Musicality World

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When we set our heartaches, triumphs, and spirituality to music, we have the opportunity to transform our personal experience and reach out to others. Learn more about the musical journey of Alicia & Whitney https://www.musical-u.com/learn/beauty-for-my-ashes-inspired-songwriting-with-alicia-whitney/

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Chords sometimes referred to with numbers, and chord progressions as a series of numbers, such as I-IV-V or 1-4-5. Find out what these numbers mean, how to build chords on any note in any key, and how you can use this to write unforgettable songs!

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Links and Resources

• Turning Ordinary People into Musicians, with Casey McCann (interview)
• Note2Self: “I Love This!”, with Lisa McCormick (interview)
• Making Ear Training Fun, with Steve Myers (interview)
• Finding the Notes Yourself, with Sara Campbell (interview)
• Seriously Enjoyable Music Learning, with Shelle Soelberg (interview)
• A Toolbox of Musical Understanding, with Scott Sharp (interview)
• I-IV-V Chords in Major Keys
• The vi-IV-I-V chord progression
• The Circle of Fifths
• Podcast Episode: The Power of Solfa

Transcript

In several past episodes the same topic has come up: a way of thinking about chords that makes it much easier to play by ear, improvise, and get an instinctive feel for what’s going on in the music you hear. Steve Myers, Sara Campbell, Shelle Soelberg, Casey McCann, Lisa McCormick, Scott Sharp – all these guests have mentioned the “one, four, five and six” chords.

The band Blues Traveler even start one of their hit songs by declaring it’s “Just another 1, 4, 5”.

So what are those chords and why do they matter?

This is one of the most valuable things to wrap your head around in music. And if you don’t play chords on your instrument, please don’t tune out! Understanding how harmony works can help you improvise melodies, it can help you write your own music, it can help you decipher music notation and sight-read more easily. It’s that fundamental.

What are the 1, 4, 5 and 6 chords?

Simply put, when people talk about chords using numbers like this they are just referring to chords relative to the key, the tonic note. It’s a shorthand for the role that each chord plays in a key – and the things people say about chords using numbers are true in any key.

In a recent episode we talked about finding chords in scales – and that’s exactly what we’re doing when we talk about the 1, 4, 5 and 6. It’s taking that number note from the key’s scale and building a chord on it.

Let’s get concrete for a moment. The power of this system is that it abstracts away from the particulars of any one key – but that can also make it a bit confusing at first.

Supposing we’re in the key of C Major. Note 1 in the scale is C. Note 4 is F, note 5 is G and note 6 is A. As covered in that previous episode we can build a three-note chord called a “triad” starting from each of those notes.

When we do this from the note C we get the C major chord, and that’s our “one” chord. From the F note we get an F major chord and that’s our “four” chord. From the G note we get a G major chord and that’s our “five” chord. And finally from the A we actually get an A minor chord, and that’s our “six” chord.

Can we build chords from notes 2, 3 and 7 too? Of course! But we’ll talk in a moment about why those aren’t the ones we’re focusing on right now.

So we can build these four chords from the scale, and we can do that in any key.

If we do it in the key of G Major instead of C Major we end up with G major as our “one”, C major as our “four”, D major as our “five” and E minor as our “six”.

We’ll definitely be talking about the Circle of Fifths in a future episode because that’s a terrific way to shortcut this process of figuring out the chords in any key without needing to count through notes of the scale. But for now just know that you can figure out what these one, four, five and six chords are in any key. The one, four and five will always come out as major triads and the six will always be minor.

So what’s the point of all this?

Why the 1, 4, 5 and 6 chords matter

In our episode on The Power of Solfa we talked about how naming or numbering the notes of the scale relative to the root note is helpful because it gets us away from all the letter names and sharps and flats that vary in every key, and gets us directly to the way we actually hear music. We interpret notes relative to the key’s tonic, and so naming notes in that way makes it far easier to start understanding what’s going on in the music you hear.

Exactly the same is true of chords. When we abstract away from any one key and talk in terms of these chord numbers we get straight to the heart of how harmony actually works and how our ears are interpreting the chords we hear.

Here are a few questions you might have found yourself asking about chords:

• Why do these chords sound good when I play them after each other but those other ones don’t?
• How can I know what chords to choose when I’m writing a song?
• If I want to play a song in a different key than the sheet music or recording I have, how do I know what chords to play?
• Why do so many pop and rock songs sound kind of the same even though they have different melodies?

All of these questions can be answered easily when we think in terms of chord numbers – but they all get very complicated if you only think about the literal names of chords in different keys.

For example: The one, four and five chords are the most commonly-used chords in almost every genre of music, with the six chord following shortly after. That means that a ton of music we hear each day is using just those chords.

If we only thought in terms of keys and chord names that wouldn’t be obvious. We’d be able to hear that the songs’ chord progressions sounded kind of similar but they’d all have different chords so it wouldn’t be clear why. When we translate those chords into this one, four, five, six naming system it’s immediately obvious: they are all using exactly the same chords, just in a variety of keys.

That is a massive shortcut if you want to train your ears to recognise chords. Because really what you want to learn isn’t “how can I hear a C-G-A minor-F progression?” – it’s “how can I hear a 1-5-6-4 progression no matter what key it happens to be in?” Your ears really don’t mind what key is being used and so you can quickly train them to hear that same pattern in any key.

So the one, four, five and six chords matter because they are the most frequently used in music, and thinking about them in this numbered system matters because it lets you focus on what’s actually going on harmonically and how your ears are actually interpreting the chords musically.

The next question we have to tackle is…

Rome or Nashville?

As I’ve been explaining this I’ve just been saying “one”, “four”, “five” and so on. But when it comes to writing the chords down there are a couple of different systems.

The first is the Nashville Numbering System. Super simple, we literally just write down the number. The number “1” for one, the number “4” for four, and so on. Generally the major/minor quality of the chord is assumed based on what’s normal for the key, so for the “six” chord you just write the number “6” and the musician reading it knows that’ll be a minor chord.

The second system looks intimidating but is just as simple. It’s to use Roman numerals for the chord numbers. We write a capital “I” for the one chord, a capital “I” followed by a capital “V” for the four chord, a capital “V” for the five chord, and a lowercase “v” and “i” for the six chord. That can look weird if you’re not used to Roman numerals but actually that weirdness is part of its advantage. We use numbers for lots of different things in music but we only use Roman numerals for naming chords like this. So when you see these symbols written down you immediately know that it’s referring to chords in the key. You still say them out loud as “one”, “four”, “five” and so on.

Start using the 1, 4, 5 and 6

So now you understand what the one, four, five and six chords are. You can start taking advantage of this immediately. Next time you’re playing a piece of music ask yourself what the numbers are for the chords being used. You might be surprised how often it boils down to just these three or four chords. That’s why you might hear people talking about “3-chord songs” and “4-chord songs”.

The next big step is to start learning to recognise these chords when they’re used. As I said before, you have a huge shortcut here because you know you’re just looking for the same patterns, no matter what key is being used. We have a whole Roadmap and set of modules for learning to recognise and play chords by ear in Musical U and it’s centered on this insight: that focusing on just the one, four, five and six chords actually covers a huge amount of ground.

Yes there are other chords that can be used, and yes the types of chord can go beyond just major and minor. But get your mind and ears wrapped around the one, four, five and six chords and you’ve got the best possible foundation for understanding and recognising each and every chord you hear.

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The post About the I, IV, V and vi Chords appeared first on Musical U.

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Are you preparing for a great 2018? Before setting goals and resolutions, take a moment to reflect on your musical growth in the last year. You may be surprised by just how far you have come! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-review-your-musical-year/

Talking with her was so enjoyable that we knew we had to have her on the show, and share some of her ideas and insights with you too.

Casey is the founder of Eclectic Music which offers music lessons and classes to musicians of all ages, and The Little Middle School, a small private academic program for ages 11 to 14. Casey believes that anyone can learn anything, as long as they have the tools and guidance.

She especially enjoys working with students who have struggled in the past and helping them to find success. At Eclectic Music, they have the tagline of “Turning ordinary people into musicians”, which we love. And she’s also incorporated musicality training into The Little Middle School’s academic program, something we talk about in this conversation.

As always, we were keen to dig into Casey’s own early music experiences and how she developed her musicality before starting to help others to do the same. We talk about:

• The key insight about guitar and music theory that let her immediately have new freedom playing piano
• How she was able to start playing songs by ear, even without formal ear training
• Why at her school they let students pick each day what instrument they want to play rather than expecting them to pick one and stick with it for weeks or months

There are a few really key insights in this episode as well as a refreshing and powerful philosophy on approaching music learning in general. We loved having the chance to speak with Casey again and we think you’re going to really enjoy hearing her perspective and seeing how it can impact your own musical life.

Listen to the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• Eclectic Music
• The Little Middle School
• Kodály: A Musical Language
• The Benefits of Do-Re-Mi, also known as Solfège

Transcript

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

Casey: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, Christopher.

Christopher: So, I’d love to begin with a little bit about your own journey as a musician. Can you tell us, what were those early years like for you, learning music?

Casey: Well, I grew up in a musical family, and sometimes I don’t like telling people that, because they go, “Oh, well that’s why you’re a musician, because you were from a musical family.” But I’m one of four, and I’m the only one who chose a career in music. But, my dad is an amateur musician. He’s had a basement rock band since I was in utero and, so he’d play a lot of classic rock and then meanwhile, on my mother’s side of the family I had an uncle who was a concert pianist, and he lived with us for a while and so I’d fall asleep listening to Chopin nocturnes and Scarlatti sonatas on the piano. So, I grew up listening to a lot of music and a lot of different styles and my parents had a wide range of tastes, so I listened to everything from Patsy Cline to the Beatles to classical music, and with music all around, I actually didn’t take up an instrument until later than a lot of children do.

I started piano lessons at around age 11 and I picked up guitar in my teens after watching my dad play for years, and I’m kind of going, “Eh, I could probably try that,” and then, I was always singing, sang in choir, through middle school and high school and then I ended up picking up trombone in the high school band and just kept picking up instruments and decided to study music in college, as well.

Christopher: Well, with that array of instruments and styles, I’m beginning to see where the name “Eclectic Music” comes from. You these days have a really fantastic and remarkable method with the way you teach music and I’d love to know, has that stemmed from the way you were taught music early on, or were those lessons fairly traditional in the way they were taught?

Casey: That’s a great question. In my piano lessons, my uncle was actually my piano teacher and he was excellent at teaching musicianship and musicality, in terms of technique and artistry, so making the music sound beautiful. However, I did not learn music theory and I found reading music very difficult, so it wasn’t until I started picking up guitar in my teens that I started to figure out how chords fit together and then started to learn more by ear, and that in turn really helped me to understand the classical music that I’d been playing.

