Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/finding-an-online-music-teacher/
Trying to find an online music teacher? There are many benefits to learnin gmusic online, but it can be more difficult finding a teacher that fits your musical needs.

The team from TakeLessons joins us with some insights for finding your next music teacher.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/finding-an-online-music-teacher/

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part One
• Unlocking Your Musicality: Part Two
• About Keeping It Simple

Transcript

Christopher: Hello, and welcome to the Musicality Podcast. My name is Christopher Sutton. I’m the founder and director of Musical U. It’s my pleasure to be joined today by our Musical U team. We don’t have our Resident Pros with us but we have the full line up we normally have on our Monday morning team calls. Monday morning, depending on which country you’re in. For me, it’s generally afternoon.

It is myself, Stewart, Adam, Andrew and Anastasia and we are going to be picking up on one of the common themes that came across in our Episode 100 Celebration Roundup, where we had 26 fascinating music educators sharing their one top tip for unlocking your inner musicality. The theme we’re gonna be picking up on today is the idea is that we are all musical inside already.

I’m excited on this one because, as I jokingly said to my team before we kicked off recording, this is our mission statement, more or less, at Musical U. This is our brand, this is our message, this is what we’re all about, is trying to help musicians feel and be equipped like they are truly musical in a natural, creative, confident way.

So, of course, I was delighted when this came up with lots of our contributing guests. We had Andy Wasserman talking about the musical gold inside you and how when you enjoy music you hear, it’s because it’s resonating with the music you have inside. We had Bill Hilton, David Reed and Forest Kinney talking about how you can be creative from day one and you have that inside you, even if you don’t yet have phenomenal instrument technique, you do have the ability to create and express.

We had David Andrew Wiebe talking about, specifically, you already have musicality inside and you just need to tap into it. David Wellerman talked about how sometimes we need to put down our instrument to realize what we have inside and what we can express musically. And Jimmy Rotherham expressed the kind of could I philosophy, which is that we are all musical, we can all use our voice, we can all express musical idea and for him, that comes through in his work in inclusivity in school music and helping kids to all feel like they are musical, that they can sing, that they can take part in musical activities.

This is kind of near and dear to our hearts at Musical U and I’m excited to have the chance because, you know, I think we all take it for granted at this stage, having been working in musicality training for one to ten years, depending on the team member. It’s rare that we sit down and actually really talk about it except in a very specific way when we are developing new material.

Broadly speaking, why don’t we kick off with Stewart. What does it mean to you Stewart, this idea that we are all musical inside already?

Stewart: Well, I think all of us listen to music in some way. I would like the think if you can listen to the radio, tap your foot, whistle along, hum along, you can do something musical. I don’t think many people think like that. It’s a shame, really. I got to know a little bit more about this and how deep it goes. I’ve written about it but I also taught guitar and it always bummed me out when I see people come in who were told, for one reason or another, you can’t play guitar. I’d be like, “Well, why?” Luckily, thankfully, whoever was with my parents said, “Let’s try one more teacher.”

One came in, it was a woman who was about 5′, real short but she had tiny hands. The guitar, her first instructor was like, “Your hands are too small to play guitar, so you shouldn’t play guitar.” She was about kind of ready to give up, so she came in. I talked to her and I said, “Well, let’s move your hand around a little bit.” Next thing you know, we were doing lessons for a few years. Her big goal was to play music with her kids so they could sing and she could play and she was able to do that. Thankfully, she moved on. It’s kind of like not believing the lies that others will say.
That happens especially when we’re young and that stuff sticks with you, I think, through time. I had stuff, when I was young, that was said to me. I know other people who had the same thing. Just negative little comments from teachers or other students like, “Oh you can’t sing,” or “Oh, you can’t do that.” No, no, no, you can.

To me, as a community conductor on Musical U, I get to see a lot of people come through that, I don’t know what you want to say, like the opening of their mind, like I can do it and they get excited. That’s one of the best days. That’s like a huge, great moment of my day when I see someone go, “Man, I’m getting this, this is really good.” See, you can do it. Don’t believe the other stuff. It’s great to be part of something that does that.

Christopher: Nice, yeah. I think we all enjoy seeing that with members and we’ve had, for sure, some dramatic cases where people have come in and you almost wonder why they joined because they seem so determined to fail and so determined that they don’t have what it takes. When that turns around and they start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and they start seeing themselves do this things in music that they thought were beyond them, I think we all get a massive kick out of that.

Stewart: Yeah, sometimes it just takes a little extra time. I had, you know the students, and I’m sure Andrew probably has some examples of this also, I had one student also, she was mentally handicapped. She could work. Her mom brought her and once again, they had a teacher and he was just like, “Oh, she can’t do it.” She came in and I worked with her. She ended up having a blast. She was doing it and the mom came in, this was like a few years after and she said, “Thank you. You took the time with her and worked with her and she’s doing music and she loves doing this.”

Another guy, it was kind of funny, it reminded me of Mr. Holland’s Opus, I think, that movie. It was a scene where this one guy has a really hard time with tempo. Mr. Holland, he puts a helmet on his head and starts tapping on his head with a drumstick so the guy feels [01:01:17]. I had a guitar player and he came in and we tried everything, he just could not get that steady beat. I’m like, “I know this guy has it.”

I took a drum … I didn’t start whacking him over the head … but I did tap on his knee with a drumstick. Eventually, it started really catching on and he got it. It’s like finding those neat ways to help people in.

Christopher: Yeah. That’s a nice example where clapping in time is something that people really, I think clapping in time and singing in tune are the big two where everyone feels like everyone should be able to do this. But if you haven’t learned or you haven’t happened to kind of absorb it passively, it can be tricky. It’s been fun and interesting for us at Musical U figuring out how do we actually teach those skills in a step by step way while helping people pass the emotional and psychological baggage that may have been holding them back.

Stewart, you thankfully solved this for me. I forgot to ask everyone to introduce themselves. I think what came across in your answer is you’re a guitar teacher and community conductor at Musical U. Before we go ahead, I should just ask Adam, Andrew and Anastasia to please give a quick intro for anyone listening who hasn’t heard you on the podcast before.

