The Sound of Gold with guest Gregg Goodhart

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0:51 Hi, Welcome to the Sound of Gold. If you've been here before, welcome back. If you're new, welcome. Basically, my whole idea for doing this show is to focus on music, musicians, music teachers, and music schools, as well as various music programs in our school system. And I'm a big advocate for keeping music alive, keeping musicians alive. And there's so much that. Goes into playing an instrument. There's so much. Sorry, I have a cat here who's who's wanting to get all the attention, So she's gonna have to share my attention today. This is Callie.

1:33 So with that being said, with music, there's just so much to dive into. There's so much to cover, and if you're a musician, you get it. It's a never ending journey. It's a never ending, like you never get to a point where like, Okay, that's it, I know, I know what I need to know and move on. It's just for your forever growing. And that's the beauty of being a musician is that there's never too. Much to learn. And the beauty of being a musician amongst musicians is that we get to help each other and learn from each other as well. Over the years. I'm a music teacher, I teach piano. I'm a piano performer as well. I still, even though I'm a teacher and a performer, I still take lessons occasionally, and I still follow other teachers that inspire me. One of those teachers is Greg Goodheart, and he's otherwise known as the Learning Coach.

2:29 He does a lot of online classes and his research has been such an inspiration to me that I've let my students know about him as well, and I even take classes from him and love. To learn from him. And I've love to welcome him today to our show. Greg Goodheart, are you with us? Yes, you are right here. Hi, Lisa, Hi, Thank you so. Much for making us a part of your day today. Thank you for having me. I really really enjoy being here. So things you. Said got me thinking already, but go ahead, So I have. To I have to say, and I always start my show off with just well, I'm an honest, transparent person just because it's easier to live that way. But to say up front, I've been following you for years, so I always feel like I know you because I follow what you I follow your webinars, I follow your what you have on YouTube, I follow you on musicality, you your practice classes. I've had one of my students, I Lean, has been working with you as well. And I just I am a huge advocate for learning, and I feel like for me personally, I can never learn enough, and you just give me that vibe that you are so into like learning and learning more. And what I said at the beginning of the show is like, there's so much depth to musicality, and there's so much it not only goes into music to learn music. You can use

4:02 some of the tactics in so many different areas of life as well. So you know, there's so much ground. To cover within the time frame that we have. Let me ask you, where would you like to get tell me something about like what inspired you. Let's start with that what inspired you to begin this journey in music. It's funny I wrote down a couple of things you said. I was going to say to say something about but when you said that, when you said, I'm a teacher, and I still go and learn things from other teachers, That's how it happened to me too. I was teaching. I've been a teacher for decades and before I did this business, the latest one was thirteen years at a high school running a music program for my instrument, and then hiring other teachers, doing all this stuff. And I got to a point not long into it.

4:46 I was a good teacher in quotes one words, than everything. But not long into it, I realized I can't get my students past a certain level. I don't know how it's done. And I did it like a lot of music teachers did it. Do it. Try this, that didn't work. Try that, Oh that worked a little bit. Try that. What are we doing? What this brings me to is the most exciting thing. How I got here because I realized I hit a ceiling. I didn't I have a master's degree with music, and I couldn't play nearly. As well as I should have played. With that amount I should be touring the world with the amount of work that I did. What and I knew? I just I had an idea. It wasn't talent or some magical force, but that's what we think it is. Brings me to exactly what I was thinking when you were talking about going to other teachers.

5:31 We have something now, and we've had it well, we've always had it as humans, you know, have it described in research and science. We always wonder, and I do this, if if I've got a student who needs to do this, what should I try to get it done? We try it and if it doesn't really work, we try something else. Oh no. We now have the ability to know that if we ask someone to learn something and they do it exactly as we ask them to do it, which is not ten hours a day and hanging from the ceiling and. Counting a thousand cars as they drive by or whatever. It's nothing like that's it really takes less time. You got to introduce it the right way. That's kind of the art of teaching it. We know with certainty that someone will learn and when they come back to me and they haven't learned, well, it did something that wasn't what I said, so let's look and then we go through the process. Aha, right there.

6:23 Oh I didn't realize that. And once you get it down, you're guaranteed to get it. Mind me of something. You were talking about how this applies to everything in life, and my wife was talking she's in. The financial industry, your life was. Talking about, Oh, it takes three months to onboard people, you know, and she's not talking about like financial brokers. And then she's talking about the people who support the brokers. And you know, there's a lot going on. You got to send emails and packages and people are out doing presentations. But it's not something that requires a doctorate, okay, and these people come in and they can learn. And she said it takes three months to figure out if they're going to do it or not. So I can tell you in three weeks and by the time we got to the third week, it would be you're not following directs. If you would, you'll do great and get all sorts of raises because going to learn to do it well and you're going to be wonderful.