In fact, when I was in high school I went to a summer music camp. It’s called Summer Youth Music School. It’s at the University of New Hampshire, up in Durham, New Hampshire, and I was there – it was a great program, two week program, and there’s kids there. You learned jazz, you learned classical, so you take these classes and most of the kids really didn’t like the classes because they just wanted to hang out with their new friends from camp and get snacks out of the vending machine. And so we were in this dorm lounge and there was no air conditioning and it was a really hot day and so everyone’s just half-asleep in the afternoon after a big lunch but the instructor started talking about chords and what the notes are in the chords and how you build a chord like a major chord and a minor chord and a diminished chord and how the chords fit in with the key.

And this was like the missing information that I had never had before, because I was learning how to read notes on the piano, but it was always just individual notes. And then I could play the chord shapes on the guitar, but I didn’t know what the notes were that were in those chords. So this is the piece that fit it all together so I was, like, leaning forward and writing everything down and so into it. Meanwhile, my friends were on either side of me, like, dozing off. This is a moment that I have never forgotten, because that was really what allowed me to, kind of, combine these two sides of the music that I’m playing, the classical music on the one hand and these, these rock and pop songs by ear on the other hand, and now I could take all this knowledge that I had learned from guitar and start playing in a pop style on the piano and the strange thing is that that actually helped me to read music, too.

So I was able to then translate everything I learned about chords and be able to see the chords as they were laid out in the music, like, kind of, knowing that an E minor chord is E-G-B and so, kind of going, “Oh, well, that note must be a G and that note must be a B,” and in time I was able to actually read music, where before I’d really just been faking it.
So, with my students, I really want to give them both sides of their musicianship. I want to make sure that they can play by ear and they’re learning to read music and that one, kind of, helps the other. If you’re thinking of music as a language that you speak and read and hear, so to speak.

Christopher: That’s wonderful to hear about and I think it’s such a valuable insight for anyone. Whether or not you’ve gone through that particular journey, I think the pianists of the world tend to get trapped in just thinking about dots on the staff and thinking about each individual note, and the guitarists tend to get trapped in chord charts and just knowing the name of the chord and the shape on the fretboard and I can totally relate to where you’re coming from, because for me, I was stuck, actually, in both of those two worlds, totally isolated from one another playing guitar and piano until I came across, I think it was called “A Chord Piano Course,” and suddenly that made me realize, oh, you can actually play piano by thinking about the chords, rather than just, you know, dot-by-dot on the page.

Casey: Mm-hm.

Christopher: And I love that for you, you were able to also translate that to making sense of the dots on the page and giving you that new insight into how the sheet music worked.

Casey: Yes. The structure of it was really important to me and has continued to be fascinating to me, as I’ve progressed in my career that I feel like a lot of what I do with my students is, they come in and they want to learn how to play the song they’ve heard on the radio. And so, it’s my job to figure that out for them. And yet, as I had, you know, spent years doing that, I’m the one that’s getting all the benefit, because that practice of figuring out songs over and over again, whether it’s on the guitar or the piano or any other instrument, that’s how you learn to play the instrument, you know? In a sense, the skills you have as a musician are, “Here’s all the songs I can play,” you know, that the songs you can play sort of defines who you are as a musician. So, in figuring all these songs out I was really growing, so I soon realized that my job was actually going to be to teach the students how to figure out those songs and basically model that process so that they could do that themselves, because that’s what so many people, particularly adult students, want to be able to do, is they don’t really want to spend years mastering perfect classical technique. They want to be able to get together with friends and jam or, you know, play a song and have people sing along, and that’s – it doesn’t take but a few weeks to a few months to be able to do that, with a basic level of competence, if that’s what you’re aiming for at the start.

Sadly, a lot of teachers don’t know how to create that result for students and they want to be the one who’s like, “Well, let me show you: Buh-duh-luh-duh-doot,” you know, and show off, but ultimately it’s so much more empowering to students if you can be teaching them, you know, teaching them how to fish, as the saying goes.

Christopher: Right. So, let’s come back for a minute, if we may, just to – after you had that pivotal moment of, kind of, connecting the two worlds, how did the next few years go for you in terms of developing as a musician and becoming a music teacher? Were you mostly learning from book, or by ear, or a bit of both?

Casey: Oh, so I spent the next few years learning how to write songs and, playing in bands with friends and, figuring out songs that I wanted to learn how to play and I did take a music theory course. I went to a very small high school that didn’t really offer a music theory course, so I was just like, “Give me the book, and just let me learn something.”
I blazed through a semester’s worth of stuff in maybe, you know, two or three weeks just because I wanted to follow up from everything I had learned at camp and I just really wanted to get all that information. Not that figured base has been that useful to me in my music career, all these arcane bits, but, and then I did go to college. I actually got a degree in music education, and that was helpful and I did learn, you know, a lot of the more classical – I was actually a voice major, so I was forced at knifepoint to sing opera, that’s pretty much what it took, for me. That wasn’t really my strength as a musician, shall we say. But I did continue to write songs, continued to play, and so much of who I am now as a musician, although I love and appreciate the classical music that I’ve learned, so much of what I use professionally and what I use for my own enjoyment is the stuff that I taught myself sitting on the edge of my bed when I was 16, 17 years old, and so have devised the Sitting-on-the-end-of-the-bed Test, which is, you’re figuring out a song, and you go, “Well, you know, how hard could it really be?” You just picture some guy writing this song and they’re just kind of trying to put it together, casually, you know, at midnight, or whatever, when they’re sitting on the end of the bed in their hotel room, and so, it’s sort of like an Occam’s Razor of music, you know? Whatever is the simplest way is probably what they were ultimately doing.

Christopher: That’s a great point.

Casey: It’s easier than it looks.

Christopher: Yeah, and I’m sure that takes a lot of the overwhelm and intimidation out of trying to figure something out by ear for your students. That’s a really great visualization to have.

Casey: Yeah, to humanize these great artists and realize they’re just – they’re just people who made up something that they thought sounded cool.

Christopher: So, looking back, I guess it’s easy to see that you actually took a really interesting trajectory with your music learning and one that was maybe a bit different from the majority of people who are stuck in that world of scales and repertoire and passing exams and just reading the notes on the page. Were there any moments along that way where you realized that you had gone on this more interesting path that maybe was going to open up different doors for you, as a musician?

Casey: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that I really had that chip on my shoulder from starting late and not really feeling good about my ability to read music. I had an episode in high school where I was supposed to be the accompanist for a choir and I tried it and I really couldn’t do it, because I couldn’t read the music fast enough and I couldn’t figure out what I was missing that other people had.

Later on I learned that it was the chords, but it did take me, still, a few years to, kind of, get back to where I thought I should be, reading, reading music, so, it just seemed to me that I didn’t have a special talent for it that I saw other people, it seemed to come a lot easier to them, and found my way into being a teacher and had these hopes of being a songwriter. I wrote a lot of songs and was dabbling in being a recording artist and in my early 20’s I had the opportunity to go to this conference out in L.A. that was for songwriters and recording artists and it’s thinking about, maybe I could learn, like, could meet people or learn to write songs better, or learn to market my songs better, maybe get a song in a commercial or something like that. You know how in early adulthood, you have these possibilities of where your life can go and you’re just, kind of, pursuing all of them simultaneously.

So, I was really intimidated because, I was this girl from this small town in Maine and I was a lot younger than everybody else and less accomplished and it was real exciting and exhilarating but really intimidating.

So, at the conference center in the hotel they had a nook in the lobby. It was sponsored by a company, an audio company that had supplied a digital piano and some recording gear and a PA. And so, people would take turns and dabble on the piano, and as the night went on, people were sort of starting to gather around and people were taking turns performing a song, but of course, like, everybody there was a songwriter.

Nobody wants to hear everybody else’s songs, you know, you just, you want to hear a familiar song and so, I don’t even remember how I ended up sitting down at the piano, but I did, and, you know, somebody was like, “Oh, can anybody play this song?” and it was like, “Let it Be” or something. I don’t remember. Piano Man? And, and I was like, “Oh, I could try that.” And it’s something I’ve really come to enjoy is this sort of high-wire act of like, “Well, I’ve never played this song before, but I can probably, kind of, figure it out on the fly,” based on having heard it a million times and music – knowledge of music theory and then, sort of, trusting my fingers.

So I played the song and everybody sang along and then I started getting requests, like, people were like, “Oh, well, can you play Hey Jude?” and “Can you play…” you know, just listing off songs, and I sat there for an hour just playing song after song and some of them were things that I knew how to play and some of them were things that I had never played before but I knew and, and so, that was a turning point for me to realize that, “Well, you know, I may not be the virtuoso that other musicians are and I may not ever end up being a professional million-selling recording artist, but I have some legitimate skills, here, with the ability to figure out a song by ear on the fly and, and, and bring people the enjoyment of singing together.”

Christopher: For sure. I love that picture you just painted of you sitting at the piano, kind of busking your way through having not realized up until that point that actually, this was a really special ability and something that most people around you, I’m sure, at that time couldn’t do.

Casey: Mm-hm.

Christopher: That must have been a huge boost to your confidence. Did you return to your music learning with a new sense of who you were as a musician?

Casey: You know, I think that’s – it’s – isn’t it always the hardest for us to recognize the skills and traits that are special about us and the things that we can do that nobody else can do? I think that it was still something that, I just kind of assumed that everybody else could do, but that actually helped my teaching because it was something that I didn’t think of as a gift, I thought of as, like, “Well, I took these specific steps to learn how to do this. I have a process for being able to.” Maybe because I didn’t consider myself talented and I approached music in this very analytical way, a very, you know, nerdy kind of way of like, really trying to understand it and can’t just pick up an instrument and dazzle people.

So, I think that’s really helped me to bring that to other people, the fact that I kind of go, “Well, yeah, but anybody can do this.” And so, I think that’s been – that’s, that’s really where I’ve taken it, is to see if I can benefit other people with that and bring other people along the same way that I was and give other people that same opportunity to, to say, “Oh, this? You mean, just like this? Oh, I can do that.”

Christopher: I love that, and I really appreciate you sharing this story, because those two things are so at odds in how we traditionally think about music, you know, the, the picture of you busking away at the piano and impressing everyone that you could play by ear versus what you just said, you know, you were doing it in a methodical, analytical way because you felt like you didn’t have talent or a gift. You know, I think that would surprise a lot of people that those two things were happening at once because we so often see that play-by-ear musician and assume it must just come naturally and easily with no thought or effort.

Casey: Yeah. That’s why I love the program that you have, Musical U, because I just think anything that we can do to demystify that process. With music it’s – people ascribe so much to talent, “Oh, well, you know, you just – that person is just born with it. Their grandparents were very musical and ultimately I think that that unfortunately shuts people out who have huge potential to be able to learn the skill of music, the skill of playing by ear, just like they can learn to read and write and play tennis and drive a car, so anything that we can do to demystify this process – and maybe it looks like magic, like anything that’s done well, you can kind of make it look easy – but anything that we can do to show that “No, this isn’t magic,” and kind of show people the inner workings and, you know, unscrew the top off the magic box and just see that it’s just some different, you know, different gears and chips and whatever else, you know, but it’s all knowable and understandable.