Adam, why don’t you go first.

Adam: Hi everyone, I’m Adam Liette. I’m communications manager at Musical U. In addition to being a trumpet player and a guitar player, I’m a veteran of the United States Army Band.

Andrew: Hi, I’m Andrew Bishko. I’m the product manager on the Musical U site and content manager on the Musical U blog. I play many instruments. Currently, my big project is playing mariachi music with my wife in a wonderful mariachi band.

Anastasia: Hey, my name is Anastasia Voitinskaia. I’m the assistant content editor here at Musical U. I’ve been a pianist since the age of three, a guitar player since the age of 10 and more recently, I picked up the bass and the synthesizer. I also occasionally sing. I currently play bass and sing in a band and I have my own experimental electronic project that is going to be my focus for the next little while in my musical life.

Christopher: Very nice.

Why don’t you continue for us Anastasia and share a bit about your thought on what it means that we are all musical inside already.

Anastasia: For sure.

I think the most basic thing to remember that people forget and that I forget sometimes when I’m in the throws of, “Oh, I’m not satisfied with what I’m making,” is if you can enjoy music, you are, in fact, musical. It means that you have an ear for music. It means that you have a taste in music and you know what sounds good to you, at least.
Unless you are completely tone deaf, which is so, so rare, or you’re just not paying attention. Also, you can hear music, you can appreciate it, you can [inaudible 01:04:29] out the dynamics, the phrasing, the articulation: for example, the guitar effects that someone is using, the different tones of the synthesizer. For example, you could try active listening to some of your favorite music and, chances are, you’re very capable of perceiving what about it you like. What makes it musical? Is it the melody? Is it the chord progression? Is it the way that it slows down and speeds up, for example?

All of this to say, also I think a core component of simply being human is also being musical because we are human and we do have feelings and they have to be expressed somehow. What better avenue to express them then through music, right?

Christopher: Nice. I think there’s an important point there, which I try not to over [inaudible 01:05:34] because it is simplification. A lot of the kind of ear training stuff that we talk about and train people on at Musical U is fundamentally about equipping you with words and mental frameworks for things your ears are already doing. Yes, there are some skills where you need to go deep and really get into the nitty gritty. It’s remarkable who often we have musicians join the members website, who’ve been playing music for 10 years and they feel like they have a terrible musical ear. In just few weeks, they can totally transform because, actually, they just lacked a few of these kind of mental structures or ways of thinking about what they were hearing or words to put on things that, once you put those things in place, they realize, “Oh, actually, I was understanding my ear, what was going on. I just didn’t have a way to grasp it.”

I think you’re exactly right, Anastasia, that we can see in anyone who’s enjoying music, that they have some kind of musicality inside them, so it must just be a matter of bringing that out.

Anastasia: I find for me, at least, from a very young age, and I saw this in other people that are just starting out on their instruments. When we play naturally, we tend to play pretty musically. We don’t sit there and plunk out note by note by note unless someone tells us to do so.

For example, when I was taking piano lessons, once I had learned everything, once I had gotten the notes under my fingers, once I had gotten the technique down, once I was comfortable with the material, essentially, I wasn’t playing robotically. I was playing pretty naturally. There were some lulls. Again, not really changes in pitch or rhythm, obviously, I was still playing the same notes. But something was changing. I was kind of injecting myself into the music, so, of course it would change. I’m gonna play a piece differently than how you would play a piece or how Andrew would play a piece.

Technique is obviously so, so important but I find sometimes it almost gets in the way because you’re thinking too much about the technique and you’re saying, “Oh, I’m not musical, I can’t get this.” When, in fact, if you just had the technique already under your fingers, and you were comfortable with what you were playing, you would in fact be playing musically. You wouldn’t be playing robotically. You would be thinking about other things, such as how the piece makes you feel, how you can express yourself through it. What is the emotion behind it to begin with?
Bottom line, I think our default is playing musically, not playing robotically. We are all capable of it.

Christopher: Yeah, fantastic. That’s really well put. In a way, it’s a parallel barrier. We talked just them about how one of the barriers is you don’t have the words or the mental frameworks to understand by ear. You are exactly right that the same thing happens in performance where is technique is a barrier and the person sitting there feeling unmusical, they might just not have got good enough with the technique to reach that nice, green field of exploring it musically.

Anastasia: Exactly.

Christopher: For me, that’s one of the big things was learning how much of an impact it had if I memorized things. I was a big sheet music reader and, as long as I was looking at the notes on the page, I always would be playing a bit robotically and kind of intellectually. When I bothered to sit down and memorize, it gave me a completely different opportunity to explore that music and express something with it. I think it’s that question of technique and of how much you’re needing to pay attention to getting the notes right. Once you move beyond that, you have the ability to let that musicality out.

Anastasia: For sure. As your confidence increases, so does your musicality, really, obviously, because you’re more comfortable.

Christopher: Yeah, it’s a two way street isn’t it? The more you’ve got these skills under your belt, the more confident you are. The more confident you are in them, the easier it is to express something.

How about you Adam, how do you think about the subject about everyone being musical?

Adam: You know, for the past 100 and some episodes of the musicality podcast, there’s these moments that just stick out in my head. I keep a file of these great quotes. One thing that Andy Wasserman said, he said, “I believe that every, single person is already am musical master, they just don’t know it.” I just love that quote and I think that speaks so much to what we do.

I really found, that both as a performer and as a teacher, we get shoved in this perception that this is music. What is music? It’s just a very … perhaps it’s a result of modern music education or just the mindset of “Well, now I’m making music.” Whatever that means. I often wonder, if we come in at music with that perception, does it shut us off from these new, exciting learning experiences? As we explore this really wide world of music that’s becoming more and more transparent and open to us with modern technology.

I’d just like to expand upon a very unique set of circumstances I had while I was serving overseas in Afghanistan. I was a member of the 82nd Airborne Division Band. In 2008, we got deployed to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. We had two jobs. The first job was just to play music. We played for soldiers, we played for dignitaries. I got to play for President Obama and the governor of Texas, you know, really high ranking people in our government, which is cool.
We also had a job to train the Afghan National Army. That’s actually, at the time, was the biggest job of ISAP was training the Afghans so that they could guard there own country. The Afghan National Army has a band, much like western armies do. A big part of our job was to train their band. We did this both at their equivalent of West Point, which is the American Military Academy in Kabul, Afghanistan. In addition, we would host them in our camp at Bagram Airfield.

