Is This The Missing Piece For Your Musicality? (Inside The Book)

Did you know there’s one foundational skill which makes everything in musicality easier?

I’m talking about everything from ear training to playing by ear, improvising, writing music, improving your rhythm, jamming with other people… Everything that makes you feel truly musical inside and out, benefits from this one foundational skill.

And yet the vast majority of musicians would say they cannot do it, and a lot are afraid to even try.

Today, I want to share with you what that skill is and why you absolutely must start learning to make use of it in your musical development.

Welcome back to another episode of “Inside the Book”, where I’m going to be diving into our forthcoming Musicality book and share some of the juicy goodness from the chapters inside.

If you haven’t heard about this book yet, I’ll put a link in the show notes to the previous episode where I explained all about it. But suffice to say, this is going to be like the “missing manual” that every music learner should have been handed on day one to fill in all of the material that’s normally missing for people in terms of how to become more naturally musical and how to start doing the things that most people think take talent.

You can go to musicalitybook.com to pre-register your interest, and that will make sure you get all the latest updates and freebies and good bonus material as we gear up to release the book.

But with these episodes, I want to just share a little peek inside and something valuable from inside the book for you today.

Let me start by asking you a simple question: Can you sing?

If you’re a musician of any kind, and your answer to that is “no”, or “not really”, or even “I’m tone deaf”, then you need to know what I’m going to be sharing today. Because until you can use your singing voice as a tool in music, learning, everything else related to musicality is going to be way harder than it needs to be.

So today I want to share the start of the chapter on “Singing and Musicality”, where we lay out exactly why every person involved in music making absolutely must be using their singing voice, even if that seems uncomfortable right now, and even if you have no desire to ever become a singer.

So let’s dive into the book.

I want to start with a little bit of context, so just to run through the table of contents, if you missed the past episode, just to explain where this chapter fits in the book.

So the book split into three parts. In part one, we cover some foundational skills that everything else depends on. So, mindset, what is musicality, audiation (being able to vividly hear music and understand it in your mind), Singing and Musicality (that’s where we’ll be diving in today), active listening and then practice and super learning skills (to accelerate your learning).

In part two, we introduce the building blocks of relative pitch and rhythm that help you understand and recognize notes and rhythms instinctively in music.

And then in part three, we move on to applying all of that good stuff to concrete skills like improvising, playing by ear, writing songs, playing expressively, which is what we dived into in the last episode, and performing in a really spellbinding way.

So that’s the structure of the book. Just to explain that this singing chapter comes not as a, you know, random side tangent or an appendix or something, or “just for the singers”.

This is, to us at Musical U, a foundational skill that you absolutely want to put in place and then use throughout everything else you do in your musical training.

And what I wanted to share with you today, I’m just going to read through the beginning of this chapter because it kind of sets the scene and explains why this is such a key topic and something that you might be missing out on. I do just want to say, if you already sing happily, if you’re using it day in, day out as part of your musicality training, your ear training, your musical development, fantastic. I love you, I’m happy for you, keep it up!

We find that even among our keenest members at Musical U, even those who’ve heard our reasoning and heard the benefits and understand and have even experienced the benefits, often it kind of falls by the wayside.

And that particularly happens if you’re someone who didn’t grow up singing, or you’ve been told in the past you’re not a good singer. So if you’re in that camp who’s kind of convinced but isn’t doing it a lot, I hope this will kind of restoke that fire for you and remind you why this is such a valuable tool in your toolkit.

So chapter, I think, four, on Singing and Musicality.

Our singing voice is every human being’s natural first instrument.

Yet even among those who devote countless hours to musical development, many still shy away from singing. In fact, I’ve found that the majority of instrumentalists are reluctant to sing – generally because they think they can’t sing or they sound bad when they try. And yet your singing voice is the most direct way to bring music out from inside you, and it has an unparalleled power for developing your musicality.

You deserve to have this unique tool in your musical toolkit.

The goal of this chapter is not to turn you into a stage singer who grabs the mic and fronts a rock band, joins a choir, or auditions for the next Pop Idol contest. It is far more modest, but at the same time far more important: to get you feeling comfortable and confident using your singing voice as a tool for musicality training.

If you would currently classify yourself in that group of musicians who “can’t sing”, there are two big lessons I want to share with you, which come from working with tens of thousands of musicians of all kinds here at Musical U.

1. Any past experiences which have given you the idea that you can’t sing or that you don’t have a good voice can be safely ignored. A lot of people have had negative or critical comments about their singing from teachers, from friends, family members, other musicians, and I know it can be hard to shake those off.

