Before I dive into all that, tell me if any of this sounds familiar... 

when you first got into learning music, and that might have been a few months, a few years, maybe even a few decades. When you first picked up an instrument, you probably had in mind that it would be easy, that it would come naturally to you, that you would turn into this amazing musician for whom anything was doable and you could learn anything you wanted to with ease.

I know that's how I felt. I was really, maybe naively optimistic, but super optimistic. And I thought, like I loved music so much. I knew that musician identity was part of who I was. Like I, in some way, I was destined to be an amazing musician. I knew that. But what happened for me, and I'm guessing this might have been the same for you, is that as I started learning, I found it didn't come that easily and it felt like, in fact, every step forwards was a bit of a struggle. And after that kind of very early honeymoon period where everything's new and exciting, it very quickly began to feel like quite a grind to make any progress in music. And over the years I tried all kinds of different methods, teachers, even different instruments.

And what I found was I never managed to tap into that natural music learning ability I thought I should have. It never felt like it clicked for me. It always felt like I was swimming against the tide, really fighting for every inch of progress. Does that sound familiar? I know that for a lot of the musicians who come to us at Musical U, that is their life and they are so passionate, so determined, they're sticking with it, in some cases for decades.

Full credit to them, full respect to them. They have fought for every inch of progress to become a good musician, but at the same time been left kind of frustrated and disappointed because there's some part of them that knows it should be easier than this. They should be able to learn faster, improve quicker, memorize new music more easily, and it just, whatever they try, it doesn't seem to happen.

What you might not know is that this has nothing to do with talent or your natural abilities. For a long time, I thought I was deficient because I saw people who could learn super fast and I certainly couldn't. But what I always thought was about talent or genetics or a gift, actually, it turned out to come down to a special set of practice techniques.

And I know that might sound overly simplistic. There is so much stuff out there about how to practice, what to practice, when to practice. All of that I would consider the "old traditional methods", anything you've heard about like how to practice effectively is almost certainly part of this body of knowledge that goes back a hundred years and has barely changed in that time. Even the proliferation of YouTube videos and online courses, they still almost all use the same practice methods, which ultimately boil down to try the same thing again and again, and gradually hope you get better at it. And if you're not getting better quick enough, put in more practice time or concentrate harder.

That is what 99% of musicians are doing. And it turns out the scientific research over the last 20 years has proven extensively: there is a better way. 

And that's what I wanted to talk to you about today, because if you are not yet using these so-called "superlearning" methods in your musical life, you are literally wasting 90% of the time and effort you put in.

I'll say that again. You are wasting 90% of the time and effort you put in, meaning if you adopt these other ways of practicing and learning, you can literally learn 10 times faster. 

And all of the things that have frustrated you before, all of the sticking points or the plateaus in your learning or the things you can just never quite seem to get up to speed or get the hang of all of them, become very easily learnable for you.

And I realize that might sound too good to be true, particularly if you're in that camp that has spent a lifetime learning music already. But the science is very clear, and we've had the opportunity over the last few years at Musical U to really prove this. So we developed an online course with probably the world's leading expert on applying this science of superlearning to music.

And this course Musical Superlearning has gone on to help 3000 plus musicians. I think it's about 3,500 in fact, to learn these kinds of skills. So we're talking about being able to sit down for practice and make more progress in a single practice session than you used to get in a week, two weeks, even a month.

In some cases, we had musicians who had for years been plateaued at the same kind of intermediate level and resigned themselves to, they would never get better. They were quickly able to break through those blocks. Now, what I'm talking about here are not small tweaks to the way you practice. It's not just kind of a routine for practicing.

These are very strange, counterintuitive methods that you can apply throughout your music learning, whether it's learning a new piece of repertoire or trying to master a certain technique on your instrument or trying to memorize stuff so that you can remember it not only next week, but next year. All of the stuff you're currently doing in music, you can apply these, the same kind of superlearning toolkit to it to make yourself much, much more effective and get much more progress in a much shorter amount of time. 

Now, I could go on and on all day about the incredible results we've seen over the last few years, but I thought instead I'd give you just a few examples of real musicians like yourselves at Musical U, who've tried these methods through our course and got these kinds of results. 

So as you can see, these methods really work. They're strange, they're counterintuitive, and they are absolutely not mainstream. These are not well known. They are not the things you're gonna find by chance in a random YouTube tutorial or online course, but they are extensively proven and really just work like clockwork.

That being said, there has been a bit of a problem, and I, I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit this. We really pride ourselves at Musical U on making training easy and fun and effective. So if you take any of our courses, any of our membership training, anything inside Living Music, We have really worked diligently to make it not just effective, but also easy and fun.

And that's something we've really prioritized and really I think done a good job of. If you ask musicians at Musical U, they'll tell you, it doesn't feel like slaving away learning. It often just feels like fun, enjoyable music making. So that's kind of our norm. But I have to confess, Musical Superlearning is not like that. In fact, we , we had one memorable case where someone described it as being like a trip to the dentist!