I’m a bit ashamed to say, at the time, I really dreaded having to teach the Afghani’s. They had no concept of western tonality. They were playing on these instruments, western instruments, trumpets, french horns, trombones and the like, that they had just been given by NATO in the past eighteen months. For the first time in their life, they’re holding a clarinet and trying to make a sound.

They didn’t even know how to play their own instruments, let alone any concept of John Phillip Sousa, Henry Fillmore, Holst, Carl King, all these very standard, military march composers. We were even getting down to the root basics of reading western notation. It was very, very painful to try to teach them, even with translators.

Then one night, what we typically did is, on Friday nights, we would all get a bon fire going and we would all sit out there drinking tea and smoking cigars and the Afghani’s came out of their tent, they heard us all talking. They just bring out this collection of just these ragtag, beat up old instruments. It was their native instruments, it wasn’t our western instruments. They started playing, out there in the middle of nowhere. I was completely blown away.
All week long, we had struggled with these musicians, struggling with the mechanics and tonality and just basic musicianship of what we were trying to teach them. They were moving effortlessly throughout their songs, playing entirely by ear. This went on for over three hours, we sat outside there, jaws dropped listening to them play and eventually joining in. They weren’t just jamming, they weren’t improvising, they were playing songs. These were folks songs that had been passed down for generations. Those that weren’t playing would sing, sing in Pashtu. Complete command of notes, rhythms and the lyrics of their native songs.

They, indeed, had musical inside of them, but we were approaching it from the wrong aspect. I think that has so much to do with what code I taught, using the folk songs from your native tongue to begin to teach music, I think that really speaks to that, this very real experience with adult musicians
As I look back on that, what surprised me the most in all of this has to do with context in history. These musicians had lived through the oppression of the Taliban, two decades where music was strictly forbidden and was punishable by either corporal punishment or death. Yet, though all this oppression, music lived on. Even in the very youngest musicians, who were born into this oppression, music found a way to reach through the generations into them. That continues to inspire me to this day because it inside all of us and it’s multi-generational. I think part of our job as musicians is to continue to pass this wonderful gift of music to the next generation and to everyone, indeed, that we meet.

Christopher: Wow, that’s an amazing story. I love it too as an example or a symbol of tapping in to your musicality. Even Stewart touched on an aspiring guitarist who had been told her hands were too small and I think we fully all encounter people who tried an instrument, struggled and decided music wasn’t for them and the less common people who tried an instrument, struggled, tried another instrument, struggled, tried another instrument, found they loved it. The choice of instrument or genre or cultural, musical heritage, it’s so powerful for our success in music. I love how some of our guests talked about tapping in to your inner musicality and we have to talk about unlocking it. It’s not about creating something that isn’t there. It really is about being willing to explore in music, until you find the thing that resonates with you. Until you find the instrument or the style of music or the opportunity to actually find out what you’re capable of.

I hope that comes across in pretty much every episode of this podcast. Any time you’re struggling or feeling unmusical, you’re probably just not quite pointed in the right direction. I love your story, Adam, because it’s such a clear cut example of how people in one context can seem totally unmusical but put them in another context and they’ll blow your socks off. It’s amazing.

How about you Andrew? I so enjoyed interviewing you for the podcast in the past because of your kind of philosophy of music making. I think that’s probably what brought you to Musical U in the first place and why you fit in so well in the team here. So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and what it means that we all have music inside.

Andrew: Well, music is natural, as nature is musical. When we think about the rhythm of the seasons, the rhythm of the wind and the rain and the rhythm of our own heartbeat. The melodies of the voices that move in and out of our lives, everything is musical. We are immersed in this. We are part of this. I think a big thing that’s happened since the advent of recording and the available prerecorded music is that people get used to seeing the end product. They don’t experience the process. They don’t hear other people learning music. I know there is this one video about African talking drum player where he’s talking about how he learns music. They said, “How did you learn to play the talking drum?” He said, “Oh, you know it’s from when we were kids, when we were three years old. You pick up a drum and we talk like this.” It was learned naturally, like speaking.

I remember when I was studying Klezmer music and listening to anecdotes about what it was like in the villages in Eastern Europe and they said that people only stopped singing in order to talk to each other. They were always singing, they always had a little tune going. Everything was musical.

A friend of mine in Italy, who went to Naples, first moved to Naples in the 50s, he said you would walk through the street and everybody was singing. Singing songs, flowing out of the windows and the rooftops and all the vendors were singing, where music is a part of everybody’s life. The learning process of being a child and allowing yourself to express musically is a natural part of your growing.

I look at my own children and I see my children are musicians, they’re sheep herders, they’re dishwashers, they’re mathematicians, they’re scientists. There’s not that segmentation. But in our society, we have this thing of specialists. What are you going to be? We ask a child, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” How could you segment that? Limit that, limit your possibilities. That disconnects us and so we think, “Oh, well that person’s going to be a scientist, that person’s going to be a musician, that person’s going to be this, that person’s going to be that.”
We give up our innate musical, or we’re talked out of it. The truth about music is that it’s always about the music. I have a masters degree in music but I can listen to somebody who knows three chords and sings a song that they wrote with envy of their musicality and their expression. It doesn’t matter how much education you have, it doesn’t matter how many notes you can play, it doesn’t matter how much training you have or what you can do. It’s about the music, it’s about the sound that’s happening in the moment. Not to put all that other stuff down because it’s wonderful. It’s part of our nature and it’s been, with our culture of specialization, we’re separated from that.

Another thing is that people think they have to wait until … I have to have this skill before I can do that. I have to have this skill before I can do that. I’ve talked to members, doing discussions on Musical U site, on working towards improvisation, I’m doing this, this, and this and then I’ll start improvisation. It’s totally backwards. Improvisation, creating music, songwriting, can be part of your expression from day one. In fact, you’ll learn faster through that. That’s what it’s all about. Everything else is procrastination. It’s like, you want to make music, make music now. Skills are something that you’re adding to it. Skills are also developed in that way.

