Coaches Corner, Episode 2

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Coaches Corner, where I get together with some of the coaches from our Next Level program here at Musical U so that they can share some of the insights, tips, tricks, wisdom and nuggets that come out of their coaching week to week.

I’m joined today by Zac Bailey, Andy Portas, Camilo Suarez, and our head coach, Andrew Bishko.

Let’s kick things off this time with Andy, why don’t you get us started, what’s been going on in coaching recently?

Andy: Well, I suppose quite an exciting one, really. I had one particular client who was learning to play a jazzt standard, and as they were kind of working through it, it kind of dawned on they weren’t, wasn’t kind of swinging. It was very kind of straight and quite stilted.

So what we decided to do was so we could contact that inner drummer. So this was a kind of a matter of. And it’s kind of taking a steady tempo.

And then initially starting with triple, triple, triple, triple, and then kind of talking to the drummer and asking what they’re playing on the right symbol, and that becomes a ten to 1 to ten to 1 to ten to 1. So we got her doing that as she was kind of clicking on the beat.

From there, we kind of moved to more of a kind of more kind of percussive sound. So takata, takata, takata, takata. So we did that for a little while.

And then the next job was to really get involved with the drummer and feel what that drummer wanted to play. And this involves kind of improvising with the rhythm. So you get ta ta ka ta ta ta ka ta, ka ta ka ta ta ta ta ta ka ta ta ta ka ta ka kata. So kind of got her doing that sort of idea.

And then when she played again, we noticed that as her inner drummer was kind of playing along with her, what she was playing was really starting to swing. So it kind of felt like a piece of jazz music then. But what our assignment was for the week was to kind of continue doing this as she’s taking a walk, a daily walk through the park.

And she reported back to me the next week and was kind of saying, what funny look she got as she was kind of strolling through the park going takata! But it really worked. And, yeah, she did great.

Christopher: Wonderful, fantastic. I love that. We talk sometimes about your inner metronome and having that clear sense of the beat, but I love the idea of developing it into a fully-fledged drummer that you can give orders to and interact with.

That’s fantastic. Awesome. How about you, Camilo? What’s been going on in coaching?

Camilo: Well, I had a wonderful question this week from a client who is also interested in improvisation, and her question was, well, how do I bring my improv to life? I was a little bit puzzled, what do you mean by that? And she said, well, I think I comprehend the harmonic framework. I know the right notes, but still my improv doesn’t sound like it fits the music that I’m trying to play.

So we’re trying to play calypso, and it sounds like I’m playing jazz or something else. So what we did is that we tried to look for some rhythms within the music that we were listening to, and she came up with this rhythm, and then after that, she found something else which made a complete phrase, something like that.

Then she started adding notes to that, and her improvisation just became much more within the style and much more fluent and similar.

Christopher: Fantastic. That’s so cool. I love that as a way to really highlight how we can overlook the rhythmic aspect of improvisation, and having that constraint can open up other dimensions for you and bring it in line with what you were imagining. That’s fantastic. Zac, how’s coaching been? What’s been going on lately?

Zac: Yeah, coaching has been great. I’ve been getting a lot of results from my clients, and they’ve been having a lot of satisfaction.

And I’ve been finding this sort of common thread between all my clients that leads to better results and better satisfaction, and that is when we’re setting goals, we think about, how do you want to share the music?

So I always ask people, what musical experiences do you want to have? How do you want to share your music?

And that is a game-changer for people’s clarity in choosing what they want to practice and how they want to practice. So I ask them to think about, how do you want to share your music? Who are you sharing it with? Why are you sharing your music? What is the purpose?

So every client has something different, and it can be, you know, preparing songs to rehearse, to try out for a band. So some people want to share their songs they’ve been working on and try out and try to get accepted into a band.

Other clients want to do an open mic. I have a client who’s working on five songs to prepare for an open mic set.

I have clients who want to write albums. I have clients who maybe just want to share a song on YouTube, just playing, playing a song, sharing on YouTube. I have clients who want to just do a living room performance for their partner.

And when we find these experiences, these real life musical experiences where we’re sharing music with others, it really fuels people with excitement. They get excited to practice.

They know exactly what they need to practice. And then when they practice that and then they follow through and have those experiences, it’s like so satisfying. They’re enjoying it and loving it.

So just thinking about sharing, sharing your music, who do you want to share it with? Why do you want to share it? What experience do you want to have? What experience do you want the listeners to have? Are they just enjoying what you’re playing, or are they accepting you into a band? Or are they going to go check out your website and see what other music you got going on? So just thinking about sharing the music is a game changer for getting more results and having more satisfaction with music.

Christopher: That’s fantastic. Yeah, we talk so much about that blurring of practicing and performing, don’t we, at Musical U? And, like, bringing some of those performance experiences into the practice room and making sure it’s all part of one kind of smooth continuum.

But we don’t talk about it so much in that goal-setting or planning phase where, yeah, I love the way that brings motivation and that kind of vivid intention to what they’re then working on. That’s fantastic. Andrew, how’s coaching? What have you been up to lately?

Andrew: This has been something that’s actually been going on for quite some time with coaching.

I asked my clients, when they’re working on some music, to close their eyes.

Our lives are so dominated by our visual sense, and we always talk about wanting to memorize the music, which is playing the music without the visual cue of some sheet music or wanting to feel the music. And when we close our eyes, it opens up a whole new world.

One of my clients described this as “living in worlds of sound”. He says he made a commitment at this one point. He came and said to me, I’m committing to living in a world of sound, where he would learn everything by ear.

First, he was focusing, really on listening and active listening. And it was amazing, the difference that it made to just focus on sound. I mean, music is all about sounds, really.

And so living in that world of sound, and our biggest distraction to that world of sound is having our eyes open oftentimes. So that’s been a really great one. And you can see how people, when they do that, they are in touch with a lot of their inner senses, the way their instrument feels in your hands, and also the sort of thoughts about music.

And also, people get more in touch with the way they feel new music, like, feel it in their heart or feel it in their body. They start to get in touch with those feelings when they’re not distracted by the visual, by what’s going on around them or a piece of sheet music in front of them. It’s also really surprising.

You know, that’s often a shocker when someone’s playing a piece of sheet music and they’re practicing and practicing, and I tell them, okay, now play that with your eyes closed. And people are like, I don’t have this memorized yet. But it’s so cool how very frequently they close their eyes and they do much, much, much better than they thought they would do.

So it’s something that you can try right now. It’s something you could try today. And that is still, you know, the gift that gives, in my Next Level coaching.

Christopher: That’s wonderful. Yeah. I love that, I remember when you mentioned that phrase, “living in a world of sound”. It’s a really powerful one to keep in mind, isn’t it?

Fantastic, well, I so love getting together with you guys and getting a little peek into what’s been going on in the coaching recently.

Until next time. Bye!

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