I DIDN’T START OUT AS A MUSICIAN

I started out as a bricklayer who desperately wanted to be a musician.

In my early twenties I began picking up professional work, first doing some studio sessions and gigs, and then joining what I believe was one of the UK’s first Blues Brothers tribute acts. That led to years of gigging, touring and recording, including work overseas.

I later went to Belgium to record an album before joining Neverland, a folk-rock band that came tantalisingly close to a record deal.

By then, music wasn’t something I dreamed of doing anymore. I was a musician.

MUSIC BECAME MY CAREER

In my thirties, I decided it was time to get the education I’d missed earlier and went to university to study Music and Music Technology.

That eventually led me into music education. I became Head of Music and Music Technology at a college and later began postgraduate research in composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

Although circumstances meant I couldn’t complete the research degree, I was invited to teach at the Conservatoire. A couple of hours a week gradually grew, and I spent the next 15 years there as a visiting tutor, alongside continuing to gig, compose and make music professionally.

On paper, at least, I looked like someone who ought to know what he was doing.

There was just one rather important problem.

I THOUGHT I HAD RUBBISH EARS

Here’s the odd thing. By this point I’d been a professional musician for years. I had a music degree, I’d been Head of Music and I was teaching at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

And I still thought I had rubbish ears.

Playing by ear had never come naturally to me. I’d pretty much accepted that some musicians could just hear what was happening in music and I wasn’t one of them.

About five years ago, I decided to have one last serious go at doing something about it.

I started working on hearing everything in relation to the home note, or Do in Solfa, and listening much more closely to bass lines and how the music moved.

At first, I struggled. So I kept listening to the same music over and over again.

And then something rather wonderful started happening.

The more I listened, the more I could hear. And the more I could hear, the more the music began to make sense.

For the first time, I realised that my ear actually worked.

After all those years believing this was something I simply wasn’t good at, I discovered that I could do it.

I was genuinely elated. I wanted to tell everybody. If my ear could change after decades of believing I was rubbish at this, perhaps a lot of other musicians had given up on themselves too soon.

That discovery changed the way I thought about learning music.

WHY I CREATED LISTEN PLAY GROW

That discovery eventually led me into online musicality coaching. For the past three years, I’ve worked with musicians helping them develop their ears, understand what they’re hearing and become more independent in the way they make music.

Along the way, the ideas behind Listen Play Grow became clearer.

I don’t believe musicality is something reserved for a lucky few. And I don’t believe becoming a better musician has to mean accumulating more and more theory, exercises and information.

A lot can change when we learn to listen more deeply, sing what we hear, experiment and actually make music.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Developing your ear takes time and attention. But the things that transformed my own musicianship were surprisingly simple.

Today, I’m still learning, still experimenting and still out gigging as a working musician.

Listen Play Grow grew out of something I genuinely wish I’d discovered much earlier:

The music was already inside me. I just had to learn how to hear it.

WANT TO KNOW HOW THE COACHING WORKS?

If you’d like to know what working with me actually looks like, what happens during sessions and what we might work on together, you can read more here.