Music: The Language Of Emotion (Meet The Team with Andrew Bishko, Head Educator)

Meet Musical U’s Head Educator, Andrew Bishko and discover the fascinating musical background which produced his unique skillset and made him the perfect match for Musical U!

In this interview we dive into Andrew’s musical background, featuring piano, flute (classical, jazz and Native American), reggae, Klezmer, mariachi and more. We hear how he gradually learned to play by ear and improvise, developing his own methods and techniques which he then began to teach his students.

Then, in a surprising and unlikely way, how he found his way onto the Musical U team, contributing in a content editing and member support before starting to create and oversee the development of new material inside Musical U membership, culminating in the Living Music and Next Level programs.

Andrew also shares three weird and surprising things which can have a big positive impact on your musical development.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• Andrew’s interview with CNVS
• Andrew’s interview with Dave Bainbridge
• Meet the Team: Andrew Bishko (2017 interview)
• Musicality Now: The Musicality of Sitting on a Rock (2018 podcast interview)
• Next Level Coaching
• Coaches Corner, Episode 1
• Register for the upcoming live training at YourMusicalCore.com

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome back to the show. This is the first of our interview episodes, and I couldn’t be more excited to kick this off with our head educator, Andrew Bishko, a name and a face that will be familiar to many in our audience already.

And I believe we did one or more interviews with you, you’ve been on the podcast for an interview, and on the website. And so I’ve had the chance to do this once or twice before, but so much changes.

And we’re going to have all kinds of guests on the show, and I’m excited for that and to resume interviewing all kinds of musicians and music educators and bringing superstars onto the show to share with our audience.

But I wanted to kick things off with a new series of kind of “meet the team” interviews because I know a lot of people in our membership are interacting with our team day by day.

They’re getting help. They’re getting answers to their questions. They know the profile picture, and they might have a sense of the person’s personality, but they might not know any of their musical background or what makes them so expert.

And so these “meet the team” interviews, the idea is to give you both a glimpse into the team member’s musical life and musical background and a little peek into what they do at Musical U as part of the team.

And so we’re kicking things off today with our Head Educator, Andrew Bishko.

Andrew, I’ve had the chance to know you for seven, seven years now?

Andrew: Eight! We’re coming up on eight.

Christopher: That’s crazy. And I referred to my notes from when I interviewed you for joining the company when we celebrated your musical U-iversary a little while back.

I went back in Evernote to my 2016 notes to see what I thought of you when we first met, and it was spot on. I was like, “this guy is awesome. This guy gets what we’re all about.This guy has the skills. He’s going to be a great contributor. I hope it works out!”

And here we are, seven, eight years later, and it certainly has been working out. And I really wanted to kick things off with you just to give people a peek into what makes you basically the ideal person to be the Head Educator at Musical U.

So no pressure. You’ve just got to blow them away in our conversation today.

And, you know, I was thinking before we started, this is both the easiest and the hardest interview for me to do, I think, and that’s probably coming through already. It’s the easiest because you and I could sit here and reminisce or go nerdy on musicality and superlearning, or make plans for the future for hours and hours and days and days, which we often do.

And so in that sense, it’s easy. But I’m trying to keep these interviews relatively short, so I’m going to have to really pare back.

And on top of that, you and I know each other so well. I’m very relaxed and informal and comfortable chatting with you – where normally if I bring in a podcast guest I’ve never met before or I’ve only spoken to once or twice, there’s a certain level of, like, reserve and formality, and I’m a certain version of me that is quite careful about what I say. And so I’m going to try and be that interviewer today as best I can. But clearly I’m not doing a great job already with my tone and manner!

Andrew: Don’t be too careful!

Christopher: Cool. But I would love to begin, in terms of formality, I’d love to begin with my official first question I love to ask people. And I’ve asked you before, and I’m going to compare answers and make sure it’s word perfect to what you said before, obviously!

But I would love to hear your latest and freshest take on my favorite question:

What does musicality mean to you?

Andrew: Musicality. There’s a feeling of connection when we’re really feeling the music from the inside out. And when we’re in our flow state and where we’re playing the music, we feel like we’re at one with the music.

