Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/exercise-musician/
As a musician, you likely spend much of your time practising. In addition to your music practice, there are some great benefits to including physical exercise in your routine as well.

Here are 6 ways regular workouts can help you become a better performer. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/exercise-musician/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-freestyle-a-guitar-solo/
Ever vaporized into awe and envy as your favorite shredder picked up a guitar and pulled a face-melting freestyle improv out of nowhere? How do they do that?

Let’s focus on three essential qualities that seem to describe the bulk of what is today known as “freestyle” guitar: https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-freestyle-a-guitar-solo/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/why-you-should-learn-to-play-by-ear-first/
There tend to be two kinds of musicians in the world: those who teach themselves to play by ear and those who learn to play through formal lessons.

No matter where you are coming from in your musical journey, here are 4 benefits for learning to play songs by ear first! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/why-you-should-learn-to-play-by-ear-first/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/hearing-harmonies-active-listening/
When we listen to a song, our first instinct is to listen first to the melody and the lyrics. Have you ever tried focusing on the harmony of a song, instead? https://www.musical-u.com/learn/hearing-harmonies-active-listening/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/songwriters-secrets-how-to-write-a-song-without-an-instrument/
Is it even possible for you to write a good song without an instrument? While it’s true that writing a song is easier if you play guitar, piano, or other instrument, playing an instrument is not a requirement for being a good songwriter.

In this article you will learn songwriting techniques that will help you with or without an instrument. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/songwriters-secrets-how-to-write-a-song-without-an-instrument/

This week, we explore the chord progressions that countless popular songs share and look at why these songs are absolute earworms, interview a music educator who emphasizes the importance of hearing music in your head, and dedicate an entire podcast episode to the topic of audiation – also known as deliberately imagining the music you’re about to play before your fingers hit a single note. Lastly, we take a closer look at CNVS’s stellar debut full-length album Gran Copiloto, and why this collection of songs won’t leave your subconscious for a long time to come.

But first, something to improve the voice you hear inside your own head…

June’s Masterclass

We’re delighted to announce that this month’s Masterclass will be led by Davin Youngs of the Chicago Singing Circle. He will be joining us on June 30th for an hour-long live lesson on the topic of sounding good as a singer.

If you’ve ever been afraid to sing in front of people, or think singing is irrelevant to your instrument playing, or are reluctant to record your singing voice – you won’t want to miss this!

Register here, and we’ll see you at the end of the month!

Popular Progressions

If you think all songs on the radio seem to sound the same, we’re happy to reassure you that you haven’t lost your mind.

Though there is a near-infinite amount of possible chord progressions, there is a surprising degree of overlap in the progressions that those radio-friendly earworms are built on. And for good reason – some sequences of chords simply stick, by virtue of having a pleasant and satisfying overall sound. 

Learn about this phenomenon in Exploring Common Chord Progressions, where we introduce you to the popular kids in (chordal) school, why they’re so well-liked, and how to use them to write your own hit.

It can be easy to think of chords as just a component of musicality, but many of the tools that we stress here at Musical U (scales, intervals, and the circle of fifths) are all part of the broader picture of what makes chords and chord progressions work. To dive deeper into this concept, Sound Bridge explores the relationship between the elements of music and diatonic chords.

Guitar players have all the tricks! For guitar players, changing keys can be quite simple, especially if the guitarist uses a capo. To learn more about this wonderful musical tool, chec out Tomas Michaud’s lesson on incorporating a capo into your music.

We learned quite a few chord progressions in this packed article, and we hope that you are busy exploring them! It’s interesting to note that many of the popular songs that define our interest in music have very similar chord progressions. So much, in fact, that the Chord Genome Project asserts that by learning just 23 chords, you will be able to play the majority of popular songs. Find out more and take the challenge!

Music and Curiosity

Curiosity may routinely kill cats, but it does absolute wonders for music teachers and learners alike.

Sharon Mark-Teggart is one of the brilliant minds behind The Curious Piano Teachers, an organization aiming to shift the mindset of music educators towards open-mindedness, curiosity, and centering the student by making the lessons about their learning, and not the educator’s teaching.

Read our interview with her over at Becoming Curious, with Sharon Mark-Teggart to gain some amazing insights on teaching, learning, and the power of an inquisitive approach to music.

Sharon spoke about her music toolbox, and how she brought this with her each time she performed or had a new student. But what exactly should be in your music toolbox as a learner? Kathleen Ballantyne outlines the seven elements of musicality that a musician needs to be successful on the Alfred Music website.