But as we’ll be discussing more below, those are not actually any indication of whether you can sing or not.

I won’t pretend those comments were just nonsense or tell you that you actually do sound amazing right now when you sing, but I am going to tell you it is 100% possible for you to learn the singing skills you need to start sounding good. So begin right now by changing that “I can’t sing” to “I can’t sing yet”.

2. Once you put a couple of simple skills in place (which can be done quickly) you will be surprised how much you start to enjoy singing and how indispensable it becomes in your music learning and your musicality training.

In particular, two frequent comments we hear from members going through our singing material are that:

A. They actually really enjoy singing now, and

B. they wish they had learned this skill much sooner.

We won’t go in-depth teaching you singing in this chapter. Singing is an instrument in its own right, and although we have extensive training for it inside Musical U, this book is not the place to try teaching you an instrument through words alone.

What we are going to do is show you how to get started using your singing voice confidently, accurately, and reliably to express yourself musically and develop your musicality. If you find that you enjoy singing enough to want to explore it further as an instrument, that is a wonderful bonus, and you’ll find some pointers in this chapter for how to take the next steps.

So why do you think you can’t sing?

If you think you can’t sing, there are probably four contributing factors in play. Not coincidentally, these map to the four H’s of musicality.

1. You don’t understand how singing actually works or what it takes to sing well. That’s the “Head”.

2. You have difficulty judging pitch, and so you can’t reliably hear when a sung note is too high or too low. That’s “Hearing”.

3. You have poor vocal pitch control, so you can’t adjust your sung note quickly and easily to reach the target note. That’s “Hands”, even though in this case it’s not literally in your hands the way the other instrument skills are.

4. You have emotional or psychological hang ups about singing, so you don’t sing or you do so timidly, which actually makes it harder to control your pitch and sound good. That’s the “Heart” piece.

The balance of these four will vary from person to person, but it’s always some combination of them which causes a person to believe they can’t sing.

In this chapter, we’ll tackle number one (Head) by helping you to understand the mechanics of singing in tune, known as matching pitch.

For number two (Hearing), meaning difficulty judging pitch: if you’ve been learning music for a while, this is probably not your limiting factor, but there may still be some work to be done to improve and refine your pitch discernment. This will be covered in this chapter as part of learning the two core skills of Matching Pitch and Vocal Control.

And then we have a little insert box.

This is going to be an aside in the book, so we’ll just take a brief tangent as I read it, and we’ll come back to the four things. So:

A quick word about tone deafness.

Have you ever been called or called yourself “tone deaf”? This is a serious blocker for a lot of musicians when it comes to singing.

Culturally, there’s a strange blurring together of that term “tone deaf” and the skill of singing – when they’re actually completely separate things.

Back in around 2014, I got a real bee in my bonnet about this. I kept talking to musicians who were using our ear training materials, and when I would suggest using singing to help them improve their ears, all too often they’d make a comment about being tone deaf.

Tone deafness is a real phenomenon. The precise scientific name for it is amusia. It is extremely rare. It means you literally can’t distinguish higher notes from lower ones at all.

I knew that the musicians using our ear training resources were not tone deaf. How could I know? Because if they truly suffered from amusia, they would not enjoy listening to music. Can you imagine how bizarre or boring music would sound to you if all note pictures sounded the same?

If you want to be certain about it, I actually ended up creating a simple test. You can take, at tonedeftest.com, based on the scientific measures of amusia, which will tell you in five minutes or so whether you are actually tone deaf or not.

Our findings from over 2.3 million people taking that test over the past nine years confirm the scientific estimates.

We’ve found that less than 1.5% of people are truly tone deaf. And it’s likely even less than that because we know some people who take the test just answer randomly on purpose!

For every single one of the 98.5% of people who passed the test, and almost certainly you too, it is absolutely possible to to learn to sing in tune, sound good, and benefit from singing in your musical development.

So that’s the end of our tangent into tone deafness. I hope that clarified a few things for some of you!

Back to number three, “Hands”, poor vocal control. The cause here is simply that you have not yet learned this skill.

It’s the unfortunate flip-side of singing being everyone’s natural first instrument that we assume you’ve got it or you don’t. And so if your pitching is all over the place when you sing, oh, that must be because you have a bad voice.