Now, the trick is that this is not something that happens all the time or it’s not a place where we’re kind of lost in the music, necessarily. We might be very present. We might be thinking a lot, making decisions about what we’re going to do based on what we just did or thinking about the music that’s around us.

So it can be a very, very not out there state, but a very present state, very present in the moment. But I want to include that, that moment, that thing that we all long for when we see our musical heroes and we can tell that they are just totally into it and totally connected, when we have this longing, this deep desire for this connection of being musical from the inside out.

But I believe that musicality is also everything that we do that brings us to this place and everything that we do when we respond to this place.

So musicality isn’t just that peak experience. Musicality is this commitment to really identifying as a musician and as someone who expresses themselves musically, someone who has, you know, we. Music is what we – music is our birthright, as humans.

I don’t believe you could tell me one example of a human that doesn’t have music in some way, shape, or form. In the most direst of circumstances. You know, people that are going through horrible things, music is still there for them, and music is something that makes us human. I had a friend recently who told me, you can’t live without music.

People can’t live without music. And think about that. We, you know, we put music on the back burner on all the school programs and everything like that. It’s a hobby, you know? Right. But we can’t really live without it.

So music is that feeling of connection, that feeling of presence, and everything we do, you know, the practicing, the studying, the striving, the learning, the experiences, the performances, everything that we do that brings us into that place as we identify as musicians.

Christopher: I love that! You covered a lot of ground there, and I think what stood out most to me was this idea that musicality is a verb rather than a noun, in a way. Right?

Like we very much take the perspective that it’s a choice, and it’s an approach more than it is ticking boxes on a set of skills. And someone can have incredible musicality with a very basic, you know, on paper skill set.

And the flip side is also true. You see the… I don’t want to throw shade, but, like, you see the shredding guitar players who nail every note, but there’s not much musicality to it. And I’m sure they have that slightly robotic feel as they do it. But I love the way you described it there as something that is very much what you’re doing more than what you’ve achieved.

That’s awesome.

Andrew: Yeah.

Christopher: And so let’s go back in time, and I need to be careful how I ask this, given that we’re aiming for a relatively short interview!

But give us the kind of nutshell musical journey you’ve been on yourself, because, like I alluded to before, you are this magical fit for what we do and how we do it at Musical U. And that was clear in 2016, and it’s only become more and more clear as you’ve helped shape the company and develop what we do.

But I’m sure people have wondered, like, where did this guy come from? How did he get this deep insight into all of the stuff we now specialize in?

Andrew: Well, so when I grew up, we had a lot of music in the house. We had a beautiful grand piano that was my mother’s.

And, we had music playing a lot. I had one thing, actually, that was very difficult for me, that we didn’t have a lot of singing. And I actually had a difficulty in singing.

I mean, I couldn’t sing. I would literally lose my voice. I mean, my voice would totally disappear if I tried to sing.

And that’s actually something that shaped my whole musical life. So I started out, you know, we had that piano in the house, and my parents always, I never, ever remember them to tell us to stop banging on the piano. And I know I did lots of banging on the piano.

I played around in the strings inside. I went underneath, I knocked on it. And so either I was too loud to hear them or they were supportive of my development.

I like to think the latter. So I grew up, started piano lessons, and then another thing that was, seemed at the time to be in adversity. I wanted to play the bass in orchestra.

And my parent, my mom and my piano teacher said I had to play the flute, which I totally didn’t get because that was, quote unquote, the girls instrument. So in 1970. 1970, that was not cool. I’m not trying to be incorrect, but in 1970, you know, things were different, and I was a little boy, you know, so go figure.

But anyway, actually being, having it be “the girls’ instrument” became really fun in high school because I was sitting with all the girls, which was great, but it also spurred me to make the flute cool. And so I started looking into all these different flutes of the world, like Irish flute music and African flute music and all these things.

And by the way, no Internet. So this was going to the University Heights public library and taking out records and exploring. And I started to learn some of this music by ear.

I started to learn Irish music by ear and other kinds of music. And because I couldn’t sing, when my friends would get together to sing, then I would take out the flute because I couldn’t sing, so I would play. So that helped with my ear playing at that time.