We all know that every musician learns differently, and it’s important that we consider these differences when learning music. One factor is whether a musician is left-brained or right-brained. Sublimelody approaches learning the piano through both of these paradigms, and gives solutions that will be valuable to any music learner.

Sharon talked about the significance of learning how to sing the part that she was getting ready to play, and how much it improved her overall musical understanding of the piece. It’s true that most instrumentalists will never become “singers”, but applying the art of singing can be very important to your musical growth. Robert from Living Pianos dives deeper into the subject of the importance of singing for instrumentalists.

A Great Sidekick

From one of the most musically diverse countries in the world comes CNVS, a rock band with an emotionally charged and beautifully textured sound that immediately jumps out at you in their stellar debut full-length album Gran Copiloto (translation: Great Copilot).

In Open Your Ears to Gran Copiloto with CNVS, we give you an introduction to these Mexico-based rockers and dig into the instrumentation, song structure, and lyricism that lend Gran Copiloto’s tracks their incredible, genre-transcending sound.

Ready to feast your ears on the whole album, start to finish? Just in time – Gran Copiloto is out today, June 15th, on Spotify.

A great band has a specific dynamic that they are able to achieve during the songwriting process. However, it can be difficult to develop the ability to write songs together. If you need something to jumpstart your creative process, consider songwriting sprints – Todd from Heat on the Street explains how to get started.

We love the music of CNVS for many reasons. Not the least of these is how they are able to integrate so many different styles and sounds into a truly unique form. For other ways to develop a one-of-a-kind songwriting style, look no further than Guitar and Lace’s tips for crafting unique musical creations.

In addition to the fantastic music, the lyrical content in this album is spellbinding, effortlessly going back and forth between English and Spanish. Writing great lyrics doesn’t have to be an exercise in frustration – check out Musician Port’s 10 tips to get you started.

CNVS have certainly found their niche, and we are happy to be able to share their music with you. There are so many ways for musicians to bring their music to the public in new and interesting ways. Robin from Urban Masterclass is another artist that has found his speciality, and shares with us how to make a living selling beats online. This isn’t only for the producers – no matter what your genre is, Robin has some great tips for navigating the online music marketplace.

The Music In Your Head

In the same way that an artist can visualize a work before it’s even made, a musician can hear music in their head before a single note is played.

This is a skill known as audiation, and in fact, it’s a skill you already have.

In About Audiation, we share how you can use your skill to improve your musical memory, play more naturally and musically, and do the (seemingly) impossible: practice your repertoire without even having your instrument in your hands!

Though we are all born with the ability to audiate, it’s a skill you can grow and develop, to become a “superlistener” – with the ability to discern not only the basic melody, but also complex rhythms, harmony, and tonal centers. Color In My Piano explains how to get started developing your audiation skills, and the benefits it brings.

As we learned, developing audiation skills is powerful way to visualize and hear the music without ever having to play it on your instrument. Though it can be challenging to develop this skill to a highly proficient level, it proves incredibly rewarding. Learn how one music teacher uses this skill in her classroom with Mallets and Music.

After developing your audiation skills, you will find that you can not only be more musical on your instrument, but you can practice and think about music without an instrument. Catherine from The Piano Practice Eastbourne discusses the many ways that you can enhance your musicality without ever picking up your instrument.

From Your Head to Your Fingers

You may not love how songs get stuck in your head, but in truth, this may be your brain telling you that it’s itching to audiate!

How great would it be to practice your musical repertoire without even touching your instrument? How much would your playing improve if you could imagine the music you’re about to play in your head?

Head over to our podcast episode on audiation to learn how you can harness this innate skill to understand and play your music like you’ve never played it before.

The post Popular Progressions, Music and Curiosity, A Great Sidekick, and The Music In Your Head appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/3-strategies-effective-music-training-plan/
Becoming a better musician requires planning. But planning well doesn’t have to be complicated. Design your training plan with these 3 essential strategies and your odds of success are immediately increased. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/3-strategies-effective-music-training-plan/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-transcribe-music-before-you-start/
You hear a favorite tune on the radio and jump to your instrument, trying to pluck out the melody. When you listen to a tune and try to write out what you hear, you are transcribing music.

In this series from Musical U you will learn how to transcribe this instrumental track, step-by-step. Let’s get started! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-transcribe-music-before-you-start/

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Interview with Sharon Mark-Teggart
• Interview with Gerald Klickstein
• Interview with Donna Schwartz
• Gordon Institute of Music Learning
• About Active Listening

Transcript

Today I wanted to talk about something mentioned by Sharon Mark-Teggart of The Curious Piano Teachers in our recent episode, and which also came up when talking with Gerald Klickstein, author of The Musician’s Way, and that’s the importance of forming a vivid “mental model” of music *before* you play it.

