Musicality World

The answer will vary from musician to musician, but at the top of many lists will be expert advice and feedback, an ability to self-critique, and an understanding of how music is written.

This week on Musical U, we’re giving you a little bit of each. Vocal coach Judy Rodman offers valuable advice to singers, music teacher Cristian Contreras explores what is means to teach effectively, and the Musicality Podcast delves into the often-intimidating practice of recording your own singing voice and listening back.

But first, we have a master guide on the backbone that your favourite hit songs are built on: chord progressions!

A Chain of Chords

Behind almost every unforgettable tune is an unforgettable chord progression.

However, chords aren’t just strung together in any order – there are underlying secrets that make certain combinations and series sound incredible, while others fall flat.

In Musical U’s Introduction to Chord Progressions, we’re giving you a crash course in chords and how they’re put together to form the songs you love. Songwriters, this guide is for you, too – we have seven simple tips to get you writing progressions with punch in no time.

When understanding and writing progressions, there are so many chords and keys to remember. If only there was a shortcut to help put it all together! Fortunately, we have a way of organizing chords in the same scale together into a chord family. Chelsea from The Chord Reserve explores chord families and the benefits of grouping chords this way.

A fantastic chord progression can take you to a new world, a place where you can experience all the emotions that our favorite music brings out in us. For your listening pleasure, Marco Cirillo has recorded six chord progressions that will take your breath away. We hope that this inspires you to dive deeper into progressions and the power that they can bring to any piece of music.

One last note: let’s refer back to one of our favorite subjects: the magical circle of fifths. This musical tool will unlock countless mysteries of music and allow you to express yourself with ease. Consonus Music explores how one teacher uses the circle of fifths to teach composition.

All Things Vocal

Judy Rodman has seen every angle of the world of singing: starting off as a professional jingle singer, she proceeded to land a recording contract, get herself into the Billboard #1 spot, write a hit for LeAnn Rimes, and become one of Nashville’s most sought-after vocal coaches.

In All Things Vocal, with Judy Rodman, she gives a fascinating account of her rich career, how she honed the skills needed to thrive in the industry and expert advice for everyone from beginning singers to seasoned chanteuses.

Judy’s fascinating musical journey all started with a gig singing jingles. While we often think of jingles as something trivial in our current world, the practice is still very much alive. Are you interested in trying your hand at becoming a jingle singer? Voice Council gives five tips for becoming successful in the field.

Judy has been a star on both sides of the microphone in the musical capital of Nashville, Tennessee. While making it big in this famed city isn’t as easy as the famous television show makes it appear, you can give yourself a leg up with these helpful suggestions from Trip Savvy.

Judy had a turning point in her career when she began to coach other vocalists. We talk a lot about music teachers on this site, but we don’t regularly talk about the difference between a teacher and a coach. Vocal Process discusses the difference between the two, and how you can make the best decision for yourself no matter where you are in your musical journey.

Teaching Music the Right Way

Being a good music teacher doesn’t happen by accident – it requires constant self-education and self-critique.

In 5 Habits of Effective Music Teachers, Cristian Contreras explores what it means to be an exceptional and inspiring teacher. Some of these may surprise you; good teaching does not mean having all the answers, or sticking with tried-and-true repertoire. What it does mean is an adaptive, dynamic approach to the profession.

Being a music teacher is not an easy vocation, and we are fortunate to have so many wonderful music teachers amongst us. Like all musicians, music teachers have their insecurities about their musical abilities and are always in pursuit of excellence on their instrument. Teaching With Orff discusses “The Imposter Syndrome”, and how you can gain confidence as a music teacher.

Part of being an effective teacher is keeping up with the latest in technological innovations that upgrade the way that we teach. One of the most popular creations in the last couple of years has been Google Docs, a cloud-based way of utilizing basic office apps. But that couldn’t have any application in music, could it? 88 Piano Keys developed a method to organize lesson notes within Google Docs that may change your mind.

Changing times have also changed the way that many people learn, and it is imperative to change with them if you want to make the biggest difference. Teachers Magazine explores two different students’ learning journeys, and gives some valuable information to make sure that you are helping your student.

Listening to Yourself Sing

Recording your own singing voice can be a surreal experience – chances are, what you’ll hear back on the recording is quite different from what you hear inside your own head.

