Christopher Sutton:
If I had to give people one tip that would shortcut the learning process and give them a big taste of what the accelerated learning techniques are all about, it's that you want to shift that balance. Instead of spending 90% of your practice time getting things right and 10% making mistakes and practicing them until you get them right, you want to flip it and you literally want to be spending 90% of your practice time making mistakes and really going deep on those mistakes. And that means all of your time is spent actually improving the stuff you need to improve.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician, and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month, without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

Michael Walker:
All right, so I'm excited to be here today with Christopher Sutton. Christopher is the founder and director of Musical U, which is an online training community that teaches artists how to play by ear, sing in tune, and overall just become better musicians. Become more musically confident. He was originally trained as computer scientist who specialized in developing music related software for desktop and mobile.

Michael Walker:
And today, I want to talk with him about really one thing that he's mastered, is the ability to improve the learning process so you can significantly reduce the amount of time that it takes in order to improve your musicality. And all of us have a limited number of hours in the day. We have the same number of hours but it's limited. And so I think that there's such a huge leverage point in your ability to learn and to speed up that progress. So I'm excited to have him on the podcast today, and Christopher, thanks for taking the time to be here.

Christopher Sutton:
Pleasure, Michael. It's really great to have the chance to meet you face to face. I've been a long time listener and real honor to be on the show.

Michael Walker:
Awesome, man. Cool. So to start things off, I would love to hear the little bit about your story and how you get started with Musical U in the first place.

Christopher Sutton:
Sure. I am someone who grew up doing a lot of music. I was the music guy in the class who would lumber into class in the morning, clutching a saxophone and electric guitar and swan off to a singing lesson midway through the lesson and that kind of thing. And that's really where the start of my Musical U journey begins, because looking back, it was bizarre that I was seen as the musical one because I felt not like that at all.

Christopher Sutton:
I loved music. It was my passion. I was putting a lot of time into it. I was learning instruments. I was singing in choirs and groups and doing stage shows and musicals and that kind of thing. But I did not feel like a real musician, and I don't know if your audience can relate to that. But I had a lot of what I now see as imposter syndrome, as well as some quite genuine limitations on what I could do, so that I could look around to other musicians who were playing by ear or improvising, writing their own music, all of that stuff that I associated with talent or being a natural musician, none of which I could do.

Christopher Sutton:
And so I was slaving away diligently trying to become the musical one that everyone saw me being and just inside feeling really frustrated and disappointed and not good enough in a lot of ways. That makes it sound very negative. At the time I wasn't conscious of most of that, so I was just happily soldiering along as a teenager. I did a lot of music in school. By the time I got to university age, I lost faith in myself to be honest. I wouldn't say I'd given up on the dream, but I had definitely let go of the idea that I would be a great musician.

Christopher Sutton:
And so music was still my hobby. I took up a couple more instruments. I started learning bass and then blew the harmonica and I still kept it going on the side. But as you said in your introduction there, my specialty became computer science. I studied that as my undergrad. And then I managed to sneak to via things back towards music. I did a master's degree in digital music processing, which it's the science of audio engineering. So teaching computers to analyze music and do all of the clever stuff that these days Adore or an audio workstation can do to music in terms of correcting tuning or timing or analyzing things in great depth.

Christopher Sutton:
And that was just burgeoning at that time, so it was a lot of the scientific research behind how to make computers do that. I managed to combine that computer science background with my passion for music and that was super cool. And I went on to do a research scientist job at a little audio startup company in Cambridge, where they were doing clever things with audio steganography.

Christopher Sutton:
As part of that day job, I miraculously found my way back to that passion for music. Because in the day job, I was developing algorithms that messed with sound basically. There would be a recording of a song or a clip from the radio, and our company was embedding data in that sound. And the trick of it was to do it without it being noticeable to the human ear. So I was doing all of these really detailed listening exercises and comparing 17 different versions of a high hat sound and trying to figure out what was working, what wasn't.

Christopher Sutton:
And as part of that, I started developing my ears to be able to appreciate those differences. And it opened up this whole world for me that I had never known was there. And those of you in the audience who've done studio work, you're probably familiar with the idea that the engineer can hear that 10 kilohertz band needs to come up three dB and that kind of thing. And they've got beautifully tuned ear to pick up on those nuances.

Christopher Sutton:
And I started doing the training that lets you learn to do that. And that was super exciting in itself just because now when I listen to music, it came alive in a whole new way and I was picking up on all of this detail and I could listen to a song I thought I knew backwards and inside out, and discover all of these new depths and details. So that in itself was super exciting.

Christopher Sutton:
But really what it led to was the discovery that there was a whole bundle of stuff called ear training for music. And this was just a mind blowing discovery it for me. I think these days it's better known in the age of Google, we're all familiar with a lot more than I was back then, I think. But for me, I had always just felt I had a bad musical ear. I could get through with my instrument, but I literally never got told there were exercises I could do to recognize notes and chords by ear, or there was something you could do to improve your sense of rhythm.

Christopher Sutton:
When I discovered this existed, I dived in with great passion and it just, it started to shift my belief in myself and my optimism, I suppose. As to what was possible for me in music and everything that followed from there in terms of building the business and developing Musical U was really coming from that seed of, "Oh wow, whatever I thought I could do in music was just a tiny fraction of what's actually possible if you know the methods, if you know the procedures, if you know the type of training to do as part of your musical life."

Michael Walker:
That's so cool, man. Thanks for sharing. I feel like that's something that a lot of people can relate to. Probably a lot of people here too, there's going to be a mixture of some people who maybe they got their start playing music by ear or without sheet music, and then some people who were able to learn through sheet music or took classical lessons and there is a little bit of a disconnect and it's a different style of learning.

