The Goal (Inside The Book)

Would you like to learn music like a gifted prodigy? How about unlocking your instinct for music? And what if you could unleash an inner natural musician that’s just been waiting inside?

That’s the promise of our forthcoming Musicality book. But what exactly does all that mean? And is it even possible?

Welcome back to another “Inside The Book” episode of Musicality Now. And when talking about this book, I’ve been saying things like “we’ve taken all of our best stuff from the last 15 years and packed it into one hefty volume that you can have on your shelf. All our best frameworks and tools and techniques and methods, all of our best explanations”.

And if you’re a member of Musical U, that should be pretty exciting to you! But if not, I’ve realized you might be wondering “what’s the point of this book?” like, “packing all that stuff in there? Sure, great. But what’s in it for me? What results is it going to deliver if I buy a copy and dive in?”

So that’s what I want to share today by unpacking one particular part of the cover of the book. And if you’ve been following along with these episodes, you’ll know we held a cover design contest recently and had over 400 submissions for the cover of this book.

And we whittled them down, and I invited you guys to vote on it. We picked a cover, and we’re very close to unveiling it. I can’t wait to share it with you.

And today I’m going to share just one little tidbit. Because to get the cover designed, I had to provide all kinds of info about the book, what’s in it, who it’s for, what kind of style we want, all of that stuff.

And I also had to provide any text that was going to go on the front and the back cover. And in particular, one piece of it that I thought was going to be really hard and then turned out not to be, was the tagline.

So what’s a tagline? Well, I just before hitting record, hitting broadcast, I grabbed a bunch of random books from my shelf to illustrate this point. So these are really random, I apologise, but…

So this book, for example, Positive Intelligence is the title, and the tagline is “why only 20% of teams and individuals achieve their true potential and how you can achieve yours”.

Or this one, Draw To Win, which is a great, fun book about better creative thinking through sketching things. Draw to win, “a crash course on how to lead, sell, and innovate with your visual mind”.

And this one, a music one, Kodály’s Principles In Practice. Sorry, I’m trying not to mess up my camera’s autofocus. Here we go.

“An approach to music education through the Kodály method”

And finally “Write Useful Books”. I’ve been relying on this one, “a modern approach to designing and refining recommendable non-fiction”.

So you can see not all books have this, but a lot of non-fiction books do.

And with a one word title like “Musicality”, and particularly when it’s such a broad word like that, having the right tagline really matters. And you can imagine if we didn’t, then you might see a book on the shelf called “musicality” and it could be a novel with that title, it could be a scientific literature review of all of the scientific research on musicality, it could be a guitar method book that just happened to pick that title.

So I knew it was going to be really important to get the tagline right for this book, to make sure it had instant appeal to the right people and explained what the book was all about and why it was unique.

And I honestly, I thought I would have to wrestle with this and carefully tweak and refine it and get every word just right. And then one day, a couple of days before we launched the cover design contest, I sat down and I just wrote it. And turned out I was pretty, pretty happy with how it came out, which shocked me, but it didn’t seem to need tweaking.

And so here’s how it came out. Let me share this with you:

“How you too can learn music like a gifted prodigy, unlock your instinct for music, and unleash your inner natural.”

And on today’s episode, I just wanted to unpack that a little bit and share with you why I, that is the tagline and what this book can do for you.

And one of the biggest challenges we face at Musical U is how to inspire without being overly hype-y or promising things we can’t deliver. Because what we do, what we specialise in, is really distinctive and unique, and we do produce some pretty incredible life-changing transformations.

And the kind of skills we teach are things people think are beyond their wildest dreams. So it can be really hard to get the balance right, where we get that across to people who meet us for the first time without it seeming too good to be true.

And so, clearly with this tagline “how you too can learn music like a gifted prodigy, unlock your instinct for music and unleash your inner natural”. That’s a big, bold promise! So that’s why I wanted to unpack it a little bit on today’s episode.

So let’s take it bit by bit.

First off, “how you too can”, and this is really important, it’s not just “how you can”, because we’ve done this before with tens of thousands of musicians of all kinds. And, you know, without that word “too”, it might seem like this is just kind of speculation. You know, “this could be possible”, “we hope this will work for you”.

But this is literally about inviting you to join all of those who are already doing this day in, day out at Musical U. So it’s very much how you “too” can come join us doing this incredible thing in music.

“Learn music like a gifted prodigy”. Honestly, I flinched a little when I wrote that, because “gifted” and “prodigy” and “talent” are words we’re always really careful with at Musical U, because culturally, they have so much baggage, and that makes them really powerful. But it also risks people assuming completely the wrong thing.

And I wanted to use them here because, really, a gifted prodigy, that captures two things, I think. One is that when we think of a gifted prodigy in music, like the seven year old virtuoso violinist or the 13 year old rock guitarist shredding away on YouTube or whatever it may be, or indeed that rock superstar that you admire and go see on stage, in an arena, at a concert, we think of gifted prodigies as A. learning much faster than everyone else, and B. accomplishing things that the regular mere mortals never could. And that’s really the spirit of this book.

So what we do at Musical U and what we focus on in this book is those two things. One is how can you transform your learning speed through the whole superlearning toolkit and adopting these different practice methodologies that deliver two times, five times, ten times the normal learning speed. And what we would call “musicality training”, which is all about the ear side of things, the instinct side of things, the creative side of things, which enables you to do things that regular people can’t.

