7:42 She did NOT miss the introduction. The orchestra was playing a different concerto than the one she was prepared to play. After her panic attack, her muscle memory kicked in and she didn't miss a single note in the intro.
I was going to mention this. This is a remarkable feat of memory as well as musicianship. It’s definitely one of my favorite stories about music and deserves that recognition.
I couldn't help but think of how we all know the alphabet... but we always seem to start back at 'A' when trying to work out where another letter is in the order.
i know the exact position of the first ten, or up to J, i can tell the number of position and what follows/precedes what of them immediately without thinking but get completely lost starting on k (11th) i never thought about it but now that you mention it, it is weird. and no, I don't use it in any kind of code or anything.
Very insightful observation. I would conjecture that it is because most of us have learned it as a sequence and have a tendency to repeatedly recall it within the same sequence rather than experiencing each letter as a distinct entity to be retrieved when its place in the sequence is given. We only know it from one direction. We don't yet know it forwards, backwards, AND at any point in-between. (Sideways seemed to run into the same problem when the teacher asked him what was the second note in the right hand in the 7th measure of the third variation.) Likewise, I would state that a similar problem arises from practicing things like scales and chords as specific sequences without variation. There are very few occasions in which we might play something as a list, but oftentimes, people practice scales and chords in this way rather than in the ways in which they are actually applied (i.e.: within the context of musical pieces). For those that would like to approach music theory concepts in the context of actual pieces of music, here are some good resources... • For classical music: musictheoryexamples.com/index.html • For pop music: www.hooktheory.com/theorytab
When it comes to the alphabet, there are certain flow parts that fit together like a part of the puzzle and become memorable in their own right. For me, these are Abc, hij, lmn and qrs that I can pick from. So say you are looking for k. For me, I'd need to start at A to find it because I can never remember if k is before the hij or after for some reason. But if I want to know where x is, I'd start on the qrs instead because I know it's a decent ways after r. However, if I needed to recall what number the letter is in the alphabet, unless I trained myself to know a 1 b 2 c 3 and q 17 r 18 s 19 etc then I'd have to start from A and count down. I have no doubt that some pieces of music, or any other artistic endeavor that has steps also ends up with the same thing. Can't always know exactly step 3.4 is on recall, but you might know step 2.5 and work from there to find it, rather than having to start at step 1.
@@vixxcelacea2778 that's definitely true. I'd say the same thing applies to performing music. If you lose your spot, then most of the time, it only takes a few beats or bars for you to figure out where you are if you know the song well.
I remember seeing the clip at 7:44 before. It wasn't that she messed up. It was there was a miscommunication when she was hired to play and she thought she was supposed to play a completely different concerto. When the music started she had a moment of "oh my god what's happening?!" She whispered to the conductor that she thought they were supposed to play a different piece. She then took a moment to breath and think, and then played the entire correct concerto because she did learn it before. Pretty scarry and impressive!
Joke's on you I'm such an overthinker, manual blinking and breathing mode are normal to me, that's how I feel my clothes and that's how I talk to people
Arguably isn't that what people are after when pursuing Mindfulness? Breath-based meditation is just literally making breathing a conscious thing. So good job: you've achieved mindfulness!
As somebody who is also an "overthinker", it's not really an achievement. Some people are just born like that. There are some benefits -- it's surprising what people overlook, sometimes -- but the problem is that everything is overwhelming all the time and I can't turn the goddamn thing off. If anyone ever starts pursuing the art of Mindlessness, please call me.
UbiSergei omg how long did it take you to write that? I love you. I'm trying to meditate ten minutes a day but Ive been falling out of schedule, thanks for reminding me about the peace it will bring into my life
Most of the time: Student: "Tell me how to get better." Teacher: "You have to do this and that." Student: "I do not want to practice. I just want to be better." ...
Stage 5 is when you yourself become the audience . You unconsciously play the piece while your conscious mind feels everything; every note, every expression. It's as if you are listening to someone else play the piece, and you can become fully immersed. Whenever I achieve this successfully, it's just indescribable how awesome it feels.
YEEEAAAAAAHHH it's the BEST. And then that can lead to more analysis, "oh this would sound good like that, oh this part is my FAVOURITE let's put some oomph into it" and then once you learn THAT you get to LISTEN to that
So that 'stage 5' is something similar to a phenomenon I've experienced with gaming. Occasionally, I'll become aware of my muscle memory and the fact that my screen is basically just a small window, but that doesn't actually hurt my performance. Like, my executive function kicks in, but instead of getting overwhelmed by the fact that I can suddenly feel everything my thumbs are doing, I actually just start observing how my thumb movements translate into the natural-feeling motion of my avatar. It's like I'm watching myself play from the inside and it's a bizarrely enjoyable experience.
Yeah, that was the experience I had with the bit where he mentioned manual breathing and feeling one's clothes. I do a lot of meditation, so being aware of basic things like that is fascinating and interesting to me rather than disorienting.
Isnt its still called choking in games? I was under the impression tilting is when your emotions get the better of you and you stop being able to concentrate
You're absolultely correct. Tilting is when you allow your anger (or more generally, negative emotions) to interfere with rational thinking or performance
@@Celastrous Yeah, doesn't the term tilting come from old pinball machines? Where players would get and and hit or "tilt" the machine? Or am I just talking nonsense?
In music I find "tilting" as the phenomenon where the more you work at something (like a measure/phrase), the worse it gets until you take a break and come back to it later.
I am not smart enough to relate this to a memorized music, but it's kinda like the alphabet, even though I do know it and everybody knows it since first grade I still can't tell the 19th letter of the alphabet without counting it all from the beginning
Because you're never going to be in a situation where calling out specific letters is ever relevant. You just need to know them. I however know, and keep in mind that this is almost 4 years without looking at the piece that introduction to most phrases in Artie Shaw's Clarinet Concerto start on C, one of my favorite phrase introductions starts on Eb and ends on Bb. If you gave me the first measure of that song, I could probably play the whole thing and eventually end up in flow
You just answered something I've wondered about for years. I used to play in a wedding band back in the 80's. We played at other functions too but mostly weddings. We had a few hundred songs in our repertoire. To this day I cannot recall hardly any of them. I can remember many of the titles but I could not remember how to play any of them. And now I know, it's because it was muscle memory. It faded pretty quickly. What a temporary thing it is. Thank you very much. Your video was very informative.
Can absolutely relate to this as a digital artist! The term "flow" is something I've used countless times when describing what it feels like to just be 100% concentrated on the act of drawing, not noticing time fly by. But I haven't yet put that much thought on the fact that there's a clear mix of unconscious / conscious decision-making when in that state! There is definitely a weird combination between pure instinct (like; "I'll need to add a touch of blue there, because that *feels* right) and constant refocusing on the array of rules you know of ("does this make sense in that perspective / is this anatomy correct") I think the only time simple "unconscious competence" happens in drawn art is when mindlessly doodling something very familiar? Like, even when doing mundane practice stuff (drawing straight lines over and over, drawing a copy of a skeleton 1for1) you're still required to put self-critical thought into it, otherwise you'd just not be doing any actual improvement because, like you mentioned with "being your own teacher" - you wouldn't catch your own errors otherwise. I guess it might simply be that there's more room to catch errors/wrongness in what you're doing when it comes to drawn art compared to music? Or that "body mapping" just isn't very efficient to depend on when it comes to art? There's always a new thing where you can start from the beginning of that learning pyramid (drawing animals your whole life doesn't give you the ability of knowing how to draw buildings) it could probably be compared to learning harp after mastering the guitar or somethig like that. There's just this constant room for improvement, and the idea of "masterlevel" rises proportionally to your skill? Hm and maybe learning a song to the point of unconscious competence, is the same as drawing a copy of a piece until it looks identical and you can do it by memory,,, but actually understanding how to build up a drawing like that from ground up, and *why* it looks like that,, might be closer to "bringing out the voice of the chords" or rather even composing your own song?
The last bit about composing = drawing without copying seems very accurate since I myself tend to use that analogy of drawing as something like composing music, in it you basically need to create different lines and shapes every time you draw, even if you trained those shapes before, in paper they're not always exactly the same so distortions occur much more whereas music is a much more "controlled" environment for acquiring skill.
Yeah it's really interesting to think of visual arts in the context of this video. It's not a 1:1 comparison, because music exists in the 4th dimension (time), whereas a drawing exists in the 2nd or 3rd. When I'm drawing, I can go into a flow state for one or more steps in the process, but since the drawing is laid out in front of me the whole time, my brain periodically re-asses what I need to be doing next. For example, I'll flow through a line drawing in stage 4, then I need to stand back and look at the piece from stage 3 before I add color. So with visual art there is definitely a back-and-forth conscious and unconscious state of mind. Musicians don't see their whole piece at once, so their process doesn't involve taking a step back like that. They create their music linearly, whereas I look at an entire drawing at once and develop different parts of it at different times. Does that make sense?
Remarin I totally agree here! For the last example, the “fifth master level” of sorts, it’d be something like drawing a comic character. You drew them a hundred times already and plan to a thousand more. You consciously want to not make the perspective bland so you use what subconscious skills you’ve learned to make their position and orientation shift a little in the next frame they are the focus. It makes the new frame a little more distinct; it has underlying tones too-now they’re more standoffish because they’re to the side, or maybe less so since they turned closer to forward.