Michael Walker:
The learning to play by sheet music is a much more heady, analytical, very good for your brain, I think. And probably some of the skillset that enabled you to be a great computer scientist and to develop this software was helped along by your ability to be classically trained. But then it sounds like one of the challenges is around that feeling. And again, I think a lot of people listening to this may be able to relate with this idea of feeling like, man, I really wish I could sit down and just play a song by ear. How do people do that? How do they hear a song and just play along with it right away?

Michael Walker:
That's so awesome that you've been able to develop this software that can help with that. In a way, it's almost like you developed it for yourself. Back then if you had known or had access to something like this, how much more quickly would you have learned and how much easier would your life have been?

Michael Walker:
Now that you've worked with a lot of musicians, helped to develop this ear training and seen the transformation from someone who considers themselves not being really that kind of musician or having that kind of talent to learning how to develop it, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see artists struggling with when they first get started and they want to learn how to become a better musician and to improve their training?

Christopher Sutton:
Well, I think one of the reasons I've been so looking forward to this conversation is the word you just use their, talent. Because I think your audience has a very special relationship with that word compared to a lot of people I talk to at Musical U. A lot of our students are more or hobbyist musicians. They don't necessarily have career aspirations or consider themselves an artist.

Christopher Sutton:
And that word talent really sums up a lot of what we do in the sense that we try to demystify all of the stuff that gets bundled up in that word, talent. And it's not for a second to a takeaway from anyone who is talented or considers themselves talented. And in fact, a lot of people I talk to, they really appreciate what we do because often they get called talented and they resent that, because they know how much hard work and grind and dedication goes into that performance that appears effortless. And how much work goes into the craft over the years to get to the point where you seem like a talented superstar.

Christopher Sutton:
A lot of what we do, whether it's on the ear training side and showing someone that improvisation isn't magic and songwriting doesn't require a flash of inspiration from the musers, there are methods and processes and techniques you can do to draw that out of yourself. Or if it's what you alluded to in the beginning there in terms of accelerated learning and the magical virtue, so who can sit at the piano keyboard and dazzle the room with the amazing arrangement out of nowhere at great speed. It's not because he was born gifted. There's a process to get to that point.

Christopher Sutton:
And that same principle of applies, where we tend to look at it and we're like, "It's so amazing. It must be talent. It must be a gift. They must have genetics or some kind of blessing from God that lets them do that because to me, it's unfathomable and I know I can't do it." And in fact, all the scientific research and certainly all of our experience at Musical U has validated and proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it can all be broken down to very simple learnable skills.

Christopher Sutton:
And that's super exciting, I think for any musician who's felt any of the imposter syndrome I talked about or any limitations in their own learning, whether it's with the ear skills or the instrument skills or anything else, to know that anything they look up and admire is within reach.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. That's such a powerful mindset shift in general. I've heard some people talk about that before from, it's like having a learner's mindset. A fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, then you think things are the way that they are and people are born with talent and they just are that way. Whereas the growth mindset is knowing that yeah, actually, if I'm not born with it, that's okay. I can learn it and it's going to be a trial of error of learning. Where I'm going to probably suck for a little while I'm figuring out how to make it work, and then I'll improve over.

Michael Walker:
That's such a empowering mindset to be able to take, is knowing, yeah, it's within reach. You can do it. You just need to figure out the right steps to be able to do it.

Christopher Sutton:
Exactly. Yeah. I think it was Carol Dweck, psychological researcher, who coined those two terms, fixed and growth mindset. And there are two things I think in that that are incredibly exciting. One is that all of the research into talent and the things we've been talking about shows that it is learnable. Whatever your mindset might be, the fact of it is you can learn to do it, whatever your natural abilities might be.

Christopher Sutton:
The second thing is her research showed that the mindset you take, a, is a choice, and b, has a massive impact on your results. What she found was that people who had that growth mindset were able to learn things way above and beyond what the people with the fixed mindset managed to do. And she showed that there were things you could do in terms of self-talk and motivation, and just purely understanding that it's a choice to adopt that growth mindset.

Christopher Sutton:
Even if you up until now have felt like, I wasn't born gifted, I'm limited, I'm not a good learner, I don't have a good ear, you can literally just make the choice now to change that attitude, to believe that these things are learnable for you and all the results showed that they will be.

Michael Walker:
All right, let's take a quick break from the podcast. I can tell you about a free, special offer they're doing right now exclusively for our podcast listeners. If you get a ton of value from the show but you want to take your music career to the next level, connect with the community of driven musicians and connect with the music mentors directly that we have on this podcast. Or if you just want to know the best way to market your music can grow an audience right now, then this is going to be perfect for you.

Michael Walker:
So right now we're offering a free two-week trial to our music mentor coaching program. And if you sign up in the show notes below, you're going to get access to our entire music mentor content vault for free. The Vault's organized into four different content pillars. The first being the music, then the artist, the fans, and last but not least, the business. When you sign up, you unlock our best in-depth master classes from a network of world class musicians and industry experts on the most cutting edge strategies right now for growing your music business.

Michael Walker:
On top of that, you'll get access to our weekly live masterminds, where our highest level of modern musician coaches teach you exactly what they're doing to make an income and an impact with their music. Then once a month, month, we're going to have our music mentor spotlight series. That's where we're going to bring on some of the world's biggest and best artist coaches and successful musicians to teach you what's working right now.

Michael Walker:
And one of the most amazing parts is that you can get your questions answered live by these top of music mentors. So a lot of the people that you hear right here on the podcast, but they're live interacting with you personally. So imagine being able to connect with them directly. On top of all that, you'll get access to our private music mentor community. This is definitely one of my favorite parts of music mentor and maybe the most valuable. Is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and discuss everything related to your music career.

Michael Walker:
If you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now and sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing contents, connect with the community and sign up for the live master classes that happen every week. This is a gift for listing to our podcasts, supporting the show. So don't miss it out. Go sign up for free now and let's get back to our interview.

