The little fella inside you that gets in the way on channelling music (amongst other things). Like a 2 year old with a temper tantrum it plays tricks with you – if you let it! Fed on fear it prospers and helps you self sabotage all those things you were working towards until one by one the phone stops ringing and the ego has won. Oops! Not what we intended was it?

So how to deal with?

The trick is to remember to observe it as if it was another person (because it is in a way). Take the perspective from outside yourself and observe what;s going on both inside and outside and you’ll see your ego craving whatever it craves.

Mine seems to seek recognition and certainty of late and, if left to its own devices unchecked, will seep into all areas of life.

So as I head off to make a cup of green tea, I’m going to sit and observe my little friend and, as a result, make some different choices to bring the music back into my world.

What does your ego want?

Don’t think of President Obama  / David Cameron (insert your President / Prime Minister’s names here) wearing a pink tutu.

OK….so what are you thinking of in that instant. Yes, I thought so.

To tell someone – as any parent of a young child will tell you – only encourages the opposite to happen. Don’t fall, don’t forget, don’t make a mistake. All of these sabotage our efficiency and progress.

Music education sets us up to fail very often because the underlying default instruction we come to learn through admonishment from our teachers or feedback from our audiences is ‘don’t play the wrong note’ or ‘don’t make a mistake’.

I saw this in one of my guitar students yesterday learning a new piece. Stroking the strings tentatively progress was a little slow. So we agreed not only that he had permission to make mistakes but I actively encourage him to play the piece wrong. I asked him to play it faster than it was written and to strike the strings as if he was very angry and frustrated. In doing this there was much laughter as the piece was, frankly, butchered. But something happened…

When we returned to play the piece as originally written the number of wrong notes, stumbles and stutters almost disappeared. Why?

Well, we forget that learning is both an unconscious and a bodily process (not just a logical one). Remember when you learned to ride a bike? Only when the body had learned how to balance were you able to ride successfully.

Failing fast and teaching the body how not to do it is simply a process of elimination that is speeded up. The more mistakes there are the more incorrect ways your body knows not to play a particular piece. So, much more efficient. Put this experience in a safe, nurturing environment and a dose of laughter and the speed of learning increases exponentially.

The same is true of your instrument. Your body has to ‘get it’ as well as your brain! Remember that next time you practice.

You may have noticed that the Internet is increasingly being used to deliver music education to both students and teachers alike (really?!)

Meet Sandy Holland, co-founder of e-music maestro one of the first, comprehensive online resources for helping piano players take their musicianship to the next level and helping piano teachers take their teaching from good to fantastic. I've had a look and it is brilliant but don't take my word for it, check out the independent reviews for yourself.

In the meantime, have a listen to this new interview to find out more about how e-music maestro helps develop your musicianship as a piano player.

Enjoy!

So here we are. Paul Crick – The Music Performance Coach is now accredited as a Professional member of The Association of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (ANLP).

ANLP accreditation dovetails with the existing accreditation from the Association of Integrative Psychology (AIP).

I applied for membership for two reasons. First, professional accreditation from one of the leading standards organisations offers my clients the reassurance that (i) my skills comply with national standards and (ii) I have the ability to pursue a programme of continuous professional development through the ANLP’s research, conferences and special interest groups.

Well, there’s progress for you

Back from a day in Birmingham as part of the judging panel for Live and Unsigned competition several ‘economy’ related things struck me about what I had witnessed (and enjoyed) as I zoomed homeward up the M69.

First, song arrangements. The more successful artists were more musically literate and hence, selective in their choices for arranging songs. Many artists all played the same chords with the same harmonic arrangements as a default setting for the song. Different songs require different arrangements and there are times – clearly – when different musicians playing the same chord has a purpose and impact. However, study any artist of any genre carefully and learn how they use chords because it will improve your playing and your songwriting. Good song arrangements require economy in your musical choices.

