Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/get-rhythm-finding-the-beat/
Do you struggle with finding the pulse of a favorite song, trying to figure out a drumbeat for your mix, or notating a complex rhythm?

Let’s talk about getting your rhythm!

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/get-rhythm-finding-the-beat/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/a-guitar-method-that-works-for-teachers-and-students-with-david-hart/
Why do some methods for learning an instrument seem to work better than others?

David from G4 GUITAR METHOD joins Musical U to share the secret of the 80/20 principle that works so well for his students.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/a-guitar-method-that-works-for-teachers-and-students-with-david-hart/

The Musical U team discusses the importance of taking it step by step in music – and breaking your practice down into “chunks” that make sense for you.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part One
• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part Two
• About the Message in the Music
• About Listening as the Route to Musicality
• About the Importance of Joy and Pleasure
• About Exploring Without Self-Judgement
• About You Being Musical Inside Already
• About Keeping it Simple

Transcript

Christopher: Hello, and welcome to the Musicality Podcast. My name is Christopher Sutton and I’m the Founder and Director of Musical U and I’m excited to be joined today by Stewart, Adam and Andrew from the Musical U team.
This is an episode following up on our 100th episode celebrations, where we asked 26 experts to share their answers to what’s one thing people can do to unlock their inner musicality?

There were several themes that ran through those answers. Even though each answer was interesting and different. There were a few things that came up time and again.

And so we wanted to take a few episodes to explore those themes and share some thoughts from the team on each of them.

In this episode we are going to be talking about taking it step by step. The importance of small chunks and making steady progress over time.

I’m really keen to dig into this one because I’ve seen the impact it can have for someone to shift their mindset including for myself, to shift your mindset from I must go big, I must hit that goal straight away, to, let’s break it down, let’s take small steps and work bit by bit towards that goal.

In our expert answers we had Casey Von Neuman talking about how it’s important to slow down and take things in small chunks.

Chris Owenby talked about how the great and accomplished musicians we admire all have a backstory and their expertise comes from the little things over time that add up and let them achieve those things.

Jeremy Fisher talked about stepped practice. The idea that when we’re struggling with a piece of music the trick is to take just that difficult moment, hone in on it and then gradually expand from there as you learn to play that part of the piece.

This is something that comes up in almost every context in learning music. It’s certainly something we remind members of regularly at Musical U and as I touched on there it’s come up for me, no shortage of times, in my own musical life.

Before we dive into this I’m gonna ask each of the team to introduce themselves incase you haven’t heard them on the podcast before.

Adam, why don’t you kick us off and say a little bit about yourself and your role at Musical U?

Adam: Hello everyone. My name is Adam Liette. I’m the Communications Manager at Musical U. I’m a trumpet player, guitar player and singer.

Andrew: Hello. I’m Andrew Bishko. I’m the Product Manager at Musical U. In charge of all the different contact and modules and things that we are doing there and I am the Content Manager on the Musical U blog. I’m also a music teacher, a songwriter and improvisor, a multi instrumentalist and a mariachi.

Stewart: Hello. My name is Stewart Hilton I am a Community Conductor. Most of you would know me as GtrStew777 inside the site and also I play guitar outside of Musical U I have a few different projects, a tribute one and the other one is a country thing. And there you go.

Christopher: Stewart, why don’t you start us off?

You play in a tribute band at the moment. You’ve played in other bands in the past and you also teach guitar. So I’d love to hear how you think about this topic or whether you think it’s important to break things down into small steps.

Stewart: Definitely. I hadn’t even thought about that until you just said it.

Yeah. With the tribute artist that’s a really good example. When he had contacted me. This guy does five different tribute acts so there’s a lot of music to learn. One of the things he would do and I was very thankful about is he said, learn these songs first, learn these second, don’t worry about these.

To take it up a level to of the tributes he does are Elton John and Billy Joel and for any guitar player who’s played or piano performers will know that piano guys love to write music much more deeper than just normal guitar stuff. There’s more chords, there’s more jazz chords, there’s more interesting rhythms they have. It makes it difficult.

My first goal was to just work through the rhythms and site out things and I had to chart em because there’s just so many chords. That you had to have the chart in front of you with words because you use words to cue off on the chords.

That was like my basic thing. At least get that, the rhythm and then build onto it, cos you have to get the signature lifts if there are any in and build on that.

When using that same idea, we always try and help that with the members. Most of us day to day even with the tribute guys. I heard it and I’m like, Oh God I gotta learn all this so much and in your head you build this huge mountain that you’re like, I gotta conquer this now, well you don’t really need to. You can piece it off one step at a time.

That really downplays the stress that you are currently going under and won’t help you lose a lot of hair from pulling it out of your head.

Yeah, so that’s definitely helped. In the long end of things.

Thankfully he would always tell me about shows coming up so I could work on one act, whereas just trying to learn em all I could just focus on this one show and then as another one would come up I could then focus in on that one.

Yeah. It’s definitely doing it in small chunks at a time is a huge thing and makes things much easier in the long run on ya.

Christopher: I think you touched on the major thing there which is overwhelm. We have a lot of material in Musical U about planning and goal setting and for a large extent it’s really about helping members avoid overwhelm.

We touched on this in our recent episode with Sarah Campbell and we were talking about keeping it simple, the importance of keeping it simple.

Likewise taking it step by step or breaking it into chunks is just critical if you’re not gonna get to that state where you like, oh my gosh, there’s just so much to do, I need to look at every website, do every exercise and I’m not gonna be ready until I’m done.

Anything you can do to simplify or to find the one piece of it that you can do today it’s so essential.

Stewart: Oh yeah. You just build onto things.

This year I took golf lessons at the beginning of the year. I like to play golf. I’m not that good. My wife got me three lessons at a real nice place that gave lessons.

He gave me first some tips and there was a lot of stuff he was going through. But there’s three I’m trying to remember and of course, at the end he goes, well you can pay for more lessons and we haven’t even got in the golf season and I’m like, I have enough to worry about right now.

It’s knowing that, because a lot of people we are, we’re like well yeah lets continue. But, I don’t even have the other three things smooth yet. If I add anything more it’s just gonna get confusing. I even get on the golf course and golfers [inaudible 00:33:03]everybody has a tip for you when you have a bad swing. They are like, you know, you need to do this. And I have to calm them down, like look I have so many things going on in my head right now I have to focus on those little things.

The same things with music, we wanna just do it all and it’s like no, just focus on this, these two or three things or it’s just the whole book.

Christopher: Yeah. That’s a great observation. Not all small steps are created equal and chunking it down is great but it’s not a magic bullet. You can still end up overwhelmed, you can still end up going down the wrong path.
One thing I particularly wanted to touch on when we talk about this is that you can do it yourself but there are definitely cases and particularly in music education where it can be really valuable to have an expert show you the step by step.

I definitely feel like this is a valuable part of what we do at Musical U. Is with our modules and our road maps.
It’s not that you can’t find that information in other places, certainly some of what we do is unique but a lot of it isn’t. The value is in a clear, broken down, sensible step by step method for it.

Having someone who’s gone there before or ideally someone who’s helped other people do what you’re trying to do can save you a lot of time because chunking it down is not enough. If your chunks are wrong or they’re heading in the wrong direction. You are not gonna be any further along and as you point out there Stewart you need in yourself and in your teacher to be aware of the pacing of it and the chunk size and when you’re ready to move on.

In that case with the golf, him giving you another tip or doing another lesson, that would be another small chunk but that’s not the kind of chunk you needed right then. The chunk you need is to play 9 holes and see how it goes.

Stewart: Yeah. I think you wanna get to attainable goals.

I always like talking to people about celebrating things.

Find a goal. Hit it. Celebrate it. Then you can move on.

For me in golf I wanted the break 50 for my hole. That’s my attainable goal and I’ve done it a few times this year so I can celebrate that.

The same thing with music. Find some quicker attainable things and when you get there celebrate it, be joyful about it and then move on.

That makes it a lot more fun.

Christopher: Absolutely. That is huge for motivation and I think also it’s important in terms of avoiding getting totally stuck.

If you just have one big goal in mind. It’s so easy to get stuck and not even realize you’re stuck. Whereas when you’ve broken it down more and you’re taking small steps forward you really notice when you stop that momentum when you hit a sticking point.

You’re thinking about it in a level of detail that allows you to see, okay, it’s not that I’m rubbish at this topic, it’s not that I’m failing at my big goal it’s just that this step is causing me a problem.

Again I can’t help but think of it in the context of Musical U and the training we provide where hopefully. And I think in a lot of cases, when a member gets stuck, it’s very easy to say, this is why you’re stuck or this is what you’re stuck on and it’s even easy for them to self identify and not just say oh, I’m rubbish at your training or oh I can’t figure out what I hear.

They come to us and say, listen, I’m struggling with, you know, distinguishing and perfect fifth and perfect fourth when they’re harmonic and at that point it’s really easy to help them find a solution because the chunk size was small enough. They saw they got stuck. They knew why they were stuck and they could look for a solution.

