How To Crush Complexity: Part 2/3

Hello, and welcome back to this special training on How to Crush Complexity - So That Music Comes Easily.

A big thank you to everyone who left a comment or sent me a message about the first video, it’s clear that this topic of complexity and overwhelm really resonated with you guys and you found the advice around squashing overall overwhelm helpful. But it was also clear that some of you were itching to get into the specifics - and that’s what we’ll be getting into today.

Now this session is going to run a little long - but you know from the last video how much I appreciate the busyness of your life, and particularly how tight time can be when it comes to music learning. So I have made sure that this session will be packed with valuable information that can actually save you a ton of time and wasted effort - so it will be well worth your while to watch the whole thing.

I’m super excited to share this with you - I knew I was eager to dig into this topic because there were a few insights and mental shifts that I was sure could help you - but as I put together the material for today’s session I realised just how cool and impactful this stuff can be for you. Plus, there is chemistry and also dinosaurs. So we’re going to have a good time.

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In this training we’re talking about the topic of complexity in music learning. Why is it that learning music seems so hard and overwhelming - when music itself is often dazzingly simple in its beauty and elegance.

There’s some kind of mismatch between our experience of enjoying the music we love - and our experience of slogging through it and battling overwhelm when it comes to learning to be musicians ourselves.

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In today’s session I’m going to show you that there’s one root cause behind most of the struggles you’ve faced in learning music.

And I’m going to show you two specific examples of how knowing about that root cause can set you free - so that music comes easy.

So that you can pick up your instrument - and just play.

So you can sit in with any group of musicians and hold your own.

So you’re not dependent on sheet music, memorisation or holding firmly to rigid music theory rules.

You have an innate instinctive intuitive understanding of how music works - and you can use it in any way you choose.

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Now I’m not delusional! Everything we learn in life requires some effort and repetition, you need to put in time and energy, of course. But when it comes to music education there are a few things that make it much, much harder than it needs to be.

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The first is just that music is vast. It’s huge. There is so much to learn, and we’re often excited about learning all kinds of different things. But we as humans are not very well equipped to deal with the enormous amount of information now at our fingertips and all the new opportunities we’re presented with day after day.

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This can lead to a feeling of general overwhelm in your musical life. So in the last training session we talked about several specific strategies you can use to address that problem and get clarity about what you’re working on in music and how.

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We talked about having a:

Clear Big Picture Vision

A MAGIC Goal

An Effective Training Plan

Progress Tracking

Suitable Support

So if you have that feeling of overall overwhelm and you haven’t watched that first video yet, please jump back and watch that one now. The chances are that one or more of these pieces are missing, and once you fill them in, you’ll feel much more in control and organised in your musical life and able to focus in on the specific skills you’re trying to learn.

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So assuming you clear up that general problem of complexity causing overwhelm, and you’re working away with a clear vision, a MAGIC goal, an effective training plan, you’ve got progress tracking and support - why is it that some musical skills still seem really complicated, and out of reach.

In particular, those skills of the “natural” musician like being able to play by ear or improvise or sight-sing - those can still seem incredibly difficult or even impossible for you to learn.

For example:

“I want to be able to move keys up and down to be able to play along and jam with others without being a pain to them.”

“I love playing, but i cannot hear notes. I need to look at the tabs to know what to play”

“I can't read music, just tabs, and I certainly can't just play what I hear.”

“I want to be able to work out how to sing a song without always having to ask a pianist to help”

“I want to improve accuracy vs hit and miss of hitting the piano to transcribe”

This went on and on - lots of struggling, and frustration. And feeling like these skills you wanted so badly might just be impossible for you to learn.

So this brings us to the second reason that music learning is much, much harder than it needs to be.

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I’m willing to be that there has been a missing piece - a missing step, in fact - in your music education.• • • •

Now if you’ve been following us at Musical U for a while you’ll know we’re all about musicality training - learning the “inner skills” of music. You probably know we specialise in ear training and we’ve helped hundreds of thousands of musicians to train their ears to play notes and chords by ear, to improvise, to write music - all of those great, expressive skills that can make someone seem, and indeed feel like a “natural” in music.