Secondly, distortion. Perhaps unsurpisingly, a lot of the artists who auditioned today were rock / grunge / metal acts. This being Birmingham and the Black Country, home of British Metal, has inspired many to follow in the footsteps of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest etc…etc. However, plugging in, turning everything up to ’10′ including the gain on the crunch channel of the amp is a creative decision as opposed to a default setting. What is worth noting is that by ‘backing off’ the gain (and the treble tone),  and choosing chords judiciously is more likely to get to a ‘killer rock tone’ than the default approach of ‘everything on 10′ (or more!). The nature of the competition does not afford the luxury of a soundcheck so it is worth getting to know the settings on various amps and your guitar to get close to your preferred audio settings. Add in the uniqueness of the contact of your fingers on the neck and voila – better tone, greater musicality…more economy.

Third, solos. The solo is an opportunity for self expression and, too often, it is used as an excuse to pack together as many notes as can be played – on said instrument (bass, guitar, keys) – to demonstrate virtuosity as a default setting. Again solos are creative decisions so there are no rights and wrongs in truth but I would argue that there are great solos and poor solos and the better ones are borne out of….yes, you guessed it….economy. Think of the really great solos that you love to listen to or copy. Chances are they (1) fit the song being played (2) have a shape and a musical phrasing that makes sense to the listener (and the band!) and (3) have dynamic phrasing that combines loud with soft, a note flurry with space and phrasing that has a musical start, middle and end.

So, when writing your next song or preparing for your next live performance, have a creative check up and make a conscious decision of the economy within your own art. There are no right answers and I suggest that consideration of the economy in your music will yield an improvement in the results you get.

Happy New Year, one and all. I hope 2012 brings you all you need, all you want and exceeds your expectations by a million miles.

My year has – I’m pleased to say – already got off to a cracking start as a long held ambition to work at the heart of the music industry to work with young emerging artists got a kick start. More about all that in subsequent posts…

If you are a vocalist – at whatever level – then this post is for you. Meet the extraordinary speech therapist and vocal coach, Dr Joanna Cazden.  Through my work with The Modern Vocalist, (thank-you again Robert Lunte) I managed to persuade Joanna to share some of her valuable time with me to share some of the secrets to maintaining a healthy voice as a singing professional.

In this interview Joanna shares her lifelong passion for music and her holistic and medical knowledge and experience of what it takes to really look after your vocals so that you can deliver your best vocal performance anytime and every time.

Before departing for 2012 I wanted to say a massive thank-you to Robert Lunte, Chief Executive at The Modern Vocalist for letting me loose on the Influential Leaders of Voice series and getting to meet and work with so many highly knowledgeable and skilled interviewees. We expanded to a number of new platforms and saw interest levels in Robert’s work as a coach of vocal athletes accelerate to new highs. Thanks to everyone for listening.

In 2012, Neil Long, former Capital Radio DJ and author of ‘The Podcast Bible’ takes over the ‘hot seat’ and will be Robert’s running mate. I wish them the very best for 2012 and beyond.

I wish you a very happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

You can always tell when you are in the presence of an expert and, as the inventor of vocal science – or vocology – Dr. Titze is most definitely that.

In this interview he talks about his background and how he was able to bring together his passions as both an engineer and musician to create a unique body of work around the science of how the voice works. He is Executive Director at the National Centre of Voice and Speech in the USA

Having just performed at the weekend to a small audience of 50, I wanted to reflect on some of the lessons I learned from the experience and to share them with you.

Truth has, it would seem, a number of dimensions to it.

Time; are you present in the moment or are you thinking ahead to the rest of your set with the more challenging pieces, worrying whether you’ve rehearsed them enough. Are you worrying about the recovery in your performance a couple of bars ago and whether it was ‘good enough’. Or are you in the present moment focused on what is happening right now and living through the notes as you play them?

Energy: in which direction is your energy flowing? Is it outward towards your audience with the intention of moving them or is it from the audience to you with intention of being deemed ‘good enough’? Are you seeking approval and worthiness or are you sharing the energy of music and moving others beyond their normal day to day concerns and worries to feel joy, happiness, sadness or whatever emotion arises for them?

Trust: are you able to trust yourself to perform? Are you caged and hemmed in by the notes on a stave, the urge to comply with generally accepted codes / standards / codes of compliance for performance?

Do you know the music well enough to ‘let go’, to trust the automatic pilot of your muscle memory to physically connect with the notes without thinking. Do you trust enough to get out of the way of yourself – the thinking mind – and create the emotional space to inject your feelings (not anybody else’s) into the piece you are playing?

