Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/chord-ear-training-101-2/
Even though it might seem magical when someone sits down at the piano or picks up the guitar and seems to know every song, with a little chord ear training, you can do it too!

Read on to discover how you can learn to play chords by ear. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/chord-ear-training-101-2/

The Musical U team tackles the topic of active and deliberate listening, and the benefits it brings to your musicality.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part One
• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part Two
• About Active Listening
• About Learning Faster by Recording Yourself

Transcript

Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Musicality Podcast.

Today, I’m joined by Stewart, Andrew and Adam from the Musical U Team. To follow up on our recent episode 100 celebration and talk about one of the themes that came up among several of our guest experts on those episodes.

We’re gonna be talking about listening as the route to musicality and it’s interesting because that is to me an obvious idea at this point, you know, the way I’ve been immersed in ear training and musicality training over the last decade this is just front and center in what I think about.

But, it was fascinating to see the different guises that came up in among our experts. So, for example Andy Wasserman, noted that the music inside of you is what makes music appeal to you. When you hear a song you like that is it resonating with your inner musicality.

Fiona-Jane Weston talked about listening for the message in the music.

Forrest Kinney and Bill Hilton talked about exploring in an improvisational way, and listening to yourself to see what you’re coming up with.

Katie Wardrobe recommended this as her top tip to listen actively all the time to develop your ear.
Gerald Klickstein gave the fantastic advice to record yourself when you are playing or practicing and listen back because that’s an amazing way to accelerate your learning.

Matthew and Jeremy from Music Student 101 talked about listening as one of the activities you can do to level up your musicality and finally Kendra McKinley stood out to me as someone who talked about not focusing all too much on your contribution and the importance of listening to the other voices around you. For example, if you’re in a band, being aware of everyone else that’s playing, not just your own notes.

This was a core idea that came up in a lot of different ways, so I was really looking forward to getting together with the team today to talk about what this means to each of us listening as the route to musicality.

Before we dive in I’ll just ask everyone to introduce themselves. Stewart, why don’t you kick us off? If you could just say a little bit about yourself and your role in the Musical U team?

Stewart: Hi, my name is Stewart Hilton and I am the Community Conductor inside Musical U and outside that I play guitar, teach guitar in a few groups. There you go.

Andrew: Hello, I’m Andrew Bishko. I’m the Product Manager at Musical U. Helping to write new materials and organize them and talk with members.

In addition, I’m the Content Manager for the Musical U Blog.

Outside of that I’m a music teacher. A multi instrumentalist playing woodwinds and keys and I have a Mariachi band with my wife, I play accordion in that band.

Adam: Hello everyone, I’m Adam Liette, I’m the Communications Manager here at Musical U.
I’m a trumpet player. A guitar player and lately started singing in the church choir.

Christopher: Very nice. How’s that going for you?

Adam: It’s absolutely wonderful. I love it.

Christopher: Andrew, why don’t you kick things off for us? I know you’re someone who’s thought a lot about listening in the context of learning and playing music.

Tell me, what comes to mind when I talk about listening as the route to musicality?

Andrew: Well. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around those kinda guys, some guy comes to a session, he gets out his guitar and he’s like aaaahhhh, you know, and it’s like it doesn’t matter what else is going on in the room, he’s listening but he’s just listening to himself and it’s like if you would breathe out, you know you are breathing out, hoooooo, and you never take an in breath. Listening is the in breath of our music.

You focus sometimes, we get so much into our playing, we’re playing, we’re doing this, we are making this sound but [inaudible 00:05:12]take an in breath.

The other thing is that many of us listen to music casually. Music is going on in the background and with recorded music, music’s going on everywhere all the time but, it’s very important to develop the skill of act of listening. Not only is it important, but it’s really fun.

So, listen deeply to the music that your on. Personally I can’t do anything when music is on. If music comes on it just grabs my attention and I can’t have background music but, other people can.
The idea is to focus on one instrument or you might want to focus on the interaction between two instruments on a dynamics at any musical element and you’ll learn so much from it and it’s so enjoyable to see how all the parts come together to form the whole. This can even happen listening to one single melody line, focusing on listening to that.

Listening, it’s kinda like this, okay, let’s say you are asking someone on a date and you say, first there’s two guys gonna ask a girl on a date and guy one says, wow baby, you’re hot, let’s go out and guy two says, oh I really like the way you parted your hair on the other side today and the color in your blouse really brings out the color of your eyes and what you said to Jimmy over there, that was amazing, I really liked the way you responded to him, I’d like to get to know you a little better, let’s go have some frozen yogurt, you know, who’s gonna get the date?

I mean maybe the first guy’s more honest and the second guy’s a serial killer but at least the second guy was listening in a way. He’s looking, he’s observing, he’s taking it in, he’s taking an in breath.
It’s the same thing with music. It’s so much more nuance, so much more dimensional and so much more enjoyable and musical when you’re listening, listening to yourself, listening to others and when you make the practice through active listening through your day, through taking some time to do that.

Christopher: Terrific, well I was expecting to call this episode “about listening” but I think it’s going to be “About serial killers and froyo”.

I think for me, it’s been a funny one because with my marketing hat on I’ve always struggled with whether people care about the really important point that improving your ears helps you enjoy music more.

Like that, to me, is a really powerful thing that when you learn to recognize notes or chords by ear, or you learn to hear parts in parallel or identify instruments or audio effects by ear it transforms the way you enjoy music.

If you’re passionate about music and you love listening to music, what could be better than hearing it ten times more clearly and more vividly?

I think I’ve struggled with whether anyone else gets as excited at that as I do and it’s a lot easier to talk about, you know, you can play chords by ear so you don’t need to look up chord charts anymore, that’s very specific and tangible but to me, a big part of what’s exciting about developing your musicality are these inner skills of music is, as you describe there, the ability to relate to the music around you and the music you enjoy and hear in a very different way.

How about yourself, Adam, what are your thoughts on this as listening to the route to musicality?

Adam: That was really inspiring thank you.

I’m gonna go a completely different direction though.