7:06 But if you just don't want to do it, no harm, no foul. But we'll have to shake hands and each walk different, different direction, and it's so much easier that way, and you know what you assign will work, and if you know enough about it, you can predict the stages people will go through as they learn it, and they're amazed. Like you said, I think this, and that's exactly what I thought, and I almost quit, but then I thought this, like you said, I. Would you see it enough. It all happens the same way. Folks. Y'all have as much talent as. You need, and learning works the same for everybody. You just get there into it. So that brings me to the Talent Code. I've read it twice. I get something out of it each time.

7:47 I think, maybe that's just being human. So share something with us about with our listeners who have not read it, and where they can find it and tell us a little bit about it. Oh yeah, my book Cracky The Talent Code. There's actually another book called The. Talent Code, which is a good book. So that is the researchers will tell you, and there's papers on this. There's a researcher named Hardiman who's talked a lot about this. Is there is a gap in between the science and all of the rest of humanity that wants to learn, and we got a lot of frustrated people out there who want to learn and can't learn a matter how hard they try. I just thought of something recently. It's a tagline I'm going to use. Kids don't dislike school because they dislike learning. Kids dislike school because they dislike not learning. That's the problem. If you actually taught them all how to learn, and they all knew they would get everything with a small amount of work, it would be a totally different ballgame. And I know this because I will never forget walking out of my third grade classroom on the last day and the teacher standing at the door saying, you passed by the skin of your teeth.

8:50 Words, that's the kind of student I was. I realized it. I didn't know how to learn. So in this role of an interpreter, someone who's in between professors don't know how to speak. Teacher researchers do not know how to teach. It's a graduate university with a select group of people. You do not know what it's like to go out into the real world and have to get people on board with learning. The people in your classes can drop out at mid semester if they're not doing well. I taught high school. No one gets to drop out. You have to have either you teach them or you're dealing with the parents. So you have to learn exactly how everything works. You can be confident into what you're doing. Teachers, on the other hand, first have too much to deal with to really be doing a lot of this stuff. It became an obsession for me like music was at one time.

9:37 So that's what that was. And so researchers don't speak teacher. You just don't know how to speak the research language. It took forever for me to learn how to read studies and everything. So once I figured all that. Out and then could dive in and go deeper, the whole magic of the thing was how do I get in the middle there where I could take the best of the research, not the surface stuff, which is a lot of what you see people marketing the science. Oh, spacing, You should do your practice at different times, Sure you should, But spacing is a lot more complex and a lot more subtle and applicable than just that. It'sact the whole. Workshop your student's taking with you right now. The first four weeks is all spacing only, and it's space repetition. Anyway, I'm getting into something else. So I said, what am I?

10:20 What do I need to do to get this into This is my superpower that I've developed, and all teachers should develop this. How do I make anyone understand this stuff so they can use it? And the answer, and that's what that book is. It's trying to get people to understand. Look at all these gateways. Here's the gateway to learn about talent. Here's what I found. You can go ahead and look at the research and see what you find all these little gateways in and then you can start using it, which takes a long time. You can find someone who can teach it. There aren't that many. But and I will tell you the secret teachers. I will tell you this secret to teaching all this stuff. Look at something called cognitive load theory. You have to reduce the amount of things your working memory pays attention to down to an amount it can handle, Otherwise you will reach too much confusion and won't learn. Well, my gosh, then how do people do trigonometry? Because the working memory only holds five to seven pieces of information, and trigonometry you've got to automatize all the previous knowledge and have it in your long term memory. The teacher has to find exactly what that is, exactly what can get in through working memory into long term memory and then start building that up.

11:33 And that's what I spent my life doing. So there I have a few like thoughts in my head and I don't want to forget any of them. Inter Leaving and spacing, Thank you with our audience. Interleaving, what does that mean? And how does that relate to spacing? Thanks because you've gotten into an area that most everyone gets confused. People think, well, if you let the spacing needs take more breaks. That's part of retrieval practice. But it means change up what you're doing every ten minutes, which is correct. But that's not spacing specifically as far as I'm concerned. Refers and in the things I've read, refers to spaced repetition interleaving, and I'll explain both. Interleaving refers to interleaving.

