In this episode, John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com) interviews Tony Parlapiano, founder of popMATICS, about his innovative online piano curriculum that focuses on playing by ear, creativity, improvisation, and practical theory. Tony explains how he’s built a strong online student community through popMATICS. He also discusses how storytelling and collecting ‘musical souvenirs’ deepens listening, and how he balances structure with freedom to help students play and create music every day.
In this episode:
- How Tony’s methods focus on teaching piano through creativity and personal connection rather than traditional method books. He emphasizes understanding music beyond just reading notes, fostering a community where students can explore music freely.
- How popMATICS uniquely blends curriculum and an online community that encourages students to learn by doing and sharing experiences. This approach helps students of all levels, from beginners to those with formal music education, to connect with music in a meaningful way.
- Tony’s concept of “souvenirs” to help students retain musical lessons. This strategy encourages students to find personal connections with music to make learning more engaging and memorable.
- The importance of authenticity in Tony’s marketing strategy and how he shares content that reflects his teaching philosophy, attracting the right students for his approach to piano.
For those looking to grow as instructors and build your music school, Tony shares his truly innovative approach to teaching piano that emphasizes creativity, community, and understanding music as a life skill. His unique methods foster deep connections with students of all levels and backgrounds, and highlight practical strategies for integrating music into everyday lives of students.
Rock School Proprietor is a podcast for independent music school owners and lesson studio operators looking to attract more students and create a sustainable business. New episodes drop Wednesdays at RockSchoolProprietor.com and on all podcast streaming platforms.
Tony’s links:
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Episode Transcript:
(Please note: This transcript was generated by robots. There may be errors. For the best experience, please listen to the podcast episode.)
John Kozicki (00:01.006)
Welcome to Rock School Proprietor podcast. My name is John Kazicki and my guest today is a piano instructor, the founder of Popmatics, which is an online piano curriculum and community focused on playing piano by ear and a real working knowledge of theory and improvisation and creativity. Tony, part of the piano. All right.
Tony (00:27.747)
That’s it. Very well done.
John Kozicki (00:30.584)
Thank you. Thank you. I usually ask those things, but we had some technical difficulties before we started and I forgot. I forgot to ask the pronunciation pronunciation of your name, Tony. I’m excited for this, Tony. How are you doing? OK. So that intro that I gave you real working knowledge of theory. So this is the first time we’ve met, but.
Tony (00:42.851)
Okay. Yeah, me too. I’m doing great. Talk.
John Kozicki (01:00.29)
I heard you on Eric Branagh’s podcast and I thought like, man, Tony is teaching piano in a way that feels a lot like how guitar players teach guitar and guitar instructors teach guitar. And you wrapped it all up in your brand Popmatics, which is an online curriculum and community. give me the short version of how you describe.
Popmatics because yes, it’s a curriculum, but it’s also this you’ve created this real legit community and culture around something that you’re doing online, which I think is really unique.
Tony (01:43.972)
Yeah, it’s funny, you ask a question like that, that should be very simple to answer if someone had spent lot of thinking about how am gonna market this thing? How am I gonna get this thing out there? I would say our purpose is to make music easy for people and to give them an experience where I provide kind of a minimal amount of structure and giving them the opportunity to maximize their level of freedom. So even though we have a program and we have a community,
John Kozicki (01:48.386)
You
John Kozicki (01:57.293)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (02:14.027)
And we do a lot of things together as a community, like throughout the course of the year, we go on what we call the great adventure, where we explore all 12 keys over the course of 12 months. So that’s something that we go through as a school together. So every month there feels like this natural new starting point. We’re exploring new technology and every key gets a unique presentation versus sometimes the standard thing where everything’s the same. just got to, you know, every…
John Kozicki (02:30.242)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (02:41.057)
landscape, every key that we go to has its own experience. So there’s a lot of community elements to it, but there’s a path for each individual to customize and learning how to kind of share that space together in a community where it can be for really, we have students in here who have been playing for decades with degrees in music, and we have other people where this is their first experience with music.
John Kozicki (03:07.093)
Hmm. I love that. I love that. I’m gonna I’m gonna put a pin in the you have students who’ve been playing music for you who have degrees in music. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I run a rock school. So it’s very much about community and about playing from day one, right? Our goal is, yeah, cool. Come join our club and play music with us. And you’ll learn music along the way by doing it.
Tony (03:08.141)
So it’s.
John Kozicki (03:37.49)
And we’ve got a student in one of our adult bands who is a middle school orchestra teacher. I believe she’s got a master’s degree, And she plays cello and very accomplished. And I have these conversations with her where she says, I want to learn how to play and understand music like you guys do. And it blows my mind. I personally did not go to school for music. I went to school for
for business and marketing, but I’ve always played music. And so that’s the kind of stuff that blows my mind. Do you get that same thing with those students?
