The “Complete Musician”

Since musicality is not one single thing, it’s never going to be measurable by a simple number or a set of “levels” or “grades”, nor a final “destination” that everyone can agree on * In fact, one of our Pillar Beliefs here at Musical U involves the fact that learning music is an endless journey. More on that in the next chapter. .

Still, after seeing tens of thousands of musicians go through the Big Picture Vision exercise you’ll be learning about in the next chapter, we have come up with a simple shorthand which we’ve found tends to resonate strongly with the majority of musicians:

The “Complete Musician” is one who can step into any musical situation with confidence, and play something that sounds—and feels—great.

It doesn’t cover all the bases (for example, maybe you want to substitute “play” for “sing”, or perhaps you only ever want to sit alone and compose music without ever stepping outside your own home) so please understand we’re not suggesting that this definition should necessarily be your exact goal.

Nevertheless, it’s proven to be a handy concept for many. In fact, this is the official overall goal of our Next Level coaching program. Every musician who comes in is different, with their own distinct musicality and their own unique “Big Picture Vision” for their musical life—but the freedom, versatility, and musical mastery that’s implied by this concept of the “Complete Musician” is one that almost always resonates strongly, stokes their inspiration, and increases their clarity.

All of this begs the question then: what would it take to become that kind of “Complete Musician”?

The H4 Model Of Complete Musicality

Back when Musical U was still “Easy Ear Training”, and our focus was on making ear training easy, fun and effective, we developed something we called the “trifecta”.

This was a way of thinking about “what it takes to be a great musician” by breaking it down into three components:

• Instrument Skills
• Music Theory
• Ear Training

And showing them as a triangle with each one connected to the other two:

This was a helpful clarifier for many musicians who came to us, and served as the basis for the Integrated Ear Training approach you’ll learn about later in the book. All three areas are familiar to most who’ve been learning music for a while, but few musicians are giving all three their due attention, or thinking about the connections between them.

Over time, as we watched musicians have varying degrees of success with Integrated Ear Training, we discovered that there was a fourth vital component to consider: Mindset.

Mindset can make the difference between a musician who has enormous success, and one who struggles, despite having exactly the same “natural abilities” and exactly the same learning material. We’ll be devoting a whole chapter to the topic, so I won’t go into more detail about it here, except to say that in due course we realised that “Mindset” was an over-simplification. Really, we needed some broader representation of everything that’s going on emotionally as well as psychologically in the musical journey.

The result was what we now call the H4 Model of Complete Musicality. It’s what our transformational musicality program Living Music was built on, and it’s the basis of our Next Level personal coaching, where we work one-to-one with a musician over the course of a year to help them break through to their personal “next level” in music.

Now I want to give it to you too.

Don’t let its simplicity fool you! Adopting this H4 Model as how you think about your musicality can have a huge impact throughout your musical life, forever.

We said that the “Complete Musician” is someone who can step into any musical situation they want to with confidence and play something that sounds—and feels—great. These, then, are the four areas which produce that “complete musicality”:

Head, Hands, Hearing and Heart

Head

In traditional music education, Head would be called “music theory” and typically taught in a dry, abstract way, full of rules and facts. In my experience, most musicians dislike it, and even those who do like it find it hard to really get much benefit from it beyond the basics of being able to read score notation.

That kind of “music theory” certainly isn’t bad as such, but the way it tends to be utterly divorced from real music and real musical activities is a big problem.

What does all the theory actually sound like? How do you do something with it when you’re sitting with your instrument?

Even students who master theory “by the book” tend to find they still don’t really understand music instinctively. That’s why we’ve always taken a very different attitude to music theory here at Musical U and would encourage you to do the same:

Make sure that it’s always connected with real music and the musical activities you’re actually doing.

There are two parts to this:

1. Flip It

When I had the chance to interview YouTube music theory sensation Adam Neely, he finally put words to what I’d been instinctively feeling, and trying to achieve inside Musical U.

Traditional theory is “prescriptive”, meaning it tells you facts and rules about how music is “allowed” to work. It implies that music is a certain way because the theory says that’s how it goes.

However, you can instead treat theory as (merely) “descriptive”, meaning it serves to describe how music does work.

When we treat theory as descriptive we don’t discard all the “rules and facts”, but we’re able to see them for what they are: an attempt to clarify what music and musicians naturally do. It is a set of helpful ideas, terminology and rules of thumb which can help empower a musician.

