Inside the Book: How to play expressively

I want to share with you a sneak peek into one of the 18 chapters of our forthcoming musicality book and the framework which can help you to play more expressively.

So when I opened the reboot of the show a couple of weeks ago, I said we’d be doing some kind of sneak peek stuff into our forthcoming musicality book, and this is the first of those episodes, we’re going to call them “Inside the book”, and the focus today is going to be on the chapter on Expression and I’m going to share some ideas and a framework you can use to start learning to play more expressively, which is often a really missing piece for people. They know they want to play with more expression, but they have no idea how to actually do that and how to make it happen in a natural way.

So I’m excited to share with that with you today. And we’ll be doing it in a way that also explains a little bit of the backstory of the book. So that should be really interesting.

I do want to say before we dive in, we had some really fantastic feedback and comments on yesterday’s episode, the “zombie cowbell” episode, and I just wanted to call out one of them in particular. This was on YouTube and it’s a hard name to pronounce, but I’ll do my best, @melfhlzahlpd, great username, posted to say “my theory is to buy the best sounding, most playable instrument you can afford even as a beginner, it’s more motivating to play if you can make a beautiful sound.”

Wholeheartedly agree! Yeah, that’s something I actually should have spent a bit more time on. Maybe I think I said in passing, you know, “maybe it’s a new instrument”.

And that’s definitely been true for me personally. And I know a lot of our members. When you buy that new model or you pick up a second instrument for the first time, that joy of just playing even a single note, like this guitar, my current guitar, I bought it because I loved the sound of it. And that digital keyboard behind me, digital piano behind me. Likewise, for the first week after I bought that piano, I would sit down and I would literally just play a C major 7th chord and I would go “aaaah!”

So absolutely, the sound. And I think another point being made there was if you can stretch your budget a little to buy a better, easier to play instrument, that actually does you a favor rather than kind of scrimping and buying the budget version because you’re not quite committed yet.

Totally agree. I always recommend, you know, investing in a good instrument to begin with.

And if you choose your instrument, you know, based on aesthetics, like we said yesterday, or the sound, or even because, like, your musical idol plays that model, those are all legit reasons! Let’s not be too dismissive.

And as long as it is a good, well made instrument, you can absolutely indulge the part of you that just wants to light up with that particular instrument. Awesome. So thank you for that comment, @melfhlzahlpd. And please do keep all the comments coming in.

So like I said, today we’re going to be diving into a chapter, chapter 17, I think, from our forthcoming musicality book. Just to say, if you haven’t heard about this book, I’ll share a little bit now in a moment.

But we now have an early interest list set up. So if you go to musicalitybook.com, that’s where you can sign up to get the latest updates, to get exclusive bonuses. I think we’re actually going to probably give away the first chapter or two for free as kind of a preview and taster of the book. And so that’s not quite set up yet, but if you go now to musicalitybook.com and register, we’ll make sure you also get that when we add it to that page in future.

So where did this book come from?

If you haven’t heard about it already, this has been codenamed “the missing manual”. And that’s become a slightly ironic name because as I’ll talk about today, it has been delayed a lot more than I ever would have believed! And so it has been missing, in a sense.

But we named it that because this really is the book that every musician, every music learner should have been handed on day one of learning music.

This is packed with basically everything we’ve learned over 15 years about developing your musicality, about unlocking your natural talent for music. And, you know, I use those words with a bit of a tongue in cheek, but it’s all of our frameworks, all of our methodologies, for everything from improvising and playing by ear to jamming and performing and singing and rhythm.

We’ve packed it all into one book, and the idea is, this can be like your musicality bible. And I have been so passionate about this project, and we’ve poured so much into it. It’s going to be phenomenal when it appears.

But as I’ll explain in a moment, it has been an epic project beyond my expectation. So what I want to do today is share kind of a before and after for one chapter in particular, which needed a heavy rewrite. So this is our chapter on Expression, and I want to do that for two reasons.

A, to give you something clear and concrete that you can take away and run with. So I’m going to show you the framework you can use to experiment with expression and figure out what does it mean to play expressively.

And B, to give you kind of a behind the scenes peek at why this book has proven to be such an epic project.

So, for context, we expected to ship this last year. We announced it, and actually some people got it as a bonus with membership. We said, we’ll ship you the book as soon as it appears. And just to say, if you’re one of those people, thank you for your patience. I apologize for the delay. You are still absolutely entitled to your free copy. As soon as it ships, you’ll be first in line.