Tony (04:19.169)
Yeah, well nobody taught them this side of the music making. A lot of times they worked with the final product, the final results. They were always learning from sheet music and they’re sat next to a supervisor each week who’s letting them know every mistake that they’re making. so that experience where they don’t really often have had any guidance into just creating music, just making music with very
John Kozicki (04:37.249)
Mmm.
Tony (04:48.995)
minimal constraints. So we definitely find that. get a lot of, why didn’t anybody show me this before? And so there’s definitely a little bit of that. And I would say sometimes the beginner has an advantage in some ways, because they come in and they don’t have any history of thinking that there’s a hard key. We have a new student who comes in, she says,
I don’t understand when people talk about hard keys. I feel like every month you show me a new key and that becomes my new favorite key. Like what a beautiful experience to have as a student and to be able to kind of treat them all with kind of a balanced approach where we’re just, okay, we’re going to focus on this one key throughout the course of the year. And so no one’s ever really built them a structure like that. It was possibly too much structure with very limited amounts of freedom. And so they feel like they can’t.
just play with freedom because there’s a right way. It’s been so ingrained from day one.
John Kozicki (05:51.179)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (05:56.302)
So you’re a piano instructor and that is not, you don’t talk like a piano instructor in that way. Like the way that you’re approaching it. Again, I come from like teaching guitar so I get it but how did you personally get where you are as a piano instructor?
Tony (06:17.366)
So that’s an interesting question too, because I didn’t have the typical experience that most piano instructors have. I didn’t play piano as a child. I didn’t start playing piano until I was in college. And I was already on track. I thought I was going to be a high school band director. And I played brass instruments and I played a little guitar. The brother who’s 24 years older than me taught me how to play bass. And if I could just play the roots, I could play with him and his buddy and their little duo. So that became kind of my start.
John Kozicki (06:34.092)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (06:47.578)
And I never really had a piano instructor. I was in school for music. I did have a couple of semesters of classical piano lessons, which…
Tony (07:01.652)
I mean, I have to tell you, when I changed my major to being a piano major, I didn’t even know all my major triads in root position. Like I really didn’t know what I didn’t know. And so the fortunate thing is at the time I was working at a mom and pop music shop and there was a lot of teachers there that were part-time teachers. were primarily gigging musicians. So I was surrounded by a lot of gigging musicians and that got me the opportunity to play with others.
John Kozicki (07:09.261)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (07:31.03)
So I got started playing in bands right away. And then I started working with a lot of different singer songwriters. So when you say my approach, I sound more like a guitar teacher. I learned almost everything I know from guitar players. I learned a lot of what I know from guitar players who don’t understand or don’t communicate in standard theory terms. Where if I’m like, I’m asking them about a chord, they just play it again. And they’re like, it’s that. It’s that sound. And then
John Kozicki (07:44.429)
Hahaha!
John Kozicki (07:51.221)
Yeah, yeah.
John Kozicki (07:58.958)
I
Tony (08:00.483)
I had a songwriter friend who played in lot of alternate tunings, and he had really just no idea what the chords were called. He might be able to give me the root, but all these extensions, he’d have to play one note at a time, and I’d have to find it on my keyboard and try to make sense of it. So in a way, I was kind of protected, and I was able to develop my understanding of sound through trying to understand all my friends who had a unique approach to it.
But at the same time, I was in music school having to learn the standard theory, so I was able to make those connections, if that makes sense.
John Kozicki (08:36.845)
Oh, 100%. Yeah, absolutely. It’s you had that same like it’s like the Victor Wooten moment, right? You had an older brother who was playing music and you just wanted to you wanted to speak that language, you know, you wanted to get in there and jam. You didn’t have the training, but you just started communicating with music with other people who are already speaking it.
Tony (08:37.986)
Yeah.
Tony (09:05.73)
I’ve never thought of that connection. Victor Wooten is such a hero of mine. I try to watch every interview that they ever put out with him in it. I read his book and I dip into it all the time. It’s one of five books that I really treasure. I love that book so much and I recommend it all my students. A lot of times they don’t know what to do with a book like that because they love the philosophical approach. But then they’re like, okay, but what do I do? What do I actually do? I think that’s where Potmatics kind of fits in.
Victor Wooten gave us such a beautiful story from his imagination of this learning process and creative freedom. But he himself said, I don’t want to make a Victor Wooten method. know, don’t want, you know, because how he got there, how do you explain that sometimes? And I think that that’s one of the advantages I have as a music instructor because I didn’t really have a piano instructor.
John Kozicki (09:43.533)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (10:00.983)
guiding me the whole way. Yet at the same time, I had lots of mentors and people to look up to and people to play with. And I was in different bands.
