my goals as an improviser, was to be comfortable in the higher positions. Was for my improvisation technique to be at the level of my playing technique, because I felt like my playing of orchestral music was here and my improv, like I never went past third position or below. I really stayed in the lower part of the instrument where I felt comfortable.

Laura: And so incredibly at certain points in the workshop… At one point in the workshop, one of the instructors had me stand. I’m pretty sure it was in front of everybody. We’d have these big sessions every morning and then we break up into smaller groups throughout the day. And he had me play and sing at the same time, in fourth position on the A string on the violin and my voice is not as high as it was in 2003. But he said, “Just sing what you play, or play what you sing,” rather. And there must have been some background something maybe he said at the piano. I don’t really remember. And all eyes were on me. It was a very weird experience. But he was David Darling who’s one of the great improvising musicians of our time, Grammy Award winning Renegade cellist, maybe renegades the wrong word, but I think he was seen as a renegade for at least part of his career.

Laura: And here, he was telling me to do this. And so I did it. And that connection between my voice and my playing was very meaningful. That was another very meaningful experience. And I’m going to pair that with four years later when I returned in 2007. I had a private lesson with him, I said you could sign up for private lessons. And I didn’t really know what we were going to do if he was going to have me do exercises and he said, “Oh, you, you can play.” We were sitting with his cello and I unpacked my violin, and we played for an hour. There was no format. There was no talking there was only laughing we would finish something and then we’d laugh. And I think it was like two enormous 30 minute pieces that we just created spontaneously, and was so incredibly inspiring.

Laura: And again, it’s a situation where you suddenly feel this is possible and accessible to me, given the environment that I’m in. I know for a fact I’m a person who feeds off the musical energy of my colleagues, chamber music is my absolute favorite thing to do. And I have a trio and I always feel so energized after we rehearse. And so I know that practicing alone with recordings is not the same. But between those chances that you have to have those really great experiences with colleagues, you do have to find a way to keep nourishing your own creative voice. And so I feel very fortunate that I’ve had these incredible group experiences, and one on one experiences. But also I’ve found a way through the creative ability development approach to keep the creative juices flowing, so to speak.

Christopher: Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit more about that if we may, because I believe it’s a big part now of how you teach improv to your students. What is the creative ability development framework?

Laura: So the creative ability development is a philosophy that uses musical improvisation to nurture and grow the creative side of the brain. So just the way the Suzuki philosophy is about helping children become noble adults. The creative ability development is about developing the creative ability in the brain, over and above its use in music, but it uses music improvisation as a vehicle as a tool for that. The person who developed the philosophy, her name is Alice Kanack, K-A-N-A-C-K and she has her own school in Rochester, New York and you can definitely look her up online.

Laura: And she came up with this philosophy in the 1980s when she was teaching violin in New York City. Her background is as a violinist and violistin composer and she had in her teaching studio someone who I’m sure she would agree because she told me this, we would call the unteachable student. I use air quotes, and that’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s a student who doesn’t seem to be able to learn, given any approach, whether it’s scales, or just read a basic orchestra part. And so I think this was a student who’d been passed from one teacher to another. And so here the student arrived in her studio and she mentions the student in her own philosophy text, which is found at the beginning of all her music publications.

Laura: And she just thought, okay, maybe he needs a different approach. And because she had a composition background, a master’s in composition, she just started playing on the piano some basic chord structures in the easiest key for violin, which is A major, that’s the first key violinists learn in. And pretty soon he was able to play in tune because he was tuning to the piano and choosing the notes he wanted to play. And so if he wanted to C sharp if you mind said, I want to hear C sharp, he would adjust his finger to make sure the C sharp was in tune with the chords she was playing on the piano. And so she had kind of an aha moment where she thought, wait a second, this is not just a way for us to pass the time in the lesson. He’s actually getting something really profound out of this.

Laura: And so she developed a full methodology, including pre-recorded tracks, and at the time, cassette tapes, and now CDs and hopefully in the future MP3s, where children play along with a given track for two to three weeks as a creativity etude. And the tracks range from two to five minutes long. And the child does it for about as long as they want. Sometimes I have students who want to do it twice when they’re at home and others, it’s a longer track, they’ll just play for 45 seconds or so as long as they do it regularly the same way we ask our students to play scales and etudes and other technical exercises.

Laura: And the approach is so step by step and mirrors the key structure of Suzuki book 1 for violin and then she wrote and recorded one for viola and cello so it mirrors the key structure for viola and cello, which is a fifth lower than violin. And then she wrote one for piano, and I believe for piano it focuses on F sharp pentatonic and then C major in the mode of C. So for violin for instance, it starts in A major and then goes to D pentatonic and B minor blues, and B minor blues and D pentatonic is the same notes. It’s really easy on the violin, actually. You don’t have to think about it too hard. You just say what fingers to use and what strings and suddenly the violinist is improvising in D pentatonic and everything sounds good because in the pentatonic scale, every note sounds good with every other node. So it’s incredibly satisfying.

Laura: And then it’s until the end, there are 28 tracks in that first book. At the end, it’s all G major and the modes of G. So the way the recordings are structured, you’re playing in G major first and then you tell your student, it’s still in G major, but then it’s in A Dorian, or D Mixolydian. And they don’t have to know that. They just have to know they still stick around in G major, and you could suggest it’s in G major, but you might want to start on an A, you might want to hang around A if it’s an A Dorian, for instance. But I’ve sort of gotten a few steps ahead, but that’s a little bit of the approach. Did you want me to give a little demonstration?

Christopher: Please do, yeah.

Laura: Okay, so I’m going to turn on my Bluetooth speaker and my iPad here. So the very first exercise that I get my students to improvise with, the first track has a title and it’s called What’s The Answer to My Question? And that’s because the violin on the track plays a chord progression, a baseline, but plays it in a soprano register. And all my students learn to sing that before they play. So they start by singing it. And there’s a periodicity to this particular track. So first, the violin plays that baseline in a soprano register, and then it gets transferred to the cello in the left hand of the piano and there’s different harmonizations. No, the harmonizations are the same, but different textures of accompaniment.

Laura: And when you hear it, it’s going to sound quite thick, because beginning improvisers need a place to hide. They need to go into the music to find what their voice is, and this process can take up to three years of daily practice of the exercise so that we’re not getting, right away, hardcore playing. In fact, it often surprises parents that they’ll have a very outgoing child who plays their pieces like this and then they improvise like this. One other thing I want to say before I play is, Alice came up with three rules that I have passed along to my students as well. And when it’s time to improvise, we create a bubble protected by these three rules.

Laura: Rule number one is that there’s no such thing as a mistake. And that includes technique on the instrument. So once we get everything set up beautifully, the mom can’t come and fix the wrist and can’t say, “Your pinkie is not curved.” We leave the child alone and of course, we want everything set up beautifully before we start. Rule number two is applause and silence. So we keep quiet while that child is playing and we clap at the end to show appreciation for the effort and for the creation. And when we play together when I do improvisation games with all my students, we clap to say thank you for sharing your idea with me, because of course, we know great improvisers borrow from each other constantly.

Laura: And then rule number three is never criticize a friend. And this is a very important rule for parents, especially the most diligent parents, who will say, when the child’s searching for a note, “Why don’t you just play a C sharp? Just play an open string,” and who get to feel a little bit of anxiety. And I know it seems like I’m parodying, but the anxiety is real. They really want so much for their child and they don’t realize that this is like watering a seed that you water the seed and give it sunlight, but you don’t yell at it if you don’t see a sprout right away. Because of course, it’s developing the root first. So a lot of the work is going on behind the scenes and very quietly as the child’s voice emerges.

Laura: So, with that long preamble, I’m going to play what is called the creative ability development twinkle. It’s what’s the answer to my question and you’ll pardon my voice because I’m going to sing the way I asked my students to sing. Then I’m going to play like a somewhat beginner student would play, a students who can play the A major scale and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

Laura: (Plays Vioilin)

Laura: It’s a pretty long track it’s about four minutes long. And it’s so lovely because the periodicity of the chords allow the child to experientially understand the concept of a passacaglia without burdening them with the label passacaglia when they’re five. We can attach a label later on.

Christopher: And for those who aren’t classically trained, what is a passacaglia?

Laura: Oh, the passacaglia is a composition based on a recurring bassline. Usually, it’s in three. This passacaglia is in two so usually a passacaglia will be 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And over top of the bassline, the melodies and the counter melodies will change, but the harmonic structure will stay the same.

Christopher: Thank you. And I think that gives a really great taste of what this approach can look like and what you might be doing in your lessons with your students. I wonder if we could use that maybe as a way to pick apart what matters and what doesn’t in this world view on improvisation because as I alluded to earlier, there’s a lot of different schools of thought. And in particular, what I’d love to hear you speak on is the relationship between improvising and instinct and music theory rules and memorized vocab and ear training skills. When you’re teaching your students improvisation, what’s the balance between those or which feature and which don’t?

Laura: So the younger the students is, the less information you give them that is not relevant. And that is not relevant, I know is subjective. But with a student that starts with me. So let’s say it’s a five or six year old beginner, we allow the setup to happen, I will probably do some improvisation using the piano with a different book, just as we wait for the physical to gel on the instrument. And then when we move to the violin, because at that point, they’re only playing in A major, I may say stick to the A and the E strings just so they don’t go on the low strings.

Laura: So they’re the three rules that govern how improvisation happens in the studio. And then there are rules or parameters for each of the exercises. And it’s hard to balance those two because sometimes a child will make what I call ugly sounds on purpose. So they know there’s no such thing as a mistake. So they’ll look, sometimes they’ll stare right at their mom, which is a bit of another topic. But as long as the instrument is fine, we know that there is music out there that is not beautiful. We know that there is art, great art that is not about beauty, but it’s about a search for truth, or it’s about sarcasm, or cynicism. And I think it’s okay to let a child do that.

Laura: But coming back to the theory, I will just tell them the finger pattern. So if they only play an A major, all I have to say is you can play any note you want on the A and E string. If they play in other keys, if they play, for instance, also in G major, but they’re starting improvisation, and we start an A major I will say just stick to the A and E strings and keep your second finger touching your third finger. And this can seem anti-theoretical, and it’s not that I’m not teaching theory to my students, when my students will learn scales, learn the name of the scale and the name of the notes, and they know what they’re playing. But when it comes time to improvise for young children, that’s too much information.

Laura: Now, the differences with teenagers, I’ve often been asked to teach workshops. I’ve worked with a string program at a local arts high school where I’ve gone several times over several weeks to work with the grade nines there. And in that situation, they need more information. They need information, because for them, it’s a comfort, they need to know why they’re being asked to do this. And of course, teenagers are usually self conscious, particularly when asked to do something outside of their comfort zone in front of their peers. And so when I do work with preteens and teens who have not been improvising from the start, I give them a lot more background information. It’s a little more wordy.

Laura: And when I work with my own teenage students, I do say, “Today we’re going to learn the blue scale.” And we learned the blues scale and I even have some written materials. “We’re going to play it off a page. We’re going to do a B minor blues. And let’s play this B minor blues or we’re going to do D Dorian. And Can anyone tell me D Dorian is in the same key signature as what key?” And they… “Oh, okay,” and they try… I said there’s no sharps, there’s no flats. “Okay, it’s C major.” So we’ve definitely talk about theory with my older students. So it’s about being sensitive to the needs of those children.

Laura: Now, my older students now have all been improvising since they were little. And so when I introduce a key to them, it’s not a burden, because they already know how to improvise and they know that if they play a C sharp in D Dorian or an F sharp, they will hear it immediately, first of all. But me having told them the scale is less important than how they decide… What they decide to do with that note, that “outside note”, note outside of the key. I don’t know. I think that answers your question and then some.

Christopher: It’s really helpful. Thank you. And is there any… How do you help them develop their judgment or their taste or their experiential output in improvising? I ask because we do it a certain way at Musical U and I’m curious to know, is that conversation happening? Are you exploring with them, “Hey, how did that improvisation go?” Or is it kind of respected as a closed bubble that that’s that and they do it their way?

Laura: So that’s a really good question. And if I notice that a student, who… If it seems like a student hasn’t really been practicing their improvisation, and I think that would be when I’ve assigned the exercise, when they come to it, and they don’t really seem sure at all of what their choices are, then the first question is, how often did you do this, this past week? Because if I just assume they’ve done it every day, then that’s not helpful. So, assuming they’ve done it every day then… I have this one student, and he’s a real, real analytical teenager, he’s going to be a brilliant scientist, he’s going to make some fabulous discoveries. And he also plays the violin. He tends to fall into this one bowing pattern that he does all the time. And that’s where he’s comfortable. Now, the notes always change but he’s always doing the same slur pattern.