12:15 Your learning episodes. A learning episode. I think I just made that word of right now a learning episode, But it's how long you sit and work on something you know I'm gonna learn about the you know how congress works, Okay, I'm gonna. Sit there and read. Well, I'll do it for an hour to figure out out two chambers and all this stuff. Okay, but you don't want to do that for an hour. What you really want to do is do it for ten minutes and do something else for ten minutes, and then do that for ten minutes and do something else. You want to constantly shift what you're doing. It should feel uncomfortable, and you should switch before you truly understand what you're doing. I know it sounds weird. And then spacing a space repetition. We're used to doing ten or twenty five or thirty or fifty reps in a row. Look up something called the power law of learning. By about the third or fourth rep, they're almost useless. That's why we do all these reps and it doesn't work. What you want to do is do one repetition spaced out by five or ten minutes once and only once for about three or four days.

13:10 Try that, everybody. You'll be amazed. So I've been playing. This is not about me, but I'm getting to my point. I've been playing for over forty five years. Not to give my age away, older than that. But anyway, two words you had said in one of your webinars or something I read problem solving. Yes, the light bulb went off for me personally, because it's no problem for me to sit and play just by heart. It just comes through me. To sit and play somebody else's music and to read their music. I have no problem reading, but chunking it in portions and segments of it and looking at it like a problem solving equation.

13:56 Like for five ten minutes, my brain. Is completely focused. I'm not thinking about what's for dinner. I'm not thinking about where I have to go tomorrow, not thinking about who I need to call. I am completely there so giving myself that break of and for everybody maybe it's different, but that those two words problems solving, my brain goes. Ooh, you got my attention. What are we doing? And so that's another reason why I connected with you as well as I. Have you on the show, is because I'm learning. I've learned so much from you. I continue to learn so much from you, and just little things that you say and that that you've researched and that you offer to teach is just so like aha for me. Anyways, and I know you.

14:41 Have other students too, and I'm sure they feel that way. In what way? What ways can students reach out to you to learn more about your courses? Oh, my website is Greg goodheart dot com. You can see my little logo down there. That's yes, that's right. That's three g's in a row. In the middle. Some poor sap is missing a G because I got all the g's in that naming part of the world. Like names Gary what everyone calls them airy because you know I took the G Greg goodheart dot com. Tons of free stuff, but it's it's kind of overall. Here are some books you can read here, others if you want specific stuff I have also, I have master classes that are in my shop, and I do a monthly practice class.

15:26 If we want to at some point talk about that. That's something I invented that hasn't existed before now, and it's part of how you get people hooked into the learning. It's not enough to say, trust me, if you do this, you'll be good in four weeks. That's if you can do something in twenty minutes that most people thought used to take four weeks, then you've grabbed people in so I've invented that I do one of those every month, which is open to the whole world and is ridiculously cheap, you know, based on a lot of times when I get paid to travel around and talk to schools, and as you mentioned, this works and everything. It works in academics, I train teachers, I do professional development for I go to music departments, and I go to the academic stuff.

16:06 So you're right, it's all over the place. So any of that stuff. There's areas of my website and you can always get in touch with me at hello at greg Goodheart dot com. Yes, this is easy to reach out to you and let me ask you the difference. And there might not be a difference, but maybe. For our listeners who are just tuning in and haven't worked with you before or know about you. I know you have this ongoing practic class for the next several weeks, and I know it's your first time putting that together. Is however, you. Have the practic class once a month, So is this like? Is this? So? This is this is my marketing problem. I call everything practice something and then and then people get it's confused.

16:52 The practic class is different than the we have this. I have this eight week thing going. It's closed right now. I'll offer this is the third time I've taught it that and then i'll do another one sometime in the future. I haven't decided yet. We have a waiting list. You keep it on. That's called perfect practice, that whole eight week course. You know, the practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect, right, the old saying that I used to say all the time as a teacher. So that's every once in a while I offer a course on something. Practic class is a monthly meeting, and I think many of us everyone has a different idea what the word master class means. But in the music world, there's a master up on stage. You go up, you play your piece, and then the master tells you things that you and you're a teacher who's wonderful, but that's a master. They know things that you know you know, and they give you the master advice during that class. So it's the same format, come up and play. Accept the differences is I'm not gonna tell I don't know someone playing violin. I don't know how to tell you to interpret violin music barely. I'm a classical guitarist, but what I did say, leave that for the master, and leave that for your teacher. You can't move your fingers right right there, and you keep making mistakes that every time, don't you?

18:01 Yep? How do you practice it every day? I can't get it. I've been doing it for four weeks. That's what we work on. So that's the difference in every month. It's different people, many times that I've never met on instruments I've never played, and we just go straight from show me your problem, then I'll fix it. And the point is, and that's why I'm so proud of the practice classes. The point is is if it was talent that was holding you back for days, weeks or months, then how did we just fix it in twenty minutes here? And it's faster, easier, cleaner, much easier to play. And it has a certain impact on people. This is why. And I do these live when I go to schools. It has a certain impact. I mean they're live here, but they're not impression, a certain impact on people when you see someone go through it and you see how is that?