But we, it’s funny, we initially hit kind of practical problems with shipping it. So this was my preview copy. Like, we once we had a first draft of all the material, I had this shipped to me as kind of a preview to get a sense of how thick it would be and what it would be like.

And it seemed like we were on pace to ship it – not quite as planned, but really close to the original shipping date. And then we hit, like, fulfillment, logistical issues, and that actually was really frustrating at the time. But it proved to be a godsend. Because as I sat on that rough draft two things became clear.

Number one, we have extremely high standards at Musical U for all of our material, and I don’t want this to sound too pretentious and grandiose, but I want this to be a book that lasts 100 years. Like, the stuff packed into this is timeless, and it’s going to be as true 100 years from now as it is today. But we need to make sure it’s a book worthy of being in print for 100 years.

So we originally thought it would be quite a quick project. So not sloppy and half assed, but rapid. Because we have 15 years of experience, all of our frameworks are proven, they are well defined. We know how to explain things in a way that makes sense, and we have this vast amount of written material on all of these topics.

And so the idea was we will kind of package it up in a book form and be ready to go. And what gradually became clear was that just getting the right information in there wasn’t going to be enough.

And what I shared today from the expression chapter, I think will make clear what I mean. It really needs to stand alone and flow well. And we also had all of this new insight coming in from Next Level coaching that we wanted to incorporate too.

So, you know, something we talk about at Musical U is avoiding perfectionism, and I’m pretty good at that. I’m definitely in the camp of “recovering perfectionists”! But still, there’s been a lot of writing and rewriting and redrafting to go through, and so it’s in a good shape now. The whole of part – it’s in three parts, I’ll show you in a sec, the whole of part one is pretty much ready to go. I think we actually do need to now retrofit a little bit of what we just shared in the “Your Musical Core” training from last Saturday. There’s a new section needed there, but for the most part, part one is done. We’ve had early readers read it, give feedback. We revised it. It’s good to go.

Part two is about to get that early reader feedback, so it’s pretty much there. And then part three is still a little bit underway. And chapter 17 that I’ll share on Expression is part of that part three, but we’re nearly there.

So there’s been a lot of that kind of heavy lifting that we hadn’t anticipated. But the second reason is even just in terms of packaging it up in the right way and making it flow well as a book.

On top of that, what really surprised me, to be honest, was how much more diligent and precise we needed to be in explaining everything. And this chapter on expression is the perfect example where, you know, if you look at our Musical U membership material and our courses, like, all of our material works in itself, and it’s all compatible with each other.

And so for our average member, it all makes sense. It all works. They can learn all of the things. But when it’s all in one, in one book, I hadn’t anticipated how much more everything needs to link together perfectly.

So let’s dive in, and I think that will become clear.

Just to set the context, this is the table of contents for the Musicality book. So there’s an introduction.

Then part one is all of our foundational skills. It’s the real fundamentals that run through everything. So we open with mindset. We talk about musicality. What is musicality, what does it mean? And your personal interpretation of that word and that theme. And then we cover four core skills, four foundational skills that then are used throughout the rest of the book to make everything more effective.

So the first is audiation. So, imagining hearing music in your mind in a really vivid and detailed way, singing, and specifically singing for musicality. So whether you want to be a singer or not, how do you use your voice, your innate first instrument, to develop your musicality? Active listening, how do you decipher and dissect and understand all of the layers and aspects of the music you hear. And then practice, and super learning in particular, how do we get ten times the results from the same amount of practice time? And so that’s really setting a firm foundation for everything that follows.

In part two, we cover the building blocks of your instinct for music. So we open talking about ear training and the traditional methods and why they’re not so effective and what can be done better.

And then a section on relative pitch. So the relationships between notes. And we introduced three building blocks for your relative pitch, solfa, intervals and chord progressions.

And then we move on to the rhythmic side of things and have a few chapters on understanding rhythms by ear, having the instinct for music, improving your sense of rhythm and all that good stuff. So that’s kind of all the core skills of listening in particular.

And then in part three, we move on to what do you actually do with all of that? So this is kind of the application of all of those core skills. We talk about improvisation, we talk about playing by earth songwriting. What we’ll be looking at today, expression, how do you play expressively and put emotion into your music. And how do you put on a compelling performance, and how do you prepare for a performance in a way that makes it work just as well as everything did in the practice room?