So fast forward, I went through high school. I was doing band and orchestra, blah, blah, blah. And then after high school, I just quit.

I didn’t start. I wasn’t playing music anymore. I went to Northwestern University.

I wound up in a humanities program and graduated there. But I always had my flute with me. I was always carrying it around in a little case.

And even though I couldn’t play that well anymore, and I found myself a little bit after graduation in Italy, I had gone there, and I was having a great time. I loved it there. I was running out of money.

I didn’t want to go home, so I started to busk. I started to play out in the streets with my flute. And I realized that the longer I stayed out there, the more money I made, and also the better I got at playing the flute, you know, but it was all improv.

I didn’t have any scores. I didn’t have any of my classical music. And so I was just making everything up, playing everything by ear, improvising.

And so I did this for, I don’t know, a couple years. And when I came back to the States, you know, I was really. I was really into reggae, and I wanted to join a reggae band, and I would go out dancing lots, like, you know, three, four nights a week and talk about how I wanted to be in a reggae band.

And it happened! I joined a reggae band, and we went on tour all over the place. We did tours in Europe with the Department of Defense and in Asia.

We toured most of the eastern United States and all the way to Alaska as well, which is where I met my first wife. And so when my stint with the band came to an end, I really wanted to improve my musicality. They had tried to get me to sing backgrounds and sing in the band, and I just was dismal.

And so. And I also couldn’t communicate. When I would write a song, I couldn’t sing it for somebody, and I would write songs and try to communicate.

This is how the bass line goes boom, boom, boom this is how the melody goes boom, boom, boom and so I wanted to continue my music education, and I was accepted into the third stream studies program at the New England Conservatory, which is an ear based program and a program about developing your personal style. And there I didn’t have a choice. In order to move forward, I had to sing.

And I started to discover that I really liked it. I really liked singing and what it was doing for my musicality. I realized that certain things that I thought I heard or thought I understood musically really got much more clear and defocused when I could sing them.

And so also at the New England Conservatory, I discovered Klezmer music, which became my obsession for the next 15 years. And I, through that process, I mean, that just changed my life. That’s a whole other story.

But everything was learning by ear and developing new techniques because there was nobody at the time playing Klezmer on the flute in the way that I wanted to really make it sound. So I learned all kinds of new techniques that I created for myself. I began to compose and improvise and everything in that style, and had a band back in Alaska.

And that when I started to branch out into other kinds of music, I started to take all that with me, all the improvisation and everything I was learning at the New England Conservatory about jazz theory and Lydian Chromatic Concept and all that stuff. And so I went on, and a friend of mine gave me a native american flute, and I started to play this Native American flute and to bring in everything that I had learned about improvisation and playing by ear. And it was a really moving experience for me.

And eventually, I wrote a book about it. I wrote a book about, and it really was, I wanted in this book to be all about creating music from the inside. So there was no songs in this book, there was no repertoire.

It was all about improvisation and learning for yourself. And so just the book, it’s sitting out there, right? And so when I, in 2005, I moved from Alaska to Missouri, and I began a music ministry and started to do a lot of songwriting, a lot of songwriting in many different styles, teaching songwriting. I was teaching all through this.

I was teaching first in Alaska. I was teaching at university, and then here in Missouri. I opened up songwriting classes and different kinds of classes and a lot of world music classes, too.

So I was discovering different kinds of music around the world. And so I was teaching, and I was teaching private lessons. So I teaching private lessons since 1990.

That’s a whole other story, I guess. So everything’s coming together here in Missouri. And at one point, I was teaching one of these classes at the university, and I said, oh, my gosh, I’m done.

I’m done with this. I’m going to go home and I’m not going to come back. And I did that.

And I started to think about, you know, different things I could do, all the piano teaching experience that I’d had and everything I developed. I developed my own piano teaching curriculum based on improvisation and kinesthetics and all kinds of things. And then I was having a hard time starting my own business.

And so I started looking on UpWork, and I found this the first day I was on upwork, I looked up music, and there was Musical U, and I applied for Musical U, and I think that’s another question coming up. But I started at Musical U in 2016.

