Steve has a long and varied musical background. He had a negative experience in primary school that made him decide that maybe music wasn’t something for him, even though he enjoyed it. As an adult learner, he’s found learning to be intimidating and disjointed. In his life generally he’s already a very technical person, but he ran into problems when he was trying to connect these various skills he learned about to his actual instrument.
Nothing was able to fill the gap between learning musicality skills and actually creating music.
Steve saidthat the Foundations course seemed to say all the things that he had been searching for. A way to internalize music and just be able to know it. “Forget all the theory and the technical chops, to actually be musical”.
As he started the course, he was at first surprised by the simplicity of the songs. But as the course developed he was amazed at just how musical these very simple songs were. And by stripping away the complexity of the music he was able to discover more about phrases, melodies, and rhythms in a way that had never been possible before.
Moving forward, Steve says he’s learned that you can take this method and techniques to get information from any music, and that this process of learning and experimenting with music is something that’s going to stay with him.
One of the major benefits that he discovered was learning music by actually playing with it, rather than staying within technical definitions. Everything in music had seemed circular for him, as everything was defined in terms of itself or another technical concept. He’s now discovered that music theory is just a way to describe the music, and is still important – but not the starting point for him any more. Learning all of the concepts and songs was more of an experience, and he’s finally been able to experience the music in a way that he never had before.
Full Disclosure: Somewhat hilariously, we've since ended up hiring Steve too! As with Zac, he purchased the Foundations course as a regular customer and provided this feedback and case study video long before any employment was discussed.