One of the things we talk about here at Musical U is how powerful it is to play with others. Get different musicians together and that was something we did back in the conservatory too. I studied trumpet at the conservatory and we were in this [inaudible 00:09:45] the Bill Adam, no relation to me Adam. Bill Adam, who was the legendary trumpet professor at Indiana University and part of his philosophy was, you need to spend 50% of your time resting in between the notes and that was just to allow your muscles to recover, all your facial muscles, keep your brain focused cos we were playing four, five or six hours a day.

One of the things that my professor told us we had to do was find a partner to play with cos trumpet players typically have what we call daily routing and it’s very rudimentary stuff, it’s all your long tones, your standard exercises, stuff from the Arban Method Book.

It can be a bit monotonous after a while, especially when you are talking about these hour and a half, two, three hour long practice sessions. But, like I said, we were told to find someone else to play with. So when I was an underclassman I would find the best trumpet player to play with and when you’re playing with the partner, it’s literally like a synchronized dance. Where the upper classman would play the note first and then I would repeat it, then he would play the next note and I would repeat it and it would go on and on for two, two and a half, three hours like this.

What I figured out later on, was that, by doing this I spent a full 50% of my practice time listening to the other trumpet player, mimicking his sound. Ingraining that sound into my mind and over time I was then able to make that sound as well.

It was really kind of crazy after a while, you could walk through the hallway with fifteen trumpet players all playing and you could walk through with your eyes closed and be like, there’s Rob, there’s Zak, there’s Heather. We all knew each others’ sound. It was ingrained in us.

I just think, we talk about listening a lot and listening is very important when learning [inaudible 00:11:47]new songs doing audition training but personally I found the most transformative part of my music education and experience came when I applied listening to the very fundamentals of music.
That’s what I miss most about the Conservatory is that I play alone now and I need to get some more trumpet players in my life and I definitely look forward to that in the future.

Christopher: That’s very cool, wow. That’s such a great example to of, how something that can seem like a magical ability actually just takes time and practice.

If you had said to someone, oh yeah, I can identify five or ten trumpet players just by their sound, they’d be like, what, no, all trumpets sound the same. Are you kidding? You must be some kind of magic man.

But, as you describe it there, if you spend half your time listening your ear is gonna get as good as your fingers and that kind of skill is within reach.

I think Andrew and I did a talk about it when we did an episode on playing multiple instruments, it’s that thing where learning to play and instrument means you hear it in a completely different way and you just described that vividly the trumpet. I think any instrument you get within a mediocre standard on, when you hear that in a recording you have a visceral response to it.

Adam: And the other added benefit to this is that we were close, we were brothers and sisters. There’s always competition in a studio. But, you genuinely cared about your friends’ progression. We are still close to this day and that came because of all those hours spent just dancing note to note, back and forth from note to note, exercise to exercise.

Christopher: Nice. How about you Stewart? How has this come up in your musical life?

Stewart: Well Adam, I just wanna let you know you’re gonna be living closer. I have played trumpet, however, it’s been thirty years so you will definitely know it’s me playing when I start trying to play.
Anyway, on the topic. I’m someone who wants to sit and listen to music. Especially you know if its on or having a good stereo system in the car and you know, we have two stereos in the house and the basement when we’ve finished it, I told my wife, I want it set up so I can sit and listen to music down here, loudly, possibly.

We have it kinda set up as such for me to do that so, you know, some people think there’s an earthquake going on in the close vicinity to the house at times, but, nope it’s Stew he’s downstairs listening to music.

I enjoy listening cos I think as Andrew discussed this and you and Adam, I like listening to how the music goes and even the little subtleties, like zeroing in on what the guitar does, what the bass does, what the drums are doing in certain parts. Maybe the vocal harmonies, oh wait, there’s other instruments going on that I didn’t realize were there.

We did some contest a while back on Musical U, well not a contest but like a challenge, and it was for people to listen to the song and listen for the different instruments that were going on, and I think it was Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson, just used stuff that you thought people would’ve never used in a recording session.

But, if you listen real closely you can hear all these little bizarre things going on that you knew were there but, you never really listened and paid attention to what was going on in the recording and it’s just amazing how many instruments you would use, doing some of those two and a half, three minutes songs. It’s like, good grief, these are like orchestrations.

To me, it’s very enjoyable listening to how that goes. Because to me, when I listen, if you listen to some really good music that you like, I always kinda think of it as, I like going driving and it’s like taking a back road through the countryside that you’ve never taken before and it’s seeing all these new things along this road, oh, there’s a barn over here, oh I never noticed this lake over here, and that’s kinda like listening to music. It’s all these neat discoveries that can come.

And to take us to one more level. I’ve done some recording in the past and the last recording I did, we used new school technology to record old school.

We recorded as much as we could live. So, there’s no copy, paste. Every track we did was done, we hit record and let it go.

The bassist and I took a chance to sit back and listen to go, did that work there? Do we need to maybe make more space there? Oh, I wonder what it would be like, which was fun, is to.

I think it was more in the ’70’s you would hear these really bizarre panning things going on in left and right speakers, so we started doing that. We put that into the recording and it just made it really fun because as most people know, if you go into a recording studio, you’re paying some pretty big dollars to be able to do some of that stuff.

Having our own personal recording thing, you can sit back and tinker with, oh you know on this side maybe I’ll just play a regular first position guitar chord, but maybe over here, I’ll take it up fifth position and create some nice little things going on.

Being able to listen and hear how that works is a lot of fun and it brings the joy into the music because not only are you getting to create, but you’re even able to listen and go, did that work? Did it not work? It was exciting to do that.

I look forward to, at some point, to be able to do it again.

Christopher: Nice, well I think it’ll probably be on your next project, which will be a trumpet duo with our own Adam Liette.

Adam: Yes.

Christopher: I wanna wrap things up by laying out a few different types of listening we’ve talked about and as I’ve said at the beginning. This to me, it sounds like a clear and obvious topic, but there’s a lot of depth to it and we’ve talked a bit about listening to other musicians, if you are in a band or if you’re practicing in a partner way, like Adam talked about, and that can really be a powerful way to develop your collaboration skills.