Another thing that happened in 2016 is my wife and I, we started a mariachi band, and there was a need for that in our area.

There were no other bands. I loved the music. My wife grew up listening to the music in San Diego, and singing it.

And so we started this band, which has been super fun and super successful. We’ve got, like, I call it “Gigamageddon”! We have so many gigs coming up next few months, but so that was also a big part of my musical journey.

And really, at this point, my musical journey also becomes my Musical U journey, which I think maybe we’ll talk about later, but I think that sort of sums up a little bit about who I am musically and how I am, where I am.

Christopher: Fantastic. Thank you.

I always love hearing your story, and what always shines through is both the eclectic background you have and the kind of exploratory, creative approach you’ve taken to music making. And before we kind of pick up the story in 2016 and talk about what you’ve been doing at Musical U, I just want to touch on one thing, because I think it would be easy for someone to hear that story and be like “oh, Andrew, you know, he was one of those people that could just play by ear and improvise, and he’s always done that.” And I know that’s not quite the case, but maybe you could talk a little bit about that, because clearly both of those things were a big part of the musician you grew into.

But I think it’s fair to say you weren’t someone who could just magically do it because of a mystical talent, right?

Andrew: No, it was. I mean, well, first of all, I want to say that there wasn’t anyone teaching me to do that at first. Um, you know, so when I was young, it was more like I just the “just do it” method of play by ear, where I would play something, I would listen to something, I’d play something, and I would try to approximate it, try to get close, you know? So that was a something that was really, you know, a part of my own process at that point.

But it was. It was difficult because there was a lot of music that I wanted to play that I, you know, I couldn’t figure out. I didn’t really have the tools.

Singing started to make a huge difference when I started to sing, that made a huge difference in my ability to play by ear. Another thing is that I was always encouraged to be. Even though my piano teachers never wanted to hear me improvise, they never cared about me.

The things that I made up, songs that I made up, any of that stuff on my own, I would always mess around. I always play around. But I remember, you know, at the piano, I would always experiment and try and play around.

And then I had this buddy who could just sit down and play songs and improvise songs. He would improvise goofy songs about me, and it was just hilarious, you know, and fun. And he was so easy with it.

And this was something that, you know, when I sit down to the piano, I came up with a lot of really interesting sounds and weird sounds that I explored. So I had that part down, exploring, exploring the instrument, but I had no idea how to make musical sense of it. And this is something that, you know, I learned over years and years of figuring things out.

You know, a big part of my piano journey is when I was trying to teach piano, and I started to teach people, and I realized people don’t understand chords, and I didn’t understand chords growing up. No one, my piano teacher never taught me harmony, never taught me how to use harmony, and that’s, you know, so much of playing the piano. And so I started to teach my students to play chords, to hear chords, to do chord progressions, and in the process, learning it myself.

So a lot of my learning has been my teaching journey because I’ve learned more from teaching than anything else. So if I had a student that wanted to play a song and wanted to play it figure out from the radio or play it by ear, I helped them figure it out, and that I developed this process and developed ideas about playing by ear, which really are now a big part of our musical you curriculum, along with, you know, what I’ve learned since I’ve been at musical you and, like, about sofa and relative pitch and all the things. So it’s been a constant evolution, and it’s something that’s been always learning, and I’m still always learning about it.

Christopher: Well, that’s definitely one of the other things that always stands out when I hear about your musical background is that you very much embody that lifelong learner that I think epitomizes the kind of musician who’s drawn to us at Musical U. It’s the person who’s growth minded and always reaching for that next thing, and, just, as we tend to put it, “enjoying the journey” of finding the new musical adventures. So let’s pick up at the story.

When you joined Musical U, if I remember correctly, you didn’t apply for an education role. Is that right? Like, I feel like we were advertising…

Andrew: Yeah, you were advertising for social media, and I was like, I know nothing about social media, but I really like this company, so I’m going to just go ahead and apply because I don’t know.

I’m gonna figure it out. And so I wasn’t hired for that position. But Christopher looked at my stuff and my book and everything. He said, you know, this guy could help me out with the public, the articles. And so at the time, we were writing a lot of articles on easy. First it was easyeartraining.com, and then Musical U.