And if you talk to the musicians who graduated from it, they'll tell you it's an amazing course, but it's always kind of nagged at the back of my mind that experience of learning superlearning just wasn't as easy and joyful as we really strive for here at Musical U.

And on top of that, our team has now spent over three years working inside that course with musicians of all kinds, discovering what really works and what can make it even more effective. And so finally now we felt the time had come to take all that we had discovered and come up with a new way for you to get access to that whole toolkit of superlearning techniques.

Let me share with you what it looks like. What we've put together is a 30-Day Superlearning Practice Plan. 

You are already practicing music. Maybe you're doing it daily, hopefully you are, but you are putting in some time each day to learn the instrument, technique, your repertoire, whatever you're working on in your musical life.

And we figured instead of having you take this four week intensive course and try and develop these techniques, why don't we just modify the way you are already practicing as you go. So that over the course of 30 days, just by adjusting the way you are already practicing, you are able to absorb all of this superlearning toolkit.

And in the 30 days, not only make much, much more progress with what you are working on, but also come out of it feeling like you have this toolkit you can then apply it to anything you want to learn in future. 

Really distilling out all of our learning from three plus years and thousands upon thousands of musicians about what really makes it easy and joyful to learn superlearning and get the full benefit of that entire toolkit that's been extensively proven now to double, 5x or even 10x your learning speed.

That's what's on offer for you. And to celebrate the launch of this new Practice Plan, we've also put together a special set of bonus resources that are gonna make it easier for you to get even better results. 

So if what I've been talking about in terms of dramatically accelerating your music learning, as well as making it easy and fun for you to master and memorize all the new material you work on in future, if any of that sounds good to you, then you are not gonna wanna miss this opportunity

I really hope you will take advantage of this opportunity. There has never been a better, easier, more enjoyable, more accessible way for you to get your hands on the entire toolkit of superlearning techniques than the new 30-Day Superlearning Practice Plan.

Zac, say a quick hello and introduce yourself. 

Zac: Hey, thank you Christopher. Hello, I'm Zac from the Musical U team. I'm the head of member success and I'm really excited to share some superlearning wisdom. 

Christopher: So, Zac, you have probably more experience than anyone else on the team helping members inside Musical U with these superlearning techniques that are very new to a lot of them.

Tell us a little bit about what this can do or what results you've seen among members who use these techniques.

Zac: I think the biggest result from superlearning that I've seen in members is the understanding of what they can accomplish. Some people come in thinking they want to do this very specific thing and it's gonna take them a long time to achieve it on their instrument, maybe play a specific song, and then once they learn superlearning, they understand that they can do so much more and they start getting such bigger ideas and set their goals much higher because they realize they can achieve so much more with less time.

Christopher: Absolutely. It can be really inspiring, can't it, to see their horizons kind of grow and their sense of who they can be change so dramatically. One of the things you mentioned to me is, worth talking about or worth sharing, is the idea of playing music rather than your instrument. Talk a little bit about that.

Zac: Playing music rather than the instrument is really powerful because it allows your own internal creativity and expression to start flowing out, and rather than being in your head about, oh, how do I make this object work? You just think about what you want to express and then it can be a little bit magical almost when it just starts to happen and it flows out and it just allows you to open up instead of being closed in. 

Christopher: I love that. Yeah, and I'm sure magical is the right word for people watching or listening to this who don't feel like they're that creative or expressive. You know? It can feel like, like you said, just you're manipulating an object. What does that have to do with superlearning?

Zac: Playing music first rather than your instrument, allows you to get into a flow state a lot easier, allows you to access more expressiveness and more enjoyment. And those are two things that are really important for accessing the flow. And when you access the flow, you learn way more. And the more you tap into the flow, the more you learn and the faster it comes.

Christopher: I love it and I know for a lot of our members, their usual music practice, like the standard practice approach would have them learning something and then eventually, once they can play it really well, trying to memorize it. I know that you're a fan of kind of flipping that on its head. Talk a little bit about that idea of memorizing from the beginning.

Zac: Memorizing from the beginning is so powerful for superlearning because it increases your brain strength a lot and it also just makes the music come a lot quicker, a lot flowier again, gets you into the flow more. When you memorize first, you aren't as reliant on other things and you feel more in control and you feel more competent and you have more confidence, which allows performance to come easier.

And it also feels really cool.

Christopher: And there's a phrase I've jotted down here from our conversation before, “the power of forgetting”. What does that mean? 

Zac: It sounds kind of crazy, but forgetting something can actually be really powerful because when you are superlearning, you want to make sure that your brain stays engaged and it stays active. And when something becomes a little bit too easy, then your brain starts to get a little bit bored and it stops engaging with it as much.

So when you've forgotten something a little bit and then you go to do it again and it's more challenging, you can't quite remember it, you have to think harder. And in that process, you strengthen your brain's ability to retrieve information, and then when you go to perform, it just, it'll start to flow out of you much easier with less effort.