So you can see there’s a lot of ground to cover in this book! I initially thought it would be kind of 200 to 300 pages. As it stands, it’s more like 400 to 500, depending on what we do with the typography and font and page size and so on. So it’s going to be a hefty tome! It’s exciting.

So that’s the overview of, just so you know what’s in the book. But then what I want to share with you is the Expression chapter, or rather, like, what we’ve been up to on the Expression chapter.

And I was just working on this in the last couple of weeks, is why it’s front of mind, but I think I’ll just read the introduction. It’s not a very long intro, but that’ll kind of set the scene for what I want to share with you in terms of how do you learn to play more expressively?

So we open the chapter with a fantastic quote from Beethoven: “To play a wrong note is insignificant. To play without passion is inexcusable.” I love that. And then you’ll see one of a handful of fixme’s still remaining in the book, where we know we need to come back and put something in or fix something.

We need some quote from someone modern. I’ve been trying to be careful throughout the book that when we have some ancient wisdom, we also have some more recent example, and we’re going to source just the right quote there from, you know, someone like Jacob Collier or Victor Wooten or someone who really exemplifies musicality and can, I’m sure, has said something amazing about expression.

So:

Think back to what first inspired you to pick up an instrument or open your mouth to sing. I’m guessing it wasn’t a desire for dry, robotic music note production. More likely, it was the emotion of music and a deep desire to express your own emotions through the music that you love.

Sadly, many of us wind up sat with our instrument in hand, pressing the buttons, and even if the right notes come out, where’s that feeling? Have you ever been told by a teacher or a well meaning friend to play with more expression or maybe you’ve commented on a musician playing so expressively. What does that actually mean? And why hasn’t anyone taught us how to do it? We watch and listen to our musical heroes. We see and hear how they embody the music, reach into our hearts, touching us deeply.

Perhaps you’ve had moments where you felt the music moving like that through you and wondered, where did that come from? And how can I do it again? We understand what playing expressively means in terms of its effect and impact on the audience. We know instinctively when we hear or play music with great expression compared with a dry, lifeless performance. But what is it that actually constitutes playing with expression? And is it something you can learn to do? If you’ve read this far in the book, you’ll appreciate by now that at Musical U, we’re never satisfied with answers like “it just happens!”, “nobody really knows!”, or “it’s just a gift!”. When it comes to music, there is always an explanation if we have the courage and determination to seek it out.

And fortunately, musical expression is no exception. In our H4 Model of Complete Musicality, this represents a large part of the Heart component. How do you go from operating an instrument to feeling like the music is flowing out from inside you through your instrument? In the next chapter, we’ll cover another big part of it, how to connect more deeply with your instrument, the music, other musicians, and your audience.

In this chapter, we’ll introduce a way of thinking about playing expressively, which transforms it from a mysterious abstract “You’ve got it, or you don’t” phenomenon into something clear, concrete, and practical. You’ll learn to expand your musicality through playing each and every note with intentional musical expression, and to do so in a way which lets you intuitively infuse your music with the emotions you feel in inside.

So that’s the intro to the Expression chapter. And I was reminded as I read through that I should just give a little context for where the material came from. So this chapter is based on a Dip from The Fountain. So The Fountain is the continuation of our Living Music program, and a Dip is a two-week kind of mini-course inside there, and we have one called “Emotion and Expression”.

And like I said before, you know, that hangs together really well. The people who’ve gone through it loved it. It helped them play with more expression. And in a sense, it was done. It was good, it works. But as we’ll see in a moment in this context in the book, it needed another look.

And I also wanted to make very clear this book is kind of “by me” in the sense that I am the voice, I am the author. It is me who’s wording everything. But absolutely not a solo endeavor! And it really is the Musical U team over the last 15 years that have come up with refined, developed, and written a lot of the material the book is based on. So particular shout-out to Andrew Bishko, our head educator, who created that Emotion And Expression Dip that this chapter was then based on.

And, yeah, I just want to make sure I’m always giving suitable shout-outs, because you don’t have the Acknowledgments page in the book that will give enormous credit to everyone in the Musical U team when the thing is in print.

So that was the intro to the chapter. So far, so good. And what the original outline looked like was the chapter is divided into two parts.

The first is “outside in”. And that’s about, you know, creating music outside and then discovering what emotions that creates in you, so kind of expressing and then coming to the emotion. And then part two is the reverse. It’s, how do I get that emotion from inside me out, through these tools of expression?

And so that’s the structure of the chapter, and it was really part one that was challenging once we came to the context of the book. And again, so, in the context of the Musical U, membership training – perfectly fine. This outline worked great.