And so my job was to edit. At first, it was editing and the articles and then formatting them and making cover images. I really liked the image part. I kind of missed that part, but really fun making these cover images for the articles.

And so taking things that other people had written. And we had a lot of wonderful authors, but a lot of our authors, English was not their first language, and so there was quite a bit of editing involved. And of course, as I was editing, there was always my own two cents creeping into everything and.

But also wanting to communicate our message from Musical U and our beliefs and take all these things and shape them that way. So, met a lot of wonderful writers. Then I started writing, writing articles and doing interviews.

That was always fun, doing interviews. And we did a wide range of things. I did this whole interview article with a mexican rock band, I don’t know if you remember that CNVS, with Dave Bainbridge. There was that interview. So we did some really cool interviews, lots of articles about musicality, and just exploring different ways to reach the audience with our message.

And that quickly grew into a role working inside the Musical U website, which was pretty new at that time. And I started with member support, so I started helping Stu out with the member support and answering a lot of the musicality questions, the deeper musicality questions.

And then we began writing new lessons, new modules for the website. And another thing we did at that time is we organized at that time. It was a la carte.

We had all these different topics, and then you could just choose from these different topics. But then we realized that people wanted to have more direction, and so we made these roadmaps. So there were guides that took you through this forest of 50 training modules, 50 plus training modules.

And those roadmaps then evolved into creating new courses. I’m going to say the word, “course!” New courses like, well, Christopher and Anne started out with Foundations, and then I started working on The Musician’s Ear, Improv Immersion, Ear Training For Beginners.

And we learned so much from each one of those courses because we had our wonderful membership giving us feedback. And it was a really wonderful period in which we honed our educational delivery, where we figured out what really works, what really helps people learn things, what keeps them engaged. What combination of media and text and images.

And so I’m really proud of our educational delivery. And when I look at other educational sites, it’s like nothing really compares. You know, everyone slaps up a bunch of videos and says, that’s educational delivery.

And we really have a beautiful, beautiful way of also pacing, you know, where everything’s paced out in bite sized chunks. So it’s really wonderful the way things work at Musical U, and we’ve evolved that through that. So those courses and everything we learned for that.

Christopher: I know what you mean, that era was so fruitful, wasn’t it? It was intense, looking back. But I think in the space of 2018 to 2020, we made six or seven standalone courses, and I’m still proud of every one of them. And I’m still delighted when someone chooses to buy one and goes through it and still gets amazing results, even if you and I kind of look back on them as “the old stuff” at this point.

But the next stage in the journey was really about consolidating and combining everything we’d learned so far, right?

Andrew: Yes. Yes. So Christopher posed the question, “what could we do to provide a one year experience of complete and total musical transformation for our members?” And that was the beginning of the Living Music program.

And that year was. I’m just getting shivers thinking about it. It was incredible.

We had the most amazing team. I was heading up the education team, and we were working together, everyone working together on the living music, the Living Music Seasons. So Living Music is that if you don’t not familiar with it, there’s four Seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and each one has a different theme.

And in those seasons, we consolidated all that we had learned from making these courses and from the core modules at Musical U and created this absolutely transformative experience. And we did it all. It was a, we created 48 weeks of content in 52 weeks, which was just insane because it is.

There’s so much in there. There’s just so very much in there. And the people that have gone through there, through living music are going through oftentimes again and again.

So we have people that have gone through there two times, three times, four times gone through it, because they keep getting more out of it.

And the other thing that was the principles of Living Music were that each season had to start from scratch, where you could start anywhere, and they would all, but yet they would all build on each other. So that was a really amazing step in our educational delivery where everything is accessible to people and you can start at different places and still have this amazing experience.

And then it creates this kind of what our team member Camilo Suarez says, like, it’s a circular learning rather than a progressive learning. It’s circular and it spirals up and I don’t know, he’s got to get in there and experience it. But we had such amazing results from Living Music.

