Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/breaking-music-theory-box-david-kulma/
Music theory can be a difficult beast to tame – many struggle with it, and some musicians give up on it entirely.

Fortunately, there are “public nerds” out there who have made it their job to make music theory accessible and engaging for non-musicians…

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/breaking-music-theory-box-david-kulma/

With Music Corner

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/music-business-whats-changed-whats-stayed-cliff-goldmacher/
These days everyone is an expert. Just slap something up on the internet, and if it looks good, everyone will trust that you know what you’re talking about. Right?

Well, if that’s the case, how do you know that the “expert” advice on your songwriting and songwriting career is really going to help?

The answer is to find someone who’s been around, and who moves with the times. Someone like Cliff Goldmacher:

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/music-business-whats-changed-whats-stayed-cliff-goldmacher/

With Cliff Goldmacher

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/making-68-mistakes/
6/8 is a popular time signature in music. It seems simple enough: six eighth-note beats per bar. However, musicians often struggle to recognise or play 6/8.

There are six common mistakes musicians make with 6/8. Learn about them and you’ll be able to avoid them yourself.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/making-68-mistakes/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/15-improv-experts-on-their-favourite-examples-of-improvisation/
Musical U take a comprehensive look at what it means to improvise, from all angles.

Through podcast episodes, interviews, tutorials, and even some new improvisation modules and a roadmap, we’ve examined the ways you can approach improv, how to use specific musical elements to get started in improv, how to improvise with others, and how to put yourself in the right mindset for spontaneous playing.

Read on for 15 experts’ diverse takes on their favourite bits of improv, why it’s stayed with them, and what impact it’s had on their career and the way they think about music.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/15-improv-experts-on-their-favourite-examples-of-improvisation/

Can you imagine having the kind of musical mind that can:

• Hear music and effortlessly recognise the notes and chords by ear.
• Glance at sheet music, tab or a chord chart and immediately hear in your head how it should sound.
• Spontaneously create your own original musical ideas as easily as breathing and share them with other musicians or an audience using your voice or your instrument.
• Just sit down and play for your own pleasure, relaxation and creative fulfilment.
• Sit in on jam sessions or gigs with any group of musicians with no prior preparation required because you know you’ll have something solid to contribute.

A musical mind that feels capable and confident in any musical situation – because you understand instinctively how music is put together.

The kind of musical mind that makes learning new things in music is a breeze – because everything just connects together and makes sense.

Does that sound exciting to you?

In our Musicality Unleashed series we’ve been talking about the mindset shifts and mental models which can empower you to do all these things and more. And last time we talked about how to bring this all together with the established “Kodály” approach which has been proven over decades to effectively put in place an empowering foundation of musicality.

After discovering the effectiveness of the Kodály approach I decided we had to do something to get it into more people’s hands, so last year we launched the first ever online training course following a Kodály approach, Foundations of a Musical Mind.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Get the Musicality Unleashed cheat sheet
• 1: The Truth About Talent
• 2: The Two Things Most Music Education Is Missing
• 3: What Makes a Musician a “Natural”?
• 4: Did You Skip Step One?
• 5: A Better Mental Model For Pitch
• 6: A Better Mental Model For Rhythm
• 7: Don’t Just Learn Songs – Learn Music Through Songs
• 8: Singing Is Your Birthright
• 9: Creativity Is The Vehicle, Not The Destination
• Foundations of a Musical Mind: Special Launch Offer!

Transcript

We collaborated with Anne Mileski, a leading curriculum designer trained in the Kodály approach and she put together just a phenomenal 6-week course for us. We call it “Foundations of a Musical Mind”.

Now if you’ve been following our website or podcast for a while you’ll know that at Musical U we actually aren’t big fans of the course structure for learning musicality – for the general case of becoming more musical, a one-size-fits-all course just isn’t the best option. But rather than try to incorporate Kodály ideas piecemeal into our main training system we realised that because we were going to be starting from absolute zero with this new training, actually the course approach could work really well.

Because whatever background musicians are coming in with – whether they’re just starting out or have been playing for years, whether they’re a singer, guitarist, saxophonist, or anything else, whether they like blues, rock, classical, jazz – and whether they’re mostly driven by wanting to play by ear, improvise, write their own music, or just have a deeper and more instinctive understanding of how the music they love is put together – this course genuinely could help each and every one of them.

Easy to say! Not so easy to do. But knowing it would be a challenge we were able to draw on Anne’s expertise and our extensive experience helping adult musicians learn musicality skills online, and based on the results and comments from our first group of students who went through the course last year we actually managed to pull it off. I’ll be sharing some of those comments alongside this video so you can see for yourself.