So it took the approach that every note in music can be seen as having:

– Timbre. So the sound, the texture, the quality of the sound of the note.
-Dynamics or volume: how volume changes over time.
– Articulation: How are you adjusting the start and end of each note with things like tonguing technique or vibrato on guitar? Or, you know, the different ways you can precisely shape a note with your instrument. And
– Tempo: Are you slowing down, speeding up, and that kind of thing?

And then it wrapped up talking about phrasing and how you can use all of those things, not just with one note, but to shape a whole musical phrase. And so, in the original training module, you know, we walk through each of these, we explain them. We give examples. We have exercises where you can play around with each of these and see, okay, what can I do with articulation? What kind of emotion does that conjure up? What can I do with the tempo? And how does that affect the feeling of the music? And so on. And that all worked great.

But as we were revising this chapter, when we thought it was about done, I left this comment because there was a sentence in it. When we introduced these four things, we’re like, “these are the four characteristics of a note that we’re going to be exploring and experimenting with to play more expressively”. And I left a comment for Andrew. I was like, okay, the sentence read “you may notice these are not quite the same as the four dimensions of a note that we covered in the active listening chapter, though they’re similar”.

So that was a line in the text. And I left a comment for Andrew. I was like, “this really bugs me!”

And there was just something not right to me about having these four aspects of a note introduced here when a number of chapters earlier, we’d said, in the active listening context, “when you listen to a note, it has these four dimensions to it”.

And it wasn’t just that there were four and four. It was also, you know, in a sense, the book was saying, this is what a note has. These are the all of the characteristics of a note. And then somewhere else it was saying, these are the four characteristics of a note.

And it didn’t sit right with me that they were two different versions of the same thing, if that makes sense, even though each one, in its context let you do and understand everything you needed to.

And so this was one where we then had to go away and think very deeply and talk it through and talk it out. And it’s a great example of how, you know, everything covered in the book is stuff that the Musical U team, for our own musicality, we kind of take for granted, and we’ve taught it in various ways, and we know how to explain it in various ways.

But there’s a really big difference between knowing something and knowing it clearly enough to not only teach it to someone else, but do so in the context of teaching EVERYTHING to someone else, like this book.

So in the context of the book, it was really important to me that when they got to this chapter on Expression, having been using active listening all through the rest of the book and having been thinking about these four dimensions of a note, we weren’t then like, “oh, now think about these other four characteristics”. I wanted to make sure it was, like, fully compatible, fully aligned.

And so that took a fairly heavy lift! But what it turned into then was matching the four dimensions of active listening. So in the context of active listening, we have this four-dimensional active listening framework that we teach where you’re listening for these four dimensions of a note of music.

The first the same as the other one, timbre. So the sound quality. What makes a middle c on a piano sound different from a middle c on guitar or french horn or whatever? The texture of the sound, the characteristic sound of the instrument.

The second is dynamics, again, so volume, how it changes over time.

But then three and four were quite different from the original. So the original, we went on to articulation and tempo. In active listening, we have pitch and rhythm.

And so if you think about it, if you kind of visualize a note in your mind, those are its four dimensions. It has pitch, how high or low it is. It has rhythm when it happens in time. It has dynamics, how loud or quiet it is, and it has timbre. It has more detailed texture to it than just a single note, frequency.

And so we knew from the active listening, like those really do codify a single note, and they can also open up how you listen to music overall.

And so we rejigged it so that instead of talking through those original four and then wrapping up by saying, let’s apply those to a musical phrase, we start by talking about phrasing. And then for each of these, we explore how can you vary it for a single note, and how can you vary it over the course of a phrase. And then at the end of the part, we look at how can you use all of these together to shape a phrase.

So just to highlight for you, this is something you can take and run with. And I wanted to make sure I gave you some valuable concrete takeaway today.

And this is it. So if you sit down next time you practice music, just think in these terms. So play a single note, any note, and see what can you do to change the timbre of it. How can you change the sound quality? And that completely varies by instrument. You know, with your singing voice, you can make all kinds of different sounds. Even with the same vowel, you can make all different, you know, raspy voice or a chirpy voice or a bright voice or a dull voice or a growly voice. With a guitar, you’ve got, you know, where you pluck the string, whether you play with a finger or a plectrum. If you’ve got electric guitar, you’ve got all your pedals to play with. So there’s all kinds of options available to you, even with a single note.

