The Power of Ease and Joy in Music Practice – Are You Missing Out? (Coaches Corner, Episode 4)

Christopher: Hello and happy Saturday to you! It’s been another jam-packed week here on the Musicality Now show. Hello to everyone tuning in live, and if you’re watching the replay, you’re very welcome too.

If you missed anything this week we had some really fun episodes. We kicked off with a look back at Beatles Month, inspired somewhat by this new painting in my office. And if you haven’t heard those episodes, they’re some of my favorites from the back catalogue of the podcast, all about the musicality of the Beatles.

We also had a mini interview with Tero Potila, where he shared insights on his own creative process and where that came from over the years, and then a clip from his masterclass, where he shared something really powerful. If you’ve ever hesitated to collaborate with other people in music, I highly recommend checking out what he shared, because it’s one of those things that can just permanently shift things for you in your musical life.

Then I did an episode sharing some tips for one of our central exercises here at Musical U, something we recommend every single member does and returns to regularly, how to find your north star in music. And then we had our next meet the team interview with Camilo Suárez yesterday, which was a lot of fun. I enjoyed chatting with him and actually learning a little bit more that I hadn’t known about his backstory. So if you’ve seen him around the site, we had a comment on YouTube saying “Oh, I’ve seen Camilo pop up here and there, great to learn more about him”, do check out that Meet The Team interview that went out yesterday.

A bit later today we have our masterclass for all members with Molly Gebrian, so I’m super excited for that. She is one of the luminaries of bringing the science of accelerated learning into the world of music. So she’s going to be sharing insights from the world of neuroscience to help you learn more, faster and more easily in music.

Now on to today’s episode!

So today we’re wrapping up the week with another episode of Coach’s Corner, and as always, it’s packed with goodies for you. This time we have:

– Andy sharing the benefits of figuring out melodies and chords using solfa.

– Zac talks about the surprising impact that tapping into a spirit of “ease and joy” can have in your music learning. That’s actually one of our internal core principles on the team, to do things with a sense of ease and joy. And he really saw that have a big impact with one of his clients.

– Camilo talks about how basslines can actually help you memorize more easily by understanding the structure of music more deeply.

– And then Andrew talks about the power of language and doodle tugging for your musical development.

All that and more in this round of Coaches Corner!

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Hey, we’re back with another round of Coaches Corner where I get to hang out with our Next Level coaches to get their insights and breakthrough ideas from recent coaching, things that can help you in your musical life, as well as providing a little peek into all the great stuff that’s going on every week inside Next Level.

Today I’m joined by our head coach, Andrew Bishko, as well as coaches Camilo Suárez, Andy Portas and Zac Bailey. Welcome, guys!

So, Andy, I’ll pick on you first this week. Tell us something interesting or useful from your coaching.

Andy: It’s been recently has been a wonderful time for clients learning how to transcribe using solfa.

We’ve had quite a few who’ve been going through the process of choosing a song, figuring out the melody using solfa by ear, not using their instruments, but also figuring out the chord progressions as well. And what they’ve kind of gone on to do is then perform the song. But by kind of taking the view through solfa and kind of repeated listens to kind of figure it out, it kind of allows them to get like a, I suppose I’d describe it as a kind of 360 view of the song.

So as soon as they take that to their instrument and their voices, it kind of flows out with minimum effort, really. So that’s been absolutely wonderful to see. And like I say, there’s been quite a few clients been doing that to great effect. It’s been great.

Christopher: Fantastic. And if anyone isn’t familiar with solfa, can you explain a little bit why that’s so useful when you’re transcribing or trying to play something by ear?

Andy: Yeah. It’s a means of knowing the pictures of a non-specific key.

So you can sing up from do up to do and it gives you the degrees of the scale. But the idea is if you can kind of locate the home sound, so if you can locate do, you can then relate every other note you hear in that song back to do and therefore kind of label that. This could be labeling it from one to one to seven, or it could be used in do re mi fa so la ti do.

So it’ll work in both ways, but it’s a powerful, powerful method. It really is.