This is something we teach a lot at Musical U, though it’s actually only recently that we’ve been turning it into a full-on training module.

The word we use for it is “audiation”, which simply means to imagine hearing music in your mind. That word was coined by Edwin Gordon, known for his “Music learning theory”, which was mentioned and recommended by past guest Donna Schwartz. I’m hoping we’ll have someone from the Gordon Institute of Music Learning on the show in future, but for now I wanted to just tackling this one part of his approach.

You might also hear it called “auralising”, and although those two words, audiation and auralising may sound technical, it truly is no more complicated than imagining music in your mind.

It’s the musical equivalent of visualisation, you’re just trying to vividly imagine the thing in your mind.

We all do it, every day, any time a song pops into your head on purpose or by accident. If I ask you now to take a moment and think of your favourite song, or the theme music from your favourite TV show – I’ll stop talking, see if you can hear that music in your head.

Were you able to hear it? You just audiated!

When you first start, it will probably be a bit fuzzy and you may not remember the music very well. But with practice you’ll be able to conjure up really realistic musical renditions in your mind’s ear.

So you see, you don’t need to learn to audiate. But it does take practice to get good at it.

Why would you want to do that?

Well, audiation is a seriously powerful tool to have in your toolkit as a musician and music learner.

It’s sometimes called the “Secret Music Practice Skill” because just like visualisation can help an athlete or performer prepare for the big event, audiation can be used to practice your musical repertoire, even when you’re not at your instrument. Simply imagining the music, in as much detail as possible, helps your brain to create and reinforce the connections that later will let you perform it well.

In fact there’s a great way to make this even more effective, called “Mental Play” – we’ll talk about that on a future episode.

So audiation can help you practice, even when not at your instrument. How does that work?

Well there are a few big benefits of audiation, each of which has a positive knock-on effect to how well you’ll play when you return to your instrument.

The first is that audiation is clearly very closely related to musical memory. The more vividly you can conjure up a rendition in your mind, the better you are remembering that music. When you gave it a try a moment ago you might have found that it started off easy but then you realised you couldn’t remember the words, or you weren’t quite sure about the notes or rhythm, or you found you had no idea what instruments were there apart from the prominent melody part. So practicing audiation helps you develop your musical memory and that benefits you throughout your musical life, beyond just the obvious use case of performing without needing written music.

The second reason audiation helps you practice is that it forces the brain to really understand what’s going on in the music. It’s easy when performing from written music to think you know what’s going on, but sometimes we gloss over a lot of details, or for example there’s the singer in a choir who does a great job of singing their own part – but ask them to audiate the music and they’ll find they have literally no idea what the other singers are singing. Practicing audiating a piece of music makes you really dig into what’s going on and whether you are truly aware and understand each aspect of the music.

And the third reason is the impact it has on the musicality of your performance. This was what Gerald Klickstein and Sharon Mark-Teggart were referring to, that to play music in an expressive way, in a musical way rather than a robotic way, you must have the music inside you first. And that means being able to imagine what you want your performance to sound like *before* you play it.

Apart from that new training module I mentioned, the main place audiation has featured inside Musical U up until now is in our improvisation modules. Because it’s the interaction between playing, listening and audiating that allows you to be truly free and creative in your improvisation. You need to be able to imagine your musical creation before trying to bring it out into the world – otherwise you’re just at the mercy of whatever your fingers happen to do based on the rote learning or robotic patterns you’ve taught them.

So to a large extent audiation is the core of musicality. Yes there are lots of external skills we want to learn and develop to let us express musical ideas in the world. But before that we need our ears and our brain to have understood the music we’ve heard or the music we want to hear, and that lies in your musical imagination and the ability to audiate.

As I said earlier, one of the wonderful things about audiation is that you don’t need to be taught it. Yes, there are pointers and resources that can help accelerate your learning, hence our new training module, but fundamentally it’s something you simply learn by doing. So challenge yourself this week to try audiating something every day. Pick a song and see how thoroughly you can conjure it up in your head and how much of it you can play back in your mind. I’d suggest checking our previous episode on Active Listening to help you with that, that’s a musical awareness skill that is very closely related to audiation. At first you’ll probably just have a fuzzy idea of the main melody and maybe not the whole song, but day by day you can add instruments, add sound quality, add detail and precision, until you have a really realistic playback in your mind’s ear. Take this skill to the music you’re working on too, and I promise you’ll see a big impact. Especially if you couple it with Mental Play – but that’s a topic for another day.

The post About Audiation appeared first on Musical U.