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So at this point you might well be expecting me to say “Aha! The missing piece is ear training!” and launch into an explanation of why ear training is the solution to everything.

And in some sense it can be. But it’s not that simple. And I think you know that because the chances are you’ve given ear training a try. Maybe for an instrument exam, maybe you downloaded an ear training app. Maybe you’re actually a member of Musical U and you’ve been working on some of our ear training in there.

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So ear training is part of the solution - of course it is, because it’s so core to how inner musicality is developed, and fundamentally musicality is about feeling like music is easy and natural for you.

But just “doing ear training” is not a magic bullet. And just tacking on ear training as an extra activity is going to have limited impact on your musical life.

For a single root cause to be behind all the various complexity you’ve all been bashing up against in your music learning it has to be pretty fundamental, right? Something that deep down has not quite “clicked” right with the way you’ve been learning music.

So what is that “missing step”?

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What is it that sets apart the greats in music?

What lets the “natural” musician do all the amazing free, creative, expressive acts like playing by ear, improvising, jamming with tight rhythm, writing songs, and keeping an audience totally enthralled?

Bottom line: What’s the difference between the average music-learner and a “talented” musician?

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Last year I had the chance to talk with Professor Anders Ericsson who is the world’s leading scientific researcher on the topic of talent. He’s made it his life’s work to study a wide variety fields including music and ask: what is actually going on when we say someone has “talent”.

He’s identified, broken down and codified the behaviours that lead to someone being “talented” in a particular area.

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And ultimately what these behaviours all lead to are what he calls “more sophisticated mental representations”.

To put it another way: The “talented” musicians have a different mental model of music than the average music learner.

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Now that’s not suprising, right? We kind of know instinctively that there must be something different going on in their brains. It’s not just about their fingers being well-trained, or them having a nice-sounding voice. The “talented” musician, the “natural” musician - it’s clear they understand music and relate to it in a fundamentally different way than we seem to.

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To put it another way: They just seem to have a “musical mind”

And here’s the crux of what I want to share with you today.

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When I said just now that the “natural” musician has a more sophisticated mental model than the average musician, your brain probably immediately drew the following conclusion:

If I want to be a “natural” I need more sophisticated mental models.

And you’re not wrong.

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But you probably also made the following assumption:

sophisticated = complicated

Am I right?

This, right here, is the root cause of all the complexity you’ve been facing. The assumption that to get better in a skill, things need to get more complicated. So if you’re not yet as good as you want to be, you need to keep diving deeper and exploring the more complicated ideas, and details, and techniques.

That’s a totally understandable assumption. And it’s not totally wrong. Generally speaking, the more advanced we go in a topic, the more complicated things become.

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But if you ask someone who’s reached the highest levels in studying a topic or mastering a skill: did their practicing on day 5,000 feel more complex and overwhelming than on day 1? Well, no. It generally doesn’t. It’s hard-ish on day 1 and it’s hard-ish on day 5,000.

You’ve probably experienced this yourself. Yes, when you step back, the later material is more complicated. But it doesn’t have to feel more complex because you’ve got there step by step.

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And that is what I most wanted to share with you today:

• Learning music isn’t complex because it has to be.

• It’s complex because you’ve probably skipped a step.

Specifically: you’ve probably skipped a step in developing your mental representations, your mental models.

Now we could go down a whole tangent here about the history of music education, and the impact of the printing press on what it meant to learn music, and how and why modern music education has ended up mismatched to modern music learning.

But we don’t need to do that. Because it doesn’t really matter why we’ve ended up with this step missing in music education. All that matters is that we have, and I don’t think I need to tell you the history for you to see this is true.

Instead I’d like to tell you about my high school chemistry class.

Bear with me.