I think that’s a huge part of the value of breaking it down into small steps like that.

Stewart: Well. I gotta say, you just reminded me of something and that is what the tribute artist, we had no rehearsals so there’s a term that we use and we had to use especially when I first started with him and that is, when in doubt, stay out.

There have been moments when I’ve gotten up and I don’t remember the song, but it was the first time I played with him, and I wrote the song out and I got up and I hit the first chord and I’m like, good Lord a cow just died somewhere, and I was like, what the heck’s going on. I’m looking at the guitar and I’m looking at the music and I’m like, this should be right, so I hit the second chord, still terrible and at that point I moseyed off the stage and let it go.

Afterwards he was like, you did the right thing.

So then the next week I got with that song and figured out. I can’t remember exactly what had happened. I may have come in on the wrong beat or the chords on the sheet weren’t lined up with the words which can create a mass of bad moments.

It helped me out and that’s kind of a good way of going at it.

Also not getting negative and beating yourself up if you do have a mistake and just go, okay I just need to take it back, figure out what happened, and then go forward.

Christopher: Yeah. I think that’s a great case where. By the sounds of it, because you had approached this is a step by step way I’m sure you were able to come away from that gig thinking oh, that one song, something was off.

Whereas if you’d psyched yourself up into, this is a job and I need to nail the whole job perfectly you probably would’ve come away from that thinking, oh *bleep*, I’m not good enough at that job.

Adam. How do you think about this or use it in your own musical life. The idea of taking it step by step?

Adam: Well to be honest I haven’t always been the best at it.

I think we all have those stories of going to the music store. For me it was Dream Theater. I was like, I wanna play like John Petrucci from Dream Theater. If you are listening to this and you haven’t heard John Petrucci yet, go listen to Dream Theater, they are incredible. Then after a couple of weeks, I threw the book away because I couldn’t do it.

I like to think of what Forrest Kenney in episode 100 talked about. We need to approach music like a child and I think about when you’re talking about step by step, small chunks. I think about learning the music language. The music language which has a lot of similarities to learning another language.

I’m bi-lingual, I know that several people on this team are. Probably a lot of our listeners. When we think about learning a new language. There’s a popular cartoon here in the States, Ni Hao Kai Lan and the kids that watch it are like, I can say Chinese, Ni Hao. Like that’s the only thing they can say in Chinese but they are like so excited by it.

That’s how we first start approaching learning a new language. I speak Indonesian and when the first time I could say [inaudible 00:40:10]good morning, how are you, I was like wow, I can say this, right!

I think, sometimes if we just find joy in that little moment and understand that great, I can speak this one phrase that doesn’t mean I’m ready to read a translation of Danté. Very high level stuff.

You are not gonna go from a simple major scale to Mozart. There’s a lot more along the way. Just like with a language, you have to learn the root words. You have to learn the prefixes, suffixes, male and female and proper chord structure and verb, oh my gosh, it’s a long, long process.

We are not learning those little bits as a means to get to that end point. We learn little bits cos it’s more fun along the way. We can put things together and before you know it we’re speaking full sentences and then we can tell a story. Yes we still might be using simple words, we’re not using complex words yet but we’re still able to tell a musical story with very simple parts, elements of musicality.

I think that’s a great way to approach learning a language cos if you went to go learn Chinese tomorrow you wouldn’t expect to listen to Chinese radio tomorrow or the day after and be able to understand it. You would understand it’s gonna take a long time to learn Chinese.

If we really think about that with our music training I think we’ll find more joy in the little things and we’ll be better well served for it.

Christopher: Absolutely yeah. That’s a great analogy.

I think part of the challenge and part of why this is worth covering on the musicality podcast is that in the case like learning a language or with a child learning to walk or most skills in life. We get that. It’s gonna be step by step. You need to take it slow.

With the inner skills of music we have these cultural assumptions about what it takes and I think that leads people to expect either they can do it already or they are gonna suddenly click and be able to do it.

We offer a masterclass occasionally called how to play by ear with zero talent required. In that I talk about playing notes or chords by ear and make the analogy to reading. I’m like, look, if you are learning to read, you don’t begin by taking War and Peace off the shelf and trying to read it. You don’t hand a kid War and Peace on day one of learning to read and expect them to do it. But, somehow with music we do, we’re like, I listened to a song, I couldn’t figure out the chords therefore, I can’t play by ear. The reality is it does need to be broken down. We start reading with the letters and a few simple words like ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ and eventually you work your way up to the literature.

It’s the same for these inner skills in music. You can and it needs to be broken down into small chunks and I think a neat example too of what we were talking about before about it needs to be the right chunks. If you are learning a language a foreign language that is, don’t open the dictionary and start by learning all the ‘A’ words one by one or whatever the first letter of that language is. That is not the way to master the language. Having a tutor book or a teacher to point you to the most important things to learn first and the sequencing of it is really critical.

It’s the same in music. It’s not a matter of I want to play chords by ear, therefore, I’m gonna start today by learning to play C Major by ear and tomorrow I’ll do C Minor and then I’ll do C Major.[inaudible 00:43:49]

I bought a book once that was pre porting to teach you to play by ear and it took that kind of approach. It was like, here are the eleven kinds of C Chord. Now let’s try playing them by ear. I was like, what, what, what, complete, almost gibberish to me anyway. Maybe it works for some people but I always have that in mind of an example of how breaking things down in small steps in itself doesn’t help you. There are wrong ways to do it and you need to choose your resources or your mentors or your teachers carefully.

How about you Andrew. What are your thoughts on breaking it down step by step?

Andrew: Well. I’m gonna start with something that seems contrary here.

In my teaching when I’m doing a piano lesson. A lot of times the first thing I do is say wave a pencil in the air and I say this is my magic pencil, and I point it at em and I say, you can now play anything you ever wanted to play on the piano. What is it?

They’ll pick a song and I’ll say, okay let’s start learning it now. You know and they are like, oooh, you know?

A lot of times the song is Fur Elise, Ludwig Van Beethoven you may have heard it before.

What we do is we take that song, that person might not be able to read a lick of music or anything like that or may not have played but we break it down for that particular person.

I have learned how to break it down into small little steps in a pattern. And, gosh, doing that I’ve discovered so much about these pieces of music myself.

The student is highly motivated because it’s a piece they really wanna play. Okay, they won’t know how to play the whole thing, we’re just gonna play the first little, deedle deedle deedle deedle dum, whatever but they’re really motivated.

We’ve figured out ways to do it and they have nothing to do with the standard piano technique or standard practices or anything like that. Picking out patterns, bringing out music, singing to…Using all these little techniques these little, step by step by step by step and suddenly the student realizes they can do it.

We become impatient with the process and we procrastinate on our musicality and playing music. We enjoy the process. We had a master class with Lisa McCormick it really encapsulated for me. She says, note to self. I love this, why are we doing music, why are we wasting out time with these ridiculous sounds when we could be mowing the lawn or something, right Stew?

It’s because we love it, we love it and learning to love the process. Learning to love the little learning steps like Adam was saying, appreciating that little step, really loving it really appreciating it.

I understood this on a certain level, but, I too have pieces of music where I feel like I’m banging my head against a brick wall. Trying to learn a certain part and I asked about this and Lisa’s class and she said do it because you love it and I realize this goes so much deeper so if I can [inaudible 00:47:33] this one passage and I can’t play it because there’s something going on with my fingers. Well then I have to learn how to re position my accordion and maybe I have to do some work on my muscles I have to take two years of yoga classes in order to play this passage to get my technique up or something, whatever it is but I love it and I wanna do it, I wanna make it happen.

It’s a voyage of self discovery. You learn things about yourself and you don’t know where it’s gonna take you. It might take you on a side journey that you weren’t really aware of.

One of the great things about Musical U is that we have such a variety of material. There’s so many ways to go at it. And the beautiful thing I tell so many members. They say, shall I do this or shall I do that? Should I do this? I say, do whichever one you want to do, whichever one stimulates your heart because it’s all going to the same place, just coming from a different perspective.

We all chunk things differently. In my teaching experience I’ve seen certain students can take things in big chunks. Understand something all the way and certain students have to have it broken down.

I’ve had to break things down in ways that I didn’t know that you could break it down so far. It’s like splitting the proton or something. But sometimes you break it down that far and sometimes its boop it’s all one chunk.

It’s similar with your own learning you discover these things about yourselves. With Musical U with all the different varieties of approaches and training and the vast quantity of material you have the opportunity to explore this and what’s more is you’ve got feedback and you’re being guided along the way.

You’ve got Stew in there. Rooting for you every step of the way, answering your questions and myself, sometimes.
It really is about learning to love the process. To enjoy the process and remember why we are doing this. We are doing this because we love it.

Christopher: Fantastic. There was a ton packed in there that was really insightful but I particularly love that you noted the need for it to be personal.