Christopher: Perfect. Fantastic. Yeah. Well, I think we've probably given people a little initial taste of how some of these odd and counterintuitive techniques can actually boost your learning in weird ways. Of course, if anyone wants to go further, we've got the new 30-Day Superlearning Practice Plan that you can check out.

There's gonna be a link beside this video, and Zac, we're gonna get together again tomorrow, if I remember correctly, to talk about a few more of these strange and powerful techniques. 

Zac: Absolutely.

He's been hard at work with Andrew from the Musical U team on our new 30-Day Superlearning Practice Plan, and we're gonna talk about a few more of the techniques you may not have come across and might think sound a bit weird, but actually turn out to be super powerful.

Zac, thanks for joining me again today.

Zac: Awesome. Thank you, Christopher. I'm excited to be here. 

Christopher: So I love the phrasing you jotted down for this, which is “mistakes as friends”. Tell me about this one. What's this all about? 

Zac: Yeah, I know this sounds crazy, but mistakes are really great friends. In fact, they can be your best friend.

Like what if you had a friend who every time they came around they boosted your practice and gave you a bunch of information about what you could do to improve and they can actually be really fun. 

I know that sounds insane. A lot of times mistakes can cause frustration, but when you can start to flip that and you understand that every time you make a mistake, it's actually this valuable, juicy piece of information that gives you direction on what to practice. And when you know what to practice, then you can do it with much more intention, and then you feel like you're getting more success and it's really, really powerful.

I love making mistakes now. If I make a mistake, I get excited, I'll laugh and then I'll take notes and I'll know exactly what I need to practice. And that keeps me improving and improving because that's what we want from our practice. We want to keep improving. So superlearning teaches us to flip mistakes around and use them as a guide for our improvement and our progress and it becomes really powerful the more you do that. 

Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah, and I think it's one of those ideas where once you internalize it, it really changes your perspective. You know, this I think is a big part of why we can say with confidence, a lot of musicians are wasting 90% of their practice time, and it's because they're kind of doing their best to avoid mistakes and focus on playing the stuff they can play - when actually all of the learning opportunity is in those mistakes and in those tricky areas, right?

Zac: Absolutely. If you want to improve kind of with anything in your life, you need to get outside of your comfort zone and don't be afraid to make some mistakes because that's where the biggest growth happens. And you can when you're superlearning. You can harness mistakes in your superlearning and, make it so that you're making mistakes every day.

I have a teacher who told me, if you make 200 mistakes a day, then you're doing it right. And he intentionally tries to aim for 200 mistakes a day. That's like his, when he's really getting into superlearning and really trying to dig deep and learn something. He aims for mistakes.

He aims for 200 mistakes a day, and I think that's really inspiring. 

Christopher: I love that. Yeah, and I think when we talk about superlearning, it's easy for people to see it as quite a dry, technical, scientific thing because of course there is all of this scientific research and a lot of what we focus on is, you know, really perfecting our technique and getting the notes right and playing things as quickly and perfectly as possible,

But obviously here at Musical U, we are all about musicality and one of the things I love about you in particular, Zac, is you're always coming back to that creativity and that flow and that expressive feel of music that's so important. And you mentioned this is a big part of your superlearning coaching and what you help people with in our superlearning material at Musical U is this expressing as the vehicle for learning.

Talk a little bit about that. 

Zac: Expressing as a part of the learning process has been really powerful for me personally and also for anyone that I've coached or mentored because it really just taps you directly into what you want to achieve, especially when it comes to learning music and superlearning music. 

Because music is emotion. Music is energy and we have to tap into our expression of that to really learn music. You might think that learning music is just memorizing dots on a page, but learning music is about tapping into energy and tapping into our emotion and our expression. And also, scientifically, they've done research on how getting into the flow state and using expression and creativity really accelerates your learning process.

And that's, you know, that's everything we do is an expression. And if you can tap into the emotional side of that and the energetic side of that, you get into the flow more and you superlearn more and it's a lot more fun. Enjoyment is a huge part of superlearning. We want to enjoy ourself. We want to, we want to have enjoyment so we get into the flow. 

And if we're truly expressing ourselves, then we already are feeling successful and we're already getting into the flow and we're already tapping in to what those dots on the page are supposed to be doing, which is sending energy and sharing emotion and moving people with our music.

Because at the end of the day, people don't want to be impressed by your techniques. They want to feel your expression and your emotion and you can put that into the music at the very beginning and it accelerates your progress and it makes it a lot more fun. 

Christopher: A hundred percent. And ironically, the last one on our list is “the power of not finishing”.

Tell us about the power of not finishing. 

Zac: Yes. I love the power of not finishing. It's incredible. One time I got told by a mentor of mine to get it 80% done and then get feedback. When you don't finish something, your brain is gonna work on it in the background. So say you're in a practice session and you're trying to get this section of the music down really well.