So why this drastic difference in sound, and what can you do to get yourself used to listening to recordings of your singing?

In About Your Voice Sounding Weird, we explore the physics behind this phenomenon, a tool that can help you hear a great approximation of what other people hear when you sing, and how to objectively judge your singing voice.

If you have ever sung into a recording device, you have experienced the phenomenon of hearing your own voice for the first time. Inspired to Sing dives a bit further into this subject, with recommendations on how to get over your uneasiness.

No matter how much you don’t like listening to a recording of yourself, there are many benefits to taking this deliberate step in your musical journey. You will learn a great deal about how you perform, and this will help you improve the next time you go into the practice room. Audrey Hunt explains what you should do after hearing a recording of your voice.

While many of us cringe at the thought of hearing our recorded singing voice, can you imagine not being able to listen to your own voice? Recently, America’s Got Talent featured an inspiring young woman who sings with the voice of an angel, despite being totally deaf. We hope that the story of Mandy Harvey inspires you to gain the confidence to sing!

New Paths in Your Musical Journey

In his tips for effective teaching, Cristian Contreras discussed the importance of continuous practice, self-critique, and improvement. This applies equally to teachers and students, and we hope that this week’s offerings have inspired you to explore new avenues in your musical journey, be it recording your voice or writing your own chord progressions.

The post A Chain of Chords, All Things Vocal, Teaching Music the Right Way, and Listening to Yourself Sing appeared first on Musical U.

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If you sing, it’s likely you’ve recorded and listened back to your voice. Chances are, you were surprised by what you heard, and thought “Is this really what I sound like?”. In this episode of the Musicality Podcast, we explain why recordings of yourself sound different from what you’re used to hearing, and how to get comfortable with listening to recordings of your own singing voice.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Interview with Judy Rodman
• The Benefits of Recording Your Music Practice
• HearFones, a tool for vocalists to hear themselves
• How To Love Your Own Singing Voice

Transcript

Does your voice sound weird?

A lot of people who’d like to sing don’t because they fear their voice will sound weird, or bad. A lot of musicians even, will avoid singing because they think they don’t have a good voice.

This is a natural worry, since our voice is such a personal part of who we are. They can be truly unique, and for the great singers of history that’s a good thing. Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong – these voices are unmistakeable.

But that’s not the kind of “unusual” most of us are worried about.

In episode 11 of the Musicality Podcast we talked about how powerful it can be to record yourself and listen back, so that you can become your own teacher in a way. For instrumentalists and singers alike this is an amazing tool to have in your music practice toolkit.

The catch is that for singers, this can be a really hard exercise to do. Because a lot of us go into it worried that we’ll sound bad – and then when we listen back to the first recording we think “oh wow, do I really sound like that?!”

It’s like a confirmation of our deepest fears, that if we sang for other people they’d think we sound weird or bad.

But here’s the thing: the reason your voice sounds odd on a recording doesn’t necessarily mean it will sound anything but fabulous to other people.

There is a specific scientific reason our voice on a recording sounds odd to us, and knowing that can help you get past those first few awkward recordings – and the apparent weirdness of your voice will fade away. Trust me. This happens to every person, including me.

Before I say more though, I do need to acknowledge something which I’m sure a lot of you are thinking… Yes, it is possible that your voice actually does sound weird or bad! I’m not pretending that’s impossible. But the point is that the weirdness you hear on the recording is an auditory effect and one which fades – so you can’t possibly judge straight away. And if your voice is weird-sounding, then you know the best way to fix it? Recording yourself! That way you can pinpoint whether you have trouble with pitch and tuning, or your enunciation is off, or any one of 16 different factors that can affect whether you sound good when you sing. We have a module inside Musical U called “Good Voice” that walks you through these and how to address each one.

So I’m not pretending you’re definitely an incredible singer – at least not yet! But I do want to explain why you need to record yourself and listen back at least a few times before you make any judgements about your voice.

So, why does your voice sound weird on a recording?

The answer is physics. Specifically, the physics of how sound is transmitted through the air versus through your body.

The big part of why you may flinch the first time you hear your voice on a recording is simply that it’s unfamiliar. The sound you’ve been hearing as you talk each day, as you sing to yourself in the shower, and even as you were making the recording – it is actually different to the sound captured on the recording, and the sound that other people hear when you speak or sing.