Christopher: Fantastic. And Zac, share something interesting or useful or fascinating from your recent coaching! What’s been going on?

Zac: Yeah, recently… Man, one of my clients in particular has really tapped into the spirit of ease and joy. And I have been really surprised, even myself, and impressed with how much success that is created for her.

On one of our calls, I asked her, what do you love the most? What makes you the most happy? When you’re doing music, when you’re musicing, expending your music time, what makes you the most happy?

And she said, when a song is easy for me to play and I can just play it and it feels good and it just flows out of me and it’s just so much fun.

And so I said, well, how do you have any songs in your repertoire that are like that? And she said, yeah, I’ve got a few songs like that. And I said, well, when’s the last time you played one of those songs? And she said, oh, wow, I don’t think I’ve played any of those songs in a while.

And so I made her the assignment. I was like, this is your homework. You know, you got to play a song that you love that’s easy and joyful every day, and that’s your first thing you do.

You pay yourself with that first. You tap into that feeling of ease and joy so that you can experience that.

And since she’s been doing that every day, she has been getting so much more done in less time, but also finding more time for to do more and also having more energy and more focus.

So it’s like this compound effect of having more energy, having more time, finding more time. The time that you spend is more focused and you enjoy it more. So since she’s been starting her day with an easy, joyful song that’s fun and filling that energy, it fills her up with energy, and then she gets a lot more done with her other practice as well.

So I’ve just been like, “wow!” Every time she sends a practice log, there’s wins that just keeps flowing.

It’s amazing. So that it’s like a fountain of ease and joy, you start swimming in it, you start tapping in it, maybe throw in some wishes, and then before you know it, you just ease and joy everywhere, and it’s amazing.

Christopher: That’s fantastic, I love that. Like an ease and joy catalyst. By playing a song, you find ease and it flows well.

I’m reminded of David Reed’s answer to “what is musicality?” Where he talked about often, what lets us feel musical and feel like we have good musicality is actually playing something quite a bit below our ability level so that you don’t have to worry about the technicalities or feel constrained by them. And I thought that was a really good insight, and it gels well with what you said there, where you really get into the spirit of the music when you know it’s something you can play well.

I’m also reminded, somewhat random, but I’m reminded of a podcast I heard one time where a guy was talking about gym exercise.

So he was a personal trainer in the gym, and he talked about how his clients were determined to do bicep curls because they wanted really big biceps, and he was trying to get them away from that and doing, like, compound lifts and more kind of serious work in the gym.

But he realized that actually, the way to do it was to let them do their bicep curls at the end of the session, so they’d spend their energy and their effort on the more serious compound lifts, using the whole body. But then at the end of the session, he’d be like “now do some curls” and they’d really enjoy just using the last of their energy on the thing that they were motivated by.

So I wonder whether you could put it at the end of your session, too, as your reward for doing your work, or you could sandwich it. I know you’re a fan of the sandwich Zac!

Zac: An ease and joy sandwich. That’s a good one.

I’m all about paying yourself first and putting your love first. So I think it’s actually, in my opinion, more beneficial to do it first than last.

Because if you spend all your energy working out is different than playing music, but you spend all your energy and you’re feeling exhausted, you might not get to that thing that gave you ease and joy, then you didn’t do anything that caused you joy that day. So I think to me, it’s top priority to do something that’s easy and joyful every day. That’s number one, because that’s what you really want with music.

I don’t know. I think I would like to be able to do push-ups and pull-ups with ease and joy! But generally, they’re kind of hard.

But with music, we want it to be easy and joyful. That’s what we want. That’s why we practice. We don’t want to practice to be up on stage struggling through songs.

We practice so that we could be on stage having fun and connecting to the music, and so that, in and of itself, is what we want to practice. And the skill, the skill of prioritizing ease and joy and the skill of being connected to the music, that’s where musicality comes from. And I was actually inspired by David Reed’s answer to “what is musicality?” That’s what really made me kind of double down and look for more ways to leverage those easy and joyful activities. So that is really powerful. I love it.