As always at Musical U we put a big emphasis on personal support and guidance and that meant that we were able to learn from this first group’s experiences to fix, improve, refine and extend the course as they went through it. So it’s now even better than it was to begin with and I’m super excited to be opening up enrolment now for a new class.

Now one big advantage of the “course” approach is that it’s very clearly structured and time-bound. This is a 6-week course, designed to take about 15 minutes per day. And we know now that it does indeed deliver on that. Some people took a bit longer each day, others zipped through it, but we saw that on average it does take about that long, so it’s not a massive time commitment to get real results. And by the end of the 6 weeks you’ll have gained some really quite impressive skills in identifying notes and rhythms by ear and actually doing all kinds of interesting things with those skills.

One potential downside of the course approach is that instead of a small monthly fee like we charge for Musical U membership, it does mean putting down a single payment for all the training and that’s inevitably going to be a higher price.

And of course we do provide a really generous guarantee policy, so that if for any reason it didn’t deliver all these wonderful results for you, you can get all your money back. I wanted to make sure it was risk-free for you to make this investment in your musical life.

But I’m really proud of the price we’ve managed to hit with this – because compared to the in-person Kodály training you can get it’s an insane bargain.

And when you look at the impact it can have on your musical life (and the impact it’s already had on all the musicians who’ve gone through it so far) – it’s really hard to put a value on that.

You *could* just go on, feeling like learning music is a struggle. Like music theory and ear training never quite connect up with the music you know and love. Continuing to learn pieces note-by-note and feeling anxious about forgetting them, or needing to perform without sheet music in front of you. Feeling like you’re just not a “natural” and don’t have what it takes to feel free, confident and creative in music.

Or you could put in place a new foundation for understanding music, deeply and intuitively. You could experience, for possibly the first time, true freedom and creativity in improvising or coming up with your own musical ideas. You could hear music – and immediately know the notes and rhythms being used, and connect that all with sheet music or playing your instrument.

That’s something that’s going to transform the whole of your musical life for the rest of your life. What would that be worth to you?

Now let me ask you something: As I say these things, is there a little voice in the back of your head going “Yeah *maybe*. But I don’t know if it’ll really work like that for me.”

I’m personally a bit of a skeptic. If someone promises amazing results with a product or service I’m going to have my doubts.

But I hope you know from our brand and from the Musicality Unleashed series, that we are not about false promises of overnight success, or selling people on myths and pipedreams that get them excited but fail to deliver real results.

We’re about the methods that really work. The proven systems and training material that can genuinely transform a musician’s experience of music.

So when we saw that the Foundations course was indeed providing the kind of transformative experiences it was designed to, we sat down with a handful of course students to ask them how it had gone. So that you could hear from real music learners, just like you, that this stuff really does work.

So please check those out – so that you can allow yourself to get excited about this and believe in the transformation that’s ahead of you.

Because if you love music – and if you have ever felt limited, restricted, or you’ve struggled in your learning – and if you’ve itched for that freedom, creativity, confidence, that deep instinctive understanding of how music works – then it really is a seriously exciting opportunity that’s in front of you right now.

Now because of the personal support we’re offering to make sure this course really delivers results for you, places are limited. And enrolment is open for just a short period. Like I said before, this course quickly sold out the first time it was offered, so if you’re interested then please act fast to secure your spot.

And I look forward to seeing you in there!

P.S. For members

Oh – and don’t forget, as a member of Musical U you have access to an exclusive members-only discount on the normal pricing. Just make sure you use the special discount link we’ll be emailing to you and you can enjoy a nice saving on the regular price – our thank you to you for being a member of Musical U. See you in there!

P.S. For alumni

Oh – and don’t forget, as a former member of Musical U you have access to our exclusive member discount on the normal pricing. Just make sure you use the special discount link we’ll be emailing to you and you can enjoy a nice saving on the regular price – just our thank you to you for having been a member of Musical U, someone who’s dedicated to their musicality training and open to trying new things. I look forward to seeing you in there!

The post Foundations Of A Musical Mind Is Open! appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/common-rhythm-problem-spots-getting-lost/
Every musician has been there, from the seasoned pro to the beginner band kid playing her first concert.

You are playing your heart out and you find out that you are lost, just lost, lost, lost. What can you do?

In this article we’ll share some ways you can make sure you never get that sinking feeling of being lost again.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/common-rhythm-problem-spots-getting-lost/

We’ve been talking in this Musicality Unleashed series about some powerful insights and mindset shifts for tapping into your inner musician and transforming how free, confident and creative you feel in music.