To what extent do your conditioning, values and beliefs interfere with your ability to trust yourself? What chains bind you that cause you to choose not to let go?

Humanity: are you able to accept that you are not – contrary to myth – superhuman and willing to lower the mask of that self imposed deception so that your audience can see who you truly are rather than the figment of your imagination that you would like them to think you are?

None of these things are necessarily easy and some performers find speaking their truth easier than others. The performer we were as a small child – the carefree, capable, fearless, enigmatic, funny and feeling – is still there today. The challenge is to break the mental bonds of compliance, conformity and criticism that have constrained the truth to a watered down version of who we are.

Of all the things that are taught in music lessons, at what ever standard, little is spoken of about these key elements of being a performer and how to stand in your own truth. It isn’t until you reach the upper echelons of performance (and usually in the classical genre) that you are invited to explore the idea of truth to any degree.

What a missed opportunity that is? What a shame traditional approaches to teaching music and artist development do not address these challenges sooner. Thankfully, the human mind and body are highly malleable and it is never too late to achieve change. We are all works in progress.

However, all is not well. In the first lesson he was asked to read some music and answer some basic questions on scales and, having no formal musical training (he currently learns guitar by ear and by rote) he naturally couldn’t.

The next part of the story left me initially incensed, then disappointed and eventually highly optimistic.

According to his dad, the boy arrived home in floods of tears having been belittled by his music teacher (and his classmates) and left to feel embarrassed about his inability to read. Yet, the whole point of being in a music class is to learn what you don’t know and music, as any seasoned professional will tell you, is a life long journey. I interviewed Steve Howe from Yes recently and he shared that his foray into the world of the jazz trio meant that he had to learn a whole new vocabulary of music even though the primary alphabet – the little black dots – remained unchanged.

Now I appreciate there are three sides to every story (yours, theirs and the truth) so I will reserve judgement until our next guitar lesson. After all, our challenges arise with the meaning we choose to give to things and it is definitely the case that my student in this case has chosen his response (even if he does not yet recognise this to be so).

Whenever an uncomfortable event occurs there are generally four things that happen:

1) The truth of the event itself
2) Our own recollection of the event with all it’s distortions, generalisations and deletions
3) The emotion associated with the event that we experience
4) The positive lesson to be taken from that event into the future

The emotions we experience often hide the positive lessons. (With more serious types of physical and emotional trauma, our emotions can cloud these lessons, unnecessarily, for years and years). The impact of our emotions can affect us at both the conscious level (e.g. He now wants to give up music for fear of being made to feel stupid again in class) and at an unconscious level. The impact influences how we think about things and – as a result of that thinking – how we behave and the results we get.

When we go back to the find the positive lessons within a specific event – however uncomfortable that event was – we change the meaning of the event. Once we change the meaning then the challenge (e.g. emotional discomfort) we were experiencing usually disappears and often for good.

How much better would it be for this particular teacher to encourage this student to come to terms with their interpretation of the event; of feeling embarrassed at not knowing how to read music. If you have never been shown how to do something, how can you possibly know? There is no shame in that.

There are a minority of music teachers in every generation throughout the whole of the music education system that seem to enjoy belittling or forcing their students to conform rather than searching for the light within them and encouraging it to shine. Actually thinking about it, this is true of most subjects that are taught.

Tempting as it is, I choose not criticise them because they too, have not been shown either how to deal with their own insecurities and patterns and / or how to encourage each individual student’s light to shine.

Great teachers observe their students and help them find ways to express their own individual essence and artistry (we all have this ability). Great teachers create generative change by helping the student to tap into the resources they already have inside of themselves. My student can read music, he is just not yet aware of that fact yet.

Giving the gift of courage and confidence to express ourselves authentically is why music is such an important subject to teach to youngsters irrespective of whether the student progresses to a career in music or not. You only have to witness the impact of El Sistema programme in Venezuela, Columbia and America to see this.

My hope is that more and more educators learn this so as to help the next generation be more confident and less fearful in expressing themselves in a positive way.

As to our next guitar lesson, I’m really looking forward to that. Not because I want to encourage my student to continue to study music or give up but to help him remember the joy of self expression through playing music and to help him change the meaning of this event for himself and to grow.