Christopher: Mm-hm. Absolutely, and I know our listeners are dying for me to ask – and I don’t want to put you on the spot and ask you to deliver a master class here, but I’m sure they’d love to know – you talked about a process there or that you’d done it step by step and so it seemed very clear and obvious to you that you could figure out songs by ear. Can you give us a sense of, of how that works, how you went about that?

Casey: Sure. I have a school group that I work with, every day. It’s a group of about 20, middle schoolers, which, in the United States is about age 11 to 14 and it’s an academic program. You learn math, social science, social studies and everything, but every day we start off with music and what I’ve been showing them is that every chord has a color and if we think about the chords as just being the letter names that’s obscuring some of the real magic of these chords that if we understand each chord in relationship to the key then it has this certain color every single time.

So your listeners may know that, for example, we have the one chord. The 1-4-5 are the most common chords, in any given pop song or folk song, there’s literally thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of songs that are written with just these three chords, right? For example, in the key of C, that would be our C major, F major and G major chords. Well, each one has a color and just like the colors that you see, you can describe them, but you can’t quite define them, right? So, like, if I – I’m, like, “How would you describe red?”

You’d say… it was hot. Yeah.

Christopher: You’d know it when you see it.

Casey: Right. Right. It’s a subjective experience of this visual color, right? So just like when I describe what the one chord sounds like or feels like, it’s like, “Well, it’s like your home base. It’s tranquil. It’s resting. And then a five chord has this sort of aggressive quality to it. It’s bright. And then four is kind of placid and has a sweetness to it.” So, just like when you’re teaching colors to a small child, they have to learn it by trial and error, basically, and so the same way we have to learn these chord numbers through trial and error, so, you know, you try something and you go, “Oh. Whoops, that’s not a G, that’s an F. Okay. Well, so that’s the four chord. That’s what the four chord feels like.”

And so over time, you have more and more experiences with these chords and you can start to name the colors without even having the instrument in your hand. You go, “Oh, there’s the one chord going to the five chord going to the two chord going to the four chord.” And then you go, “Oh, well I’m in the key of C so that must be C, G, D minor, F,” and it seems like magic but it just takes practice, just like a baby kind of going, “Oh, this is blue. This is yellow. All right. Got that one.” I don’t know if your little girl is learning chords, or, I mean, learning colors right now.

Christopher: Learning colors, sadly. Not chords quite yet, but, hopefully soon.

Casey: (Laughs) Yeah. So it’s just that process. So, so over time, we learn the job that each chord does in the key and then the color that we associate with that as an, as an individual person, and that’s, that’s the, the basis of it, essentially, is basically experiencing those different colors and learning to associate those with the numbers based on –

Christopher: I think that’s such a great explanation. So, when we think of – you sat at that piano at the songwriting convention – you were essentially remembering in your head how the song sounded and asking yourself, kind of, what was the color of each chord that then let you translate it into a particular key and how to play on piano. Is that right?

Casey: Exactly. And then the magical thing that starts to happen is your fingers over time start to be able to hear, so to speak, the chords so your fingers start to be able to find that next chord on your instrument, whatever it is and, and then, and then that simplifies the process, too. So sometimes your fingers find it before your ear is consciously aware of it, but that comes from a foundation of, that’s the part that looks like magic, but of course, that comes on the foundation of a lot of practice and thought into it.

Christopher: I think what’s beautiful there is that you’ve described yourself as someone that was very theory-minded and it was theory that kind of unlocked all of this for you. But actually when you talk about how you do it and how you teach it, it’s very practical. It’s very hands-on and it’s, kind of, experiencing the music much more than it’s thinking about figured base and, you know, interval relationships and that kind of thing.

Casey: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I do recommend that for those who want to learn how to do this they actually, start with really simple pop songs. It’s great to go back to, you know, the 1950’s pop songs, a lot of which were just four chords that you can hear pretty easily and, if a song seems too hard, just move on to the next one.

All you have to do is figure out what key it’s in and then figure out, you know, if you can get half the chords, great. Make a little game of hangman and you just write out, like, “Okay there’s, must be a chord there, I don’t know what it is. There’s probably a chord there,” and you write out these little dashes where, where the chords go, maybe with the lyrics and then you fill them in and skip the ones you don’t know, but over time you’re hit rate gets better and better, and in the meantime you’re basically learning how to play the song.

So, it’s just very practical and immediate as opposed to doing it in isolation. I don’t know what your courses were like for your ear training, but a lot of times the chords is kind of this very, dry kind of hearing, you know, the sound on a badly played piano and then this other sound is kind of out of tune, and you can’t really tell and a lot of people think that they don’t have a good ear because they’ve been working, you know, on that kind of stuff and it’s, it’s a lot easier when you hear it out in the wild and start to experience in a song you already know well, so.

Christopher: So – sure. I think we’ve found there is huge value in the kind of isolated ear training drills to…

Casey: Yes.

Christopher: …get you to skill up quickly but at the same time it needs to be connected to real musical tasks and what you actually want to do in music, otherwise it becomes a very dry abstract and frustrating exercise.

Casey: Yeah. I think for notes, having the isolated drills is helpful and incredibly necessary, because with notes it’s like, you can’t wrangle them in, in a regular song, like, it’s just too much, but where a pop song, if it only has four chords then, it’s a lot easier to handle it, but when you’re learning notes and learning intervals, having that just much more simplified prepared environment is really incredibly helpful and I wish I had had a lot more of that in my training.

Christopher: Sure, well, it doesn’t sound like you were held back at all and I love that you explained there how you quite quickly realized you wanted to not just use this ability you had to help your students learn songs by rote, you actually wanted to equip them with that same ability to tackle any song by ear. I’d love to hear more about your work at the The Little Middle School and also at Eclectic Music and the way you teach these skills of musicality.

Casey: Sure. One thing that we’ve found is really important is that it just doesn’t matter what instrument you choose, particularly for small children but even as an adult, if you’re learning the language of music. So learning to, to read and write it, that can be helpful, but particularly being able to listen and translate that to reality, whether that’s with your voice or with, with any instrument, really all you need to do is learn where those notes are on whatever instrument you happen to have in your hands and learn some basic techniques, you know, how to pluck, how to press the strings down, that kind of thing, and, and you’re off and going. So many people are really impressed, so it’s like, “Oh, this person can play guitar and ukelele, and mandolin,” and it’s like, “Ah, it’s all the same skills,” you know? It’s, it’s really not that fancy. So that’s one thing that I think holds people back, sometimes, is this feeling, this, this need to master an instrument and the cool thing is, I think, we get to decide as musicians what mastery looks like to us. It’s really like, “I want to play this song on an instrument, and I’m gonna learn how to play this song on the instrument.” Great. You don’t need to hit this, this external level of, of expertise that somebody else says that, that’s required, it’s really for your own personal enjoyment and satisfaction.

So with The Little Middle School, especially where we have our music time in the morning, all of that is completely by ear, we play a lot of pop and folk songs. The, the kids’ favorite song right now is “House of the Rising Sun,” the old folk song, and, so the kids might pick up a guitar, percussion instrument, bells, we have a couple of harmoniums, so, it’s like, you know, a pump organ that sits on the floor, from India, and, banjo, ukulele, mandolin, whatever else we can find and we learn what the chords are and, and then they’re off and going, and one of the things that we do is, maybe after we finish the song, it’s like, “Okay, so, what percentage did you get?” you know, “Did you get 50% of the notes? Did you get 30% of the notes?”

And we tried to normalize the idea that you don’t get the whole thing. It’s fine if in your learning process you get a little bit here and a little bit there, whoops, I missed that chord – no big deal. That’s the wonderful thing about playing with other people, is that the music keeps going and you can just jump back in whenever you want to. It’s very casual. The spotlight’s not on you. You’re not performing, you’re really just sharing.

So that’s an experience that a lot of people have never had and so, it’s sometimes hard to explain it to parents, because they don’t really know what that looks like, but really, that’s – it’s just such a joyous, authentic experience of making music. And then the next day, they can pick up a different instrument and try the same song on that instrument, and, and really pace themselves.

Christopher: That sounds wonderful. But let me play devil’s advocate, for a minute and pretend I’m that parent who shows up at your door who maybe hasn’t learned music themselves, at all, and they come to you and they’ve heard what you get up to in your morning music sessions and I imagine they’d say something like, “We really want Johnny to be good at music. Shouldn’t he just be playing the guitar every day?”

Casey: That’s certainly a good question. I think, that’s a tricky – I think if Johnny wants to play guitar then he can really focus and be dedicated to that particular instrument. And there is certainly something that can be said for consistency over time.

But, one of the things that I really feel is important to advocate for is this idea that between virtuosity and not being able to play at all there’s this huge range that is the ability to just be musically literate human being and that’s – when I say literate, I don’t necessary mean reading music. I mean, just being able to play, being able to sing in tune, all of the different skills of musicality that you teach with your program. And, I don’t know what it’s like in the U.K. where you come from, but in the United States, you go to a restaurant at 8 p.m. and you’re gonna hear a really terrible version of “Happy Birthday,” um – (Laughs) the average American adult can’t sing “Happy Birthday,” and so, parents are so quick to say, “Oh, we don’t want to try to make a virtuoso, here. We’re not going to send her to Julliard. We just want her to learn music,” and it’s like, “Well, this is what it is.” So, what people might not realize is it only takes a few months for a kid to learn how to play the guitar if they’re focused. So if you mix that up with learning some other instruments, no big deal, and yes, you could devote your entire life and be Segovia and spend, you know, years and years mastering the guitar at an incredibly high level, but most people don’t need to do that in order to feel like they’re somebody who plays guitar, it’s really all about the level of confidence you have and the level of satisfaction that you decide you’re going to be okay with, which is a tricky one. I guess there’s a lot of us, too, who are never going to be satisfied or never going to feel like real musicians as long as we play, but ultimately – don’t you think sometimes, at a certain point, it just becomes a decision that you make?

Christopher: I think so, and I think it’s easy, I am sure, as parents who don’t play music, but also as musicians ourselves to feel like you’re making a choice between being really good at music or just enjoying music, and I think what stands out to me about your program and your approach is you do have enjoyment and creativity at the heart of it, but actually, what you’re focusing on are, arguably, the most fundamental and the most important musical skills. These aren’t just “can I, you know, play along?” skills instead of learning to be a good musician. These are the skills that make you a good musician, and later you can decide you’re going to be the profession expert on guitar or you choose your instrument but you’ve got that foundation of what really matters.

Casey: Exactly. Yeah. That these are the skills that you can take in any direction, yeah. So, so rather than try to, you know, build a giant tower that’s in one area, we’re kind of, you know, building a strong foundation that could support multiple towers, with, you know, multiple instruments, being able to reach a high level in multiple areas.