How does "focus" not also have a very conscious element to it? And I'm not sure I could separate the unconscious/conscious parts that clearly if I think of what it's like for me to be in flow: I'm sometimes conscious about what techniques I'm using and how I apply them, while style is usually happening unconsciously for me. I know there are artists who make their style a conscious choice, but there are also artists whose style is just based on what comes "naturally". For me, being in "flow" is when I'm entirely immersed on performing the task at hand, the best I can - making conscious decisions that are based on unconscious experience/knowledge A.K.A intuition, or something like that? I could guess that different people might be conscious/unconscious of different aspects depending on how they work.
As a pianist, I totally relate to what you said regarding muscle memory. I used muscle memory a lot to play multiple melodies without needing to rely on a sheet. But often, when I didn't play a certain piece for some time, I might forget and miss the few first notes that usually get the muscle memory activated. Then I am just getting confused trying to use my memory to hit the right notes and getting my muscle memory to activate again. Lesson of the day: PRACTICE OFTEN!
Same 100%, that part of the video really hit close to home. The feeling of making a mistake and having to start all over because you aren't able to just pick up at a certain measure (thanks to relying solely on muscle memory) is the absolute worst.
As a dancer, I find this concept really interesting. This's really my favourite video of yours! I feel like this explanes a lot of things that I've noticed and expands it! Thank you really much!!💕
Yup, me too. I was thinking about one piece I'm currently learning that I just need to stop thinking about. I need to get it in my body more than in my head right now. :S
In my opinion it is 'The Zone' that athletes talk about, I think it can apply to musical performance as well as athletic performance. When you have practiced until you know the thing you have to do to the n'th degree and your automatic reflexes take over and you can hardly remember the last 10 minutes or it seems like a dream. That's the zone. Happened to me once on my black belt grading (30 years ago), I was performing really well and then it came to the wood breaking, I can remember standing in front of the wood and feeling all the other graders focusing on me and feeling the nerves and the pressure and then all I can remember next is walking to the back having broke the wood, I have no memory of throwing the actual kick - none at all. I had to look over my shoulder to check whether the wood was broken or not. The Zone.
"Choking" is the term you're looking for, "tilting" and "breaking immersion" are slightly different. I loved you're point though. Controllers and instruments are very similar. In the same way your brain can start overfocusing on the notes you're playing and how you're playing, you can overfocus on the buttons you're pushing and how you're doing the combos instead of "He missed the tech, I'm going to punish him." and unconsciously do it perfectly. (Smash bros Melee) Actually you see this happen often with shield breaks: The player gets a lucky shield break and in thinking, "What's the optimal punishment," freezes or does two things at once, flubbing an input. Or when they hear the crowd behind them cheering or booing in big tournaments. "Momentum" is also a big term in the smash community: it's when a player is doing really well, not messing up anything and due to the intense speed of Melee, it becomes daunting and overwhelmingly hard to regain your composure to beat them. But it can happen and that's sometimes called, "a reset."
Not Right Music i feel more connected to music as well every since i began improv. Like that example of his teacher telling him the specific measure was bs that isn’t important.
I get you, but sometimes when it happens and you're playing the piece in public you just have to go with it, or if you're practicing or in an exam it CAN be hard to follow up the mistake but you don't necessarily go blank, veggie mode.
Any thoughts on how to rewire a brain most comfortable with reading a score to becoming confortable thinking about chord changes and associated scales on the fly?
Fantastic video as always! I don't know that I'd consciously thought of that pyramid in that way, but I've noticed something like that in myself and other musicians. I've found it very much applies to fighting games as well in that the best players no longer think in terms of "quarter circle back, light punch..." but rather see a situation forming and use what they've practiced for years to handle it. An interesting note: at 7:42, Maria João Pires actually practiced the wrong concerto for that concert and was realizing it in the moment. She pulled the correct one from memory, though, and the concert proceeded. Such an incredible talent.
I swear, this channel is quickly becoming my Bible! Every single video is like religious experience and completely elevates the way I think about music! As a music teacher, this is very exciting for me :)
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Your channel is so interesting even to people who don't have anything to do with music
For the body mapping thing, I've heard it called "Kinesthetic Projection." Basically when you're accustomed to a tool so you use it thinking about the result you want, rather than the process. A good example would be pressing the A button on a controller to jump. If you've been playing the game long enough, you'll think "jump" and press A rather than thinking about which button to press. Driving and playing an instrument are also good examples once you've mastered those skills. Pretty sure I first heard this idea from this ExtraCredits video: th-cam.com/video/ijcezUy3ZzY/w-d-xo.html
This video put a concept I have felt for years that I just couldn't quite describe in words to people and laid it out perfectly for me. What a great video.
The mention of the fifth stage at 10:06 implies having to distinct levels on focus on your performance; unconsciously experiencing low level thinking while also consciously attending to embellishment, expression, and improvisation. Like playing along to your own background music. Inchresting
I HUGGED MY LAPTOP SCREEN THIS IS THE VIDEO I DIDN'T KNOW I NEEDED This topic is something that I've always wondered about, thank you for finally making sense of it and communicating it clearly :) Keep up the great work!
Btw, body mapping comes up in games and media studies. It's a concept that Marshall McLuhan called 'AUTOAMPUTATION' because he was a huge drama baby. It's also sometimes called _abnegation_, the times when your brain stops perceiving the boundaries of your 'self' at your body. Anyone who's really got into the zone with a videogame controller gets there real fast and easy, and the same happens for tabletop games and board games.
Thanks for bringing in another field of study! It's always fascinating to see how concepts reoccur and get rediscovered or restated across disciplines... but it's almost impossible to find that out unless someone tells you the magic word it's called in that other field. :)
That "stage of unconscious competence" was exactly what happened to me during the time I took piano lessons. I always learned a piece until I was perfect at it, but I could only play THAT particular piece of music... then my teacher would give me the next piece of music and I couldn't translate the notes into piano keys anymore, because I'd stopped using the notes in my practices. Being not the most patient teacher of all time, she got very frustrated and annoyed with me and practically shocked, that I had forgotten how to read base keys, that I forgot to play in any other tone scale than the one of the last piece I'd played. So, to avoid her getting angry at me, for a few weeks I'd practice a bit more than usual, play the notes until I'd memorized them enough to be able to please me teacher, but then she'd give me the next piece to play and everything started all over again. It's rather a question of WHAT you make the unconscious incompetence. If my teacher had thought more of making me practice playing from the sheet, more different pieces and not the same one over and over again, and made my note-reading the unconscious incompetence, they way people type on the keyboard without thinking, even though keyboard typing is easier, because the language you type is easier. In the end I quit the lessons though, because I never had much of a goal in playing the piano.
6:09 I have a book called Understanding Comics, it’s a fantastic book that makes beautifully explained points about art as a whole. It basically said that exact thing relating to simplicity and props. Making a prop an extension of your character.
That's awesome. I've had that moment at the beginning of this year. Felt like I was harnessing the energy of everyone I've known or related to like a Spirit Bomb. I was howling with laughter. It's several notches more profound than just being 'so focused that you don't notice time passing'. It was actually more like time expanding, decades into the past and decades into the future.
As a dancer, I completely agree with your "stage 5" theory. Muscle memory is incredibly important for dancers. When you're performing a long dance piece, you need to rely on muscle memory to carry you through the complicated movements. At the same time, you need to be aware of so many other things. Where the other dancers are, what your facial expression is, set and costume pieces, and (of course) the music. If you simply rely on muscle memory, you can freeze and completely forget the choreography. Yet there is this mind and body connection that has both unconscious and conscious aspects to it.
My most recent teacher noticed that I'd always unconsciously memorised all of my music (stage 4, basically) and in the past 2 years emphasised "organising the music in your head", aka knowing where every note and dynamic marking is like what you said. And you're right, it's such an incredible experience to perform at that 5th level
I'm a singer, and I freaking have horrible stage freight. But I push myself to sing in front of people to receive feed back, and I'm even doing the talent show. Whoo, ima die.
Flow is so bloody amazing. It's what I've always looked for in every band I've been with, where we all "flow" together as we jam and so far, has had some of the most magical results. In one of my first performances ever with one of my first bands, we hit a spot in the song where I could just feel that the other guitarist's gear was about to give out and shut off. There was nothing that I could put my finger on as a trigger, no noise differences or anything, I just had a weird feeling overcome me that said, "he's about to drop.... NOW" and I immediately fell into trying to cover both of our parts as his pedal lost power. I have no idea how I was able to do it. "Magick" is the best way to describe it too. I've likened it to serendipity at times, as when one is flowing thru the day, serendipity happens and it's always the most amazing day. But there is a dark side to "flow" outside of music. My first girlfriend and I fell into a "flow" one night when we were doing the naughty and everything turned tantric. It was so earth shatteringly amazing that every partner I've been with since has been judged on whether or not we have a spark and ability to "flow". When I find one who can't, it kills all attraction. Dunno. Maybe I'm just a flow junky.
This video was incredibly insightful and helpful for me. I’ve been working harder recently to improv my skills as a musician, and I will take all of this with me, so thank you. Truly.
acting is similar to this. To be able to embody a character so wholly that you no longer act, you literally ARE the character (stage 5+ of your competency chat) Is a magical art that is completely different for each actor
7:43, I looked that clip up and she didn't make a mistake. It was just a misunderstanding, she though she would be playing a Mozart piano concerto, but the orchestra started playing another concerto. That's why she put her hand to her forehead and seemed to panic. She had practiced the wrong piece for several hours in preparation, set her mind to the wrong thing. Amazingly though, she switched gears entirely during the few minutes of the orchestral introduction and played the entire concerto without mistakes!
