The Musicality Book Cover Reveal! (Inside The Book)

Today, I want to share with you the cover design for our new Musicality book! This book has been in the works for a couple of years now. It’s brewed up to be something pretty epic and I’m so excited to get it into your hands.

Today I want to give you a sneak peek of the cover design and tell you also how to get some exclusive bonuses we’re doing to celebrate the launch. A quick note, this one is definitely a visual episode, so if you’re tuned into the audio podcast, please do go look up this episode on YouTube so that you can see what I’m showing you.

Otherwise, if you go to musicalitybook.com now, you can see what I’m referring to in this episode.

So if you’ve been following along with our book launch journey in these recent “Inside The Book” episodes, you’ll know we held a cover design contest for the book.

And the book, if you haven’t been following along, is our forthcoming book entitled Musicality, and it’s our all-in-one manual for everything having to do with increasing your natural musicality.

So playing by ear, improvising, jamming, performing with confidence, having good rhythm, singing in tune, accelerated learning, all the stuff we specialise in here at Musical U, we’ve distilled down 15 years of experience helping adult learners online, as well as decades and decades, probably over a couple of hundred years of experience on the Musical U team, all into this thick hardback book that we’re putting out into the world this coming September. I couldn’t be more excited to get this into your hands.

And sadly, despite the saying that “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”, I think we can all agree, we often do. And so it was particularly important to try and get the cover right for this book, especially because it’s been designed not just for our keen Musical U members who’ve been with us for years and want this companion guide sitting on their shelf, but because we hope it will help us reach even more people who haven’t come across us before, have no idea of what musicality training is all about, but are excited by the prospect of becoming more naturally musical.

So the cover is critical, and so we did what we’ve done a few times in the past. For example, for the Musical U logo, for the Living Music logo, for our Pillar Belief icons. Any time we’ve got something visual that I really want to make sure we nail, we tend to do a design contest because that means you get ideas and concepts from a whole range of designers before whittling it down to the winning concept, and with this book cover, that concept was gonna be really critical.

So if you saw our episode, I guess maybe six weeks ago, I invited you guys into the process. We had over 120 people vote on the cover of designs when we’d narrowed it down to just four.

Thank you so much if you were one of those who voted and gave feedback, we got such helpful feedback, both from all of you in the audience and the Musical U team. We factored that in, we weighed up the various criteria, and actually, the design we ended up going with was your favourite! Among those 120 people who voted, this was the top-rated design.

It also happened to be my favourite, which was great, and the team loved it, too. So I’m really excited to finally share that with you today, as well as a peek at the new musicalitybook.com site where we’ve got all the info now about the book. Well, not all the info, but a lot more info about the book.

So I’m going to give you a peek at that in a moment. And also just to say there’s a couple of other things to share with you, including pre-order bonuses and something really exciting we have coming up in September.

So without further ado, we need a bit of a drum roll, but I think my mic noise cancellation is going to cancel it out if I do one. But I would otherwise grab a drumstick and give you a little drum roll!

Here we go, the cover design for the new Musicality book!

So this is the design we ended up going for. And again, if you were one of those who voted, you may have strong feelings about this design, but it was definitely the popular favourite and I love it for a few different reasons.

I think number one is just the spirit of it. I hope you’ll agree that at a glance, this dancing figure surrounded by music, colourful, vibrant energy, it’s absolutely the spirit we’re aiming for with this book. And of course, there’s a risk that when you publish a, like, 500-page manual on music learning, it could be very dry and very textbook-like.

And we were really going for the opposite with this book. The way it’s written, if you’ve followed any of the sneak peek episodes I’ve done where we’ve shared bits from the book, it’s written in quite an informal and quite a friendly, inclusive, encouraging style, much the way we do everything at Musical U.

And so I wanted to make sure the cover conveyed that rather than just being like… some of the design candidates were a bit more textbook-y.

And so I love the spirit of it and the energy. And I think maybe most of all, it just conveys the sense of freedom we want with this book.

You know, everything about musicality training is really about increasing your freedom in music. Escaping from the sheet music, getting out from your bedroom where you practice alone and playing with other musicians, feeling confident you can do all of the incredible things you’ve been dreaming of. It’s really that spirit of freedom. And hopefully you agree, I think this cover really encapsulates that.

At the same time, we wanted to make sure it wasn’t too light. And I love that this cover also has a bit of authority to it. I think if you saw this on a shelf, it would make an impression that it is a serious book.

And that’s very much the vibe of the book. It’s that attitude of inclusivity and encouragement and excitement and energy, coupled with some very down-to-earth, practical, proven frameworks, techniques, methodologies, information, explanations, exercises to help you improve in a really concrete way.

