The process I outlined in the previous blog post can be reversed when we start working on drawing musical information out of learning someone else’s music.

I often classify this loosely as active vs passive learning.

• Passive learning leads us to learn the song we’re working on, play it like the original, tick that box and move on.
• Active learning asks why the line is the way it is, what lead to it being like that, what the musical elements are the comprise it and how we can make them our own.

So from melodies, we can extract phrases – elements from within the tune or riff or bass-line that are transposable, that we can build variations on, that we can put into other music contexts, we can harmonise to create a different emotional layer on top of the now-unrecognisable line. We can draw out all kinds of material that we can then use in our own music, which hopefully is happening anyway as we build/find context in which to practice the phrases we’ve identified as existing within the melody.

And then, in order to make sure that our own musical prejudices and limitations don’t stop us from discovering the hidden gems in the phrases we found, we can process that material even further by way of applying our ‘parameter and permutation’ approach to the phrases, so see what other patterns are in there, which in turn lead us to less obvious phrases, leading back to melodies…

The combination of having a distinct process for turning ‘music’ into ‘my music’ with a learning approach that demands context for every exercise removes the need for a lot of the questions about ‘where’s the value in this?’ or ‘what’s the point?’ – if the value isn’t apparent in the specific thing you’re practicing, move on and try something else – there’s so much amazing music out there to be found, that spending hours frustrating yourself in exercises that have no apparent learning outcome is just a recipe for being put off the instrument.

By all means dig deep into complex and challenging music – understandable doesn’t mean ‘simple’ it just means that the nature of the outcome is somehow linked to the material being worked on, whoever seemingly complex or basic the start point.

Does that make sense?

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