PLEASE talk about the music in Avengers Infinity War!! Especially how effective it was when they conditioned us with 10 years of movies + constant ads to be pumped and excited with the avengers theme, and then how they DIDN'T play it during the opening Marvel logo sequence. That was SCARY effective in making me feel like something bad was about to happen before the movie even started. Would love to hear your take on the whole thing!
This is why my voice teacher in college insisted that we memorize a piece in at least three different ways: visually, thematically, lyrically, and/or muscle memory. That way if you went up in one, you had others to fall back on. As a flute player, as well, I think you can do the same in other musical disciplines even without words - create images and sequences that give the music an arc or a journey, and then memorize that journey as well.
Stage five is something called meta-conscious competence and it’s something we go over in the challenge course industry as part of training. Unconscious competence is dangerous if you’re supposed to be belaying someone up a climbing wall or clipping twenty people to a zip line one at a time for an hour. Meta-conscious competence is the understanding that it takes work to avoid unconscious competence and it’s the application of that understanding to the task at hand. You might not be thinking about the motions of checking a person’s equipment or all of the double and triple checks you do before sending them up into the trees, but you are thinking about the checks themselves and making sure you get through all of them.
You’ve just helped me better understand a phenomenon I’ve experience countless times but never really knew how to articulate. When I’m practicing a piece I’ll spend all of my time and energy picking apart a piece and memorizing it point by point, then when performance time comes I just sit down and it’s like I have two brains. One is consciously picking apart the music as I play it, watching for notations and accidentals and cues, and the other brain is my normal ADD-addled circus which is just flipping through thoughts and fantasies and emotions like an old film to try and understand what it is that this music is trying to convey and what it means to me. It’s always my favorite part of being a musician.
Sort of. It's described actually rather similarly to his "fifth stage" applying all of your brain to the task at hand, performing every bit to biological perfection.
Wow...man, so many amazing points. I think metacognition might be the closest to the 5th tier from a psych view. In high school, I think the most bad*** thing I did was learn a piece of music for band with the inclusion of the rehearsal numbers etc. I would come to school without my music (bad, terrible, I would be so stressed with my students now if they did that) and one day my band teacher asked why I didn't have it. I told him I knew my part. So he asked me to start playing a specific measure in one of the rehearsal letters (without saying the letter, just the measure). I did so with ease and wasn't questioned about my music again. However, while it was impressive and I was all smug at the time, I quickly learned in University that one should throw out everything they THINK they know. When I tell you I had some extremely intense practice sessions, because I realized I sucked, man... it was insane. This video was reading me like a book. One concept that really helped me reach tier 4 was practicing out of context. Whenever there was a part I couldn't play in tempo (flute in high school piano in college), I had to slow everything down. Then, when I could play it faster, but certain fingers lagged behind, I would drill those fingers over and over until I could seriously feel my tendons. Orrrr, more importantly, until I could play it without thinking. If I felt tense or afraid of a phrase, section, voicing etc., I then knew that I didn't know that section well enough. I had a time in seminar where I lost my fingering in Bach. When you do that, it's over. (I hated played Bach more than Lizst, though, so there's that...) My solution was to literally finesse the rest of the prelude and fugue, I managed to remember the ending, and I got out of there. All the piano teachers and some piano majors knew. Others wondered if I was improvising or if Bach was just more "jazzy-fugue" that day. Then, there were those who didn't know I had messed up. I was soooooo embarrassed, lol. In hindsight, I am grateful that I had/have so many humbling experiences. Thank you for this video.
7:43 Uh, no, that's actually a clip of her panicking during an open rehearsal because the orchestra played a different concerto from the one she was informed of prior to the rehearsal. And apparently it was a piece she had played the year before, and she managed to play the whole piece from said distant memory, without having to stop the performance and walk away. True professional champion, and a genius.
That was beautiful, dude! As a long term but not totally dedicated pianist you blew my mind with the distinction between memorizing music procedurally and photographically. I've definitely had the experience of freezing up in a performance and only being able to continue by going back to a certain point where I could remember how to get my hands to start doing what they were supposed to do to perform the piece. I guess I've only been memorizing two parts, the physical sequence of the entire song and the sound of it played in the right order. But it never occurred to me to actually commit to the level of being able to visualize each measure from memory! Definitely wouldn't kill me to put a little more effort into preparing pieces to performance level. Can't wait to truly learn these Beethoven sonatas I enjoy so much; thanks for the tip!
I love watching this kind of thing before I have to go on stage. Like both days this coming weekend. We can reach the point of carrying on a conversation while playing....but then, I have to sing. Not yak. Sing hard. So the attention is even further divided. Playing and singing, they are both separately aligned on the pyramid of competence. What a pain in the ass...but also a joy. Thank you for your work.
The "flow" state was called the "alpha state" by Stan Getz: "That's what I call the 'alpha state.' That's a state of relaxed concentration and effortless creativity."
This was such an incredible video because it perfectly explains it! I remember learning lines and songs for a musical I was the lead in and I got up to a point where I started reciting everyone else's lines because I knew the musical so well. But when it got to dress and tech rehearsals and my nerves got the better of me, my auto-pilot for the lines, choreography and songs started to falter (I felt horrible - it felt like everyone was counting on me to get it right). It was only on the night of the performances where I had re-read the entire play and just fell into the character and the world of the music that I did my absolute best performance (which also wasn't recorded and it still kills me today!). I wasn't entirely unconscious of what I was doing but I just let what I had been preparing and practicing for months "flow" naturally. Dude, your content is amazing - seriously my favourite channel on youtube.
This. Was a real wake up call for me. I admit that I am a very vain and proud person on things that I'm good at and love it when I can do it effortlessly to almost unconsciously. When I fail, or make a mistake, or freeze or get lost with what I am doing, I really get frustrated with myself that it is degrading my self esteem. I feel like right now I've spiralled down with everything that I loved doing to stage 1 and I don't know how I can climb myself back up to stage 2. I am going to have to put more effort than I did before. I can't believe I have left watching this video for so long. Thank you @Sideways this is an incredible video.
I’ve been practicing karate for 7 years now and it’s honestly mindblowing how applicable this is to any other skill. Before the pandemic I had been stuck in stage 1 for the longest time, but when I came back I realized I had emotionally grown enough to know/figure out what was I doing wrong. This specially happened to me with kata (also called a form) which is sort of like a pre-choreographed fight with multiple imaginary opponents that you need to perform flawlessly in order to win a match. I started to be able to correct my posture, to control how hard I striked and kicked, to be conscious of what by body was doing at every single moment so I could correct it as quickly as possible. It’s an incredible sensation, because you can feel how you’re getting better with every move. It’s like a challenging puzzle you grow more and more eager to solve.
Having seen the “You are now manually breathing” thing many times before, it no longer works for me. Could this be like me having actually learnt “the piece” like knowing exactly what note you are playing without having to hum?
Everyone is already at the 5th stage of breathing. Everyone has perfect muscle memory and if they have to think, they can pick up right were they left off. What you were really doing was learning to stay focused and not let breathing get in the way of focusing on the video similar to when you are doing homework and trying not to get distracted by people talking in the background.
Thank you for this video I related so much. I've always told this to my parents but they never understood because i explained it as "practice makes perfect until a certain point. Then practice makes you worse". This video is so clear.
ulquiorra hey! I would revisit the piece, practice it at half speed, and add the variation idea mozart nd sideways talk about here. Dont worry if they sound like a mastapeece just do it to excersize the mind! Personally I like to abstract harmonic concepts and then insert them into diff genres, so syncopated latin beat or like a ragtime feel, etc
iammusic thanks I'll try that though one thing I've been trying to is memorise the score rather than the piece so if someone asked for an exact note I'd know what it is an this way I don't start getting it wrong in that fourth stage 😂
the hierarchy of competence reminded me of when i was in orchestra at my school. it often got to the point when i'd stop reading the sheet music and just played based on memory, which made it difficult to improve and was probably a part of the reason as to why i left. what you brought up with having to have almost a visual copy of the music in your head when playing was also interesting to me, more because thats something i really cant do in the way you described. overall great video!!
Completely relate to this. I play piano in restaurants etc for a living and therefore have played some of my core repertoire literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times, and now I can play it so automatically that my mind starts to wander and before I know it I've reached the end of the piece. The big issue is that I don't even enjoy playing that music now because it's just an automatic chore! My response is to always be learning new songs and also change key spontaneously to keep you on your toes! Great video
I randomly came upon a video of yours. Now i keep watching them all haha. I love videos that anaylize different subjects. Thanks for making these brother!
In my school-music school, we have these 'safety nets'; baisically, you note in regular places in your score-eg, end of a phrase, after two pages, e.t.c- and you must be able to memorise these and be able to play from there, so if you perform and your muscle memory fails you, at least you can start from a safety net and carry on. Hope this helps xx
More than being conscious of your unconscious competence is being able to be unconcionusly competent and being conscious of everything you do during that state. It's like being unconciously competent and consciously competent simultanioulsy.
OMAYGAS. Bro. This blew my mind. I have been aiming to be so good at something so I don't have to think about it. Man. This really opened up a lot of internal assesment
Ive watched two videos. This and the ear training one. And you officially have a new subscriber. Besides the fact that I’m learning so much musically and just absorbing more information. It is ridiculously hilarious and that’s why I now love your videos.