Instead of getting it down a hundred percent, you get it down about 80% and then you go on to something else. And then during that time, your brain is working on that. It's working to close that loop in the background. And then what happens is you come back to it later that day or the next day, and you're almost at 100%, you're at 90% and you didn't put in any extra work.

And if you had put in that extra work in that original session to get to that 90 or 100%, it may have been really frustrating. It may have taken you a long time, you may not have gotten there, and then afterwards you feel like you didn't achieve what you wanted to achieve and you put in a lot.

I've done that so many times where I, I'm a recovering perfectionist, so I used to get, you know, if I don't get a hundred percent right now, I didn't accomplish anything. That's how I used to feel. So when you get that not finish, you feel like you accomplished a lot more and you did a lot less work because you're allowing your brain's natural processes to work on closing those loops in the background when you do other things.

So when you don't finish something, you're actually leveraging your brain and letting your brain do what it, what it loves to do, which is close those loops in the background and accelerate your superlearning and so you can get so much done in less time and feel so much less stress and less frustrated.

And it's very nice. 

Christopher: Fantastic. Yeah, and I'm so glad we finished on that one because I think it, what you just said encapsulates so much of this, right? That it's maybe counter to what you've been taught in the past or what you feel instinctively should work. But actually the things you can do to kind of trick your brain or prod your brain into learning on your behalf without you having to put in so much conscious grind and not nearly as much time… That's the heart of superlearning, right? 

And when we're able to equip our members, our students, with a whole toolkit of these techniques, you know, they're not just wacky ideas pulled willy-nilly out of nowhere, and we just let them go wild with them. That's not gonna work, but when they're these carefully selected, proven concepts that are done in a particular way, all of it combines together for, you know, double, 5 times, 10 times the learning progress.

And we see that day after day when people get this toolkit into their hands. That's why we're so excited, as you can probably tell, about the new 30-day Superlearning Practice Plan. There'll be a link alongside this video if you want more details on that. 

All that remains to say then is a big thank you to Zac. It's been awesome to have this chance to get to chat with you about superlearning and share some of these ideas with our audience. Any parting pieces of wisdom for those tuning in? 

Zac: Yeah. Thank you Christopher. You know, I think a big part of the superlearning process is just keeping your brain engaged and figuring out ways to be creative and, you know, enjoying your practice.

That's a big part of it. So you know, then the, and the power of not finishing, you know, that allows your brain to be engaged. Not just in the practice session, but also the rest of your life. So you can always be superlearning all the time. So digging into that 30-day plan is gonna definitely empower you to not only be superlearning in your session of practice time, but also every other moment in your life, which is really cool.

So you can just never stop learning. 

Andrew: Hey, I'm Andrew Bishko. I'm the head educator at Musical U, and Christopher, it's always fun to get together anytime we can. 

Christopher: So, Andrew, you will have come across this too, where a lot of musicians, when they first encounter the idea of superlearning, are a little bit skeptical because, you know, there is such a standard status quo in terms of how you do music practice and how you learn new music.

Could you talk a little bit just to set the scene about the difference using some of these superlearning techniques we're gonna be talking about? The difference that can make for the average musician. 

Andrew: Well, the difference is huge, it was huge for me. And I've seen it happen over and over again with like, I mean, literally thousands of our members, who have gone through these superlearning techniques. They're weird, they're counterintuitive. They sometimes tug at long held emotional attachments that we have about ourselves. So they kind of sometimes open us up in ways that could be uncomfortable at first, but then produce such great results musically, and such great advancement where we discover things about ourselves that we didn't even know we could do. 

I've seen people that like literally didn't know they could do things like sight-read or play chords by ear.

And then after going through superlearning, and just discovering, wow, I can do this. I didn't think I could do this thing. You know, where they actually had a whole chunk of skills. It just appeared, you know, that's like pretty radical. But even back to the idea of like passages that you've been trying for years to play through.

And I've had this experience too where like, stuff that I've been playing literally for decades, that I would always struggle with certain passages, and all of a sudden, wow, it just, having them be unlocked, being able to play them. And then being able to learn new music so much more rapidly, and learning music that you didn't think you could, you know, the music that was, you know, beyond the box. The dream songs, you know, the things like, wow, I wish I could rock that. And it just coming to life. And we've seen that happen over and over and over and again with our members. 

Christopher: Fantastic. Yeah, and I guess where it all begins really is this idea that a lot of us have never really been taught how to learn, right? Like our instrument teachers dive straight into learning how to operate the instrument and learning particular music. But there's this whole world of scientific research, as well as practice we've gone through with our members, of actually teaching ourselves what it means to learn.

Talk a little bit about that and how we kind of have to reprogram ourselves a bit. 

Andrew: Well, yes, you know, so we don't know how to practice, basically. And what did you learn about practicing from your teacher? Usually it's like, go and practice, practice for 30 minutes. You know, practice this, you know, it's like practice...

