Benefits of musical cross-training
Benefits of musical cross-training
My teaching mission is to make my students into well-rounded, self-sufficient musicians. Part of that is building a broad range of skills. The broader the range of skills you have, the more those skills will reinforce and amplify each other, so one of the best things you can do for your development as a musician is to study a secondary musical skill. In this post, I'm going to give my recommendations for the top 4 music skills you should study, and I'll explain how musical cross-training can benefit you.
Athletes cross-train all the time. Doing another sport or workout in addition to the one that’s their main focus helps them improve their overall fitness and gain skills and abilities that will give them an advantage. For example, many Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fighters do yoga to improve their flexibility and balance.
In sports, the most popular cross-training activities include yoga, weightlifting, and swimming. For musicians, no matter what primary instrument or skill you’re pursuing, I recommend cross-training in at least one of the following four areas:
Singing - Everyone has a voice, so everyone should know a little something about how to make music with it. Singing really well is a unique skill set that doesn’t overlap a whole lot with other instruments on a technical level. The union of words and music allows for a different kind of expression than any other instrument can achieve. There’s also an especially intense psychological component to singing, and every musician can benefit from exploring this most personal (and most portable!) of instruments.
Piano - Piano has been widely seen as the essential instrument for the study of classical music, and keyboards are used in innumerable other types of music-making, too. Higher education music degrees almost universally require piano proficiency, and although the merits of this situation are hotly debated, it’s what we’ve got to work with at the moment. Pianos are ubiquitous, especially in educational settings, and so, so much music comes with a piano accompaniment. Because of its wide range, its capability of playing a great number of pitches at once, the very simple functionality of hitting a key and getting the intended note, and the intuitive layout of pitches on the keyboard, it’s useful for many purposes and especially convenient for the study of harmonic theory.
Recording tech - By now, recording equipment and programs are even more ubiquitous and more essential to modern musicianship than piano, and we’re way behind where we should be in teaching students what they need to know about recording and editing music. Because schools are not yet requiring basic instruction in recording technologies, and private teachers are generally not investing in building their competence in this area (guilty, but I’m working on it!), musicians are mostly forced to resort to learning from fellow amateurs or the internet. But make no mistake, knowing how to record and edit is the new basic music competency. Singers in particular need to know how to use microphones and how to edit tracks together. Every musician should know a little about how to use a DAW (digital audio workstation) like Garage Band, Ableton, Audacity, or any of the numerous other options out there. No, it’s not exactly an instrument you could perform live, but of course you can use tech to make music, and you’ll learn a lot about listening and about what makes music sound and feel the way it does, too.
Guitar - Another ubiquitous instrument, the sound of the guitar is essential for pop, rock, and country styles. Unlike a piano, it’s a portable and inexpensive instrument, and the ease of playing chords and improvising riffs leads to a different type of music-making mindset.
I do not teach guitar or recording tech, but I do teach piano and singing, and I sneak elements of each into lessons for the other. I also offer dual lessons, piano for singers, and singing for instrumentalists. I can’t recommend this type of training highly enough! My cross-training students are such creative and confident musicians, and they tend to advance more quickly than students with a more narrow focus.
While there are both advantages and potential drawbacks to cross-training in sports, in music, the only drawback is that you might spend less time practicing your primary instrument. The benefits are more than enough to be worth that time. Here’s what you can achieve with music study in a secondary subject:
Understand music better and deepen your skills
Some instruments lend themselves more easily to developing certain skills. Piano can push you to read music better and is helpful for studying harmonic theory, for example, and singing helps you make expressive and personal music more easily. You’ll also understand musical concepts, especially theory, better when you have multiple ways to approach them and use them. Playing piano helps you practice vocal music - if you don’t have perfect pitch, you need reference pitches from an instrument. You’ll most likely be singing with other voices or an accompaniment, and you can hear what those other parts of your pieces will sound like if you can play them on the piano. Piano skills can also help you out a lot if you’re composing or creating music in a digital editing workspace. And trying out multiple instruments gives you more different ways to express yourself through music.
Collaborate better
One of the greatest things about making music is coming together with other musicians to create a performance or recording. You can collaborate with another musician better if you have experience with their instrument and know what’s easy, difficult, or impossible for them to do. Understanding what singers are doing and what they need makes you a better accompanist, producer, or composer. Singers, likewise, can make their best contribution if they understand what the instrumentalists and producers are doing. If you compose, you should definitely try as many instruments as possible to get a sense for how to write something that will sound good that musicians will want to perform.
Make music more independently
Collaboration is awesome, but being a self-sufficient musician who can do all the work to bring their creative vision to life is also awesome. With multiple skills, you can create recordings all on your own. If you can do the vocal parts and the accompaniment parts, you can make and edit together your own full performances without needing anyone else’s contributions. A cappella multi-tracks are extremely popular these days; a singer with a good mic and some audio editing know-how can create lush harmonies out of only their own voice. And if making tracks isn’t your thing, singing and self-accompanying on piano or guitar lets you perform a whole song on your own, live.
Make more money
I’m gonna be honest, learning music is not really likely to lead you to a lucrative career, but if it does work out for you and you do become good enough at music to get paid, you’ll have more options for paid work if you have diverse skills. If you can sing and self-accompany on piano or guitar, you’re a one person show; that means you don’t have to share that paycheck. And those vocal multi-tracks I mentioned before are the basis of many monetized YouTube channels. On top of performing options, you’ll also have multiple different skills you could teach.
Do you cross-train? What are you learning, and how has it helped you? Tell me about it in the comments.
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