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When I was in high school, or “secondary school” as we call it in the UK, we started learning about atoms in Science class. We learned there were different chemicals in the world like Hydrogen and Helium and Lithium and these were different types of atom that behaved different and all the world was made up of these atoms.

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“Great!” I thought, and I formed a little mental model where these atoms were little balls of different types, because that’s how we were representing them on the page, a circle with a letter in to show that this hydrogen atom was different from that helium atom, and we could talk about how they’d interact and we could solve little problems and conduct experiments and so on.

All well and good. But then a year or two later in Chemistry class the teacher dropped a bombshell: atoms weren’t little balls at all.

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In fact, they were all a nucleus with protons and neutrons in and a number of electrons spinning round it. Now our picture looked like a ball with little things orbiting it, and that was fine. But then he explained that the number of protons in the nucleus was what made the difference between a hydrogen atom and a lithium atom. Wait, what?! These two atoms which in my mental model had been made of completely different “stuff” were suddenly made of exactly the same “stuff”, just in different proportions?

Mind blown. But now I had this more complex mental model with the orbiting electrons and everything, and it turned out that we could solve some more interesting problems now and we could explain some of those experiments we’d been doing earlier. Cool.

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But then… I spoke to a cousin who was doing chemistry at university and they told me that this whole orbiting thing was nonsense. In fact electrons are more like waves than particles and the whole structure of an atom was different than I’d just been learning. Mind blown again. And clearly his new mental model let him do all kinds of more complicated things which was cool.

So why am I telling you this story about my chemistry studies?

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Well there are a couple of important lessons here:

1. Your mental model needs to suit the task you’re trying to do.

The problems we solved with the “orbit” model were quite different to the ones we’d solved with the “ball of stuff” model, and the mental model had to match what we were trying to do. It’s not just that the more complicated models let you do everything the simpler ones do and more. There are actually tasks which are much easier to do with the simpler mental models.

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2. You can’t skip a step. It’s not just that we teach young people the simpler models because they’re young. We start with the simpler models because it provides a firm foundation for everything that follows. The more advanced models don’t replace the simple ones - they build on it.

So now you’re probably starting to see why I’m talking about all this.

There is a mismatch between the mental models you’ve been given for music and the tasks you’re trying to do.

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You haven’t been given the right foundation. So this situation: [IMAGE]

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Is actually more like this: [IMAGE]

We’ve inherited a system of music education based heavily on classical music and the “conservatory” model where students dedicated several years of their life to studying nothing but music.

It is not well matched to the modern adult amateur musician, and leaves us struggling through no fault of our own - but because an important foundation hasn’t been put in place, and we haven’t been given the mental models we need to make sense of music.

We’re also surrounded by all this incredible recorded music, and (particularly as adults) we tend to come to music learning thinking that we should be able to quickly play music that’s just as complex and intricate as the music we listen to.

In a minute I’m going to get into specifics for pitch and rhythm. But I want to be clear: I’m not saying that other things you might have found in music theory or ear training are wrong. But it’s likely that they’re little bits and pieces of more complicated mental models that don’t apply to the stage you’re at, and can’t really be used effectively unless a foundation has first been put in place.

Okay, so there’s this step missing. And you’re probably thinking “Huh, that sounds pretty bad”. But it gets worse.

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Because music education (and by that I don’t just mean school music education, or universities or textbooks - I also mean the vast majority of mainstream YouTube videos, online courses, instrument teachers, all of it) - music education is also lop-sided. It’s totally unbalanced.

I like to think of there being three major components to learning music, what I call the “trifecta”: There’s •Instrument skills, •Music Theory, and your •Ear.

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And music learners tend to focus probably 80% of their efforts on the instrument. Playing from sheet music, chord charts or tab, learning scales and repertoire, practicing specific techniques and working on their speed and precision playing the instrument. And this goes for singers too.

Then maybe 10 or 15% gets spent, often reluctantly, on music theory. And often that’s only done so that you can make sense of music notation.