This is because when we use our voice the sound travels out into the world around us through air conduction: the molecules of the air vibrate and carry the sound wave. That’s how other people or a microphone hear the sound. But as our vocal folds vibrate the sound also travels around our body – specifically through bones in our skull to our own ears. Bones conduct the sound very differently to the air, dampening different frequencies, and that means that our ears are picking up a mixture of two very different versions of our voice while other people and microphones are hearing just one of the two versions.

So you are very used to how your voice sounds when that sound comes both through air and through the bones in your skull. But when you hear it purely through air for the first time, you hear something quite different!

This is where the “hearfones” invention mentioned on our recent interview with Judy Rodman comes in. This is a clever device that helps send more of the air-conduction sound back around to your own ears, so that what you hear is much closer to what other people hear or what is captured on a recording. It’s an instant way to get the same effect as listening to yourself on a recording.

Whether you use hearfones or a recording though, the main thing to note once you understand that the sound is genuinely different (through no fault of your own!) is that the instinctive reaction you have to it is almost certainly coming from the unease of hearing your own voice sound so unfamiliar, rather than any real quality judgement. It’s unnerving to hear your own voice sounding different – a bit like if you looked in the mirror and then your reflection stuck its tongue out at you! It would be you, but also not you, and that’s uncomfortable.

So what can you do about it?

Well, the good news is that the solution is simple. There’s no way to get everyone else and microphones to hear you the way you’re used to hearing yourself – but you can easily get used to hearing yourself the way everyone else does.

It literally just takes a bit of courage to brace yourself for the discomfort, do the exercise of recording yourself and listening back a few times, and you’ll find that unfamiliar feel quite quickly disappears.

Then, once you can listen to the recording of your voice and feel comfortable that yep, that’s your voice too, then you are in a position to start making judgements about what sounds good or bad, and using the exercise in the powerful way we discussed back on episode 11.

So that’s why your voice sounds weird the first few times you hear it on a recording. Take courage that it doesn’t sound nearly so weird to other people! And if you want to learn to evaluate and improve your voice, there are few better ways than recording yourself. So brace yourself for the slight discomfort and weirdness, try it several times spread over a few days, and make friends with how your voice really sounds. I’m confident you’ll discover that it’s not nearly as weird as it first appeared.

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The post About Your Voice Sounding Weird appeared first on Musical U.

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Let’s consider this for a moment and how it applies to the music teaching profession. A practitioner is someone who actively and regularly engages, in a disciplined manner, in a profession or art form.

To me, this is epitomised by the memory of my teacher, who was continually enthralled with music. When he was not educating his many students, he would be either practicing technique, learning new repertoire, or listening to music for inspiration.

To me, this conscious and systematic discipline of being actively engaged in your passion is what separates the average music tutor from a music educator. Let’s look at five things that truly effective teachers are always doing…

1. An Effective Teacher Needs to Practice What They Preach

How many piano tutors do you think there are out there?

Yes, most of us took some piano or guitar lessons as a child, learnt to read basic music at school, then probably read some books and watched some Youtube Videos. Some of us even chose music as a partial elective at school, or may have attended a band camp at some stage.

We could then take this limited knowledge we possess, and sell it off to someone who has not yet commenced their musical journey, with the premise that as a tutor or “teacher” you can actually help them improve. Sadly, this is the case with some who call themselves tutors, rather than glorified hobbyists.

A good educator must first have mastered their art and studied the principles underlying human development to fully understand how to teach someone the art of music. This goes far beyond replicating your musical history, or relaying what you think was the right path when you first learnt music.

This means looking critically and objectively at your learning journey, your educators, and at yourself. Were all of your teachers qualified? If not, that’s fine, but what did they teach you that was worthwhile? What didn’t they teach you? How can you fill this gap for your students?

Was your learning journey a structured regimental one filled with many hours of rote repetition? Or were you perhaps brought up in a musical family where playtime meant a jam session with your siblings or parents? In either case, what were you missing? How could your process have been advanced?

Finally, what about your current teaching methodology? Does it remain stagnant and trapped in the past, or does it evolve alongside you?

Bottom line: an effective teacher must practice what he or she preaches and be conscious of how and why they teach the way they do.

2. An Effective Teacher Needs To Stay Up To Date

Still teaching with the same old John Thompson’s Easiest Piano Course?