Laura: So, once in improvisation is over. Like you said, I don’t go back and analyze it with him. We don’t take it apart, but I then add another rule. I’ll say, “Okay, I want you to do this exercise again. And this time, every time the passacaglia comes back, I want you to change articulations.” I said, “It can be as simple as doing one legato, one staccato, one legato, one staccato if you want to do that.” And then he’ll do that. And I’ll say, “Okay, let’s do a different rule. How about this time, you have to change rhythms every time the passacaglia comes back?”

Laura: And so the way you address what could seem to be like a student being stuck in a certain way of playing, this is assuming the student is actually practicing, it’s just to create another rule. It’s just to give them another parameter to be within or I’ll say, “Okay, now this time, it can only be staccato, and you have to put at least two rests in there. I want to hear to rest if you need to take your bow off the string you take your off the string,” or a student who’s really afraid to go in through a position to improvise are up higher than first position, I’ll say, “This improvisation is only in third position. You have the choice of how many notes you want to play,” basically telling them one note is fine, but they’ve got to get in third position and stay in third position for the minute and a half, or whatever it is.

Laura: And of course, even if I say, “You can only play one note, if you feel like it,” they will inevitably play more notes. And maybe try to go down and then giggle. But it’s never seen as a discounting of what their previous improvisation was. I never have had to go there because then what’s happening is they will not feel safe. And, above all, I want them to feel like they’re safe because through that feeling of safety comes freedom. And then the paradox with improvisation is the more strict you make the parameters, the more creative they need to get, and the more that will push them gently, not necessarily totally out of their comfort zone, but I like to think of it as making their comfort bigger.

Christopher: Absolutely fantastic. Thank you. Well, that really adds a lot of interesting detail and ideas, I’m sure for some in our audience to take away and start applying for themselves. You’ve been using this approach in your teaching for over a decade, I believe and working with children and with adults. Recently, you’ve been moving more into helping other teachers adopt some of these ideas. Could you tell us a bit about what you’re up to over on your Facebook page with that?

Laura: Yes, well, I’ve been a creative ability development improvisation teacher trainer and coach since 2016. And I’ve held in-person workshops here where I live and also in Montreal, and informally in the United States. When I was teaching at a Suzuki Institute, some colleagues who knew what I was up to said, “Please, please, we have an hour and a half free, can you give us a workshop?” So we found a room and this camp and without any of my notes, I did a teacher training session. So I’ve been doing these in-person teacher training sessions, and now I’ve started to go online, which has been really interesting.

Laura: So on my Facebook page at Lauren Zarya Nerenberg, if you go to Facebook, and if you can’t remember, my middle name is Zarya, you can just search up my whole name and eventually you’ll find me. I’ve been posting videos about different aspects about teaching improvisation to children. Because I’ve been doing this for so long and I have maybe a slightly unusual background with the jazz having nourished my creative side when I was young. I realized that many, many classical teachers are interested in offering this to their students, but they’re just not sure where to start. And for many of them, they assume improvisation equals jazz. And of course, we absolutely know that’s not true.

Laura: I believe you’ve had Jeffrey Agrell on your podcast. He’s someone that I’m familiar with and I’ve been in contact with him and I’ve heard him on other podcasts as well. And he said something once that really stuck with me, he said, “For the vast majority of the history of music, creating our own music, improvising was a normal way of music making.” And it’s only relatively recently in the history of music, that it’s left the world of classical music and has been relegated to other genres. So jazz for sure and country and fiddling. And then in the classical world, it’s only the organists who still improvise regularly. And that’s great for them and it’s great for the parishioners and for the bride and groom, but I think it’s something that’s lacking.

Laura: And if we think of Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, these are the monuments of the world of classical music and they were also incredible improvisers, very much admired for their skills and as improvisers. It just so happened that these three were triple threats. They could improvise, they could play brilliantly and they could compose. Well, that’s great. I think most of us are not going to be triple threats, but that doesn’t preclude us from also doing these other things. Not only playing the music written by another person, but by allowing ourselves to see what we have to create.

Laura: And just because I’m not Stephane Grappelli, or I’m not Wynton Marsalis or Miles Davis, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have something to say, and that it ends there. I think we wouldn’t tell someone to stop learning to play the violin, or you’re never going to be Itzhak Perlman, so you might as well quit now. Thank goodness, you’re not going to be Itzhak Perlman, the world doesn’t have room for millions of Itzhak Perlmans. But I think the same way amateurs feel drawn to studying an instrument, why should improvisation only be reserved for those who may already be creative? More air quotes.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, it’ll come as no surprise to regular listeners to this show that I couldn’t agree more with everything you just said. I really applaud the work you do and I’ve really enjoyed digging into some of the videos on your Facebook page. So I’d really encourage anyone to check that out. We’ll have a direct link in the show notes. If you can’t remember, Laura Zarya Nerenburg to type into Facebook search, and we’ll also link to the other resources mentioned in this conversation. Laura, it’s been such a pleasure as I suspected it would be to get to unpack some of this and hear more about your teaching approach. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today.

Laura: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure for me, Christopher.

The post Creative Improv for Classical Musicians, with Laura Nerenberg appeared first on Musical U.

Joanne’s musical life has never been the same since she started using Band in a Box. She went from writing zero songs to writing and covering hundreds of songs! She has learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way, so we were excited to have Joanne on the show to share her musical journey.

In this conversation Joanne shares:

• How Band In A Box made a life-changing impact on her song-writing and musical performance.
• How she used performing with backing tracks as a stepping stone to accompanying herself.
• The simple and specific song-writing process you can try if you’re just starting out.

If you’ve never tried song writing, are nervous performing, or you’ve never come across the Band In A Box software, this episode will enlighten you.

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.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• • Joanne Cooper Online
  • Joanne Cooper – First Song with Band-in-a-Box for Windows video course
  • Band-in-a-Box 101: A beginners guide to making and performing with Band-in-a-Box backing tracks by Joanne Cooper
  • How To Make A Backing Track, with Joanne Cooper
  • How To Make A Backing Track with Band-in-a-Box YouTube Video
  • Band-in-a-Box for Windows and Mac
  • Joanne’s Extensive Playlists of Videos on YouTube
  • Musicality Now – About the I, IV, V and vi Chords

Transcript

Joanne: Hi this is Joanne Coooper, I’m a singer-songwriter from Johannesburg, South Africa, and this is Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Joanne, thank you for joining us today.

Joanne: Thanks so much Christopher. I’m really looking forward to this interview.

Christopher: So, I’ve had the chance to get to know you a little bit. We’ve spoken a couple of times before and you’re a member of Musical U, but I only know a little bit about your back story. So I’d love if we could start out there and I know you got started with music early in your early teens, is that right?

Joanne: Yeah, at about 13 was when I first started playing the guitar. Although I loved to sing way before that and I kind of harbored some secret desires to be in one of those shows, those musical shows. But I came from a very unmusical family, so I had no idea how to go about doing that or anything. And at 13, I persuaded my mum to buy me a guitar and mainly because all my friends were learning to play the guitar and she bought me a guitar, which was very surprising because I never … always, I didn’t usually get what I wanted, what I asked for and she went ahead and bought me that guitar. I was brought up in Zimbabwe so she had traveled down from Zimbabwe to South Africa and had bought me a Washburn nylon string guitar and had smuggled it back through the border on her back. And we all thought it was terribly funny because my mom was acting like she was a hippie, but actually, she was probably a lot younger than I am now. It really was quite funny.

Joanne: But I started playing the guitar and have played all my life. But giving away my age, I obviously started playing long before there was any internet or any way of learning songs. So I went and bought myself a John Denver play along book and one of the songbooks that you used to buy with all the chords and the lyrics and everything in it, and I learned all those songs. And then, just really started playing by ear because that was the only way to learn, I wasn’t going to lessons or anything. And I used to hear a song that I would like to be able to play and I would just listen to it and write up the lyrics by hand, and then switch the record off and then just try and work out the chords and sing along, doing my own thing.

Joanne: So I never really worried that much about sounding like the recording because I ended up, everything was A, D and E. And I couldn’t really understand why everything that I ended up working out was an A, D and E. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve discovered that that’s the one, four and five in my key, my favorite key of A. So, played guitar growing up, played at people’s weddings and around the campfire. And then joined up with a friend of mine called Karen in 1998 and had a little band called Ellis Band, which we thought was very cute, and we used to go around to all the clubs and play with backing tracks. And then she left in 2000 and never really came back to South Africa.

Joanne: So I kind of hang up my guitar for quite a few years. I got married and had kids, and then in about 2014 I took up singing lessons and that revived my interest again in making music. And then shortly after, no sorry, it was about 2010 actually that I started the singing lessons. And shortly after that I discovered Band In A Box on the internet and I bought the tool and downloaded it and immediately started writing songs and recording songs and have been very, very active with Band In A Box. Since then, I’ve written hundreds of songs and recorded hundreds of songs, covers and originals. And became a reseller of Band In A Box last year. So I’ve got a little online business around Band In A Box, I did a course, I did a video for you guys. I made a video that’s done really well actually on YouTube, on how to use Band In A Box, making backing tracks and recording song and wrote an ebook. So I’ve got a small online business doing that.

Joanne: And then, in about 2014 I started making these play along videos, because I was gigging on my own with back tracks, and I decided that if I could make karaoke type videos with the chords and lyrics, then I wouldn’t need to take along a songbook with the chords and lyrics written out. So I made these karaoke videos for my own repertoire. It’s basically a foolproof way of being able to perform, you’re not going to make any mistakes with chords and lyrics and you’re not going to forget what they are, and I’m notoriously bad with chords and lyrics. And then I decided … I wondered if other people would be interested in these videos. I put them on YouTube and it’s been absolutely phenomenal.

Joanne: My YouTube channel has taken off with these play along videos, people absolutely love them. And what I do is I just take popular songs and I make these karaoke type videos. So that’s a big part of my business now, a major part of my income on my online business. And that’s where I am now, I’m doing a lot of performing, live performing now, so I’ve kind of dropped my back tracks now. I don’t generally perform with back tracks anymore. My guitar playing has improved enough that I can perform just with me and my guitar. I’m not a fantastic guitar player, but your site has helped me get confidence that I can perform on my own with just my guitar. I generally just sing loudly to drown out my bad guitar playing.

Christopher: I know guitarists who do the opposite. They play loudly to drown out their singing.

Joanne: Yeah, yeah. I just sing loudly. And I’ve actually recently, well in the last couple of years, teamed up with a really young guitarist and he’s brilliant and he compliments me nicely. But it’s still nice to be able to play on my own, so I do perform a lot of folk clubs and I’ve performed in four national arts festivals, and I’m hopefully going to be accepted for my fifth national art festival. So I go down to Grahamstown and I put on a little one woman show. And there, I specifically say in the adverts, don’t come if you don’t like folk music because there’s going to be three quarters of an hour of folk music, just me and my guitar. So yeah, that’s where I am at the moment, it keeps me very busy. It’s not my full-time job. I am a computer business analyst during the day, working full-time for a FinTech company. So it’s a hobby, but hopefully, who knows maybe it can evolve into a more full-time job in the future.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well, I think the thing I was most keen to unpack with you today was the intersection maybe of creativity and technology. And you mentioned Band In A Box, and as you say, you did a guest video for our YouTube channel a couple of years ago, I think.

Joanne: Yeah, it was.

Christopher: Which is consistently one of the most popular videos on our channel. And it’s just-

Joanne: Amazing.

Christopher: It’s such an interesting area because I think the people who know and use Band In A Box absolutely love it. And yet the majority of music learners, I think it’s fair to say, don’t really know about it. So I definitely want to talk specifically about Band In A Box, but maybe before we do that, we could go back to some of the early years and the roots of your creativity, because you’re clearly a very creative and capable person and you’ve been growing into this identity as a musician who is out there performing and is writing songs and is helping others to use technology to write songs. Was that always the case, were you a teenage kid who was scribbling down song lyrics in lessons and that kind of thing?

Joanne: Definitely always scribbling down lyrics, always scribbling down lyrics. And I still got lots of lyrics in my repertoire of misheard lyrics, but are so in me thatI can’t get past it. Anyway, but I don’t know, I think I was always a confident singer, but I’ve never really been a confident guitar player at all. But I always thought that I could do something, I could perform in a pub or … I went, I was in a ski resort for a whole season many, many years ago, and I took my guitar with the idea that I would play in a pub. I mean, there was no way I was going to be able to do that, I just wasn’t at that level. But I think always had the idea that I could get to that level with a bit of work and that’s where Band In A Box came along and just saved me completely, because I’m not a great guitar player.

