… and the very first thing you should know about me is that I am not a “natural” musician.
In fact, when I was about five years old, the organiser of a singing group I was in told my mum that she thought I might have a hearing problem! I’m thankful that my mum didn’t share that with me until 20+ years later, so I kept singing away happily (and a hearing test confirmed that my hearing was actually fine). There were, however, plenty of other incidents in my childhood which could easily have put me off music entirely.
Such as having one of my best friends in childhood be an apparent “prodigy”, able to easily play by ear, compose and perform professionally from a young age. It seemed like he could effortlessly do anything he set his mind to in music (while I could do none of it).
Or how despite being a devoted singer in multiple choirs and barbershop groups for more than ten years, I was never the one chosen to take solos in choral performances.
And then there was the “aural skills” part of the instrument exams I’d take each year, where my teacher would do a special session a week or two before the exam, to run through the tests that would be included. I would fail almost every single one. I think I could reliably clap back a rhythm. That was about it. Interval recognition, sight-singing, improvising a melody—all an epic fail, every time, year after year.
Still, I persisted. My love of music burned strong, and even if I had fully taken on the identity of being a “rubbish musician”, I continued to throw myself into it with a passion. So much so that as I lumbered into school each day, lugging some combination of cello, electric guitar, saxophone and clarinet (on top of my school bag and sports kit—and did I mention I was a short and weedy kid, to be trying to manage all that?) I actually earned a reputation among the non-musicians in my year as “the musical one”. That only amplified the pain and shame, because I knew that I was possibly the least musical kid around—and surely anyone else who did music at the school must know that truth too.
So how the heck did I wind up running the world’s leading organisation for providing musicality training, surrounded by a wide variety of online institutions which pride themselves on having the most famous rockstars and virtuosos amongst their staff?
Well, I suppose one way to put it is that if I could crack it for myself—surely there would be nobody I couldn’t help!
Over the years my music hobby continued, and I added jazz piano, bass guitar, and blues harmonica to the mix. I read up on music theory. I dabbled in writing my own (embarrassing teenage) songs.
I still carried that identity of “painfully untalented” with me throughout… until in my early 20s I stumbled upon something that changed everything for me.
At the time I was working as an R&D engineer at a small audio technology startup just outside of Cambridge, UK, where I’d studied for my degree. As part of my work, I needed to perform “critical listening” tests, to see if our equipment was harming the quality of the audio passed through it.
My boss Pete told me to study up on “Golden Ears”, and fortunately a colleague, Nick, was a BBC-trained sound engineer who was able to give me a nudge in the right direction. As I went through the leading “Golden Ears” training course, I learned to distinguish subtle changes in sound. I started to be able to tell a +3dB boost in the 10kHz band from a +6dB boost in the 12kHz band, or that there was a slight chorus effect being added, or that there was an odd disparity in the stereo field.
It was all fascinating stuff, and “woke up” my ears in an exciting new way. I listened again to music I thought I knew inside-out, and could suddenly appreciate whole new levels of detail.
But that wasn’t actually the most exciting part. What was most exciting was the discovery of one simple phrase, “ear training”, which set me on a path that would change my life forever.
Now this was back around 2007, when the internet and Google were not what they are today, so finding out more about this topic was easier said than done!
There were two big discoveries though, almost immediately:
- There was a process called “ear training” which could actually improve my ears and increase my default natural ability to hear things. This was a learnable skill!
- Alongside the “audio” ear training I’d been doing, focusing on things like frequencies and audio effects, there was a whole adjacent area of ear training for music itself! I found people talking about doing ear training for intervals and chords, and hints that this could actually unlock the kinds of abilities I’d always thought were magical.
As I dove head-first into the world of musical ear training it was like lightbulb after lightbulb were finally coming on. I set aside the “talent myth” (more on that later) and began to see clearly the practically-unlimited musical potential which I, and every other music learner, had actually been born with.
I could now see that the reason I had always failed the “aural skills” tests wasn’t because I was naturally deficient or limited. I had just never been taught those skills.
And, as I started to shed my old identity of “painfully untalented”, I could see other explanations hidden in plain sight.
Like how it was no coincidence that my childhood friend who was the “prodigy” was actually the son of two professional conductors—and he had been immersed in instrument lessons, theory, and ear training from pretty much the day he was born.
Or that the reason I’d never been selected for solos had little to do with my singing, and everything to do with the fact that I couldn’t pronounce my “s” sounds cleanly (a.k.a. had a lisp—which also turned out to be another fixable problem, with the right training.)
The more ear training I did, the more I found I could play by ear, improvise, write music, transcribe what I heard, and do everything else that had once felt fundamentally beyond my reach.
Being a geek, I started making iPhone apps to help me with my own ear training. The first one was selected by Apple to be featured on the front page of the App Store. And, to make a long (and very bumpy!) story short, I ended up quitting my day job to go full-time, starting “Easy Ear Training” in 2009 to share with others what I had discovered about musical ear training, and how to make it easy, fun and effective.
I had never intended to start a company, and I tried repeatedly to put the project aside. Somehow, I was never able to.
I knew just how much I had struggled to find good information or resources for ear training. I found myself constantly asking “How is it possible that there is no go-to company or website to help musicians develop their ear?” And so, despite being massively under-qualified, and perhaps the least likely person in the world to do it, I found myself taking on the mission of doing something to put that bizarrely-missing piece in place.
From the very beginning I had the good sense to recruit other people more expert than myself to write material and create products with me. And over the years, as we worked with dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of musicians of all kinds, it gradually became clear that “ear training” was only a part of what we were really doing.
In 2015 we rebranded the company and launched a new membership program as “Musical U”, devoted not just to musical ear training, but the much broader topic of musicality training. You’ll be hearing much more about that in the next section, so for now I’ll just say that like ear training, this seemed to be a bizarrely-neglected area.
I found myself asking once again, “How could something SO important and SO powerful be so utterly missing from most music education?”
For nearly a decade now we’ve worked towards a single clear vision at Musical U: “A world of natural musicians.”
How can we spread the message, create the very best resources, and collaborate with other music educators to have one specific impact: to put musicality at the heart of what it means to “learn music”, where it always should have been.
I’ve been fortunate to have the chance to work with some of the most passionate, experienced and insightful music educators on the planet, and it’s been my great honour to serve tens of thousands of musicians inside Musical U, and reach several million more through our public material. That still kind of blows my mind. Yet I know it still only represents the beginning of our journey, if we’re to have the impact Musical U was created for.
This book is our latest, and in many ways our greatest, effort towards that mission. So before we dive in, I want to thank you for picking this book up, for reading it, and for anything and everything you do to increase your own musicality from this day on. You are helping to create a more naturally musical world, and that is truly a blessing to us all.