So the spirit of the book is very much those two things that people typically associate with a “gifted prodigy”. And through going through the chapters of the book, you’ll learn exactly how they do it.

So it’s not some weird, magical, mystical thing. It’s like “oh, okay, they learn much faster because they’re doing this stuff, and they can improvise and play by ear and jam and write music because they’re doing this stuff”.

Next up, “unlock your instinct for music”.

So that word “instinct”, again, it comes with a bit of baggage, and it can seem overly hypey, particularly if you currently don’t feel at all instinctive in music.

But what makes it powerful and relevant here is that this is the end goal of musicality training at Musical U. And if you think about traditional “ear training”, it always feels a little bit abstract and scientific and like a test where you’re trying to get the answers right. And really what we want to get to as musicians is the music just flowing out of us, and we just instinctively know what to play, when or how to perform.

And this is a big part of what makes our approach very unique. It’s not easy to make it work in a book, to be honest, because so much of what we’ve done over the last 15 years has been multimedia and interactive and very human-supported inside Musical U membership and our courses and so on.

And so to translate that into a book form and still get to this point of instinct was not an easy task. But I’m really happy with how it’s turned out. It’s turned out really great. I’m excited to get it into people’s hands, because the real value of it is even when you’re at the beginner level, it can start to feel instinctive.

It’s not “I’m going to slog away on this stuff for ten years, then maybe it will feel like instinct”. It’s like “oh, no, it can be instinct from the very beginning”.

And that’s why I wanted to use this word “unlock”, too, because part of why it’s possible is really 90% of the work has already been done in your subconscious.

And so we want to leverage that genuine existing instinct for music. When we listen to music and we respond to it, or when we hear something and we can judge, does it sound right or not? Does it sound good or not? That is all our musical instinct and musicality training is just about building that little translation between the instinct that’s there and the stuff we want to do out in the world.

And actually, on Zac’s meet the team interview, I remember he described it as building a “musicality bridge”. And that’s a great way of putting it, because the instinct is in there. You’ve got it. You love music because you have that instinct. All we need to do is show you how to bring that out into the real world through the music making activities you want to do. So it’s about unlocking the instinct that’s there.

And finally, “unleash your inner natural”. So you may know we have a vision at Musical U. Everything we do is in support of this vision of “a world of natural musicians”.

And it’s a funny one because music is so natural, right? Like anyone who loves music, and particularly if you are a musician or a music learner, however you consider yourself, it does in some sense feel really natural to us, right? Like it’s a natural part of being human.

And yet most musicians don’t feel all that natural in their musical activities. Often there’s a lot of thinking going on, there’s a lot of self doubt, there’s a lot of anxiety, and it can feel very unnatural to try and operate your instrument when you’re challenging yourself and when you’re pushing yourself.

But our goal is really to help you feel utterly natural in music. And again, it’s not about that being the eventual end goal. It’s about designing the whole process so that the journey of becoming the musician you want to be has you feeling very natural in music throughout.

And that word “unleash” can seem overly hypey to some people, I know, but it’s just the perfect word for this because it really conveys that freedom that runs through everything we do and everything that’s packed into this book.

And we hear that so much from our members, that sense of freedom. And “finally, finally, I’ve escaped into the world of music-making I always suspected was there”. And sometimes they say it explicitly, where it’s just like “oh, this, you know, this improvising. I suddenly feel so free.” Or, you know, playing by ear. “I feel like I’ve been set free from the sheet music”.

And often not explicitly, just implicitly, the way they talk about the new skills they’re getting and the new things they can do, you hear that joy of freedom and breaking free coming through.

So it really does feel like something has been unleashed inside you. And, you know, it’s not about the bolting on some awkward skills. And “maybe I can add this onto my music practice”.

It’s really about bringing all of the natural musicality you already have inside out and setting that inner natural free.

And even if right now you don’t feel like you have an inner natural or you don’t feel like you have that instinct, we know from 15 plus years of experience, probably 100 or 200 years of collective experience on the Musical U team, and from tens of thousands of musicians, we know it is in there. It is inside you. And all we need to do with this book is help you unlock it and unleash it.

So that’s the tagline: “how you two can learn music like a gifted prodigy, unlock your instinct for music and unleash your inner natural”.

It’s a big, bold promise, and I won’t pretend it didn’t feel a little bit intimidating to commit to that and hand it to the designers and say, this is what’s going to go on the front of the book. But it felt right. And again, it’s how you, too, can, because it’s based on real, concrete experience.

And the stuff in this book isn’t kind of new guesswork that we hope might deliver results. It’s the stuff that’s been proven day in, day out over years and with so many musicians of all kinds to really deliver that promise, really live up to that promise.

So if hearing about this got you a little bit excited, if any or all of that tagline appeals to you, I’d encourage you to go to musicalitybook.com. And depending on when you watch this, you can either register your early interest or you can go ahead and pre-order your copy. I can’t wait to get this into your hands. We’ll be unveiling the cover very soon and opening up for pre-orders soon, so look out for that coming up very soon.

That’s it for this one. Coming up next on the show, we have our next coaches corner episode. I will be back with that one tomorrow.

Until then, cheers. And go make some.

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