You may think since it helped you learn, then it must help your students in the same way.

Well, consider this: if the system or course was written so long ago that your teacher’s teacher used it, and in 2018 it hasn’t changed at all, should you still use it?

Unless it’s an indoctrinated staple such as Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, the answer is a resounding no! You need to stay up to date on the latest teaching resources and methodology, particularly when they demonstrate proven results. One that I particularly like is the Australian Based “Blitz Your Theory” by S. Coates, since it breaks down traditionally difficult and dry theory into manageable and engaging portions, which include rewards and challenges for younger students.

What about the way you teach technique, even classical technique?

Are you stuck in old-school teaching techniques?

Whilst playing four-octave scales based on semiquavers alongside a rigid metronome at 120 bpm was always the epitome of my childhood, I much preferred playing modes with my Jazz teacher who accompanied me whilst we improvised together.

I have applied this principle to my students when it comes to teaching technique. Make it enjoyable, goal-based, and interactive, since that is what they are paying for. Besides, you will create some fond memories in the hearts and minds of your students and their parents if you create music with them rather than supervise them playing scales to the pulse of a machine.

Through study of new methods and techniques, you will remain current. Never stop searching!

3. An Effective Teacher Needs To Engage Their Students

If you’re a teacher, chances are, students today were born in a completely different time than when you grew up. And yes, whilst the greats and classics are always an essential basis for a strong musical foundation, there are many notable current composers and musicians writing repertoire worth learning!

This late Beethoven music which seemed to defy the classical traditions and was frowned upon by some. Recall the introverted Thelonious Monk who was not widely recognised or appreciated to a proper degree until years after his time. Your student’s musical tastes will eventually develop and branch out, perhaps in a different direction from yours.

Hence, be open and willing to learn and teach new repertoire which engages your students.

Not all composers lie six feet underneath the ground.

Thinking classical and baroque? Mix it up with some lesser-known composers whose surnames aren’t Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach. Want to improve phrasing on a melody? Teach your students a jazz piece which requires swung rhythms and 12/8 pulses. Need contemporary repertoire? Then try some modern day composers who are not yet six feet under the earth – you may be surprised by what you find.

4. An Effective Teacher Learns From Others

Meeting and interacting with other teachers of your art form will give you perspective and show you new methods or angles which you may not have yet considered.

Even if you are a respected and established teacher, you cannot deny that somewhere out there is an equally accomplished teacher who may have a few worthwhile ideas and strategies.

This can even be the case for younger or less experienced teachers who have a fresh perspective on the profession. I personally experienced this when observing a lesson from one of the drum teachers at my studio, Contreras Music. Although she was younger and less experienced, she had different ways of building rapport with her students, and even incorporated some music-based games which I had never seen in a private lesson context. I soon recognised and praised her for this, and asked if I could use some of her strategies in my lessons. The results have been very positive and interjected a breath of fresh air into my lessons.

Be open to learning from other teachers – new ones with fresh ideas and old ones with wisdom.

5. A Effective Teacher Is Constantly Practicing

Ask yourself a last but brutally honest question: compared with your most advanced student, how do your weekly hours and goals compare?

Yes, you have been spending long hours teaching and managing the studio, but have you matched your top student’s daily practice routine? Are you learning songs with the same enthusiasm and determination as themt?

How can you, as an effective teacher, ask your students to practice scales and learn new songs if you yourself are not doing the same? Even if you have spent decades learning one instrument in one style of music, can you honestly say that you have covered every angle of your genre and mastered all of the composers who had written for the period and the instrument? I personally look up to Vladimir Horowitz, who even during his later years has still dedicated himself to being a practitioner, a performer, a concert pianist. See him for yourself here performing the Chopin Polonaise in A flat Major, op.53:

Push Your Students and Yourself!

Being a music teacher who inspires their students and produces results takes continuous self-critique, awareness, and practice.

So take a stand above the rest, prove yourself a true educator, and push your students further than you ever went by being an active practitioner of your art form.

Cristian Contreras is a Sydney based educator, composer and producer who has over 2 decades of experience in the arts sector. He is a full time music teacher, who also manages his own studio – Contreras Music – in Western Sydney. Feel free to contact for any creative projects, advice or for professional composition/audio productions.

The post 5 Habits of Effective Music Teachers appeared first on Musical U.

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