Michael Walker:
That's so cool. That's foundational, having that mindset, having that belief from the beginning. Awesome. I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into maybe some more strategies or specifics for anyone who's listening to this right now. Let's say that that someone's listening right now and they have put in a good amount of time and energy and they've developed a certain amount of basic skill around their instruments that they're playing and they feel pretty proud of where they're at.

Michael Walker:
But they'd like to really develop mastery and level up and become, not just a good talented, quote unquote, talented artist, but someone who's just one of the best in their field. What do you give them in terms of recommendations for a few initial steps to take to go from good to great, or some of the best in the world?

Christopher Sutton:
Sure. Well, I think before saying nothing else, I need to preface it with one of our pillar beliefs at Musical U, which is we call it universal potential. And a part of it is what we just talked about that in a nutshell, anyone can achieve anything. That's a core tenant we live by. But another part of it is that everyone's journey is different and what that looks like for you is going to be different. Everything we've built in terms of training and all of the stuff we've provided over the last decade, it's all from the perspective, the philosophy, that there is no one-size-fits-all.

Christopher Sutton:
And so I would never want to sit here and be like, here's the one, two, three to get from where you are now to where you want to be. To me that's nonsense. But what I can do for sure is maybe shed some light on the two trajectories we see people focus most on. And I think different people in your audience will relate to these to you differently. We've already touched on both of these and in a sense, they're both under that umbrella of teaching talent or learning talent.

Christopher Sutton:
One direction would be what we refer to as musicality. It's almost everything but the instrument technique. It's playing by ear, it's improvising, it's writing songs, it's jamming, it's collaborating, it's performing expressively. It's all of that stuff that is inside you, regardless of what your fingers can do on a particular instrument. It's that instinct for music, that intuitive understanding of how music works and how to bring the ideas inside you out into the world. That is one bundle of stuff, and that's what the majority of what we focus on at Musical U is all about.

Christopher Sutton:
The second bundle of stuff is the other side of it, the instrument technique. Even if I never want to play by ear or improvise, if I'm a 100% focused on for example, performing classical piano pieces from the sheet music, I just want to be no perfect, full speed, no mistakes, able to perform at the drop of a hat or. I just want to be able to rock out in a cover band and nail every note of every solo at full speed on electric guitar. There's that whole world of getting my fingers to do what they're meant to.

Christopher Sutton:
It's a very different bundle of stuff, but all the principles we've been talking about still apply. It is all things that can be broken down step by step. And I think that's more what you were asking about, how do I get to the virtuoso level? How do I really master my instrument?

Christopher Sutton:
But I did want to just acknowledge that for some people, it's not about how quickly their fingers can move. It's that all they know how to do is play from tab or memorize chord charts. And really what they want to do is be able to just pick up and play. Or they want to go to the jam session and not feel intimidated because they haven't studied the music in advance. And for them that would be mastery. That would be real ownership of their music.

Michael Walker:
That's so good. And maybe we can touch on both of them. But I think the question or what I think would be interesting to talk about next would be maybe around what you could call deliberate practice or how someone can develop that level of technical mastery. Let's imagine that they have that instinct pretty well developed already. And of course, again, it's mastery, so it's like they're going to keep going deeper into it.

Michael Walker:
But let's say that they are interested in more of the technical aspect and maximizing their time. They probably feel already like they have a limited amount of time that they're supposed to spend posting on social media and doing their day job and doing x, y and z but then they also want to develop their craft. What are some ways that they can really maximize their time to get the most benefit from their learning?

Christopher Sutton:
This is so important. I was literally just talking yesterday with a new member of the Musical U team who has been traveling a lot, and he was asking me like, "When you were traveling a lot with your wife, how did you manage to keep up your music skills?" Because he's going from place to place, his schedule is different each day and he's thinking in terms of, how can I carve out 30 to 60 minutes with my guitar?

Christopher Sutton:
And what I said to him was the trick of it in using these accelerated learning techniques, because you're not going to be able to carve out 30 to 60 minutes. You're certainly not going to do it every day. And if you stick to the traditional methods, that's a real problem. Because we've all been taught, you need 20 minutes. Warm up and then go through your repertoire and you're probably going to want to do them scales.

Christopher Sutton:
There's a whole lot of stuff and it takes a lot of time. And even if you are really diligent and disciplined, it's tough to maintain that if you're an adult, if you have kids, if you have a day job, if you have other things in your music career that you've got to be taking care of, or if, as in his case, you're traveling or your schedule's all over the place.

Christopher Sutton:
The good news is you can improve a lot more in a lot less time than what the traditional methods have taught us to believe. I grew up 100% in that traditional mode, of brute repetition is one way to put it. If you play your scale and you don't get it right, play it again. And if you're playing the piece and you can play it at 60 BPM but you know it needs to be 110, do it at 60 and then try it at 65 and then make some mistakes. Go back to 63 and basically doing the same thing again and again.

Christopher Sutton:
And we've all heard the saying that doing the same thing again and again expecting different results is the definition of insanity. And yet in music, that's what we do. And the enlightened teachers have been wise enough to improve that slightly. A good teacher, for example, will say, "Oh, you made a mistake in that section. Let's zoom in on that section. Play it till you get it right. Okay, you've got that bit right. Let's try playing the piece again."

Christopher Sutton:
And once you've learned some of these modern techniques for accelerated learning, which I'll explain in a minute, you can see that and just see how much inefficiency and wasted effort it is. You are almost always spending 90% of your practice time practicing stuff you can do. And that's just the nature of how it's structured. And so, if I had to give people one tip that would shortcut the learning process and give them a big taste of what the accelerated learning techniques are all about, it's that you want to shift that balance.