Christopher: Absolutely, and I think it’s important for adults to realize that it’s never too late to put that foundation in place, you know, even if you’ve started building your tower, you can go back and learn some of these fundamental skills of musicality and give yourself that advantage. At the same time, I think it’s so important, the work you’re doing with children, because one thing that drives me crazy is when I meet someone and they tell me, you know, they took piano lessons as a kid, but they never liked the piano.

I just think that’s such a missed opportunity because I bet if you put a banjo in their hands, they would have loved it, and I think when parents feel like they need to pick an instrument and force it on the child rather than give the child the opportunity to learn music in a way that doesn’t pre-select an instrument for them, it’s such a disaster in so many cases, and so I love that you’re giving children that opportunity to learn who they are as a musician while doing valuable skill development and then they can go on to decide the instrument that’s right for them.

Casey: Yeah. And I think for adults, too, that they’re – they might be surprised at what they actually have retained, because a lot of the skills that people want as adults, like we were saying before, being able to play by ear and being able to play songs that they want to play and someone’s maybe taken ten years of classical lessons on an instrument and they feel like they can’t do anything with that and, but yet, they have actually absorbed a lot of that musical language, and so they’re often pleasantly surprised when, you know, these ten years of playing trumpet in the band actually translate to being able to hear musical patterns and being able to, to figure out a song by ear or keep a steady beat or learn patterns on a new instrument. a lot of that, it, it’s stored somewhere. It does come back. So there’s a lot of success stories that I’ve seen, with people who maybe fear it’s too late but then they actually can do it.

Christopher: Definitely. We see that again and again at Musical U where someone joins – they’ve been learning music for a long time but they feel like they’re at step zero in terms of developing their ear and what we explain is, actually, you probably have a pretty good ear, you just don’t have the mental frameworks to kind of make sense of it and put labels on it and put it into use on your instrument and it means they can actually very quickly kind of put those missing pieces in place, a bit like you discovering the theory and being able to join the dots a bit, they’re able to make great progress very quickly because they’ve actually been doing, kind of, passive ear training for several years, already.

Casey: Right. Passive ear training. I like that. Yeah. I bet you probably get a lot of “Why didn’t – why anyone tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me…”

Christopher: (Laughs) Absolutely.

Casey: …it was this easy?”

Christopher: Yeah.

Casey: Yeah.

Christopher: “I never knew it could be this easy.”

Casey: Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher: And so I want to be a little bit selfish, for a moment, if I may. As you know, I have an 18-month-old daughter and we’re starting to think about her music education. You know, she’s loving music already, which is fantastic, and she seems to be a fan of both Reggaeton and Tchaikovsky, so I think that must bode well, but I’d love to hear your perspective as someone who has a lot of hands-on experience with early music education as well as this very powerful and unique perspective on what matters when you’re starting to learn music. What advice would you have for someone in my shoes who has a young kid who wants to get them off to a great start in music?

Casey: There’s been a lot of research done on this, so called, “window” of opportunity to develop a child’s capacity for musical understanding, develop their very aptitude, and they say the window closes by age six. Much like learning their native tongue. But people misinterpret that to mean that you can’t learn music by the time you are six. If you haven’t started learning music by the time you’re six, it’s hopeless, and that’s just not true. Like you said, children are – they’re developing their tastes, they’re listening to the music that their parents are listening to, so she’s being exposed to music all the time and that exposure is how she’s developing that capacity. So, really, listening to music with her, singing with her, having musical experiences with her, taking her to see live music and musicians, doing a little class, like, you know, just – it doesn’t have to be fancy, just, you know, singing and, age-appropriate songs, clapping, tapping, developing that sense of rhythm, sense of pitch. For a lot of children, a lot of parents are so self-conscious about singing, but it’s so great for kids to hear their parents sing. That’s how they learn, they learn through mimicry and they learn everything from their parents.

So, any time that you can make up little songs, you know, at bath time and mealtimes and just little, you know, parodies of existing songs or make up your own melodies – I’m sure you do that all the time, um –

Christopher: More than my wife would like.

Casey: (Laughs) So, she’s soaking that all up. And then, as they grow, then I think parents want some more specific things that they can do because they see that their child is starting to learn to name letters and numbers and colors and they want a formal music education, as well. And after having done a lot of thinking about this and a lot of classes and so on, I realize it’s fundamentally weird to take your kid somewhere and have them learn from a professional when, you know, you’ve got this three or four-year-old that really is going to learn best from, from her very own parents.

So, what I like to do is give parents some tips for basically whatever the musical equivalent is of learning those numbers and letters right at the beginning and that would be learning some simple music patterns, like, starting off with, basically the notes of the pentatonic scale, so, “sol, mi” would be the first pattern that’s from Kodály, who’s done a lot of research and a lot of, work in early music education and, so, “sol, mi, la, sol, mi” is that first pattern that kids would learn, “Rain, Rain, Go Away,” and “Ring Around the Rosie,” and then, learning mi, re, do. And there’s a lot of songs that incorporate those five tones – do, re, mi, so, la, – and that’s really a great place to start.

You can get a set of desk bells, which are great because, there’s just this set of eight, eight bells resonator bells, like what you ding the bell for service at a hotel counter, but each one is a different tone. And usually they’re tuned in the key of C major, and they’re great because you can – a child can just hit them, really easily without having to have any fine motor technique and then, so what you do is you take the F and the B away and the child should never see those. Put those in a cabinet somewhere, and just focus on that pentatonic scale where you have those five notes with – actually, six bells, ’cause you have two C’s – and those always sound beautiful, you can’t hit a wrong note, as you know. It’s always gonna sound nice. And so they can arrange the bells different ways, they can play a lot of different melodies. You can play a lot of different melodies with those, and you can do kind of what you do when you read and you read a story, that, like, you might let her start filling in the last word, like, the rhyming word, has she started doing that, yet?

Christopher: Not yet, no.

Casey: Looking at pictures, name – like, you know, Where’s the Bunny?” so you might sing a song like, “Hot Cross Buns” and, like, so, you’re going, “Hot Cross Buns,” and then, the child will play mi, re, do, and doesn’t need to know the rest of the song, but they’re just playing that one little part, and that becomes, just, their first little step into making music together, just playing these little two and three note patterns as they fit into the song.

So there’s a lot, there’s so much that can be done with just those little bells and then bringing in, some percussion instruments and playing different patterns, playing call-and-response, something, you know, clapping, clapping rhythms and then mimicking them, and then, and then something to blow on is always fun, like, a little melodica, where you press the keys and make different tones and that’s a little bit of a step for more, like, four and five and six-year-olds, but, if a child is doing that stuff at home, they’re getting a tremendous music education, because that’s what they need, is they need that sense of pitch and that sense of rhythm, and that’s gonna be the foundation they can build everything else on and parents don’t have to worry if their singing doesn’t sound good. They just keep going and the more they do it the better they’ll get, but the child, the child will still learn to be able to sing, even if not every note sounds beautiful and is perfectly on pitch.

But I really want to empower any parents out there who want to try something like that, that they can. They can and in the process we’re creating some new norms for what we want children to be able to do. It’s not a high bar, but it’s a, you know, maybe the next generation will be able to sing, “Happy Birthday,” you know?

Christopher: Fantastic. I think there are a few better goals than that for transforming the world.

Casey: (Laughs)

Christopher: Terrific. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today, Casey. If listeners happen to be in Atlanta or want to learn more about your program, can you tell us where to find out more about The Little Middle School and Eclectic Music?

Casey: Sure. Our website for Eclectic Music is eclecticmusicatlanta.com and we do lessons in the local area and Atlanta but if people are looking for support for their children, as I was talking about, or if they’d like to know more about how I teach chords using the colors, they’re certainly welcome to get in touch with me, and, we can see how – if there is any way that I might be able to serve them, and The Little Middle School can be found at thelittlemiddleschool.com.

Christopher: Fantastic.

Casey: I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. A lot of fun.

Christopher: Thank you again, Casey.

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The post Turning Ordinary People into Musicians, with Casey McCann appeared first on Musical U.

Matthew and Jeremy are based in Birmingham, Alabama, and although they studied some of the same courses at university together, their musical lives have taken them in quite different directions. Matthew is the award-winning composer of over 70 instrumental and vocal works in a wide range of musical styles, and is now a professor of music at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Jeremy runs Area 47 Sound, where he has recorded sound for commercials, documentary, film, national news, and prime time television. He’s also a bassist, performing live with three bands.

We’re regular listeners of the Music Student 101 podcast and often recommend it to people who ask us how they can brush up on their music theory – so we were really delighted when they agreed to come on our podcast and share their own experiences and insights.

In this episode we talk about:

• How music theory and ear training have played a part in two quite different music careers – one into academia and composing, the other into performance and live sound recording
• The big mindset shift you need to make learning music theory fun and successful
• The core skill that underlies having a good ear, and bridges the gap between musical ear training and audio ear training

And we ask them the very blunt question: “Is there a point to doing a music degree?”

If you’ve ever questioned the usefulness of music theory or a music degree – or wondered if they’re things you’re missing out on, this conversation with Matthew and Jeremy is going to provide you with some real wisdom and insight.

Listen to the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• MusicStudent101.com
• Berklee Online
• Who’s On Your Ear Training Team?
• Active Listening Tutorial

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Jeremy and Matthew. Thank you for joining us today.

Jeremy: Well, thank you for having us.

Matthew: Thank you.

Christopher: I’d love to start with a little bit about your beginnings in music and maybe Matthew, you can go first.

Matthew: Okay.

Christopher: Can you tell me what was it like for you learning music, early on?

Matthew: Well, let’s see. I grew up with an extended family of musicians. My grandfather played guitar, both of my grandmothers played piano. I had an uncle that played several instruments and from about ten or eleven on through adolescence I spent a lot of time just playing with these family members and it was largely playing by ear. My grandmother did teach me to read a little bit and music just sort of became my identity by the time I was fifteen or sixteen, and so when I was a little older and all my friends were looking around, “What am I going to go to college to do?” – you know, I was looking through potential majors for universities and I saw that there was such a thing as a music major. As soon as I saw that, it’s like, well, “That’s what I’m doing.”

So, yeah, I got to college, I learned a lot in college. I could read a little bit but I learned to read much better, you know, I learned much more about theory in my first few years of college and I’ve never really looked back. A musician is just what I am and it’s just always been that way, really.

Christopher: That’s really interesting that you started out with the playing by ear style of learning and it was moving to college where you filled in the more academic side of things – because at this point, you are a very academic-oriented musician.

Matthew: Yeah. I even call myself an academic, a music academic at this point. Yeah, and I definitely know music academics that did it the other way. They sort of were interested in the academic side of music and through that learned. But, yeah. I started off just sort of playing by ear, playing gospel hymns, a lot of it, and bluegrass tunes and things like that and did that for years, played in bands all through college, and so, you know, I feel like I sort of have a foot on two sides of the fence.