We’ve talked about listening to music recordings, like a CD or an album and the kind of active listening you can do and I’ll link in the show notes to a past episode we did all about that and what you can listen for.

We talked about recording yourself. Gerald Klickstein was recommending this, and again, it’s something we’ve touched on several times on the podcast before so I won’t labor the point but just to say, that is a very different kind of listening and it comes back to these questions of self judgment and your inner critic and becoming objective about evaluating your own performance.

And finally, there’s doing the same thing in the moment. Learning to be present as Andrew often touches on in the context of improvisation. Learning to be in the moment and really paying attention to the sounds you are making because that can be the path to figuring out what you like, what you don’t, what you need to adjust in future.

Those are four different types of listening that I think can each tribute to your musicality development and I just wanted to wrap things up by laying those out and challenging everyone listening to take a minute and just think about how you are using each of those in your own musical life. I’m sure you are using one of them, but I’d be surprised if you were using all four and I know that for myself it’s easy to forget that I should be recording myself or in fact saying, oh it’s easy to get caught up in technique and forget to pay attention to the notes I’m making and so I think it’s just having in mind those four different types of listening and asking yourself, how am I, or how could I be using this in my own musicality training?

All that remains then is to say a big thank you to Stewart, Adam and Andrew for joining me on this episode. Thank you to you all for listening and we’ll see you on the next one!

The post About Listening as the Route to Musicality appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-steps-to-piano-improvisation/
Piano is probably the most intimidating instrument to improvise on. It can be overwhelming to sit down and try to play something purely from your imagination.

To help you improvise easily and confidently on the piano, follow these 5 steps from the Musical U Team! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-steps-to-piano-improvisation/

https://www.musical-u.com/masterclass-registration/
Want to find more time for your music? Then join Musical U with Bree Noble for this month’s free masterclass.

Learn some tips and tricks to find more time for music, even if you have a crazy busy schedule! https://www.musical-u.com/masterclass-registration/

With Women of Substance Radio Podcast & Female Entrepreneur Musician

In this month’s Instrument Packs we let loose Musical U’s Resident Pros on the topic of “Play it with feeling!” The results surprised us in their breadth, depth, and the variety of approaches to accessing that passion and bringing it to full expression in our music.

Guitar

Resident Pro Dylan Welsh believes that “feel” is a word that seems to get thrown around a lot, but it can be a little ambiguous as far as musical adjectives go. Generally, it’s used to describe guitarists that play very “expressively” – in other words, they seem to be expressing a genuine emotion or feeling through their playing. Dylan draws from several strains of thought as he describes how to achieve a deeper connection with the guitar:

Including:

• What it means to play expressively, and how we can break that down in a way that makes a little more sense for the sake of applicable practice.
• The three primary ingredients for expression on the guitar – the prerequisites to playing expressively.
• A few good techniques and exercises that you can incorporate into your practice routine that will allow you to start expressing yourself faster.
• Why and how singing is your most powerful tool for making that deep connection with your guitar – even if you’re not such a good singer.
• Multi-purpose MP3 backing and demo tracks to practice your mind-instrument connection.

Check out Dylan’s Resource Pack as he reveals the most important and surprising tool for any guitarist to bridge the gap between the amazing music you hear in your head and your ability to bring that expression all the way out on your guitar.

Piano

Connecting with your instrument (and your audience!)  gives music meaning and makes both performing and listening more enjoyable! The ability to play with feeling comes innately to some, but for others, it can be a difficult journey. In this resource pack, Resident Pro for piano, Sara Campbell, teaches specific ways to enhance the emotional connection with your music:

Including:

• What might be “standing in your way” if you struggle with this connection.
• Micro-level dynamics and phrase shaping.
• An expressive exploration of the Irish tune, “Danny Boy”.
• How to mine the emotional information from song lyrics – even when you’re playing an instrumental solo.
• Jazzy MP3 “Danny Boy” backing tracks for a new take on an old tune.

Playing piano with feeling does not have to be a mysterious process! Sara shows that careful and loving attention to a song can help you bring forward your deep expressive potential.

Bass

We often spend our practice time focusing on technique, exercises, working out difficult passages – and then we wonder why that connection with our inner feeling selves doesn’t quite come through in performance. Steve Lawson, our Resident Pro for bass, brings the idea of playing with feeling into the practice room in unexpected ways, as he shows you how to create more enjoyable, satisfying, and musical experiences in the practice room that will transfer to more meaningful and passionate performances:

Including:

• The power of finishing something – starting small, and bringing a creative process all the way to its conclusion.
• Fixing what you need to fix in your playing while creating something beautiful.
• Changing it up – keeping yourself out of a rut by shifting your approach.
• Collaborating with others – giving and receiving feedback from other bassists to keep your attitude fresh.
• MP3s tracks for you to explore your creative strategies.

Bassists are often the journeymen of the music world, expected to lay down an unwavering groove while the other musicians take all the glory. While this is an important skill, practicing creativity, and creatively practicing will strengthen your bond with your bass and flavor all of your playing with your own expression.

Coming up next month…

Stay tuned for new and exciting resources for our Instrument Pack members!

Interested in getting access to these resources and much more, with an Instrument Pack membership? Just choose that option during checkout when you join Musical U, or upgrade your existing membership to get instant access!

The post Play it with feeling! Resource Pack Preview appeared first on Musical U.

When we first came across the Modacity app, we were impressed. But quite often the research and literature around music practice seems to end up being quite divorced from the actual expressive and creative nature of music itself, so since it’s quite a scientific and sophisticated app, our first assumption was that the creator was probably quite a technical guy. In fact, we discovered that nothing could be further from the truth!

Marc’s a fascinating guy and in this conversation we talk about:

• What an epic road trip taught him about what his French Horn could do
• How you can start connecting with the more expressive side of music-making, even if you don’t consider yourself creative or artistic
• The principles that can transform the effectiveness of your music practice and get you better results faster, and in a more enjoyable way.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Marc Gelfo’s website
• Modacity
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck
• About Deliberate Practice in Music
• Interview with Prof. Anders Ericsson

Transcript

Christopher: Marc, I was joking with you before we started that I might have you record a little intro fanfare for us. Would you mind?