Joanne: So with Band In A Box, you don’t need to be a great guitar player because they’ve recorded all these fantastic guitar players who can accompany you. So with Band In A Box, I was able to use my voice and make good recordings, without myself having to play my mediocre guitar playing.

Christopher: I see. And for me, I got introduced to Band In A Box back when it looked terrible. Like I have these really vivid memories when I was at university, I was learning blues harmonica with like the one harmonica teacher in Cambridge. And I’d go to his house and we’d have these harmonica lessons, but he had Band In A Box, and it was amazing. He had this old rickety windows PC and he’d click around and suddenly we’d have a 12 bar blues in A, whatever key we wanted to work in. And it was just, at the time it sounded pretty good. These days it has these incredible parts, as you say, that are almost indistinguishable from real music recordings. Whatever you happened to be doing.

Joanne: They are actually real musicians. So what they’ve done is-

Christopher: Exactly. But it’s drawing on the real samples.

Joanne: Yeah. They’ve recorded real samples and the technology actually transposes that into the key that you want and obviously stretches the audio according to your Tempo and things like that. So what year was that when you were first introduced

Christopher: Wow, showing my age now.

Joanne: No, that’s fine.

Christopher: It was in 2002 to 2005, so this was probably 2004.

Joanne: Yeah. So they were probably at that stage completely MIDI based. Whereas now they … I use … The majority of them are real tracks, which are real musicians, yeah. So that, now you’ll find a completely different experience with Band In A Box.

Christopher: Absolutely. And even then though, it was somewhat magical to me and it was so useful. Because I was just learning to play blues harmonica solos, but to be able to just create realistic sounding, to some measure, music tracks on the fly like that was amazing. And it sounds like it was similarly magical for you and like filling a need that you were otherwise having a bit of a struggle with.

Joanne: I think for me, I wanted to, for some reason I wanted to record a CD. I had no idea how to go about doing that, and my guitar playing obviously wasn’t good enough to record. And I also didn’t really know how to go about getting songs, like getting the licenses for cover songs to record cover songs. So that’s when I started writing my own songs, because I figured if I want to write a CD … Sorry, if I want to record a CD, then the easiest way is if I write all the songs, then I don’t have to worry about the licenses and whatever. So that’s what I did, and that’s when I found Band In A Box. So it was really so that I could write my own songs and record them without anybody else being involved and release these CDs. That’s what I started out doing in 2012. The quality of some of these, the work that’s coming out with Band In A Box is incredible. People are getting really, really good at it now, you cannot tell the difference. They’re so good at mixing it so beautifully and doing the arranging, that you really can’t tell the difference.

Christopher: And so, I don’t want to turn this into a full on tutorial, because-

Joanne: No.

Christopher: Not least because you’ve done that for us on our YouTube channel, we can put that in the show notes. But for someone who’s never come across this software and we’re saying, it can produce the backing track or it can help you write a song. Can you just describe like very roughly what it looks like. When you were sitting down and thinking, “I want to make a song, I’ve got this software.” What were you doing and what was the software doing?

Joanne: So if you have got a normal, a chord sheet, like a good old song, let me try and find something here. That you printed from the internet, let’s say, you’ve got something out of Ultimate Guitar, with just the chords and the lyrics. So the chords are above with the song and the lyrics and that’s how you play the guitar. You just open up the program, you change the key of … On a drop down you say, okay, I’m singing in in G or whatever your favorite key is or whatever the chords on the piece of paper are. You change the tempo and then you just type in the … you choose a style and then you type in the chords and you press play and it’ll generate the backing for you. And they as I said, they’re real musicians and they’ve gone and recorded all these samples. So it takes the audio sample that they’ve recorded and it stretches it and it transposes it, so that it fits in with the chords that you just tap into the interface.

Christopher: And so for someone like yourself back then who’s thinking, “I know I can sing, I’ve got these lyrics, I’m writing the songs on my guitar, but I’m not really confident in my guitar playing.” It let you take what you had and produce something that sounded like a real music recording as it were.

Joanne: Exactly, exactly. And a lot of the time I’ve even gone to the extent when I’ve made a video, I’ve had the guitar and I’m playing the guitar as if I’m the one playing the guitar on the recording. So yeah, it really is amazing. It’ll generate backing for you for whatever style you want. So whatever style of music you like it’ll generate the backing for you. And then you obviously make changes to it, you do arranging, you cut out instruments, you put in other instruments, you generate fills, you … It’s quite endless what you can do.

Christopher: I’m glad you mentioned that. Yeah, because it’s not just press a button and this is your option, it’s very conditional and adjustable, right? So you can still feel like you are the one composing it, even if it’s other kind of synthetic musicians that are playing it for you.

Joanne: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well it comes, the Windows version comes with a free DAW called Real Band. So once you’ve generated your basic backing, you open it in Real Band and you can do your normal arrangement. So it puts it in a .wav file and you can do your normal editing and that you would normally do, as if you’ve recorded the audio live in a studio. So, once I’ve written a song, I’ve generated a basic backing track, I open it and Real Band and I make changes and I generate a set, oh that would be nice if a mandolin played those eight bars and then you just generate a mandolin and you put it in those eight bars. And you do your arranging then, so that you make it completely your own.

Christopher: Fantastic. How did your-

Joanne: Does that make any sense?

Christopher: I think it does, yeah. I obviously have a bit of knowledge of the program, but I think even someone who didn’t would follow what we’re talking about there and the usefulness of it. And it sounds like it was something that let you express your creativity in a new way, into a greater extent than you’d been able to just with you in the guitar.

Joanne: Completely. I think it did more than that for me. It actually changed my musical life completely. It really did, it changed my musical life.

Christopher: And so talk a little bit about that. How did your songwriting continue after that first CD you were working on?

Joanne: Oh wow. So yeah, the first, it’s got a very active community, Band In A Box. So what I did was I went onto the forum and I got inspiration from people who had been busy with the program for years. There’s a lot of people on there who know the program inside and out. I listened to these things and I was like, “Wow, can’t believe what these people are able to do with this tool, it’s completely amazing.” After I’d spent a lot of time that I eventually dived in and bought the product and then started out just writing. I had written a song, I think on the guitar, so a few songs. I’d been on some songwriting course or something, so I’d written a song and I just went into Band In A Box and I made a backing track. I remembered it had a violin in some part, and some guitars.

Joanne: And then I very, very self-consciously posted it onto this user forum in the Band In A Box community just to say, this is my first song ever, my first recording ever. And the encouragement that I got from the folks there was unbelievable, it really, really was, it just set me on the path. Because what I’d been doing before that as I’d been … because I come from a technology background, I started out as a programmer and I’ve always been in computers. I had been mucking about with trying to record my voice and my guitar using Mixcraft, I think it was, and I just had a mixer and I just plugged the mixer straight into my laptop and I’d been making these terrible recordings. So I’d been mucking about with that for quite a while before I discovered Band In A Box.

Joanne: Then when I discovered Band In A Box and I discovered that I could just sing and the rest was all taken care of, I literally, ran down the road crying for joy. I was so happy because I didn’t have to muck about with trying to record the guitar and trying to get the top arch to sound nice and it was … just changed my life. So then I started writing regularly, I take part in February Album Writing Month. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, Christopher.

Christopher: No.

Joanne: No? It’s an internet forum where songwriters from all over the world get together for the month of February and everybody attempts to write and record 14 songs in the month of February. So it’s a very collaborative environment. I’m not going to make it this time because I’m going skiing tomorrow, but I’m up to nine songs, so far in February. And so I take part in that I write throughout the years. I write for people if they want me to write songs for them. Yeah. So that’s where it’s taken me. Where Band In A Box has literally taken me with my songwriting.

Christopher: Terrific. And did that just lead naturally to being comfortable performing? Or you mentioned you are getting out and performing now. How did that work?

Joanne: Definitely. I have always being on the fringe in performing. I’ve always performed at the folk club, but never really, really been comfortable. I went to my first National Arts Festival four years ago and I went on my own. And at that National Arts Festival, I took … I made backing tracks and I took backing tracks and I performed quite a lot of original stuff and a few covers with backing tracks. Because I wasn’t confident enough to play my guitar, just me and my guitar. And that was okay, but it was a start.

Joanne: And then the next year, I took my guitarist, Libs, with me. So I had him to back me up on the guitar and he also sings harmony. But I was singing the main lead vocals and he was singing harmony and playing guitar. So he came the first year and in the second year he also came with me. In the fourth year I decided this is crazy, I can actually do this on my own. I can pull it off, I can play the guitar, I can sing folk music and just keep my guitar playing quite simple. That’s what I did last year, I just went down and it was my best year actually. I enjoyed it the most, because you are completely free, it’s just you, you don’t have to worry about anybody else. And I performed 10 to 15 folk songs in the space of three quarters of an hour, and everybody loved it. So yeah, it’s been a long journey, but I think I am at it now.

Joanne: At the last National Arts Festival I said to my daughter, who always comes with me, I said, “You know, for the first time the stage fright has gone, for the first time ever.” And since then the stage fright seems to have gone. So yeah.

Christopher: Wonderful.

Joanne: That’s definitely helped me.

Christopher: Were there any tips or techniques that helped you get to that point? Or do you think it was just a matter of repeat practice and putting yourself out there?

Joanne: Repeating, repeating, repeating. And also knowing, it’s not … nothing’s going to happen to you, you’re not going to die. You just get up and sing and you only can put across what you can do. You can’t be any better, you can’t perform like somebody else. And if you forget your lyrics or you forget your chords, it’s not the end of the world. People don’t mind, they’re grateful that somebody who’s got the guts to get up and perform. So I kind of just forced myself to carry on. Carry on going to open mics without my backing tracks, because I think from the singing lessons I could get up and perform in front of 200 people with a backing track. I was quite fine, there would be no problems with that, but take my backing track away and give me a guitar and my nerves were just completely shot.

Joanne: And since then, I have been working on it, but I think I’m finally at a level where I’ve kind of just accept the type of guitar player that I am and the type of guitar player that I’ve become and appreciated it really. Just appreciated the gifts that I’ve been given and I’ve been able to do, and I get up and I perform and I sing. I just sing, loudly to overcome my bad guitar playing.

Christopher: Wonderful. And you were sharing with me earlier, another performing context at a local music shop that sounded like it was a really great opportunity to kind of get comfortable expressing yourself. Tell us a little bit about that.

Joanne: Yes. That’s so interesting. My friend Libs, works at the local music connection, so I’ve become really good friends with him. And they have open mics to two nights a month, and then on a Saturday morning they set up a PA system outside the shop, just on the porch, just right outside the shop and with a big sign saying, “Just come and jam.” And what’s tended to happen over the last few months, is that I’ve tended to be hosting those sessions. Because the people who work in the shop are busy serving everybody in the inside, so they can’t devote four hours to sitting and encouraging people. So I go there, I plug my guitar in and I just encourage people that are walking in and out to come and jam, in whatever form that takes. If it’s a song that they want to sing or play around with a guitar, or play the bongo drums or the tambourine or whatever they want to do, just come.

Joanne: There’s nobody really even watching, because it’s outside the guitar shop, so nobody’s really paying attention, and people absolutely love it. Most people will say, “Oh no, I can’t sing or whatever.” So I say, “Oh well, what songs do you like?” And try and find some common ground between what I can play on the guitar and what they can sing. And they’ll come up and they’ll sing into the microphone and we’ll have a little session there and then they’ll play the mic … play the tambourine and some people will come along and pick up the bass and start just playing the bass, and it’s been absolutely amazing. It’s really been amazing, because people need to be encouraged. There shouldn’t be any snobbery around music, people should be encouraged. For many years, there’s absolutely no ways I would play a guitar in a guitar shop, I would just be too embarrassed to pick up a guitar and play. And there’s no way, people shouldn’t feel like that, they should just pick up a guitar and play, you know? Nobody cares, just play.

Christopher: Absolutely. It’s funny, people ask fairly often whether we’re planning to do like live events at Musical U, like are we going to get out there and do things in person like workshops or events or like, what’s the word? Evangelizing, I guess. And the answer is no, we’re firmly focused online, for now at least. And I just … I love what you said so much. I think if we were out there with Musical U ambassadors, they would be doing exactly what you just described. I can’t applaud that highly enough, because as you say that there’s no need and no value in the snobbery and it causes such reticence in people to share the musicality they do have. So I think that’s tremendous that you’re out there encouraging people to just pick up something and make a musical noise.