And then after that, we created The Fountain, which was the follow on courses, and we call them Dips and Dives, short and long courses that took all the Living Music knowledge and consolidated it. So bringing everything together to write songs or bringing everything other to record, or bringing everything together to deepen your improvisation, you know, all, there’s different things that we’re doing in the fountain there. And then what followed there is.

It became evident that there were people, there was our members, and there were people in the community that wanted to go even farther. And so we began the Next Level coaching program. And that’s 2022, is that when it started? 2023 started?

Christopher: Somewhere in 2022, towards the tail end of the year.

Andrew: Really? Wow. Okay. So we, so we started the Next Level coaching program, and that was, that is continues to be like where a lot of my focus is right now on the head coach there.

I started out with, basically it was me as the coach, and then we quickly added Zac, and you may know him as ZSonic and, and Andy Portas and Camilo Suarez. And now we have a new coach coming on soon. We’re not going to reveal anything about that right now!

But we really have built this absolutely beautiful program. And the results have been just incredible to see when people really commit and they have that one on one experience combined with the group experience that we have both a one on one, we have the community in Next Level, and we have the group coaching with, with amazing guest coaches. It’s just been amazing to see that the deep transformations that people are having in that program and very gratifying and also just super enjoyable to be to work with the team on this. And one more thing I want to say about Next Level is that we learn so much from this Next Level experience, from having this intimate one on one experience with the clients.

And all this learning starts to feed back into the rest of our curriculum. So a lot of the things that are in The Fountain or other courses or new things coming up, like, if I may mention Christopher’s going to do some kind of workshop coming up.

These are drawn from our experience in our Next Level coaching, and it’s this wonderful trickle down effect that is helping to move the whole mission and the whole experience of musical you and musicality forward.

Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah.

It’s funny. I wasn’t expecting the conversation to go quite like this, but I suppose because you are our Head Educator, your story at Musical U is really the story of our educational development and, like, the different things we’ve tried and the different approaches we’ve combined and so on. And you described that really well.

Tell me, what’s your favorite thing to do in your role at Musical U?

Andrew: Well, what’s interesting is that I can safely say that every year I’ve worked at Musical U, it’s been like I had a different job. It’s always. There’s always some new project or some new role or some new.

Sometimes some new technology. I mean, there was one point where I was, like, really fun to learn about code and doing the back end of the articles and stuff and all that, but. And then now it’s the, you know, this educational thing.

So currently, I have to say that the high point of my week is our coaches meetings. Our coaches are so wonderful and so wise, and as my experience is in my life, where teaching is my learning ground, that’s my playground for learning. This is true with our coaches.

And so everyone comes in so excited to share their new insights. You know, every week, we have a huge “aha” moment.

We could just literally write an entire course on what we share in our coaches meeting each week – or several courses! I mean, there’s just so much richness, and it’s such a wonderful group, and it’s very exciting and deep, and I always come up with, like, after those meetings, so right now.

And, of course, I love the one on one coaching to one of the most satisfying things about the one on one coaching. And also, I like when I’m doing live calls, working with people, live meetings, live calls, anything where I’m live with people, it helps me to get in touch with my own intuition. I find them finding a flow from the inside out that I don’t quite experience when I’m just by myself. It’s when I’m with other people where I can communicate and bounce things off each other, where I really start to flow.

I say things that I never even thought before. I was like, who said that? And that feels really good. I love doing that, and it’s a very delicious kind of a connected feeling.

Christopher: Terrific. Awesome. Yeah.

And your comment there about how much is happening inside Next Level, I’ll give a shout out to the workshop you mentioned, it’s a live training happening this Saturday, 4th May. It’ll be about an hour long. Everyone’s welcome.

And really, the idea is to pull out some of the goodness from Next Level and share it with a wider community. And in particular, there’s this one new concept we’ve been developing over the last few months that I think is going to be a real game changer for our members for how we develop things in future. And this is the first time we’re going to be revealing it.

So I’m super excited. I just saw the registration page for that event from the team. It’s like this close to being ready.

So with any luck, when this video goes out, there’ll be a link in the show notes to register for that training. I’m trying to make sure it’s also ready for the weekly update we’re sending out to members today. So, knock on wood, you’ll be able to actually register for that live session, and I hope you’ll join us.