18:46 Oh that was okay? How's that? Oh my gosh? How am I playing it that fast? Here? Let's go a little faster. Oh my gosh. And when you see that, that's how it feels. That's how problem solving feels. The reason kids dislike schools not because they learning. The reason kids dislike schools because they dislike not learning. If you would show them how the problem solved in the most basic way. I'm telling you, and this is what goes on in the practice class. What happens is when you solve even the smallest problem, and any problem that you do not know the answer to, once you start working on it, is a problem for you, whatever that is. I don't care how basic or how complex. When you solve that, the brain releases dopamine and makes you happy. Yes, and then you want to do more.

19:33 This is the key to self motivation and self efficacy, and it creates self esteem. Everyone wonders where that come from. How do create self esteem in kids get them to actually do things they never thought they could otherwise do by obeying cognitive load theory and teaching them, in very small ways how to do the most basic steps of problem solving, which is the essence of something called deliberate practice. I love it. I love it. I have to pause for a second and just apologize to my audience if you're hearing some background noises, and I know my engineer might hear too. Just a quick about three weeks ago, my daughter and I found a teeny tiny kitten out on the street, and so we rescued her and so she's she's healthy now and she's finally out of confinement. And so if you hear noise in the background, she's just having the time of her life.

20:28 So I apologize for the noise. It's teeny tiny kitten. So but anyway back to what we're talking about. You know what you said about the instrument and about you know, you play class guitar, and it doesn't matter what student, what instrument a student comes to you with. And for me personally, I work solely on I teach the piano. I teach music theory. But I always tell my students, let me help. Let's intertwine kind of the theory and and the foundations of learning music because it's a language in itself. But also get to know your instrument, because your instrument. The more you get to know your instrument and how to work it out and take the steps you need to take, you'll find that you you can play it smoother because.

21:21 You tend to own the instrument and let instead of it owning you. Yes, I said very similar to that. Yes, yeah, And so you know you had you had mentioned also with students learning. Uh fast. I knew. I think it was last week maybe in one of your classes you mentioned practice zen, and I love that because your approach to teaching someone not to give secrets away of your practice class, give them all away. Your micro mycro practices turn into macro because you're able to handle it.

22:05 And it's again another lesson in life. The more you can manage but a problem, even if it's a measure of music, the more you can manage it, the more control you have as a person. And I think as a human being, we all want to feel that sense of control when we are mastering something. Right, So you mentioned practice zen, But then I laugh because I think of like Sesame Street, you talk about the speed monster. Yeah, right, So it's like, how do you practice practice zen without letting the speed monster take over? And me and myself, I'm working on a piece just for the fun of it, just because I'm playing along with one of your classes and another teacher as well.

22:53 I have to remind myself to slow down because it's like human nature. Like you've said it too. You want to get it. Done like yesterday. Mm hm. So you know, focusing on smaller segments, not for three hours, but for five minutes here or ten minutes. Here, three hours, just do it and bits and other stuff in between. Right, and if you do it that way, you won't need three hours. You'll find three hours goes by pretty quick. Well that's the zen. Yes, that's it right there. There's a researcher named me Hichak sent me high who spends Yes, this is flow. That's what that is. When time starts to melt off the clock of It hasn't happened to your student and my course, yet it will because that's what starts to happen. You brought up something very interesting.

23:41 He said, you teach the instrument. Let me be really clear. You have to well you don't have to, but you have to learn the instrument. That's what instrumental teachers are there for. They'll give you a smattering of practice advice. He'll give you some music theory, but they are the instrument expert. I cannot tell you how to hold your finger to get to a black key when you're playing a C nine chord. I can't tell you exactly what you should do. You do that. But what we haven't done is looked at Hey, music theory is a separate subject. No one learns how to compose and how to master music theory in a piano lessons. In piano lessons, no. One learns how to play piano. In theory lessons. You do little bits. You got to learn how to do a one, four or five to pass your little theory exam or whatever it is. But that's small parts. And we've been smart enough over the last few hundred years to separate these courses out for their own area of study.

24:32 If you want to be serious about, you know, music, you do several years of just music theory. Do you do many years of just instrumental applied? You do years of just ear training, a class just for ear training, you do years of just history. For some reason, we have not figured out that you need a separate training for practice for how we learn, and I have, you know, kind of. Fallen into that gap, and That's where I'm at. But we haven't figured that out yet that we can just do it through tips and. Tricks, and we absolve ourselves by saying, must be talent. There's some magical force which I cannot describe, do not know what. It is, can't say what it's made of, can't say where it comes from, can't say anything about it.