Marc: Absolutely. This is the intro fanfare for The Musicality Podcast.

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

Marc: My pleasure. Happy to be here.

Christopher: I came across you through your fantastic IOS practice app called Modacity, but I discovered there’s this really fascinating individual behind the app who has a few different kind of hats that you wear, so I’d love to go back to the beginning and learn a little bit about your own musical journey and what it was like for you learning music.

Marc: Sure. Well, I started drumming before I was born, according to my mother. Let me out of here. And by the time I was five or so, I had climbed up on my grandma’s organ and figured out Take Me Out to the Ball Game, I think maybe with a little help. So my parents started me on piano, and I liked piano, but I don’t think I liked my teacher very much, and that’s when my story, that is like many other people’s stories, began, where I was learning scales and rudiments and fairly bored, eventually ran away from home to stop piano lessons.

My parents understood that protest and got me a new piano teacher, which I worked a little bit better, but it was very much the standard western story of learn to read music, do drills, and perform repertoire written by somebody else. Then I went from there, around age 10, to violin and cello, playing in youth string orchestra, and finally got to band, where I discovered the French horn. The horn stymied me initially, as it does many, it’s called “the divine instrument” because only God knows what’s going to come out when you blow it.

I couldn’t even get a sound on the thing for about a week. I didn’t have a teacher. I grew up in a small town in Florida called Vero Beach, and just the band director kind of helped me get started, but I really fell in love with the horn and with band. It was like I was becoming a teenager and starting to hear these movie soundtracks, John Williams, James Horner, that would sometimes just bring me to tears with their beauty or epic magnitude. I fell deeply in love with the horn and with music making.

At the same time, I was programming. I started coding when I was eight. I was writing artificial intelligence chatbot kind of stuff when I was in seventh grade for the science fair. I had these dual passions going. I wanted to do music. I wanted to do horn. I had some success. I was well respected and loved in the high school band, but I never really made it to All-State. I didn’t know what a music festival was. I didn’t have access to teachers who really understood the horn very much, and so it didn’t go anywhere.

I ended up going to Northwestern because I didn’t get into the music school there, but I got into their cognitive science and computer science program. That’s when I realized that what had been holding me back was not my lack of talent but, rather, my approach to building talent or my whole understanding of skill acquisition in general.

I can keep going from there if you’d like.

Christopher: Well, first let’s pause for a minute, if you wouldn’t mind, because it sounds like there was kind of a burst of fresh enthusiasm midway through that journey. After you had the drudgery of learning piano in a way that didn’t resonate with you, you moved to French horn and playing in band, and it sounds like you were enjoying things from that point on. Why was that such a change for you?

Marc: I think that music originally is meant to connect people, and that band offered that experience for me of making music together, which string orchestra kind of had, but it was not so much. I enjoyed string orchestra, but band really wowed me. Oh, wow, what a huge collection of sounds. And it’s also just really fun, and people got along great, so that hooked me.

Christopher: Cool. You said something there about changing your viewpoint on talent. Describe, if you would, what had your viewpoint been through those first 10 years or so of learning music, and did you see yourself as someone who was naturally good at it, or how were you looking at things?

Marc: I saw it both ways at the same time. I had a lot of awareness that I loved music, that music would flow through me. I started improvising at the piano after I stopped piano lessons, and I felt so connected to what we were doing in band. I understood how to read music and I would move fast along the things that I was doing, but at the same time I was hitting failure, after failure, after failure, after failure when it came to societally defined milestones. I felt a ton of resentment and disappointment around that, and this sort of belief that I just must not be talented. It’s what Carol Dweck calls the fixed mindset.

Christopher: Gotcha, yeah. And I think that might surprise some people having heard your credentials, as it were, as a French horn player these days, the kind of orchestras and philharmonics that you’ve played with around the world. You mentioned that in time you realized that the way you practiced or your skill acquisition was maybe at the heart of what was holding you back. Tell us a little bit about that.

Marc: Yeah, absolutely. And right before I do that, I’m going to share a tip, Gelfo tip number one, about these credentials, which is to this day, when I go … I played with the Philadelphia Orchestra for the first time this year, and I took that experience, I treasured that experience, and I took the essence of it and I sent it back to little 17-year-old Marc who was sitting in front of these rejection letters from music schools thinking I’ll never get to play in an orchestra ever.

My tip is that as you inevitably get these milestones of beauty or connection or achievement in your musical journey, to really drink them in and send them to your past self and say hey, past self, I know you were struggling, but it’s going to be cool.

Christopher: Nice. I love that. I think all of us have a tendency to rush through the successes and not allow ourselves to really enjoy and relish and appreciate ourselves for having accomplished them. I love that tip to remember your past self who would have loved to experience what you just experienced.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. Getting into the discovery that talent is not a fixed attribute, that’s pretty well known at this point. There’s books like Talent is Overrated or The Talent Code that disassemble that myth fairly comprehensively, but for me it was just being in cognitive science, learning about skill acquisition. At the same time, I was studying Chinese at Northwestern, and my Chinese teachers were drilling me in a particular way that I knew from cognitive science was the opposite of the most efficient way to pick up a language.

Music is a language, and it just all sort of started brewing in my head, and I realized at some point, oh, I just haven’t really been practicing like I should be, what if I really go for it and practice well. And that did, indeed, make a big difference, and I’m still learning to practice better and better all the time, and it makes a bigger and bigger difference.

Christopher: I’m sure this is something we’re going to talk a lot more about, but I have to ask you, at that point, what were those language teachers doing that was so wrong?

Marc: Massed practice is one of the things that was wrong. I would write the same Chinese character 17, 20, 30, 50 times. I would study upwards of six hours to plus per day on Chinese, writing these characters over, and over, and over, and over. In cognitive science, plenty of studies on this, your brain habituates to that stimulus each time you write it, so by the fifth or seventh time, it’s fairly habituated and there’s a very low learning impact.

