Foundations of a Musical Mind

Could A Forgotten 83-Year Old Method

Hold The Missing Piece To Easily

Becoming A “Natural” in Music?

Everything we ever thought we knew about “talent” in music might just be wrong.

The latest scientific research has proven conclusively that there is no “magic” required to be a talented musician.

In fact it has revealed there is just one crucial difference between the average struggling music learner – and the “talented” greats.

Now music learners are turning to an ancient method of music learning that fills in this “missing piece” and can transform your natural musicality.

You see, although modern educational institutions would have you believe they can teach you how to become a great musician, in reality generally all they teach is instrument technique.

But what about:

Playing notes and chords by ear?
Improvising?
Creating your own music and expressing the musical ideas that are in your head?
Being able to look at a piece of sheet music and just sing it directly, or hear in your head how it should sound?

We all know these things are possible.

In fact they seem to come easily to certain musicians.

So what do those “gifted” musicians have that the rest of us seem to be lacking?

You might have found yourself thinking:

“This shouldn’t be so hard!”

… and suspected there’s some secret…

Some insider technique or gift that makes the difference between feeling free, confident and powerful in music – versus feeling like every note is hard work.

If you could just find that switch to flip, everything would be easier.

It turns out that there is one thing which mainstream music education utterly fails to deliver – yet can make that difference and transform any aspiring musician into a confident “natural”.

It doesn’t require any innate “talent” or special “gift” for music. But it can make you feel like you have both of those things.
It doesn’t require a lot of time. In fact once you put this missing piece in place, you’ll find you seem to have a lot more time for music – because (just like those “naturals”) everything seems to come easily now, as each thing you’re learning just slots smoothly into place in your brain.
And it doesn’t matter what instrument or style of music you play, or whether you’ve been playing for weeks, years or decades.

Put this missing piece in place – and you’ll discover a whole new relationship with all the music you hear, love, imagine, sing and play.

Let’s be honest:

Most music learners are struggling.

Even with a good teacher and great resources, it can feel like a gruelling battle to improve in music.

You carefully learn each new piece of music note-by-note in your practice sessions – but then you always feel nervous to go beyond what you’ve carefully practiced and prepared.

You feel limited because you’re prone to hitting the wrong notes or making some other embarrassing mistake when you go out into the “real” world of music.

Add in all the different musical skills and all the activities you want to include and improve in – and it quickly becomes overwhelming.

There’s too much to juggle and just never enough time.

If feels like even the time you do have is somehow being wasted…

It doesn’t have to be like that.

Have you ever wondered why music seems to come easily to some people?

Those musicians who can sing anything, play anything, pick just the right notes in any key, any style, any musical situation…

They seem to have absolutely no fear or nervousness in music.

It’s like they have a deep instinctive connection to music that lets them feel free and do whatever they want to easily.

We’ve all been taught that some people are “talented” or “gifted” – and so when we see those amazing musicians, we assume they just “have it”. They’ve got something we don’t, and those impressive skills are probably beyond us.

Over the last 10 years scientific researchers have dug deep into this question of “talent”.

The conclusion of all the research is clear.

According to Cambridge University’s “Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance” over 100 leading scientists have now studied this topic in a wide variety of disciplines and have all come to the same conclusion:

There Is No Such Thing As “Talent”.

Everything that looks from the outside like a “gift” in fact was built, step-by-step, through hard work and practice.

As Harvard Business Review put it:

“Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born.”

Sure, some people seem to find it easier to begin with, making us think they’re a “natural”. But that headstart quickly fades away.

None of those musical skills which seem magical, like:

Playing by ear
Sight-singing
Improvising
Jamming

None of those require any special innate abilities...

Every single one of those skills can be learned.

In fact, you might have already discovered books, courses and training which promise to teach you these “inner skills” of music.

But there’s a serious problem which means that trying to learn these skills ends up being hard, slow, frustrating work.

(So hard, slow and frustrating in fact that most musicians give up.)

After attempting “ear training” or studying up on music theory, it doesn’t seem like we’re any closer to these amazing skills we were craving.