Christopher Sutton:
Instead of spending 90% of your practice time getting things right and 10% making mistakes and practicing them until you get them right, you want to flip it and you literally want to be spending 90% of your practice, time making mistakes and really going deep on those mistakes. And that means all of your time is spent actually improving the stuff you need to improve. Now, I realize that fully sounds pretty abstract. It sounds good, right. But what does that actually mean?

Christopher Sutton:
You used a phrase, the deliberate practice and I definitely want to give a shout out and tip of the hat to a guy called Gregg Goodhart. He goes by the name, The Learning Coach. This is the man I've met who more than anyone else in the world has specialized in applying this stuff to music specifically. Over 20 years, there's been all of this scientific research into learning and all different disciplines, all different fields, and a massive outcome of that is what you call deliberate practice there.

Christopher Sutton:
And Professor Anders Ericsson was their pioneer in that research. I had the chance to interview him a few years back before he passed away, and such an incredible researcher. It's one of those things where once you hear about it, it makes perfect sense and you wonder how you ever didn't know about that. I actually like explain it with Greg's words because I think he did a really good job of breaking it down. For anyone who hasn't come across this idea, deliberate practice is a way of practicing which basically anyone we consider talented or virtual or so has been doing. And they probably weren't conscious of it. They certainly weren't calling it deliberate practice in the majority of cases.

Christopher Sutton:
But even if you go back to the time of Mozart or Beethoven and you look at the biography, you look at how they grew up, what they spent their time on, how they were learning music, you can see it through all of that. In a nutshell, what it is is being extremely mindful of what you're doing when you're practicing. And that sounds simple. But anyone who's tried meditating knows, staying present, staying mindful, easier said than done.

Christopher Sutton:
Even if we put aside my mind wanders during practice and I realize I've lost a minute or two, that level of distraction is one thing. But I'm talking about a whole other level where you are 100% present and focused. Bringing that mindfulness to your practice almost inevitably puts you into a mode of learning that Gregg describes as a three-step process. And this is paraphrasing what professor Anders Ericsson describes in the literature and how he breaks it down.

Christopher Sutton:
But what Gregg says is you do it as a series of plan, do reflect. And it's like a triangle where you go round in three stages again and again. And if we make it concrete, supposing you are working on, you've been writing a song, you've composed this really great riff for it, but you can't quite nail it, or at least you can't nail it at full speed. So you know how it's meant to sound, but your fingers just aren't doing it. What that would look like would be, "Okay, I know this riff's the problem. Let's just work on this riff. I play it once, what happened there? I've done the plan, I'm going to play it once. I've done the do, I play it once?

Christopher Sutton:
The trick that most people miss is the reflect. Most people, they play it once, they get it wrong, they're like, "I'll play it again. Or I'll slow it down and try again." And you just mindlessly try doing it again and again, and hoping your brain or your fingers figure it out. With this mindful approach of deliberate practice. You insert this step of reflect, so that when your third finger hits the fret slightly wrong and creates a buzz on the string, you are like, "That's what's going wrong. And that's why my fourth note is getting tripped up over that finger."

Christopher Sutton:
And you really zero in on that and you're like, "Okay, so what could I do about that?" And so then you do a plan and you're like, "Well, one way would be if I move that finger a little bit earlier. Let's try that." And so you do that and you're like, "Well, that didn't quite fix it. Okay, let's reflect and see what else could I do?" It becomes this scientific process of analyzing how the practicing is going. And again, I'm sure people listening are like, "Yeah, that makes sense. That sounds like it would work."

Christopher Sutton:
The trick of it is really just to do it. There is a whole body of knowledge and techniques, many of which Gregg has pioneered, which apply it to music and give you a whole toolkit of things you can do as part of that three-step process. When something's not going wrong, what can you try? If you're getting it right but it's not quite up to speed, what can you try?

Christopher Sutton:
Just to say, there's a whole lot of stuff there, but it all lives in that framework of deliberate practice and how can I make sure that each minute, each second I spend during practice is actually focusing on what's going to move the needle so that I come away from that practice session truly having learned as much as I could have in that amount of time?

Michael Walker:
That's so good. I love this stuff. But it seems like it's so important, especially in today's day and age where it's almost like the age of distraction. We all have our cell phones, we all our devices, there are push notifications every few seconds that can really pull us away from our ability to deliberately focus.

Michael Walker:
And it's interesting too, I think there's so much wisdom in that triangle that you shared. Both in terms of learning to play an instrument, but just in general too, and learning in general. The planning, doing, reflecting. One of our conceptual frameworks around productivity and project management that we teach is, we call it the RPS system. It's like GPS, where in order for the GPS to work, it needs to triangulate where you're at right now or just starting point. It needs to have the destination, it needs to know where you're going. And it needs to be able to track out on your path, if you take a wrong turn, are you still moving towards the right path?

Michael Walker:
And RPS stands for retrospective, planning and scheduling. And going through that process on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly, quarterly, yearly basis where you reflect on your previous timeframe, and then based on the reflection, you plan the next timeframe. And then you actually schedule it in your calendar so that you do the thing. And then at the end you can reflect and go through it. So I think there's so much wisdom in that model.

Michael Walker:
I also love what you said about, that was a big shift, just a great mindset I think, of switching from spending 90 to 95%, doing the things that you already know how to do and just 5% learning the new things, to flipping it around so you spend the majority of your time learning and actually making mistakes. That's so good. Because I think that it makes a ton of sense. With the way that our brains work, that's how we learn, is by doing the things that we don't know how to do.

Michael Walker:
It reminds me of a quote that I've heard before, when it comes to speaking and listening, and just the ability to be a good listener is such a valuable skill set to master. Because when you listen, you can learn something because if you're talking, then you're not really learning anything new. You're just expressing what you already know. But if you learn how to listen and be an amazing listener and take the beginner's mindset, like you're talking about, then it opens up the world to be able to learn as opposed to just do 95% of what you already know.