And then maybe there’s a bit of time left for developing your ear skills.

So it’s totally lop-sided.

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And yet it’s the ear skills that are the key to feeling like a natural. Like we talked about before, almost any musician you admire and who’s captivated audiences, who seems totally free and confident and capable - only a tiny fraction of that comes from instrument mastery. And there are plenty of technically-capable instrumentalists who don’t feel at all free or natural.

Because all that “inner musicality” comes down to the ears, and the theory understanding.

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So when you combine this lop-sidedness with the missing step in your mental models - it’s no wonder that almost every passionate amateur musician feels limited and frustrated - and like they’re not a “natural”.

So that’s the bad news. That’s the situation you’ve inherited as a 21st century music learner, through no fault of your own.

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The good news is this: when you put that missing step in place, and you rebalance these three components a little - you can very quickly start feeling that freedom, confidence and ease in music. I’m not going to pretend you’ll be an overnight virtuoso. But it’s not an exagerration to say your whole relationship with music can be transformed in the space of a few weeks.

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Now I know some of you are thinking “That all sounds great in theory, but what does this actually mean in practice. How can I use this discovery that there’s been a missing step in my mental models?”

So I wanted to share a couple of specific examples with you. And they’re powerful ones.

I’m going to look at pitch, and then at rhythm - and show you how putting a new foundation in place, some more suitable mental models, totally change the game. And learning music becomes something that just “clicks” and flows for you.

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I said earlier that one thing that trips us up is that we let our expectations for music learning be set by the music we love and listen to. Whether it’s Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis or Mozart, we hear this amazing music, we think “I want to do that!” and then music education falls short on getting us anywhere close.

And I’m not raising this to say “Hey, just set your sights lower”. But because I want to pick up on what, specifically, is problematic about that - and how it relates directly to this missing foundation I’ve been talking about.

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When you guys shared what seems complex to you, and the skills you most dream of having but have always struggled to learn, it was things like:

- Playing notes by ear

- Figuring out chord progessions and harmony by ear

- Improvising solos

- Understanding rhythm notation and being more precise with rhythm

- Being able to sing, or hear the notes in your head (what we call “audiation”), when you look at a score

At a glance these might seem like quite varied skills. Yes, they all come under the umbrella of “musicality” that we talk so much about here at Musical U. But learning one can look quite different to learning another.

Here’s the thing though: what makes them seem complex is actually very, very similar.

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Here are a few factors that cause us to trip up when we try to do one of these things:

Key. When we try to play by ear or improvise, we know there’s something to consider about the key we’re in or the scale we’re using, but that can get really confusing with sharps and flats and so on. Ditto for sight-singing or audiating from a score. We can kind of start to get the hang of it in one key, but as soon as we go out into the “real world” it seems like every song’s in a different key and we’re almost starting from scratch.

Arrangement. If we start from a simple isolated series of notes, or rhythms, or a very simple score, things may be fine. But “real” music tends to have a bunch of instruments playing at once, pitches and rhythms all over the place, the recording might be mixed or have effects that make it even harder to pick apart by ear.

Length. One or two notes - sure, that’s fine. A bar? Yep, can handle that. But once the bit of music we’re trying to get our head around gets longer, our musical memory comes into play too, and suddenly we can’t remember the thing we thought we just figured out and it all starts feeling overwhelming again.

Speed. Whether it’s playing by ear, improvising, rhythms, sight-singing - as we start to learn these skills and we take isolated examples carefully, slowly, one note at a time, things are manageable. But all too quickly when we turn our attention to “real” music or real musical situations and suddenly the notes are flying past at what seems like lightning speed. As soon as your ears or your fingers have managed one bit, things have already moved on.

So these are a handful of examples of factors that make all of these skills complex for us - and they all point to the same thing: We’re trying to run before we can walk. There’s a missing step to bridge us from the super simple theoretical examples, to music more like the stuff we love and listen to.

So the solution?