You play a scale, why do people hate playing scales so much? Because you go up and down and up and down and it doesn’t happen in music. Maybe a couple of Mozart pieces they will play a scale. Otherwise, you don’t even play scales in music. Play with the scale, don’t play the scale, play with the scale. Play up and down and inside out and play with the notes and play here. If you have a little technical part, you work it out, make a little melody, make it creative. Improvise with it, allowing us to express our inner musicality every step of the way where music is not the goal but music is the process. It’s something that we’re doing all the time. Then we’re adding skills to that and adding to our toolbox.

Christopher: Lovely. That is something I’d just like to underline. If I could go back to myself as a 12 year old and share that, it would have had a dramatic impact. That idea that whether or not you aspire to be a songwriter, or whether or not you aspire to be an improviser, those are things which completely transform your relationship with music and your enjoyment of the learning process.

If I could just go back and kind of open my eyes to the fact that improvising could be my way of learning the pieces, my way of learning dynamics and phrasing and technique, whether or not I had any interest in being an improviser, that would have been a massive gift.

For anyone listening who’s never tried to improvise and kind of tunes out when hearing about improvisation, I hope you’ll think a bit about this idea that it is simply a word we put on the idea that you can express your own inner musicality and that technique doesn’t need to be a barrier. Learning the words and the mental frameworks and the ear training skills doesn’t need to be a barrier. We all have some way of expressing ourselves in music from day one, the first time we pick up an instrument.

I have so enjoyed talking to you guys, I knew I would and I was curious to hear what would come out because as I touched on at the beginning, this is something that we are all immersed in day in day out and something we are often trying to communicate but something we rarely actually discuss in the team.

I’ve really enjoyed this, I hope our listeners have enjoyed the conversation as much as I have.

Well I want to say a big thank you to Stewart, Adam, Andrew and Anastasia for joining me on this episode. Thanks to everyone for listening and we’ll see you on the next one!

The post About You Being Musical Inside Already appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/what-is-the-circle-of-fifths/
The Circle of Fifths (also called the “Cycle of Fifths” or “Circle of Fourths”) is a powerful tool from music theory.

Learning the Circle of Fifths helps you to more easily play by ear or improvise, by understanding the musical connections between notes and the chords.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/what-is-the-circle-of-fifths/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/the-20-most-romantic-renditions-of-jazz-standards/
Tired of the repetitive music on the radio?

After a healthy dose of romantic listening to twenty reimagined jazz tunes, read through to the end for tips on recreating sultry jazz standards in your own image.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/the-20-most-romantic-renditions-of-jazz-standards/

These voicings aren’t limited to traditionally chording instruments like guitar or piano – you can even learn cool chord shapes for your bass.

Let’s take, for example, a C major chord. The three notes that spell that chord are C, E, and G. Now here’s the magic: no matter what order or where you play those notes on your fretboard or keyboard, if you’re playing those same three notes it’s still a C chord!

E-G-C? Still a C chord. G-E-G-C? Still a C chord.

There are endless possibilities and combinations that you can devise – even for just three little notes.

So what are these different chord voicings good for?

• easier and smoother transitions from one chord to another
• harmonizing melodies while keeping the melody note on top
• avoiding clashing notes with singers or other instruments
• creating fuller and/or more sparse sounds
• creating cool riffs that link up with other players
• creating special sonic atmospheres – from light and airy to dark and crunchy (and everything in between
• and more!

When you learn to play chord voicings, you’ll also gain more mastery over your keyboard or fretboard.

In this month’s Instrument Packs, you’ll see how each of Musical U’s Resident Pros approaches the topic of chord voicing, and how you can explore the possibilities on your instrument.

Piano

Spanning 88 pitches, the piano presents a huge canvas for painting chord voicing effects. But it all starts with getting the special close voicings known as “inversions” under your fingers. Resident Pro for piano, Sara Campbell, makes inversion exercises fun, beautiful, and musical, and then expands on them with lovely two-handed voicings leading to a surprisingly sophisticated harmonization of a very familiar little tune:

Including:

• Lovely exercises for practicing your inversions for triads and seventh chords that actually sound like music.
• Simple examples that transform these inversions into more beautiful voicings.
• Finding hidden beauty in a simple tune through harmonization with chord voicing.
• MP3 backing tracks for each exercise that will raise your enjoyment up to the next level.

With ten fingers and 88 keys, piano chord voicing can be very lush and satisfying without being all that difficult. Sara will guide you as you delve into the possibilities.

Guitar

Resident Pro Dylan Welsh confesses that he is a chord voicing nerd. Dylan first shows you how the principle of chord voicing works and provides practical exercises. A very actively gigging professional, Dylan has heaps of wisdom to share on how to deploy chord voicing in a band context:

Including:

• The theory and practice of chord voicing.
• Exercises for finding and practicing new chord shapes on your fretboard.
• How to harmonize a melody.
• A myriad of practical applications for chord voicing.

With Dylan’s chord voicing guidance, you’ll open your mind and fingers to a world of chordal bliss.

Bass

Typically, bass players tend to play one note at a time. But Resident Bass Pro Steve Lawson‘ demonstrates that with a few simple chord shapes, you can expand your harmonic expression whether playing alone or with a group. Plus, learning chords on the bass deepens your harmonic understanding of the fretboard when you do go back to single notes:

Including:

• The one shape you need to start playing chords over any major or minor chord.
• Explore both closed and open voicing for triads – both major and minor chords.
• Harmonize the C Major scale so you can start using major and minor thirds around the neck of the bass!
• Three MP3 tracks demonstrate how to play the chords in a musical context, and double as backing tracks for your own chords and improv.

Watch, learn and practice as Steve demonstrates how to expand your bass playing into the chord zone.

Coming Up Next Month…

Ever hear a recording of yourself and thought, “That’s not quite what it sounded like in my head…” You may have been feeling it, but somehow something gets lost in the translation when you put it all on your instrument.