Christopher Sutton:
I think you're right. It comes back to that growth mindset where, yes, it makes sense that you want to spend 90% of your practice time working on what you can't do, but that's not much fun. And if you go into it with a fixed mindset, one of the aspects of a fixed mindset is that mistakes are something to be embarrassed about and feel bad about, because it's an indication that you are not good enough.

Christopher Sutton:
In the growth mindset, a mistake is a good thing because it's identifying an opportunity for you to improve. And so, that's why these things go so closely together. Because if you come at this with a growth mindset set, you literally can look forward to mistakes and enjoy that moment because you know that doing anything that you can do is a waste of time. I do want to just note too, that one big breakthrough we see people have is to really distinguish practicing from playing.

Christopher Sutton:
And I think a lot of people, particularly in the hobby musician realm, but I think also people who have so much to juggle with their music career, that their instrument practice is in a box and it has its time and they tick the box each day. You fall into this trap of practicing just being playing time. It's like I play through the pieces I know how to play and okay, if I make a mistake, I might spend a little bit of time working on that. But I'm mostly just playing what I can play.

Christopher Sutton:
And this is really about shifting and saying like, "No, if I'm doing 30 minutes of music practice, I'm going to spend those 30 minutes practicing. And I'm okay with it all being mistakes because I'm there to practice. And then maybe I'll give myself 10 minutes to play at the end, and it will be all the more enjoyable because I've put in that work and I've improved so that my playing is better and better." But I think just distinguishing those two can be a real light bulb for people when they realize, what they've been calling practice has just been playing.

Michael Walker:
That's so good. Awesome man. Well, I feel like that part in and of itself, I feel like could literally save people five, 10 years of their lives going down a path of just doing the playing, rehearsing what they already know and flipping that script so they realize, yeah, it's much better to learn and to make mistakes and to grow from that versus just doing what I already know.

Christopher Sutton:
Can I give people one other suggestion?

Michael Walker:
For sure.

Christopher Sutton:
Just because this is another of those things that really can have an impact. I alluded to that big toolkit of great stuff you can learn that helps you with this accelerated learning and lives under the umbrella of deliberate practice. One big part of that is what's called contextual interference. And this is basically the idea that your brain gets lazy unless you make it not be lazy.

Christopher Sutton:
Even if you're doing what we just talked about and are trying to really focus, there is a subconscious learning process happening neurologically in your brain. And I'm sure we've all experienced where when you first start learning something, you seem to learn quite quickly and you're getting the hang of things quickly, and then over time you plateau and it becomes harder and harder to make progress.

Christopher Sutton:
That's because your brain has switched out of the ultra fast learning mode. And there's literally a different chemical thing going on when it's then just lazily learning. And so, this thing called contextual interference is techniques you can use to flip the brain back into its fast learning mode. And in a nutshell, what it is is changing ... it's called contextual interference because you're changing the context of the learning.

Christopher Sutton:
And Gregg has all of these ninja ways of doing it. I actually like giving the example from someone else, a guy called Mars Gelfo who created the Modacity practice app, which is a super cool app for tracking your music practice. And he had this lovely example he gave in a masterclass at Musical U of, if you always practice your music in the same chair in the same room, facing the same direction, next time you're practicing and you're hitting a trouble spot, go somewhere else.

Christopher Sutton:
If you're inside, go outside. If you're in one room, go to another room. Change your environment, your literal physical environment. If you can, change from sitting to standing or vice versa, or put yourself in a weird physical position with your body. Sounds wacky, sounds like it shouldn't matter. But in fact, it is one gentle way of triggering that contextual interference effect and resetting the brain's learning curve, so that it's then in a mode where it's like, something's different, something's weird. I better pay attention. I better really focus on what's going on.

Christopher Sutton:
And that in itself actually chemically makes your brain get the hang of it faster. Even on top of the conscious plan, do, reflect we were talking about there, this set of techniques lets you literally flip the brain into a different mode of learning and it is super cool. There's a whole bundle of stuff there, but I just wanted to give that because that's something anyone can try tomorrow. And you'll probably find that the progress you make in that wacky new location or position is actually considerably more accelerated.

Michael Walker:
That's so interesting. That makes sense too, just in terms of the way our neurons fire, how it's like to create a completely new neuron connection. It's just a different, it requires a different chemical reaction than strengthening the existing bonds that are already there. I've heard something before about using your left hand versus your right hand, and just that act of using your left hand when you're used to using your right hand can really activate your brain. It can accelerate your learning, so that's awesome.

Christopher Sutton:
Yeah. If people are curious, there's a great guy called Dr. Josh Turknett, who is both a neuroscientist and a banjo teacher. And he has this amazing site called Brainjo. And that is the kind of thing he gets into, is like-

Michael Walker:
That's so cool.

Christopher Sutton:
... what is happening chemically?

Michael Walker:
Brainjo.

Christopher Sutton:
What can you do physically to make your brain do the other stuff? So definitely yeah, check out Brainjo as well. He's got some really great articles on that science of learning.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. It also reminds me of ... this is something that's definitely been true in my own life, but a lot of my mentors, they also speak to this idea of giving yourself time where you just break off completely from your day to day life and you go somewhere else. Even a few days a year or a week a year, where you just go somewhere else entirely and use that as an opportunity to do some deep level reflecting and deep level planning. And just putting yourself somewhere else, unconnecting or disconnecting from your normal day to day life.

Michael Walker:
Even things that we don't usually think about, like our habits are so strong. Even just waking up in the same place, just our brains function reduce the amount of energy that we need to spend to do the things we do every day. Just like putting yourself in traveling or putting yourself somewhere completely new to do that kind of thinking has been so helpful for deep level planning around the business stuff that we're doing. And it's interesting how it ties into what you're talking about with that. You're breaking from what's familiar in order to improve learning.