What does that mean? What does practicing even mean? And most people, practicing means you play something over and over again. You know, maybe you figure out, oh, I've gotta work on this one part a little bit more. But it's still about playing it over and over again. We have these great myths. “Practice makes perfect”. And we're gonna learn how that's just not true. 

And we, the, our practicing is, we don't know how to do it. It's very inefficient. And you know, it's a terrible realization, but it's a very empowering one to realize how much time we waste when we're practicing, and that with just these tweaks and tweaks in our mindset and in our practice, how we can make a huge difference in the efficiency of our learning. Of actually understanding how our brain absorbs information and then how we get that information back out. And how we can apply that to our music learning.

And it's mind blowing and it's huge. And you know, one thing I do wanna say too is that, this is things that people have figured out on their own. This is why we have people like Mozart or prodigies, or you know, people that have done amazing things. We think they're so talented. It's because they figured these this stuff out on their own.

We don't have to figure it out on our own anymore. We know how to do it. And it's, just amazing. 

Christopher: And I'd like to just underscore for anyone who isn't familiar with Andrew, you know, when you are condemning the traditional methods and talking about how wasteful they are of our time and energy, you're not just saying that as someone who's been learning and playing music for your whole life.

You're also saying as someone with decades of experience being that teacher and assigning the practice work. And it is kind of humbling and shocking to realize how badly we've been wasting everyone's time for so long, isn't it?

Andrew: Absolutely. You know, I can't tell you there were certain things that I would do over and over and over again in my teaching. And just like being so frustrated with my students and it wasn't their fault.

it wasn't my fault either because I was ignorant. But still, you know, what our teaching, you know, traditions leave us with and our practices leave us with, is, it's so sad. And it, creates this idea like that we can't do things. I can't do it. I'm not talented. I can't do this. Why can't it, why is this so hard for me?

And we start asking those questions and we give up. We give up on our dreams. We give up on, you know, the very thing that moves us about music and about our desire to make music. We give up. We put our, we lessen ourselves. And I'm so, like excited that we're breaking this cycle. And excited to share this with everybody about how we can break the cycle and, I'm seeing this, doing this for the whole world. I really am. 

Christopher: And we've touched a little bit there on some of the emotional or psychological stuff that can come up, right? Like there's a lot that it can stir up, and there's a lot we have to be prepared to challenge about our existing beliefs and understanding. A lot of it I think, is encapsulated in this idea of Growth Mindset, which people may have heard of but not necessarily really grappled with.

Talk a little bit about that and the relevance for superlearning. 

Andrew: Okay, so Growth Mindset is a concept that was brought forward by Carol Dweck, who's a famous psychologist. And she differentiated between two kinds of mindset that people tend to have. A Growth Mindset and a Fixed Mindset. 

So Fixed Mindset says my intelligence is static. That means that what I have, I've got, I was born with it. I've got certain talents and certain abilities. Now, this can be really damaging not just for people who are not having abilities, but people who initially start to be really good performers. You know, when you're growing up and people say “oh, you're so talented.” “Oh, you're so good.” 

You know, like I, you can do this. That could be really damaging too, because what tends to happen is that we think that this is innate. This is a quality that we were born with, and we've either got it or we don't. And so we're either trying to protect that thing that we've got or we are, but we don't think that this could expand and grow.

On the other hand, Growth Mindset, is a mindset in which we believe that we can expand, that we can grow, that we can learn. That if we don't know something, we can learn it. If we don't know how to do something, we can learn how to do that. And so we tend to put effort into learning. We tend to try harder.

And those people, even like people that might have, you know, initial experiences, or, you know, abilities or something like that. If they don't have a Growth Mindset, they don't grow and develop. But someone who doesn't seem to have, skills can learn them. And if they have that idea, you know, that go-getter attitude.

I can learn this, I can do this. Growth Mindset people aren't afraid to fail. They're not afraid to make a mistake. They're not afraid to have these experiences, because they know that everything they can learn from everything. Where Fixed Mindset people are like if, you know, if they make a mistake or if somebody criticizes them, they're like, they're crushed and they don't think they can go forward.

And the truth is that we all have some of this in either side of us. We all have both of these mindsets. But when you start to do superlearning, you start to uncover this and you start to see, wow, I've been holding myself back here. And you start to really see what your potential is. 

And that could be a little scary sometimes, because that goes against things that we've been taught by our parents and our teachers and from, you know, really early on. And so, but it's worth doing. It's so worth doing. To get out there and realize who you are and what you can do.

Christopher: For sure. And I think what we've found is if you're approaching it in the right way, you know, if you're not just stumbling around, hoping to figure out better ways of learning, if you are doing it in a guided way and you're being given this toolkit, actually you can very quickly kind of tune into that Growth Mindset, right?

Because you very quickly start discovering, oh, I can do that, or, wow, I can make more progress than I was expecting. 