I can remember what it was like not to know these things. I can remember what it was like to learn these things. And I tend to know where people are or where they’re struggling. And sometimes I’ll meet with people and I’ll talk to anybody for free for a little while, you know, because I love just kind of helping them see where they might be. And I mean, sometimes it’s as simple as just, well, they don’t think in keys. They don’t even think in keys. They don’t even understand that there’s like a home or a tonic, whatever you want to call it.
John Kozicki (10:14.198)
Hmm
John Kozicki (10:37.739)
Right.
Tony (10:39.458)
They’re just memorizing a couple patterns and it doesn’t really mean anything. So eventually those all fall out of your memory. And so they just keep working on their short-term memory over and over and over again. And they can only play the last thing maybe if they have the music with them. It’s like all the fun stuff’s in here and it’s been transferred to like out here. It’s all the focuses. Here’s the chord chart. So even that stuff, I’m totally down for…
John Kozicki (10:43.319)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (11:07.916)
people using chord charts and learning songs through that, but I want them to bring a level of understanding to it. So that’s what Potmatics also offers. It’s like a lens. The fact that I created a whole unique language around it was really more of a way of just kind of leveling the playing field. Because if I start talking, okay, tritone substitutions, sharp 11 chords, lydian this, people, one of two things happen. They might hear something and think they already know it, in which case they kind of bypass it or
John Kozicki (11:16.511)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (11:38.582)
they’ve heard about those things before and it’s been intimidating and confusing. So by kind of creating a totally unique approach that doesn’t dismiss anything from music theory, but helps you build connections to it. Cause as they’re going through the experience, you’re naturally up against your comparative mind. You’re to be like, wait, isn’t that just this or that? And it could, it could be, but the reason that I’ve renamed it is to give you this whole experience. So it’s never just as simple as the label that defines the one thing in music theory. It’s more of a.
subject that kind of opens up.
John Kozicki (12:09.709)
Okay. I wanted to talk a little bit about, I guess, theory and teaching and we’re gonna get deep is what I’m But we’re gonna start simple like on your website for Popmatics. It says, I think it’s the tagline play music, not just notes. And do you think learning to play piano or learning to play an instrument
Tony (12:22.175)
Great.
John Kozicki (12:39.981)
is about understanding how this machine, the piano or the guitar or the drum set works, or is it a way that is more personal for each individual to understand how to use that instrument and apply it to their own lives? Does that make sense?
Are you learning to operate a machine or are you learning to integrate this tool into your life to create something bigger?
Tony (13:10.635)
I would say it’s the balance of both. Even all the homework assignments that we do that I give as the structured homework assignments, I try to make that work into the rhythm of their daily life. We’re always making connections when I’m explaining music theory or we’re going on a creating adventure and I’m describing something. They’re all connected to things that you would do in your everyday life, typical adventures.
even something like the pentatonic scale. So we call that like the path. And it’s like you’re on the path. And then, you know, they start to learn like, the pentatonic scale. There’s all these different scales and numbers and all these things. So I don’t reject that term, but I don’t come in and I don’t really, I don’t use that standard terminology of a pentatonic scale. What they learn from us is, it’s a major scale without the half steps. So they learn it in something that’s
got a story built around it. And then when we bring those half steps in to kind of complete the scale, they kind of think of those, that four and seven from the key, which is kind of funny because we’re recording this on April 7th, four, seven. The four and the seven, you know, these borders, it’s kind like the borders to the path that help keep you within the key. So there’s like a story built around the whole experience. And then the traditional theory label comes in later. So I think it’s a nice balanced approach of both.
John Kozicki (14:23.916)
Tony (14:40.181)
But the experience always comes before the label. People would call that sound before symbol. And so you might have a whole adventure and you say, okay, we went on this great adventure. We took this trip to the spring and we use these characters from Potmanics. And that’s what they call Dorian. You know, they’ve gone through this whole thing and they don’t, if I start with that today, we’re going to learn Dorian. Dorian’s major scale, you know, it’s, it, people start tuning out right away.
John Kozicki (14:57.644)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (15:06.763)
But if you just kind of take them on the adventure. So I think it’s kind of a balance because at the end of those creating classes, the last thing we do is we take five minutes. We all go on mute and we all create for five minutes, feeling inspired by the things we just went through together as a class. But also it’s player’s choice now. You’ve been listening to me for 45 minutes. Your only goal is to create for five minutes in the key of the month. And
John Kozicki (15:06.87)
Yeah.
Tony (15:33.067)
They’re all instructed to record those and to store them in their private locker, to send them to their locker. That’s kind one of our daily practices is create for five minutes every day. If you miss a day, don’t let it turn into two in a row. You need a little grace period because people will be too hard on themselves. But you just tell them, like, you can miss a day, but don’t let it turn into two in a row. And so this becomes kind of part of the rhythm of their life, just like everything else. I have coffee in the morning. I read a book for a little bit. I do this and I go do my campfire recording. And so.