Joanne: Pick up … Yeah, just pick up … And kids, will love to come along and to sing something into the microphone. And even if I just play a couple of chords with them and help them sing or whatever, genuinely I can look up the chords on my iPad and just put something together very quickly, it doesn’t have to be great. But they love it, they absolutely love it.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well we’ve mentioned several of your projects already and we’ll have links in the show notes. I believe your main website is joannecooper.co.za, is that right?

Joanne: That’s right, yes.

Christopher: And so that’s where you’ll find Joanne’s music, her songs that she’s written, as well as the play along videos. And tell us a little bit actually about your Band In A Box course and book you mentioned briefly earlier, but if someone’s listening to this being like, “Oh, that sounds amazing, that’s exactly what I needed. Let me go run and buy it now.” Tell them about the training you offer there.

Joanne: The course, I made a couple of years ago, I think two years ago, it’s called First Song With Band In A Box. So it’s a video course, it’s got 12 or 13 videos and it takes you step-by-step through recording your first song with Band In A Box. So whether that’s an original song or whether it’s a cover song, it doesn’t matter. It takes you all the way through from tapping in the chords to generating a backing, arranging your song, tuning the vocals, if that’s what you want to do, all the way through to releasing it on YouTube or on iTunes and that kind of thing.

Joanne: I think a lot of people do battle with Band In A Box and they’re a little bit overwhelmed because there’s a lot in there. You open this interface and you go, “Oh, there’s so much, and I don’t know what to do.” But actually, if you just start out and you just try and make a simple backing track, and then record yourself singing over that simple backing track, you can get up and running within the hour. Leave off the complicated stuff till later, that’ll come, just start recording with what you’ve got. Don’t worry too much if you haven’t got an excellent microphone, you just need a USB $100 microphone plugged into a laptop.

Joanne: It takes people step-by-step through the process of recording their song, using Band In A Box. And then I wrote an ebook a while back, which is just a beginner’s guide, just to sit using Band In A Box to make a backing track. So as I mentioned, these two products with the Windows Band In A Box, this Band In A Box software named Real Band. So when I’m recording a song from start to finish, I rely heavily on Real Band. But actually, you can do a lot of the functionality just in Band In A Box. The ebook just focuses just on Band In A Box itself, and in the course is Band In A Box and Real Band.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, we’ll definitely have links to all of those in the show notes for this episode. Before we say goodbye, Joanne, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask, since you’re so experienced with songwriting, do you have any tips for those in our audience who want to get into songwriting or have been doing it a while? Are there any things you’ve picked up along the way that particularly helped with that creative outlet?

Joanne: Just start. Just start and write. Just start, really just start. Just write a story, try and make it rhyme or put some sort of cadence to it so that it reads nicely like a book, and then just start putting it to music. What I’ve found is quite an easy way to do, is just start with the one, four, five, the major chords, and just start singing over your chords, until you’ve got a melody, and then start going back and changing the chords and re-harmonizing it a little bit so that you can put some variety. And so, just even changing the major chord for its relative minor, will give it a different feel. But when you’re just starting out, just write a story and just put chords to it to start. Use the one, four, five and just start writing.

Christopher: Terrific. Great advice. Thank you so much Joanne, for joining us on the show today. It’s been really a pleasure to get to hear a bit more about your musical background and your journey and I know that listeners and viewers will have picked up a lot from hearing your story. Thank you again.

Joanne: Thank you so much, Christopher.

The post Pathways: Joanne Cooper appeared first on Musical U.

In this interview, Brent Vaartstra of Learn Jazz Standards and the Passive Income Musician podcast shares his four “defaults”: mindset ideas for getting through this difficult time while staying positive and connected through music.

He talks about:

• The power of gratitude and how to focus on the things you’re grateful for on a daily basis.
• The impact of generosity, and ways to volunteer and donate your resources.
• The importance of community engagement.
• Goal-setting, and how to take this time to invest in your dreams.
• Recognizing the activities and routines that will help you make the most of every day.

Brent’s “defaults” are the perfect antidote to the unusual circumstances we have found ourselves in – his ideas are as helpful for your daily well-being as they are for your musicality. Enjoy!

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• • • Learn Jazz Standards
    • Learn Jazz Standards podcast
    • Passive Income Musician podcast
    • Musicality Now – How to Stop Doubting and Start Performing, with Brent Vaartstra
    • Musicality Now – An Ear for Jazz, with Brent Vaartstra
    • The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being by Hale Dwoskin

    Enjoying Musicality Now? Please support the show by rating and reviewing it!

    Rate and Review!

    Transcript

    Christopher: Hello, this is Christopher Sutton from Musical U. I’m here today with Brent Vaartstra from Learn Jazz Standards and the Passive Income Musician podcast. Brent had a fantastic episode of his own show, the LJS podcast this week in which he shared some of the mindset tips and ideas that are helping him in the current crazy world situation that we’re all finding our way through at the moment.

    Christopher: I wanted to share those with you, our Musical U audience, so I invited Brent onto the show. Aside from just having the chance to catch up with him which is always a good time, I asked him to come on and share those four ideas that he had on his own show. Brent, first off, how are you doing? How are things in New York and what’s the latest?

    Brent: Yeah, doing good, thanks for asking. Like a lot of places around the world like New York is, we’re having a hard time, a lot of businesses closed down, a lot more people getting infected every day or at least reported infected. It’s so strange for such a vibrant city and the strange feeling that’s in the air, but I know a lot of people are struggling with that as well. I’m assuming it’s similar over where you’re at as well.

    Christopher: Exactly. Yeah, here in Valencia we’re in total lockdown, you’re not even allowed to go out for exercise. It’s odd to look out the window and see the streets so empty, but it’s definitely the right move at the moment, and that’s why we’re encouraging people to stay in and play on at the moment with our dedicated website.

    Christopher: I was saying to you before we hit record, I think it’s a bit tricky for people like us who normally do a show about music learning to know what to say at the current time, whether we should just kind of focus in on music learning, or talk more broadly to our audience given that we probably understand a little bit of what they’re going through. I thought you found a beautiful balance on your show this week with your episode, and so I wonder if you could share those four defaults you were saying were particularly helpful for you at the moment.

    Brent: Yeah. I’ve just kind of found some ways in my life when things are challenging or things are tough, some different things that have helped me, and they may not help everybody, but they’re things that helped me and I wanted to share with my audience those things.

    Brent: They don’t hear from me often like you said about things about personal life or personal development at all, I teach jazz. I think those things are so important right now because while we are all concerned about our physical health, we should be concerned about our mental health as well being locked in, not having much access to the outside. It’s a lot to deal with, and these are things that have been helping me. As you mentioned, I have four defaults that I’d like to share.

    Brent: Default number one is to default to gratitude. Gratitude is really important. Now, a lot of us have heard that before, like be thankful for things and you’ll feel better, and it can kind of sound a little bit kitschy, a little bit like, is that really going to help? But about a year and a half ago, I really started taking this seriously. I was dealing with some negativity and anxiety inside me.

    Brent: One thing that really started helping is really just intentionally, everyday, focusing on things that I was grateful for, and not necessarily just surface things. For example, I could say I’m really grateful for my wife, and then move on to the next thing. Why am I grateful for my wife? My wife is there to support me, my wife is there to love me and me to love her back because I have her in my life. We have this, and this, and this, and then I’ve just created a whole other list of things to be grateful for.

    Brent: What I mentioned in my episode was I’m really grateful for my office, although I’ll be moving out of it, unfortunately, but really grateful for that because working from home for me was a really big source of stress over four or five years of my life. When I was able to move out of home and really get this office space to start serving my audience through, that had a positive impact on my mental health.

    Brent: I think about that and then I think about, “Well, who made it possible that I could have this office space to improve my sleep and my mental health?” Well, it was my audience, and then I start being grateful for all those people in my audience over at Learn Jazz Standards and how important each one of those people are.

    Brent: When you start thinking about that and it starts to get bigger and bigger and balloon and balloon, and if we spend just some time, I like to do it when I run, have some time where I’m running and I can just really focus on those things. It really does start to program the way your brain thinks a little bit, and it helps you at least shift when things are negative to something that’s a little bit more positive.

    Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah, that one resonates with me so much. It’s funny, just before we jumped on today, I was doing an interview with a chap named Dylan Hart, and he was talking about the importance of coming from the right emotion when you play music. He acknowledged the fact that as musicians, we often… we might be frightened to dismiss that and just think purely intellectually and rationally about getting the notes right. Actually, a big part of what makes your performance musical is coming from the heart and wanting to express something.

    Christopher: I think that’s so true here too, where for me, you can intellectually be like, “I will write down three things to be grateful for today” and you think of them and you write them down, but you’re not really connecting with the emotion. I know for me, if I take the time and I try to really feel that gratitude, I forget where I heard it said but “you can’t feel fear and gratitude at the same time.” You mentioned anxiety there, I think the same is true, if you really get into that feeling of gratitude, you can’t help but escape from whatever negative emotions might have been going on. I think that’s such a powerful one.

    Brent: Absolutely. It’s also important to say that it’s funny how sometimes we know we should be grateful but we don’t want to go there. I don’t know if you can relate to that. Sometimes we know that an antidote is to focus on the things that are going right in our lives, but we don’t want to do that, there’s something that seems hard about doing that. But when we can surrender to that, that’s where I’ve found the real transformation.

    Brent: Especially in times like these, these are times where we really need to not focus so much all the time on what’s going wrong. There’s a lot of things not going right now, we need to start thinking for ourselves, what is going right? What can I latch onto? That’s been helpful for me.

    Christopher: Absolutely. Default number two?

    Brent: Default number two is important because when we realize what we have to be grateful for, when we realize things we have, we start to realize that not everybody has those things. Whether it be financially, maybe you’re not below the poverty line and you’re grateful that you’re not below the poverty line, but then you have to acknowledge there’s someone who is. Maybe it has nothing to do with money, it has to do with family or it has to do with any number of things that you might realize you have but someone else doesn’t have those things.

    Brent: So default number two is to default to generosity. Study after study shows that one of the biggest things that impacts our well-being as humans is actually to be generous, is actually to give. That sometimes seems untrue to us because like sometimes we’re like, “No, I feel better when I get things,” or we just want to say the right answer we know we should say, “Oh yeah, when I give things to other people” but deep inside maybe we don’t completely believe that.

    Brent: More than ever, now is a time to be a little bit generous, and it doesn’t have to be through money, it could be through time. For example, yesterday I was working with… and I am not saying this to toot my own horn or anything like that, but it’s just an example. I was working with a teacher who is running Facebook ads to Skype lessons, and so we were working on a sales page. We’ve been spending hours every day working on this sales page.

    Brent: That’s giving of my time, right? That’s something that you could do because this person, he doesn’t have what I have or maybe what you have, Christopher, we have online music presences. A lot of musicians right now are going, “I relied on the gigs that I had. I relied on the private lesson that I had before in person, and now I don’t have that anymore.” They’re like, “I don’t know how to pay my rent.” You realize something that you have and how can you help someone else that doesn’t have that.

    Brent: A good example here in New York City is a lot of restaurants are really, really struggling, and a lot will close down because of this crisis. In New York City at least, there’s still take out and delivery. Now is a time that me and my wife have been maybe ordering a little extra from that local coffee shop or bar to help support that business a little bit more because, ultimately, they need that help. There are little ways that we can think of being generous, and that not only is going to help others around us during this time, it’s going to help us up here to help us get through this.

    Christopher: Yeah, for sure. I think that’s important to underscore because I think at times like these, if someone says to you, “Why don’t you volunteer or why don’t you donate?” It’s so easy to be like, “I just don’t like it. I don’t have time. I don’t have money. Let me just look after myself for a little bit and then I’ll get back to that good charitable giving that I know I should do.”

    Christopher: But as you say, ironically it’s kind of self-serving as well because Not to go down too woo-woo a rabbithole here, but it’s in a book called the Sedona Method. The guy talks about how actually we all think that being loved will make us happy, and actually that’s not true. If you think about it, some of your past experiences, it’s when we’re most loving when we love someone the most that we feel the most joy and happiness.

    Christopher: I think this is the same way, the act of generosity. If you feel like you are giving, it really does help you on the inside as much as it helps the person on the outside. If anyone’s doubting that they have what it takes to be generous at this time, I just really encourage you to think of it in those terms, that it’s not a totally selfless act.