Then dynamics, you’ve got the whole range from pianississimo through to the more most fortissimo forte. You can come up with quietest to loudest, even with a single note and over the course of the note. So it’s not just pick one timbre, pick one volume and play the note. See how you can experiment with them over the course of a note.

And then pitch. Of course, you’ve got, what is the “correct” pitch? What is the right note? I’m trying to play. But of course, you can bend into that note on a lot of instruments, you can apply vibrato and vary the pitch over time. You can add ornaments so you can go semitone or a half step higher before coming into the note. All kinds of options. Even when you’re still playing that correct pitch, as it were, there’s a lot of things you can do.

And then rhythm. Again, if you play the “correct” rhythm, that’s great. But A, you can interpret the rhythm in your own way, but B, the precise placement of the note can make a huge difference, too. And, you know, this one is a little bit harder to experiment with a single note with. But there are still things you can do in terms of the start and end of the note and the timing of those.

So you can sit down and play with all of those with a single note. And then for each one, try playing a phrase, a little musical excerpt from something you’re working on or something improvised, and just see, again, what could you do in each of those dimensions to change how it sounds, and then finish up by trying to shape the entire phrase using a combination of them.

So that’s a really powerful framework to open up all of the possibilities to you of how to play more expressively. Essentially, anything you hear as an expressive performance comes down to the choices the musician is making in each of these four things, both for each note and for the phrase overall.

So it may not be obvious to you in this context without having read the whole book, but hopefully, maybe you can see how much more powerful it’s going to be to have this chapter done this way now.

Because if you’ve been going through the book, if you’ve been practicing active listening, using these same four dimensions and really listening for what’s being done with the timbre, the dynamics, the pitch and the rhythm, then when it comes to practicing playing expressively and you’re using those exact same four dimensions, of course you’ve got this amazing feedback loop between what you listen to and what you play.

And that’s actually part of what we get into in part two of this chapter is how do you practice with that feedback loop so that you’re not just intellectually making choices for each of those four, you also are honing that instinct for, okay, I’m going to play this in a sadder way, or I want this to feel really hopeful and inspiring, or this needs to sound angry, whatever the emotion is, learning to instinctively make the right choices with the timbre, the dynamics, the pitch, and the rhythm to actually bring that out in your music.

So that’s the new outline of the chapter. And of course, in the chapter we have more details, more explanations. We have exercises for each of them along the way. But I hope you’ll find that’s a framework you can take and run with and start experimenting with.

And if you’ve ever wondered “how can I play more expressively?” this is the answer. This is how you can do it, and this is what you can spend time exploring and experimenting with in order to unlock that for you instinctively.

So I hope you’ll give that a try, and I hope you enjoyed that little glimpse of the chapter in progress.

We’re nearly there now with the revised version, and that is chapter 17 of 18, so we’re getting close. And if you go to musicalitybook.com, you can register your interest now if you want that whole chapter in due course, if you want the whole book, that’s where you should sign up, musicalitybook.com

We’ll be sending out email updates as the launch develops and as we get ready to release it. And you’re going to be the first ones to get preview chapters, to get bonus material, to get other sneak peek stuff, and probably some exciting bonuses when you actually order your book in due course or you receive your copy.

So go ahead to musicalitybook.com that is fresh off the press, so hopefully working correctly. Do let me know. If not, send an email to [email protected].

And let me know if you want more of these inside the book chapters! There is, you know, as you can imagine, this is, I mean, it’s going to be thicker than this, but this is jam-packed with stuff. I could pick a random page and share so much stuff that you can take and run with. And I’m very happy to do more of these episodes if that’s going to be fun for you guys.

So do let me know, leave a comment, send an email and we can definitely do more “Inside the book” chapters as we get close to actually publishing and releasing and getting it into your hands.

That’s it for today. I’ll be back tomorrow with our next Meet The Team episode that I’m super happy about. It’s going to be Stewart Hilton, our Community Conductor, beloved to so many of our members at Musical U. He’s been with us almost since the beginning of the membership site, a really fantastic part of our community and that name, Community Conductor really sums it up. He brings everyone together, keeps us on track, and keeps the heart right where it needs to be.

Final encouragement to go away and practice playing expressively, explore the timbre, explore the dynamics, explore the pitch, explore the rhythm, and start to figure out for yourself, what choices can I make to have the emotional musical effect I want to?

As soon as you start doing that, you’re going to find it opens up all kinds of expressive possibilities for you, and I would love to hear how you get on with that. Do let me know.

Cheers!

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