Eh, I disagree with a couple of things here. Although I value the art of teaching music very highly, I'm don't think you always need a teacher to improve your playing. When you're just getting started or are learning something entirely new? Yeah, I suppose it helps, but it's very possible to teach yourself new skills. It just makes it harder, not impossible, and in some cases it can actually be preferable. Also, I agree with you're proposed 5th level, and I get the strong impression you're writing from a Western Classical point of view, where most of the time, you have to learn how to play a piece note by note as it's written on paper. This allows you to learn how to play the piece entirely by muscle memory. You don't have this luxury when you're playing a style that depends a lot on improvisation. In which case, you have to function on this 5h level all the time.
When I learn new music, I find it's best to get familiar with the piece or technique or whatever by myself. Then, when I have a vague idea of how it goes, I play it for my teacher, and he offers some criticisms. So I go home and practice while keeping his criticisms in mind, and, when I have a stronger idea of what I'm supposed to be doing, I play it for him again. It's a cycle in which most of my practicing is done alone.
+Lotoreo Yeah from the videos I saw in the Sideways's channel he speaks from a western classical perspective, which incredibly seems to explain why he gets several ideas wrong. Besides your points, in a video about the four chords progressions he goes on how lack of "creativity/complex ideas" explains why the four chord progression is so overused nowadays, when this assumption basically throws out of the window the very concept of soloing and improvisation, since those are mostly based on the amount of variation one can come up with the melody inside a fixed chordal structure. That is, at least, the impression I have with some of Sideways ideas, there is the possibility I'm getting the channel's stances wrongly, of course.
I'm working on a video where I'm going to explain the pros and cons of being a self-taught musician. It's obvious a lot of people, like Sidways here, don't see the possibilities granted only to those who have no mentor or lessons. But yes, self-taught musicians definitely fall behind because it takes more time to discover some lessons yourself as opposed to just being told.
+Todd Tolson I wasn't clear enough. What I was trying to say is that the prevalence of the four chords in music isn't a direct issue of creativity and quality, since in fact limited structures can convey more innovation than unlimited ones (it's easier to change something already established than "changing" something that doesn't exists yet), this happens in soloing (creating melodies inside a common or pre-established structure), improvisation and composition (that's where pop music comes in, the creation of its melodies happens inside a common structure). I got a feeling that Sideways was somehow trying to make a *conceptual* point about his *preference* to a more sophisticated chordal resolution instead of adressing the point that it was probably just a matter of bland artistic choices using those four chords, since it is easily possible to breed sophisticated music from the four chords even if they're repeating. That was my problem with the video. Sideways was appearing to be only justifying his classical western orientation instead of making a fair judgment on the use of the recurring four chords progression. Still as I said earlier, maybe I'm not getting him right so yeah. The video is a good food for thought, still, so I'll give him that.
My question is, how does this video fit with jazz musicians? If improvising, reading off the sheet music, and playing by memory seamlessly blend together, what's the deal? This dynamic is strange in my case. I'm a jazz bassist, which means that I interpret and improvise the score in the moment constantly, at least for walking bass lines. Since we have so much music, I simply don't memorize the songs. I know them and can recognize them at a glance. There is a written bassline for me to play, but jazz allows me so much freedom that I often write new lines on the go. The sheet music is merely a suggestion now. Maybe the choke reflex is overshadowed by the improvisation reflex? When the band is so dependent on my constant quarter notes, I can't afford to screw the rhythm.
With freedom, comes other types of responsabilities. I think jazz need an equilibrium between conscious competence (right anaylsis) and unconscious competence (right intuition) while you improvise.
It's amazing how this can be applied to pretty much any skill. Anything that anyone has ever been good at can be tracked down to these key concepts. Great video! I love your content, and I'm not even a musician!
Drawing/art students are just as bad, but with them what happens is a sort of opposite phenomena rooted on the idea that "all artist works are works of talent, not effort and study": a drawing student, specially a teenager, will convince themselves they "can't draw" and the teacher "can" because they have not yet reached a level of skill they are satisfied with; then, if you, as the teacher, try to create guided studies of subjects you feel they could learn to improve and reach said level... they get frustrated and freeze lol it's hard to explain these sort of skills are an ever learning process, that you won't learn how to draw like your teacher in just a year because we've been drawing for a decade, and that we, ourselves, are aware we are too still improving; but they want the skill NOW, and when that doesn't happen, they give up
That's another reason why I put so much value on ear training. Even if you have no intention of making your own music or playing things by ear, being able to articulate the aural information in such a way I feel would act as the greatest defense against choking up and completely stopping because if you remember what it sounds like and know what that sound corresponds to on the keyboard, you know what to do.
learning with a teacher is a faster but more limited solution. learning yourself needs more knowledge of yourself and honesty to yourself, but is a lot less limited in what you can achieve in the end. so imo teacher is needed for the first steps, to get some fast results, to not lose the motivation, or to get some kind of feeling of how the stuff is running. but in the end, either you will become your own teacher at some point, or you will stuck at the entry to this "world" you are trying to conquer.
I really love watching your videos. While I'm not a musician at all, as an artist there's a lot of transferrable wisdom in your content, that I enjoy to consider. Thank you for the great content!
I loved this video, but I gotta disagree with you about teaching yourself music being a bad idea. Different methods of learning are useful for different outcomes. If your goal is to become a skilled classical concert musician, a teacher is definitely going to at least make your life a lot easier, and maybe even make what would otherwise be an unattainable goal possible. But if you want to develop a unique style of contemporary playing, teaching yourself is a great way to go. Things that in other settings would be hindrances can be incorporated in ways that set you apart from other musicians in appealing ways. In both cases you have to be deliberate and dedicated, like very few people can just mess around on an instrument with no direction and come up with something people are really gonna respond to. But autodidactic musicians have definitely made a lot contributions to a wide variety of genres. I guess I'm just sick of western classical musicians saying that all musicians should want to be western classical musicians.
I used to play the guitar A LOT for like 12 or so years. Never went to conservatory tho, so I relied mostly on what you call body mapping. Then I stopped playing because I got into cinema and dedicated myself to that, but then this year I started playing again. So for my bday I asked a friend if I could play at his bar. So I made a list of songs that I knew well enough and added a few new ones and went on stage. And I froze. Like 5 times. The room was full of my closest friends and family, so they were all supportive, but it was so crazy because I'd never had problems with being on stage, either playing music or acting or whatever, so I couldn't really understand why. This video made me understand some of the things that happened. Thank you for that; I really like your channel btw.
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 88 | คู่เอก "ป้อมเพชร vs อัสลามจอน"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ZqTVVbMgbo/mqdefault.jpg)
7:42 She did NOT miss the introduction. The orchestra was playing a different concerto than the one she was prepared to play. After her panic attack, her muscle memory kicked in and she didn't miss a single note in the intro.
th-cam.com/video/fS64pb0XnbI/w-d-xo.html It's such an amazing story! So many of my teachers have brought this up
My teacher told me this story as well, many times...
I was going to mention this. This is a remarkable feat of memory as well as musicianship. It’s definitely one of my favorite stories about music and deserves that recognition.
that’s an example of when the muscle memory DIDN’T fail them.
Yes, Sideways wasn't going to insult Pires like that on my watch, but luckily I wasn't the only one
The bottommost part of the hierarchy of competence is procrastinating by watching youtube videos about competence
😂 oh yes. I recognize this.
True story.
I couldn't help but think of how we all know the alphabet... but we always seem to start back at 'A' when trying to work out where another letter is in the order.
Well, letters aren’t paired with numbers all too often except in codes or something
i know the exact position of the first ten, or up to J, i can tell the number of position and what follows/precedes what of them immediately without thinking but get completely lost starting on k (11th) i never thought about it but now that you mention it, it is weird.
and no, I don't use it in any kind of code or anything.
Very insightful observation.
I would conjecture that it is because most of us have learned it as a sequence and have a tendency to repeatedly recall it within the same sequence rather than experiencing each letter as a distinct entity to be retrieved when its place in the sequence is given. We only know it from one direction. We don't yet know it forwards, backwards, AND at any point in-between. (Sideways seemed to run into the same problem when the teacher asked him what was the second note in the right hand in the 7th measure of the third variation.)
Likewise, I would state that a similar problem arises from practicing things like scales and chords as specific sequences without variation. There are very few occasions in which we might play something as a list, but oftentimes, people practice scales and chords in this way rather than in the ways in which they are actually applied (i.e.: within the context of musical pieces).
For those that would like to approach music theory concepts in the context of actual pieces of music, here are some good resources...
• For classical music:
musictheoryexamples.com/index.html
• For pop music:
www.hooktheory.com/theorytab
When it comes to the alphabet, there are certain flow parts that fit together like a part of the puzzle and become memorable in their own right. For me, these are Abc, hij, lmn and qrs that I can pick from. So say you are looking for k.
For me, I'd need to start at A to find it because I can never remember if k is before the hij or after for some reason. But if I want to know where x is, I'd start on the qrs instead because I know it's a decent ways after r.
However, if I needed to recall what number the letter is in the alphabet, unless I trained myself to know a 1 b 2 c 3 and q 17 r 18 s 19 etc then I'd have to start from A and count down.