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Strip it back. Then build it back up.

It’s just like that atom model progression in chemistry - we can’t leap to the advanced model just because we know that’s the most “correct” or “true”. If we don’t give ourselves the chance to establish the foundational concepts and understanding, we’re just going to end up bewildered.

So how about instead we begin with a foundation of building blocks that are so simple that you almost can’t get them wrong?

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It’s kind of like learning to read. When a child wants to learn to read and they’re really into dinosaurs we don’t go to the library and get the biggest reference book on dinosaurs and hand it to them!

It may be the most advanced and “correct” information on dinosaurs.

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But that kid needs to learn some letters. And then some simple words like “cat” and “dog” and “tyrannosaurus rex”. And then, once they’ve got some foundational skills and mental models we can start introducing the stuff they were aiming for all along.

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So what are these fundamental building blocks in music, the stuff so simple you can’t get it wrong?

Before I talk specifically about doing this for pitch and rhythm I want to pause for a moment. Because I know the specifics are exciting and interesting and useful - but I want to make sure this has really sunk in.

Because if you take only one thing away from this training, it should be this: There has been a missing step in your music learning. And pushing forwards isn’t going to do you any good until you step back and put this foundation in place. Find the right mental models and the right building blocks - and then you’ll be able to charge forwards quickly and easily.

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In other words: Put that missing step in place - and everything will be much, much easier.

Specific Example: Solfa Okay. Let’s talk about pitch! Melody and Harmony.

How does all this talk of a missing foundation apply here?

I’m going to share a mental model with you that is most likely the foundational step you’ve been missing.

And I’d like to tell you a little about how I can to discover this - because it’s probably pretty similar to the path you’re on.

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The first couple of decades of my music learning were heavily instrument-focused. Thinking about that trifecta again, I was probably 90% Instrument and 10% Theory. No ears at all.

And so when it came to pitch, my mental models were all about theory, meaning notation and the symbols on the page. And about my fingers on the instrument or how I controlled my voice. I had various understanding of the rules around keys and scales and sharps and flats.

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But to be honest, in my mental model, every pitch was pretty much the same. Sure, some were higher, some were lower, sometimes accidentals would trip me up or I’d have to grapple with an unfriendly key signature.

But I really had no mental model for what made a melody sound the way it did. I had no basis for improvising or creating my own music except the rules of music theory that told me which pitches belonged in the key and could be considered “safe”.

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I think I probably had some grasp that the tonic note of the scale was important and different from the others. And if you pressed me I could probably explain about how chords were constructed from certain notes of the scale. But I didn’t really know what that meant or why it mattered. And basically every note in the scale and the key was pretty much the same to me.

Sounds pretty bleak when I describe it like that, right?

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Because we kind of know that for the “natural” musician, that’s not how it is. They really get the musical role of each note and how to choose just the right notes at just the right moments.

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But this is the level of mental model that I would estimate 80% of musicians out there reach.

And often we think the solution is more theory, and when I thought about trying to be more free and creative in music I went straight to the theory books and hoped to find new rules or explanations that would be enlightening. They never were - because I was reaching for a mental model that was steps ahead of what I needed.

So I went on to have a bit of a breakthrough. I discovered ear training, and for me that meant discovering interval recognition.

And that was a big leap forwards because for the first time I was starting to hear how pitches related to each other. I was starting to understand why major chords used particular notes from the scale and minor chords other ones. And how it might be possible to play by ear or improvise or sight sing or audiate, by using the sense of “relative pitch” that I was developing.

Hooray! I had a new mental model for pitch, and it was enabling some cool new skills. I could start to play by ear and improvise and that was super exciting.

But without knowing it, I had skipped a step.

Intervals were empowering - but actually really hard to use! I understood intellectually how useful they were and I saw hints of it when trying real musical tasks.