I mentioned you should have a teacher, make sure you are doing the right steps or the right chunks but you’re absolutely right that what’s sensible for one person is absolutely not for another.

Of course that’s why we are so personal about it at Musical U. Whether you are thinking about it musically or not I think this is something to keep in mind that just because something is step by step it may not be the right steps and that doesn’t mean they’re bad steps it just means they’re not right for you.

That’s why having a teacher, a mentor or a guide or even just a musical buddy to talk it through with can really help because you do need to find the method that suits you and you do need to be willing to pivot and change and observe when things are going off track and that is the beauty of having someone more expert or more advanced or even just along side of you to talk it through with.

Andrew: I was going to say teaching about the teacher issue. That one of the thing I would like to ask when a student starts is, what do you wanna do? What is your goal? Because not everybody wants to be a John Petrucci or an Aldi Miller or [inaudible 00:51:14]Some of them the one woman I have who just wanted to play chords with her kids so they can sing along.

There’s all these arrays of all these different goals that people wanna do with their musicality and tapping into that and adjusting how you wanna go about your journey and how you wanna go about it and learning it is so different from one person to another.

Christopher: Yeah. I wanna make sure we don’t end up this episode with the listener feeling like, you know, we started out by saying this about avoiding overwhelm and I think from some of what we’ve said you might be ending up feeling a bit overwhelmed in the sense that we’ve said there’s no one perfect method.

This isn’t a magic bullet and just chunking it down isn’t gonna solve all of your problems but I think there are some concrete things there that everyone can take away.

The first is that you should chunk it down. It’s almost never right to just try and leap straight for your goal. It’s almost always valuable to try and chunk it down. Take it step by step. Doing so gives you the opportunity to see your progress. It helps keep you motivated. It helps you observe when a sticking point is coming up and be specific about what you’re stuck on.

The other major thing is those steps may or may not be right for you and you can try different methods. That is something you can do all by yourself. Just try different courses, or different approaches or just keep changing tack until you find your way forwards.

Or you can take advice from and expert in whatever you’re trying to study so that they can help you skip some of that experimentation. Ideally with some human involvement. We have a past episode of this podcast about choosing and succeeding with online music courses and one of the points made there is that there is a human factor required. There is no perfect one sized fits all course.

A big part of that is that a human can talk about it with you, they can understand why you are getting stuck and they can recommend a new step by step path that’s gonna get you where you wanna go.

I hope that that’s sending people away with a bit of encouragement that this is not a simple thing but it is an essential thing and it is a powerful thing.

Whatever you are working on in music do just take the time to think through, alright what are my steps? How can I chunk this down and how am I gonna do my best to ensure those are sensible steps or the right chunks for me and keep monitoring that over time?

A big thank you to Stewart, Andrew and Adam for sharing your thoughts on this episode.

It’s been great to have the chance to chat through this topic with you.

Thank you to everyone to listening and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Musicality Podcast!

The post About Taking it Step by Step appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/whos-ear-training-team/
When you embark on a new quest it’s important to have a team around you.

People who can inspire, support and guide you, who’ll be there to make sure you reach your destination. Do you have people like that for your ear training journey?

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/whos-ear-training-team/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/think-cant-sing-ask-10-questions/
Think that you can’t sing? 🎤

Understanding what makes a voice sound bad will enable you to see that there are steps that you can take to improve and learn to love singing 🎉

Get started today with this tips from the Musical U team!

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/think-cant-sing-ask-10-questions/

Behind almost every successful musician is a dedicated arranger and producer – someone who does everything from deciding the individual instrumental parts that will comprise the song, ensuring that the song is well-harmonized, coaching the musicians in-studio, and generally overseeing the creative process behind putting a song out into the world.

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Marti Amado, an arranger and producer with over 25 years of experience under her belt – creating music for TV, film, and advertising, as well as working with countless songwriters and performers to translate their musical ideas into the finished product.

In this insightful interview, Marti talks about her early musical life, the internship that opened her eyes to her dream job, the process of building her own studio, and the lessons she’s learned from a long, rich career of bringing musicians’ dreams to life. Aspiring producers, lean in – Marti shares the skills that you’ll need to succeed as a producer in the industry – giving the lowdown on marketing yourself, the importance of ear training, and the dogged determination needed to make it in an ever-changing, dynamic field.

Both my parents were musical so there was always a lot of music in my house growing up. My mom has a master’s degree in choral conducting and led choirs, and her father was a trumpet player and big band leader in the 30s and 40s. My dad played piano by ear and sang bass in the choir. I started classical piano lessons at the age of 7.

I was a very high-anxiety kid and teen, but when I was playing the piano, it took me to this other place where everything made sense and felt right. I felt spiritual connection – I just didn’t know that’s what it was at the time!

As a young teen, I joined a local singing group – an off-shoot of Up With People. That’s when I discovered that I could play along with their songs on the records after hearing them once, without ever having seen the charts. That group also was the first place I felt social camaraderie and I loved it.

I wrote my first song when I was 13 years old. I wrote it on the piano, singing the melody and lyrics. Not coincidentally, it was in the same key and had many of the same harmonic structures as a Brahms Intermezzo in A Major I was learning to play and had fallen in love with:

Because I played classical music and was a pretty good technical pianist and had a lot of ear training and theory, I was able to come up with fairly intricate things harmonically on the piano when I was writing – which proved to be detrimental when I started trying to write pop songs!

That revelation happened when I was in college. I started music school at Northwestern University as a classical piano performance major. After spending one semester locked in a practice room, I knew that wasn’t the life for me; I enjoy people too much and wanted a more social career in music – and also, I had horrible stage fright.

I started changing majors like crazy, but finally landed back in the School of Music with a degree in Commercial Music. My senior year of college, I had this amazing internship in downtown Chicago with one of the largest commercial music houses, ComTrack, that produced original music for national advertising campaigns – McDonald’s, United Airlines, Busch, and Miller Beer. Five days a week I sat in the back of these huge downtown studios and watched the producer and arrangers work with these incredible singers and studio musicians (including many Chicago Symphony players). That was it for me. I knew then that was what I wanted to do.

I have a Bachelor of Music Degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA, with an Ad Hoc concentration in Commercial Music – which essentially meant I designed my own degree program, taking music basics like theory, ear training, music history, and music business, but also taking classes in advertising and journalism and marketing from the NU School of Journalism, communications, orchestration and big band arranging, and psycho-acoustics (the science of why we hear things the way we do).

I also continued piano and voice as applied instruments. As I mentioned above, one of the most educational experiences was an internship my senior year of college with a commercial music company in downtown Chicago. A huge amount of my training after I finished school was just diving in and learning how to use computers and the recording equipment hands-on.

When I was starting out, the combination of being young and a woman made it hard for people to take me seriously in the studio. I was producing people 10-15 years older than I was, and a few men who weren’t that thrilled to have a 25 year old woman telling them what to do (and granted, I was pretty green for awhile too!). I got comments from players like, “Ok lady, where do you want the couch?” after asking someone to try a guitar part a few different ways, and, “Is that your real hair color?” from a recording engineer I had just met in the studio at my session!  

I think at the time I went home and cried about it. But ultimately, I loved being in the studio and creating music so much, I just persisted in working at my craft, tried to learn from seasoned producers, and just kept at it. When I turned 40, I finally kind of grew into my job.

Now, my style in the studio and with artists is nurturing and “mamma hen”-like, or so I’ve been told. At 40, I was comfortable in my own skin, and could be seen as more motherly, I suppose. I also stopped taking myself so seriously and my confidence grew a lot, which made me more relaxed. Today, I really feel that I am respected in my job because of my skill and the fact that I am a woman is incidental.

Ha! Yes, when I first moved to San Diego, my former husband and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and it had a tiny washer-dryer closet in the kitchen with sliding panel doors. We had no washer or dryer, but put shelves inside the closet – which held my first keyboard (a Yamaha DX7), an Alessis drum machine, and and awkward hard-to-use Alessis sequencer.

If I am remembering right (this was awhile ago!) I recorded everything playing off the Alessis sequencer directly into a two-track digital audio tape machine. Or worse yet, I might’ve been recording to a cassette player! I had been using a higher end eight-track reel to reel tape machine to record at my prior job in Chicago but we couldn’t afford anything that fancy.

I was very fortunate to get a staff producer job with a big music company in San Diego for a few years, but ultimately really wanted to be my own boss and determine my own schedule and the kind of work I did. So I became an independent in the summer of 1993. My business has had several names over the years when I was working as a sole proprietor. In 2009, I formed an LLC and became Amado Music, LLC.

I see my role as a musical translator – it’s my job to bring every artist and client’s musical vision to life in the studio, and communicate their vision with the musicians, engineers, and singers who help to create the final recordings. Often an artist comes to me with an idea of how they want their music to sound, but if not, I also help artists to explore and find a sound that is unique and right for them and shows their talents in the best light.