I have no doubt that some pieces of music, or any other artistic endeavor that has steps also ends up with the same thing. Can't always know exactly step 3.4 is on recall, but you might know step 2.5 and work from there to find it, rather than having to start at step 1.
@@vixxcelacea2778 that's definitely true. I'd say the same thing applies to performing music. If you lose your spot, then most of the time, it only takes a few beats or bars for you to figure out where you are if you know the song well.
I remember seeing the clip at 7:44 before. It wasn't that she messed up. It was there was a miscommunication when she was hired to play and she thought she was supposed to play a completely different concerto. When the music started she had a moment of "oh my god what's happening?!" She whispered to the conductor that she thought they were supposed to play a different piece. She then took a moment to breath and think, and then played the entire correct concerto because she did learn it before. Pretty scarry and impressive!
What was the video called?
I need to know....
@@halagavi th-cam.com/video/fS64pb0XnbI/w-d-xo.html
@@halagavi th-cam.com/video/n89F9YKPNOg/w-d-xo.html i’m here three years late ,but i got you
Great job of vocalizing something I've felt for a while but lacked the skill to communicate. Keep it up!
Hey, I know you!
Oh c'mon, is like every single TH-camr I watch know themselves
We
Joke's on you
I'm such an overthinker, manual blinking and breathing mode are normal to me, that's how I feel my clothes and that's how
I talk to people
the distinguished boi Great now i breathe manually thanks alot
Arguably isn't that what people are after when pursuing Mindfulness? Breath-based meditation is just literally making breathing a conscious thing. So good job: you've achieved mindfulness!
David McPherson and you can literally do nothing with this skill
As somebody who is also an "overthinker", it's not really an achievement. Some people are just born like that. There are some benefits -- it's surprising what people overlook, sometimes -- but the problem is that everything is overwhelming all the time and I can't turn the goddamn thing off.
If anyone ever starts pursuing the art of Mindlessness, please call me.
UbiSergei omg how long did it take you to write that? I love you. I'm trying to meditate ten minutes a day but Ive been falling out of schedule, thanks for reminding me about the peace it will bring into my life
Most of the time:
Student: "Tell me how to get better."
Teacher: "You have to do this and that."
Student: "I do not want to practice. I just want to be better."
...
very true!
"muscle memory will always fail you"
me, practicing my trombone: **sweats**
Mad respect to you at least my instrument tells me where the notes are.
8:35
Nice try, but I'm naked
Same.
@@object4124 me
You can now feel the chair you are sitting on.
About to say that, then i remembered someone else might say it
@@minerscale Jokes on you, I'm awkwardly floating in the middle of the room!
Stage 5 is when you yourself become the audience . You unconsciously play the piece while your conscious mind feels everything; every note, every expression. It's as if you are listening to someone else play the piece, and you can become fully immersed. Whenever I achieve this successfully, it's just indescribable how awesome it feels.
YEEEAAAAAAHHH it's the BEST. And then that can lead to more analysis, "oh this would sound good like that, oh this part is my FAVOURITE let's put some oomph into it" and then once you learn THAT you get to LISTEN to that
So that 'stage 5' is something similar to a phenomenon I've experienced with gaming. Occasionally, I'll become aware of my muscle memory and the fact that my screen is basically just a small window, but that doesn't actually hurt my performance. Like, my executive function kicks in, but instead of getting overwhelmed by the fact that I can suddenly feel everything my thumbs are doing, I actually just start observing how my thumb movements translate into the natural-feeling motion of my avatar. It's like I'm watching myself play from the inside and it's a bizarrely enjoyable experience.
SparrowFae I imagine what he's talking about applies more to speedrunning
Yeah, that was the experience I had with the bit where he mentioned manual breathing and feeling one's clothes. I do a lot of meditation, so being aware of basic things like that is fascinating and interesting to me rather than disorienting.
Oh man I got this with Portal and it's just the best. You get to observe and enjoy how skilled you've gotten, it just feels so badass
Isnt its still called choking in games?
I was under the impression tilting is when your emotions get the better of you and you stop being able to concentrate
You're absolultely correct. Tilting is when you allow your anger (or more generally, negative emotions) to interfere with rational thinking or performance
THAT'S the word I was looking for.
Yep
@@Celastrous Yeah, doesn't the term tilting come from old pinball machines? Where players would get and and hit or "tilt" the machine? Or am I just talking nonsense?
In music I find "tilting" as the phenomenon where the more you work at something (like a measure/phrase), the worse it gets until you take a break and come back to it later.
I am not smart enough to relate this to a memorized music, but it's kinda like the alphabet, even though I do know it and everybody knows it since first grade I still can't tell the 19th letter of the alphabet without counting it all from the beginning
Because you're never going to be in a situation where calling out specific letters is ever relevant. You just need to know them. I however know, and keep in mind that this is almost 4 years without looking at the piece that introduction to most phrases in Artie Shaw's Clarinet Concerto start on C, one of my favorite phrase introductions starts on Eb and ends on Bb. If you gave me the first measure of that song, I could probably play the whole thing and eventually end up in flow
TheShadowblast123 oh yeah? Well what’s the 27th letter of the alphabet?
@@Nuclearburrit0 y
ñ
@@Nuclearburrit0 æ
You just answered something I've wondered about for years. I used to play in a wedding band back in the 80's. We played at other functions too but mostly weddings. We had a few hundred songs in our repertoire. To this day I cannot recall hardly any of them. I can remember many of the titles but I could not remember how to play any of them. And now I know, it's because it was muscle memory. It faded pretty quickly. What a temporary thing it is. Thank you very much. Your video was very informative.
That's awesome
"You can now feel you clothes" is definitely the statement of someone who has never worn a bra.
lmao
XD
Can absolutely relate to this as a digital artist! The term "flow" is something I've used countless times when describing what it feels like to just be 100% concentrated on the act of drawing, not noticing time fly by. But I haven't yet put that much thought on the fact that there's a clear mix of unconscious / conscious decision-making when in that state! There is definitely a weird combination between pure instinct (like; "I'll need to add a touch of blue there, because that *feels* right) and constant refocusing on the array of rules you know of ("does this make sense in that perspective / is this anatomy correct")
I think the only time simple "unconscious competence" happens in drawn art is when mindlessly doodling something very familiar? Like, even when doing mundane practice stuff (drawing straight lines over and over, drawing a copy of a skeleton 1for1) you're still required to put self-critical thought into it, otherwise you'd just not be doing any actual improvement because, like you mentioned with "being your own teacher" - you wouldn't catch your own errors otherwise.
I guess it might simply be that there's more room to catch errors/wrongness in what you're doing when it comes to drawn art compared to music? Or that "body mapping" just isn't very efficient to depend on when it comes to art? There's always a new thing where you can start from the beginning of that learning pyramid (drawing animals your whole life doesn't give you the ability of knowing how to draw buildings) it could probably be compared to learning harp after mastering the guitar or somethig like that.
There's just this constant room for improvement, and the idea of "masterlevel" rises proportionally to your skill?
Hm and maybe learning a song to the point of unconscious competence, is the same as drawing a copy of a piece until it looks identical and you can do it by memory,,, but actually understanding how to build up a drawing like that from ground up, and *why* it looks like that,, might be closer to "bringing out the voice of the chords" or rather even composing your own song?
The last bit about composing = drawing without copying seems very accurate since I myself tend to use that analogy of drawing as something like composing music, in it you basically need to create different lines and shapes every time you draw, even if you trained those shapes before, in paper they're not always exactly the same so distortions occur much more whereas music is a much more "controlled" environment for acquiring skill.
Yeah it's really interesting to think of visual arts in the context of this video. It's not a 1:1 comparison, because music exists in the 4th dimension (time), whereas a drawing exists in the 2nd or 3rd. When I'm drawing, I can go into a flow state for one or more steps in the process, but since the drawing is laid out in front of me the whole time, my brain periodically re-asses what I need to be doing next. For example, I'll flow through a line drawing in stage 4, then I need to stand back and look at the piece from stage 3 before I add color.
So with visual art there is definitely a back-and-forth conscious and unconscious state of mind. Musicians don't see their whole piece at once, so their process doesn't involve taking a step back like that. They create their music linearly, whereas I look at an entire drawing at once and develop different parts of it at different times. Does that make sense?
Remarin I totally agree here! For the last example, the “fifth master level” of sorts, it’d be something like drawing a comic character. You drew them a hundred times already and plan to a thousand more. You consciously want to not make the perspective bland so you use what subconscious skills you’ve learned to make their position and orientation shift a little in the next frame they are the focus. It makes the new frame a little more distinct; it has underlying tones too-now they’re more standoffish because they’re to the side, or maybe less so since they turned closer to forward.
Flow =/= focus. There is a very conscious element to flow. It's when technique is unconscious, but style and inflection is conscious.
How does "focus" not also have a very conscious element to it?
And I'm not sure I could separate the unconscious/conscious parts that clearly if I think of what it's like for me to be in flow: I'm sometimes conscious about what techniques I'm using and how I apply them, while style is usually happening unconsciously for me. I know there are artists who make their style a conscious choice, but there are also artists whose style is just based on what comes "naturally".
For me, being in "flow" is when I'm entirely immersed on performing the task at hand, the best I can - making conscious decisions that are based on unconscious experience/knowledge A.K.A intuition, or something like that? I could guess that different people might be conscious/unconscious of different aspects depending on how they work.
As a pianist, I totally relate to what you said regarding muscle memory.