Andrew: Yeah. That you know, so. It's true. It's really so helpful to have this structure, to have guidance, and to trust that guidance. You know, that's already, that's the first step in your Growth Mindset, is trusting that guidance, trusting that you know that this is there for you and that this can really work.

And once you do that, you start to learn how to trust yourself even more. 

Christopher: And there's kind of a big overarching framework that runs through a lot of superlearning, which, you know, the scientific literature might call Deliberate Practice. There's different ways to describe it, and ultimately I think it can be quite simple, even though it's very powerful.

Talk a little bit about this overall framework and the idea of Deliberate Practice. 

Andrew: Okay, so Deliberate Practice is, yes, it's a common term, being flung around in a lot of places, and different people use different ways to describe it. But, you know, breaking it down what it really means is, there's this idea of reflection, of thinking about what you're doing. 

And now just think about how you practice a lot of times. I'm gonna play this thing a hundred times, what are you doing? You're just playing it over and over and over again. We have this thing, we think we're getting it in our muscle memory, all right?

And while there's some different things about memories that our muscles hold or whatever, really what we're talking about is our brains. And that's just not how our brains like to learn. 

So with Deliberate Practice, we start to reflect. We start to think about what we're doing and make decisions and make changes. We get much more engaged in what we're practicing. 

And so, for example, rather than just doing something over and over again, you stop and you think, what can I do a little differently here? What can I do, change here to make this better? Is it a slight angle of my finger, is a slight thing that I'm doing with my voice?

Whatever it is. And we start to find all these very juicy details about what we're doing with our bodies and our minds and everything when we're practicing. We start to find these details that really give, not only give an accelerated learning experience, where we start to be, we're using more of our brains to learn all this stuff. But it also gives us this rich experience of the music where we get deeper and more connected with the music.

So Deliberate Practice has, it's a simple idea about just being more conscious and aware and mindful when you're practicing. But the implications are absolutely enormous in terms of your engagement and your connection, and your enjoyment and that whole thing that we want with music, which is to feel the music. You know, feel it, be able to feel it and to express it and be connected with it.

So it's a very powerful practice. 

Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah, and, I love the, the way you described that. Because I think it gives a good sense of how, you know, when we talk about wasting time or we talk about paying more attention, we are not talking about these kind of bland, generic ideas. I'm sure a lot of people watching or listening to this feel like they are paying attention during music practice and they're not wasting time, because, you know, they're not getting distracted by their phone and they're not, like, their mind isn't wandering.

But we are talking about like very specific tactical things with these superlearning techniques that really kick it up to a level that makes you look back and think, “oh wow, like where was my time going? Why was I spending those other 99 repetitions when they weren't getting me anywhere?” 

Well, listen, we wanted to keep this one short, so let's get together again tomorrow, because I know you'd earmarked a few more really fascinating ideas from this new 30-Day Superlearning Practice Plan. We'll leave it there for today and see you again tomorrow. 

Andrew: Yes. I'll see you again tomorrow, Christopher, and I'm looking forward to it.

Christopher: Hello again. Christopher here from Musical U, and I'm joined by Andrew Bishko, our head educator. 

We've been sharing some of the interesting, fascinating, counterintuitive, but powerful techniques we're using in the new 30-Day Superlearning Practice Plan to double, 5 times or even 10 times the speed with which you can learn music.

We wanted to share some of these ideas, because I think if you just hear that wild claim, it can seem a little far-fetched. But hopefully as you hear some of these concepts and some of these techniques we're talking about, it paints a picture for you of how different the kind of music practice we're using in that plan is, and why it's able to get you such dramatically different results.

Andrew, the next item you had flagged as worth talking about was Encoding versus Retrieval. Those are very technical terms, but explain a little bit about what you mean by that and why it's relevant. 

Andrew: Okay. Yes. You know, this was something that really blew my mind when I started to work with superlearning.

And I've seen that making this distinction has been super, super helpful for many of our members who have learned both of these ideas, but were really confused about what they were and how to apply them. So making a really clear distinction that there is different tasks, different learning tasks when we're learning music.

And one of them is Encoding. That is basically putting the music in. Taking the music like where it's on your paper or, you know, something that you're listening to, doing by ear, however it is, getting it into your brain. Then there's Retrieval, which is getting it out, which means bringing it out and playing it. 

And we really, I think we think a lot about Encoding and we talk, we call this learning. I'm gonna learn the music. Okay. So I'm gonna practice the music, which means play it over and over and over again, and that's gonna help me learn it.

Okay, I figured out a few things in there. Now I've learned the music. Then you get up to play it, and it doesn't come out the way you wanted it to. Whether it was memorized or whether it was the sheet music. And it's like, why is this, why is it not coming out? That task is Retrieval, that is pulling it back out of the brain.

And so we say, okay, well I haven't practiced it enough. So we, again, we play it over and over and over again, and it's still, we get the same, you know, marginal results. Why is this happening? Because Retrieval is a separate skill. It's a different skill. It's, something different is happening in our brains to bring something out.