    Brent: Yeah. Sometimes being generous too, like I said, I’ve mentioned time, we mentioned money, but sometimes it could just be moving yourself out of your comfort zone. One example I can think of is perhaps you’re an introvert but you have an extroverted friend, but right now your extroverted friend is probably doing a little worse than you because your extroverted friend needs other people in the sense of community. It’s harder right now where we’re only mostly able to connect digitally, if anything. Maybe that’s that extra video phone call that you could throw that person’s way. Maybe you don’t feel like talking today, but you know that somebody else might need to be talked to. That’s another way we can be generous.

    Christopher: Absolutely, yeah. I just had an email from an uncle who considers himself a real extrovert and he commented on that. I have to confess, it with the first time I thought about it, because for me, staying at home four days in a row, not such a big deal, not to see people in person everyday, not such a big deal. But for him, that’s a total life changer. It’s important to think about.

    Brent: Yeah, absolutely. It’s surprising that we do get in front of cameras and mics and stuff, but a lot of us do have more introverted personalities. It seems strange, but it is, and so sometimes it’s hard for us to think about that. A lot of musicians are actually very introverted as well, artists, that’s why we’re able to stay and practice our instruments all day for like 10 hours or something like that and not really think about what else is going on and who else needs my help. Now is a time to open up to that, I think. That’s a cool thing about uncle, that’s important.

    Christopher: Default number three?

    Brent: Yeah, default number three actually goes a lot along with what we were just talking about. Default number three is to default to community. Whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, now is the time more than ever to get engaged in a community or a number of communities. Now, obviously, we’re not talking about this time going out in person and being with each other because that’s not appropriate right now. We need to not be around each other essentially.

    Brent: This is an opportunity to get involved in things like your Musical U membership, right? There’s a community in there if people that are learning music together that you can be a part of. If you are meeting with a group of friends every single week, now is the time to make this, specially make that regular and do Zoom Meetings. I know that since this whole thing has started and the chaos has ensued, a couple of groups I meet with a couple times a week, we’ve switched everything over to Zoom and we’re making sure that we’re showing up for those things because now more than ever it’s important.

    Brent: Whereas every once in a while I’d be like, “Ah, I can’t make it tonight. Too busy.” Now it’s like, “No, we’re going to be there tonight, to be there for each other to keep that going.” It’s really important that you embrace community now more than ever. For me it is. I stand sort of somewhere in the line between a little bit more introverted, but still really needing other people to get some energy.

    Brent: It’s important to realize that we all need that right now. Even if you feel like you don’t need that, there’s someone else you know who does need that. Number three is default to community. Have you felt for yourself any like loss of community, Christopher? Feeling like something like that has been taken away from you since all of this has happened?

    Christopher: I felt the danger of it to be honest, I think part of why your episode this week resonated with me so much is that… as we were saying before we hit record, like it’s a funny time for us as business owners to know quite what to do and how best to serve the people we care about serving.

    Christopher: Ten days ago or so, we’ve decided on our strategy at Musical U which was basically just like let’s get out there and do as much as we can and open our doors. We’ve got a 30-day free trial at the moment just to let anyone come in, get access to whatever we’re doing for our members which in the week ahead is going to be like a daily live session so that … and connect with the community, talk to us. It’s all themed around music learning, sure, but it’s really doubling down on what we believe in which is the power of community and online community.

    Christopher: I know the LJS, you’re in the year of community at the moment so I don’t need to deliver that point to you of all people. Yeah, I think it’s a funny one because it draws together that generosity that we talked about where we were of like, “What should we do? How can we make sure the business is okay and be responsible?” At the end of the day we were just like, “Let’s just do everything we can. Like let’s just give away what we can for free, let people in for free. Let’s put on extra events, extra live sessions.”

    Christopher: Once we made that decision it was like, “Oh, okay, no, that’s great.” It cleared up a lot of things, and it was clearly coming from the right place, and it was focusing on our community which is the most important thing. I think it wasn’t obvious before we made that decision, but in retrospect it was clearly the right move for us at the moment.

    Brent: Yeah, that’s fantastic, yeah. That’s a great example of you being someone who is willing to foster community for others so that they can engage in that. I guess along with that as well, I guess I’ll move to default number four, the last default I want to talk to you about, and that’s a default to goal-setting.

    Brent: Now more than ever is a time to double down on your plans. Now is not a time to step away from your plans. Now is not a time to make up excuses and say, “Well, you know, because of everything that’s happening in the world, because of the limitations now of me having to stay home that I’m going to just go on the sidelines.” No, not at all. Now is the time to be like, now more than ever, I’m going to invest in whatever it is that you want.

    Brent: Maybe your musicianship, and so Musical U is a great place for that, and you want to get even more invested in reaching your musical goals inside of that community. Maybe it’s something in your personal life, I want to get more fit. Now is not the time to say, “Just because I can’t go outside and go running or go to the gym, that I can’t get fit.” You can get fit.

    Brent: Whatever your goal is, fill in the blank for yourself. Now is the time to really get clear about your goals. I know that Christopher, you’re a big goal guy and that’s a big part of what you do, is really setting up frameworks for people’s success. For me it’s also very important, most of the things that I talk about in my community, Learn Jazz Standards, as far as music goes, is not little music theory hacks, and work arounds and tricks, and maybe if I want to just one video it’s going to change everything. I mean it’s just not.

    Brent: For example, all of the materials that I put to get, well, all my courses that I put together, they’re all practice programs. They’re not like, “Here’s a new random thing every single… ” they’re all practice programs, because goals are important. Whatever that looks like for you, double down on those goals. If you had some aspiration before all this went down, go, “I’m going to work even harder on that.” Not to be the guy that say, “Hustle and grind and all,” I’m not really about that, but to just say that I want to rededicate myself to whatever it was.

    Brent: We’re not that far off from the beginning of the year. I’m sure a lot of people made New Year’s resolutions and they’re already starting to die off. Well now is the time to go, “Well, hold on a second. I made that New Year’s resolution, now it’s time for me to dive even deeper into it.” Because when you come out on the other side of this, whether you’ve lost your job, maybe you’re dealing with sickness yourself, whatever it happens to be, but when you come out on the other side of this, you’re going to be way ahead. You’re going to be accelerating your growth and whatever it is in your mind, in your physical abilities, in your musicianship, your personal life, whatever.

    Brent: Number four is default to goal-setting.

    Christopher: I love that, yeah. I think a bit like the generosity. It’s easy to look at the external circumstances, and let yourself off the hook, and shrink back, and just kind of huddle in a corner. At least I know I have that emotional instinct a lot of the time at the moment. Actually, the best thing you can do for yourself is to lean in and expand, and be ambitious, and cultivate that positive attitude.

    Christopher: A lot of the emails we’ve been getting in the last week or two as we’ve been announcing these initiatives have been not like thank you for this specific thing, but just like thank you for being encouraging and supportive and positive at this time. I think people are really craving that positive environment, and I think a lot of what we’ve talked about today is about equipping yourself internally with that positive attitude, and positive mindset, and productivity rather than letting yourself shrink back and be susceptible to the fear and the anxiety.

    Christopher: I love that you ended up with goal-setting where it’s so concrete, it’s let’s focus on something tangible but I wanted to do anyway and see if there’s maybe a silver lining here, where this can be my opportunity, this can be my moment, and I can actually come out of this in some sense better off when things returned to normal.

    Brent: Yeah, absolutely. Being able to stay busy as well during a time like this or to stay focused is really important. I was mentioning before that I had stopped working from home and I had gotten an office space, and for me that was a real positive thing for me personally. Now that I’m… mostly I’ve been home at this point, it’s been kind of hard on me a little bit, but it’s easy to get sucked down into depression, or anxiety, or things like this, our emotions we all feel, and our reaction sometimes to that is just to curl up on the couch and watch TV.

    Brent: But if we’re able to just every morning wake up and be like, “Here’s what I need to do today to feel great,” and you have that written down, and hopefully you have what you wanted to finish by the end of the week, and by the end of the month. If you have that sort of mentality, it’s going to help us get through these times where there is no certainty of when this is over. No one knows when this is going to be over.

    Brent: There’s people on the news that will make predictions, but you don’t know. So you have to have that mentality of I’m not expecting things to change tomorrow or next week or even next month, but it doesn’t matter because here’s what I’m doing in between so that I can carry on with my life and be even better than I was before.

    Christopher: Absolutely. I love that you rounded off your episode by just underscoring that you’re there and you’re listening for your audience. I know that here on the Musical U team, we’re working every day to figure out what can we do, we’re listening to our community, we’re trying to cultivate both for ourselves and for our community that positive attitude. I’d love if we could finish up by just sharing what you’re up to at LJS, and if someone hasn’t listened to your show before, or visited the site, or if they’re interested in Passive Income Musician, maybe you can share out what you’ve got going on over there in the weeks ahead.

    Brent: Yeah, absolutely. Learn Jazz Standards, first of all, we’re doubling down on a goal to build community which is our membership that we’re launching a couple months. It’s something that we’re pouring a lot into to make sure that it is a wonderful place for our community to feel motivated, to feel excited, and to feel like they’re in a safe place to explore their musicianship. That’s something that we’ve just been working so hard on and pouring our heart and soul and our entire passion into right now.

    Brent: Outside of that, we’re just continuing to make sure that we have a free podcast episode and a free video out so that there’s… so every single week, people can have something to help them. Of course, just adding to our library of just free stuff out there that everybody can take advantage of no matter what.

    Brent: There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of different things going on that we’re doing, but those are the things that I think come to mind, just doubling down on what we’ve already been doing and just really pouring in to something that we believe will be kind of the next step, the next best help we can offer to everybody in the community.

    Brent: If you are a musician and you are interested in trying to figure out how you can start your own online music education business, I do have like a little side podcast that I have done for fun to help other musicians. It’s called Passive Income Musician, you can check that out if that’s something that might be something you’re especially interested in. Now, if you’re a music teacher and you’re feeling like, “Well, I lost some students or I’m not able to play gigs,” that might be something that could help you out over there.

    Christopher: Fantastic. Well, Brent, I just want to applaud you for putting out your episode this week because I know it takes a bit of gumption to speak outside your usual subject area and trust that your audience will come along with you. I hope our audience today have appreciated that slightly different message from us, but very much aligned I think with what we’re all about here at Musical U. I just want to say a big thank you on behalf of the audience and myself for joining us to share these 4 defaults. Maybe you can just give a nutshell recap of everything so people can go away crystal clear on how to cultivate that positive mental attitude themselves.

    Brent: Yep, absolutely. Default number one, default to gratitude. Default to gratitude, wake up every morning, pick a time to really meditate on that. Default number two, default to generosity. What’s one small thing I can do to be generous to somebody today? Default number three, default to community. Who do you need to get involved with? Who do you need to be a part of to remain unified during this time? Default number four is default to goal-setting. Double down on your plans and get clear about what they are.

    Christopher: Tremendous. Well, we’ll have links to Learn Jazz Standards and everything else mentioned in this conversation in the show notes for this episode. You can find everything that we’re doing at Musical U and everything we know about is going on at the moment at stayinplayon.com. Thanks very much again, Brent.

    Brent: Thanks Christopher, thanks for having me on.

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Zach shares many of our core beliefs here at Musical U. He believes that “talent” is a myth, that music learning can and should be enjoyable, that the learning process should feel musical, that it’s more effective to learn together with others, and much more.

In this conversation you’ll hear about:

• Zach’s own first experience of playing by ear – and why he was frustrated by his family being impressed.
• The key difference between the elementary music teaching Zach does and the more common approaches you may be familiar with.
• The three core concepts on which Zach bases his teaching – and how you can apply each in your own music learning.

You will be fascinated by just how much you can learn from the world of children’s music education. Enjoy this episode and make your music journey more fun and effective.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• • Dynamic Music Room
  • Dynamic Music Room Facebook
  • Musicality Now – Designing for Joyful Learning, with Anne Mileski
  • Musicality Now – How to Improve AND Enjoy Your Musical Life

Transcript

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

Zach: Thanks for having me.

Christopher: I know you these days through your website, dynamicmusicroom.com, and I know a little bit about your teaching philosophy and methodology there. But I don’t know very much about your own backstory, and I’d love to know where you came from as a music learner. Could you tell us about how you got started in music?