John Kozicki (15:42.336)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (15:58.958)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (16:01.046)
I hope that’s answering the question. It’s kind of tying everything together.
John Kozicki (16:05.003)
Yeah, and I sort of anticipated you’d say, well, yeah, it’s a balance. Like, yes, you’re learning how to use this tool, but you’re also learning how this tool fits into your life to create. And the reason why I think that’s so important and the reason why I think it is enlightening to hear you talk about it in a way that is different when it’s presented as piano.
Tony (16:18.048)
Yes.
John Kozicki (16:35.625)
Because I think this is really important for all of all of us as instructors and studio owners to understand from a marketing perspective. Because if we’re looking at this like kind of a spectrum, right, like you’ve almost have this this engineer focus on one end. This is like this is it’s very technical and this is how you use this this thing called the piano. And these are the steps that you take to be able to like put your fingers in the right place and play these songs.
Tony (16:44.545)
Mm.
John Kozicki (17:04.907)
And then you’ve got this opposite extreme, which is like total creativity. And maybe you don’t even understand how it works, but you just push the keys, right? And see like what happens and what kind of sounds I can make. The balance is in the middle. But I think why this is so important for us as instructors, because beginners don’t know the difference.
Parents who are looking for music lessons don’t know the difference. They don’t know the difference between an instructor who approaches it more like an engineer or an instructor who approaches it more like a wild creative. They’re just looking for this thing called piano lessons.
Tony (17:44.725)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (17:46.806)
And if you are just accepting students on the basis of like, teach piano, that can mean so many different things. But if, if we examine again, as instructors, as studio owners, if we examine like, well, where are we on that spectrum? How do we approach music? What, what is our understanding and how are we going to then present that to our students? That’s going to be really, really helpful. And you finding the right students and
Tony (18:02.017)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (18:15.262)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (18:16.567)
telling other students like, you really want this more traditional classical approach, you should go to this other instructor. You know, it’s about fit. And we have the benefit of understanding that because we understand music in a deeper way. But we don’t always market it that way, if that makes sense.
Tony (18:37.97)
Yeah, it’s well, it’s true. And because sometimes if you start marketing it and it sounds too wild and it starts to sound not like what parents think of as piano lessons, which is what we kind of ran into. At first, Popmatics is very difficult to put into words and it still is. We’re talking about it on a podcast and I can still feel like I’m like, there’s so much more I could say about it.
John Kozicki (18:50.289)
Mm, okay.
Tony (19:03.582)
I think it’s when you make it, put it in your marketing, it’s really important to be clear about what it is that you do and what it is that you don’t do. And for the most part, my marketing efforts are very authentic and I don’t work from scripts. I don’t do any paid ads. I just put content out on social media and my regular routine is I go down and I record for
John Kozicki (19:13.549)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (19:32.948)
turn on the camera, I don’t even have an idea yet and I just record something for 15 minutes and at the end of that I throw the logo on the video and I do a little editing and I upload it. And that’s just kind of my daily at bat. And that’s how we primarily get students. And so they get it through that experience and then making it, I hope I’m not going too far off the track here, but it’s like, I let people know the one thing I don’t really teach here is how to read music.
because everybody else focuses on that. So I’m gonna teach you everything that happens before the music gets written, everything that happens before the music goes on the page, because those are all the final decisions at that moment for that composer. Every composer probably at some point you put the pencil down, you say, okay, it’s done. they could, like, a lot of them come back and they’re like, I would have changed that one thing. I listened to Paul Simon talking about that. He’s talking about Graceland, the album. Perfect song to him.
almost wouldn’t change a thing, but there was still one thing in there. He was like, I might not have done that. It’s like there’s this, and I think when you only work from the end result, and that’s the experience, I don’t know. I went totally off the rails from what you were asking, but that’s just kind of where I’m. Yeah, please.
John Kozicki (20:32.717)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (20:44.407)
I’ll bring it back. I’ll bring it back. You had mentioned. Well, you mentioned a couple of things. One is you don’t do paid ads. You said you don’t always have an idea. You just go and you record and then that becomes the social media post and that becomes the content. And there’s something really authentic about that.
And I think that authenticity comes comes through, right? So while it’s not necessarily strategic in you saying this is what I am, this is who I am as an instructor and this is what Popmatics is about as a curriculum and as a community, there is an authenticity there. And it doesn’t feel like. Mrs. Connelly, who was my piano teacher when I was.
nine years old and I had to ride my bike to her her house and like I never got a choice in what music I played and she just handed me the book and that’s what we’re doing. It doesn’t feel like that. So while people don’t necessarily again going back to what I was saying they may not know exactly what they’re looking for in a curriculum and an instructor by process of elimination they can say well I know I don’t want I know I don’t want this to be like
something I have to study and feel like it’s school. And so I think the authenticity is coming through. So by design, you’re finding those students that are representative of how you teach.