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But let’s come back for a moment to those things I said make musical skills challenging:

Key was a massive issue - because the amount of translation and rules I needed to connect up an interval like “a third” with a starting note and the key I was in and somehow have it make sense - even when I had memorised it all it took a second or two to move from note name to interval to the next note name. Pretty impractical. Arrangement was a challenge - because intervals were about just two notes together - but of course real music had tons going on. Length was a challenge - because again, intervals let me tackle two notes at a time but a real melody was a whole series of these pairwise comparisons! And all of that combined with the challenge of “Speed” to mean that even though in theory I could use intervals to play by ear and improvise, in practice it was really hard.

Now like I said earlier - the alternative mental models I’m going to share don’t mean that the other stuff is bad, or wrong. And here, it’s not that intervals are the wrong method. There are many situations where they’re actually the ideal mental model. But if you’re at the beginning of playing by ear or improvising or sight-singing, they are a really hard approach to start with.

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So what’s the alternative? What was the step I’d skipped?

Well, it took me a while to find. Like I said, I had some success with intervals and various other areas of ear training, and that kept me busy for quite a while.

And when I did discover the alternative, it was in the context of using intervals for relative pitch - and it took me a while longer to really realise that it wasn’t an addon to intervals or even an alternative - it was something that should really be the foundation first.

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The missing step was what’s called “solfa” or “solfege”. And I don’t want to get hung up on the terminology here because what matters is the mental model.

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That mental model was to think about pitch entirely within the key. To understand notes based on their place in the current scale, quite apart from the nitty-gritty of sharps and flats and note names.

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In the solfa system each note in the major scale gets a name, do re mi fa so la ti do. And you can extend it to handle accidentals like a “flat third”, and there are ways to tackle non-major scales too.

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It’s totally equivalent to using numbers and just referring to the notes of the scale as 1 through 7. It’s the same mental model for how pitch works.

I’m not going to teach you solfa here - that takes a bit of time. But I did want to introduce you to this mental model shift and the impact it has.

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And I’m going to give you a free handout with this training session, our Ultimate Guide to Solfa - which will flesh out all these concepts and the mental model for you so you’re in a great position to go and learn the skills to actually use solfa.

So why is solfa so great? Why does adopting this alternative mental model of how pitch works help?

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In short, it lets each note in the scale take on a recognisable musical character. You start to hear the identity of each note.

The massive change is that we’ve escaped from Key. It has a positive effect on those other things we talked about like Arrangement, Length and Speed. But the biggie is that you are thinking about pitch relative to the key you’re in.

And here’s why that’s cool and why solfa works so well:

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Because this matches how you already understand music by ear!

Think about it. If someone sings the pitches of Happy Birthday to you, does it matter what note they start from? Of course not, you’re going to recognise it as Happy Birthday right away.

If a DJ on the radio speeds up a track and the pitches all shift up a bit into a different key, does it become a different song? Nope, you’re probably going to be completely oblivious - even though technically every single pitch is now different.

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If we were to write down in notation what’s happening int these examples, let’s do it with Happy Birthday, we’d see completely different pitches.

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Take any note in that melody, and now it’s a completely different note. Yet to our ear, nothing important has really changed.

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And so thinking back to my starting point, with almost no mental model for how pitch worked, that’s how things seemed to me when it came to playing notes - but all along, my ears were hearing in this key-independent way, just like everybody else’s.

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With intervals it was a little bit better - because I was tuning in to those relative relationships in pitch that are what really mattered.

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But it was a ton of work trying to translate that to note names and back, or to handle more than a couple of notes at a time.

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With the solfa mental model, the notes all have a “place” in your mind. Each time you hear a note you immediately interpret it based on the key and you instantly know what solfa note that is.

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This means that playing by ear is a breeze. •You need to do a little work to recognise what key you’re in by ear, and then every note just jumps out at you easily. For improvising•, anything you hear in your mind’s ear you can immediately translate onto your instrument because you’re hearing what scale note it is. For translating to and from sheet music•, again there’s this one quick step of establishing what key you’re in, and after that everything is just clear and obvious. Each pitch has its place.