Play it with feeling! Each of our resident pros will show you how to take the music inside you and translate that emotion into moving performances on your instrument. Yes, there are specific instrumental techniques that will help you to access the expressiveness you have always desired in your playing.

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 Chord Voicing: Resource Pack Preview appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/why-every-musician-must-be-a-singer-too/
Are you scared to sing? Many musicians are.

And while that it’s perfectly natural to be apprehensive about utilizing your musical voice, there is so much to gain from using your first instrument: Your Voice!

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/why-every-musician-must-be-a-singer-too/

The approach we teach is based on taking advantage of the fact that there are certain theory concepts and rules which mean that certain chords go together, and certain sequences of chords are more common than others in the music we hear each day. That, coupled with the fact that the ear doesn’t much care what key it’s hearing music in, allows you to very rapidly learn to recognise the chords in a large number of songs by ear, without needing to master each and every possible chord and combination.

So it’s no surprise that this idea, of the “one, four, five and six” chords and how powerful they can be, has come up several times on the show before – and we’ve even dedicated a whole episode to it, we’ll put a link to that in the shownotes.

Today we’re joined by Austin Brentley, the man behind a fantastic new website which, among other things, allows you to immediately find out what songs use certain chords. There are a bunch of cool applications of this idea, including:

• Taking the set of chords you know already, and finding a bunch more songs you’ll be able to play right away
• Figuring out what one chord you should learn next to open up even more songs for you, and
• Providing an easy middle step to learning to recognise chord progressions by ear, using songs you know and love.

It was really cool to get to talk with Austin and learn where this project came from and how people are using it and aside from those ideas we just mentioned, we’re sure you’re going to come away inspired with some ways it could be useful in your own musical life.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• ChordGenome.com
• 1,576 Easy Ukulele Songs That All Use the Same Beginner Chords
• About the I, IV, V, and vi Chords

Transcript

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

Austin: Thanks for having me, Christopher.

Christopher: So I have been in enamored with The Chord Genome Project ever since our team came across it and I’m really looking forward to talking to you about that but I want to begin at the beginning and understand where this project came from and, for yourself, what what was the journey of learning music like?

Austin: Oh, okay. Well, the project originally began as just a tool to help me find easy three-chord songs. I was basically tired of playing “Three Little Birds,” and “Knock on Heaven’s Door” and the ones you keep singing again and again when you search online.

And then somewhere along the way, I think, Axis of Awesome came out with the four-chord song. It was a viral video where they stitched together all these pop tunes and so I realized that there are tons of tunes out there and it’s just a matter of finding them and so I started on creating a search engine that could help me easily find, at that time, three-chord songs.

Christopher: Nice. And let’s rewind the clock a little bit. What were you playing these three-chord songs on and what had you been doing up until this point to know that three-chord songs were even a thing?

Austin: Well, I’ve had a guitar pretty much my entire adult life. Every time I change countries I get a new guitar, well, old guitar from the pawn shop and consistently, it’s just languages there because I’d pick out a tune. I really did enjoy, like, bossa nova music or early rock and roll. Bossa nova was way out of my league, like, “One Note Samba,” do you know that?

Christopher: Mm-hm. By Ella Fitzgerald. Yeah.

Austin: Yeah. So that’s, you know, I was always punching above my weight but even with early rock and roll songs the progress just didn’t materialize because you’re trying to bring together all these unfamiliar chords all at once and if you stop early before you finish that song you don’t get anything, so a lot of wasted effort and then, you know, you feel, I don’t know, defeated, or I felt defeated and so, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Christopher: I can certainly relate to that, you know, I think the traditional methods for learning guitar are very much “Let’s throw all of the chords at you as quickly as possible,” you know, whether you’re learning from a teacher or from a method book and I think that chord overwhelm hits a lot of early guitar players. Were you teaching yourself? Were you studying with a teacher? When did you begin guitar?

Austin: I probably began around 18. I’m 40 now. There weren’t a whole lot of online resources at the time but that really wasn’t the problem. Like, it, there were books and if I’d been more dedicated I could have done it but what often happens is that the songs that inspire you to rush out and get a guitar are usually out of your league or out of my league, anyway, and so it was the same cycle again and again and I said, “Okay. I’m gonna do it this time. I’m gonna sit down with a guitar,” and a week or two I’d give up in frustration.

Christopher: Gotcha. And what kind of family background did you grow up with? Were you someone who was expected to learn an instrument? Was this a total tangent for you compared with what your family were expecting, or…?

Austin: My family’s a very musical family. My parents met at conservatory. My grandparents taught violin, viola, piano for years in the DC metro area which is where I am from. My brother’s a performer. So everybody was expected to study an instrument. I studied flute and piano. You know, like, I did okay but I, it didn’t really click. But when I started to travel more the guitar just made a lot more sense and that really didn’t click.

Christopher: (Laughs)

Austin: I thought it would be easier because I’m not soloing, I’m just strumming chords. I was wrong.

Christopher: Mm-hm. Well, this is something I want to definitely dig into in this episode because I think it’s kind of crazy that piano and guitar are thought of as kind of the default instruments for people to learn in a lot of cases because they are two of the hardest instruments for a beginner to learn if you ask me and, you know, guitar, yes, you sit there and strum but that’s a lot of independent left-hand, right-hand stuff going on and, as we’ve touched on, there, often the method you’re following or the songs that you want to play are expecting an awful lot of expertise from you quite early on in the journey.

Austin: Right.

Christopher: So I’m sure a lot of our listeners who have tried guitar or even struggled through and become guitar players can relate to what you’ve been describing there.

Austin: Yeah. I think it’s, yeah. Like, there are some people who are just naturals and they really don’t understand what I’m talking about but I would suspect that the majority of people out there have tried the guitar, you know, just a friend’s guitar lying around, and the majority of those people are not playing a year later, so yeah.

Christopher: I’ve often thought that if learning guitar wasn’t about learning one new chord every week and one song for each new chord but instead was about learning three chords and then a hundred songs using those chords we might have a lot more continued guitar playing than we do and a lot fewer people giving up in the first six months.

Austin: Yeah.