Ultimately it’s also my job to create an environment in the studio that’s comfortable and fun, that makes it easy for everyone to relax and give their best to the recording process.

A favorite production technique is layering. Layering two or more different sounds (with acoustic or virtual instruments) playing the exact same thing can create a totally new color.  

Production attitude depends on who I’m working with, the personalities involved and what’s most effective.

Some artists respond best to a very nurturing and supportive approach and others respond better to a challenge, “I bet in the next take you can’t _____!”

Truly there isn’t one, and that’s one of the many things I love about my job.

Monday I may be in my home studio producing and recording vocals on a co-written pop song with a young artist for a publisher or production music company. Tuesday I might be in a big commercial studio with heavyweight jazz players producing tracks for an artist’s original project. Wednesday I might be editing tracks for hours. Thursday – working on my website and bookkeeping, and Friday driving up to Los Angeles to have lunch with clients, many of whom have become friends.

My physical studio has very nice equipment – Genelec monitors, a Neumann vocal mic, Allen & Heath board, virtual instruments by IK Multimedia, Spectrasonics, MOTU and more – but it’s currently in a modest spare room in our house.

I’ve had this same setup in many different spaces, both commercial and non-commercial, over the years. When I think of “my studio”, I think of it in the metaphorical sense – it’s really me, as I am a one-person company. My brand has been built over the years, mainly by my becoming more focused on what I’m best at and not trying to do everything. For instance, big rock and orchestral film trailers are something I suck at! So I don’t bother.

About 50% of my work is arranging and producing independent artists’ songs and helping them to record and release their music. 40% of my work is creating original music for Production Music Libraries in the US and abroad. I currently have about 260 songs in my catalog that are in production music libraries. This is something I have worked to build over the past 15 years. My catalog generates passive income (royalties) for me when my music is placed in TV, film, and advertising around the world. About 10% of my work is creating original music production for corporate clients or advertising directly.

Some of the songs are solo writes, and some are co-writes with artists or other producers. I create some instrumental music, but a tremendous amount of the music I work on is vocal songs. I love working with singers and I love the emotion the human voice communicates. I also have worked as a lyricist quite a bit with younger writers as well. I specialize in retro genres like French Gyspy Swing Music, and other acoustic genres like Bluegrass, Celtic Music, and Jazz.

Here is a tune written, arranged, and produced myself, sung by Allison Adams Tucker:

Living! Walking and hiking in nature, listening to good music, watching films, reading good books, eating great food, prayer and meditation, spending time with my son and husband, and trying to be of service and give something back.

A song I co-wrote with artist Christine Parker, “Magic With You,” for Killer Tracks (under the Universal Music Publishing Group umbrella) in LA was placed in a national TV and Internet ad for Mitsubishi in Taiwan. The ad, with sweet funny visuals about a little girl and her dad who’s afraid she will grow up too soon, resonated with people – the YouTube version of the ad got over 4 million hits! Fittingly, the lyrics I contributed to the song (which was performed by Parker and arranged and produced by me) came into my head while spending time with our son, who was 2 years old at the time:

I think now even more than when I started 25 years ago, being a producer also means being an engineer at some level and being comfortable with the technology. I have always considered myself more of an arranger/producer than a producer/engineer. But because of the necessity of making demos with shrinking budgets, I have had to learn how to work with the technology.

I still love having enough budget in a project to hire an engineer who’s a real master and let them do their thing, but this is one of the areas where I am now challenging myself – to not shy away from the trickier technical stuff in the writing and programming, especially since I’ve been starting to work on more EDM-type songs. Being willing to continue to grow, never getting too comfortable, and never sitting back on your accomplishments are a big part of being able to evolve with the industry.

When I sit down to arrange or compose a piece of music, it’s a very intuitive, in-the-moment thing for me. I love the spontaneity of it. I always go with my gut impressions of what adjustments to make, what sounds to use, and where to take the melody or the arrangement.

I believe my intuition is a direct connection with the ultimate creator, God, and that’s why I feel so good when I’m creating music. It’s a spiritual high. And I have finally learned that the ideas don’t come from me – rather, they just come through me. I just have to show up and be willing to listen. Music is healing for people, music is therapy. I can’t imagine being in a more gratifying field of work.

A number of years ago, I was working on a piece of original music for a corporate client, Qualcomm, to use in a live performance for a conference of young programmers from around the world who made apps for their platform. With a collaborator, I created the music, which was a hybrid of rock and rap.

We hired a young black rapper out of Long Beach, Mark Jones, to rap in the studio. He took the basic messaging that I had put into a dummy rhyme, and on the spot in the studio, improvised and performed a rap with street language. Because the piece had to be presented to the suits at Qualcomm for approval, we had to type up a lyric sheet with the rap and “translations” below, since they didn’t have a clue what any of the rap slang actually meant!

It was pretty amusing at the time. It was the moment I gained a tremendous respect and admiration for rappers, and how improvisational their work is. The rhythms that Mark Jones came up with spontaneously were incredibly intricate, rhyming, and just sounded so cool. In a million years I could never do that!

I have been so blessed to get to work with so many talented musicians, artists, engineers, producers, studio singers, collaborators, and clients over the years. I really try to lead with love and respect for the people I’m working with, leave my ego at the door, and have mostly learned when to keep my mouth shut!

My advice? Always hire the very best talent that you can possibly afford, and always look for opportunities to work with people who are better than you. You will learn so much from them.

I don’t know the classical music career path very well – my sense is that it’s a more traditional, conventional road, with emphasis on performance. It seems like there’s lots of practice and auditions required, but once you have an orchestra or teaching position, you have a sense of security.

Working as a composer and producer in the pop music world is unconventional, to say the least.  There’s about an 80-90% chance that you will be self-employed and need to know how to get clients and gigs, so be prepared for that. Also, you must be willing and able to embrace technology as it changes. Understand it and learn how to make it work for you.

Actually, I was fortunate in being blessed with a good ear, which I got from my dad, but I learned to be a great sight reader by playing classical piano. Playing and singing in a music group as a young teen, I had lots of practice learning songs by ear from records, and also had formal ear training in my classical piano lessons – I had to identify intervals after hearing them, for example.

In music school, I actually was able to place out of my ear training classes because of ability and early training. Needless to say, ear training is incredibly important and I recommend that people find courses in ear training if it’s an area of weakness. Beyond interval training, theory, and sight singing, as a young producer, I also had to listen to lots and lots of different genres of music and analyze how the arrangements and production were put together.

When an artist or a client asks for something to sound “Bluesy Rock,” it’s a producer’s job to know how to create that. For this reason, I frequently work with musical references as a starting point, because it helps make things more concrete. As an exercise, I would sometimes listen to a pop song and using stick notation (rhythmic stems without note-heads), write out each instrument and what they were playing rhythmically as a tool for my analysis. Over the years as a producer, I’ve learned to listen at different levels – listen to the song as a whole, listen to just the drums, listen to the pitch of the lead vocal, listen to the time and feel of the rhythm section, and so on.

Be comfortable (or get comfortable) with marketing. Be an extrovert who genuinely enjoys people (or hire someone like that!), and be willing to constantly reinvent yourself as the music industry changes. “Music Producer” is a very fluid job description, and it doesn’t hurt to have another skill outside of music that you can do part time or as a contractor to help support yourself while you grow your music business. I did PR and media relations part-time for years to support my music career, and ironically, that was ultimately how I learned to most effectively market myself objectively – by doing it for others.

Ultimately, to take this journey, you have to love creating music so much and have such passion for it that you are willing to hang in there as long as it takes to start having a financially lucrative career – which never happens for some people. Making music has to be its own reward.

Taking Control of Your Musical Path

Incredible, right? It’s abundantly clear that Marti’s persistence, work ethic, creativity, and unmatched enthusiasm for her line of work has paid off, allowing her to open a studio that is entirely her own – where she can work with whoever she likes, whenever she likes, however she likes.

There is certainly a lot to be learned from music mentors, coaches, teachers, and employers. However, taking control of the direction of your musical path and branching out to create something where you call the shots – that’s an even more valuable learning experience.

For the ultimate challenge, take a page directly from Marti’s book, and try your hand at being your own producer. Learn your way around a simple digital audio workstation, upload recordings of your tracks, and experiment with using software to make them sound polished and impactful.

 

The post Bringing Musical Visions to Life, with Marti Amado appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/what-is-musicality/
Musicality is a very useful catch-all for “being musical”.

Let’s take this opportunity to explore all the ways that you can be more musical in your life!

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/what-is-musicality/

In this conversation we cover a ton of interesting topics, including sight-reading, improvisation, what makes for effective practicing, and the entrepreneurial requirements of being a professional musician today. Jeff shares:

• How many hours a day he practiced growing up, one activity that was central, and the one thing he thinks is essential to practice effectively
• One resource he’s found really useful to help him balance his creativity with the desire to make a living as a musician
• And several punchy tips on improvisation, sight reading, jazz and rhythm.