Christopher: Love it. I will let him know that’s been paying dividends in our coaching! He’ll be glad.

Camilo, how about you? Can you share something great that’s been going on in coaching lately?

Camilo: Yes. So this week we had a common theme on how to memorize music more effectively. And this week in particular, we concentrated on the role of basslines on memorizing music.

I was amazed by seeing the results on how, by starting to memorize a song, by concentrating on the bassline, the clients were able to build a more robust mental image or general image of the pieces that we were playing. And this applies to music from Beethoven to jazz standards.

I know that it’s not the first choice, when you first learn a piece, to start with the bassline, that’s usually something that you do later – or actually never do! But this time the clients found that later, by singing both the bassline and then the melody, they really got a hold of the full piece. So that also leads to better chances of building a better improvisation.

Christopher: That’s really cool. Yeah. I’ve noticed the singing teacher, piano teacher who does music lessons with my kids recently, has been doing what she’d call “root melody” work, where she’s just doing the tonic and the dominant, one and the five.

Having one of them sing that while the other sings the regular melody of the song. And like you say, it just gives you a different insight onto how the harmonic flow of the song happens and how it all fits together. That’s really great that your clients have been finding it useful for memorizing.

Are any of them thinking about buying a bass as a result?

Camilo: Hopefully! This advice calls from a bass player, so take that into account.

Christopher: We’re a little bit biased!

Awesome, thanks, Camillo. And how about you, Andrew? What’s new in coaching?

Andrew: I wanted to make a comment on that, actually. One of my clients was putting together a family band.

She had her grandchildren and nephews and nieces and everything coming in for Christmas time, and they did a concert in their garage for the neighborhood. And that was one of the her grandson, who was just a newbie on the saxophone. She gave him the root and the fifth to play and improvise, and he had an absolute blast. And it sounded great, too.

He had such a good time because he could play along with the band, even though he only knew one song. He could play on all the songs.

So let’s hear it for the root and the fifth!

Alright, so now for my contribution: the power of language.

So we are all virtuosos at speaking. We have been doing it from a very young age, and we have been practicing it since almost we were born. We started making sounds with our mouths, and we have been doing it all our lives, and we developed this great amount of virtuosity with language and with speaking. And language and speaking have all the properties of music.

They have rhythm, they have pitch, and your speaking does, and these can be leveraged. So that was a big basis for our essence of songwriting course, leveraging language to come up with rhythmical ideas, especially, that are much more complex than perhaps we are nuanced than we would if we just tried to write music. So that’s been a big thing.

Many of my clients, in terms of really finding a way to feel the music, especially when you’re doing a genre that’s maybe not a part of your own native musical culture. So I have one client who grew up in Poland and Germany, and she loves jazz, but when she played jazz, she wasn’t really feeling it, and she wanted the feel. She’s trying to get her groove and her feel going – and singing and using language has been really helpful.

So if you’re going to play jazz, and I’m not just talking about language, like, you know, words that we speak, but also just doing something that guest coach Ronald Carter called “Doodletonguing”. So if you’re going to do jazz, you know, where you scat sing, or you use those kinds of syllables and you get into the feel and groove of the music.

I have another client who’s studying Klezmer music, which is music from eastern Europe, and you know, this is very much outside her native culture, and she lives in western Canada. But to get into the music, we’ve been using different sort of syllables and languages, like where you get using these kind of syllables and these kind of sounds to get the feel and the groove of the music. And that’s been a lot of fun lately for feel and groove. Alright.

Christopher: Terrific, thanks, Andrew.

That’s super cool. I think you and I have had endless conversations about music and language and how sometimes it’s a really helpful analogy and sometimes it’s really not. But that’s a beautiful example of how those linguistic skills can be a great touch point for you in adapting to an idiom or a style of music.

Very cool. Well, I know you guys have your coaches meeting coming up very shortly, so I won’t keep you. But thank you so much for hanging out with me again, and I’ll see you next time for Coaches Corner!

Thanks, everyone.

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