Christopher: And how about you, Jeremy? How does compare with your own music start?

Jeremy: It’s not too far different. When I was about, I guess, ten years old, is when I first started taking an interest – even before when I lived in Montgomery, my Dad had a guitar and I would pluck it and make noises and they’d go, like, “Oh, that sounds great!” Looking back, it probably sounded like crap, but they were very encouraging. My parents never told me not to do that, you know, so I took an interest in the guitar. Then I saw this video, “The Final Countdown”, by Europe, and I said —

Matthew: (Sings) The Final Countdown…doo, doo.

Jeremy: … deedle-dee!

Christopher: I love that.

Jeremy: — and I was like, “Man, I want to make those noises.”

Christopher: (Laughs)

Jeremy: So I got this guitar from Service Merchandise and I said, “Dammit, I can’t get my guitar to make that noise,” and he said, “I think that’s a keyboard you’re hearing.”

Matthew: (Laughs)

Jeremy: So I got a keyboard, because at the time, the Katz USK-1 sampling keyboard was all the rave, and so I ended up making cool little sounds with that. And then eventually taking an interest in getting these little Mel Bay books and learning little, melodies and stuff like that.

Matthew: Yeah.

Jeremy: Fast forwarding to high school is when I started to pick up. I was getting into Faith No More and the Cure, some of the keyboard, bass bands or with keyboards in them. And so, it was kind of keyboard that I was into and then the necessity for a bass player came up in the band that I was in.

Christopher: Yeah.

Jeremy: And so, I put down the keyboard and picked up the bass and I’ve been hooked as a bass player ever since.

Matthew: Yeah, that actually happened to me in high school. I was playing in a garage band with my high school buddies and there was — there were no bass players, so I made my Dad promise that if I got all A’s on my report card that he would buy me a bass, and sure enough, that was the one time I got all A’s.

Jeremy: I think Paul McCartney was a bassist, by default.

Matthew: Yeah, that may have been true, yeah.

Christopher: I wonder what proportion it is that are bassists out of necessity? I was the same. I was a guitar player as a teenager until I needed to join a band and they needed a bassist rather than a guitarist, and I was like, “Well, it’s fewer strings. It’s probably fine.”

Matthew: Yeah.

Jeremy: I think it’s probably a surprising percentage of bass players who were just like that – because, you don’t think about the bass until someone makes you play the bass, right?

Christopher: Mm-hm.

Jeremy: But then —

Christopher: I think we all come to know and love it, though, right?

Jeremy: I do, yeah. I think that when you’re a bass player, once that bass is in your hands it feels, you know, it feels right, and then you come to consider yourself a bass player, not a guitarist who can play bass, and, you know, there are people out there like that, but I am a bass player, that is my instrument. If people ask me what do I play, that’s the first one I say.

Matthew: It took a bit, but I can officially say I’m a bassist, as well.

Jeremy: Yeah, but that was my high school experience, and then I continued playing bass into college. I wasn’t really thinking about getting a music degree because I figured, I kind of had the same misconception or maybe just preconceived notion that a music degree might not get you a very good –

Matthew: What are you gonna do with that?

Jeremy: Exactly. Yeah, so. But it wasn’t until I took this music basics – I guess it was an intro to music kind of class with Ronald Clemens over at UAB, and he was just so fantastic, and he really started to make everything that I was hearing and knowing what I thought I knew about music starting to piece it together, give it names, give it pictures, give it things that I can actually make sense of the whole thing, and that’s when music theory really started to take off for me, and that’s where I really got just completely in love with it. I just had to, you know, check it out and learn more about it, and I felt like it was increasing my communication with the band I was playing in. We were all in the same music theory class at the time, so it really amplified our growth together.

Christopher: That’s really cool, and I think it might be surprising for people to hear that, you know, the two hosts of a podcast that covers music theory in quite a lot of detail actually both started out not so in touch with the theory side of things. You weren’t really book learning, note-by-note musicians, by the sound of it. It was only when you got to college that that aspect of music opened up to you.

Jeremy: That’s very true.

Matthew: Garage punks, even.

Jeremy: Garage punks, I would say, garage punks. Yeah, in my formative years theory seemed like this vast, quasi-magical sort of almost…

Matthew: Inaccessible.

Jeremy: …inaccessible tome of things, you know. I mean, someone would kind of half-way teach me what the major scale was and I would halfway get it, but not enough for me to use it in any way – even though I would try desperately and I would buy books that said, “Well, this is how to make a C chord on the guitar,” or a D chord or something. But I always felt like there was stuff out there that I wasn’t getting and when I went to college, one of the – I think what attracted me to it was all of a sudden was that here are these people who say, “Well, here’s the stuff you’ve not been getting,” and I ate it up. It was very eye-opening and it allows me to do what I do now, musically, really.

Christopher: Terrific. And I’d love to ask you more about that, that it allows you to do what you do. And I think,  Matthew, you are a professional composer as well as an academic and I think it’s relatively easy for the audience to imagine why theory is important to a composer. And Jeremy, maybe it’s less easy for people to imagine – you are a gigging music as well as a professional sound recording engineer…

Jeremy: Correct.

Christopher: …and production engineer, I believe. How does music theory play a part in your life, these days, or how has it changed the way you are interacting with music?

Jeremy: Well, I think once I got to a certain level where I could easily communicate with any other musician I was playing with — most of the people I play in bands with aren’t music majors, you know? So it took a very base knowledge for me to be able to use it in the practical world, but then at some point, I just decided that I wanted to know it better. I wanted to get my ears to where I – it was really mainly for ear training, for me. And I started looking around for these podcasts that featured any kind of knowledge or musical examples. There was no musical examples out there. How could you do ear training without musical examples?

Matthew: U.S. copyright laws are the problem.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Matthew: Believe us, I mean, we get into that a lot.

Jeremy: But me and Matt – even long after college we would go and hang out at J. Clyde and have a few beers and start talking about the music world and there were times when he would be bringing up things and he was just really passionate and almost frustrated sometimes about some things and I was like, “I want to know what he’s talkin’ about.”

Matthew: (Laughs)

Jeremy: You know what I mean? “I want to be able to continue this conversation.” So that was one of the things. Okay, so not a lot of really good podcasts out there that have, you know, musical examples and actually are entertaining. God, there’s a lot of audio books out there that are just dry, really dry, boring things to listen to.

Christopher: Hm.

Jeremy: Technical? Man, you can’t throw that at people and expect them to really get into it. So that was the necessity. I don’t know, I’m not sure if I’m answering your question.

Christopher: (Laughs)

Jeremy: But that need for the theory knowledge brought me back into it and now that I’m back into doing this podcast I’m kind of re-learning my college education, here with Doctor Matt and it’s just been really cool and now I can speak the language a little bit better and hear things way better.

Matthew: True.

Jeremy: And it’s made a big difference. And you’re in your service, as well, just sitting down doing the exercises. I’m 40 years old. I’ve been doing this since I was about 15 and I still learn something new every day and that’s one of the more gratifying, cool things about it.

Matthew: And being solid in music theory, and yes, you’re right, it’s easy to see as a composer how I use theory. Playing in bands – this is something I’ve discovered, too – you and your band misunderstand music the less any of you are stabbing in dark for what you want to do, whether that is songwriting, whether that is doing your take on a cover that you all like, whether that is learning to play covers that you all like, the more each of you both internally understand how this music is working and externally can communicate it to each other, the more you can do that, the less stabbing in the dark you are, the less time it’s going to take to learn that cover, the less you’re going to struggle with sounding different from other bands, the less you’re going to struggle with finding your own voice. It’s subtle. It’s not a question of, “Well, I’m not going to be able to play unless I know what F sharp Lydian mode is.”

Christopher: Mm-hm.

Matthew: But if you know what F sharp Lydian mode is and you understand how that works then you can write songs that are in F sharp Lydian, you know, and stabbing in the dark is a great analogy to what we’re doing when we’re trying to figure out how to learn songs with limited ear training knowledge.

Jeremy: Oh, yeah, and ear training, definitely. I mean, there’s a world of difference between, “That was not the right note. That was not the right note, that was not the right note,” and going, “Oh, well he’s arpeggiating a minor chord, there.”

Christopher: I think that’s a lovely description of how music theory can empower you as a musician and it can help open up opportunities in your music-making that may be otherwise closed off. At the same time, I think a minute ago, Matthew, you described music theory before college as a kind of magical and overwhelming thing.

Matthew: Yes.

Christopher: And so, for our listeners who are in that position, maybe they’re pre-college or maybe they’re adults and they’ve never really studied the theory, for you guys at college and maybe how you think about teaching theory now, is there a trick to making it less intimidating and overwhelming? Is there a way of teaching theory that means it’s not, like, a big textbook that you need to plow through before you understand how to do anything?

Matthew: I think step one to accomplishing that goal is, don’t think of it, yourself, as a big textbook to plow through. I feel like a lot of people, even a lot of people who teach theory still treat it that way, still think of it in mind, “Well, these are the rules.”

Jeremy: Mm-hm. Yeah.

Matthew: And there’s a lot of rules and they’re complicated. Just the word, “music theory,” just the word, “theory” is enough to — yeah, it’s an —

Jeremy: It’s intimidating.

Matthew: Yeah. It can intimidate some people.

Jeremy: It sounds scientific.

Matthew: Yeah. So I think step one, for me, anyway, is to understand what I think music theory is and what I think music theory is, is the process of studying how music works so that we can understand why it does what it does. The word, “rule” is really not in my lexicon where music theory is concerned, not in a general sense.

Now, there’s — okay, if you’re specifically wanting to write a four-part choral harmony or something, you know, there are some rules you got to follow, because that’s what you’re wanting to do, but in a general term, you know, theory is not a set of rules, it’s basically looking at, “Well, here’s all this music that has come before us, you know, and this is what is going on in this music, and it makes this feel this way. We like it for these reasons. Why is that? ” You know, “How does it do that?” It’s more of a process of discovery and I think that if you understand that, it’s easier to communicate that to other people, you know. You know, I try very hard not to slam down a set of rules and say, “This is how you write music,” you know. What I try to do is say, “This is kind of the way music has worked up until now.” There are exceptions to everything…

Jeremy: Of course.

Matthew: … but, you know, this song makes you feel really sad, or this song, it feels like it is moving forward to a conclusion in a way that songs I write or whatever may not be doing that. Well, there is a music principle reason for that, you know, and I find that’s easier for people to deal with. It’s less intimidating to think, “Well, this is sort of like a secret thing I can discover,” than thinking, “Well, this is a whole lot of stuff that I have to learn before I can consider myself an educated musician.”

Christopher: Mm-hm. I think that definitely comes through on the Music Student 101 podcast. You guys talk about it in terms of understanding how music works and you often start from the idea in music and then work back to the rules rather than saying, “Here are the 17 things you need to know about figured bass and the Renaissance,” you know?