25:12 Other than you'll know it when you see it. But if the person doesn't keep getting good, then the talent didn't realize itself. And if someone's bad, and then they're a late bloomer. No when they learn, well, they get better when they don't, which if they're doing it randomly. I had a great week I learned. I don't know what I did. They have no direction. It's very hard to learn how to do that stuff. So it is a separate you. Need, Yeah, you need instrumental advice. Some of you might get it from YouTube or Facebook group whatever. Teachers are the best bet. They will take you through it. They know what you need. An instrumental teacher, which you don't realize you need, is you need. That's why I'm gonna start. I'm beta testing it now teacher training programs so teacher can teachers can incorporate this into their teaching. I'm doing one with an orchestra teacher in Milwaukee and another with a solo teacher who's in a orchestras huido, and I should be done in about a month, and then maybe in the new year.

26:04 I'll start offering that program. That's it. That's great. Someone to teach you how to practice. And the easiest way to do that is by starting with deliberate practice. You brought up problem solving and how how do I get into the smallest thing? This is how you do it right. I'm gonna take that down for just a second and say, we've all heard about deliberate practice, the ten thousand hour rule, anders ericson the nineteen ninety three study, all of that stuff and the debate whether. There's talent and all this sort of stuff. We've all heard about it. We read books about it. How many you can do it? Come on, you read books about it. How many you can do it? It's too confusing. What what you need to do is challenge yourself. Me and Ham she would always move up to another level of soccer before she was ready. And how does that help you, especially especially beginners or I work with concert artists, people who are touring the world, and when I show them how it really works, like, oh my gosh, I can't believe how much time I've been waste. I have done this quickly, and it's so much more efficient, and I just you know, and we just don't.

27:05 Know how that works. So that's what you need to do. And the way you do it is by if you read a book about deliberate practice. You have not reduced the cognitive loads. You're reading a whole book. What do you do when the rubber meets the road when you've never done this before? Don't know if you've done this before, you've done some of it, because you wouldn't learn anything without it. So anything you've learned has been using arts of deliberate practice. You just don't know what you're doing. What do you do? When you sit down? You do this plend I'm going to play the first four measures? Okay, Then you do it. Then you stop and say this is what everyone leaves out to reflect piece the lease, do it again and then again, then again? What could be better? What just happened there?

27:47 Don't be surprised if you don't know, even though you were sitting right there moving your fingers on the instrument. Don't be surprised if you don't know. Whenever I teach deliberate practice the first. Time to not about ninety percent other people the first time I do it. So how is that? Would you just do? Blank stare? This is how much we pay attention in practice. And I say, wait a minute. Didn't you have the trumpet? You were standing right here. I could swear you had a trumpet and you were playing. Weren't you here yet? You have no idea what you just did? We leave out the reflect piece to It's going to take a while for a lot of people just to start finding things. Then something's gonna happen. You're going to find six things. Oh my gosh, look at all these things that are wrong.

28:29 Why are you getting upset? They were never going to get fixed unless you found them. This is a glorious, glorious day. And since there are ways to get better at anything, able to solve the problems, you just have to learn how to do them. And then look what this also does. I'm going to try to fix all six Well that's too many. Maybe I should try just one. Well I went to the one thing. Actually there's four notes and two of them will maybe I should do just one. It breaks everything down to the smallest thing. Now, I've taught classes of students, and then my favorite is teaching one on one, which I really try and focus on more of that than anything else. And as you know, because you've also taught classes, everyone is at their own level. And I love your practice class that you have going on right now because you're like, I don't care what you practice, I don't care what you work on, working it for like this amount of time and pick whatever you want. So it's like you're you're honoring your like meeting people where they're at, there, just where they're at, and saying, let's work with what you've got going and don't don't put a cap on it, don't limit it. And I think the hardest thing for any of us, which I kind of mentioned before, is that you know, we learn, and maybe I didn't really mention this per se, but when you're practicing even like that, those let's say three measures or four measures, it feels like and you did say this looking at the stairs, and I use this terminology. If you look at like the whole staircase going up, you'll.

29:57 Never get to the top. But if you take one step out of time, it's gonna take as long as it's gonna take. You can't limit yourself on you know how long? You know? I don't know a show pen piece could take you to play. Wait, I booked a coveringhouse big for six weeks away. Then I showed up and I couldn't play. Right? Whoever told you it was only gonna. Take six weeks? Right? That's seven not six weeks in a day? Sorry, but I could never resist that one. How do we make a judgment that I should have learned it in that amount of time. Maybe it was just too darn difficult and you bid off more than you can chew. Maybe you just didn't practice it right. Maybe you played better and you thought you did. Who knows, But whoever said, whoever gave you the idea that all the neurobiological changes that need to take place in your brain, and you are changing your brain in significant ways when you practice physically changing your brain, you are whoever told you that it was gonna be six weeks or five weeks or eight weeks. We as humans tend to think, once we kind of get exhausted doing something, that we've done enough work and should have achieved something by now, and there's no there's no reason for that really.

