The book you are holding was written based on 15 years spent helping tens of thousands of adult music learners online to unlock their true musical potential through musicality training. That in turn was based on countless decades of prior experience in the Musical U team, and principles and methodologies for musicality training which date back over 100 years.
The book was inspired by a simple idea: to distil all the most powerful and effective material we’ve gathered over the years into a single volume. Something which would be useful both to those who are actively training with us inside Musical U membership or our Next Level coaching program, and to those for whom this would be their very first foray into the wild and wonderful world of musicality training.
To put it another way: I wanted us to write the book I wish I had been handed on “day one” of learning music.
Why?
Because, as you’ll discover as you read on, so many of the skills and abilities which inspire musicians to pick up an instrument (or open their mouth to sing) in the first place simply aren’t taught in mainstream music education. I’ve found that the average musician may have spent months, years, or even decades “learning music” and still have no idea of what’s truly possible for them.
This holds true across all instruments, all styles More on this in the next chapter. , all ages, all ability levels. The good news is that the promise and power of musicality training also applies equally across all those varied musical worlds. The “inner skills” of musicality are as universal as music itself.
My hope is that this book will open up some new possibilities for you in your musical life. We’ll provide clear, concrete information you can use to start exploring those possibilities and unlocking new levels of musicality for yourself.
This isn’t a “method book” or a set of exercises to follow. By its nature, musicality training should be focused on musical activities and music itself, and the details must adapt to the uniqueness of the musician. Our aim is to set you up for success in your journey of musicality training, by filling in the missing pieces that have held you back from your true potential.
And of course, should you want further help as you continue that exciting journey, we would be honoured to assist you more fully at Musical U, where we can provide audio, video, interactive exercises, and personal human support throughout. You’ll find information about what we offer at the back of the book. We have also prepared a set of free resources, including additional information and assets to help you put the book’s material into practice. Information on this can be found in Additional Resources.
Overview
In Part I of the book, we’ll cover some fundamental topics which are the foundation for all successful musical development, including setting your own personal vision for the kind of musician you wish to become, and introducing a set of foundational skills which will benefit you throughout your musical life.
In Part II, we’ll explore a range of building blocks and “mental models” for understanding pitch and rhythm instinctively, and the ear training activities which can help you master them.
Then, in Part III, we’ll look at applications of these new abilities to enable you to improvise, play by ear, write music, play expressively, and perform confidently.
For the most part, chapters are independent of one another and can be read in any order That goes double for improvising, if you’re following an improvisation approach which focuses on bringing the music out from inside you, like the Expansive Creativity framework you’ll learn about in Chapter 15: Improvisation. There are other improv methods which rely on memorised “vocabulary” and strict “patterns” and can operate with zero Audiation. However, for that very reason, these approaches tend to produce limited, robotic, generic and same-y sounding improvisation. More on that in the Improvisation chapter. . So you may like to read the book from start to finish, but you are also welcome to jump straight to the chapters which interest you most in a “choose your own adventure” way. There are lots of cross-references—but you generally won’t be held back if you haven’t yet read about something that’s mentioned.
There is a lot packed into this book! You would probably be well-served to scan through the whole text lightly to begin with, and then circle back to the sections you really want to go deep in.
About This Book
Before we continue, let me share a little bit of behind-the-scenes info with you…
When we first started the project to write this book, it moved incredibly slowly. The team was putting in the hours, and working hard to gather the material. But something just wasn’t flowing. And it took me longer than I’d like to admit to realise why!
It didn’t help that I tend to have extremely high standards for what we do at Musical U (while always trying to curb perfectionism… more on that in a later chapter!), but on top of that, what was emerging was clearly lacking a certain something. Even though the potential impact of the material itself was exciting, it all felt a bit dull and lifeless to me.
Then, one day, I was walking home from dropping my kids to school and listening to a recorded lecture by the legendary personal development pioneer Napoleon Hill. As I heard him speak on this old 1950s recording, it was the first time I’d heard his actual voice, despite having read many of his written works. As he spoke, his wit, sense of humour and personality shone through—and something suddenly clicked in my mind.
We had been treating the project like we were trying to write a textbook.
And while the goal was to provide extensive in-depth information, and fill in the gaps left by the standard music methods and theory books, something important finally dawned on me. Musical U has always been about the human connection, and being able to make the material personal to each musician who comes to us. This is one of the reasons we’ve been so successful, and one of the main ways we’re able to deliver such consistent breakthrough results for our members and coaching clients—by actually going beyond the information and methods themselves.
In the context of this book, the implication was instantly clear: we couldn’t let this be yet another dry, abstract textbook! A written book may not allow for the back-and-forth interaction we take such pride and joy in inside Musical U, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still let some humanity seep into it.
So although I would never want this to become a “Chicken Soup for the Musician’s Soul”, prioritising stories over substance, I hope you will allow me to share some opinions and personal experience along the way. And that you’ll accept (maybe even enjoy) the conversational style of writing, where I might manage to ignore my meticulous inner editor and allow myself to begin a sentence with “and”, end it on a preposition, or throw in the occasional emoticon ;) I won’t go as far as emoji though—don’t let’s be silly.
You’ll find that, as a Brit, I tend to use British spellings, except where I’ve beaten it out of myself over the years, such as in the case of “practice” vs. “practise”. We will be capitalising certain key concepts, such as Audiation and Active Listening. You can blame my high school German studies for that, as I found I really liked the capitalising of nouns in that language. And, as you’ll discover, these are skills which really deserve a capital letter ;) More seriously though, it will help us to distinguish these specific skills from more casual uses or other meanings of the same words. We’ll generally capitalise when referring to the concept or topic as a whole, but not in more specific uses of the same word. For example, capitalising in “your current ability with Intervals” but not in “learn these three intervals next.”
You’ll also get to hear from other members of the team as they share their own insights, as well as some of the world-class musicians and music educators we’ve had the pleasure to work with over the years. I believe this will help to imbue the book with some of the spirit of “Better Together”, which you’ll be learning more about in the next chapter.
I hope you will find this all makes the book more readable and helps to bring things to life. After all, music is an art, not a science. And even though the proven methods and information we’ll be sharing in these pages are, in a sense, “fact” (by virtue of having been demonstrated to work successfully for musicians of all kinds), there’s plenty which is still up for debate and subject to opinion. So to write the book in a more personal, subjective way, is true to the fact that it is all ultimately based on practical experience of humans, with humans, occupied in the human art of music-making.
So with that being said, in case we haven’t met before, I should probably take a moment to introduce myself and share a little of my own musical backstory.