We collaborated with Anne Mileski, a leading curriculum designer trained in the Kodály approach and she put together just a phenomenal 6-week course for us. We call it “Foundations of a Musical Mind”.
Now if you’ve been following our website or podcast for a while you’ll know that at Musical U we actually aren’t big fans of the course structure for learning musicality – for the general case of becoming more musical, a one-size-fits-all course just isn’t the best option. But rather than try to incorporate Kodály ideas piecemeal into our main training system we realised that because we were going to be starting from absolute zero with this new training, actually the course approach could work really well.
Because whatever background musicians are coming in with – whether they’re just starting out or have been playing for years, whether they’re a singer, guitarist, saxophonist, or anything else, whether they like blues, rock, classical, jazz – and whether they’re mostly driven by wanting to play by ear, improvise, write their own music, or just have a deeper and more instinctive understanding of how the music they love is put together – this course genuinely could help each and every one of them.
Easy to say! Not so easy to do. But knowing it would be a challenge we were able to draw on Anne’s expertise and our extensive experience helping adult musicians learn musicality skills online, and based on the results and comments from our first group of students who went through the course last year we actually managed to pull it off. I’ll be sharing some of those comments alongside this video so you can see for yourself.
As always at Musical U we put a big emphasis on personal support and guidance and that meant that we were able to learn from this first group’s experiences to fix, improve, refine and extend the course as they went through it. So it’s now even better than it was to begin with and I’m super excited to be opening up enrolment now for a new class.
Now one big advantage of the “course” approach is that it’s very clearly structured and time-bound. This is a 6-week course, designed to take about 15 minutes per day. And we know now that it does indeed deliver on that. Some people took a bit longer each day, others zipped through it, but we saw that on average it does take about that long, so it’s not a massive time commitment to get real results. And by the end of the 6 weeks you’ll have gained some really quite impressive skills in identifying notes and rhythms by ear and actually doing all kinds of interesting things with those skills.
One potential downside of the course approach is that instead of a small monthly fee like we charge for Musical U membership, it does mean putting down a single payment for all the training and that’s inevitably going to be a higher price.
And of course we do provide a really generous guarantee policy, so that if for any reason it didn’t deliver all these wonderful results for you, you can get all your money back. I wanted to make sure it was risk-free for you to make this investment in your musical life.
But I’m really proud of the price we’ve managed to hit with this – because compared to the in-person Kodály training you can get it’s an insane bargain.
And when you look at the impact it can have on your musical life (and the impact it’s already had on all the musicians who’ve gone through it so far) – it’s really hard to put a value on that.
You *could* just go on, feeling like learning music is a struggle. Like music theory and ear training never quite connect up with the music you know and love. Continuing to learn pieces note-by-note and feeling anxious about forgetting them, or needing to perform without sheet music in front of you. Feeling like you’re just not a “natural” and don’t have what it takes to feel free, confident and creative in music.
Or you could put in place a new foundation for understanding music, deeply and intuitively. You could experience, for possibly the first time, true freedom and creativity in improvising or coming up with your own musical ideas. You could hear music – and immediately know the notes and rhythms being used, and connect that all with sheet music or playing your instrument.
That’s something that’s going to transform the whole of your musical life for the rest of your life. What would that be worth to you?
Now let me ask you something: As I say these things, is there a little voice in the back of your head going “Yeah *maybe*. But I don’t know if it’ll really work like that for me.”
I’m personally a bit of a skeptic. If someone promises amazing results with a product or service I’m going to have my doubts.
But I hope you know from our brand and from the Musicality Unleashed series, that we are not about false promises of overnight success, or selling people on myths and pipedreams that get them excited but fail to deliver real results.
We’re about the methods that really work. The proven systems and training material that can genuinely transform a musician’s experience of music.
So when we saw that the Foundations course was indeed providing the kind of transformative experiences it was designed to, we sat down with a handful of course students to ask them how it had gone. So that you could hear from real music learners, just like you, that this stuff really does work.
So please check those out – so that you can allow yourself to get excited about this and believe in the transformation that’s ahead of you.
Because if you love music – and if you have ever felt limited, restricted, or you’ve struggled in your learning – and if you’ve itched for that freedom, creativity, confidence, that deep instinctive understanding of how music works – then it really is a seriously exciting opportunity that’s in front of you right now.
Now because of the personal support we’re offering to make sure this course really delivers results for you, places are limited. And enrolment is open for just a short period. Like I said before, this course quickly sold out the first time it was offered, so if you’re interested then please act fast to secure your spot.
And I look forward to seeing you in there!