Christopher Sutton:
Yeah, that's a really great connection to make. So I think of that as I think one term for is diffuse mode thinking. Where if you're trying to be creative, if you're to have ideas, the obvious thing to do is just really work at it and focus on it. But actually, the science of creativity and the brain chemistry that's going on means that often the most productive way to do it is to focus intensely and feed yourself all of the information or knowledge or expertise or context you need. And then stop thinking about it.

Christopher Sutton:
And there were these great examples from history of big thinkers like Edison who had a routine for this. And they would very intentionally not think about the thing after 6:00 PM. Or they would think about it intensely right before bed and then go to bed and they'd wake up in the morning with the answer. And there's this whole body of knowledge around, why does that happen and how can you harness it, and how can you ... Again, it's accomplishing much more in less time by doing less. And it's counterintuitive, but the brain is like that.

Michael Walker:
That stuff, it's so good. Let's take a step back and maybe step towards that direction that we talked about at the beginning. Right now we just did a deep dive into the learning process around mastery and improving our technical skillset. Maybe we can lean into some of the musicality training and some of the stuff that people probably commonly think of as being innate or being talents and they not even aware that there's a way to improve it or become more, to improve the musicality. Where do you recommend that someone starts if that's a path that they're interested in pursuing?

Christopher Sutton:
I think I might start by picking up on what you referred to earlier, which was, there's this kind of a false dichotomy where people either think they're a by ear player or a sheet music player. What I found is that both camps are super envious of and intimidated of the other. And the happiest musicians are the people who can do both. For me, I grew up 100% sheet music and the ear side was a much later addition. But we've had plenty of students at Musical U who are the opposite, and really value the kind of stuff we teach, because it bridges into that sheet music world.

Christopher Sutton:
Because if you are in the purely by ear world, the sheet music's intimidating because it has no relation to what you can do and what you hear and you don't really know how to interpret the dots on the page in a meaningful way. You can consciously learn the rules and decipher the symbols, but it doesn't seem like music to you, is what I hear from people. And so the trick of it is to bring that sheet music to life.

Christopher Sutton:
Whether you're doing that for the person who's stuck on the sheet music and wants to get free, or you're doing it for the person who is free or by ear but feels like the sheet music is lifeless, having that connection between what are the symbols on the page and what am I hearing and what am I doing is the trick of it all. That's maybe the most valuable stuff I could share with your audience today in that direction. Which is, I alluded to how air training for me was a late discovery and I won't go into the whole story of it.

Christopher Sutton:
But long and short, if it was the stuff I found out there wasn't very good. It wasn't very effective. It wasn't very fun to do. And so it got me excited because I was seeing some progress, but it was also intensely frustrating. And that was what spurred me to go off and start a company that I never thought I'd start and phase out of my day job to do this thing I never thought I'd do. Was just this idea that it could and should be fun and exciting and effective and actually get you those skills quickly.

Christopher Sutton:
Just to say, I think these days, a lot more people will have heard the phrase ear training, and a lot will have tried an app or they will have done a little web [inaudible 00:39:56] online that quizzes them on intervals or plays chord progressions for them and that kind of thing. There's a lot more awareness of it. But one thing that hasn't changed in almost all of the stuff out there, unfortunately, is that ear training is done in a bubble.

Christopher Sutton:
And so whether someone listening now has never tried it and they want to know how to do it right, or they have tried it and right now they're thinking, whatever ear training I tried, it was boring. That's not for me. The thing to know is that when we put ear training in a box, a lot like music theory, if you study it in isolation, it's really boring and frustrating. And it doesn't have much payoff. And the way to make it effective, the way to make it enjoyable and the way to really benefit from putting the time in is to connect it directly to what you are actually passionate about in your musical life.

Christopher Sutton:
And so, with ear training in particular, one thing we really have focused a lot on is how to get the power of those ear training exercises, where you're doing a quiz or you're doing drill, or you're doing some question and answer recognizing musical elements. But we are immediately then putting it to use, for playing by ear or for improvising or for writing music, so that a bit like that plan do reflect loop. It becomes a loop where you find out what you're going to learn next, you spend some time developing the core skills and then you apply it to something you actually want to be able to do.

Christopher Sutton:
We have this, call it a learn, practice, apply sequence where you are always making direct practical use of your new ear skills. And whether you do it with us or not is beside the point. The point is if you put in that applied step, it changes everything. If I could offer people one tip for successful ear training, it's whatever drills you're doing, try and do it on your instrument or with your instrument or immediately apply it to your instrument.

Christopher Sutton:
And you'll find that not only do you improve your ear faster, but you actually enjoy it enough and see enough payoff that you're going to want to keep doing it. Versus the status quo, which is a lot of people try it, it's boring, it doesn't help, so they give up. And there's a whole bundle of equivalent stuff for music theory that we could talk about, but that's what I'd say for air training, for sure. This is something I could happily talk for hours about, but I think for the sake of keeping it short, that would be my one observation, is that that is what will make the difference and that is what will let ear training be the means to an end rather than a dead end as it is for a lot of people.

Michael Walker:
That's so smart. What it reminds me of is learning how to play a song on whatever instrument that you play. I did a little bit of teaching. I was the keyboardist of our band, and so I did a little bit of teaching probably. Not a ton, probably between 10 and 20 people total. But one thing that I found that was really important was like you were talking about, when I'm teaching them how to play a song, regularly mixing in, them playing the song, with the actual song in the background every once in a while.

Michael Walker:
Where they can actually play along with all of the instruments and they can really vibe out and they put it into practice. Because if they're just stumbling along and playing it on their own with one instrument, nearly as fun as when they in practical, as when they play the full song in the background, and then they're playing along and they can really get the full scope of it. And they can play it all the way through without worrying about making mistakes or whatnot. If they make a mistakes like, "All right, well, the song's still going on. You got to keep on going."