This means you can sight-sing•, it means you can learn music• more quickly, it means you can remember music• more easily.

Solfa is the mental model which matches how your ear already understands music. And so once you put that mental framework in place and do some practicing, it becomes clear and easy to recognise notes by ear and make the connection to notes on the page or your instrument.

Super cool. I’m a bit evangelistic about it now, and if you’re a member of Musical U you will have noticed we’re increasingly encouraging people over to this method - because as great and powerful as intervals are, they are generally not the right first step, and if you come back and put solfa in place everything becomes drastically easier.

So that’s pitch. How putting a missing foundational mental model in place makes skills that seemed hugely complex suddenly seem easy and natural.

What about rhythm?

Specific example: Rhythm I’m not going to go into nearly as much detail here - because I think you get the idea now, that slotting in a different mental model means you can interpret music completely differently and that can enable exciting new activities and abilities in music.

But rhythm skills came up quite a lot in our survey so I did want to just give you the rhythm equivalent of solfa, so you know it’s there for you to explore.

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Again, my own journey is maybe helpful to share. I started out with that very dry, instrument and theory understanding of rhythm.

To begin with I didn’t have much of a mental model. The theory of the notation was explained to me, but I started out by just memorising how the rhythms sounded for a certain piece.

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My teachers started to explain counting to me, the 1-and-2-and-3-and-4 for thinking through each bar, and so this new mental model came much earlier in my journey than intervals did for pitch.

But it was the same problem! The counting method, where you subdivide each beat and figure out the timing that results - it’s comprehensive and it’s powerful, and arguably it is in some sense the “correct” way to think about rhythm - but it’s a really hard mental model to start with!

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Again, I found myself struggling with Length, and Arrangement, and particularly Speed. Show me a new piece of music and the time it took to think through any tricky rhythmic sections and figure out where the 1, 2, 3, 4 were and where each of these note symbols and rests fit in… it was slow. And the reverse, transcribing rhythm, was even worse.

Sometimes it was hard to even hear where the “1” was - so then where do you begin!?

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And all the while, just like with pitch, my ear kind of understood rhythm instinctively! And yours probably do too. If we ignore notation for a moment and I just clap this rhythm for you

DEMO ta syn co pa ti tika ♩♪♩♪♪♬

You can probably clap that back, right? But if I asked you to write it down, or if I showed you a pattern like that in notation it might take you a while to figure it out. I’d be going “One, Two and, (three) and, four and-ah”

So clearly there’s a mismatch between the counting mental model and how our ears are instinctively understanding rhythms. Are we really subconsciously thinking through the “1-e-and-a-2-e-and-a” etc. and all the complexities of swung beats and syncopation at lightning speed? Or is there a different mental model that we’ve maybe skipped over?

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The alternative mental model I want to introduce you to is using rhythm syllables. And again, I don’t have time here to teach it to you, but I want to explain the concept, which is that each short rhythmic pattern we use in music has a matching spoken word or pattern you can use. So a quarter note becomes “ta”, and a pair of eighth notes becomes “titi”.

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And so that example I clapped for you before CLAP AGAIN becomes “ta syn co pa ti tika”.

Like with solfa, you just start to recognise these names when you hear these sounds.

And I won’t go into the detail, but just to say, it’s also exactly tied to the beat, the pulse of music. In the counting method part of the difficulty is that a quarter note is the same whether it’s on the downbeat, on the upbeat, somewhere in between - and placing all those notes becomes a real mathematical challenge!

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With the rhythm syllable method, just like with solfa, you get to leverage what your ear is already good at, in a way that’s based on how music actually works - and with not very much training you start to just hear and recognise the rhythmic patterns directly.

When you hear a quarter note followed by a pair of eighth notes and another quarter note you don’t have to stop and think through where the beat is or how the notes line up, you just hear it as a “ta, ti-ti, ta” and it’s easy and natural to play that or write it down - or indeed to read a pattern like that from notation and play it directly.