So I’m really happy with how the cover came out. And the tagline there, I think it might be a bit too small for you to read, but we did a previous episode about why this is the tagline for the book, and it’s: how you too can learn music like a gifted prodigy, unlock your instinct for music and unleash your inner natural.

And I won’t go into that further. I’ll put a link in the shownotes to that previous episode where I kind of unpacked that and explained why those are the three elements we wanted in the tagline for the book.

And just to give you a peek, you can go to musicalitybook.com now and check it out for yourself, but there’s a bit of information here about the book. What’s it for, who is behind it, the team there, and then a breakdown of what’s inside.

So I go through chapter by chapter explaining all the topics that are covered. So, musicality, musical mindset, audiation, singing, active listening, superlearning. And then in part two, the kind of core ear training stuff. So ear training, relative pitch, solfa, intervals, chord progressions, we’ve got a typo there, I’m going to go back and fix that after this episode, the beat, rhythm, and then in part three, the more applied side of things. So bringing all of those core skills to improvisation, to playing by ear, to songwriting, to expression and to performance.

So that’s the breakdown of the book. And then you’ve got here what you’re watching now or listening to now, these “Inside The Book” episodes we’ve been doing. And you might notice we’ve revamped those thumbnails now to match the cover design and the overall styling of the book. So we’ll be adding to those as we do more episodes leading up to the launch.

And if you blinked, you missed it, but there is a little bit at the top here mentioning it’s not ready yet, it is coming soon, but we now have an official release date of the 23 September, which at the time of recording is just a couple of months away. Super exciting!

So I’m really chuffed that we are entering that endgame now. And this will very soon be in your hands, on your shelf and empowering you to greater musicality yourself.

So if you want to go to musicalitybook.com now, you can click here to get notified. Just put in your name and email and that’s going to put you on our early interest list. So very simple, just put in your name and email, it’ll take you to a confirmation page and that’ll make sure you’re on our early interest list for the book.

Why would you want to do that? It’s not just about remembering come September that the book is out, but I wanted to share with you a couple of other things.

So number one is we are doing exclusive pre-order bonuses with the book. So in due course, you can just, you know, buy the book off the shelf. But as part of the launch, we’re doing a special pre-order bundle where you get a couple of extra things. And if you get yourself onto that list, you’ll be the first to hear about it.

So you definitely want to be on that early interest list and lined up to pre-order it in the next couple of weeks. We’ll be opening that, I think, within a week for a select group behind the scenes, including that early interest list. So they are going to be the first to hear about it.

And then we’ll gradually be opening up pre-orders. Because part of what we’re including is limited spots. So get on that early interest list, get your name on that list and you’ll be the first to hear when we open for pre-orders very soon.

And I also wanted to let you know we, as part of the launch, we are doing something very special in September/October time, and I can’t share details just yet.

We did share full info with our most devoted, most keen, most longstanding members here at Musical U a couple of weeks ago, and they went nuts for it. I’m excited to tell you all about it, but just to say for now we’re doing a special live thing in September/October to celebrate the launch of the book and to really bring it to life. Super exciting.

All I can say for now is that tickets for that are going to be limited and the only way to get access to it will be through buying the book. So that’s another big reason to register your interest now and make sure you’re on that list and you can be first in line to nab your ticket for that coming up in September/October.

So I’m really happy to share this cover with you, share the page with you. Musicalitybook.com, you can check it out for yourself. Get your name on that list.

I have been loving hearing all of the excitement in our audience, in our membership for this book. So please do keep the comments coming, the questions, the suggestions.

And that reminds me, a reminder for you, I do want your suggestions for who I should interview.

I really want to do a special interview series in conjunction with the launch of the book because this book is like our “missing manual” that we think every music learner should have been handed on day one.

But as you can imagine, with all of the topics covered, there are so many incredible people doing great work in the world on all of those topics. And in the spirit of Better Together, one of our Pillar Beliefs, I would love to bring in some of those other thought-leaders, some of those other innovators and interview them on your behalf, to get their take on all of these topics.

And so we definitely have a whole list of people we’ll be going to. But I want to hear from you. Who would be your dream come true guest to hear me interview on the show, to bring onto musicality now and pick their brains on any one of those topics?

So anything from superlearning to ear training to improvisation to performance, audiation, singing, rhythm, you know, anything covered in the book, anything you find on musicalitybook.com. Who would be the top name for any of those topics? Let me know in the comments on this episode or send an email to [email protected] and let me know. We’ll do our best to line them up and bring them to you!

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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