We know you’ll enjoy this one and it’ll inspire you to check out Jeff’s website and sign up for his email list – and don’t miss the unforgettable name that email list has, we talk about it towards the end of the interview.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Jeff Schneider’s website
• Jeff’s YouTube channel
• 7 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing Music
• How to Practice Effectively
• Learning to Sing in Tune, with George Bevan
• About Finding Your Note
• About Your Voice Sounding Weird
• About Singing as a Tool
• About Mindfulness for Musicians
• Learning, Playing, and Thriving, with Elisa Janson-Jones
• 1,000 True Fans, by Kevin Kelly

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Jeff. Thanks for joining us today.

Jeff: Thanks so much, Christopher. Great to be here.

Christopher: I have a sense of who you are as a musician these days from your fantastic YouTube channel, but I don’t know all that much about your backstory. I’d love to know what was your early music education like. How did you get started and become the saxophonist and pianist and educator that you are today?

Jeff: Well, if we go to the very beginning, my family’s a very musical family. Both my parents played classical piano and my sister’s into musical theater. My brother plays classical piano and guitar. I was sort of the one that was like very interested in just learning how to play by ear, so I didn’t have that traditional sort of grow up with the piano, doing classical lessons. I never really took to that. Just kind of figuring out how to play movie themes on the piano. We’d watch a movie as a family and then I’d go over to the piano and figure out how to play that by ear. My dad taught me about basic chords and inversions and how to make that work.

From the very beginning, I was really interested, “Okay, how do I get my ear stronger.” Whereas a lot of kids they grew up just running through scales and playing classical pieces. I think there’s a lot of merit to that as well, but that wasn’t really my early background. Going on from there, I started playing saxophone in middle school, which is a little bit later than some of the other kids. I think most of the students were starting in fourth grade, but I was in seventh grade. It was fun. I was again kind of just messing around, noodling, figuring out how to play things by ear.
Then in high school is when I really started to get obsessed with practicing and playing music. From there on out, it was just like really my obsessions. That’s all I wanted to do was make music all the time.

Christopher: That’s really interesting. I don’t think there are many high schools students who would say they were obsessed with practicing. That sounds unusual. Tell us where the attitude came from.

Jeff: Well, you know, it was a combination of … There were some musicians that were older than me in school that I really looked up to. Actually there’s this moment where I read this interview. It was with Charlie Parker and I think Paul Desmond was conducting the interview. In it, Charlie Parker talks about how he practiced for like 15 hours a day for three years, and I just thought that was ridiculous, but I was like wow. That kind of made something click in my head and that was if I just work hard enough, I’ll be able to get to that level. I started putting in as many hours as I could.

There was like a summer I remember distinctly after I think freshman year in high school or sophomore year in high school and I practiced like eight hours a day all summer. It was clear when I came back to school the following semester, there was such an improvement in my playing. It was just a real affirmation that the practicing paid off and that the hard work paid off.

Christopher: I have a couple of questions there. I guess the first is whether you have any observations on the environment you’d grown up in or your school’s attitude to music that let you be so positive about the idea of practicing so much, you know? I’m sure there’s a personality aspect to it, but I know there’s also a lot of music education where the practicing is so dull and the payoff’s so intangible that people really struggle. Like even if they’re excited to get to the end goal, there’s very few who actually follow through and do a lot of practice at that age.

Jeff: Yeah. After teaching for a long time too, I’ve kind of gotten to see both sides of the coin there of how some students are just so engaged in getting better and have the drive to sit through the more boring exercises because they know that on the other end of that they’re going to see some real results. Whereas there’s plenty of kids out there who just don’t want to go through the hard times to get to the good times, which is understandable. That’s sort of human nature. A lot of it, like you said, I think is personality, but everything just kind of excited me.

I was just so into it at the time and still am for that mater, but at a young age I was so into that, like I said, I was able to kind of push through exercises that would make some people go crazy. I’m sure it made my parents go crazy when I was practicing all hours of the night. But to me, it was just like so much fun and awesome. I do think it’s a personality thing, but there are also … Like you were kind of alluding to, the school system that I was in, music was very much supported. We had a good music program in my high school. My band director gave me a lot of opportunity and encouraged me. I think that does have a lot to do with it as well, and my parents of course.
The same kind of thing, very supportive. They would let me practice when I wanted to, which oftentimes was in the middle of the night. I had the right environment to put that kind of work into it.

Christopher: Terrific. You touched a couple of times there on the second thing I wanted to ask you about in that which was what that practicing looked like. You made that reference there to boring exercises and endless drills and maybe we could just take that sum of where you were practicing eight hours a day. If you can cross your mind back, what did that look like and how did you know how to spend eight hours or did you know how to spend eight hours fruitfully?

Jeff: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think boring is in the eyes of the beholder, right? Something’s are going to be exciting to some people and others will find it boring. I had this distinct memory of taking this Charlie Parker licks because I had just gotten the Omnibook, the transcriptions of many of Charlie Parker’s solos. I would take lines in the Omnibook and just transpose them into all 12 keys. Just little Bebop licks. I would force myself to see how fast I could do it. Like go from one key to the next and do it up to tempo. Those were the types of exercises that I practiced, a lot of transposition.

That was just something that I heard from random people at like a music store. I had a great teacher in my sophomore year of high school. Will Vincent is this alto saxophonist. Amazing player and a fantastic teacher. He would tell me to do things in other keys as well. I just took whatever I could find and transposed it and that made a big difference.

Christopher: Got you. That’s really interesting. I think it fills in a little bit because I think you talked to people who kind of taught themselves by ear and you talked to people in the jazz world who are like, “Of course, you should play everything at all 12 keys,” but somewhere along the line you need to wrap your head around what that means. Particularly I think if you are more an ear player than a sheet music player, that’s not always easy to do. It’s interesting to hear that was a big part of your practice there.

Jeff: Yeah. That was probably one of the things that got my understanding of scales and chords. That theory knowledge, that’s what got it together because as I said, I was sort of coming up as an ear player. The act of transposing forces you to really know your scales well, to really know your chords well. I think what it also does is it helps you internalize on an oral level whatever it is you’re working on. Because whenever you hear something so many times in different keys, I think it helps you internalize whatever it is that you’re playing. It does come out both on sort of a left brain and a right brain side.

Christopher: It sounds like sax was your main focus at that point. Were you still playing some piano?

Jeff: I was always playing piano. Just kind of messing around. I would compose on the piano. I was also playing guitar quite a bit. I had the sort of Stevie Ray Vaughan blues phase a little bit before I started really getting into saxophone. Genre wise I was spread a little bit out there, but yeah. By that time when I was doing the epic saxophone practicing sessions, it was definitely primarily sax at that point.

Christopher: Got you. You clearly had some inspiration about the kind of music you wanted to play or the kind of musician you wanted to be. During that period, were there any kind of rewards or kind of results of your labor that kind of kept you motivated? Because for our listeners, motivation is often a big thing. It’s one thing to get really psyched about learning a new skill and put in a week or two, but to keep you going over time, often having some kind of outlet or some kind of event or some kind of sub goal can really help keep you passionate.

I was just wondering, for you, was it like, “Okay, now I’m going to work for 10 years and become a professional,” or were you kind of seeing some payoff from all of that hard work along the way?

Jeff: I definitely noticed results in terms of how the practicing was paying off, but at the same time, I would play concerts at school and just be so self-critical that I would want to quit. I was really self-critical at the same time. Actually what motivated me the most was getting the opportunity to play with other people, especially people who were close to my age. Because if I was playing with somebody who was around my age whose playing I really thought was great, that would push me to want to get my playing better because you can kind of see what’s possible.

It’s like if you hear a great player who’s 30 years older than you, yeah, that’s fun to listen to, but at the same time it’s like, “Oh yeah. That guy’s or gal’s 30 years older me. It makes a lot of sense that they can play like that.” Whereas if you go to hear someone or play with somebody who’s closer to your age, you know where I’m going with this, and they actually have those skills that you want, you’re like, “Wow. I really got to get it together here because I could be doing more.” That was real big motivation for me.

Going to like music camps during the summer and regional, whatever they call them, like all state, all that kind of stuff, local competitions. That sort of thing.

Christopher: Cool. Did you have a sense of what you wanted to do after high school and if so, was that what panned out?

Jeff: Yeah. I think by the time I started doing those epic practice sessions, I was convinced that I was going to just go to music school and music conservatory and just become a professional musician. My parents were amazingly supportive with that, even though I’m sure they were sort of scared quite a bit. I have a very obsessive personality and they were … I don’t even know what the word is. I just had my son. I don’t know if I would send him to music school. They agreed to have me go and it all worked out. I love what I do now. I get to be a professional musician, whatever that means. It all worked out.

Christopher: Nice. You say, “Be a professional musician, whatever that means.” It’s something that’s come up a few times on the podcast that whatever realm of music you’re in, it’s not a clearcut job description, right?