31:04 And it's so gosh, it's strange, but it's reality as a musician. And you mentioned something like this in one of your webinars, like, and I teach this too. I'm like, I'm right handed, right so a lot of people are right handed. My husband's left handed, and some people are left handed. But for me, being a right handed, my left handed is a little slower. So I say, it's the slower child. You have to have a little bit more patience with the left hand for my right hand people, but both hands. It's amazing to me how we have to train them. When it comes to learning the instrument. It's not just like okay, pick up you know, bag of groceries and put it here and put it there.

31:47 You don't think about it. You know, you drive a car, you just know what you're doing. But when you're playing the instrument, going back to really get to know your instrument but also your regions and knowing where you're playing and what you're playing and give yourself that. That permission to take as long as it's gonna take to learn. And what you need during those times are the ability to come up with small problems that are real, genuine challenges. It may only be four notes, but that are real and then fix it. Then you move on to the next Oh hey, all right, what's the next challenge? Oh?

32:27 I gotta figure that out. Oh I can't believe this and getting worse? Well, am I ever gonna Ooh? There it is? And then you can go ahead. Sorry, no, So tell us mort with the amount of research that you've done, tell us a little bit more about the brain and how the brain works. Let's say, you know, I've practiced, maybe throughout my day. I put it in an hour like on and off, right, so at the end of my day, and I'm just focusing on me. But I'm talking about general musicians who practice at the end of the day. What is our brain doing? Are we still practicing? Are we what we put in? Do we remember it? Do we retain it? How does that all work? Wow? Well that's enough for about twelve books. It's interesting to say, as our brain, So let's just start with this.

33:11 Whenever you do anything, you're changing your brain. It's responding to what is going on, and if it's anything new, it's making adjustments as to how it deals with what this new thing is. What it's doing is it's creating new neural networks. It's connecting neurons to other neurons. How everything we think, every move we make, everything we do is governed by neural networks. When I want to do. This with my hand, okay, that's a specific neural network firing off. If I do this again, it's the same neural network firing off again. So when we're doing motor skills, and this works for cognitive skills too, because cognitive skills are represented by neural network. So what we're doing is we're changing our brain. We're trying to figure out and now it depends how much skill we already have. If we can.

33:57 Already do ninety percent of what we're learning, then the brain's already automatized those skills. That's getting it into long term memory. You asked about what happens at the end of the day. What happens at the end of the day is sleep where memory is consolidated into long term memory. And then you have to work on something that which is spacing and interleaving called retrieval practice, which is something none of us do. None of us. That's why we go into tests and think we're going to get an A and end up getting a C because. We learned the material, but we didn't do retrieval practice. Yes, and then so what. You do is you change your brain that way, and you can do it quite quickly, for instance, doing something like contextual interference, which is what I usually start the practice class, which is taking anything you want to play anything, and this works for other types of knowledge as well, and making it different so that it becomes harder. So the easiest way to do this that we think of is using dotted rhythms.

34:53 Right, we play something and then we play with the dot. How many are you out there at some point in life had someone introduce issue to the concept of dotted rhythm, right, and you're like, oh, you have problems with that scale passage or with that chord progression or whatever. I want you to try this. Try playing it with the dot rhythm and you struggled, and what's going on? You got better at it, We'll try this rhythm. We'll try that. You got better, and then you got better And then what happened? Whenever I see people, it's always the same thing. Well, I still do it, but it doesn't work like it did before. Like the first couple of times I did it, it was amazing, like it made me way better. And now I do it because my teacher told me to do it. How is it our teachers have never and I was never told this a master's degree. How is it our teachers don't tell us it's not about the rhythm, it's about interfering with the context until it becomes difficult. Once you're good at the rhythms and you can just rattle them off, they're not helping you anymore.

35:48 No one I know ever has come up. In fact, I see people out there selling books on this stuff who want to talk about buried practice and this and that. They don't know the concept of desirable difficulty, which. Is would you say, I'm sorry, you don't mean to interrupt you. Would you say, that's in comparison to understanding. So what I mean by that is I want to I want to learn something so in order for me to retain it and learn it. I guess what's the difference between I guess understanding and retaining I don't think there's much difference. But if I want to learn something, I need to understand it so then I can I can grow with it, because if I don't understand what I'm doing, Like, for instance, if I'm doing, you know, three measures, playing three measures.