Matthew: Yeah, because does anybody want to hear that?

Jeremy: No.

Matthew: I mean, I don’t want to know the rules of figured bass and the Renaissance. I mean, I do, but, I don’t want to know. Yeah, ’cause that’s a great example of the exact kind of pedagogy that I think can intimidate, you know, not only people who are, you know, older and didn’t get a music degree but they’re passionate musicians, but also people who are trying to get a music degree now, you know, and are trying to learn that, saying, you know, “These are the rules of counterpoint,” or, you know, “Know parallel fifths,” and all this other stuff, and, you know, it can be intimidating for them. I think one of our original visions of this podcast was for anybody who is intimidated by this stuff to have, sort of, a, another tool, another resource that could sort of help them understand implying, in a sense, that we can help them be less intimidated.

I don’t know if we ever mentioned that as a specific goal, but. I hope it helps that I’m willing to, kind of, put myself out there as not really being all that brilliant from time to time. I’m willing to get things wrong and then we talk about why I got it wrong. It’s maybe a little more approachable. I’m hoping that helps out a little bit.

Christopher: It certainly does. It makes the — I think you play the part of the listener in a lot of situations and…

Matthew: I try. Thank you.

Christopher: …you ask the question that’s on everyone’s mind and that makes it so much easier, I think, for people to follow and understand and feel like they’re getting it.

Matthew: That’s what I go for, actually.

Jeremy: Yeah, and he’s far too modest, by the way. He’s much more knowledgeable than he necessarily lets on.

Matthew: Oh, go on. Seriously, go on.

Christopher: (Laughs) So…

Matthew: Nah, go ahead.

Christopher: …one other topic you covered on the show is music degrees and music careers and I know that part of your target audience is kind of that aspiring professional musician who is considering or partly going through a music degree at the moment, and I’d love to hear your perspective for a moment because we live in an incredible day and age for self-learning and internet resources and, in fact, your own podcast’s a perfect example of the amazing stuff that’s at our fingertips to learn things ourselves in the world of music. So, I’m just going to ask the blunt question. Is there a point to doing a music degree?

Matthew: Would you like to take that one?

Jeremy: Yeah, maybe I’ll take a stab. Um, heh, heh, are you going to edit the time it takes me to think about this? (Laughter) (Crosstalk) I just feel like if I didn’t get, if I didn’t end up in a school of music I certainly would not have been opened up to all these other things that I’m learning about in music, but I think that these things are now pretty accessible, but, again, thanks to podcasts like yours and this one. Um, where does it come in handy to have a degree? It almost seems like there’s a certain amount of — what do you call it — valid, valid —

Matthew: Vindication, or validation, or something.

Jeremy: — or, just, yeah, I mean, if you have a different — if you want to actually go into teaching music, or especially on the college level, then I think that’s absolutely necessary, you know?

Matthew: Oh, yeah. You’re not going to teach college without, but what are other places that you use your degree, if not teaching…

Jeremy: Um, you know…

Matthew: …other than just being a musician, a better, well-rounded, musician who can communicate better to other musicians and…

Jeremy: Yeah. For one thing, that — I think that’s extremely valuable. Being the musician who has a college degree versus being the one who bought an instrument and took some lessons, having the college degree means you went through the process of perfecting your aural training and your aural understanding to this level. It means you went through the process of, you know, reaching this level of music theory, reaching this level of instrument proficiency.

Matthew: Discipline.

Jeremy: Yeah. And…

Matthew: Discipline, for sure.

Jeremy: …discipline, and things, and that degree represents that, you know, and this is what, you know, I talk a lot about, you know, what separates people who want a degree from, you know, just lessons, is, there is a level of ability there and when you have that degree, you have that thing saying, “This person can do this.” It’s not necessarily that any of those things can not be accomplished without going to getting a degree. That’s — I don’t think that’s true. You can accomplish these things.

Matthew: Yeah.

Jeremy: Going to get that degree is something you want to do if you want to be a professional musician and you want to say to the world, “I have reached this level of proficiency and you should treat me as such,” when you’re, you know, booking gigs, when you’re hunting for jobs, you know, or looking to hire musicians, you know…

Matthew: Studio musicians…

Jeremy: Yes, absolutely.

Matthew: …need to be able to speak the language, I would imagine.

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah, because some of those studio people, you know, they want you in, they want you recorded, and they want you out. Time is money, you know?

Matthew: Mm-hm.

Jeremy: But it’s not as laid back as, you know, some things are, you know, like —

Matthew: Not to say there aren’t plenty of studio musicians who don’t know a lick of theory, you know?

Jeremy: That is true, yeah.

Matthew: Just do it by feel.

Jeremy: Yeah, but they can sight read.

Christopher: So, I think you’ve touched on something important, there, which is, you know, even in a case like being a studio musician or sitting in on a gig, even if no one is going to ask to see your certificate and they don’t think they care about the qualification, it is representative that you’ve put in the time, you’ve studied all of the core areas and you’ve reached a certain level.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Christopher: It’s kind of a shorthand for the level you’ve reached as a musician.

Jeremy: Yeah. They care about how good you are, right? And for a lot of people getting a degree is the fastest way to get good enough to be recognized by those people.

Christopher: Okay. So it sounds like if I put an imaginary 18-yea-old in front of you guys and they were passionate about music and they said, “I really want to do this for my life. I don’t know quite what job I want in music, but I want to be a professional musician. Should I go to college for music?” It sounds like both of you would say, “Yes. It’s a good idea.”

Matthew: My answer would be, “Yes.”

Jeremy: Yes.

Matthew: My answer would be, “Okay. Which college is best for you?”

Jeremy: Yeah.

Matthew: It would be a given that they need to go.

Jeremy: It was a great experience. It really was life-changing for me.

Matthew: Mm-hm.

Christopher: Okay. So let me give you a different imaginary person. If we take someone who’s maybe forty years old, they’ve always played guitar. They love playing. It’s their hobby. It’s their passion, but they’ve always felt really sheepish that they didn’t study theory, they didn’t go to college for music. They worry that they’re being held back because they don’t necessarily have the music history or music theory or composition skills. What can they do apart from turn back the clock and go to music college?

Jeremy: Hm. Well, there’s a great podcast. (Laughs) And, in all seriousness, we think about these people whom we’re podcasting. First of all, you know, my grandfather, who taught me to play guitar when I was small was not an educated musician, neither was either one of my grandmothers, you know, no one in my family. For a long time, my friends were not, you know, quote-end-quote, educated college musicians. I know more now, obviously, who are college musicians, but I’ll tell you this. If what you want is to have your life enriched by music, by playing music and listening to music, if what you want is to just enjoy this part of your life and get some good out of it for yourself, personally, and even for some other people around you, there is no reason to feel sheepish or inferior about that, in my opinion, okay, and that’s what I think about your podcast, because you seem to emphasize that, that it’s never too late to start learning music, you know? It’s never too late to get a better understanding.

And, actually, when we first started our podcast, we actually — I feel like we kind of really targeted more of the college level musician and then we decided we really need to branch out and make it more accessible to more people.

Matthew: Yeah.

Jeremy: So, we’re kind of hoping. And part of that effort was to make it more approachable, more kind of like you’re just talking to a couple of dudes.

Matthew: Yeah. We’ve really branched out. When we started we really were trying to say, “Well, this is how you’ll survive college theory,” but…

Jeremy: You’re right.

Matthew: …as we’ve gone in our audience has sort of given us a lot of good feedback. We’ve gotten to know our audience more and things. Yeah, we’ve really kind of moved over into that, into the exact kind of demographic you’re talking about, there, where people, you know, say, “Well, you know, I love playing music, you know, I don’t, you know, I don’t know as much as I’d like to about theory or anything,” and, yeah, we try to help them with that. Other than, you know, turning back the clock, you know, yeah. It’s never too late to start learning music.

Jeremy: Mm-hm.

Matthew: It’s, it really, really isn’t.

Christopher: Do you think it’s realistic that someone, you know, if they were considering doing night classes or maybe an online course with Berklee versus using free or paid resources online and kind of self-teaching, how realistic do you think it is to go it alone rather than following the college syllabus?

Matthew: That will all depend upon that person’s discipline.

Jeremy: Hm. Yeah.

Matthew: The hardest thing I find, and, you know, we’re kind of, I, this question is, sort of touches on, sort of, how I feel about online courses in general, you know, and online learning in general. What I find is that it is difficult, for me, at least, to stay disciplined about learning things to that level of coming back without at least a human contact person saying, you know, “Did you study today? Did you do your homework this week?”

Jeremy: Accountability.

Matthew: Accountability. Yeah. That’s a good word. Yeah. That accountability can be valuable. I definitely know people who don’t need, who are perfectly capable of holding themselves accountable.

Jeremy: Oh, I wish I was one of those.

Matthew: I wish I was one of those people, too. So, but, yeah, you know, even if you do some online courses, just like we’re saying, that accountability, that, you know, “Well, this is where you should be at week one, week two, week three,” can be very, very helpful in structuring what you, you know. But, it’s all what you want, you know. If you just want to learn this because it’s something that is, you feel enriched by knowing and it helps, this understanding is something that is fun for you to have and there is not really a time limit on that, then, you know, there’s, you know, the internet is a great place. Go out there and find what you can find and learn what you can learn.

Jeremy: And by sitting down and doing it, I promise you that you’ll have enough passion about this that you can carry yourself. You don’t have to tell, you don’t, I don’t have to have someone say, “Get on Musical U and learn your pitches.”

Matthew: Yeah. Right.

Jeremy: I’m going to situation down and do that because that’s what I’m in the mood for, you know?

Matthew: Yeah. Absolutely. If I knew I would get an F by not doing that one week, I would probably be way further along.

Christopher: Yeah. It’s a tricky one. I — obviously, I have quite a personal connection with this world of online music courses and I’ve given a lot of thought to why they work or don’t work and I think I absolutely agree with you that often it’s not the quality of the material that matters all that much. There’s a lot of good quality free stuff out there, but pulling it together in a cohesive way and putting yourself on a step-by-step course for yourself, even if it’s, you know, very informal a course that you know is moving towards your goal and having some kind of support and guidance so that when you go off track or you missed a week someone is there to get you back on track.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Christopher: I think it’s a huge deal.

Matthew: And guidance can be important, because everybody learns differently. Yeah. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, it can be almost impossible to put together an online course or a college course or any kind of course that just by way of its brilliant construction is going to be pedagogically perfect for everybody. So having that person that you can go up to or email or anything to say, “I have a question about this. I have a — you know, I’m so confused about this,” and getting that sort of personal feedback can be really, really invaluable.