Jeff: Exactly. Exactly.

Christopher: It’s very few musicians who just do one thing to support themselves through music. I’d love if you could share a little bit about what that journey has looked like for you and how you’ve approached becoming a professional musician from the point of okay, now I’m a good player. How do you then get to the point where you’re like, “Great. I’m paying my bills. This is my living. I am a musician.”

Jeff: Yeah. Well, I’m glad you pointed that out. I intentionally wanted to try to keep that open-ended in terms of not defining what it is to be a professional musician. Because as you said, the word journey, that’s so key. In my case and I think just about everybody’s case, rarely is there a point where things are static and you’re just doing the same thing over and over and over again in this field. My job and my way of making a living has been constantly evolving over time. I’ve taught little kids. I’ve taught older people. I’ve taught beginners and more advanced players. I’ve composed for commercials and advertising and television.

It’s been such a wide variety of work that I’ve sort of shifted in and out of. It’s been a journey. I think one of the I guess secrets there is just to keep your eyes open and keep thinking about ways of evolving. If you get too comfortable, it’s really possible. This happened recently with the job market. I don’t know how recently, but right where a lot of people started losing their jobs because everything was changing so much. I guess what I’m trying to say is the model of getting a gig and then having it for 40 to 60 years or whatever and then retiring is just not the way it is anymore.

Especially if you’re going to be a musician where you’re essentially an entrepreneur and a business owner, in order to do that successfully, you need to think like an entrepreneur and a business owner and not just like, “Oh, I got to go get a job.” That’s not the way to be successful.

Christopher: Interesting. I want to circle back and talk in a moment about the mindset of an entrepreneur and what you’ve learned on that side, but if you don’t mind first, one thing that I think is really notable about you and the career you have built for yourself is creativity is still at the heart of it. I think a lot of people go the educational route and they maybe extremely good teachers, but they lose that opportunity to perform or compose or arrange or create in their own musical life. I’d love if you could talk a little bit about how you’ve approached… I guess what you want your creative output to look like and how you factor that into this need to also pay the bills in some way, shape or form.

Jeff: That’s another great question. It really resonates with me because I can always tell when I feel like my creative output is not great enough in terms of like quantity with the amount of creativity I’m putting forth. For instance, on my YouTube channel last year, I started this series called Loop of the Day. It was just a way of forcing myself to actually make music as opposed to just teach people how to make it. It was a nice way of combining the educational aspects of this is how this chord works or this chord progression, but doing it in the context of me actually making something. I got to get the best of both worlds there.

I’m creating, but I’m also teaching. Doing and teaching, right? I have a keen sense of awareness as to when I need to be more creative and when I’ve sort of become too stale for my own liking.

Christopher: I don’t want to go too far down the kind of business side of things, but we had an interview recently with Elisa Janson Jones of the Music Ed Mentor Podcast. One really interesting element that came out of that conversation was how valuable the entrepreneurial skillset can be to any musician. You touched on it yourself there where if you want to make a living with music, you are essentially saying I’m starting a business, even if that’s not how culturally we’re raised to think about it. I’d love to hear any resources or lessons or attitudes or philosophies you’ve kind of incorporated to help you adopt that business persona, as well as I am a creative musician.

Jeff: I think the number one thing for me was at some point I realized, “Okay, if I’m going to think of this as running a business, then I have to look at how other businesses are run.”

So what I started thinking about was how do businesses run? You have a CEO. You have the CFO, the CMO. I’ll do it one more time. What I started thinking about was how are businesses run. You have the chief executive officer. You have the chief marketing officer. You have the head of sales. You have a creative director. All these different positions. If you’re running your own business, you have to basically fill those different chairs. That’s how I approached it. I decided okay, I got to learn a little bit about marketing. I got to learn a little bit about sales. I already had the creative officer sort of role figured out because that’s what my education was.

It was how to be creative in music, but those other positions, learning how to handle your finances. Yes at some point you can hire people to do this, but if you’re a one man show, you need to at least have a little bit of knowhow to get by and to be successful.

Christopher: Is there any clash between you playing the role of chief marketing officer and you playing the role of chief creative officer? There’s really varied opinions out there about whether this is the best or the worst time to try and succeed in music in terms of finding listeners and making a living with it. How do you think about that in getting your music out there and getting paid for it versus I’ll make the music I want to make?

Jeff: Well, one thing that I read a while back that stuck with me for a long time is this article that was referred to me from Tim Ferriss. It’s this guy Kevin Kelly wrote this article called “1,000 True Fans.” In a nutshell, he talks about how if you can get 1,000 true fans, like 1,000 super fans who are willing to actually spend money on you, whether it’d be let’s say a hundred bucks a month or a year, right? If you got a thousand fans who are spending $100 a year on you, whether that be for courses or for music that you’re making or for merchandise, whatever it is, then you’re making $100,000 by the end of the year, which is a respectable living.

More than respectable. I guess the point there is if you can get a thousand true fans, then you’re good to go. Now maybe 20 years ago this would be very difficult to do for a lot of people when the record companies are controlling the industry and so forth, but now you have so much independence. You can put music out on the internet, wow, where you have three billion people online and you have access to them. At some point, I was like really discouraged because a lot of people at, like I said, these camps that I was going to or in music school, you hear a lot of discouraging things like it’s really difficult to make a living in music.

Nobody likes jazz anymore. When you think about the fact that there three billion people online and you only have to get a thousand of them to support you, the odds are in your favor. If you know how to leverage things like the internet, which I pretty much grew up with, it’s very possible to make a living doing anything really. I mean even something as obscure as high level jazz theory, it’s possible to do that because of the access you have to the whole world.

Christopher: Terrific. I wonder if you could give an example or two of where that’s influenced you in terms of projects or decisions you’ve made? When has that idea of a thousand true fans helped you make a decision?

Jeff: I think it helped me make decisions about not needing to pander to what I think is going to be like a popular way of thinking or a popular sound. It can be really easy to try to people please and make stuff only for the reason that you think other people might like it. When you realize that there are so many people out there who … If you like something and if you do it well, somebody else is going to like it too. If you do enough work when it comes to getting your music out there, doing some promoting, learning a little bit about marketing and sales, you’re going to find a thousand people out there who like what you do.

It might not happen overnight, but it can certainly happen. There’s a lot to be said for staying true to what you like and what you feel is good and the kind of art that you want to make or whatever it is that you want to do even if it’s super, super unique. Oftentimes it’s the unique stuff that goes the furthest. That concept of niching down where you really get specific and that way maybe there’s going to be a lot of people out there who hate it, but if you try to … What is the expression? If you try to please everybody, you’re not going to please anybody. I think the same thing goes for music and for most things in life really.

Christopher: We’ve talked a bit about creativity there. I know that some of our listeners who are songwriters or composers or starting a band, that will have really resonated with them, and they’ll really have appreciated your perspective. At the same time, I know there are some listeners who don’t consider themselves creative. One thing we often talk about here on the show is how improvisation is not an out of reach skill only for the expert jazz musicians for example. You as a jazz specialist yourself and a sax player have a ton of experience with improvisation, and I’ve particularly enjoyed some of your YouTube videos talking about how to approach improvisation.

I’d love if we could talk a little bit about creativity in that context and maybe some of the more practical side of being creative in music.

Jeff: Absolutely.

Christopher: So I’ll begin by asking just the simple question of how do you think about improvisation in music? You can answer that as a teacher or as a musician or as both.

Jeff: Yeah. I’ll answer as both. The way I think about improvisation is basically just like any language where when you speak, you don’t have an exact idea of what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. You just start talking and you say something that kind of gets at what you mean hopefully. Improvisation is the same thing. You have an idea in your head. Because you’ve practiced speaking so much previously to continue the analogy, you’re able to communicate what it is you want to say musically. To get a little bit less esoteric there and talk about this is a more practical way, let’s say you learn…

I’ll continue the analogy here with language because I do think it’s helpful. Let’s say you learn a bunch of vocabulary words and the metaphor there is vocabulary words means like a lick let’s say. You learn a bunch of licks and you start to integrate the language of music into your subconscious mind by maybe you’re doing transcriptions, so you’re transcribing these licks. Maybe you’re doing transposition exercises like I was discussing before where you’re really internalizing these licks. After a while, just like when you learn a new vocabulary word, you force yourself to use it in a sentence. You force yourself to write it down and use it in your writing, in your everyday speech.

When you do that with you musical ideas, when you do that with licks, you force yourself to use them in a solo. You force yourself to use them in a composition. Eventually those lines that you practiced so much in so many different keys, in so many different contexts, even if you’ve been forcing it, eventually those ideas come out organically. That is when improvisation really starts to feel effortless and that you’re just speaking like I’m speaking right now where I don’t have to think about every single word and every single grammar rule or whatever. It’s just coming out naturally. The same is possible for improvisation.