And if you think about, what is, like if you're performing, let's say if you're going to a gig. You're going to a place, you're driving there, you're setting up your equipment, you're getting up to play something, and then you've gotta display it. You're not sitting there practicing it a hundred times and then saying, “okay, everybody don't listen to the first 99 times. Just listen to the hundredth time. That's the good one.” You know, and that's how we, you know, do it at home. So, we need to practice that idea of just pulling it out of nowhere. 

And, you know, there's a whole science, I think, you know, we've talked, Zac talked about some of these things with forgetting. And there's a whole science to that. It's all been figured out, which is really beautiful. It's just something that we have to do. We have to practice. And there's a different, it's a different technique. It's a different kind of practice. It's also one that takes actually very little time, all right?

Because we're using parts of our brain that, you know, aren't engaged at the present, you know, during times when we're not practicing, but we'll talk about that later. So it takes very little time. 

It can be very scary and frustrating, but when you understand how it works, it's amazing. And you can really get the hang of actually bringing the music out, which is like a whole half of your whole learning task, and something that we completely neglect and know very little about.

Christopher: Yeah. And so talk more about how the brain learns and why some of these weird techniques work, or why we haven't stumbled upon them before. 

Andrew: Okay. So if you think about your, the brain, the way it's evolved. Our brains use a tremendous amount of energy. They burn energy like crazy. So there's an inner mechanism to keep our brains from like basically eating us alive.

That it just, you know, our brains shut down whenever they think they're not needed. And that means if our brains are shutting down, our learning is shutting down. And there's been like research, these brain scans where it shows like if you are repeating something over and over again, your brain says, “oh, is this gonna play that again for the 37th time? I'm going on vacation. We don't need to burn all that glucose.” 

And so, but the brain activity is really heightened when there's a challenge, and where there's something going on and the brain is challenged. So if there's like, that's what a lot of superlearning is all about, is like keeping our brains interested, alive, alert, awake, and challenged. So we're keeping all that activity. We're keeping all that energy moving in our brain, which increases…

Okay, like I'm not a scientist, but like, I love thinking about my axons, which are the threads between my neurons getting myelinated. That's how they get insulated.

So there's more energy flowing between them. And that the more I keep my brain active, there's all these little axons being myelinated. And it's not just the one task that I'm learning, but a whole rich network that's supporting my learning. And that is, you know, a big thing about how our brains learn.

There's another thing that's really, you know, our buddy Josh Turknett, he's a neuroscientist that became a banjo player and a banjo instructor. And he says, practicing is telling your brain what to do when you're sleeping. There's so much going on in our brains that we are not aware of all the time.

I mean, I think Molly Gebrian, and another learning expert, she says like, 95% or more of our brain functioning is just unconscious. We just don't know what's going on. We can use that. There's a huge amount of thing that we could use. 

So a lot of times if we do something where we're sort of telling our brains, you know, I think Zac talked about like not finishing something, you know, where we would tell our brains that, okay, go work on this. Go work on this. And there's a lot of work that we can do when we're not sitting in the practice room and playing something over and over again. And actually when we play something over and over again and we get to the point like, oh yeah, we did it a hundred times, it sounds good.

Our brains say "that sounds good". You know, I don't need to work on this when you're sleeping. But if you like leave your brain something to do when you're not practicing, and it's amazing how that can accelerate your learning in a lot less time and a lot more fun. 

Christopher: A hundred percent. Yeah. And I feel some responsibility to add a bit of a caveat, like some of the things we're talking about are definitely ideas you can take away an experiment with. I would just flag again, like you wanna be a little bit careful not to be stumbling in the dark too much, right? Because it can be frustrating. And I think a lot of what we've found really rewarding and supportive for our students is just to be able to hand them “here's how you do it”. Like “this is the stuff that will work”. 

And when you have that kind of toolkit at your fingertips, all of these weird, counterintuitive ideas have very practical applications. 

I love that you're wearing your Musical Inside And Out shirt today, Andrew, because you know, a lot of what we've been talking about sounds very specific and technical and in the world of kind of “getting the notes right”. You know, in terms of memorizing, in terms of learning new music faster, in terms of getting your brain to do the stuff you want it to do.

But of course, here at Musical U, we really specialize in that inner musician and bringing the music out from inside you. I'd love if you could talk a little bit about what we've discovered over the last few years about the role of creativity in superlearning and vice versa. 

Andrew: Yes, you know, creativity and superlearning go together beautifully.

And it's interesting because that's not really the way we started. We started, it was about like, learning technique, learning the tricks, learning how to, you know, getting into being able to play that thing, you know? So it was like all, it was really very technique focused. But what we've discovered is that creativity and expression are just… there's nothing like that to activate and engage our brain.