Jeremy: I think that’s what your community kind of provides, you know? I think before the term, “snowflake,” became — a beautiful thing like snowflake — became such a derogatory term and it actually really kind of encompassed what I think about musicians. They’re all, everyone is so different and there’s not one course that can tailor to everybody’s needs, but you guys have a course where people can kind of talk back and forth and they can talk to you and you talk to them and, kind of, all figure out this thing, together, you know? I think that really makes a big difference.

Matthew: That’s a wonderful resource. It really is.

Christopher: Thank you. Well, that’s the hope, really, is that the community and the team being in there. I mean, it’s not the end of the world if you get stuck or you get confused or you get overwhelmed. You have that support system in place, but at the same time, it’s a work in progress, and I think we’re all still figuring out the right balance for online learning in terms of accountability and support and structure versus a bit more free-form, and, you know, particularly for the adult hobbyist, they don’t necessarily want someone badgering them every day making sure they’ve done their practice. At the same time, some of us need a bit of accountability to make progress.

Jeremy: My students don’t want people badgering them.

Matthew: What was that last part? I’m sorry.

Christopher: So, I was just saying, some of us need that accountability to really make progress, so, yeah, it’s a balance we need to find, I think. So, you guys started out with a slightly similar musical background. You both went to college and studied music, but you’ve taken your careers in quite different trajectories and I think that’s part of what makes the show so perfect, is one of you is coming from a more academic angle and the other from a more practical performance angle and I’d love to hear about how music theory and ear skills and ear training have factored into those quite different trajectories, and maybe Jeremy you could go first.

Jeremy: Sure. Um, well, the obvious things that you think about in music in the ear training is just being able to recognize chords and melodies and scales and stuff like that and being able to replicate things faster or repeat them or do them faster and come up with your own things, where it’s, kind of, bleeds over into my other line of work, which is location sound recording. Okay, so for those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s kind of, like, you see a T.V. show being shot. There’s the guy with the microphone, there’s the guy with the mixer, there’s a sound person and every person talking has a wireless microphone hidden in their clothes. I’m the guy that mixes it all, and when we’re, kind of, conducting interviews I can use my knowledge of frequencies.

For example, the human voice. There’s a frequency range that the human occupies. So, if you’ve got, like, a really low rumbly air conditioner over here, I don’t have to stop the whole shoot and be like, “Okay, guys, we’ve got to do something about this air conditioner.” I know that the editor can roll off a certain number of low frequencies. I can use my own judgment based on what I’m hearing to be more effective and show people that I can do a really good job, you know, and also, I think, just, the whole, you know, identifying frequencies for mixing live sound, hearing a feedback, hearing some, like, a note ring on feedback, you can kind of be, like, “Oh. I know what that is. Hey, take your, you know — let’s EQ this frequency out,” you know?
That’s where it’s become kind of a little more practical to me as far as ear training in my line of work. Does that make sense?

Christopher: Hm. It does, and was that something that came up during your college time, or something you learned after?

Jeremy: Yeah. My degree was actually music tech, so that would have put me in a recording studio, you know, cracking bands and musicians and stuff, and somehow I ended up taking that out into the field. Long story of how I arrived at that, but that, definitely, my music tech degree, lent itself to that.

Christopher: Hm, and how much do you feel you have been able to bridge those two worlds of, kind of, the audio ear training and ear skills with the more musical ear skills?

Jeremy: I think it just happens naturally. It just seems to, they just seem to work together. I’m not sure how to describe exactly how that —

Christopher: I ask partly because I think in our own material, we’ve always put quite a hard divide there and so we talk to the musicians about, you know, know certain chords and scales and so on, and then we talk to the audio engineer guys about frequencies and mixing and production and I’m always conscious that there is at least some overlap, obviously, between pitch and frequency. There’s comparisons that you can make, but also just in the sense of critical listening and active listening and being able to kind of dissect a sound by ear and a way that the lay person is not really family with.

Jeremy: Oh. That’s a big part of it, actually. Um, another thing, when it comes to editorial — and I’m listening as an editor, I’m always — everything I’m listening to — again, I don’t really know how that goes with, coincides with music, other than being a critical listener. When you’re recording music, you’re really putting it under a microscope and you’re listening for background noises and things that could kind of sully the overall sound. I mean, that’s kind of come in handy.

Christopher: Hm.

Jeremy: Yeah. As far as in music.

Matthew: There is an entire art form called, “electronic music composition” in which, you know, people create musical pieces that generally don’t use musical notes, at all. They use sampled sounds and digital audio recordings, you know, and it’s probably something that we should get into, at some point.

Jeremy: Oh, 20th century.

Matthew: Yeah, man. It’s coming.

Jeremy: Yeah. 21st century.

Matthew: But, yeah, so, it — I’ve feel like Jeremy’s right. I feel like it’s the same skill, you know, listening to a pitch or listening to a frequency, you know, it’s really just a difference of semantics.

Jeremy: A lot of people hear, very few are listening when it comes to just background sounds and sounds and, really, the way people talk and everything you hear, really.

Matthew: Yeah. And that same sentence could be said about listening to pieces of music. Many people hear, very few people listen.

Jeremy: Mm-hm. It’s not a bad thing. Just is what it is.

Christopher: So, Matthew, how would you say ear training and music theory have shaped the composer you’ve become, or, how have you drawn on those over the years to develop your skills as a composer?

Matthew: This probably won’t come as a surprise to you, but I approach composition fairly intellectually compared to some composers, not so much compared to others, but my theory is, it is how I have, sort of, shaped my overall voice over the years, so I will, you know, I will have musical ideas that I think I can make a piece out of, and from one piece of music to the next those piece, those ideas will be completely different and can come from any number of places, but when you look at the style I compose in as a whole, or the, sort of, my personal voice as a whole, this is defined very much not only by music theory in general, but by the specific music theories that I happen to be interested in at this point of my life or at the next point of my life and things like that.

I kind of, I tend to really understand music through theory. I really, really do. And when I go to create music that doesn’t exist, whether I’m consciously doing this or not, the first thing I think is, what kind of theory, what is the theory behind this, you know, whether this is a, you know, a piece of tonal harmony or, you know, a piece that is polytonal or pandiatonic or, you know, I could solicit a lot of words here, but, I’m approaching theory from the very beginning, and then ear training is how I know whether I like what I’m doing or not.

Jeremy: Ahh.

Matthew: Without that ear training, you know, I feel like I probably would go, “Okay, well, those are notes, I guess. There’s are a lot of notes. I guess this is a composition,” but it is my ear training that allows me to say, “Well” —

Jeremy: “Why do I appreciate that?”

Matthew: — yeah. “Why do I appreciate that? These are, these are the notes that are doing the thing that I want,” you know, or, “These are not the notes that are doing the thing that I want and I need different ones,” so. So yeah, it, really, my compositions are formed by my theory in ways that just, they’re just so many and so integral that it’s really almost hard to separate the two.

Christopher: Hm. I think you described that beautifully. So you guys are the cohosts of a very popular podcast, “Music Student, 101” that we’ve mentioned a couple of times. It’s been running for about a year and a half, I believe, and you have a very lovely, relaxed style presenting the show, and, you know, it’s a pleasure to listen to. You feel like you’re just hanging out with a couple of guys, talking about music theory, but —

Jeremy: We really are. That’s really what we’re doing.

Christopher: Well, at the same time, I know firsthand how much effort goes in to making a podcast episode, so I’d love to ask you guys, you know, what motivated you to go to such lengths to create such a wonderful resource for people?

Matthew: It was all Jeremy’s idea. He got me about four beers…

Jeremy: (Laughs)

Matthew: …in, and then, you know, said, “Why don’t you come to a podcast?”

Jeremy: He said yes, and that was it. I was like, “Hey, you said yes after those four beers.”

Matthew: Yeah.

Jeremy: Um, no, it does, it does take a lot, man. It really does, and I think, just, for me, it was almost a personal thing for me, because there was just nothing out there, so I was just going to create it. There was nothing out there that did what I required, that had, that, there was no music podcast out there that gave what I required, you know, and I was like, “Well, I guess I’m gonna have to do it myself,” you know, so now I’m kind of sitting here learning more about theory and in the meantime, you know, sharing that with other people from my perspective. And like you said, I try to ask questions that I think most normal people would try and ask, you know? So.

Matthew: I feel like I really believe in what it is that we have been trying to do, you know, to give a resource to people who can’t walk into a college music classroom and learn this stuff, you know. I am big on education. I believe in education as a right, you know, I feel like people who wan to know things ought to be able to learn those things and so, to me, I had a lot of, I really believed in, sort of, the mission of the thing as Jeremy described it to me, you know, after I had had about beer three, but I really believed in it and I thought this was something that was really good to do, and it’s been fun, you know? I get to, I tell people my job basically consists of me running my mouth about things that I know about and, you know, it’s the greatest job in the world in a lot of ways and this is just another extension of it, to me.

Christopher: Very cool. So, I’m sure everyone listening is super curious at this point to go and listen to your show and we’ll have a direct link in the show notes where you can go to musicstudent101.com. If someone is diving in, you’ve got — I didn’t count, but at least 40 episodes, so far, maybe more.

Matthew: We’re on 33 now, actually.

Jeremy: 33.

Christopher: 33. Okay. And so, if someone is wanting to dive in, would you recommend starting with the most recent, starting in the beginning? What kinds of things can they find in that archive of the episodes and where should they begin?

Matthew: I would say, definitely start at the beginning…

Jeremy: Yeah.

Matthew: …and if some of the early ones are things where you can think, “Okay. Well, I already know this stuff,” you know, go ahead and skip forward. I think — and we’re just now really kind of getting to this point where we are, we’re talking about things now that are going to be hard to understand unless you had a good grip on what we were talking about a few episodes ago.

Jeremy: It’s definitely a sequence.

Matthew: Yeah. Yeah. And so, I would say, start at the beginning. If the beginning, beginning, beginning is too simple for you then go ahead and skip ahead a little bit until you get to that place where you feel like it’s challenging enough.

Jeremy: Yeah. The sequence we’re using is kind of loosely based on the sequence that we were put through in school and the one that Matt is teaching, currently. He’s teaching theory at the university and so, that’s kind of the sequence we use. At the same time, we try and pepper in some little special topics things to kind of, you know, give the people’s minds a break from all the crazy theory and also just to kind of keep things interesting and cover other topics that are music-related. Ultimately, we want to cover as many music topics as necessary, but I feel like giving a base knowledge of theory from the get-go will make people understand more so what we’re talking about when it comes to history, when it comes to theory, even ear training and…

Matthew: To being a musician.

Jeremy: …being a musician.

Matthew: Yeah.

Jeremy: Musicality. Yeah. It’s, it is really been gratifying to me, personally to get the feedback on the theory aspect of our podcast. I was genuinely afraid that this would just bore people to death…

Matthew: Mm-hm.

Jeremy: …you know, and, but it is actually, kind of, the most popular aspect of what we do and that’s been extremely gratifying.

Matthew: Mm-hm.