It takes a lot of time. A lot of the struggles and the challenges arise because well, when we learned language, when we learned to speak our native language, it was at a very young age when we just kind of soak up the information and we don’t need to think about grammar or spelling or anything like that. We just kind of learned to speak by figuring it out. When most people learn to improvise, it’s later on in life when they don’t have that same neuroplasticity or whatever you want to call it. You do need to really spend a little bit more learning how to improvise.

Just like when you’re learning any language, any second language, you need to … They say the best way to learn a language is to put yourself in the country of where that language is spoken and that’s because that immersion is so effective. If you immerse yourself in music, if you’re always practicing, if you’re always transposing, if you’re always listening and transcribing and playing with other people, the music will start to come out of you organically. That’s an amazing feeling when you just suddenly have musical ideas kind of come to the surface out of nowhere it seems, and then you’re able to play them because you have that connection with your instrument.

I’ll say one more thing. Improvisation is just composition, but you do it spontaneously. Just like to improve your speaking, you can practice writing. To improve your improvisation, you can practice composing. Spontaneous composition is also a very I think useful way of thinking about improvisation.

Christopher: Terrific. That was a really well-put explanation. I wonder if I could ask you a bit more on something you touched on there, which is kind of you’re internalizing all of this vocab and now it’s in you in some sense. When the time comes to improvise, you bring it out. Can you shed any light on what for you or what you think should be the mental process for making that happen? Like is it an ear thing? Is it a music theory intellectual thing? Is it pure instinct? What does that look like once you’ve internalized this vocab?

Jeff: Ideally it’s an ear thing. However, in order for it to become an ear thing, sometimes we need to rely on theory to help us get there. When I was talking before about transposing exercises and how that helps internalize something in your ear, that’s kind of what I’m talking about now where if you use theory to help you get there, eventually it’s going to make whatever it is you’re practicing, it’s going to make its way into your ear. Another thing you can do to help that process along is by actually singing. Even if you’re not a singer, if you’re just an instrumentalist, by singing, you also help internalize musical ideas in your ear.

You also make it clear when you’re not actually hearing something accurately. Because it’s easy enough to put your fingers down on the piano or on the guitar or press keys on a saxophone and just kind of blow air and the notes come out, but it’s a lot like … I was thinking about this yesterday actually talking about how if you were to … Sure. You can say words that you don’t understand and people are going to know you don’t really understand them. It’s a similar thing. If you just push down your fingers and hope that it sounds good, maybe it might work if you’re lucky some of the time, but most of the time it’s going to sound like you’re BS-ing.

Just like if you were to go to France, speak with a French accent, but just speak a lot of gibberish in a French accent, it’s not going to make any sense to anybody. The same is true for music. In order to really understand whether or not you are hearing something clearly, if you can sing it accurately, if you can sing each note very accurately, get the center of the pitch, then you can really confirm, “Okay, I do have this idea and I can execute it clearly and accurately.” If you cannot do that, then you need to slow down. You need to make sure you can sing your ideas, and then you’ll have a much better chance at having those ideas pop up organically.

There’s a really excellent video with Bill Evans. It’s on YouTube. You can just search for like Bill Evans lesson or something like that. It’s an interview where he’s sitting down at the piano and he’s being asked these questions. He does this demonstration of how if you approximate your improvisation, it’s very clear that you’re just basically BS-ing and it’s not anything of substance. Then you play much more simple, but it’s much more clear and substantial and the difference is clear. He probably talks about the same idea in a much more eloquent and succinct way than I just did, so I highly recommend checking out the Bill Evans video that’s out there.

Christopher: Nice. We will put a link to that in the show notes. I love, love, love that you recommended singing like that. It’s such a powerful thing and I 100% agree that if you can’t sing it, you haven’t really understood it by ear. I’d almost wrap up the interview here just to make sure we sent everyone away to think carefully about that. If anyone is thinking, “Oh, but I can’t sing,” we’ll have links in the show notes to past episodes where we’ve gone deep on that and shown you some ways you can get going with singing and singing in tune. I won’t wrap up the interview though because Jeff, there were a couple more things I wanted to pick your brains on.

One was this fantastic blog post you wrote, which we’ll link to in the show notes, called “7 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing Music.” I won’t put you on the spot and ask you to read the full seven, but there were a few that jumped out of me. We can refer people to the full blog post for more, but I wonder if you could just speak to a few of these. One was that time matters more than pitches.

Jeff: Yes. I saw this video with the bassist Victor Wooten. It was an instructional DVD. He does this little example, this demonstration, where he plays every wrong note. It was almost random in terms of the pitches, but he plays with such good rhythm and feel and phrasing that it sounds amazing. If anybody’s heard Victor Wooten, you know he’s got an amazing feel and amazing phrasing and great rhythm. That really kind of drove the point home that if you have good time and good phrasing and good rhythm, you can get away with playing wrong notes.

Unfortunately, especially the way music and jazz and improvisation is taught in a lot of places, the emphasis is placed on the notes, the pitches, the scales, the arpeggios, all that harmonic analysis. That stuff is important. Don’t get me wrong. However, you can play all the right notes you want. If your time and your phrasing and your feel and your rhythm suck, it’s going to sound bad. It doesn’t go both ways. You can play the wrong notes with the good time and the good feel and the good phrasing and get away with it. It’s going to sound pretty good, but you can’t go the other way.

You can’t expect to play all the right scales and arpeggios and have bad time and phrasing and expect it to sound good. It doesn’t work that way. I think of playing music or improvisation or whatever in terms of a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid, the biggest section, that’s where the time and the phrasing and the rhythm are. Then above that later on in the pyramid is where I put those pitches and the scales and the arpeggios and all that.

Christopher: Such a powerful point. Yeah. That’s something we emphasize in our approach to improvisation at Musical U, but you’re 100% right that when someone’s learning to improvise, they go so quickly to, “Oh, what scale should I use, or what do I play over this chord?” If you’re playing whole notes every bar, no one’s going to be listening. As you say, if you play the single pitch but an awesome groove, you’re going to catch people’s attention. The second one was anticipate the chord changes. What do you mean by that?

Jeff: I learned about anticipating chord changes from one of my teachers in music school Jerry Bergonzi, this tenor saxophonist. Amazing educator. Amazing player. What he had me do was anticipate chord changes. Basically let’s say you’re playing a blues in B flat. You have a B flat 7 for four bars and then you have the E flat 7. The idea is to start playing a line that would fit on E flat 7 before the E flat 7 hits. This has a really cool musical effect where there’s a little bit of tension, and then once the harmony catches up, everything kind of resolves and it sounds really good because you have that tension and release.

But another effect I found is that when you are thinking ahead, not just for a musical advantage, but you’re also preparing your mind to be able to execute the chord accurately and appropriately. Even if you don’t start musically anticipating the chord, you’ll have an idea, “Okay, I know this chord’s coming up. It’s not going to catch me off guard when it does hit, so that when E flat 7, to use that blues example, comes up, I’ll be ready for it and I won’t be caught off guard.” That’s sort of the crux of the issue. Especially when you’re playing a fast tune with difficult changes, by the time the next chord comes up, it’s already gone and you lost your chance to nail it.

By anticipating the chord changes, by thinking ahead, you’re going to be better able to execute and be able to navigate those changes in a way that is musical and effective.

Christopher: Super cool. I love that for a few reasons. The first is that I think it’s one of those really simple concepts that can actually really kind of give you a little leap forwards in how good your improv sounds. I think it’s also because it kind of blends those two worlds of rhythm and pitch and creates a looser feel of what should I play over this chord. You’re still thinking that through, but you’re not feeling like, “And now it’s this chord, I’ll just do these notes, and now it’s this chord, I’ll just do these notes.” I think it gives you one step more sophisticated and appreciation of the melody-harmony interplay, but it’s such an easy thing for people to try out.

If you’re used to playing over the chord changes, just try stretching that boundary a little like Jeff recommends.

Jeff: Sorry to cut you off, but you are making me think like one other benefit of doing that anticipation is especially on tunes where the changes are a little bit unusual, maybe like a jazz tune like Moment’s Notice or Stable Mates where you have two fives that are moving chromatically. Where if you do, like you were saying, play in a very vertical fashion where you’re playing, “Okay. I’m playing on this key and this two five here, and I’m switching abruptly to this key and this two five,” there’s nothing connecting. It’s very vertical as opposed to horizontal.

When you anticipate chord changes, it doesn’t sound so abrupt when you go to the next chord change. It’s like voice leaning in a way. it’s like there’s some common tones between within the two chords. Even if they’re not technically notes that would work on the previous chord, by forcing it, it does connect the two harmonic areas in a way that makes it feel really natural when you go from one key to the next. If you have difficult changes, try anticipating those chord changes so that it feels much more horizontal as opposed to just vertical.