Simply flipping our understanding of what theory is from “prescriptive” to “descriptive”, it liberates rather than constrains, inspires rather than intimidates, and excites rather than discourages.

2. Integrate It

Even a “descriptive” approach to theory is fundamentally flawed if it exists in abstract isolation from real music.

The solution is to integrate it with the other three H’s below. So for example, you don’t just memorise the notes in an F♯ Minor chord. You play it on your instrument, hear how it sounds, learn to recognise the intervals inside it and the overall sound of a minor chord, and so on.

This can go in the other direction too, guiding your exploration of theory concepts to support what you’re working on for your Hands, Hearing and Heart.

Where traditional “by the book” music theory is very much a strict “right or wrong” mentality, a descriptive and integrated approach to theory brings it much more in line with the nature of music as a human art. Rather than the goal being to pass a theory test, our goal becomes developing an intuitive grasp of how music works and the musical choices available to us in any given situation.

Hands

It’s not an exaggeration to say that 90% or more of music education is focused solely on this one of the four H’s. That should already be setting off alarm bells in your head!

Generations of music learners have been taught to focus purely on instrument technique. They concern themselves only with how to play notes and chords, and get it “right”. They learn pieces or songs note-by-note from sheet music, chord charts, guitar tab or other notation, or from video tutorials. Step by step, instruction by instruction.

To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But it’s no wonder so many musicians lose motivation, or feel disappointed about the level they’ve reached, when only a single one of four vital components of their musicality has been taught!

The entire experience of learning music is transformed into just “avoiding making mistakes”. The best you can hope to achieve with that approach is to become a very good “note-reproducing robot”.

Well, what about musical self-expression? Creativity? Fulfilment and enjoyment? What about connecting with other musicians and feeling confident, versatile and free in any musical situation you’re eager to step into?

Like with “Head”, there are two big changes we suggest:

1. Learn Faster

The “Hands” component is absolutely vital, but the other big issue with standard approaches is that they are essentially a “brute-force” approach.

Endlessly repeating the same thing, and hoping it will eventually click. Making the same mistakes again and again, and getting discouraged when the mistakes don’t go away after the 99th repetition. Spending endless hours practicing, only to plateau, often at a beginner-intermediate level of instrument technique and repertoire.

Over the last twenty years or so, scientific research has proven there are dramatically better ways to spend your practice time, and that you can literally learn up to 10 times faster—by no longer wasting 90% of your practice time.

We’ll cover this in depth in Chapter 6: Superlearning. For now, just know that even if your primary (or even sole) focus was the “Hands” component, there is a much better way to go about it.

2. Integrate It

Again, this one of the four components is typically done in isolation. A student is asked to learn a new piece from notation without ever having heard it, without any idea how it should sound, without being able to sing it or even clap the rhythms. That might be okay if your goal is to be a “note-reproducing robot”—but not if your goal is to be a musician.

When you start actively building the connections from your Hands to your Head, Hearing and Heart, it totally transforms the music you play as well as the experience of learning to play it. You’re also freed up from relying on notation or tutorials to tell your Hands what notes to play, and start being able to instead bring the music out from inside you.

Hearing

One big learning point from the “Easy Ear Training” days was that almost every musician we encountered had either never tried ear training, or had tried it and had a poor experience. Even graduates of top music schools and conservatories would tell us they had flunked their ear training semester, or in some cases that they had passed the quizzes but still felt terrible that they couldn’t play by ear or improvise, despite having acquired the ear skills “on paper”.

Traditional Ear Training consists of endless tedious repetition of abstract exercises and quizzes. It’s slightly more engaging in the age of apps (and full disclosure: our very first product was an ear training app which was only slightly better than the traditional drills and exercises!)

Those methods aren’t terrible. But they are highly inefficient, and often produce little in the way of practical skills beyond the ability to pass ear training quizzes. It’s understandable why musicians either don’t do it, or do it but hate it.

Later in the book you’ll learn about the “Integrated Ear Training” approach, where we incorporate real music, and real musical activities like Playing By Ear, Songwriting and Improvisation. That way, the connections are naturally formed to your Head and your Hands. As a result you improve faster, and every bit of progress means real-life “new things you can do in music”.

Heart

In a way, I feel silly that it took us so long to explicitly recognise this fourth vital component of musicality. But then I look around and see it still missing from even the very best music education out there. I hope that after reading about it here and in the chapters which follow, you’ll likewise come to feel it’s a bit insane that this topic isn’t actively taught to musicians as standard.