Jeremy: But, and it will definitely help you understand everything else, you know. We want to talk about the history of music a little bit in the future, more, you know. We’re just now dipping our toe into that.

Matthew: Yeah. It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be fun.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, as you guys know, we don’t straight-up teach theory at Musical U. We kind of teach a few core concepts you need to get the ear skills and the inner skills, but it means I’m always in need of great theory resources to recommend to people, and I am now constantly recommending your show to anyone who feels like they need to brush up on music theory and it is also one of my favorite podcasts, genuinely. I love listening, whether it’s a recap of something I feel I know or something actually quite new to me. I a regular listener, and for anyone listening to this interview, please head on over to musicstudent101.com and give a listen. I guarantee you will enjoy the show and you’re going to learn a huge amount.

Thank you very much again, Matthew and Jeremy, for coming on the show today.

Jeremy: Thank you, Chris.

Matthew: Thank you so much for having us.

Jeremy: The pleasure was all ours.

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The post Why and How to Learn Theory, with Matthew Scott Phillips and Jeremy Burns appeared first on Musical U.

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What is the secret to success in music? Musical U sat down with Dave Bainbridge to discuss his fascinating musical career and how he has leveraged relationships and learning experiences to continue to grow as a musician. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/making-music-film-friends-spirit-dave-bainbridge/

Brian from Zombie Guitar here! Firstly, I wanted to say a thank you to Adam, Musical U’s Communications Manager, who has given me the opportunity to do a guest post for Musical U.

The topic of this lesson is beginning modal improvisation. This lesson is going to be divided into three parts:

• Part One: What the goal of using a mode, as opposed to just playing within a key?
• Part Two: Fretboard applications of modes. (We’re going to take a look at the minor pentatonic scale, and how to add notes to it in order to essentially create either the Aeolian mode or the Dorian mode.)
• Part Three: The theory behind modes and when to use them

So with that said, let’s get started:

Part 1: What’s in a Mode?

The number one most important thing that I want you to understand about modal improvisation is that modes are sounds. Modes have a specific sound that they produce, a specific feeling that is created with the music written in a particular mode. So the easiest way to understand this, even if you don’t know anything about modes at all, is to simply compare a major key to a minor key. These are, in fact, both modes! A major key is also known as the Ionian mode, and a minor key is also known as the Aeolian mode.

So if you take a piece of music and you write it within a major key and then ask the lead guitar player to solo, they would be soloing in the major scale as their improvisational framework. That piece of music would be written in the Ionian mode and it would sound happy, bright, and cheery. In other words, it would sound like a piece of music that is written in a major key – otherwise known as the Ionian mode!

A similar situation happens with minor keys. If you write a piece of music in a minor key, your lead guitar player’s improvisational framework would be the minor scale. That piece of music would have a significantly different sound from the major song – it would sound darker, sadder, and more blues-y.

7 Modes, 7 Sounds

It’s very, very obvious that the Ionian mode and the Aeolian mode sound significantly different from one another. If you can understand that concept, you already understand that modes have their own unique sound, with the Ionian and Aeolian being the most instantly recognizable.

Modes aren’t limited to just these two. Going beyond the simple Ionian and Aeolian modes, you still have five more to work with: Dorian mode, Phrygian mode, Lydian mode, Mixolydian mode, and Locrian mode.

Starting with Aeolian and Dorian

This means you have five other completely unique sounds from which a piece of music can be constructed, and you can use one particular mode as your scale or your improvisational framework to solo in. You can then write that piece of music in that particular mode, and it will take on a completely different sound from the Ionian and Aeolian modes.

You’re not necessarily modal playing when you’re playing in a major key or a minor key (respectively Ionian and Aeolian). You can call it modal playing, but for the purpose of the rest of this lesson, we’re going to look at the other modes: Dorian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Phrygian, and Locrian, as we can say that these are truly modal playing.

For this introductory lesson, I’ll be focussing on the Aeolian and Dorian modes, which are fairly straightforward to derive and understand.

If you refer to the instructional video, there were two modal improvisation examples at the beginning of the video. The first one was in A Dorian, and the second one was in A Aeolian. You’ll notice that they sounded significantly different from one another. While they shared the same root (A), they had uniquely different sounds. But the funny thing here is that the only difference between the Aeolian mode and the Dorian mode is one single note. Let’s look closer at that.

Part 2: Modes and the Minor Pentatonic on the Fretboard

We’ll do this by comparing the minor pentatonic scale to modes.

Many of you are likely familiar with the minor pentatonic scale. You have five notes before you repeat the starting note again. In order to turn the minor pentatonic scale into the natural minor scale, you add two notes.

The minor pentatonic scale simply uses five of the seven notes of the natural minor scale, otherwise known as the Aeolian mode. If you wanted to turn the Aeolian mode into the Dorian mode, the only difference is a single note! If you raise the sixth note of the natural minor scale (the Aeolian mode) by one half-step, the result is the Dorian mode.

There may only be a one note difference, but this change produces a significant difference in the sound. If you want to improvise in either of these modes, the resulting solos will also sound quite different from one another.

Though the demos at the beginning of the instructional video only show the modes using a single position, you can expand this concept to span the entire fretboard. Here’s a still from the video where you see your A minor pentatonic scale spanned across the entire neck of the guitar, where all the white dots indicate every instance of the note “A” on the guitar:

If you add your two notes to each of these positions and all the octaves on the neck of the guitar, the result is the A natural minor scale, otherwise known as the A Aeolian mode. In other words, if you hit nothing but these notes and you’re playing within this scale going up and down the neck of the guitar, the result is the A Aeolian mode.

You can then go ahead and alter that one note every sixth degree, and the result is A Dorian mode.

Part 3: The Mechanics of Modes

Now, let’s take a peek behind the curtain and look at some theory.

Before we dive in, one thing to keep in mind is that sometimes, you can break the rules and even though it’s not theoretically correct it may still be the best choice, so always let your ear be the guide. As an example, if you decide that you want to play the Dorian mode as your improvisational framework over the top of something which technically should not use the Dorian mode but you think it sounds good, go ahead and do it! If it sounds good to the ear, it’s great.

However, to give you a starting point, let’s look at some modal “rules”.

As a general rule of thumb, the more chords there are in a chord progression, the less likely it is to be modal, and the more likely it is to be in a major or minor key.

Modes typically work best over one, two, or maybe three chords, but once you start getting into anything more than three chords you’re probably not playing in a mode, but in a key.

Modes vs. Keys

Essentially the easiest way to explain this is by taking a look at the circle of fifths.

The circle of fifths conveniently groups all of the chords for each key in groupings of six, like so:

The keys of C major and A minor are relative to one another. Looking at the keys immediately clockwise and counterclockwise, your six diatonic chords are F, C, G, Dm, Am, and Em. The keys of G major and E minor are also relative to one another, and your six diatonic chords would be C, G, D, Am, Em, and Bm. Continuing further clockwise around the circle, the keys of D major and B minor are relative as well, with diatonic chords of G, D, A, Em, Bm, and F#m.

You can write pieces of music that use chords all within a single key. The more chords in a single key that you use, the more likely the song is going to be either major or minor.

The Aeolian mode and Dorian mode are both minor modes. This means they work best over single minor chords or over minor progressions. Again: the more chords you introduce into the progression, the more likely it is to be key-based and therefore, trying to apply a mode over the entire progression as your improvisational framework may not be the best course of action. In other words, the less chords there are, the more of a chance that a mode is going to work over the progression.

Soloing with Modes

The progressions that I was using to solo over in the beginning of the video tutorial were in minor keys. For example, for the Aeolian mode, I was soloing over the progression Am-G-F-G-Am. Then, when I was soloing with the A Dorian mode, it was over a two-chord progression that repeated: the Am chord to the D chord.

So, how did I know to use the Dorian mode over the Am-G-F-G-Am progression and the Aeolian mode over the Am-D progression? You could use your ear and see which one sounds better to you, but I like to actually analyze the chords and see what key they’re in and see where they fall within the diatonic chords for each key. And the easiest way to do that is to take a look back at the circle of fifths.

Soloing with Aeolian

I like to take a look and see what the chords are that I’m soloing over are. When I was soloing over the chord progression Am-G-F-G-Am, all those chords fell right into the grouping of six with the A minor at the center:

Because this grouping contained all the chords in the progression, it was pretty obvious that A minor (or A Aeolian mode) was the scale to use.

When examining minor chords in this way, the chord that falls right on the inner circle right in the center position of the grouping of six is known as the vi (minor) chord. For example, if you’re in the key of G major, look at the inner circle to see that the vi chord is Em. If you’re in the key of B, your vi (minor) chord is F#m.

When the vi (minor) chord is present along with some of the other chords within its grouping of six, you can be fairly certain the piece of music is in a minor key and you should be using the Aeolian mode. If the vi (minor) chord is not present but another minor chord is present within the grouping of six, along with some other chords in there, there’s a good chance that modal playing will start to come into play.

Soloing with Dorian

I was using the Dorian mode to solo over the two-chord progression. The ii (minor) chord within this grouping of six always falls on the inner circle in the counterclockwise direction. So, if that ii (minor) chord is present along with some other chords in the grouping of six but the vi (minor) chord is not present, that’s a good indication that the Dorian mode would apply. So, for the first example, we had A minor, we had F major, and we had G major – and these chords were right in that grouping of six.

A minor right in that center position, the vi (minor) chord was present along with some other chords in the grouping of six. A Aeolian mode was the mode to use.

In the second example, we have only two chords: the D major chord, and the A minor chord. Find the grouping of six where both chords are present.

Here, the key of G is in the center, and the inner circle counterclockwise position is the ii (minor) chord. The Am chord falls onto this position. We’re in this other grouping of six now, which contains the ii (minor) chord plus another chord. In this situation, you can assume that the Dorian mode is the perfect choice, and as we heard, it sounded great over this two-chord progression.

Soloing Smart

You can always analyze things in this manner. You can take a look at the chords that are being played by the rhythm section and ask yourself, “Okay. Here’s a grouping of six chords.  Where are these chords coming from? Is the vi (minor) chord present?” If yes, that’s a good indication that the Aeolian mode is your best bet. If you look at a grouping of six and the vi (minor) chord is not present but the ii (minor) chord is (in the inner circle counter-clockwise position), along with some other chords within that grouping of six, it’s a safe assumption to say that the Dorian mode would apply.

Brian is the creator of the Zombie Guitar and the Zombie Guitar Improv Course, which teaches players how to visualize and approach the fretboard, and apply music theory to the guitar to create incredible licks, phrases, and solos. A guitarist with over 24 years of playing under his belt, Brian has been the lead guitarist of Philadelphia-based cover band Fish Out of Water for the last 10 years.

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Need some inspiration for your songwriting goals? Songwriters take years to perfect their art, and it can be frustrating along the way. We hope that this quotes encourage you to continuing growing as a songwriter https://www.musical-u.com/learn/inspiring-songwriting-quotes/