Christopher: So on that note, how did things change for you? You were, it sounds like you were pretty consistent, you know, buying a guitar each place you moved and strumming away, having these bursts of enthusiasm. Were there any insights or breakthroughs that let you get away from that frustration?

Austin: Well, it, in building this platform, just, basically I kept discovering more and more three-chord songs, even songs that aren’t, like, normally considered three-chord tunes are playable with three simple chords, like, “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” or “I’m a Believer,” by the Monkees, which is, like, the first tune that I could call my own and basically I kept building a larger and larger repertoire and once you have those three chords it’s just a matter of polishing off these new tunes because the slightly different tempos and melodies but still fundamentally the same song, well, not the same songs but they use the same chords and it was just a much easier journey.

Christopher: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about that because the idea of three-chord songs has come up on the show several times before as a really neat way in to playing chords by ear, in particular and when we say three-chord song often we’re kind of assuming it’s gonna be the I, IV, and V chords but I believe with Chord Genome Project you’re not necessarily assuming that, right? When you say three-chord song you literally mean just a song that uses three different chords.

Austin: Correct. Like, the greatest number of songs are going to be, like, ones that use C, G and D or C, F and G, like, the same relationship but there are thousands of chords in the database. Just so we’re clear, like, when you click on a song in the search engine you’re directed to an off-site location, Ultimate Guitar, for example. So it’s really just indexing the songs that are out there in the world, you know, they’re not hosted locally but there are three-chord songs that use minors, seventh chords and the platform is flexible enough that any chords you type in you’re probably going to see results.

Christopher: So why was this important for your learning? I think people listening can probably understand that, you know, if it’s just three chords that’s a relatively easy song but was there more to it than that? Was there more to this idea of thinking really about the chords used in the songs and picking your next song to learn?

Austin: Well, actually, what kept me going is that the more people I told about this idea to, like, they were, like, “That actually makes a lot of sense. There should be a search engine like that,” and so that kept me going at a time when, you know, I wasn’t, you know, I was pouring money and time in but not getting anything back yet. In fact, every hour spent building this was an hour of not playing, so it really was kind of a big investment but that kept me going. Like, the feedback that I got from friends and family.

Christopher: Cool. And so let’s pause for a moment and think about that decision point. So you’ve been learning guitar, you’d been doing these bursts of enthusiasm, it had been a bit frustrating because it felt like every new song that you were kind of trying to take on the world and you gradually realized that actually you could leverage the fact that often there were chords in common across songs and you started to pick songs based on that, right?

Austin: Right.

Christopher: And at some point you thought, “I could build something to figure out these songs for me,” or at what point did you think, you know, this way of learning guitar is really working a lot better?

Austin: Well, so at the time it wasn’t actually for learning, it was just for growing my repertoire and then a buddy asked me, “Well, I’m starting from scratch. I don’t want to do three chords. If I just learned one chord what chord should that be?” and from that came a new feature. So, basically, we had all these songs indexed, organized by the chords they used and with that data you can determine what chord to add next no matter what your level is and that chord should be whatever one allows you to play the most new music, the most new songs and so we built this tool. It’s called “The Next Best Chord Feature” and it looks at what you know, the chords you know, and then it recommends. So if you know G-C-D, for example, it would recommend that you learn E minor next because adding that one chord allows you to play, I mean, we’re talking about going from about 4,000 songs to 12,000 songs just by adding a new chord.

Christopher: Amazing. And that comes back to what we were mentioning there, the 1-4-5 and the 1-4-5-6. You’re adding that six chord and because so many songs use these kinds of progressions your database knows easily 8,000 extra songs that suddenly you can play.

Austin: Exactly and if your starting point is C, F and G then A minor would almost certainly be the next best chord to learn so it’s adaptive, like, no matter what chords you know, including zero, it can tell you, “Well, if you’re gonna learn one chord, learn this one.”

Christopher: Very cool. So that is a really practical way to take what was, kind of, a search engine in the database and turn it into a learning tool, something that can really help people enjoy learning guitar, or, I guess, any instrument that plays chords, faster. Is that right?

Austin: Yes. That’s, basically, once we had these two components built that was the natural leap. Basically, starting from zero, you keep adding one chord at a time, which is much easier than trying to assemble five unfamiliar chords. It just, with that one chord, once you get it down, an entire universe of new songs become available. In fact, you use those new songs to get better at that one chord, which is tough in the very beginning but with practice gets easier and easier and then you’re ready for the next new chord.

Christopher: Nice. So I’m going to ask a couple of questions that I think might be on our listeners’ minds at this point and the first is, can you really play any songs with just one chord, when you were telling your friend what one chord to learn?

Austin: Yeah. Basically any song that you can, well, don’t quote me on this, but any song you can sing in the round, like, “Row Your Boat,” or “Frere Jacques,” probably is playable with one chord. So those are two songs that you can definitely play with a single chord and there is a song that they aired called, “The One Chord Song,” by Keith Irvin but I’ve never heard of it, all playable with any major chord that you want.

Christopher: Very cool, and so the other question they might have been thinking was at the other end of things, supposing you’ve got three or four chords under your belt or maybe half a dozen and this search engine is telling you thousands and thousands of songs you can play with those chords. That’s exciting but it’s also a bit overwhelming, right?

Austin: It is.

Christopher: So how do you turn that into something manageable and something that actually gives you a clear next step?

Austin: Okay. Well, so it’s not an elegant solution, partly because it’s so hard to find information out there, but the site comes with genre and decade filters so if you like rock music from the 50’s and 60’s you would apply those filters and you’d get a list of maybe 100 or so songs that use G, C and D from that. But it’s still highly experimental because songs get re-released every single year and so trying to find the earliest release date is not easy and trying to find, like, the most popular genre assigned, so, like, “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, it’s been on soundtracks probably Christmas albums, pop albums, rock albums even though it’s undeniably a country song so anybody who uses the platform, like, understands that those filters are super, duper beta but they do help because thousands of songs is overwhelming.

Christopher: For sure, and, you know, from my background in digital music and kind of combining science and music I have friends who have worked for Last FM and Musicbrainz and the BBC and I’ve kind of seen a glimpse behind the curtains of how hellish that metadata problem can be.