That stuff is also coming out in our Coaches Corner episodes. The first one was yesterday, and we have a few in the can already, so I can say with confidence, those are really value packed. And again, again, just this spirit of taking what we’re developing live every day with one to one clients inside Next Level and bringing it to more people to benefit them.

Andrew, tell me, what’s the weirdest or most surprising tip or trick or technique you could give people for developing their musicality or developing themselves as a musician? Something odd that really works?

Andrew: You had to ask that! There’s a lot of really odd things. So I’m gonna… I think I’m gonna say a few things.

One thing I want to say just right off the top, singing, all right. And people who sing, you know, it’s not an issue for them, but if you don’t sing or you think you can’t sing, I was there, you know, I literally could not physically sing. And the singing trauma really shaped my whole musical journey because healing from that, moving forward with that, and learning how to sing.

It didn’t have to be great – just being able to sing things. Singing is so a lot of people think about singing because your sound is going out from you. They think about it.

Whoo. The sounds going out. I’m singing.

I’m projecting. Whatever. All right? But singing, the vibration goes in, too, and it goes in to, you know, here’s my.

This is my scientific understanding, but it also. It goes into your own neurology. It vibrates in your brain, it vibrates in your head.

It activates all kinds of muscles and things in your body and in your emotions that are connected to your brain. There’s no more immediate musical experience than singing. And so I know that it’s like, for many people, it’s a binary.

Either you sing or you don’t sing. And it’s like, we can all do this. If I can do it, we can all do it.

And I’m not like this great, wonderful singer, you know, but I can, I can do it. And I think that’s, that’s a huge tool for the musicality.

As far as weird goes, I have to say that there’s a superlearning practice that we call retrieval practice, where you’re learning to bring things out.

Okay? We often think about bringing music in. We practice and practice and practice to get it in there. We want to get it in there, we want to get it in there.

And we don’t realize that there’s a whole separate learning task which is taking it from the in and bringing it out. So bringing it in is called encoding. Bringing it out is called retrieval.

And there’s a technique for retrieval practice called spaced repetitions, where you actually just play something once and then you don’t play it again for the rest of day. Then, like, the next day, you play it again and you don’t stop. You don’t fix anything, you make all the mistakes, you don’t practice it, you don’t.

It’s just, it’s, you just do that just once and it’s, it’s crazy because, like, I know it works, okay? But every time I sit out to do it, I’m like, gosh, I hope it works this time. I hope it works. I hope it works this time!

Or every time I assign it to one of my clients, like, please work, please work, please work! You know, it works because after a period of time, we start to be able to retrieve it, you know? And there’s some particulars as to when you put something in retrieval, when you start doing it, but that is a weird thing. That really works.

And then I think one more thing is, and then we learn this from our Winter Season, which focuses on the circle of fifths, is we talk about people, talk about ear training, talk about hearing something. Okay, talk about hearing.

I can’t hear it. I can’t hear it. I can’t hear it.

I hear that a lot. So a lot of times it’s because we’re not using our full experience. Try feeling it try finding the emotion that goes with that sound.

My latest definition for music, for myself is “music is the language of emotion”. So if you find the emotion and the subtle emotion, the subtle feeling, feeling the subtle, it’s not like happy, sad, you know, not like these binary emotional words that we have. Our language is so poor in describing emotion.

Music describes emotion, like, with complete nuance and detail and richness and precision. So if you look for those precise emotional states that define that sound that you’re hearing, you’re gonna start to hear things better. So start focusing on feeling the music. Not just hearing it, but feeling it, I guess.

Those are my top three!

Christopher: That was awesome. That was like a mini masterclass in itself. I love it.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Andrew. I’m so glad we were able to have you on as our first guest on the rebooted show.

And I know you’re super busy not just with your Musical U duties, but with Gigamageddon as well. So thank you so much for taking the time and for sharing so much with our audience today.

We will be back again on Monday with our next live stream. I’m aiming for daily, but taking Sundays off. Hope that’s okay with everyone. So we’ll be back on Monday, same time, same bat place, same bat channel.

And we look forward to seeing you there. Cheers!