Michael Walker:
That makes a lot of sense, really taking that approach of learning some of the theory or learning some of the skills, but then applying it right away as a way to really cement that into their knowledge base.

Christopher Sutton:
One thing I love about your show and your audience is that you do touch on the mindset stuff and the personal development side of things because it's so important. And I would just like to pick up on something there, which is when we teach children, we think a lot about keeping it engaging and making it interesting for them. And can they have a bit of fun with it?

Christopher Sutton:
As adult learners, often if we're teaching ourselves, but even if we're learning the teacher, we often fall into this danger of being so disciplined and so serious about it. We forget that it's really important to enjoy it. And so, something as simple as, okay, if you're going to spend five minutes drilling your scales, why don't you put on a good blues backing track underneath them, and actually play them over some music? Or as you talked about there, if you're going to practice a song, give yourself the chance to play along with the fun backing track or the band or the real recording that's going to bring it to life for you.

Christopher Sutton:
And something we talk more and more about in Musical U is that spark of musical passion inside you that I'm sure your audience can relate to. Where it's like just really feel the excitement of music. And so many of us end up learning music or practicing music in a way that feels nothing like that. And there are all of these techniques and all of these mindsets that can help you just keep that front and center and keep that spark alive, and makes sure that having fun isn't a distraction from the hard work that you're meant to be doing. It's actually the thing that propels you forwards and lets you learn more and enjoy more and keep going, keep up your momentum and keep up your enthusiasm, and actually end up accomplishing a hell of a lot more than the dry serious, disciplined way we'll ever get you.

Michael Walker:
That's so good. That does seem like a super pro. I've heard that a lot that just your ability to have fun or to make something fun, a lot of times can be the thing that makes or breaks something for you. It takes way less discipline, way less willpower to do something if it's fun. You enjoy doing it. And also in a lot of cases, it seems like that's the point of life really, is to fully enjoy it. And it's what's really fulfilling, it's to enjoy what you're doing as you're doing it. And that makes a lot of sense.

Michael Walker:
One thing that I'm kind of interested about, I don't know this for sure. It'd be an interesting survey or something to ask our audience, our listeners, in terms of that dichotomy that you talked about. That can be a false dichotomy, but the, I'm a classically trained artist. I can play by ear. I can play sheet music. Versus, I don't really know how to reach sheet music, I don't really know the theory, but I know how to play music by ear and I taught myself.

Michael Walker:
It'd be interesting to see how many of each camp we have in our community. I think if I had to guess, I think that we probably actually have quite a few more people who are leaning towards the side of either taught themselves or they took online lessons or courses that they learned how to play mostly by year and may or may not have fully understood the theory side of things.

Michael Walker:
And like you're talking about, might actually have a little bit of resistance or a little bit of a sense of fear around that or intimidation, because this whole other world and it seems pretty analytical. And maybe we could speak a little bit to, what are the benefits for someone like that to maybe lean a little bit in that direction and to learn some of the theory and how might they go about adding that to their repertoire?

Christopher Sutton:
I think it's hard for either camp to really imagine what it's like in the other one. I know that for me, when I was stuck on she music, I had no idea what it would be like to play by ear or improvise. It made no sense to me. It seemed like magic. And I hear the same thing from people who are entirely ear trained and don't read sheet music or tab or chord charts and don't know anything about music theory.

Christopher Sutton:
And again, to be 100% clear, neither is than the other, and the happiest musicians can do both. The most impressive musicians can do both. A lot of the musicians we hear of, the top pop stars, the famous musicians often are known for doing one, but can do the other. I like to point to the Beatles as an example where everyone's like, "Beatles wrote the best songs ever. They didn't know any theory." Actually, if you dig into it, we did a series on the Beatles, where I got to interview the people who are professional Beatles experts, believe it or not, these people exist and they're amazing.

Michael Walker:
Wow.

Christopher Sutton:
But again, when you dig into the biography and the backstory, it turns out they knew a hell a lot about music theory. They didn't study it from a book. They didn't always know the right terminology, but they knew exactly the same principles, structures, behaviors of music that powers rhythm and pitch and harmony and everything that made their songs work. So just to give an example that we don't want to be too rigid about those classifications or what does music theory mean, or what does it mean to play from sheet music versus not? Because I think a lot of it can and should be a bit fuzzy.

Christopher Sutton:
And I think that can remove some of the stigma or remove some of the intimidation to know that all of these are just labels we put on things. For music theory in particular, one big mental shift I find can be valuable for people is something, I think Adam Neely, you might know has a fantastic YouTube channel about bass and music theory. Adam Neely was on our podcast and spoke really well about this idea of most music theory being prescriptive. Meaning you've got a book, the book tells you the rules, you follow the rules, that's how music works. And if music doesn't follow those rules, it's wrong. It's like this is the prescription for how music is meant to be.

Christopher Sutton:
And that's how a lot of people see music theory, it's how a lot of people are taught music theory. And what he presented was, you can actually also see it as descriptive. Where the only function of music theory is to explain how music actually does work. So you start from music. You start from, what do we all know it should sound like, or how do we all know that that note sounded wrong? What does music actually do to us as human beings? And then let's try and write down some ideas about why it works that way or what it normally does or what the conventions are.

Christopher Sutton:
And when you look at it from that perspective, music theory isn't this intimating, domineering thing that you've got to study in a bay. It's actually just a really helpful cheat sheet for how do I understand in great detail, the thing I'm hearing and how can I be empowered to know what options are available to me if I want to make music that sounds good?

Christopher Sutton:
That can be a really big mindset shift for people, where you can be studying exactly the same theory course. But if you come at it from that descriptive way of thinking, where it's like, what can I pick up here that's going to help me do the thing I want to do, it actually completely changes the dynamic. And again, is an example of where it lets you learn faster and better and enjoy it more, even though it might seem like you're being less diligent or less strict or taking it less seriously.