Zach: Sure, yeah. My grandma, she was a kindergarten teacher, and she was retired by the time I was a kid. In her kindergarten classroom, which wasn’t a music classroom, she loved music and she sang all the time. She would, as a grandma, when she wants to expose us to all this great music that she would sing and listen with us. So music was always a big part of my childhood, but I never really received any music instruction until I joined band in middle school. I started on the trumpet, and then I stuck with trumpet. I picked up tuba. Loved that. Made it all the way through high school, and I always felt like music was just something I wanted to do, I wanted to share with people. I knew that when I was done with high school, I was going to go to college. I wanted to be a music teacher.

Zach: I got into my college classes and actually thought about quitting at one point, because I didn’t want to teach band, and in my mind that was the only thing you could teach. Then I went and observed a teacher, and she was amazing. I saw all the stuff she was doing with her elementary music students, and it just blew my mind that if we broke down musical ideas into elements and a sequence that people could understand, that anybody could learn complicated musical ideas, and even these kids. And I thought, hey, I want to do that. So I got really involved in it, and then since then I’ve been teaching elementary music for about 10 years now, K-5, and I’ve loved it. I’ve also taught private lessons to kids. My youngest was seven, and my oldest was about 70 years old. I taught private lessons on guitar and piano and things like that. It’s been a ton of fun.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, I’m really keen to dig into how you approach teaching, and in a minute I want to ask you specifically what you saw in that classroom with the elementary teacher that inspired you or showed you a different way. But before we do that, let’s go back a little bit to your own journey and the kind of musician or music learner you were, because I think it’s always interesting when I speak to these very expert music educators who now have a very clear understanding of how music learning works and how to impart their knowledge, to understand whether they had that experience they’re now giving their students or whether it was born of something different. What was learning music like for you?

Zach: Well, when I got into band it was a lot of hard work, but it was fun. I appreciated the hard work, practicing day after day and that kind of thing. But for me, I really felt like a musician, and this was weird, but I was in eighth grade, so I’d been in band for three years, and I was at my grandma’s house and she had this little toy piano. They were labeled from C to C in the scale. I thought, hey, I can apply some of my knowledge to playing this little toy piano kind of thing. So I played Hot Cross Buns and Mary Had a Little Lamb, and then I hit the low C to high C, and it just stuck in my ear. I’m like, “Wait, that’s the opening of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” And I’m like, “Hey, that’s pretty cool.” No one had ever taught me that, but I heard it.

Zach: I sat there for, it felt to me like a really long time, probably only like 35 minutes or something, but I sat there and, through many mistakes, plunked out that whole song, except for the bottom leading tone, which drove me nuts at the time. I plunked it out, and I was just so proud, because all this listening that I had been doing and this practicing was applying to musicianship skills everywhere. I went to my parents and my grandma, and I was like, “Hey, look what I can do.” They were so excited. They’re like, “Oh, that’s so awesome.”

Zach: But then they kind of made me mad, because they looked at me, and they’re like, “Oh, you must have a lot of talent.” And I thought, what? Maybe, I guess, but by calling it all on talent, it cheapened all the hard work I had done to figure out the song and all the hard work I’d been doing for three years in practicing my instrument and learning music, just to throw all that hard work away with the word talent. And that really informed all my teaching since then, although I didn’t realize it at the time, to be like anybody can do anything. It doesn’t matter what your talent is. You just got to put in the hard work, and you got to have the right tools.

Christopher: I love that. That is such an elegant story for encapsulating so much of what we care about here at Musical U. When we teach playing by ear, we really encourage our members at Musical U to think about it as a process of figuring things out by ear. And as you get better and better at that, and as you add in some ear training, it eventually seems like you just magically always know the right answer immediately. But you get there by doing it in a painstaking step-by-step, getting harder and harder kind of a way. From the outside, yeah, someone looks at it and they’re like, “Oh, they’ve got some magical talent.” And the musician, obviously, often is like, “Wait, what? No, no, I worked.”

Zach: “What are you talking about?” Yeah, it’s like, I did all the practice. My host teacher when I was student teaching, he made me think about improvisation in a way I had never thought before, and he told his elementary students, he says, “You guys improvise all the time.” And they looked at him like, what? We don’t do that jazz stuff that people do. And he’s like, “No, when you talk, you improvise. You’re improvising a conversation. You’re taking the knowledge you have of words and sentences and all the practice you’ve done, and you’re creating something brand new. It’s just the same thing with music, you just don’t have as much practice with music as you do with speaking.”

Christopher: After that first taste of playing by ear and getting labeled a talented musician, how did you take things after that? I mean, clearly you had that band environment in your school, where it was presumably a lot of sheet music and repertoire and concert performances. Did you also have a strand of figuring things out by ear and improvising and songwriting? Or what part did that play in your own musical journey from then on?

Zach: Well, yeah, the figuring stuff out by ear, ever since I realized that, any time there was any kind of instrument, I tried to figure everything out that I could. One of my favorite things to do, and I still do now, although not on my trumpet, I don’t play that as much anymore, but to figure out songs that I hear, any songs that I think of, or think of from, say, the soundtrack to Harry Potter, Hedwig’s Theme. I was teaching one time, and I had that song stuck in my head, so I picked up my recorder, and through a lot of work, I was able to figure it out. And my kids were like, “Oh, that’s amazing.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s just because I practiced and I’ve been doing this for a long time.” So I would do that on my trumpet and tuba and pretty much any instrument I could put my hands on. I’d just hear the song and then I’d try to figure it out. Sometimes I’d get close, sometimes I wouldn’t.

Christopher: Let’s jump ahead a little bit, then, to that teacher observation opportunity you had where you were seeing an elementary music classroom. Before you describe it, I want to just illustrate what I suspect are the assumptions in a lot of our audience’s minds about what early music education is or could be, because for me certainly, when I was growing up, early music education looked a lot like a junior version of later music education, meaning you give the kid an instrument, you explain about the staff and the key and where the notes are on the xylophone or whatever you have them playing, or the recorder, and it’s a gentle version of serious music education.

Christopher: And then, at least in the UK, the other option that you encounter is basically a music activity session, where it’s like come along, sing some songs. There’s not really any educational thought put into it, except let’s have the kids have a good time with music. And I don’t want to denigrate either of those. There’s value in both of those approaches, but it’s been fascinating to me over the last four or five years through my work at Musical U to discover, particularly in the US, I think, there is a whole other world of early music education that manages to combine the fun and the pedagogy and produce something that is both enjoyable and educational, rather than seeing those two as very different goals, which is, at least for me, the perspective I had in the UK. You can have fun playing about with music, or you can do some serious music class. So I’d love to hear, what was it that struck you when you were observing that teacher and you were like, “Oh, there’s something different here, that’s not what I was expecting”?

Zach: Yeah. Yeah, you hit it exactly as the way I think most people view elementary music as just fun times. Mine was kind of the opposite. It was more like the structured one. We sat in rows and we sang songs that we read off the staff, and it was not fun at all. But yeah, when I went to observe that teacher, I didn’t know what to expect, because I thought it was going to me like mine. But as the class walked in, she immediately started with music, and it was fun. And I’m like, “Hey, that’s awesome.” They got engaged right away. I’m like, “Yeah, this is fun. This is like one of those fun music classes.”

Zach: But then she smoothly transitioned, taking elements of the songs that she was doing and isolating some of the literacy elements that she could train their ears on so they would be doing patterns they had pulled from that song they started with. And I’m like, wait a second. Without even realizing it, all of a sudden these kids, they’ve moved from playing a game to practicing learning music. And she would have them singing from the staff, and she’d have them singing in canon and in harmony. And I was like, these are second graders.

Zach: And then almost as soon as they started to get frustrated or tired of the hard work for a few minutes, I think it was five or seven minutes, she’d transition them right out into a movement activity that was fun and that kind of thing. It blew me away, the way that you could seamlessly combine, like you said, the fun and the literacy, the serious music practice, that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. And I think it’s important to keep both. That’s what blew me away, I think, that it could be both and they could do all of these things, that these kids could sing in harmony. Adults are terrified of singing in harmony. If we can get kids to do it, we can get adults to do it too. We just have to teach them the right way.

Christopher: Absolutely. And what gets me excited, although I have kind of a personal stake in the early music education in that I have my own daughters, and I’m trying to figure out to run fun little music classes from them at home, actually what gets me most excited about this is how much we can draw on these ideas and insights for adult music learning. We’ll talk a little bit about your approach in your own training and how that all fits together, but I just wanted to highlight a couple of things there for our audience, which are the idea of respecting the fact that the learner needs to stay engaged and enjoy the process.

Christopher: As adults, we typically approach learning in such a strict and, I don’t know, almost masochistic way, where if we’re not suffering we can’t be doing it right. And actually, as you see so clearly with the children, the best way to get them into the learning activities is to make sure that when their attention wanders, you bring them back to something fun, rather than just saying, “Pay more attention.”

Christopher: And the other thing is, I think you mentioned the word transitions there, which is something that I really respect, particularly what I’ve seen in the Kodály world, but I think probably a lot of elementary music teachers are very good at this in the US, which is for us in the UK, growing up in that junior serious music approach where it’s like sheet music and do the instructions, that there was no concept of that really. It was like, okay, now we’re going to play this piece. Ten minutes have elapsed, you’ve lost interest, now we’re going to do this other thing. And it was just completely a series of almost, from the learner’s perspective, completely unrelated activities or tasks. And there was some variety there, sure, and each of the tasks was great, but there was no overall journey or flow.

Christopher: I’ve done a little bit of Kodály early music education training in a workshop where this was really talked about, how you can weave a story in or how you can have elements brought from one thing to another. Again, it’s one of those things, I think as adults we don’t even consider might be interesting or relevant or useful, but it’s such a valuable part, I think, of making that learning experience effective.

Zach: For sure. For sure, yeah. I have three kids now, so I don’t have time to teach private lessons as much as I used to, but I taught private lessons on guitar to adults, including much older adults, and even in those lessons, I would take some of the things that I had learned from my elementary kids in my private lessons with those adults, to work it out for them. We would start with something easy and something fun that they could feel successful at, and then we’d pull some of the harder elements. And like, okay, so now we’ve got these basic chords, let’s try this different chord pattern and do some practicing. We’d get to the meat of the lesson.

Zach: And then for the adults, I’m sorry, adults, I’m one too, we have almost as bad of an attention span as kids do sometimes. Before they get too frustrated or bored, we move on to something else. My adult learners always said that they loved the way that I structured lessons and that it kept them motivated to keep coming back. It wasn’t a chore for them, it was fun.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, what better feedback to hear from your students, that they keep coming back because it’s fun, and you know they’re learning along the way? You observed this lesson. It inspired you that that might be the direction for you. Where did your own training go from there?

Zach: At my school, you have you music education major, and then you have different minor options. The school had just introduced an elementary minor, they called it general music minor option, that offered more specific classes geared towards what I decided that I wanted to teach. I got to take those classes. Instead of taking double reed techniques to learn bassoon and oboe, I instead took classroom instrument techniques, and I learned more how to play guitar and ukulele and stuff like that.

Zach: And then also, I just felt so motivated by all of this that I would go to workshops all the time all over the place, to see expert presenters and see their takes on everything. I cleared my schedule as much as I could on my Fridays, and I would go into classrooms with teachers that I knew teaching elementary music, and I would volunteer to help there and learn from them. And they even let me work with the kids a lot early on in my career, and that was awesome.

Zach: Then I got into teaching, and I taught for a little while. And then my local university was hosting a Kodály levels programs, and I thought, hey, I don’t really know too much about this stuff, so I’m going to go check it out. And it went, and it just blew my mind, because everything that I had been feeling for teaching music, how you should use fun real music and how you should have fast-paced engaging lessons and you should get the kids working together, that kind of thing, all of that was in there. I decided that I loved this stuff. I got really involved. I did my level one, two, and for each training I got my certificate and got my master’s in the process as well. I mean, that’s been an overview of my training, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Christopher: Absolutely, yeah. And for listeners or viewers who haven’t been tuned into past episodes of the show where we’ve talked a bit about Kodály, or for members watching who haven’t taken our foundations course that uses that kind of methodology or approach or philosophy, could you just explain maybe some of the distinctions between what you had been learning in your degree program and what that Kodály world offered you? What was the distinction or what was new or useful about bolting on that Kodály piece of the puzzle?

Zach: Okay, yeah. The university program, and I respect them a whole lot and some of them are my good friends, but when you’re an undergrad like that, you don’t really know what you need to know as a teacher, and so the elementary music classes that I took for methods were basically survival. Here’s a little bit about the different methods, but if you’re going to do this, here’s activities that’ll get you through the day. Here’s how you should maybe structure your lessons so the kids are sort of engaged and not jumping all over each other. Here’s some instruments you can play and some other resources you can look into.