I wasn’t practicing recalling it. I was only practicing stuffing it in, and stuffing it into my short-term memory. The book Make it Stick talks a lot about this, where you’ve actually got to practice retrieving information from your long-term memory by testing it, rather than just stuffing things into your short-term memory loop.

Christopher: Interesting. What happened when you took this kind of neuroscience understanding back to the world of music?

Marc: Well, I’m still doing it, but I would say I graduated Northwestern, and I went to Indiana to study French horn and audio engineering, and that’s when things started to turn around. At that point, it was a very bro science kind of approach, like yeah, I know these things about massed and interleaved practice, or whatever.

I’m not even sure if my concepts were that fully formed at that point, but I know that I practiced differently, and I knew that I was relentlessly in touch with what felt like a productive practice session versus an unproductive practice session. Within two years of focusing on the French horn, I’d won my first symphony job, my full-time symphony job.

Christopher: Wow, fantastic, and you put that down to this changed mindset to practicing?

Marc: That’s part of it. I think that mentorship and environment were a big part of it. Indiana has more than 1,000 music school students, and all of the people who play symphony instruments are gunning for jobs, so it put me in an environment where it was expected that you would audition and care about audition success. To be honest, that’s a double-edged sword, but yeah, it got me an audition.

Christopher: Great. You said something in the early part of your story about having the music flow through you. I think most people would kind of assume that a symphony job is, I don’t want to put it too strongly, but almost the exact opposite of that, in the sense that you are required to play with such technical precision and discipline, and play exactly what is written on the page and what the conductor tells you to. You are performing at a very high level and producing incredible music, but it’s not that kind of instinctive, free, I am in control of this spirit of music.
I wonder if you could share a bit about your experiences as a professional symphony player and maybe compare or contrast with that kind of free-wheeling spirit.

Marc: Yeah, thank you for saying that. The way that you articulated it brought deep compassion to me, because that has been my experience, and I think that that’s the experience of a lot of very dedicated musicians who spend an entire career in a symphony. I remember that I had grown up listening to a recording of Mahler’s 3rd, and me and my buddy would come back from high school every day and go to his room and put on Mahler 3 and listen to it and just be amazed with the brass playing. That was the piece that I dreamed of playing.

Finally, when I was in the Hong Kong Philharmonic, maybe by my third season or something, we played Mahler 3, and I was so excited, but I wasn’t really able to enjoy the performance, even though I knew the music so well from years and years and years of listening to it, because I was so focused on executing it, all these little details. My mind used to be so active while playing the horn, and to an extent in symphony it still is.

I think you’re absolutely right that the demands of symphonic playing, the way that most people approach it, leads to a lot of mental activity which cuts off a flow state, which cuts off the connection from that flowing music idea. It’s not true for everybody, but unfortunately it gets a lot of people.

Christopher: Yeah. For you, has there been anything that balanced that out?

Marc: Yeah, a lot has balanced it out. I would say some of the most profound experiences that I’ve had with respect to the other side of just being in complete flow and complete mental silence or awe or connection with what’s going on has been, for one, after a Vipassana meditation retreat, 11 days of silence, and when I got my French horn back I just made sound on it and was amazed at just the beauty and consistency of the sound, no judgment about positive or negative, right or wrong.

That started when actually my sister introduced me to the concept of sound healing. She studied that at the California Institute of Integral Studies, which is sort of a beacon or center for more esoteric arts and studies. And this idea that sound can be for healing, not for playing right notes, struck me as tremendously different from what my training had been.

I started to get into just playing music for the act of expression and for cultivating a particular energy or essence, rather than a particular note or rhythm, and that’s a big shift. I would be overjoyed to demonstrate that difference briefly on the mouthpiece, if you’d like.

Christopher: Please do.

Marc: Okay. I’m going to focus on notes right now, and I’m going to play some right notes and right times, and I’m going to do just some little … okay. And now I’m going to focus on expressing joy and presence with no regard for notes or time or accuracy. And I don’t know, would that feel like a different sort of musical experience to you?

Christopher: For sure. It was certainly different for the listener.

Marc: Yeah. One was pretty controlled and the other was pretty free. And you can bring the two together, but the big step for me was moving all the way to the other side, of being completely free and disregarding my concern for notes, rhythms, tone quality, any of those traditional characteristics, and focusing purely on the essence of what I want to express and allow in the space.

Christopher: That is fascinating. I think inadvertently we may have given an example of combining the two at the beginning, when I half-jokingly asked you to play us a little intro fanfare. I have to say, in the moment, I was a bit surprised that it was a bit more loose and joyful than I was expecting an international symphony player to produce. I thought it would be kind of tight and regimented, and that’s not what you played at all, which I’m sure just shows how you’ve internalized this joyful aspect of musical expression.

Marc: Yeah. It’s really wonderful to be able to pick up the horn and to blast some joy through the neighborhood.
Christopher: Tell me, there’s a phrase used on your personal website a bit, which is neuro-symphonic hornist. Can you tell us a bit about what that means?

Marc: That’s the idea. It comes from symphonic, and I added the neuro on later when I felt like I’m not just a symphonic player. The things that I love about symphony is this element of teamwork, and elite achievement, and honoring the artistic greats of history with highly refined music making, but not necessarily just refined the way that 18th century defined that.

The neuro part is honoring the 21st century where neuroscience is an important part of our daily experience, whether it’s the ads that we see on YouTube, or the binaural beats that we used to get focused, or just a different light that we buy from Philips that we can use to control our mood.

I think that for me and my music making, I very much consider what’s going on in my brain, what’s going on in the cognitive systems of those who are listening or participating, and the cognitive system goes far beyond the brain. The brain’s just one organ of the cognitive system. But that’s the basic idea. Does that explain it?

Christopher: It does, yeah, and I think it’s great to unpack that a little and understand everything that’s included in that unique phrase neuro-symphonic hornist. You give the example that-

Marc: Can I add one more thing?

Christopher: Please do, yeah.