So we come back to the idea of “talent” and decide we just don’t have what it takes…

What’s hidden from view is:

There’s actually a systematic problem with modern music education.

It puts music learners at a huge disadvantage.

And we don’t even realise it.

We all know that learning needs to be a step-by-step process.

But:

What if the process you’ve been given actually has a step missing?

And what if that “missing step” isn’t just any old step – it’s the first step…

Imagine you wanted to build a skyscraper.

Where would you start?

Probably not with the roof.

Probably not by laying bricks.

In fact, if you started with those later steps you’d find everything you built had a tendency to collapse.

It would be incredibly hard to make any progress.

However hard you worked, however quickly you put new pieces in place, it would seem like you were frantically rushing – but getting nowhere.

Why?

Because you need to start with the foundation.

Without a foundation, any other steps you try to take will be much harder than they need to be.

Without a foundation it can seem like every new piece is a bit random and disjointed. It’s hard to make sense of it all.

Without a foundation it can feel like you’re perpetually struggling without making progress, like you’re back at square one again and again.

Without the right foundation you’re just wasting your time.

But put the right foundation in place, and it becomes easy to build on top.

You can even enjoy the process – because every step you take actually moves you forwards.

So what does that have to do with musicians and “talent”?

Well, the scientific research has shown that “talented” musicians are different from the average struggling music learner in one key way:

So-called “talented” musicians have

“more sophisticated mental representations”.

Put simply: they understand music in a different way.

And that makes sense, right? Because we can see that they experience music and can express themselves in music in ways that show their brain is clearly tuned in to how music works in a fundamentally different way than we seem to.

It seems like they just have a “musical mind”.

But here’s the fascinating thing:

“Sophisticated” doesn’t mean “Complicated”.

In fact, it turns out that what can transform a musician into feeling like a “natural” isn’t a vastly complicated mental model packed with music theory and extensive decades of instrument practice.

What matters is:

Having the right foundation

of suitable mental models.

You don’t need to understand every detail of all music in full complexity to start playing by ear. Or improvising. Or sight-singing directly from notation.

What you need are mental models for understanding music in a way that matches up with the tasks you’re trying to do.

Think about it:

What’s the difference between you and those great “natural” musicians you admire?

It’s not their level of instrument technique.

Sure, that can be impressive – but flashy technique is only going to wow an audience for a minute or two. After that, you better have something more substantial to keep them enthralled.

It’s not the instrument technique that makes us look at a musician and think “Wow, I want to be like that“.

It’s the ease, the confidence, the freedom, the creativity that they seem to embody.

Pick any instrument, any style, any musical situation, and one of those “naturals” is going to dive in with enthusiasm and fit right in.

Again:

It’s not about mastering your instrument.

Ella Fitzgerald wowed the world with her “One Note Samba” – literally using just a single pitch. Did it take incredible vocal technique? No. It took an incredible understanding of rhythm and how to use it.
Beethoven’s Fifth (“da da da duuuh”) is still remembered two centuries later. Did he require an in-depth mastery of any instrument to do that? No, he just needed an incredible understanding of what would work musically.
And ask any harmonica player if Bob Dylan’s harmonica technique is any good – and you’ll get a strongly-worded “NO!” But his understanding of what to do with the harmonica to make compelling music? Well in that, he is truly world-class.

So:

If it’s not instrument technique that makes for a “natural” musician, what is it?

The biggest piece that lets them feel free, confident and creative in music: mental models.

It’s their understanding of music that sets them free.

That instinctive grasp of what’s going on in music and how to participate, modify and conjure up music from scratch that we all crave.

The good news?

You can learn these new mental models – and they can be fast to put in place.

Once you put this new foundation in place, everything else comes quicker and easier than it ever could before.

And the even-better news? This isn’t about scrapping everything and starting again.

It’s about taking the time to fill in the foundation, so that all the skills you’ve already been working on finally “click” into place.

So what is that foundation?

What are the mental models that make you feel like a natural in music?