So like yes, there's science behind it, but we are creative beings. We're meant to, we're meant to create. What attracts us to music is we want to create, we wanna make something beautiful. We wanna make something that we can connect with that expresses our you know, what we have inside us. And when we connect with that, we connect with, you know, our whole, all of our emotional systems, which are also connected to our brains, right? We are accelerating our learning tremendously. 

You know, so for example, you can, a lot of times you can use improvisation as a learning tool. We think of improvisation as an end product, as something, I've gotta learn all this stuff and then I can improvise. But you can use improvisation to learn things.

You can learn your expressivity, your creativity, and practice itself, when you absorb these principles of musical superlearning, where you have a clear understanding of what all these concepts and principles are, and you're guided through that, and you make that a part of yourself, then you can take that whole thing and go with it, so you're creative, your practice becomes a creative act in itself. It's not a chore anymore. It's something creative and beautiful and fun that you look forward to, and that satisfies your creativity. Just in terms of the way you are organizing your practicing and the way you're doing things, and it just becomes much more enjoyable.

And of course if you're wanting to create music and coming forward doing that, you're practicing doing that. So it all works together in that way. 

Christopher: Absolutely. Well, I have been honestly quite shocked at just how much you are managing to pack into this new practice plan. And I'd love if, you know, for anyone watching this who's thinking about picking up a copy, share a little bit about what that experience is gonna be like, what they can expect over that 30 days in terms of their journey.

Andrew: Well, I just, like a little behind the scenes and how this kind of developed, you know. When I first, when we were first thinking about this practice plan, I was thinking about, okay, we're going to have the step-by-step, do this today, do this today, do this today, and we're doing that. But what I didn't expect, and this happened when I was talking with Zac, is, how valuable everything that we've learned over the years is in terms of the mindsets.

You know, all these things have happened because we've worked with so many thousands of people. And we've had these ideas, and we started talking about everything that we'd learned in this, in these years, and we're like, we've got more than enough to fill 30 days of that. So not only are you going to be doing things and taking the steps and learning how to organize your practicing, and how to take steps so you can then take that and develop it on your own.

But you're also going to be learning all this wisdom and all these concepts and all the results of all this research and experience, and you're going to be using your superlearning to memorize those concepts, and to make them a part of yourself so you can take, move forward and organize your own superlearning practice from the seeds that we're planting in this plan.

Christopher: I love that. Yeah. And you know, to me, from a slightly arms-length perspective, I guess, on the creation of this, it feels to me like you're kind of taking everything we've seen across thousands of students and kind of grabbing the very best of the best results and then packing it all into this really - I was about to say intense, I don't think it is intense. It's just extremely densely packed in an exciting way, 30-day plan, so that, you know, anyone coming in can go through this process and by the end of the 30 days they will have become a superlearner. And that's something they can go away with, take into their musical life and benefit from for the rest of their life.

Andrew: Absolutely. You were saying that it's densely packed, that there's a lot in there. And it's true that there is a lot in there, but it's all digestible. And we have used our own experience in superlearning to teach these things where it's not just, okay, you're gonna read a book. It's all planned out, so you get this concept on a day, and then you get another concept, and then, the way the things are looped back around and connected.

And also just the music practice itself, it's kinda like being in a laboratory. You take little test tube samples, so you're gonna be practicing with very small pieces of music.

And that gets back to what we were talking about yesterday, about learning how to learn. Because we're not learning about, we're not there to learn the music. We're there to learn how to learn the music. So we're taking very little samples of music, and we're running all these experiments on them that are gonna be fun and easy and take a very short amount of time.

You know, just a few minutes here, a few minutes there, 5 minutes on this, 5 minutes on that, whatever. And then we're going to, you know, be able to see, oh, this gave me this result. And once you have done that, you know, just like in any laboratory, you know, they do things in a test tube and then you start to apply it to an industry.

And you're gonna come home and you're gonna have this industry of practice that you can expand into, of music production, from getting these little principles. You know, it almost reminds me of like this body work I did recently where we were talking about just the movements.

Just a little bit of movement and finding the origin of that movement, and then how that guides the big movements. And, this is the experience you're gonna have this 30 day laboratory experience that you can then expand as much as you like. 

Christopher: Wonderful. Well, this has been such a pleasure, Andrew.

Always fun to get together with you and talk about this stuff, but I know that the people watching will have really appreciated everything you've shared. 

If anyone is interested in picking up a copy of the plan, we'll put a link beside this video. I think we have over 500 people now lined up to be in this first group of students going through it, so that's super exciting. Thank you so much, Andrew. Any parting words of wisdom for our budding superlearners?

Andrew: Let's get ready. It's gonna be a great ride. Be open. Trust the process. And know that the work that you put on in doing this, whether it's fun and easy, and sometimes it might not be, or sometimes it even might be a little confusing.

Just go for it. Just open up to it and it's going to make such a huge difference in your musical life. I know it's made a huge difference in mine and thousands of people we've worked with. So, really looking forward to having you blossom into your musicality. 

Christopher: Fantastic. Cheers everyone. Goodbye.