Marc: Yeah. The brain is this incredibly interconnected almost microcosm. It’s like a universe on its own. And that as a metaphor for the world informs my music making, where we’ve got an entire globe of people, and ideas, and subsystems, and collectives, and individuals, and as a neuro-symphonic musician, my goal is to connect and make music with all of these disparate parts, to make the music of these disparate parts, and not just one particular section, like Europe.

Christopher: I see. To that end, I think the way you’ve described it makes clear that playing as a freelancer or a full-time symphony player certainly pushes certain parts of your musicality to the extreme, but maybe neglects other sides of what you would like to be doing in music. You gave one example there of after a silent meditation retreat where you, I assume privately, just enjoyed some time with your horn.

Have there been other outlets or other opportunities for you to explore that side of your musicality?

Marc: Burning Man. Can we talk about Burning Man?

Christopher: Of course, yeah.

Marc: Well, I had the longest drive ever to Burning Man. I drove for three weeks to Burning Man, from New-
Christopher: Where were you starting from?

Marc: Mars. I was in New York. And I took it nice and slow. I drove across the country for fun. A buddy of mine joined me, a great friend of mine. I couldn’t play my horn in the car, so I made this hose horn with just about five or six feet of plastic tubing, and a plastic funnel on one end, and a mouthpiece stuck on the other end, and it slots. I mean, it actually has a harmonic series, and you can play all kinds of exercises, flexibilities, melodies, but it’s a funky, wonky instrument.

By the end of that three weeks when I got to Burning Man, it had really opened my mind, almost forced me to think about music making in a different way, because I didn’t have scales. I didn’t have French horn tone quality. I couldn’t play any western music on this thing. I could only play funky, out-of-tune harmonic series, fanfares, and dirges. So I got to Burning Man. I had a horn.

You were talking about sort of other elements of music making, and there’s this part of Burning Man called the Temple, and the Temple is a structure that’s built out in the deep playa, the deep desert, far away from where people inhabit on the other side of the Man. You make the trek out there through the dust to mourn, to grieve, to let go. It’s a very sacred place. Generally, the Temple is manned by meditators, all day long, all night long, people meditating in the Temple, holding space for the crying or even the wailing that’s sometimes happening there. It’s a very, very powerful, powerful spot.

One particular day I went to the Temple, and I brought my horn to be of service, and outside the Temple there were someone playing a gong, and you could imagine it’s like Mad Max, people wearing the bandanna and the goggles and like a gong, and another person had some sound healing bowls, crystal bowls, and then outside … they were at the entrance to the Temple, and it could have been 2,000 years ago, aside from the plastic on their goggles.

Then beyond the gong and the crystal bowl, there were people sitting and meditating and just holding the vibration of support and love. Some of them were grieving. Some people are offering blessings. And I sat down, and I asked if I could join, and brought out my horn and just started playing these long tones to go with the gong. And again, not focusing on notes.

You don’t play Mary Had a Little Lamb, or you don’t even play the most sophisticated Elgar funeral march. It’s not right. Primal. I was playing primal notes and purging grief from my system through the horn. It’s very simple to do on any instrument. You just take that feeling and you let it come through you, cut viscerally through you, and out through your hands or through your mouth, or whatever you’re using to play that instrument, without censoring it, without interfering, and without intellectually controlling it.

I was doing that on the horn, and eventually … I had my eyes closed a lot … opened my eyes, and there was a huge crowd of people that were sitting, arcing around me, listening, and someone came up and he looked really sad. I said can I play you a blessing, and he said yeah, please, and shared what was up in his life. I closed my eyes and just tried to kind of like feel compassion and understanding for what that person was going through, meet them there with the tone of the instrument and the emotion that I was playing, and then used the sound of the horn to transform that feeling from sadness to joy, to take that path over.

When I opened my eyes, the person in front of me … tears were streaming down his face. I just got chills. I had never done anything like that before. I don’t think I’d ever brought anybody to tears, except my sister when I practiced too much before. And to do it in such a non-traditional manner was a striking moment, and I’ve never been the same since then.

Christopher: Wow. I’m really glad we went down this avenue in our conversation, because I think a lot of what we talk about here on The Musicality Podcast is trying to get people away from the technicalities and equip them with the ideas or the skills or the techniques that will let them have that kind of deep connection with the music they’re playing.

I know that for me, I always struggled with this because I was so brought up in the note-by-note, play the right notes at the right time mentality, very sheet music based, very robotic fundamentally. I feel like on paper you’re the same kind of personality type. You’re studying neuroscience, and you’ve done some computer science along the way, and you had that background in very careful note-by-note playing and not going beyond what you were told to play.

I’d love to just ask, was there anything in your journey or any insights you have that could help someone who’s feeling kind of trapped in that analytical world, and maybe has never felt they were trapped until they hear someone describe the kind of thing you just described, and they realize they actually might be missing out on that deep connection with music?

Is there anything you could share that might help them take their first steps in that direction?

Marc: I think the first step is maybe … the first step may be to acknowledge the shadow side of this analytical rigorous learning, which the way that I see it is that it creates a lot of fear, a lot of constriction, a lot of anxiety, potentially, disappointment, shame, guilt for not holding up to standards. Those may be, if you were like me, as unconscious patterns and habits that I had brought to my music making from years of being wrong, from years of painful failures, from years of being told no, you can’t make music with us because you didn’t play the notes well enough.

Taking a second to acknowledge that, that that’s deeply painful, and I don’t think that’s in the spirit of music, that’s a personal decision that anybody who wants to go down the road of having full access to their musicianship and their emotional power needs to acknowledge and to come to terms with, and then transform.

The step after acknowledging it is to transform it, and the easiest way that I know how to do that is to get back in touch with the innate musicality, and do that by making sound and learning to feel your emotions, and then learning to channel them through an instrument. You can do that through the voice, which is our innate instrument for that. It’s our built-in instrument, and we know how do it. We know how to be really sad, or really happy, or angry.

I just put three emotions through my voice, and I can learn to do that on a pitch now, or on some kind of pitch, or even use pitch to take it to the next level of excitement, joy, or angry. Does that make sense? Is that a little too off-the-cuff?