How can you develop the musical mind of a “natural” musician?

“How is that musician so incredible?!”

I’d hear people respond by saying simply:

“Oh, they’re Kodály trained.”

The first few times I heard it I was curious – but I didn’t really think much about it.

But it kept coming up. Over the years in my work on musicality training I kept hearing mentions of this approach that seemed to hold almost legendary status…

Hi, my name’s Christopher Sutton.

I’m the founder of Musical U, the leading provider of musicality training online.

And I have a confession to make…

You see, Musical U has now helped well over one million musicians worldwide to learn the “inner skills” of music. The skills that can enable you to play by ear, improvise, and express yourself freely in music.

But I discovered we were actually falling short of how much we could help people.

We were equipping people with tools and skills which helped them, yes.

But it was a bit like laying bricks or putting tiles on the roof – before you’d secured the foundation.

I had always assumed that since people came to us with the basics of instrument playing or music theory under their belt, we could take the foundation for granted…

But that stuff is not the foundation.

Sure, it’s presented as being the starting point, in pretty much every music lesson and course around the world – but it doesn’t actually equip musicians with the mental models they need to really succeed.

While we were able to help our students and members at Musical U – it always felt a bit like building on quicksand.

So eventually I decided that I had to find out what this Kodály thing was all about, because clearly it was deeply tied to this subject I was so passionate about: unlocking the “inner instinct” for music.

It turned out that this “Kodály method” was created in the early 20th Century in Hungary, where it quickly became the official music education method throughout the country and delivered amazing results for everyone who used it.

Its creator, Zoltán Kodály, was invited to America to lecture at Stanford and even had statues erected in his honour.

But, for reasons of politics and history, this method mostly stayed hidden away and never really broke into the mainstream…

I sought out one of the top instructors in the UK and took some private one-on-one lessons – and it was really interesting.

I remember in my first Kodály lesson, I found myself thinking “this is all very basic…”

Because I knew notation, I was comfortable singing, I’d done a lot of ear training.

And we were starting from the very beginning.

But in the course of that lesson I was given some new mental models for all those familiar concepts – and I came to realise this was a whole new way of approaching music.

By the end of that first lesson I’d done some impressive things with those simple concepts that were quite different from anything I’d been able to do before.

I came away thinking

“Oh, wow – this is actually really fundamental and powerful”.

It took me a while longer to click that this wasn’t just an alternative to what I knew already – in a lot of ways it was the missing foundation that all the other stuff should have been built on.

Later I went on a 3-day intensive course where I was surrounded by Kodály instructors and students.

And that was fascinating because I got to see the impact Kodály training has.

These people ranged from amateur musicians, to teachers, to professional musicians playing in national orchestras…

Now if you’ve ever been in situations where musicians get together to learn or perform you’ll know – there’s often a lot of competitiveness and one-upmanship. There’s a lot of insecurity on display.

But on that Kodály course the atmosphere was completely different to that.

These people all had an ease and delight in music.

The skills and viewpoint that Kodály training was equipping them with – it just let them enjoy music.

It was remarkable. And exciting.

And it wasn’t just an attitude – these people could do some seriously impressive things, in terms of collaborating, creating, playing by ear, singing, and more.

But what stood out most was that having the new mental models that Kodály training equipped them with let them feel a confidence and ownership in music that just made it all a joy.

Once I’d seen this I knew we had to somehow incorporate the Kodály approach into what we provide at Musical U.

Because although Kodály training is well-proven and extremely effective, it’s still mostly hidden away…

You can find instructors or courses for in-person training here and there.

But there was no convenient, affordable, instant-access way for people to get Kodály training.

So we started to adopt parts of the Kodály approach in our online training at Musical U…

And each new thing we borrowed from the world of Kodály quickly had a massive positive impact on how effective our training system was.

But there were some aspects of Kodály that we couldn’t just “bolt on” to our existing training.

So we decided to go “all in”.

To put together something brand new, based on Kodály principles, and designed specifically to deliver the firm foundation you need for your “musical mind”...

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