Zach: That carried me through, plus all the workshops and the relationships I’d built with other expert elementary teachers. That carried me through for a while, but when I got into the Kodály world, it was just, the songs, I had already heard a lot of them, but it gave me a lot more resources for the songs and activities. But for me it was the structure and the overall planning that really made a difference to me, because week after week when I was teaching before, I’m like, okay, what am I teaching next? What should I teach next? What concepts should my kids learn next? And I was struggling to find that myself, and I was building it myself, and then lo and behold, I go and take this class, and hey, people have been doing this for decades now, so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel with this stuff. I can just look at what’s been done and pick the one that most aligns with what I like to do.

Zach: From the Kodály classes, I got the more resources for good songs. I got more information on a sequence and a structure for teaching, what you should teach when and that kind of thing. And then also, I shouldn’t forget this, because Kodály was huge on this, that he believed the music teachers should be really good musicians themselves. And so as part of our levels training, we had to go through solfège training and ear training and rhythm training, and we had to practice conducting, even though we don’t really conduct in our elementary music programs. And that, even though I haven’t used all of the solfège training stuff, like I’m not going to have my fifth graders sight read Bach canons in solfège, that’s just crazy, that made me a better musician for them. I’m more aware of what they’re doing, and they can hopefully see what this stuff they’re learning can lead to.

Christopher: Gotcha. And on that front, there’s a couple of phrases I wonder if we could unpack, that have come up. One was literacy, I think you mentioned along the way there. And the other, I’ve heard you make reference to how approaching things this way can help anyone to become musically independent, I think you said. And those are two ideas that I think are really useful to unpack as part of illustrating to people, what’s the point of all this? Okay, it’s fun and it’s effective, but what kind of musicians are we creating here? What’s so different about the effectiveness of this kind of education versus some of the traditional approaches?

Zach: Yeah. Literacy, you hear the word literacy, you think reading, and it’s not just about reading in sheet music. It’s also, I think, in music it’s about this idea of sound concepts and your aural connection to the sounds and that kind of thing. And then developing that by playing and singing and hearing all the patterns and doing them yourself. And then applying it afterwards to the symbols. We call that sound before symbol, always. There’s both of those parts, and then you go on to create yourself. And you need that to become what I like to call musically independent. Other people call it that as well.

Zach: Musically independent people, it’s not just that they can read music, whatever music they pick up, it’s that they feel comfortable doing music. It’s that they can go to church, if they go to church, they can look at a hymn and they can kind of figure out their way through the hymnal. They can ride in the car with their friends on a road trip and they can all sort of sing in tune and have a good time doing it. They can all not embarrass themselves at sporting events when they’re clapping along with the band and they’re sticking with the beat, that kind of thing.

Zach: That was really Kodály’s goal and my goal too, is I’m not trying to train professional musicians, and not everyone should be a professional musician. We need all kinds of other jobs. But music should be a part of everyone’s life, and providing this foundation is going to help everybody have music more in their life. It’s a part of what makes us human, I think. I don’t know if I walked away from your answer too far on that one.

Christopher: No, that was tremendous, thank you. And so much of what you said there is near and dear to our heart here at Musical U. I don’t think musically independent is a phrase we’ve used very much, but it describes exactly the kind of empowerment we try and provide our members and the opening up a whole new world of possibilities for them that we try and deliver. These days, as well as teaching, you have a fantastic website, Dynamic Music Room, where you share some of these ideas and lessons and resources for other K-5 and even secondary teachers. I’d love if we could talk a little bit about what defines your philosophy or your approach there, because you’re not just coming out and saying, “Kodály, Kodály, Kodály, everyone should do it that way,” or anything else. You’ve got your own perspective and philosophy, I suppose. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Zach: Yeah, sure. Kodály is my big background, but I recognize and acknowledge that there’s many different methods out there, or even if you combine methods, that’s awesome. My host teacher when I was student teaching, he was actually a wholly Orff-certified person. They’re not totally different at all. They all have a lot of the same elements to them, and so I looked at all the world of music out here, at least in the US, and I see that there’s basically three groups of people. There’s one group that subscribes to a methodology and says they’re the best and everyone else stinks. There’s one group that says they subscribe to a methodology and they think they’re the best, but they say, “Hey, you guys are good too.” And then there’s the group of music teachers that pull from the different ones and try to create an eclectic classroom. And there are great teachers in all three categories.

Zach: I imagined a site and a resource that was independent of a methodology per se, that reached what I though were the most important qualities of music education and music teaching for all grades, which is why right now it seems to be more focused towards elementary, because that’s my background, but it’s my hope eventually to provide more and more resources for secondary as well. But that’s why the three words for my slogan for Dynamic Music Room are “Authentic, engaging, and cooperative.” Authentic being we’ve got to use real music and real good activities and fun stuff to engage the students.

Zach: And then engaging, obviously there’s no learning without engagement. There’s no motivation. You have to get buy-in from the students, whether they’re five years old or 50 years old. If they’re not engaged, they’re not going to learn, and so you have to create lessons that can guide them through learning in ways that they don’t get frustrated, or if they do, they’re not so frustrated they want to quit.

Zach: And then cooperative is one I feel like we’re forgetting a lot, we’re missing out a lot of in our elementary music world especially, but also secondary from what I see. That’s students working together to teach each other and share the knowledge they’ve gained with each other. That’s a big part. I feel like there’s a lot missing from a lot of people there and that kind of thing.

Zach: My goal for Dynamic Music Room is to create these resources, but also a place where teachers from any methodology can come and just take their teaching to the next level, just a little bit more. That’s my hope.

Christopher: Tremendous. Yeah, we’ve been codifying our pillar beliefs here at Musical U this year and trying to get very specific about the vague stuff that’s been driving us and motivating us for the last decade. A couple of our pillars match very closely to what you just said, which is probably why I connected so much with your site when I was looking around it. But when you’re talking about cooperation, for us, better together is one of our pillar beliefs, where it’s just like we’ve seen so clearly that when someone’s learning in a community and there is that kind of peer-to-peer engagement, it just works so much better.

Christopher: Another of them that kind of maps to your engaging is that we believe music learning is a journey, and you should enjoy the ride. This should be an enjoyable journey, an enjoyable process, and if it’s not, you’re not going to learn well and you’re not going to enjoy it. So that was really interesting. This is the kind of thing, these are my three words, where you can just dash them off and people forget about them. I don’t want that to happen, because I know you’ve thought very deeply about these.

Christopher: So I wonder if we could just unpack each of those a little bit more, and maybe one way to do it would be if you could explain what it looks like when this is missing, why you care so much about bringing this ingredient in. And then if you have any tips or ideas for what this looks like in practice, to illustrate the specifics of what the right way of doing it, as it were, would look like, that would be really great.

Zach: Sure. Yeah, yeah. Start with authentic. Authentic music means real music. In the elementary world, it’s real folk music. If you were in the band world, you’d be using music that was composed for band, for example. And if you were an adult musician just trying to learn something, you would be trying to learn songs that were real. Like if you’re trying to learn guitar, you’d be looking at real pop songs and music played on guitar. You wouldn’t just be looking at exercises. If you don’t have that authentic piece, your music classroom, it feels like it’s missing something, because you’re either just using a bunch of composed songs that are only written just to teach a specific concept, and they just feel cheap, they don’t feel satisfying.

Zach: In the elementary world, we pick old folk songs, because our idea is that if these songs have survived hundreds of years to remain around today and stick in people’s ears, like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, love it or hate it, everybody knows it in one of its forms or the other. The indefinable quality, it satisfies you more than a cheap composed song. In the elementary world, the same thing we want to be careful of is modern pop songs, because they’re often inappropriate, and they might not be musically satisfying. That’s why when I look at songs to include for pop songs, I’ll often look for music of the ’60s and ’70s, because that’s been about 50 years now, and the ones that have stuck around, you know they’re going to be that good quality. And the funny thing is, even my little five-year-olds, I’ll turn on Yellow Submarine or something and they’ll be like, “Hey, I know that song,” and stuff like that. So you know some of these songs have some kind of quality to them.

Zach: And it’s same way when I work with adults. If they’re learning something, you got to pick a song you love. You got to pick a real song and hold that in your head as a motivator to stick with the practice you’re going to have to do, because you have to practice. You have to have the exercises and that kind of thing. But don’t lose sight of what you’re trying to get to, which is you doing that real authentic music too. Does that work for “authentic”?

Christopher: Amazing. Yeah, yeah, that really unpacked it well. Thank you.

Zach: So then engaging, in the music teaching world, we have a hard time engaging our students more and more lately, because they’re always distracted by other things. We can’t have learning without engagement. The research shows that if a student is not engaged, they are doing zero learning. Even if they’re not disrupting, they’re just sitting there staring off into the distance, they’re not taking in anything. They’re not learning. You have to be doing music. In a classroom or in a lesson that isn’t engaging, you often have the students, the learners just there. They’re not really a part of the learning process, and you need to get the students as much of a part of the music-making as possible. Not talking to them, just talking with them to build the knowledge.

Zach: Part of that, at least from my perspective, is designing your lessons in such a way that they are small chunks that students can stay engaged with and that you alternate high energy activities with low energy activities. The low energy activities are actually your learning activities, because you’re slowing things down and you’re concentrating. And then you go right out of it again. In my world we glue all these different chunks together with transitions to connect them so everybody gets that hey, we’re doing the same thing the whole time. It isn’t disjointed. Everything’s connected in that music is everywhere kind of a thing.

Christopher: Maybe we could just pause on that one for a moment, because as I highlighted earlier, I think transitions are often really just not even considered in the world of adult music education. And for me, the first time I took a one-to-one Kodály lesson, it was so striking that from the very first moment, we were doing something musical, and that flowed into the next thing and that flowed into the next thing. And at the end of the lesson, I was like, oh, we’ve done seven different things, but it didn’t feel like seven different things.

Zach: And you don’t realize it, yeah.

Christopher: No. So maybe you could give an example or talk through some of the transitions you might use, for people who’ve never encountered that idea, to show how smooth or how clever it can be.

Zach: Yeah, sure. I think of one I just did yesterday. I had my first graders come in, and as we walked around the room, I had them doing call and response right away, while I played on the ukulele and stuff like that. And then we got to our spots, we moved into a vocal warmup, instantly as soon as we stopped. And then the last vocal warmups I did were the pitches of the next song I was going to do. And my kids right now, they’re so well trained that as soon as they hear me start to specify what I’m doing, they’re looking for the next song, because they know it’s coming. It’s like a treasure hunt for them. Like, “Oh wait, I know that’s this song.”

Zach: So then we sang a song. That was just a fun, silly echo kind of song. It was about pie getting stolen or something like that. And then after we were done singing it, we sat down and I said, “Hey, the weirdest thing happened to me the other day. The pie was gone, and I wanted to find it, so I set a trap. And then when the pie was taken, I chased after the person that stole it, and it was a pirate. And he captured me, and he made me sing this song and pull on the anchor rope. And then we sang a song about pulling on the anchor rope, and then for first graders, that song also used a lot of quarter notes, eighth notes, and quarter rests. So after we played that game, I was able to throw up some patterns that had those rhythms that they could read, and they practiced reading.

Zach: And then I would change some of the notes to different patterns, and then by the time I was done, of course, they know what to look for. The new rhythm I had put up there was the next song we were going to do, something like that. So continue in that manner through storytelling and borrowing elements to compare with other songs and that kind of thing. I just love that my kids now, they get it. It’s, like I said, like a treasure hunt for them. They’re always looking for it. “I found it. It’s right here in the second line backwards.” I’m like, “Geez oh Pete, I got to get better ideas. You guys are too smart for me.”

Christopher: That’s wonderful. I can’t applaud highly enough someone who manages to work puns into their lesson planning as a pivotal transition, as a way from “pie” to “pirate.” And obviously, we don’t want to trivialize it. It’s a funny example, but I think anyone following along can imagine how useful that is. If you compare it with the alternative, where you sing a song about pie and then you turn around and you’re like, “Now we’ll do our next song, it’s about a pirate,” the kids are going to have that mental confusion. And yeah, maybe you catch their attention, but-

Zach: Like whiplash.

Christopher: Exactly, yeah. And so even if it’s a contrived or a storytelling transition, it bridges it so smoothly. I’m sure you’ve found ways to do that same kind of thing with your private adult students too.

Zach: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s not so much the cutesy story stuff, although sometimes, I mean, I’m pretty cheesy as a person, and even my adult friends know that, and my adult learners also. In the summer, my wife and I conduct a community band throughout the summer. We co-conduct. And they know how I am. They’re always prepared for bad puns and stuff like that.