Tony (22:20.096)
I don’t, I don’t try, and as you’re saying that, I don’t really try for a specific audience. And in fact, my audience has changed a lot since I turned this into the online school. I went from teaching mostly children and now teaching mostly adults. And I realized that I’m probably not gonna be most people’s first stop, just not. They will have had to have gone through it, but this is what we know about people in music, who take music lessons, is they will suffer through
years of lessons that feel like torture in practice and they still want to learn, they’ll still find a way to make it happen because that’s how powerful and magical music is and how much people want to feel connected to it. So I don’t even try to compete for that first spot sometimes because as a piano teacher, I’m so happy if it happens because those are my favorite students who ask brilliant questions like, what’s a scale? And then they test me to like,
how to explain these things that we just throw around and expect everybody to know. I’m not sure if that’s what you’re asking in terms of how do you market it or how do you differentiate yourself when you do something differently like that.
John Kozicki (23:36.301)
No, it’s it’s in fact, and I don’t even care about the question now because you just said something about like a student saying if a student asks you what is a scale.
Tony (23:46.133)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (23:48.482)
I don’t know how you would answer the question, but I’m thinking about how most instructors would answer that question. And they wouldn’t answer what it is. They would answer how you do it. They would say, okay, well, let’s talk about a scale. Well, you’re gonna play these notes in this order, or you’re gonna put your fingers in these places, and that’s a scale. And that is not what a scale is.
Tony (24:14.484)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (24:17.995)
That is how you play a scale. It’s a subtle difference, it’s like, I’m trying to draw like a comparison, like a question that a kid would ask. Like, what is this thing? And they just end up getting like not a what it is, but like a how, or, you know?
Tony (24:31.059)
Yeah. Exactly.
Tony (24:39.071)
Yeah, usually not even a good answer. Sometimes it’s like, well, why you asking? I’ve gotten that a lot from adults. When I’m trying to seek these more, like I’m trying to go like deepen the books and unlock some knowledge that gets thrown around. I ask those questions now of people. And sometimes that’s the answer I get is like, what are you asking that for? Like, you just know that, don’t you? And it’s like, I don’t, I’m trying to share it with the world and I want to adopt.
a nice worldview because Popmatics is a lens, but I don’t want it to be their only lens. want them to be able to look at something through the lens of Popmatics and know like, that’s what Tony taught me that at Popmatics. And I can connect it to this other way because I think it’s super important that people are learning from more than one person. don’t think anybody’s going to get there by themselves. I give myself a lot of credit where
John Kozicki (25:13.099)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (25:26.625)
Yes.
Tony (25:36.177)
I have that at the forefront of my mind most of the time. So I’m always inviting outside perspectives questions. I’m encouraging students to try other programs that specialize in that we might not. So a lot of the students that are here, I’m finding I’m not their only piano instructor. This is not the only music school that they’re involved in. it naturally kind of starts to attract people who are very serious about music learning and wanna
John Kozicki (25:46.893)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (26:05.546)
want to be able to see it from multiple perspectives, which I think is super important. I just think all those prerequisites that I didn’t have, because I started piano at 20 and I was in college and they were using all these terms and I just had to catch up.
John Kozicki (26:17.485)
Hmm.
Tony (26:18.963)
all these prerequisites, I had to build that understanding for myself because no one else was really doing that for me. And so…
John Kozicki (26:26.817)
but also on top of a foundation that you already had, which is really a working knowledge of playing and making music.
Tony (26:37.787)
Yeah, but a lot of this is much newer than you might expect. Even though I was playing with all those songwriters and I was learning how to play, I wasn’t involved in the magic that happened at the beginning. They did the magic part, they brought the idea to the table, and then we try to build it into a song. And so I’m always there and not really understanding how the magic part gets done, and I just get to play my part.
John Kozicki (27:00.31)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (27:07.391)
and I would memorize things, but I wasn’t really, I wasn’t thinking in numbers. The way that I teach now, it’s all within the last eight years, eight and a half years. So for 15 years, I was just…
John Kozicki (27:15.469)
Okay.
Tony (27:21.597)
I was teaching people how to do stuff in a natural kind of organic way, but there wasn’t enough structure around it. Somehow it all worked out because kind of like you said, if you just get a bunch of people in the room and you make music together and you communicate with each other, you kind of develop your own understanding of how things work. But if there’s like an absence of some type of underlying structure, like if I’m just remembering chord progressions and kind of figuring out, but I don’t actually know that I’m playing in the key of A flat right now, like
Even just things like that, said, some people don’t even think about what key they’re in. But as soon as you know I’m in the key of A flat, it’s like, boom, all my foundational knowledge for the key of A flat gets downloaded and I can start playing.