Christopher Sutton:
That's a big thing for music theory, and like I said, it doesn't necessarily change the material you're drawing from ... I really love the Music Student 101 podcast, for example. Where they teach music theory from scratch in a really informal and accessible way. That's a really great resource for people, for sure. And I think you can go to any textbook, any online course. And if you approach it with that mindset and you let it be ingredients or cheat sheets or explanations of what you already instinctively understand, that can make it a lot more fun and a lot more enjoyable.

Christopher Sutton:
I think in terms of reading sheet music, the trick is to not see it as the symbols on the page, as much as knowing the names of things. I think that can be a good way in for a lot of people. Where if you exist in that purely by ear world, whether you realize it or not, a lot of stuff is fuzzy for you. And you might be quite good at doing the thing you can do, but you probably can't explain how you do it.

Christopher Sutton:
And okay, you can still do the thing. But I know that for a lot of people, that can be quite worrying in a way. Because they don't know that they'll be able to do it because they don't know how they do it. And so if they pick up their guitar to try playing something by ear, they actually don't know until they try and do it, whether it's going to work out. And so it can make for a very fragile sense of your own musicality compared with, if you were doing it a bit more consciously or at least if you've been able to put names and structures and labels and explanations on all of that amazing skillset you have, you are able to own it a lot more and be a lot more confident. Because you actually understand how that amazing ability works.

Christopher Sutton:
And so, I would say sheet music is a means to that end. Where as human beings, we are very visual creatures. And so, even if you are purely by ear, it can be really powerful to be able to visualize in your mind, okay, I'm hearing those notes. What would those look like on the staff? Or what would the tab for that look like? Or what would the cord symbols for that be? And really just see the scribbles on a page as the visual representation that can help you make concrete what can otherwise be really fuzzy?

Christopher Sutton:
And I think again, if you take that approach to it, it's not as intimidating, it's not as prescriptive and domineering, and it can be a really natural, empowering addition to what you're already doing and understanding more instinctively.

Michael Walker:
That's super interesting. I think that's really helpful to understand the purpose and the value of theory and how it can interrelate with by ear training. It sounds like one of the benefits, as well is around being able to communicate. To be able to communicate to another person, if you don't have that ability, then like you're saying, you might know how to do it yourself. But when it comes to teaming up with other people, and I think especially when it comes to professional circles where you're going to be working with studio musicians and other artists, it helps so much to be able to communicate what you're doing so that someone else can team up with you, can collaborate on it.

Michael Walker:
But it really is just an interesting dive into the value of symbols and abstracting concepts in the first look. Like what you were talking about, that part of what came up to you was this idea of language. Essentially, music theory is like language in the sense that it's a way for us to communicate ideas to each other and to symbolize them. And if you side of the rootedness and the beingness or the actualness, and you're just in your mind thinking about all the symbols, then you can lose touch with the roots of everything.

Michael Walker:
But without a doubt, language and our ability to communicate ideas with each other and to abstract things and have symbols is such a valuable way for us to communicate with each other, that having both of those things is so important.

Christopher Sutton:
Absolutely. I feel like we could have a whole other conversation about the parallels between music and language, because there are so many areas where it's really instructive to think about that. And you're absolutely right, to make the analogy, there's no reason you can't happily go through life without learning to read and write. You can talk to people, you can listen to people, you can get through life.

Christopher Sutton:
But I think we all realize that it's really valuable to be able to read and write and to read and write in the same way as everyone else does. And it just opens up a whole world of literature. The world makes a lot more sense when you're seeing signs in the street. If you want to send someone an email, you're able to write down your thoughts and communicate with them like you were talking about there.

Christopher Sutton:
I think if you see it with that analogy, you might realize how much you're missing out on if you can only do the reading and writing or if you can only do the speaking and listening. Where really it should be this whole beautiful holistic thing where the same concepts are taking different forms. And that's really how you're going to be able to thrive and enjoy life and make the most of what you're here to do.

Michael Walker:
So cool. I love this stuff. Well, hey Christopher, man, thanks so much for taking the time to come on here and geek out a little bit and talk about both the abstract and also very practical tools. I think that I myself feel really inspired and feel like, wow, I probably just saved five to 10 years of my life versus going down out a path of spending way 90% of the time focused on stuff that you already know versus really leaning into the unknown. Yeah man, thanks again for taking the time. For anyone who's listening or watching this right now who'd like to learn more about Musical U and dive deeper, what would be the best step for them?

Christopher Sutton:
Thank you. Sure. Well listen, it's been an honor and a pleasure to be here with you. I've really been looking forward to this conversation and you're such a thought leader and inspiring leader of your community. It's a real delight to be here. If people are listening to this or watching this, then they are listeners or watches and the most useful suggestion I could make was just to say, we have a podcast. It's called Musicality Now. You can find it at musicalitynow.com.

Christopher Sutton:
And that is a mixture of short teaching episodes where we spend 10 minutes diving into one of the kinds of topics we were talking about today. Or I've had the chance to interview some incredible people over the last few years. But people like Gregg Goodhart and Josh Turknett I've talked about on today's conversation. So longer form interviews with some world leading experts on every aspect of musicality. If people are interested in the stuff we've been talking about today, definitely check out that podcast and I would love to share that with you.

Michael Walker:
Super cool, man. We'll definitely, like always, we'll throw the links and description for the podcast and for the website and I think also, we're going to be doing a partnership or a collaboration where we're doing something special as we're teaming up Musical U for you guys. So if you're in our community, if you're on our email list, then keep an eye out for that. But otherwise, yeah man, thanks again. It's been great talking with you and sure we'll allow a chance to geek out and talk again soon.

Christopher Sutton:
Fantastic. Thank you, Michael.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value at its episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about the guest today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us to that. That really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music careers to the next level. It's time to be a modern musicians now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.