We’ve talked particularly about mental models – and how it’s a foundation of the right mental models which can set you up for success and turn you into the “natural” musician who can learn new musical concepts and skills quickly and easily, and empower you to do impressive things instinctively, like play by ear, improvise, and create your own music.

We’ve talked about solfa and rhythm syllables as two specific examples of those empowering mental models and about song-based learning as a neat way to make it a fun and musical experience to develop your musical mind.

We also looked at creativity and how it’s something that can actually make your music learning easier and more enjoyable when you include it as soon as possible as the vehicle, not the destination.

Okay, so how are we going to bring this all together?

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Get the Musicality Unleashed cheat sheet
• 1: The Truth About Talent
• 2: The Two Things Most Music Education is Missing
• 3: What Makes a Musician a “Natural”?
• 4: Did You Skip Step One?
• 5: A Better Mental Model for Pitch
• 6: A Better Mental Model for Rhythm
• 7: Don’t Just Learn Songs – Learn Music Through Songs
• 8: Singing Is Your Birthright
• 9: Creativity Is the Vehicle, Not the Destination
• Foundations of a Musical Mind

Transcript

So I’m hoping that you’re feeling a new enthusiasm and excitement about your music learning going forwards!

Take one or more of these ideas and apply it in your musical life and you’re going to see some impressive results.

But I know you might also be thinking “I want *all* of that!” and wondering if there’s some neat way to bring it all together.

And there might even be some people who watched the videos and thought “That *sounds* great but surely if it all really worked this would have been discovered ages ago and everyone would be doing it.”

Well it turns out there actually is an established methodology which brings all of this together in a clear, coherent way – and so I wanted to make sure you knew about it.

There is a musicianship training method dating back over 100 years that takes exactly this holistic approach to putting a solid foundation of mental models in place, all using song-based learning.

You might have heard of it before, especially if you’ve been following Musical U for a while.

But I’m hesitant to name it and share the details – because it has a funny-sounding name, and being 100 years old, there are assumptions that come along with that. You might immediately be thinking “outdated”, “hard to understand”, “not relevant to modern life”, and so on – whether intentionally or just subconsciously.

And before I tell you about it I want to come back for a second to that idea of “song-based learning”. When I talked about it you might have found yourself wondering how exactly you choose the right songs to teach you what you need to learn.

We need a set of simple songs. Songs that are like the music we love. But simpler – in each of the ways we need to simplify to make acquiring our new mental models smooth and easy.

We need a big library of songs of various kinds and complexities that we could use to build our step-by-step training.

In fact, we all have access to just such a library.

It’s called folk music.

Now if you’re like me, “Folk” has always just been a genre. To me it conjures up wonderful-sounding Irish and Scottish music with twangey accents and traditional instruments and moving lyrics.

But fundamentally “folk music” just means “the music that society has ingrained in it”. There’s Irish and Scottish folk music that you’d find in the “folk” section of a UK music shop (if those still existed). But there’s a huge catalog of American folk music, and folk music from every country, in fact.

What’s great is that these are typically really excellent music. Not necessarily complicated, in fact some are incredibly simple, which is ideal for our learning. But they stuck in society’s memory because they were musically effective – they cut right to the core of what matters in music. Melodically, rhythmically, harmonically, even with their lyrical content. So folk music is kind of the heart of all the other genres, and that makes it an amazing choice if we’re building ourselves a new foundation.

So it’s actually folk songs which this approach I’m going to talk about uses. And I wanted to mention that because of this idea, that some things have stood the test of time because they tap into fundamental truths that don’t change. And with a little bit of polish they can be just as useful today as they ever were.

Think of Beethoven’s Fur Elise [SING]

Or Michaelangelo’s David.

Even the Bible. We’re probably not going to read it in the original Greek or Hebrew! But whether you’re Christian or not, it can’t be denied that reading a modern translation provides fascinating learning and principles that 100% apply to modern life.

Things which have stood the test of time have done so for good reason – and their age shouldn’t put us off learning all we can from them.

That applies to using folk music for your song-based learning and it also applies to this overall approach I’m going to talk about. The fact that it’s 100 years old is actually a very good thing!

So this strangely-named 100-year old method I mentioned – it originated in Hungary in the early 20th Century with a Hungarian man named Zoltán Kodály. He believed that music belongs to everybody – not a gifted few, or just those who can afford serious training. He developed a new approach using folk songs to teach the fundamental mental understanding of music, the musical instinct. And this quickly spread throughout Hungary, giving every schoolchild a natural understanding of music and ability to express themselves musically with their voice.

Despite being so successful in Hungary in the first half of the 20th Century, clearly it didn’t go on to become the dominant approach to music education worldwide. Why is that, if it’s so effective?