Zach: But yeah, in my lessons with adult learners and that kind of thing, we can transition. We can pull, like if we start the lesson with an easy song they know and they like to play, I can then isolate something and just transition and say, “Okay, now go back to that C chord, but now this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to move that ring finger over here, and now we’re playing an A minor chord.” Even that kind of small simple transition, I think, just helps to connect it. And it doesn’t feel like hey, now we just played a song, and now we’re doing learning, and then we’re going to play a song again, that kind of thing.

Christopher: Yeah, and I’m sure there’s a whole world of pedagogical theory and philosophy we could explain all of this with, but I think aside from the engagement, I think you mentioned earlier that idea of starting with something easy to build confidence. And I think those transitions really help with that too, where if you’re starting your A minor chord from the C you just played, it’s a bit more approachable than if just out of nowhere, your teacher’s like, “Let’s play an A minor.”

Zach: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher: I interrupted you at going through the three. The third is cooperative. Let’s just talk a bit about that one.

Zach: Oh, cooperative, yeah. Yeah, sure. Music is naturally meant to be shared with others and that kind of thing, and we’re meant to work together. Even solo artists who are all by themselves always have a backup band or something like that, even if it’s just a crew that helps them get on the stage and do their thing. Music is meant to be shared. In classrooms, I think it’s more than just them singing together. To help build knowledge, you need to re-explain it and share what you’ve learned with other people and that kind of thing.

Zach: In my classrooms, I always try to have the students take some time with a musical idea. Even if I’m not looking for a specific right answer, to take some time to try and re-explain an answer with each other to build a better answer themselves. Or here, let’s create our own rhythms. In this group, you have to have eight here, they must use this. And have eight there, they must do that. Then you must split up and perform them in canon with each other or something like that kind of a thing.

Zach: Getting them to work in smaller groups and cooperatively really helps to build the knowledge. It helps their engagement, and it reaches a type of learner I think we often forget about in the different brain theories of learning styles. Everyone knows the visual and the physical and the aural and stuff like that, but everyone forgets that there are social learners too. Social learners need to re-explain and work with other kids to learn in their best way, and I think we forget that part a lot. I’m trying to push that a lot, to give as many opportunities for kids to re-explain to each other.

Zach: I know as an adult learner, when I was picking up the ukulele more seriously, that I appreciated, I didn’t take private lessons on it, but I did go to group classes. I found I almost learned as much from that as I did from private lessons, because I was able to share with other people and see how other people did it, even if they weren’t the teacher. They had their own tricks that often worked just as well or hit something for me that the way the teacher was saying it didn’t, and that kind of thing. So I always encouraged my students when I had them, my adult students, to also play for other people or find someone else who was learning the instrument too, and connect and play together, because that’s important.

Christopher: Fantastic. And so “Authentic, engaging, and cooperative” is the tagline or the slogan for dynamicmusicroom.com, and as I hope this conversation shows quite well, there is so much that adult learners can pick up from the world of early music education and so much that independent learners can learn from teachers talking to teachers about it, as you do on your website. And so I wonder if you could just share a little bit about what you’re up to at dynamicmusicroom.com and what people can find there and what’s coming up next.

Zach: Sure, yeah. Right now, I only started this about four-ish months ago. I’d been sitting on the idea of starting something like this for a long time, and then finally, I’m just going to do it. As I move forward, right now I’m just putting out a lot of content, a lot of helpful resources for teachers that I feel haven’t quite been answered as specifically as teachers might want or are held back by the experts from yore, who they won’t… “Yeah, here are all the answers. You got to buy my book, though,” and that kind of thing.

Zach: I want to provide helpful resources for teachers to get into things and to get their buy-in, and then my goal is to eventually flesh out more about the authentic, engaging, and cooperative learning, flesh it out even more. Because I kind of explain it, and maybe it’s clear, maybe it’s not, maybe I ramble, but I want to flesh it out even more, maybe like a course. I don’t want to say a book, because I think books are just, they’re good, but you need to see someone doing it or do it yourself. Obviously, that’s what I believe. So maybe at some point coming out with a course or a guide for including these three things more in their classrooms, regardless of whatever kind of teacher they are.

Christopher: That sounds great. Well, I said to you before we hit record, how much I was enjoying looking around your website, and so I would really encourage anyone who’s enjoyed this conversation to go and check out dynamicmusicroom.com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this episode at musicalitynow.com. Zach, I’m excited to see what you move on to next with that website, the new resources you’re putting out, and definitely, if you come up with a course in the future, I will be one of the first people lined up to take that. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Thanks so much for having me. I’ve loved doing this, and I love what you guys are doing over there at Musical U. It’s really cool.

The post Authentic, Engaging, Cooperative Learning, with Zach VanderGraaff (The Dynamic Music Room) appeared first on Musical U.

With the opportunity to spend more time on our music learning there’s a silver lining: We can come out of this situation with new and better skills – and feeling more musical!

To help you stay musical and stay connected we’ve put together a special page at StayInPlayOn.com. We will be updating as new opportunities come about. We are eager to get you excited to get out there and enjoy performing and collaborating at a new level once life returns to normal.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• Stay In. Play On!
• Musical U Friends Page
• Free Daily Music Masterclasses
• Learn Jazz Standards
• Sara Campbell
• Ultimate Music Theory
• Bradley Sowash
• Tim Topham
• Anne Mileski
• Melody Payne

Transcript

If you’re watching this episode when it airs then you’ll be well aware of the current situation with the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19.

Now I’m not here to offer health advice or news updates – no doubt you’ve got enough of that flying at you already. But it seems clear that the sooner people self-isolate, the more lives can be saved.

I’m here in Spain on total lockdown with my wife and two young daughters – and although it’s all a bit crazy, we are all in good health so far.

And if you’re like most in our community at Musical U then faced with that prospect of staying in for several weeks ahead, you’re quickly turning to music as a rock you can rely on. I’m glad that my home office is always packed with instruments so I can keep playing. I did have a momentary panic when a guitar string broke – but it’s okay, it turned out I had a spare set.

Now I don’t want to trivialise this and say “hey, never mind, let’s all just have fun and play music!” – this is a serious situation.

But at the same time, music can be an incredible force for keeping our spirits high, helping us stay connected with one another, inspiring us to hope and be thankful. And with the opportunity to spend more time on our music learning it even offers a possible silver lining, that we can come out of this situation with new and better skills, feeling more musical, eager to go out there and enjoy performing and collaborating at a new level once life returns to normal.

So I wanted to record this special episode to share some cool things that are happening right now which can help you make the most of any extra music time you may find you have.

First off, you can expect Musicality Now to continue as normal. We took a short break – and I’ll share in a minute what we were busy with elsewhere – but we’re back on track for an episode per week, possibly more, so that you can always count on that new episode to listen to or watch.

Beyond this show though there’s actually a lot of other stuff available for you that I didn’t want you to miss out on.

Here at Musical U over the last week, as it’s become increasingly clear how many people likely face lockdown for weeks or even months, and that the sooner people start self-isolating the better – we’ve been talking with members and brainstorming in the team, trying to figure out how we can best serve you all in the weeks ahead.

Last week we announced a few quick measures for members, which I’ll just mention because I know we have a lot of members who listen to the show and you may have missed that announcement. We will be keeping our doors open at Musical U and doing everything we can to make sure you can rely on us for “service as normal” throughout this period. And we’re also doing a few extra things based on what we’ve been hearing from you.

Firstly we know a lot of folks are facing financial difficulties with their work interrupted so we’re offering an amnesty on membership payments for anybody who needs it. We don’t want your membership payment to be a source of stress and we’d hate to lose you from the community.

Secondly, we were hearing that many of you anticipated more time available for music practice, but your regular activities like local group rehearsals or performances were all cancelled so you needed something new to sink your teeth into. So for a limited time we’ve dropped the prices of all five of our standalone courses in half for you – that’s Foundations of a Musical Mind, The Musician’s Ear, Ear Training For Beginners, The Circle Mastery Experience and even our latest course, Improv Immersion.

We’re also shaping up plans for more regular drop-in Q&A sessions where you can connect with the team and other members, virtual jam sessions, a member “perks” page with exclusive discounts and offers on recommended products and services, and a new series of live masterclasses with outside experts for you. And of course we’ll be continuing to talk with you in the community to find out what you most want and how we can help.

So that’s members. We also wanted to do something to help our wider audience who aren’t yet members, like our Facebook fans and email subscribers.

So last week we launched a series of free daily masterclass reruns – one hour-long music masterclass every day for a week, free of charge. We have an incredible masterclass library inside Musical U and so it’s been exciting to share some of the highlights more widely, with sessions from folks like “The Learning Coach” Gregg Goodhart, vocal coach Davin Youngs, improv extraordinaire the late Forrest Kinney, and several more. And we’ve had such a great response to those with hundreds tuning in for every session, we’re going to keep that party going with a few more daily masterclasses at least.

Along with those masterclass sessions I wanted to provide a way for those who were eager to get access to even more. So even though we don’t usually offer a free trial of Musical U membership, for a limited time we’re offering free membership for a full 30 days, with no obligation and no strings attached. So if you miss a masterclass you wanted to catch, or you want to watch them all, or you want the full in-depth skill training that complements them or you want to connect with other music learners like you during this time, then you can come in, try it all for the next month, and not pay a penny. We do of course hope you’ll choose to stay, and you can enjoy a big discount on regular pricing if you do – but there’s no pressure and no obligation, you’re able and welcome to come in, use it all, including the new special events we’re organising for members – and then leave at the end with no payment required.

So that felt like a good start, to do what we can to help our community and wider audience stay engaged in fun, productive music learning at this time.

Of course if you know us here at Musical U you’ll know we never pretend to be the one true be-all-and-end-all of music learning – we love to collaborate with and help recommend other amazing online music educators. So from the outset we were also looking for ways to go beyond just what we at Musical U can provide ourselves.

This week we went ahead and added a new “Friends” page to the Musical U website. You can find that by going to musical-u.com and clicking “Friends” in the top menu. This is something we were working on anyway as part of bigger website changes to showcase our mission and more of what we’re all about here at Musical U – but given the circumstances it seemed smart to go ahead and make sure all visitors to our site had easy access to our top recommendations for other resources that can help you in your journey of becoming more musical.

As you can probably imagine, that wasn’t an easy page to put together! Because I wanted to include pretty much every single one of the amazing guests we’ve had interviewed here on the show! We did have some particular criteria for who to include though, which is a bit hard to explain until those fuller website changes are made. But just to say if you spot any notable absences, folks like Brent Vaartstra at Learn Jazz Standards, for example, who you know we highly recommend and consider a good “friend” of Musical U – that’s no slight on his work, it’s just about the particular framing of that page, which will hopefully become clear in due course.

As well as that Friends page, over the last week I’ve been reaching out to all our friends and contacts in music education to see what they have planned, and paying attention to what’s been going on in the various music teacher groups online.

A lot of us have been trying to figure out how to adjust what we do to best serve music learners at this time, and a lot of music teachers have been hastily making the shift to online teaching. A big shout out to some of the amazing teachers-of-teachers like Sara Campbell, Glory St. Germaine, Bradley Sowash, Tim Topham, Anne Mileski and Melody Payne who’ve been rapidly providing special training and guidance to help with that transition.

So there’s a lot going on! And to help you stay musical and stay connected we’ve put together a special page at stayinplayon.com with details of everything I’ve mentioned.

You’ll find there the free daily Musical U masterclasses and whatever we do next after that, you’ll find a list of all the special resources and opportunities with other music education providers online that we know about, as well as a way to let us know if you come across any we’ve missed. And we’re also compiling a list of independent teachers who are accepting new online students at this time if you’re looking for something new or you want to support music teachers at this difficult time.

We’re also encouraging you to share what you’re doing to stay musical during this time, by posting on your social media of choice, whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever Snapchatty Tik-Toky thing the cool kids are using these days, with the hashtag #stayinplayon – so that even if you’re not joining us for our group activities inside Musical U we can all still feel connected and inspire one another to draw on music as our comfort, our refuge and our silver lining at this time.

I would love to hear what you’re up to – but instead of our usual invitation to drop us an email I’m going to ask you to put it out there on social media for more people to see and be inspired by. Hashtag it #stayinplayon and we’ll see it there.

So head over to stayinplayon.com and check out everything that’s happening and I hope to see you at some of the live events we’re organising for members and the public in the weeks ahead.

Stay healthy. Stay safe.

And together, let’s stay in – and play on!

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