36:36 I have to kind of understand for me and my teaching. I want to be able to understand what steps I'm taking, what regions I'm in, where I'm going, because that gives me kind of a road map. To Yes, that's the first stage. You go through this and say, I have to know where the notes are. The first plan is knowing where the notes. I don't think anyone disagrees with that first plan. I mean, once your fingers reach the instrument right, some people say, we'll go home and analyze the theory. Okay, whatever, that's all fine and good, whatever your assignment is. That there's nothing wrong with going home and analyzing it first, if you have the theory skills to do so, it's not wrong with that. Go home and just look for the hard parts, okay whatever, that's cool too, Or you go home.

37:19 And just play whatever it is. But we know that when the fingers hit the instrument, the plan is to get all the notes right to what you're and you do it. Oh my gosh, the third and fourth note I can't really get or I don't know what region I'm in here or something like that. Okay, well let me just double check. Oh okay, that's this region. Oh oh, I thought it was this. Bam. That's learning right there when you say I thought it was this, but now I. See it's this. That is the first stage, the understanding. And here's what you're doing. You're trying to get this stuff out of your working memory and into your long term memory. Working memory holds somewhere around five to seven pieces of information at the time. It's why you forget someone's name two seconds after they tell you, because another couple of pieces of information come in. But if you're only a to deal with that amount of information, how is it?

38:02 You can have discussions about vastly complex topics, whether it's music, history, politics, sports, it doesn't matter. You can have but how is it where's all that information coming from? It's stored in your long term memory and you used a good tern there as you're saying it, Well, I need to understand it so I can retain it. Retain is only the first part. The part we always miss is retrieve. It's not enough to get it into your memory. Yes, now, with retrieval, though, there's a I think there's a line in the sand because I could play three measures over and. Over again because they're in different regions. I'm trying to get it or to retain it. However, there the fine line is overpracticing those three measures because in your one of your your practice class, the Saturday class, five minutes or ten minutes, and then choose something different, right, because that's the interer leaving. So I'm wanting to express to our listeners how important that is because taking the focus off of that frustration you you you stop it, Okay, So when we get I tell my series, if you get frustrated with a piece, you just need to stop, because then your brain's already thinking about is there any more ice cream in the.

39:17 That's mental fatigue. You cannot practice through mental fatigue. But if you practice this way, not through mental fatigue, it's not lifting weights, you don't push through, but if you push to write when you get frustrated, realize that you need a break or that you need to quit for the day. And then if you keep doing that over the course of days, you'll be able to go for an extra three or four minutes. Then you'll find another three or four minutes and you'll find it keeps because you're building something in the prefrontal cortex of your brain that governs your ability control yourself and focus that hard. It's a developable skill, so you have to learn how to focus this. I don't care if you're practicing thirty minutes a day and you do this and you can only go five. You made more progress in those five minutes than you used to in your thirty I promise.

39:59 You that, and go ahead. No, you you had mentioned I think it was Saturday's class about going to the gym and working out like you. You're not going to be looking like the Hulk after you know, two hours of one workout. You just have to be consistent with repetition of practicing of working out and be okay with that. But I like the gym. You can have small victories every day where you literally can do things that you couldn't do before. Just because it's not play something the way this great artist played it. It's I couldn't even get through the first four measures in time. Now I can trust me. That will make you feel great. Then the next day I'm doing more. I'm doing more, and before you know it, Oh, I learned the whole piece.

40:41 How about that? What's your what's your advice or suggestions. I'll try and be brief on this. So let's say we're playing, Okay, I'm working on a nocturne by Billy Joel. Right, it's it's it jumps from you know, from different regions on the keyboard and so so it's a beautiful piece. My point is is I just went blank the timing, Okay, the dynamics when we're practicing portions of the song. And this is not just for me. This is for the listeners who are musicians and who are students as well. You talk about and I talk about it too when I teach. Don't worry about the dynamics, don't worry about the timing. Just find out where your steps off, find out where you're dancing, find out where you're going. But then when do you bring in the timing and do you suggest timing is just follow it like buy the book or for me, I'm like, let's put a little of your dynamics in there, or do you feel like the dynamics that the composer has put in there is just like that's got to be that way.

