Listen Play Grow is an ear-led approach to music coaching designed to help you become a more complete, confident and independent musician. We begin with listening, use singing and experimentation to connect what you hear to what you play, and use music theory when it helps explain and understand the music rather than as the starting point.

The aim isn’t simply to give you more musical information.

It’s to help you do more with music.

At the heart of the approach is a fairly simple idea:

The music is already inside you.

That doesn’t mean you already know everything you need to know. You don’t.

It means that if you’ve spent decades listening to music, singing along with songs, anticipating choruses, recognising when something sounds finished and noticing when somebody plays a wrong chord, you already understand far more about music than you may realise.

The job of coaching is partly to uncover that understanding, connect it to what you can consciously hear and do, and help you become increasingly independent.

Listen first

Music is sound.

Painfully obvious, perhaps, but it’s surprisingly easy to learn about music without spending enough time really listening to it.

We can learn interval names.

Memorise scales.

Study chord symbols.

Read notation.

Learn the theory explaining why something works.

All of those things can be useful.

But knowing that something is called a perfect fourth isn’t the same as recognising what that sound is doing when you hear it in music.

At Listen Play Grow, the starting point is therefore usually listening.

Not necessarily formal “ear training”.

Just listening.

What can you notice?

Where does the music feel like home?

When does the harmony move?

What is the bass doing?

Can you hear where a section finishes?

What changes when the chorus arrives?

What can you sing?

What can you find on your instrument?

The names can come afterwards.

Theory serves the music. The music doesn’t exist merely to demonstrate the theory.

Listen. Play. Grow.

The name describes the process.

Listen means learning to notice, recognise and increasingly understand what music is doing.

Play means experimenting with what you hear and understand, and using it to express something yourself.

Grow is what happens as those experiences accumulate and you begin to trust what you hear and what you can do.

And the word play matters.

You’re allowed to experiment.

You’re allowed to try something without knowing whether it will work.

You’re allowed to get things wrong.

In fact, if you never get anything wrong, there’s a fair chance you’re staying safely inside things you can already do.

Building the whole musician

One of the central ideas behind Listen Play Grow is holistic musicality.

A musician isn’t simply a pair of hands operating an instrument.

Instrumental technique matters enormously, but it sits alongside many other abilities.

Can you listen?

Can you recognise what music is doing?

Can you remember it?

Can you respond to another musician?

Can you improvise?

Can you express an idea?

Can you recover when something goes wrong?

Can you play without somebody telling you what comes next?

Can you trust yourself?

Can you share your music with other people?

These abilities are connected.

Better listening can improve understanding.

Understanding can help memory.

Experimentation develops creativity.

Creativity can build confidence.

Confidence makes us more willing to perform, improvise and communicate.

The individual exercise isn’t the point.

What it’s developing in you as a musician is the point.

Your voice connects hearing and playing

Singing appears regularly in Listen Play Grow coaching.

That doesn’t mean you need to consider yourself a singer.

And nobody is judging the quality of your voice.

Your voice is simply the closest musical instrument you possess to your musical imagination.

If you can hear something and sing some approximation of it, you’ve already started bringing that sound out of your head and into the physical world.

Your instrument can come next.

Sometimes we’ll sing only a couple of notes.

Sometimes the home note.

Sometimes a bass line, rhythm or melody.

It isn’t a performance.

Your voice is a bridge between what you hear and what you play.

Coaching isn’t simply teaching

There are times when I teach.

If there’s something you genuinely need to understand, I’m not going to sit mysteriously asking coaching questions until you somehow discover the answer yourself.

Sometimes you need information.

Sometimes something needs explaining.

Sometimes I can hear something in the music that you can’t yet hear, and the useful thing is for me to help you hear it.

But teaching isn’t my default response to every problem.

Quite often I’ll ask questions instead.

What do you think is happening?

What are you hearing?

What could you try?

How would you work this out if I wasn’t here?

What would make this easier?

The point isn’t to withhold answers.

It’s to develop your ability to find them.

If every musical problem ends with me providing the solution, I may have solved today’s problem while doing very little to help you solve tomorrow’s.

You help decide where we’re going

Listen Play Grow doesn’t follow a fixed repertoire or grade-by-grade curriculum.

You arrive with musical interests, frustrations and ambitions of your own.

Perhaps you want to play songs without chord sheets.

Improvise.

Perform.

Accompany yourself while singing.

Understand the theory you’ve accumulated in a way that finally connects to actual music.

Or perhaps you simply know something isn’t working but can’t quite identify what.

Those things become our starting point.

But that doesn’t mean every session begins with me asking:

“What would you like to do this week?”

and then doing whatever you request.

Part of my job is to bring experience and an outside perspective.

You may believe you need more theory when I think the missing piece is listening.

You may want something harder when I think simplifying would teach you more.

You may think you need another exercise when I think you need to make some actual music.

So the route is negotiated.

You bring your ambitions and experience. I bring mine. Between us, we work out a useful way forward.

And that route is allowed to change.

As you develop, you may discover musical interests and ambitions you couldn’t have predicted when we started.

That’s not the programme going wrong.

That’s growth.

Expect to experiment

Curiosity matters enormously in Listen Play Grow.

Instead of:

“I can’t do this.”

I want us gradually to get closer to:

“Why can’t I do this yet?”

or:

“What happens if I try this?”

You may be asked to improvise.

Sing.

Play without a chord sheet.

Work something out before looking up the answer.

Transpose something.

Record yourself.

Perform.

Some of those things may feel uncomfortable.

The aim isn’t discomfort for its own sake.

There’s a useful edge where something feels uncertain but achievable.