Christopher: Awesome. The third one that jumped out of me that I couldn’t not ask about because it’s such a great heading was secrets of sight reading. That’s a hot topic for a lot of our listeners who maybe struggle with traditional notation or feel like they just can’t get fast enough. What would be your recommendations there?

Jeff: There’s a lot that goes into a good sight reading. I didn’t learn these lessons or a lot of them I just kind of figured them out out of some trial and error, but sight reading is always a real challenge especially for me. What I think helps quite a bit are a few things. One, again, the time is going to be more important than the notes. Get into the habit of if you make a mistake, don’t just stop and restart that measure or go back to the beginning. Because in a real life situation, if you’re sight reading a tune or a chart with a band and you make a mistake, they’re not going to stop for you if you make a mistake. You have to keep going.

You want to get into the habit of not losing the time. A nice exercise to help you get into the habit of this is playing a measure and then resting a measure. Playing a measure and then resting a measure. This will get you in the habit of letting the time go forward regardless of whether you’re playing or not. It keeps your eyes moving along the page. Because if you make that mistake and your eyes are suddenly locked on where you made the mistake, you’re going to have a lot of trouble getting back to where everyone else is. You want to get in the habit of keeping that forward momentum. The other thing …

Christopher: Sorry to interrupt, but just to clarify, you’re talking about playing a bar and then letting the music continue as it were, but you’re maybe imagining in your head before you come back in?

Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Christopher: Got you.

Jeff: You can sing it in your head where you’re resting or you can just let the time go by. It’s just to get into the habit of not feeling like you need to be getting every single note right. Because in fact, the time and keeping the time going is more important than nailing every single note.

Christopher: Right. The beat moves on with or without you.

Jeff: Exactly. Yeah. Well said. Another thing that is really effective when it comes to sight reading is chunking information. This concept of chunking is pretty popular in how to learn. It’s the concept of taking little bits of information and combining them into larger chunks so that your brain has a little bit more free space to process things. For instance, if you have a G, a B, a D and an F in succession, rather than seeing four different notes, four different pieces of information, you can say, “Okay. Look, it’s G-B-D-F. That’s a G7 arpeggio.” Suddenly your brain is able to chunk four pieces of information into one and that’s just going to free up your mind space to look at the next phrase.

What I do oftentimes is if I’m handed a new piece of sheet music is I’ll just take a look through. If I can find any patterns right off the bat, any sort of arpeggios or scales, maybe I’ll circle them just to kind of remind myself, “Okay. This here is an arpeggio for this chord or this here is a scale.” This is where knowing theory can be really helpful because the more scales you can recognize, like if you see oh, it’s a pentatonic scale or oh, it’s an augmented scale or a diminished scale, like if you can put those labels on it, that’s going to really help you organize the information in a way where it’s chunked together and it’s not just going to be a million notes on the page.

Last but not least, just practicing like anything else. You have to be familiar with just like those arpeggios that I was talking about. Rhythms. You see the same rhythms come up again and again. The more you practice sight reading, the more you’re going to recognize those rhythms. It does take time. It’s difficult, but I hope that those tips are helpful in some way.

Christopher: Yeah, fantastic.

Jeff: They are for me at least. They did help me.

Christopher: Fantastic advice on sight reading. You mentioned practicing. I’d love if we may to wrap up by talking again about practicing and in particular, you have a piece of advice in an article on your blog about how to practice effectively that I just thought was so important for people to factor in. I wonder if you could share with us what is the secret to practicing effectively?

Jeff: One of the best ways to approach practicing is to think of it like … I like to think of a balance beam. You have a gymnast on a balance beam. If they fall off the balance beam, everyone knows. It’s very, very clear. Where am I going with this? Well, I like to create exercises for myself and for my students where it’s very, very clear when they fall off the balance beam. The reason for that is I want them to know when they’ve made a mistake.

Instead of falling into the trap of just kind of noodling around, sort of aimlessly playing, maybe they’re working on an exercise, but then they kind of get distracted and they start going onto something else, if you have focus to the point where you’re able to realize when your attention has wandered or to go back to my balance beam analogy, to the point where you fall off the balance beam.

Focus is the most important thing, right? If you lose focus on an exercise that you’re working on, you’re not going to be making the most out of your time. One thing you can do to improve focus is thinking about practicing like meditation where basically with meditation in a nutshell, you are focusing on your breath. As soon as you realize your focus wonders away from your breath, you bring your focus back to your breath. It’s as simple as that. It’s like you realize you’re not thinking about what you’re supposed to be thinking about, so you bring your attention back to where you’re supposed to be thinking.

It doesn’t have to be anything more complicated than that. You don’t have to bring emotion into it. You don’t have to like beat yourself up over the fact that you started thinking about what you want for lunch later in the day. It’s just, “Okay. I got distracted. Now I’m coming back.” But if you don’t realize that you got distracted, you’re never going to be able to bring yourself back. That’s why the practice of meditation is actually really useful for practicing music. Because if you’re able to become aware of the fact that you’re thinking about lunch, then you can stop thinking about lunch and start thinking about your exercise that you’re supposed to be working on.

Now what I was talking before about the exercises and the balance beam and all that, I’m trying to think of an example here. Let’s say you’re doing something with a metronome. You’re practicing something with the metronome. You have the metronome on beats two and four. It’s like one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. You’re working on this time exercise let’s say. It’s kind of tricky. Sometimes you might mess up and now the metronome suddenly shifted to beats one and three. You flip the beat in your head so now it’s one, two, three, four.
What happens is the metronome let’s you know, “Oh, I’ve done something. I flipped the beat. I’ve fallen off the balance beam. Now I could get back on it and practice this exercise and try to do it correctly next time.” If you don’t have that awareness of the fact that you have either made a mistake or your mind has wondered off, then you’re basically wasting a lot of time. It’s basically like spinning your wheels. To wrap that up, stay focused on what you’re working on. Be aware of whether or not you’re focused or not. If you realized that you’ve lost focus, no big deal.

Just bring your focus back to what you’re supposed to be working on and get on with practicing. That’s all there is to it there.

Christopher: Awesome advice. That is something that can make such a transformational difference in the results people get I think. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are in the situation, I have been myself, where you set aside the time for music practice, but if you really stopped and looked at how you are spending that time, it’s more like just playing around than practicing. I think you’re absolutely right that focus is such a critical part of that and setting yourself up in a way that you can really answer the question, was I focused or not?

Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Christopher: I’m sure for anyone listening it’s clear at this point how much wisdom and insight is packed into Jeff’s head and how generous he is with it. I wanted to point you to something in particular on his website that you must go check out. Jeff, could you tell us what are Musical Truth Nuggets?

Jeff: Well, Musical Truth Nuggets are just a fun name for basically my newsletter in which I include some videos that I’ve made, blog posts that I’ve written. It’s just an easy way to get notified when I come out with new material and new teaching so that it gets delivered directly to your inbox and you don’t have to worry about searching it out. That can be found on my website. There’s a sign up form right on the homepage of jeffschneidermusic.com. Those are the weekly Musical Truth Nuggets that I try share with people.

Christopher: Nice. Well, it’s more than just myself on the team who has been enjoying those Musical Truth Nuggets for a while now. I would definitely recommend going to jeffschneidermusic.com and signing up. Could you give people an idea of what else they’ll find on your website and your YouTube channel?

Jeff: Yeah. My YouTube channel, I talk a lot about the stuff that we talked about today. Fortunately, I’m able to edit myself a bit more so I don’t come off as long-winded. The YouTube videos, as I said, cover a lot of different musical concepts and topics. I try to get involved with different visual representations of those concepts and topics so it can be very clear and easy to understand. Also on my website I have some courses, some guides that supplement and support the YouTube videos. For instance, I have this chord scale chart.

I call it “The Last Chord Scale Chart You’ll Ever Need” because it has everything, and its laid out in such a way where it’s super easy to understand. It’s the kind of thing that I wish that I had when I was learning different scales and modes and arpeggios and all that kind of stuff. I have some piano voicing that I call “Sick Voicings Volume One.” Volume two is coming out soon. In that I include really hip voicings for piano that are amazing for jazz and for gospel and neo-soul and R&B. Again those are laid out in such a way that’s kind of unique. It will help you when it comes to composing and reharmonizing. It’s all the voicings that I love to use in my own playing.

Christopher: Fantastic. I hope Jeff is going to forgive me for saying something rude, which is that these courses on his website are massively under priced for the value you get.

Jeff: They probably are.

Christopher: If you’re imagining spending a ton of money here, do check out his website. See if any of those courses appeal and then pick up a few because they are going to give you more Musical Truth Nuggets and more insights and wisdom like Jeff’s been kind enough to share today. All that remains is to say a big thank you, Jeff. That’s been such a pleasure talking through these topics with you, and I really encourage everyone to check out your website, your YouTube channel, and learn more.

Jeff: Thank you so much, Christopher. It’s been a pleasure talking with you as well.

The post Focusing on What Matters, with Jeff Schneider appeared first on Musical U.