41:48 This is an area of great controversy, especially in classical music, which is what I studied, but all over the place. Oh, if you're going to do repetitions, do them with the feeling and do them with their understand where that's coming from. Now, who's giving you that advice? Someone who's automatized the skills of a thousand different shapes of crescendos. Someone who's played. For so long that their fingers are not Yes, I can cite read things and make them sound decent the first time I see them. That's a rising line, I'll throw in a little swell and it'll sound. But I've got I've been doing forty years of formal study to do this. So this advice that we're getting is well meaning, but it's too much cognitive load. If you can't play the notes, how the heck are you going to control your dynamics?

42:36 I love that. Yeah, So most of. Us are at a level where I don't care what it is. You first need to play the notes. Now here's the thing. It's not the most elegant saying, but interpretation is a technique first, or it won't exist last. Okay, So now you go. To your interpretation, and how do we teach it because I taught it this way for a long long time. Percendo there, no, no, no, get louder there, yes, yes, feel it. Oh here, now do this and you get it shaped up just right and it's nice, and say there, play it that way, okay, cool, let's go on. Now. The next week they come in, they don't do it. Well, I thought I was doing it, That's what they always say. I thought I was doing it, and you do think you're doing it. They're being very honest.

43:19 What we don't do is say, wow, you don't know how to control a crescendo. Why am I trying to get you to do a crescendo over and over again here in a lesson and you're not in full control. I, as the teacher, say, whoa, let's back off, let's do this. Maybe let's take this thing and play it. With a day crescendo. Then let's do a swell. Then let's do every other note really loud, then, and let's do all these little bits of contextual interference that give us greater dynamic control. Depending on where the student was at, I might say, listen, go home and play you your two octave scales and try to play the first note as quiet as possible, the last note as loud as possible, and be even through all of them. I would do it as a technique first, then you can layer it in. It's kind of like this, if you're teaching a kid who recently learned to walk to dribble of basketball, you don't do both at the same time, Or to walk and dribble of basketball, you don't do both at the same time.

44:14 Walk better at walking, then you do dribbling by itself. Then you do it together because you have to automatize both skills before you bring them together. The problem with this old advice, which is well meaning, I understand exactly where it's coming from. It's for people with higher level skills than most of us are at yet. Because I was getting this advice as like a freshman in college and I just started reading music the year before. I was a self taught rock and roll guitar player, Like, really, really, you want me to play I don't have enough control yet. Then you can layer the other things in when you get other skills and you do more crescendos and you do more things like that that you're mute at. Lisa just so you know, when you get. More more skills, then you can layer the other the other shore, then you can layer the other stuff in.

44:59 This is to the Dunning Kruger effect where people with higher level skills. You have to be really careful with this. When you're a teacher, especially if you have really high level skills, you will assume knowledge in your student that isn't there, and that's the kiss of death for learning. They try and try and try and try and not be able to do it and feel like they don't have talent. Right, all of us teachers have an out in music, Well, you just didn't have enough talent. That's not it. Anyone can do anything, and you have to start at a level at where at which we can handle it, and most of us want to start it a higher one. Yes, yes too. Until you've autotized the skills. That's separation of the two.

45:40 Until you've automatized the skills, do one or the other. In fact, some people might want to take this advice. Listen, if you're trying to learn something really really hard and you haven't been playing that long, why don't you try and learn in two or three easy pieces with crescendos and day crescendos and do that and get those skills going where the cognitive load is lower so that you can go into the other thing. Go ahead, go ahead, and. Please we're just about at a time and I could talk to you for another hour, and there's so much to talk about. Please tell us again for our listeners, how can students get in touch with you and how can they learn more about your your classes? Yeah? At dot com uh d R E G G G O O D H A R T and uh there's like a free thing there that I'll show you how to do dot and rhythms, catual in reference.

46:29 It'll make you better at something you're struggling with now. It's free. Actually a bunch of free stuff on there. There's classes for sale, there's all sorts of stuff. And you can always get in touch with me at hello at breag goodheart dot com. Well great, thank you so much for being on the show today. I'm all about keeping music alive and and being an inspiration for our students. And I had to add. That I wrote that when you said at the beginning, I wrote that down you said, keep music alive. I will make this very quick. You want to keep music alive. Folks, Stop letting kids quit because they don't get it. Keep them in there because they do get it. Not forcing them they'll want to be there when they actually learn. That'll help keep music alive.

47:11 Love it well. Thank you so much, Greg, We will be in touch. And again to our listeners, thank you for being part of our show today. And you know how to get in touch with Greg and you're not hard to find. Great good heart, you get the three gee's. So thank you so much, Greg, and I will see you soon. Thanks, see you soon, Okay. Take care. Thank you so much for tuning in today, and I would like to end our show with a little piano playing. We have about a minute left. If you are a student of music, if you're interested in taking lessons, Greg has been a great inspiration to me and I know you will enjoy learning from him as well.

48:05 Please help keep music alive.