Austin: Yes.

Christopher: You know, taking a single song and, you know, it’s, what’s obvious to a human that “Ring of Fire” is a country track by Johhny Cash actually can be incredibly hard to pull out from the haystack of data you find online. So —

Austin: Yeah. In fact, I’ve used both The Last FM and Musicbrainz and it’s tough to navigate but until I find a better solution those filters are here to stay.

Christopher: Nice. Well, it certainly does the trick and there were a couple of reasons I and the others on the Musical U team were really excited to discover this project and I think for me it was partly just that geeky appreciation of the challenge you’ve taken on and how simple you’ve made it for the user because behind the scenes I know there’s a crazy amount of implementation and analysis and, kind of, problem-solving that needs to happen but from the user’s perspective it’s as simple as you’ve described it. You know, you type in the chords, you hit search, you do some filtering if you want and you get back the answers.

Austin: Yeah.

Christopher: Super cool. So that geeky appreciation was definitely there but also it really scratched an itch for us because we teach a lot about how to recognize chords by ear and we talk about three-chord songs and four-chord songs and describe it as kind of the shortcut method where, you know, if you learn to recognize just a handful of chords or chord progressions by ear it opens up all of these songs to you compared with if you’re trying to take on all of the major and minor chords at once and so part of the challenge for us is always how can we give people practice tracks or practice examples to work with and so your website is a fantastic resource for that and I would certainly encourage any listeners aside from using it as intended and clicking through to see the chord chart on ultimateguitar.com or wherever it comes from, just that initial search can really be a useful training tool. So if you know you can play C, F and G, do the search, skim down the list of songs, find one you know and then just sit down and try and figure out the chord progression by ear, you know, where do the chords change? Which, is the change in the four, the five? That’s a really fantastic exercise and you’ve skipped that really, I was about to say, dangerous, that’s overstating it, but that potential pitfall of trying to figure out your random song on the radio and not realizing it’s using all kinds of weird chords that you’ve got no chance of recognizing by ear. So that selection process is a really helpful thing for ear training, I think.

Austin: Yeah. I can actually speak to that. Like, the more that I play, like, sometimes the song will come on the radio, like, I have a two-and-a-half-year-old and “Under the Sea,” the Disney tune from Little Mermaid, it’s like, “You know that, I think I can play that with three chords,” and it’s not an official version, like, Disney would not pay me money to perform it but it’s playable with the three chords and I’ve heard that song a thousand times. It never occurred to me and I think just as a result of playing more and more I’m making those connections that you’re talking about.

Christopher: That’s great, and you, we were talking a little bit before we started recording and you were saying how you’d kind of brushed up on music theory along the way to build this project and I think what you just described we should dwell on for a second because I think everyone knows the guitar player who has memorized 300 songs and played for a decade but can’t play by ear at all. So it’s certainly possible to immerse yourself and not develop your ear in that way but you, I think because you have the theory knowledge and this appreciation of what’s going on musically you have be able to kind of leverage that immersion to actually develop the ear skills, it sounds like.

Austin: It’s, you know, it’s an organic and slow process but I’m getting there. Like, I’m picking up music theory tidbits along the way and, like, you know, I wouldn’t hold me up as an example to the world but where I was and where I am now, for me, is a huge difference.

Christopher: And I had assumed, when encountering this project and discovering that you were the guy behind it, I had assumed you must be a programmer and amateur musician like myself who had kind of put this together in his spare time and it was growing into something bigger, but that’s not the case. Tell us a bit about what it took to build the Chord Genome Project.

Austin: Well, I mean, an endless search of developers around the globe, like, this is in year four now, but I’m not a coder at all and trying to explain what it is I want to do to the developer who, you know, is a genius at code but doesn’t know music theory, necessarily, it’s been a struggle but I’ve actually found one who admittedly doesn’t know much music theory, necessarily, but we’ve done some, we’ve covered a lot of ground together and so I explain what new feature I want to add and he’s able to implement it and I’m happy now.

Christopher: And have there been any particular challenges along the way apart from trying to communicate this to coders who maybe don’t get the music theory or quite understand where you’re coming from? Have there been any hurdles to overcome?

Austin: Every day. Every day there’s, like, a new challenge that I didn’t see in advance but, like, one of the big ones early on was the need to standardize chords in the back end. So you can spell, for example, A major many different ways. Just by itself, a capital A, or A with a big m, A major, A major with and without spaces but all those are fundamentally the same chord and so they have to be stored as one value so that a user who searches any of those spellings will see any of those songs use any of those spellings and then we have to do the same thing with all the other chord families to minors, diminished, etc. and also with harmonics.

So once we had indexed most of the songs we were going to use they were probably, I think, 50,000 different chords but after standardization there were 2,000 unique chords, 2,100 or so and as a result of standardization.

Christopher: Interesting. I guess that comes back a bit to that point that what seems obvious to a human is actually quite complex from a machine’s point of view, you know, a human who’s studied a bit of theory knows that a capital A means the same thing as A with a capital m next to it. That’s how chord charts work but to a machine those are two completely different things.

Austin: Yes. I have other challenges, like, I could fill up an entire podcast with — so we’re still in beta and probably for a while. Like, another thing that the songs that we index to, they’re on user-submitted websites like Ultimate Guitar which are fantastic resources but anybody can edit or remove songs so the, what we’ve indexed today won’t necessarily be how the song looks tomorrow, so it’s a constantly moving target and so I’d like to figure out a way to show users more accurate results and you can sometimes, I guess, resuscitate a song. Are you familiar with Archive.org?

Christopher: Mm-hm.

Austin: Yeah. It takes snapshots of the internet but I really don’t want to use that approach. I want to send the traffic to these websites because they put together amazing resources. So that’s another challenge right there.

Christopher: Fantastic. So you mentioned there how there are 2,000 or 2,100 unique chords that your database knows about and, again, I think the listener might be thinking that sounds crazy. (Laughs)

Austin: Yes.

Christopher: You know, “I’ve just learned my first three chords. How do I get from there to 2,000?” Can you speak to that at all, and, you know, if and how someone needs to learn those 2,000 chords?