John Kozicki (27:54.349)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (28:03.021)
I want to shift gears and talk about the concept of souvenirs in Popmatics. I think it’s, I think you call it building, students building their decks. So give me a little bit about what a souvenir is and what students building their decks, what that means.
Tony (28:17.407)
Yeah.
Tony (28:25.279)
This is in the you we were talking before this is in our listening pillar There’s like the three areas so we talked a little bit about the creative part and a little bit about the understanding and so this is kind of getting into the area of listening and so the the structure that I put in for students there is to listen for 20 minutes every day to music for 20 minutes every day, which we assume people should be doing anyways, but like you give them some structure around it and so the deck is Is is like their second stop the first thing they build is an eight trap
And it’s just a single playlist, limited capacity. It can only be eight songs, but you can put any eight songs you want in there. But the idea is that you keep listening to these songs 20 minutes a day. And those become, it’s kind of like the waiting room for this experience of building your deck. So when we’re talking about building a deck, I’m relating this to like a deck of cards. So you’ve got 52 cards in a deck, 52 weeks in a year. You try to collect a souvenir each week. And that’s the process of building.
your deck. Now a souvenir is just something, if you have a memorable lesson that you can take away from a song. So just like if you go on vacation and you want to remember the family vacation and you go to this awesome place and there’s a gift shop, you’re not trying to buy the whole store. You’re trying to find that one special thing that reminds you of the whole trip. And this could be something as simple as the concept of a backbeat. You know, you have a song with a strong backbeat.
You’re like, that’s my backbeat song. And it just is in there. And every time you hear it, that’s the first thing that comes to your mind. This is my backbeat song. And it reminds you to listen for backbeats when you’re… Or you could have a song that just oscillates back and forth between a one chord and a four chord. For me, that’s Orange Sky by Alexi Murdoch. And it just gets, every time I hear it, I have this rule. like, if I took an inventory of most songs in the world, most songs would start on a one chord and then they’d go to a four chord.
John Kozicki (30:16.077)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (30:24.978)
and I’m just kind of reminded of that lesson. And so you build 52 souvenirs or their little lessons that they remember forever. And eventually as they build that deck, they start hearing connections between songs. That’s my back beat. this song has a strong back beat too. But there’s always a specific reason why the song made it into the deck in the first place. It’s not that you can’t learn more from it later. But the idea is to build this collection
In a way, it’s kind of a replacement for the method book. They’re the lessons that you get to keep. that on the track?
John Kozicki (31:02.739)
Yeah, so I’m gaining something else from this also. And I’m going to share this with you because you mentioned the concept of a souvenir and buying something in the gift shop and something very emotional about that. You’re choosing something. Because you like it for some reason, because and you may not even know what that reason is, right? And I think what you’re saying, because this is again, is part of the listening lesson.
Tony (31:16.2)
Yes.
Tony (31:26.419)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (31:33.005)
The students are choosing something in songs that just speaks to them. There’s no rules associated. You don’t have to go and find a song that’s got a one and a four chord change. They just need to find something that they like. And when you study music, when you have more advanced students, they might be able to identify why they like it. But when you’ve got
Tony (31:38.013)
Yes.
Tony (31:49.628)
Yes.
John Kozicki (32:01.961)
less experienced students who don’t have that context. They’re literally just choosing something they like. It makes me think of my wife and I, my wife is not a musician. And I want to say we’ve been dating, I think we were early married. So we had been together for maybe seven years or something like that. And to this day, I don’t remember what the song was.
Tony (32:11.743)
Yes.
Tony (32:30.846)
Mm.
John Kozicki (32:30.945)
that she was like over the moon about. She was talking about how much she loved this song. And I noticed like, it’s it’s a Waltz feel. You like it because it’s a Waltz. And I broke it down for her and she got so pissed. She was so mad. Yeah, yeah. And she was so mad because it was something that was very personal to her and she connected with on.
Tony (32:47.134)
I’ll tell you why you like it.
John Kozicki (32:58.923)
like an emotional level, there was something about that song that she loved. And then I wrecked it because I said, here’s why you like it. Let me explain like the let me explain the music theory behind it. And you like these other four songs that have the same thing. And I knew you would like this one. And it took the magic. It sucked the magic right out of it for her. Right. So, you know, total fail on my part as like a as a husband.
Tony (33:02.61)
Yeah.
Tony (33:07.948)
Yeah, I’ll tell you.