Well, that’s a story for another day, but suffice to say that for reasons of history and politics and the established institutions of music education, its impact has been limited in a way that’s frankly tragic – because of the immense potential it holds for any musician in any country or age…

The thing that put Kodály on my radar was that I kept hearing about it over the years, and it was often given kind of a legendary status. “Oh, such and such amazing musician – well they’re Kodály-trained.” So I finally looked into it properly myself to see why it had such legendary status among serious musicians.

I took some private one-on-one lessons with one of the top instructors in the UK and it was really interesting… I remember in my first Kodály lesson, I found myself thinking “this is all very basic” – because I knew notation, I was comfortable singing, I even knew a ton of aural skills stuff like intervals and so on.

But in the course of that lesson I came to realise this was a whole new way of approaching music. And by the end I’d done some things with those simple concepts that were actually pretty powerful – like improvising my own melodies to fit a form, like tapping one rhythm while I sang another, and so on. And I came away thinking “Oh, wow, this is actually really fundamental and powerful”.

It took me a while longer to click that this wasn’t just an alternative – it was, in a lot of ways, the missing foundation that all the other stuff I’d learned should have been built on.

Later on I went on a 3-day intensive course where I was surrounded by Kodály instructors and students. And that was fascinating because I got to see the impact it has. These people ranged from amateur musicians, to teachers, to professional musicians playing in national orchestras.

Now I’ve been in tons of situations where musicians get together to learn or perform. And what stood out the most on that Kodály course was the incredibly different atmosphere. These people all had an ease and delight in music. The skills and viewpoint that Kodály training was equipping them with – it just let them *enjoy* music.

There wasn’t that competitiveness or insecurity or one-up-man-ship that’s so common when musicians get together. And they could do some seriously impressive things, in terms of collaborating, creating, playing by ear, and so on. But it was really the spirit that jumped out, the way that having these new mental models let them feel a confidence and ownership in music that just made it all a joy.

Last year I interviewed a chap called Jimmy Rotheram for the podcast – he had adopted the Kodály approach in the UK primary school where he teaches music. And not only did the kids transform musically, it had such a powerful effect on their minds that their school went from being literally among the worst in the country, to being rated in the top 1% of schools nationwide for progress in reading, writing and maths.

Talking to Jimmy what clicked in my head was that Kodály is super successful with children – because it starts from the very basics and gives them the right mental models.

But it’s not just “so simple even a child can understand it” – I’d say it’s “so simple even an adult can understand it”!

So I wanted to make sure you knew about Kodály, and how it is a great way to bring together everything we’ve been talking about in a clear and holistic way.

Like we’ve been talking about – this can be the foundation you’ve probably been missing. But for reasons of history and politics it’s mostly been hidden away in children’s music classes and niche communities with in-person training.

And if you want to seek out a Kodály training course that’s going to be a fantastic way to put a new foundation in place for yourself.

I should mention though that in the real world it’s not easy to get Kodály training. And it’s certainly not cheap, I paid several hundred pounds for that 3-day course, for example. And it was well worth that investment.

But it left me grappling with this weird situation where I was providing affordable musicality training worldwide through Musical U – and proud of what we’d built there. But I had discovered this super valuable missing piece – that was mostly hidden away in the real world with prohibitive prices.

Once I’d seen this I knew we had to somehow incorporate the Kodály approach into what we provide at Musical U.

Because although Kodály training is well-proven and extremely effective, it’s still mostly hidden away…

You can find instructors or courses for in-person training here and there.

But there was no convenient, affordable, instant access way for people to get Kodály training.

So we started to adopt parts of the Kodály approach in our online training at Musical U…

And each new thing we borrowed from the world of Kodály quickly had a massive positive impact on how effective our training system was.

But there were some aspects of Kodály that we couldn’t just “bolt on” to our existing training.

So we decided to go “all in”.

To put together something brand new, based on Kodály principles, and designed specifically to deliver the firm foundation you need for your “musical mind”.

This course has been a runaway success, beyond even what I’d hoped for in terms of delivering students fantastic results – and we’re about to reopen enrolment.

So if you’re interested in an easy and affordable way to get access to this amazing approach then stay tuned for next time where I’ll be sharing all the details!

The post Bringing It All Together appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/singing-in-english-tips-for-esl-singers-and-coaches/
From Mexico to Japan, the amount of international performing artists that are singing in English might surprise you.

Although time and regular practice can allow ESL singers to become proficient in a non-native language, learning how to sing without an accent can be incredibly challenging and even costly.

One of the best ways to efficiently maximize an artist’s financial resources is to invest in a vocal coach that has experience working with international students.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/singing-in-english-tips-for-esl-singers-and-coaches/