Christopher: Not at all, no. That was perfect. Thank you. And I love that exercise of really stripping it down and not jumping straight to how can I play this piece with more emotion or feel more in the flow when I play this complicated repertoire, but really just sitting down with your instrument and finding way to bring out that emotion you instinctively know how to express with your voice on your instrument instead. I think that’s a fantastic suggestion.

Marc: That’s right. That’s the next step, is you get the instrument. And if it’s a guitar, you strum it really angry, and you don’t care about what sound comes out, or if you’re feeling really grateful and just full of love for life, you give it a very satisfied strum, and then you tame that. You tame the beast of your emotions and learn to put it through chords, and chord progressions, and phrases, and arrangements of phrases, and eventually you have entire pieces of music.

Christopher: Having heard your story, which to dramatically oversimplify we could describe as going down a route of technical perfection and the highest levels of musical performance, and then or maybe along the way discovering this very different side of musical expression, it would be easy for someone to assume, I think, that at that point you just kind of drew a line under it, and you picked one or the other, and that was that.
But you’ve developed this fascinating app that I think combines a lot of what we’ve been talking about, and so I’d love if we could talk a little bit about Modacity, and maybe I can begin by just asking you to introduce the app and what it can do for people.

Marc: Yeah, sure. I want to talk about these different areas of music first real quick, because you made it sound like okay, I’m climbing the ladder of technical perfection, and then I discovered the ladder of emotional authenticity, let’s call it, or musical truth. I want to propose a different model of understanding, which is that they’re kind of the same ladder. It’s like the yin and the yang in many ways, and that in order to unlock the next level of technical proficiency, you need to raise your musical truth. And in order to access the next level of music truth, you need to work on your technique.

That’s very hard to do. It’s very hard to manage a practice session. None of us, me included, can even begin to approach what’s possible, what science has proven is possible, with the learning curve, because managing a practice session is an art and a science on its own. That’s what led me to create Modacity.

Modacity is a mobile app right now, and it allows you to organize your practice sessions into practice items. Whatever it is that you want to practice, whether it’s relaxation, or joyful screaming, or major scales with added ninths, you just list that in Modacity, organize it into practice sessions. You can budget time with timers, set notes, watch your stats, and then actually practice with the app.

This is where it takes care of allowing you to let go of the analytical side, because you can’t analyze as you perform and be 100% performant. That’s where self-recording comes in. When you’re practicing with Modacity, it’s all about self-recording and then listening back analytically and deciding what your next steps are using the deliberate practice protocol.

Christopher: Cool. Well, you mentioned a few things there that we definitely have to unpack a bit. Any longtime listeners of the show will know that at Musical U we totally advocate for self-recording. There’s definitely a kind of psychological emotional hurdle to get past at first for some people, but it is unparalleled as a tool for improving your skills more quickly.

I love that you put this at the heart of Modacity, but I have to ask a question that might be on some people’s minds, which is when you play in your practice session and you record it and then you listen back, don’t you need a teacher to listen back to tell you what you’re doing wrong or what you need to improve?

Marc: Absolutely not. You need feedback. You can’t do without feedback, but you can do this in some ways without a teacher. I’m a huge advocate of teachers, but for a different reason. I think of yoga, where you constantly are finding your edge. Do you know what I mean? You’re stretching, and you’re like okay, there’s my edge. And you can always imagine what a little deeper version of a stretch might be than you can actually go.

And it’s the same way with music, where if you listen back to a recording of yourself, almost anybody, I’m going to bet on this, can hear one thing that they’d like to improve about that. If they ask themselves honestly, according to all of my artistic sensibilities, all of the music that I’ve heard and love, everything that I hold to be aesthetically true from my most internally authentic place as an artist and creator, what’s one little improvement I could make on this?

That’s all you need to ask, because that’s all you need to be working on anyway, is one thing at a time, one improvement at a time, and deliberate practice. Modacity walks you through that process and allows you to gauge whether you’ve made that improvement, and then save the strategy that caused that improvement to happen so that you can make it automatic.

Christopher: Terrific. I’ve been playing with the app myself and just have to commend you, because it’s the first and only time I think I’ve seen deliberate practice systematized in this way. I imagine a lot of our podcast listeners, if they heard our episodes about deliberate practice, probably had the experience I did when I first came across this idea, which was you get super excited, you think that makes so much sense, I’m going to practice that way.

And you spend a week with these principles or ideas really firmly in your mind, and your practice goes great, and then a few weeks later you’ve just kind of got the vague idea still in your head, and you’re mostly back to practicing in the old traditional way and not being all that mindful about what you’re practicing in each session.
And I love that Modacity makes it so easy to keep this kind of framework front and center so that you really know okay, what am I actually trying to improve here, what am I doing to try to improve it, and then afterwards reflect and say well, did that improve it or not, and based on that, what’s my next step.

Marc: Glad to hear that from you. It’s true for me as well, and I’ve been making incredible gains in my playing, more so since I launched Modacity than the rest of my life.

Christopher: I commented in passing on how it’s tricky at first sometimes for people to record themselves and listen back, because we do have such, I guess, emotional barriers to accepting the bits that are good and being able to recognize the bits that are not so good.

I did just want to mention that this deliberate practice framework is also super helpful for that, because it just reminds you you’re not expecting to listen back and hear a perfect performance. That’s absolutely not what you’re sitting down to do. You’re trying to work on one particular thing, and then really just ask the question did this particular thing get better or worse this time.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. I was complaining to my roommate the other day about my articulation, and I said I’ve been playing French horn 25 years now, you’d think I’d have something simple figured out about articulation. He said isn’t that cool that you’ve been doing it all this time and you’ve still got major, major things to unlock and new things to learn, that’s amazing. And I said yeah, oh, yeah, you’re right. And then I went to Modacity and I typed in articulation and I started to solve this problem that has been bugging me for 15 years.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, to pick up on that, I think that’s a beautiful mindset to take to it, and a really positive spin to put on what could be a really frustrating situation.