I used muscle memory a lot to play multiple melodies without needing to rely on a sheet. But often, when I didn't play a certain piece for some time, I might forget and miss the few first notes that usually get the muscle memory activated. Then I am just getting confused trying to use my memory to hit the right notes and getting my muscle memory to activate again.
Lesson of the day: PRACTICE OFTEN!
Same 100%, that part of the video really hit close to home. The feeling of making a mistake and having to start all over because you aren't able to just pick up at a certain measure (thanks to relying solely on muscle memory) is the absolute worst.
Sideways I'm writing a paper on the psychological effects of being a lifelong musician, you are inSPIRIN me bruv.
Sideways habe you watched You Lie In April?
I hope you still have the paper cause I would love to read your findings!
As a dancer, I find this concept really interesting. This's really my favourite video of yours! I feel like this explanes a lot of things that I've noticed and expands it! Thank you really much!!💕
Yup, me too. I was thinking about one piece I'm currently learning that I just need to stop thinking about. I need to get it in my body more than in my head right now. :S
In my opinion it is 'The Zone' that athletes talk about, I think it can apply to musical performance as well as athletic performance. When you have practiced until you know the thing you have to do to the n'th degree and your automatic reflexes take over and you can hardly remember the last 10 minutes or it seems like a dream. That's the zone. Happened to me once on my black belt grading (30 years ago), I was performing really well and then it came to the wood breaking, I can remember standing in front of the wood and feeling all the other graders focusing on me and feeling the nerves and the pressure and then all I can remember next is walking to the back having broke the wood, I have no memory of throwing the actual kick - none at all. I had to look over my shoulder to check whether the wood was broken or not. The Zone.
"Choking" is the term you're looking for, "tilting" and "breaking immersion" are slightly different.
I loved you're point though. Controllers and instruments are very similar. In the same way your brain can start overfocusing on the notes you're playing and how you're playing, you can overfocus on the buttons you're pushing and how you're doing the combos instead of "He missed the tech, I'm going to punish him." and unconsciously do it perfectly. (Smash bros Melee) Actually you see this happen often with shield breaks: The player gets a lucky shield break and in thinking, "What's the optimal punishment," freezes or does two things at once, flubbing an input. Or when they hear the crowd behind them cheering or booing in big tournaments. "Momentum" is also a big term in the smash community: it's when a player is doing really well, not messing up anything and due to the intense speed of Melee, it becomes daunting and overwhelmingly hard to regain your composure to beat them. But it can happen and that's sometimes called, "a reset."
That's one reason I got into improvisation - because I suck at remembering lengthy scores.
Not Right Music i feel more connected to music as well every since i began improv. Like that example of his teacher telling him the specific measure was bs that isn’t important.
Until he makes a mistake on the previous note and doesn't know how to continue the piece
I get you, but sometimes when it happens and you're playing the piece in public you just have to go with it, or if you're practicing or in an exam it CAN be hard to follow up the mistake but you don't necessarily go blank, veggie mode.
Jazz is the way to go man ;)
Any thoughts on how to rewire a brain most comfortable with reading a score to becoming confortable thinking about chord changes and associated scales on the fly?
Fantastic video as always! I don't know that I'd consciously thought of that pyramid in that way, but I've noticed something like that in myself and other musicians. I've found it very much applies to fighting games as well in that the best players no longer think in terms of "quarter circle back, light punch..." but rather see a situation forming and use what they've practiced for years to handle it.
An interesting note: at 7:42, Maria João Pires actually practiced the wrong concerto for that concert and was realizing it in the moment. She pulled the correct one from memory, though, and the concert proceeded. Such an incredible talent.
this video is just so precious i'll be coming back to watch it another million times
I swear, this channel is quickly becoming my Bible! Every single video is like religious experience and completely elevates the way I think about music! As a music teacher, this is very exciting for me :)
Your channel is so interesting even to people who don't have anything to do with music
Who doesn't have anything to do with music?
For the body mapping thing, I've heard it called "Kinesthetic Projection." Basically when you're accustomed to a tool so you use it thinking about the result you want, rather than the process. A good example would be pressing the A button on a controller to jump. If you've been playing the game long enough, you'll think "jump" and press A rather than thinking about which button to press. Driving and playing an instrument are also good examples once you've mastered those skills.
Pretty sure I first heard this idea from this ExtraCredits video: th-cam.com/video/ijcezUy3ZzY/w-d-xo.html
Thanks for linking that video, it was fantastic!
This video put a concept I have felt for years that I just couldn't quite describe in words to people and laid it out perfectly for me. What a great video.
The mention of the fifth stage at 10:06 implies having to distinct levels on focus on your performance; unconsciously experiencing low level thinking while also consciously attending to embellishment, expression, and improvisation. Like playing along to your own background music. Inchresting
I HUGGED MY LAPTOP SCREEN
THIS IS THE VIDEO I DIDN'T KNOW I NEEDED
This topic is something that I've always wondered about, thank you for finally making sense of it and communicating it clearly :) Keep up the great work!
This kinda broke me but also put me back together. ^^ Very interesting though, it makes sense. In theatre stuff, for instance. Cheers
Mimex001 Arnaldo sorry? Was that called for at ALL??
Btw, body mapping comes up in games and media studies. It's a concept that Marshall McLuhan called 'AUTOAMPUTATION' because he was a huge drama baby. It's also sometimes called _abnegation_, the times when your brain stops perceiving the boundaries of your 'self' at your body. Anyone who's really got into the zone with a videogame controller gets there real fast and easy, and the same happens for tabletop games and board games.
Thanks for bringing in another field of study! It's always fascinating to see how concepts reoccur and get rediscovered or restated across disciplines... but it's almost impossible to find that out unless someone tells you the magic word it's called in that other field. :)
That "stage of unconscious competence" was exactly what happened to me during the time I took piano lessons.
I always learned a piece until I was perfect at it, but I could only play THAT particular piece of music... then my teacher would give me the next piece of music and I couldn't translate the notes into piano keys anymore, because I'd stopped using the notes in my practices.
Being not the most patient teacher of all time, she got very frustrated and annoyed with me and practically shocked, that I had forgotten how to read base keys, that I forgot to play in any other tone scale than the one of the last piece I'd played. So, to avoid her getting angry at me, for a few weeks I'd practice a bit more than usual, play the notes until I'd memorized them enough to be able to please me teacher, but then she'd give me the next piece to play and everything started all over again.
It's rather a question of WHAT you make the unconscious incompetence. If my teacher had thought more of making me practice playing from the sheet, more different pieces and not the same one over and over again, and made my note-reading the unconscious incompetence, they way people type on the keyboard without thinking, even though keyboard typing is easier, because the language you type is easier.
In the end I quit the lessons though, because I never had much of a goal in playing the piano.
6:09 I have a book called Understanding Comics, it’s a fantastic book that makes beautifully explained points about art as a whole. It basically said that exact thing relating to simplicity and props. Making a prop an extension of your character.
That's awesome. I've had that moment at the beginning of this year. Felt like I was harnessing the energy of everyone I've known or related to like a Spirit Bomb. I was howling with laughter. It's several notches more profound than just being 'so focused that you don't notice time passing'. It was actually more like time expanding, decades into the past and decades into the future.
As a dancer, I completely agree with your "stage 5" theory. Muscle memory is incredibly important for dancers. When you're performing a long dance piece, you need to rely on muscle memory to carry you through the complicated movements. At the same time, you need to be aware of so many other things. Where the other dancers are, what your facial expression is, set and costume pieces, and (of course) the music. If you simply rely on muscle memory, you can freeze and completely forget the choreography. Yet there is this mind and body connection that has both unconscious and conscious aspects to it.
Great video! I love how coherent your ideas are and how you apply ideas from different fields to music.
My most recent teacher noticed that I'd always unconsciously memorised all of my music (stage 4, basically) and in the past 2 years emphasised "organising the music in your head", aka knowing where every note and dynamic marking is like what you said. And you're right, it's such an incredible experience to perform at that 5th level
I'm a singer, and I freaking have horrible stage freight. But I push myself to sing in front of people to receive feed back, and I'm even doing the talent show. Whoo, ima die.
Flow is so bloody amazing. It's what I've always looked for in every band I've been with, where we all "flow" together as we jam and so far, has had some of the most magical results. In one of my first performances ever with one of my first bands, we hit a spot in the song where I could just feel that the other guitarist's gear was about to give out and shut off. There was nothing that I could put my finger on as a trigger, no noise differences or anything, I just had a weird feeling overcome me that said, "he's about to drop.... NOW" and I immediately fell into trying to cover both of our parts as his pedal lost power. I have no idea how I was able to do it. "Magick" is the best way to describe it too.
I've likened it to serendipity at times, as when one is flowing thru the day, serendipity happens and it's always the most amazing day.
But there is a dark side to "flow" outside of music. My first girlfriend and I fell into a "flow" one night when we were doing the naughty and everything turned tantric. It was so earth shatteringly amazing that every partner I've been with since has been judged on whether or not we have a spark and ability to "flow". When I find one who can't, it kills all attraction. Dunno. Maybe I'm just a flow junky.
This video was incredibly insightful and helpful for me. I’ve been working harder recently to improv my skills as a musician, and I will take all of this with me, so thank you. Truly.
acting is similar to this. To be able to embody a character so wholly that you no longer act, you literally ARE the character (stage 5+ of your competency chat) Is a magical art that is completely different for each actor
I've watched this video more than once, it's so awesome. Love your channel
This channel is really inspirational, thank you.
