Musicality Now

Hey - do you feel like giving up? Is your musical life driving you a bit crazy and you’re wondering if you should just throw in the towel?

What we have for you today is something a bit different, and I will not be involved in the episode at all, because what we have is a team episode of the show. We've got the Musical U team together, and what we're doing is it kind of came out of happenstance where we had a few weeks in a row where on our team call, one of the members of the Musical U team randomly mentioned they listened to an old episode of the musicality podcast and learn something really cool, or they particularly enjoyed something.

At Musical U we talk a lot about your Big Picture Vision and getting clear on the things you're most excited about achieving in your musical life if everything went perfectly. Your ideal musical future. This is a powerful idea - but there's a big barrier that often holds people back. In this episode you'll learn what that barrier is and how you can stop it from holding you back from your true musical potential.

Have you ever wanted to get out there and start performing? Maybe solo at an open mic night, maybe getting involved in the local blues jam, maybe starting or joining a band - or even going out and getting paying gigs as a live performer. If so, you might have found yourself in the situation many of us do: our skills are up to scratch but we’re still not ready. Emotionally, mentally, psychologically, we just have some kind of barrier that stops us from taking the plunge.

You can enjoy the process of learning music. You *should*, in fact! Believing that enjoyment and achievement are mutually exclusive is holding you back from your true musical potential.

Today we're joined on the show by John Hatcher, the founder of Blues Guitar Institute, a website and YouTube channel devoted to teaching acoustic blues guitar with a simple straight-forward approach

Have you wished you could improvise, but found the whole thing intimidating, overwhelming, or just a complete mystery? There's one thing I can tell you, in just a few minutes, that will let you begin improvising today and set you up for continued success.

From her TED talk to provocative sound art installations to YouTube teaching videos and of course her professional performing career, Evelyn’s work just sparks of passion, creativity and wisdom - and so to say we were eager to pick her brains about musicality and the listening skills of music would be a huge understatement!

Does the idea of improvising scare you? Have you given it a try but quickly decided you didn’t have what it takes? If so, we would understand. In this episode, we're going to talk about where that fear comes from, how you can overcome it, and how to make it easy to learn to improvise.

Today we're joined by Nikki Loney from Full Voice Music. Nikki is a professional singer and voice teacher and creates resources to help other voice teachers with young singers in particular. Nikki was introduced to us by Sara Campbell, our former piano pro at Musical U who’s a voice teacher and singer herself, and she made the connection because Nikki’s speciality is something near and dear to our heart here at Musical U: helping people “make peace” with their voice

Playing by ear and improvisation are two of the most sought-after skills in music. The key to learning these skills is to train your ear to effortlessly recognize the relationships between notes - and the answer doesn't necessarily lie in learning intervals! Musical U founder Christopher Sutton talks about the intuitive solfa method for recognizing notes and why it works

Today we have the pleasure of talking with Adam Neely, whose YouTube channel is followed by over 600,000 people - and is described as “video essays, lessons and vlogs on new horizons in music and music theory.” More informally, we'd say that Adam makes some of the most solid and also thoroughly entertaining videos on music theory out there

In this episode, we talk about your musical path and trajectory, encouraging you to think about your Big Picture Vision and how to get yourself there

We are super excited to be joined on the show today by Ruth Power, the creator of Piano Picnic - a method for learning to play piano by ear that remarkably manages to teach it in lessons so short and simple they almost guarantee a student will succeed

Today I wanted to share just one small nugget with you, Marc’s idea of “hacking habituation”. As you’ll be hearing, this led on to some interesting discussion of the emotion of musical expression and mastering the inner game too