John Kozicki (33:26.561)
But like from a teaching perspective, we can offer that to our students because what they’re going to choose in these souvenirs and what they’re going to, they’re going to create their, their deck. They’re going to build their deck based on stuff that they love. And then what a credit to you to be able to use that as a way to say, this is amazing insight into what is like firing you up.
Tony (33:30.728)
Well, yeah.
John Kozicki (33:56.013)
as a fan of music, as a student of music. So dig more into that stuff because as a student of music, they’re going to like they would have loved what I said. Not my wife though.
Tony (34:05.651)
Yeah.
Tony (34:09.551)
Absolutely. And I have to tell you, there’s a fine line with the building of the deck because it’s not meant to be a playlist of your 52 favorite songs. Kind like you said. So by all means, there’s too many songs in the world to have songs in your deck that you don’t like listening to, but also to not be too precious, overly precious about what goes in there because we have a lot of classes, we’re sharing space together, I’m teaching lessons and songs.
And even though there’s really no rules about like, have to go find a one-four song. There is a lot of suggestions like, all right, everybody should have like a heartbeat song. For me, that’s Blackbird. You hear the tapping of Paul McCartney’s feet. I know that 92 beats per minute. That’s my walking tempo. It’s an easy song to walk to. So I encourage like students to find you’re talking kind of circling back to some things we talked about before, like find your own walking tempo. Like where, where’s your natural cadence? Right. Find a song that kind of aligns with that.
John Kozicki (34:51.639)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (35:07.836)
Now find one that’s kind of in a more relaxed feel, like you’re sinking down like 60 BPM, you know, and that’s your that’s your rocking chair song or the sunset at the end of the day, you’re just relaxing or find something around 128 that gets you up on the dance floor. So even having like three songs just for what we call a heartbeat, like beats per minute, but it’s connected because that’s how we teach it is you connect by tapping your heart to the beat. Small movements like that can…
be a big thing. you mentioned the souvenirs too. It’s like that’s, my whole room is filled with souvenirs of little things that, little lessons, little tributes to my children and parents and the people I love in my life. it’s, it is powerful because typically if you choose things for very specific reasons, if you know why they’re in there, if you can name it and
It can be something that’s just truly, like you said, it could just be a moment in the song. I love it because of this thing that’s happening, what’s going on? And the fact that that is kind of like what we do in the school. But you’re right, it can be terrible when you try to like explain it to other people. know, it’s like, there’s only so much patience people have for kind of listening us speak the music thing.
John Kozicki (36:15.063)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (36:32.104)
But the more you can relate it to life, everyday life, like why do you love this song? Have somebody explain that. like, it reminds me of a sunset. And then you’re like, perfect. This is your sunset chord. And that’s another thing that we do that makes things personal too, before you even get all the, if your knowledge, you grow into it over time. That’s the nice thing about kind of separating the understanding portion, is cause it gives us time to just talk about music.
John Kozicki (36:37.473)
Yes.
John Kozicki (36:43.361)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (37:02.94)
from not an area of understanding, but more from our imagination. just that, you know, you can talk about how colorful it is to you. There’s room for everyone to share that experience at Popmatics. And I think that that’s part of what makes it really special too.
John Kozicki (37:06.806)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (37:20.115)
you I think you’re what’s interesting about this and I don’t know if this is going to resonate with you or not but it’s to me it’s as if you are like you’re a listener I can tell you’re a listener you’re an observer you’re looking for those those connections that people make on on like a deeper level with music and then the jumping off point and how they can connect that with how they play
or how they learn. And I think that’s, there’s something really special in that and really magical because so much of music lessons is about transferring information. And the hope, it’s all, it’s like maybe almost as if it’s a hope that our students will make those connections on their own.
Tony (38:05.127)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (38:17.771)
Like if we give them enough knowledge, if we share enough information with them, then they’ll be able to make those connections personally. Like, why do I love this song? Why do I want to play this instrument? Why do I want to write a song about whatever’s going on in my life? We hope that they make those connections, but really at the core, I got to believe that most people who want to play an instrument
They want to make those connections. You know, they love music. They want it to be like, they want to embrace all of those things more. So I think it’s a credit to you as an instructor. Maybe hard question to answer. How, how do we do that as instructors?
Tony (39:04.454)
John Kozicki (39:09.407)
I gave you way too much to think about right there.
Tony (39:12.925)
Yeah, think… Again, I feel like I’m sort of answering your questions, but not maybe in the way that you might expect. I think helping them make the connections comes through relating everything to daily life. between… I think especially what’s powerful is making connections between songs.
It could be something as simple as an instrument. I’m just thinking about my favorite drummer of all time. I’ve kind of internalized this drummer when I play. And sometimes I think of different drum grooves from different songs. And James Gadsden, who just passed away, was the drummer for Bill Withers and a whole bunch of others. He made tons of hits. And there’s three songs in particular of his that I listen to that they have these incredible…
grooves on like a 16th note hi-hat. It just sounds like a sprinkler system going through the song.