Let me put it this way: Have you ever felt emotions while learning or playing music? Have you ever experienced a negative “voice of self-doubt” inside your head, or heard your “inner critic” giving you a hard time during practice or a performance? Do you always feel truly, deeply connected to all the music you play and the other people around you in music—or do you still wonder if hopefully, some day, that connection might emerge?

If those questions made you feel a bit sheepish or self-conscious, you’re not alone. Even with the very best teachers and learning materials, musicians are left struggling with emotional hangups, psychological baggage, limiting beliefs and mental blocks, with no idea what it actually means to “connect” with music or their audience (even though that’s what they want most).

The “Heart” component is about recognising that there is deep emotion and a psychological journey involved in learning music and being a musician.

You don’t need to feel helpless in the face of it all, or like that stuff should all be shoved to one side and hope that one day, eventually, when you “master your instrument” it will all just disappear.

Instead, you can actively learn mindset principles which can remove lifelong limiting beliefs and unlock new levels of musical ability, as well as to develop performance skills which demystify what it takes to perform in an engaging, compelling, emotionally-moving way, and feel a deep connection to music with every note you hear and play.

Don’t Be A Chair With Just One (or Two) Legs!

If you look at any great musician—across instruments and genres, and throughout the ages—every single one of them is strong in all four of these areas.

Head, Hands, Hearing, Heart.

When all four of these parts are developed and connected, it’s transformational. You develop your inner musician. You get in touch with your own true musical nature. You connect with—and harness—your innate instinct for music. And instead of the music always being “out there”, and your Hands needing to be trained to reproduce it robotically, the music starts coming from inside you.

So I’d invite you to ask yourself now: how well do you think you’re doing in each of these four areas? How much time and energy have you put into learning each?

If you’re like most non-professional musicians, over 80% of your time has been spent on the Hands, learning technique and new pieces. Maybe 10-15% has been spent on your Head, learning bits of music theory. And perhaps 5% on Hearing, doing a little “ear training”. If you’re a professional, you may have diligently put a bit more effort into the Head and Hearing—or maybe not.

Can you see now how lopsided that leaves you as a musician?

Imagine trying to sit on a chair which had three of its four legs far too short—or even missing entirely! Or imagine if you had a chair with four good matching legs—but each one stood alone, with nothing connecting them.

Can you see now why you might always have felt a bit unstable and uncertain in music, and why you have been bashing up against barriers which no amount of technique improvement was ever going to conquer?

Those are not inherent barriers. You just haven’t yet honed the required areas of your musicality.

Once you see this, you can’t un-see it. You’ll realise that almost every website, course, and even in-person teacher is just addressing a single one of these areas.

For example, almost every “instrument lessons” website out there just teaches “Hands”, as do most in-person instrument teachers. Endless ear training apps just teach “Hearing”. Centuries of music theory textbooks and courses have just taught “Head”. And typically only high-level performance coaches will touch on “Heart”.

The result is generation after generation of “lopsided” musicians, not realising that they feel so limited only because they’ve put all of their music-learning effort into just one of four essential areas.

So not only is it important to have the very best methods and frameworks for each area, you will also want to make sure you are developing your musicality in all four.

Connection, Connection, Connection

One of the most crucial and powerful aspects of the H4 Model is that not only are you made conscious that all four of these components are essential, but that they are not isolated skills.

For you to reach your true musical potential each of the four must be connected to each of the others.

When you take a holistic, integrated, approach, you are making sure that each skill is widely usable in real musical situations, enhancing your musical life with every step forwards you take.

As a bonus, this integrated approach means that each step of progress in one area has a positive knock-on effect on all of them, developing your musicality much faster than if you just work on each in isolation.

Using the H4 Model

When you develop each of these four areas—Head, Hands, Hearing, and Heart—as well as the connections between them, that’s what produces that incredible “complete musicality” for you.

You can use this model to:

1. Assess where you’re at right now. Where there are strengths and opportunities?
2. Look at where you want to get to (your Big Picture Vision, see next chapter), and really get clear on that in terms of the H4 Model. What does that version of you look like, in terms of each of the four H’s?
3. Figure out how you can achieve that vision most effectively, designing your learning all along the way.

Keep this model in mind throughout the rest of this book—and the rest of your musical life!