7:43, I looked that clip up and she didn't make a mistake. It was just a misunderstanding, she though she would be playing a Mozart piano concerto, but the orchestra started playing another concerto. That's why she put her hand to her forehead and seemed to panic. She had practiced the wrong piece for several hours in preparation, set her mind to the wrong thing. Amazingly though, she switched gears entirely during the few minutes of the orchestral introduction and played the entire concerto without mistakes!
The way you said that stage 5 felt like casting a spell just makes me think that you're heading towards becoming an actual Bard, D&D style
PLEASE talk about the music in Avengers Infinity War!! Especially how effective it was when they conditioned us with 10 years of movies + constant ads to be pumped and excited with the avengers theme, and then how they DIDN'T play it during the opening Marvel logo sequence. That was SCARY effective in making me feel like something bad was about to happen before the movie even started. Would love to hear your take on the whole thing!
This is why my voice teacher in college insisted that we memorize a piece in at least three different ways: visually, thematically, lyrically, and/or muscle memory. That way if you went up in one, you had others to fall back on. As a flute player, as well, I think you can do the same in other musical disciplines even without words - create images and sequences that give the music an arc or a journey, and then memorize that journey as well.
Stage five is something called meta-conscious competence and it’s something we go over in the challenge course industry as part of training. Unconscious competence is dangerous if you’re supposed to be belaying someone up a climbing wall or clipping twenty people to a zip line one at a time for an hour. Meta-conscious competence is the understanding that it takes work to avoid unconscious competence and it’s the application of that understanding to the task at hand. You might not be thinking about the motions of checking a person’s equipment or all of the double and triple checks you do before sending them up into the trees, but you are thinking about the checks themselves and making sure you get through all of them.
You’ve just helped me better understand a phenomenon I’ve experience countless times but never really knew how to articulate. When I’m practicing a piece I’ll spend all of my time and energy picking apart a piece and memorizing it point by point, then when performance time comes I just sit down and it’s like I have two brains. One is consciously picking apart the music as I play it, watching for notations and accidentals and cues, and the other brain is my normal ADD-addled circus which is just flipping through thoughts and fantasies and emotions like an old film to try and understand what it is that this music is trying to convey and what it means to me. It’s always my favorite part of being a musician.
So Ultra Instinct?
FUCk
Holy shit you're right
Yeah, Ultra Instinct is basically just a megamumbojumbo'd way of talking about flow
Sort of. It's described actually rather similarly to his "fifth stage" applying all of your brain to the task at hand, performing every bit to biological perfection.
Wow...man, so many amazing points. I think metacognition might be the closest to the 5th tier from a psych view.
In high school, I think the most bad*** thing I did was learn a piece of music for band with the inclusion of the rehearsal numbers etc. I would come to school without my music (bad, terrible, I would be so stressed with my students now if they did that) and one day my band teacher asked why I didn't have it. I told him I knew my part. So he asked me to start playing a specific measure in one of the rehearsal letters (without saying the letter, just the measure). I did so with ease and wasn't questioned about my music again. However, while it was impressive and I was all smug at the time, I quickly learned in University that one should throw out everything they THINK they know.
When I tell you I had some extremely intense practice sessions, because I realized I sucked, man... it was insane. This video was reading me like a book.
One concept that really helped me reach tier 4 was practicing out of context. Whenever there was a part I couldn't play in tempo (flute in high school piano in college), I had to slow everything down. Then, when I could play it faster, but certain fingers lagged behind, I would drill those fingers over and over until I could seriously feel my tendons. Orrrr, more importantly, until I could play it without thinking. If I felt tense or afraid of a phrase, section, voicing etc., I then knew that I didn't know that section well enough.
I had a time in seminar where I lost my fingering in Bach. When you do that, it's over. (I hated played Bach more than Lizst, though, so there's that...) My solution was to literally finesse the rest of the prelude and fugue, I managed to remember the ending, and I got out of there. All the piano teachers and some piano majors knew. Others wondered if I was improvising or if Bach was just more "jazzy-fugue" that day. Then, there were those who didn't know I had messed up.
I was soooooo embarrassed, lol. In hindsight, I am grateful that I had/have so many humbling experiences. Thank you for this video.
7:43 Uh, no, that's actually a clip of her panicking during an open rehearsal because the orchestra played a different concerto from the one she was informed of prior to the rehearsal.
And apparently it was a piece she had played the year before, and she managed to play the whole piece from said distant memory, without having to stop the performance and walk away.
True professional champion, and a genius.
Dude, your videos are highly engaging and rewarding! Thanks for sharing, and for digging into my brain.
I feel this man. This is what I go through when acting. It’s a step in the journey of loving something so much. That step 5 idea is brilliant.
That was beautiful, dude! As a long term but not totally dedicated pianist you blew my mind with the distinction between memorizing music procedurally and photographically.
I've definitely had the experience of freezing up in a performance and only being able to continue by going back to a certain point where I could remember how to get my hands to start doing what they were supposed to do to perform the piece. I guess I've only been memorizing two parts, the physical sequence of the entire song and the sound of it played in the right order. But it never occurred to me to actually commit to the level of being able to visualize each measure from memory!
Definitely wouldn't kill me to put a little more effort into preparing pieces to performance level. Can't wait to truly learn these Beethoven sonatas I enjoy so much; thanks for the tip!
I live you sideways
We live him
We all live him :)
This was exactly what I needed to hear at this stage of my musical career, so thank you
Sideways:Puts nightmare Book for pianists on screen
Me: looks left
Hanon: stares at me
Hanon and Czerny every day. Ugh. Brought back memories.
I love watching this kind of thing before I have to go on stage. Like both days this coming weekend. We can reach the point of carrying on a conversation while playing....but then, I have to sing. Not yak. Sing hard. So the attention is even further divided. Playing and singing, they are both separately aligned on the pyramid of competence.
What a pain in the ass...but also a joy.
Thank you for your work.
The "flow" state was called the "alpha state" by Stan Getz:
"That's what I call the 'alpha state.' That's a state of relaxed concentration and effortless creativity."
This was such an incredible video because it perfectly explains it! I remember learning lines and songs for a musical I was the lead in and I got up to a point where I started reciting everyone else's lines because I knew the musical so well. But when it got to dress and tech rehearsals and my nerves got the better of me, my auto-pilot for the lines, choreography and songs started to falter (I felt horrible - it felt like everyone was counting on me to get it right). It was only on the night of the performances where I had re-read the entire play and just fell into the character and the world of the music that I did my absolute best performance (which also wasn't recorded and it still kills me today!). I wasn't entirely unconscious of what I was doing but I just let what I had been preparing and practicing for months "flow" naturally. Dude, your content is amazing - seriously my favourite channel on youtube.
sometimes i just forget how to walk
every time I see a stair, let me remember how to walk down stairs. (most of the building I go only have one floor)
This. Was a real wake up call for me. I admit that I am a very vain and proud person on things that I'm good at and love it when I can do it effortlessly to almost unconsciously. When I fail, or make a mistake, or freeze or get lost with what I am doing, I really get frustrated with myself that it is degrading my self esteem. I feel like right now I've spiralled down with everything that I loved doing to stage 1 and I don't know how I can climb myself back up to stage 2. I am going to have to put more effort than I did before.
I can't believe I have left watching this video for so long. Thank you @Sideways this is an incredible video.
So going from unconscious competence to unconscious incompetence is like learning a poem and forgetting it with time.
I’ve been practicing karate for 7 years now and it’s honestly mindblowing how applicable this is to any other skill. Before the pandemic I had been stuck in stage 1 for the longest time, but when I came back I realized I had emotionally grown enough to know/figure out what was I doing wrong. This specially happened to me with kata (also called a form) which is sort of like a pre-choreographed fight with multiple imaginary opponents that you need to perform flawlessly in order to win a match. I started to be able to correct my posture, to control how hard I striked and kicked, to be conscious of what by body was doing at every single moment so I could correct it as quickly as possible. It’s an incredible sensation, because you can feel how you’re getting better with every move. It’s like a challenging puzzle you grow more and more eager to solve.
when you said “you are now consciously breathing” i started wildly hyperventilating and couldnt stop for like 20 seconds lol
You are brilliant. Thanks for explaining this concept in such clarity. Flow is the bomb.
Stage IV: Ultra Instinct
in a nutshell
Body mapping reminded me of when I used to accidentally hit my violin on the music stand and say "ow"
I’ve seen that happen with video game players. I also get really angry when I break the nib of a pencil for no logical reason
Having seen the “You are now manually breathing” thing many times before, it no longer works for me. Could this be like me having actually learnt “the piece” like knowing exactly what note you are playing without having to hum?
Everyone is already at the 5th stage of breathing. Everyone has perfect muscle memory and if they have to think, they can pick up right were they left off. What you were really doing was learning to stay focused and not let breathing get in the way of focusing on the video similar to when you are doing homework and trying not to get distracted by people talking in the background.
ILikeSpheres that sounds fair enough
Thank you for this video I related so much. I've always told this to my parents but they never understood because i explained it as "practice makes perfect until a certain point. Then practice makes you worse". This video is so clear.