But that’s nonsense. We don’t expect ourselves to be able to operate a motor vehicle or a computer keyboard or a guitar or piano, for that matter, without spending the time learning the physical motions. Why should our singing voice be any different? In this chapter, you’ll learn the basics of vocal control.

Then, number four, “Heart”, the emotional or psychological hang-ups that might be holding you back. This is often the biggest blocker to people learning to sing.

Sadly, for many of us, it started young. If you’re otherwise a good musician, this barrier can be particularly powerful because you might feel guilty for not being as good as you think you should be. As a result, many musicians simply refuse to sing so they can avoid confronting this painful issue.

Rather than try to undo that past conditioning directly, the most effective solution is actually to prove to yourself in a safe and unintimidating way that you actually can sing.

By following the suggestions in this chapter, you’ll be able to see those past experiences in a whole new light. They will gently fade away and no longer be a blocker or an anchor holding you down.

So the good news is you already have everything you need to sing.

Why? If you’re reading this book, it’s safe to assume you love music, and that means your ears work. If you can speak, then we know your voice works. So the Hearing and Hand components are ready for development. And as you go through this chapter, we’ll address the Head and the Heart components, too.

So our aim in this chapter: We we are not expecting you to develop an incredible, versatile, knock-your-socks off ability to sing. We are not expecting you to declare yourself a singer, volunteer to front a band, go off and join a choir, or even sing at the next karaoke night.

Our aim is simply to reach the point where if you want to sing a certain note or a sequence of notes, they come out clearly and accurately on the intended pitches.

If you’ve never sung, or you’ve been told that you can’t sing, or you feel too nervous to even try, then the best thing I can do is to encourage you to step back from that intimidating idea of “being a singer”.

It might even help you to pretend, at least for now, that there are actually two types of singing.

There’s the professional, up-on-stage, artistic mastery, impressive kind of singing.

And then there’s the everyday kind. Like when you hum a tune to yourself or you sing your kids a lullaby, you sing to yourself in the shower, or maybe even do take part in the occasional alcohol-assisted night at the karaoke bar.

You can also think of it as the difference between becoming a public speaker or a Hollywood actor… versus just learning how to talk.

Or the difference between being an Olympic medal winning speed cyclist… versus just being able to ride your bike down to the shops.

Or the difference between becoming a famous portrait painter… versus just being able to paint the living room walls.

In all those examples, we understand that there’s a kind of basic competence we can reasonably expect to achieve, and the fact that some people make it an art or build a career around it, that doesn’t hold the rest of us back from learning to do the useful, everyday level of that same skill.

Think “functional”, “serviceable”, “fit for purpose”, “gets the job done”. That’s what we’re looking for. You feel comfortable using your voice, and you can basically sing the notes you mean to.

Now don’t get me wrong! As always, I do want you to aim high and dream big, and I hope you will connect with your voice and want to cultivate that part of your musicality further and make being a singer part of your musical identity.

But if right now you’re in that spot of thinking you can’t or don’t want to sing, then start with just aiming for the basics that “good enough, basically works” level of singing.

That alone is enough to make singing a powerful tool for you. And it doesn’t need to take long.

To give you some idea with the way we teach it at Musical U that you’ll learn in this chapter. You’re looking at maybe a few weeks of practice to get to that level.

Cool. So then we have a call-out for our “good voice” opt-in. We have a really great guide to “16 keys to sounding good as a singer”. I think I’ll put a link in the show notes to where you can grab that so you’re not kept waiting. But that’s a really cool thing to check out if you want to understand really why you don’t sound good at the moment.

And actually the next section… I think I’m going to stop this episode here, but the next section we’ll come back to in the next episode, I think. Because in the next bit we go into real concrete benefits of learning to sing at this basic, everyday level. And I think that’s really valuable just to hammer home what this can do for you in terms of playing by ear, recognizing notes and chords, expressing musical ideas, having a better instinct for rhythm.

So we’ll come back to that in the next “Inside the Book” episode. We’ll read the next bit of this chapter, I think, and I’ll share that with you too.

So hopefully that landed with you. I’d be really curious to know. Post a comment and let me know whether you’re watching on YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or you’re listening to the podcast. You can also email me at [email protected]

I would love to hear how this landed with you, where you’re at in terms of singing, and whether this gave you a little boost of motivation to explore whether actually singing might be a real possibility for you, especially if it’s something that in the past you’ve shied away from and assumed you couldn’t do.

That’s it for this one! Coming up next, we have “Meet the Team” with Mr. Andy Portas, and our next episode of Coaches Corner.

Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | YouTube | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!