But I’m sure some people listening are hearing about a practice app and thinking that’s great for someone who’s doing really well with their music practice and wants to accelerate it and do phenomenally well, but I’m not doing great with my music practice, and I feel like I’m not really learning that quickly, maybe because I’m later in life, or maybe just because I’ve always been a slow learner, it’s not even worth me trying this app. What would you say to someone who’s got those kinds of thoughts running through their head?

Marc: I would say take a breath, take another breath, and maybe we can question some of those assumptions, because everybody has progress available to them. Neuroplasticity has been documented in the elderly. It’s available to anybody. People lose half a brain and they relearn skills. It’s not about the inability to learn. Everybody can learn. Everybody can grow. I would say definitely check out Carol Dweck’s book on The Growth Mindset. Open yourself to the possibility that you can learn, and then give these tools a shot, because there’s better and better tools for organizing and optimizing your practice.

When you see your star rating go up in Modacity over time, you’re like oh, wow, I went from 10% mastery to 40% mastery in two weeks, this is working, I’m going to make it to 60% mastery in another two weeks. It really does work. Keep an open mind and use the best tools that are available to you. And yeah, be positive about the possibilities.

Christopher: I think that’s really good advice. You started to paint a little bit of a picture there of what it’s like to practice with Modacity week by week, and maybe you could just do a kind of before and after, or compare and contrast. What would your average hobbyist musician’s practice look like without using an app like this versus what it could be if they did pick up Modacity and start training with it day by day?

Marc: My guess is oh, I should practice but I don’t really want to, or I should practice, okay, I’m going to go practice, what do I play, I’m just going to noodle a little while to get warmed up, oh, wait, that sounded bad, oh, that sounded bad, okay, that’s cool, noodle a little bit, oh, I want to listen to this tune that I’ve been working on, cool, I’m going to listen, oh, I’m going to listen to another tune, okay, now I’m going to noodle a little bit, oh, my teacher said to work on some things, but I don’t really remember, I think it was scales, massed practice, massed practice, massed practice, get a little better, forget everything, get distracted, and put away the instrument because you’re feeling discouraged. That might be one path that some people have taken.

Christopher: I’m hearing a 13-year-old me in my head going yep, that sounds about right.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. I’m hearing versions of myself. With Modacity, it would be like oh, there’s my instrument, cool, it’s time to practice, oh, my … oh, finally time to practice, I’ve been waiting all day for this, pull out Modacity, put on do not disturb mode and open up my Tuesday playlist, cool, okay, today I’m going to do long tones, I’m going to do scales, I’m going to do some visualization, and then I’m going to work on these three pieces that I’ve got for my recital, and I’ve got time budgeted, okay, this is like 45 minutes, and then I have an open-ended improvisation practice after that, and then visualization, all right, cool.

Start, practice, record myself, make improvements on each thing, make notes for what I’m going to do next time, give myself a star rating so I can track my mastery, flow through the practice session, hit the finish button, and be congratulated on the amount of time spent and see that go into my practice bank.

Christopher: Love it. Well, I’m sure everyone listening can imagine the impact that would have on their musical life. You don’t have to read the literature to realize that practicing in a smarter way can deliver better results quicker, and I think you’ve implemented some of the leading research on effective practice and self-assessment into the app, so that’s really fantastic.

What’s coming up next for Modacity? Where do you take it from here?

Marc: Very excited to start offering practice packs. Those are going to be curated practice sessions. For example, I’m building one right now on how to practice multiphonics with the French horn, a very extended technique for the horn. You’ll be able to download those practice packs … they’re part of a subscription package of Modacity … and practice, say, how a certain trumpet celebrity practices trumpet, or how a guitar player practices these things, and have embedded videos that walk you through a sort of hybrid of curriculum with built-in time to practice those things as long as you want to practice them.

From there, we’re going to be going social, which I’m very excited about, and start connecting musicians around practice, around sharing, around getting more feedback, and starting to accelerate the social component of music learning and music making.

Christopher: I see. Well, that is an exciting horizon to have in store. I think you mentioned earlier in the conversation the importance of context of you getting that spot in the symphony, and it’s something we’ve certainly seen time and again at Musical U. We hammer on about community, and I know some people hear that and they’re just like look, I don’t do Facebook, I don’t want to instant message people, I’m not into that social thing online.

But what we try and explain is this is not chitchat for the sake of chitchat, that this is leveraging the fact that you can learn incredibly quickly when you take advantage of other people’s learning journeys. When you learn from each other and share what you’re working on, we’ve just seen time and again in Musical U, when a member is willing to kind of take that leap into the community and make use of that side of things, it really is transformational on the results they get. I think that’s super cool that you’re including it in Modacity in the future.

Marc: Yeah, and I love that about Musical U, by the way. I really appreciate that.

Christopher: Thank you. Cool. Well, Marc, it’s been such a pleasure to talk with you, and I feel like we’ve pulled back the curtain a little, and the man behind such a technical and, what’s the word I’m reaching for, kind of sophisticated app also has this incredible spiritual, and mindful, and loving side to him that comes through in the way you’ve talked about your own musical journey. I think that will only encourage people to dive into Modacity, give it a try, and see what it might be able to unlock for their musical life.

Marc: Yeah, very excited to share that, very excited for more people to practice with Modacity. You can hear the difference. I went to an opera concert a few months back, and one of our kind of star Modacity users is a great opera singer, and she was singing at that show. There was a particular passage, very difficult coloratura, moving around, jumpy, jumpy, and I could hear … I thought for sure she practiced that with Modacity. I could hear the Modacity in it. And we got together afterwards and she said did you hear that passage? I practiced it with Modacity. I was like yes.

So definitely encourage people to try it out and see how much progress they can make and how much more they can enjoy and relax into their practice.

Christopher: Amazing. Well, for anyone wanting to check that out, you can search the app store for Modacity or go to modacity.co, and of course we’ll have a link directly to that in the show notes for this episode.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Marc.

Marc: My pleasure, Christopher. Thank you for having me.

The post Emotion and Efficiency, with Marc Gelfo appeared first on Musical U.

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