I know exactly this I cant properly played Beethoven's sonata pathetique while thinking about it, if I think about it I get it wrong
ulquiorra hey! I would revisit the piece, practice it at half speed, and add the variation idea mozart nd sideways talk about here. Dont worry if they sound like a mastapeece just do it to excersize the mind! Personally I like to abstract harmonic concepts and then insert them into diff genres, so syncopated latin beat or like a ragtime feel, etc
iammusic thanks I'll try that though one thing I've been trying to is memorise the score rather than the piece so if someone asked for an exact note I'd know what it is an this way I don't start getting it wrong in that fourth stage 😂
the hierarchy of competence reminded me of when i was in orchestra at my school. it often got to the point when i'd stop reading the sheet music and just played based on memory, which made it difficult to improve and was probably a part of the reason as to why i left. what you brought up with having to have almost a visual copy of the music in your head when playing was also interesting to me, more because thats something i really cant do in the way you described. overall great video!!
I feel like choking on stage is somehow related to older people when they have an Alzheimer's moment
Completely relate to this. I play piano in restaurants etc for a living and therefore have played some of my core repertoire literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times, and now I can play it so automatically that my mind starts to wander and before I know it I've reached the end of the piece. The big issue is that I don't even enjoy playing that music now because it's just an automatic chore! My response is to always be learning new songs and also change key spontaneously to keep you on your toes! Great video
This blew my mind
I randomly came upon a video of yours. Now i keep watching them all haha. I love videos that anaylize different subjects. Thanks for making these brother!
"You should hit stage 4"
Great, way to make it sound like cancer.
JK, great video man.
In my school-music school, we have these 'safety nets'; baisically, you note in regular places in your score-eg, end of a phrase, after two pages, e.t.c- and you must be able to memorise these and be able to play from there, so if you perform and your muscle memory fails you, at least you can start from a safety net and carry on.
Hope this helps xx
Would stage five be that you're conscious *about* your unconscious competence?
More than being conscious of your unconscious competence is being able to be unconcionusly competent and being conscious of everything you do during that state. It's like being unconciously competent and consciously competent simultanioulsy.
OMAYGAS. Bro. This blew my mind. I have been aiming to be so good at something so I don't have to think about it. Man. This really opened up a lot of internal assesment
"ultra instinct"
Huh good timing recommendations, I was just having an in-depth conversation about this as it relates to smash melee
Ive watched two videos. This and the ear training one. And you officially have a new subscriber. Besides the fact that I’m learning so much musically and just absorbing more information. It is ridiculously hilarious and that’s why I now love your videos.
Eh, I disagree with a couple of things here. Although I value the art of teaching music very highly, I'm don't think you always need a teacher to improve your playing. When you're just getting started or are learning something entirely new? Yeah, I suppose it helps, but it's very possible to teach yourself new skills. It just makes it harder, not impossible, and in some cases it can actually be preferable.
Also, I agree with you're proposed 5th level, and I get the strong impression you're writing from a Western Classical point of view, where most of the time, you have to learn how to play a piece note by note as it's written on paper. This allows you to learn how to play the piece entirely by muscle memory. You don't have this luxury when you're playing a style that depends a lot on improvisation. In which case, you have to function on this 5h level all the time.
+
When I learn new music, I find it's best to get familiar with the piece or technique or whatever by myself. Then, when I have a vague idea of how it goes, I play it for my teacher, and he offers some criticisms. So I go home and practice while keeping his criticisms in mind, and, when I have a stronger idea of what I'm supposed to be doing, I play it for him again. It's a cycle in which most of my practicing is done alone.
+Lotoreo Yeah from the videos I saw in the Sideways's channel he speaks from a western classical perspective, which incredibly seems to explain why he gets several ideas wrong. Besides your points, in a video about the four chords progressions he goes on how lack of "creativity/complex ideas" explains why the four chord progression is so overused nowadays, when this assumption basically throws out of the window the very concept of soloing and improvisation, since those are mostly based on the amount of variation one can come up with the melody inside a fixed chordal structure.
That is, at least, the impression I have with some of Sideways ideas, there is the possibility I'm getting the channel's stances wrongly, of course.
I'm working on a video where I'm going to explain the pros and cons of being a self-taught musician. It's obvious a lot of people, like Sidways here, don't see the possibilities granted only to those who have no mentor or lessons.
But yes, self-taught musicians definitely fall behind because it takes more time to discover some lessons yourself as opposed to just being told.
+Todd Tolson I wasn't clear enough. What I was trying to say is that the prevalence of the four chords in music isn't a direct issue of creativity and quality, since in fact limited structures can convey more innovation than unlimited ones (it's easier to change something already established than "changing" something that doesn't exists yet), this happens in soloing (creating melodies inside a common or pre-established structure), improvisation and composition (that's where pop music comes in, the creation of its melodies happens inside a common structure).
I got a feeling that Sideways was somehow trying to make a *conceptual* point about his *preference* to a more sophisticated chordal resolution instead of adressing the point that it was probably just a matter of bland artistic choices using those four chords, since it is easily possible to breed sophisticated music from the four chords even if they're repeating.
That was my problem with the video. Sideways was appearing to be only justifying his classical western orientation instead of making a fair judgment on the use of the recurring four chords progression. Still as I said earlier, maybe I'm not getting him right so yeah. The video is a good food for thought, still, so I'll give him that.
This is a really helpful video! I've made so many mistakes on different occasions, but hopefully this video will hope me overcome future issues.
My question is, how does this video fit with jazz musicians? If improvising, reading off the sheet music, and playing by memory seamlessly blend together, what's the deal?
This dynamic is strange in my case. I'm a jazz bassist, which means that I interpret and improvise the score in the moment constantly, at least for walking bass lines. Since we have so much music, I simply don't memorize the songs. I know them and can recognize them at a glance. There is a written bassline for me to play, but jazz allows me so much freedom that I often write new lines on the go. The sheet music is merely a suggestion now. Maybe the choke reflex is overshadowed by the improvisation reflex? When the band is so dependent on my constant quarter notes, I can't afford to screw the rhythm.
With freedom, comes other types of responsabilities. I think jazz need an equilibrium between conscious competence (right anaylsis) and unconscious competence (right intuition) while you improvise.
This was literally the most eye opening video I've ever watched. And I've spent at least 4 thousand hours on youtube. This video is priceless for me
DID YOU REALLY HAVE TO SHOW HANON ON SCREEN😭
It's amazing how this can be applied to pretty much any skill. Anything that anyone has ever been good at can be tracked down to these key concepts. Great video! I love your content, and I'm not even a musician!
Drawing/art students are just as bad, but with them what happens is a sort of opposite phenomena rooted on the idea that "all artist works are works of talent, not effort and study": a drawing student, specially a teenager, will convince themselves they "can't draw" and the teacher "can" because they have not yet reached a level of skill they are satisfied with; then, if you, as the teacher, try to create guided studies of subjects you feel they could learn to improve and reach said level... they get frustrated and freeze lol
it's hard to explain these sort of skills are an ever learning process, that you won't learn how to draw like your teacher in just a year because we've been drawing for a decade, and that we, ourselves, are aware we are too still improving; but they want the skill NOW, and when that doesn't happen, they give up
you deserve every subscription you get and more. the effort you put in (possibly the unconscious amount of ;) )... thank you.
Hey wanna know what forgetting your music piece is like?
You just lost the game.
That's another reason why I put so much value on ear training. Even if you have no intention of making your own music or playing things by ear, being able to articulate the aural information in such a way I feel would act as the greatest defense against choking up and completely stopping because if you remember what it sounds like and know what that sound corresponds to on the keyboard, you know what to do.
learning with a teacher is a faster but more limited solution.
learning yourself needs more knowledge of yourself and honesty to yourself, but is a lot less limited in what you can achieve in the end.
so imo teacher is needed for the first steps, to get some fast results, to not lose the motivation, or to get some kind of feeling of how the stuff is running. but in the end, either you will become your own teacher at some point, or you will stuck at the entry to this "world" you are trying to conquer.
I really love watching your videos. While I'm not a musician at all, as an artist there's a lot of transferrable wisdom in your content, that I enjoy to consider. Thank you for the great content!
I loved this video, but I gotta disagree with you about teaching yourself music being a bad idea.
Different methods of learning are useful for different outcomes. If your goal is to become a skilled classical concert musician, a teacher is definitely going to at least make your life a lot easier, and maybe even make what would otherwise be an unattainable goal possible. But if you want to develop a unique style of contemporary playing, teaching yourself is a great way to go. Things that in other settings would be hindrances can be incorporated in ways that set you apart from other musicians in appealing ways. In both cases you have to be deliberate and dedicated, like very few people can just mess around on an instrument with no direction and come up with something people are really gonna respond to. But autodidactic musicians have definitely made a lot contributions to a wide variety of genres.
I guess I'm just sick of western classical musicians saying that all musicians should want to be western classical musicians.
Dude, I’m no musician but I ice all of your content! Getting a new video from you always makes my day!
I used to play the guitar A LOT for like 12 or so years. Never went to conservatory tho, so I relied mostly on what you call body mapping. Then I stopped playing because I got into cinema and dedicated myself to that, but then this year I started playing again. So for my bday I asked a friend if I could play at his bar. So I made a list of songs that I knew well enough and added a few new ones and went on stage. And I froze. Like 5 times. The room was full of my closest friends and family, so they were all supportive, but it was so crazy because I'd never had problems with being on stage, either playing music or acting or whatever, so I couldn't really understand why. This video made me understand some of the things that happened. Thank you for that; I really like your channel btw.