Austin: Okay. So there are about 350,000 songs in the current index and you need 2,000 chords to be able to play all of those songs and we actually ran a process starting from the first chord and with each new chord you’re able to play a slightly higher percentage of the database. But what we’ve discovered is once you’re at chord number 23 you can play 50% of the songs in this database, which just blew my mind.

Christopher: Wow.

Austin: Thousands of songs, thousands of chords needed to play everything, but with just 23 chords you can play the majority of songs and, like, this index is no slouch. It’s a pretty representative cross-section of songs from genres all over the globe and users from around the world submitting songs they like. So there’s pop, rock, jazz and folk from all different decades. So by extension, in theory you could play roughly 50% of all English-language popular music with, it might not be exactly 23 chords but it would be absurdly low.

Christopher: Amazing. And, to be clear, we’re not even talking about transposing things into a convenient key, are we? Like, you’re talking about playing these songs in the key they were written in.

Austin: Well, yes. And, like, once you land on the page, as written, without any transposing, if you did transpose, I mean, it would probably be 80, 90% if you transposed all of those 23 chords up and down, well, I guess, 11 times. But with 23 you could do a lot of damage. Just 23 chords and so, like, I actually wrote a blog post, “The 23-Chord Challenge,” where, it’s ambitious if you learn one chord a week. I don’t know if I could do that one chord a week on the guitar but if you learn one chord a week then in less than six months you would be able to play roughly 50% of the songs out there, which is kind of a cool concept.

Christopher: Yeah. That’s super interesting and we’ll definitely put a link to that post in the show notes because I think whether or not you want to embark on this challenge or, indeed, use the database to guide you in it, I think that analysis alone is super-fascinating because, you know, we talked a bit about how guitar method books often just throw everything at you and I don’t want to overstate it, but I think often they’re a bit misguided in their choice of chords and, you know, a lot of musicians are left thinking, “Okay, first I have to learn all the major chords and then all the minor chords,” and that’s 24 chords, right there.

Austin: Right.

Christopher: And, you know, it’s not the case that the 23 chords you just mentioned are all of the major and minor chords, by any stretch, so I think if nothing else then everyone listening to this should go check out that blog post and see for yourself, what are those 23 chords that unlock half of the music to you and do a little bit of theory work yourself. If you’re familiar with the idea of 1-4-5 or 1-4-5-6, just look at that chart that Austin’s put together and ask yourself, why are they these chords? Why are these the ones that artists and musicians and songwriters have used again and again?

Austin: Yeah. There are a lot of seven chords. Yeah, if you just did majors and minors, which is an intuitive approach, but you’re leaving a lot of songs on the table.

Christopher: Mm-hm. So that’s a great exercise. Austin, you are a really interesting blend of music and tech with this project and I certainly am a big believer in how technology can make it fun and easy to learn music in a way that’s never been possible before. Aside from the Chord Genome Project, have you come across anything that can help our listeners learn faster or enjoy learning more compared with the traditional approaches?

Austin: Yeah, actually. Like, the purists out there, might hate this. My Dad, a flute teacher, definitely hates this idea but I use this, it’s a metronome. My phone is turned off for the podcast but it’s a metronome that speeds up imperceptibly but it’s, like, it slowly speeds up with time, forcing you to play faster and faster but, like, you don’t really notice it and then every now and then, like, I’ll stop the metronome and then go back 50% of the way, make it 50% slower than where I stopped and then I start it again so, like, because I’m taking a step back, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is unbelievably slow,” but it’s much faster than where I started so that has helped me a lot.

Again, my Dad hates it. He’s all about standard time and, but I would definitely check that out. There are apps like that for Apple and Android, as well.

Christopher: Teriffic. I love that tip. I’m kind of half-heartedly, well, enthusiastically but without a lot of practice time, learning drums at the moment. I have a pair of drumsticks on my desk and I’ve been following a few tutorials that are, like, “Try it at 60 bpm,” and “Try it at 70,” and blah, blah, blah, which is fine but it’s kind of tedious to stop and start like that. So I love that idea of, you know, speeding, both the idea of gradually speeding up and having a metronome that will do it automatically for you and that reset to 50% of the speed so you can enjoy that moment of, “Oh, this is kind of easy, now.”

Austin: Exactly. It kind of reminds me of the mood lighting that restaurants use where over the course of 15 minutes or half an hour the lights become a little bit brighter, a little bit brighter and then all of a sudden it gets dark and romantic, but, you know, it just goes on an infinite cycle, doing that again and again.

Christopher: Is that true?

Austin: Yes.

Christopher: Ha. I have never noticed. I mean, I’ve noticed it getting suddenly darker but I’ve never known they were doing a cycle.

Austin: Yep.

Christopher: That’s fascinating. I’m gonna watch for that next time I eat out. That’s very cool. Wonderful, Austin. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you. Can you tell people where they should go to try out the Chord Genome Project?

Austin: Oh, okay. So thechordgenome.com or you can go to thechordgenomeproject.com. I think by the time this podcast airs we’ll have a search page up that doesn’t require any login. Just head over to the search page then if you’d like to see even more results there are paid versions, obviously, but try before you buy and, you know, I hope it helps the listeners out there.

Christopher: Amazing. I’m sure it will. I think, you know, we talked about checking out that blog post purely for a great insight into chord progression theory and the most useful chords. We talked about using it as a way to guide you in learning guitar or piano and what chords to learn next and also purely to get more fun and repertoire out of the chords you already know and I definitely recommend that ear training exercise, too, where you look up what songs use a certain set of chords and then you just sit down with your instrument and try and figure out for yourself how the progression goes.

So this is an amazing tool to have at your disposal. A big thank you and commendations to Austin for putting it together because I know it can’t have been easy and I think this is going to become a widely used and valuable tool for musicians.

Austin: If anybody does use this site, please do not be shy with feedback, like, if you ever face a problem others might, as well and so it helps me make it better and better, so.

Christopher: Wonderful. So Austin, a big thank you for coming on the show.

Austin: Thank you very much, Christopher. It was a pleasure.

The post Exploring the Chord Genome, with Austin Brentley appeared first on Musical U.

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