Part of my job is helping us find it.

Too easy and very little changes.

Too overwhelming and it becomes counterproductive.

Somewhere between the two is usually where interesting things happen.

Mistakes are information

One of the least useful musical ambitions is trying never to make a mistake.

Of course accuracy matters.

Technique matters.

Preparation matters.

But mistakes tell us things.

They reveal where our understanding becomes uncertain.

They show what hasn’t yet become automatic.

They may reveal that we’re relying on memory rather than hearing.

And occasionally a supposed mistake produces something more interesting than what we intended.

The aim isn’t to become careless.

It’s to become a musician who can notice what happened and respond rather than being frightened of getting something wrong.

You’ll be expected to do things between sessions

Coaching isn’t simply a weekly conversation about music.

Something has to happen between the conversations.

Towards the end of a session we’ll normally agree what you’re going to work on before we meet again.

We’ll try to make it realistic and clear enough that we both know what you’ve committed to.

And then I’m likely to ask what happened.

That’s accountability.

If you intended to do something and didn’t, I’m interested in why.

Perhaps the task was unrealistic.

Perhaps you didn’t understand it.

Perhaps life got in the way.

Perhaps you were frightened of doing it badly.

Or perhaps you procrastinated.

The answer isn’t always:

“Try harder next week.”

Sometimes the useful work is understanding why the thing didn’t happen.

You need to tell me when I’ve got it wrong

This matters.

Coaching is a two-way relationship.

If I’m pushing too hard, tell me.

If you’re bored, tell me.

If something I’ve suggested seems pointless, tell me.

If you don’t understand why we’re doing something, ask.

If you think we’re heading in the wrong direction, say so.

I can’t respond to information I don’t have.

That conversation isn’t coaching going wrong.

That conversation is coaching.

Sometimes two perfectly reasonable people simply aren’t a good coaching fit either.

That’s why we’ll talk before you commit.

You should be deciding whether you want to work with me just as much as I’m deciding whether I believe I can genuinely help you.

Supportive doesn’t mean fluffy

I laugh quite a lot.

I make jokes.

I love it when clients do too.

Music matters enormously to me, but I don’t think that requires us to be solemn about it.

Learning can be frustrating enough without treating every wrong note as a national emergency.

But supportive doesn’t mean I’ll agree with everything you say.

If I think you’re avoiding something, I’ll probably say so.

If you’re making something unnecessarily complicated, I’ll say that too.

If you tell me you can’t do something and I think the evidence suggests otherwise, don’t expect me automatically to agree.

Challenge should happen within a relationship where you know the person challenging you is on your side.

I may push.

I may question.

I may occasionally annoy you.

But I’ve got your back.

Confidence comes from doing

I can’t give you confidence.

I can encourage you and remind you how far you’ve travelled, but lasting confidence is much stronger when it’s based on evidence.

You played without the sheet and survived.

You worked out the chord yourself.

You improvised and something musical came out.

You performed while nervous and discovered that being nervous didn’t stop you playing.

You made a mistake and nothing terrible happened.

Do enough of those things and confidence stops being something I have to persuade you to feel.

It becomes something you’ve experienced.

Progress isn’t always obvious

Musical development isn’t linear.

Sometimes things change quickly.

Sometimes apparently nothing happens for weeks.

And musicians are remarkably good at noticing what they still can’t do while forgetting what used to be difficult.

So occasionally we’ll turn around and look backwards.

Where were you three months ago?

What can you do now that you couldn’t do then?

What feels ordinary today that once seemed impossible?

That doesn’t mean ignoring the distance still to travel.

It means recognising the distance already travelled.

Sometimes you need a new approach.

Sometimes you simply need to keep going.

Part of my job is helping us tell the difference.

The aim is independence

This is where the whole approach is trying to lead.

Not towards somebody who knows every piece of music theory.

Not somebody who never makes mistakes.

Not necessarily somebody with astonishing instrumental technique.

And certainly not somebody who needs me forever.

The aim is a musician who can listen, understand, experiment and make decisions.

Someone who can approach unfamiliar music with curiosity rather than fear.

Someone who increasingly trusts their ears.

Someone who can use theory when it helps without needing theory before they dare to play.

Someone who can express themselves.

Participate.

Solve musical problems.

And keep growing after the coaching ends.

In shorthand, we’re moving:

from thinking towards hearing

from knowing towards understanding

from following towards participating

from dependence towards independence

from fear towards curiosity

from playing notes towards making music

That’s what I mean by Musical Freedom. Musical Connection. Musical Confidence.

Is the Listen Play Grow approach right for everybody?

No.

If you primarily want specialist instrumental technique, find an excellent instrumental teacher.

If you want to work through a fixed graded curriculum, traditional instrumental lessons are likely to suit you better.

If you want somebody simply to tell you exactly what to practise each week without asking for your input, coaching may frustrate you.

If you don’t want to experiment, sing, listen closely or occasionally do something outside your comfort zone, this particular approach probably isn’t right for you.

And if what you really need is information, there are vastly cheaper ways to get it.

Listen Play Grow is for musicians looking for something broader: individual guidance towards becoming a more complete, confident and independent musician.

Listen. Play. Grow.

Listen to the music.

Listen to yourself.

Notice what’s actually happening.

Play with it.

Experiment.

Sing.

Try things.

Get some of them wrong.

Notice what happened.

Try again.

Gradually understand more.

Gradually depend less on somebody else telling you what comes next.

And gradually trust the musician you’re becoming.

The intention isn’t merely that you know more about music. It’s that you can do more with music.

Because the music was already inside you.

The work is learning how to get it out.