So again, I just wanted to introduce you to this concept to show you that there is an alternative mental model available. One which better matches the skills you’re trying to learn and which creates a firm foundation for all the more advanced stuff to be built on.

Like with solfa, I’m not saying the stuff you already know is wrong - just that it will all make a lot more sense and come a lot more easily to you if you circle back and put this missing foundation in place.

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So you might have some hesitations at this stage.

In particular I want to make clear: I’m not suggesting this is some kind of magic trick where in just a few days you can completely transform into a natural musician!

The new mental models I’ve been talking about take a bit of time to sink in. Just like back in chemistry class, it took a while to wrap my brain around the orbit model and then I needed to practice using it and doing exercises before it was second nature.

So these do take time to learn - but we’re talking in terms of weeks and months. And what’s really cool is that because they’re the missing foundation, you can actually start using them almost from day one. Like with solfa, it’s not an exagerration to say you can start using solfa skills to play simple examples by ear or write them down in notation right from day 1.

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Another hesitation that you might have is that this just sounds like yet another thing to learn. We’ve talked already about the challenges of fitting music into a busy life and juggling various parts of your music learning. So I do get that concern.

But here’s the thing: these aren’t some bolt-on skills that would be nice to have. These are truly foundational. And it really doesn’t matter how quickly you build a house if there’s no foundation there. It’s going to collapse. Every brick you place is going to sink down, so that you never actually reach the height you wanted to.

That’s a weird metaphor. But you get my point: Doing this stuff will actually make it far easier to succeed with everything else you’re currently doing - so why wouldn’t you pause for a moment to put this missing foundation in place? It’s a dramatically more efficient use of your time than continuing without it.

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The final hesitation I thought might be on your mind right now is if these concepts haven’t been new to you. You might well have come across solfa or rhythm syllables before, especially if you’re a member of Musical U. And so if they haven’t already had this transformational impact on your musical life you might be thinking they just didn’t work for you.

But here’s the thing: did you approach them with this “missing foundation” mentality? It matters a lot whether you study them in isolation as an individual skill to learn, versus actually learning them in a holistic way that combines with the rest of your musical knowledge and skills. More on that in a moment. If you didn’t approach them like that then I’d say you haven’t really given them the chance to have the impact on your musicality that they could.

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So in this training I shared with you the one root cause behind most of the complexity in music learning: skipping a step, so that you’re not equipped with suitable mental models for the skills you’re trying to learn.

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I shared two particular examples of more suitable mental models for pitch and rhythm which can mean that skills like playing by ear, improvising, sight-singing and more aren’t complex and overwhelming - instead they feel easy and natural.

Hopefully you’re feeling inspired and excited. I know that when I discovered these things it was like a big weight had been lifted from my shoulders, or a fresh new vista was laid out ahead of me. I could suddenly see why things had been so hard, and how they could actually start to feel intuitive instead.

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But you might be thinking “Okay, cool. So now I know I need to check my mental models when things seem hard. And I’ve got these two new things I could investigate, solfa and rhythm syllables. And I think I understand the basic concepts. But how do I actually learn those two things? And what about other skills that those two don’t cover, or how you put these into practice to actually do the playing by ear, or improvising, or make sense of music notation?”

Well, in the next part of the training I’m going to talk about that. What it looks like to adopt new mental models like these, and how you can make it easy on yourself to do this in a coherent and holistic way, so that the new foundation you’re putting in place covers all the bases and sets you up for success in all areas of your musical life.

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Because clearly to have a “musical mind” it’s not just about learning a clever new trick or developing one particular skill to a high degree - it’s about understanding every aspect of music - easily, naturally and intuitively.

So until the next video, I’d love to hear what you thought of this session.

Did you have any “Aha!” moments along the way?

What do you think of this idea that there's a missing step, a missing foundation in your music education?

Please post a comment, and let me know. And I’ll see you on the next video!