Tony (40:19.075)
It’s like that’s something that now students listen for. So they’ll show up to a class and I’ll be like, all right, what do you hear? Like when we’re modeling the experience of listening to a song for the first time, that’s really what it is. It’s like, what do you hear? There’s not this agenda. Like I’m going to teach you this. I’m going to deliver all this knowledge. I know when I’m teaching a class, I’m not trying to teach more than three things in one class. There’s like three souvenirs at different levels that people might pick up. And I think that
Teachers sometimes, we have all this knowledge and we wanna share it and it feels good and as soon as the student looks like they think they got it, that’s when it’s time to like shut up and just let them go be with it and knowing when to turn that off. And I’ve had to learn to do that with my teachers and just say, that’s enough for now. That’s enough. Like I’ve got enough to think about for a week. One of my favorite books.
John Kozicki (40:58.588)
Hahaha!
Tony (41:12.967)
that I dip into all the time, The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I remember the first time I picked it up at Barnes and Noble, I read the first chapter and I didn’t buy the book because I was like, that’s gonna keep me busy for two weeks. Like I’m gonna just come back. I read one chapter and you know what I mean? I think understanding, I don’t think you need to break things into like a million pieces for people. I think people can understand and layer a few concepts at a time. But I think that’s a big part of it is knowing when to stop talking or when to like,
John Kozicki (41:23.309)
You
Tony (41:43.069)
It’s so exciting, you wanna share every little moment or every little detail about a song. That’s something that I’ve had to learn a bit about. But it’s also something I’ve had to teach my students to like know when it’s time to tune out and just go focus on your thing. Cause they might be in a creating class and I’m going into part four and I just remind them, I’m like, this might be too much for some of you right now. If you need to just pretend I didn’t say nothing. And just when we go into our campfire, you work with what you have. And so that’s part of
you have to teach them that as a student, otherwise they’ll just believe they’re supposed to understand everything that you’re saying. that’s the, I don’t have like a…
I don’t know how to do this stuff. That’s kind of like what you said. that’s, I’m trying to make up an answer. I don’t really know how it happens and every student is different, but balancing that, trying to balance that listening. I can even feel it here. It’s like, I’m on a podcast. So I’m so excited to talk and share things and it can feel out of balance at times. So I try to always keep that in check. And I think teachers need to remember that there should be a balance of equal exchange.
between what you’re doing, the time that you’re sharing.
John Kozicki (42:58.689)
What this feels like to me, and this is something that I’ve talked about before on the podcast and with other guests, is we do this thing as instructors. And I think this is part of what you were saying. We almost feel like we have to always be teaching. We always have to provide value and we tend to overdo it.
And sometimes it’s just okay to maybe not put that pressure on ourselves and let students explore and let students have those realizations. Does that maybe sum it up?
Tony (43:44.773)
Yeah, I think so. think every teacher would be wise to understand that like almost everything you want to teach your student, they could learn for free on the internet. And so there’s a term I heard a long time ago that made sense to me talking about music teachers were knowledge workers, which means we add value to information. The information itself is not really that valuable because everybody’s teaching it. free. Go watch.
John Kozicki (43:54.455)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (44:14.907)
And that’s good and it’s also part of the problem because people don’t know how to filter, like you said before, like which path am I going to be on? Which boat am I going to get on? Where is it going to take me? Because someone might look at something I do very similar. Like I have a friend who was an MLT practitioner and knows a lot about the music learning theory. And he always likes to point out a lot of the similarities that we have. And I’m like, that’s great, but I want to talk about the differences because we might be like pointed here, but
John Kozicki (44:21.591)
Yes.
Tony (44:41.572)
If you’re just like one degree off and you go several nautical miles, you end up in very different places. So I think the experience that we offer is really what it’s all about. that’s…
Tony (44:55.115)
I think that’s a harder part to try to deliver sometimes because it’s where you get people who are just like, oh, all you need is chords. And then they drop people in the middle of the ocean. And they’re like, OK, I can learn a party trick, and I can play a few songs. But I didn’t really learn, like, how did I get here? How did I get to understand this? So slowing down, giving a very nice experience where you can
John Kozicki (45:06.722)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (45:22.798)
offer that space for students to share their own personal experiences and just know.
It sounds like it would be slow, but if you truly learned one thing every day, or you truly collected one souvenir every week, and you took that with you, that became kind of like a foundational building block in your understanding, that’s kind of what I’m most interested in. I’m not trying to build your whole house for you. I just want you to be able to build whatever house you want.
John Kozicki (45:49.389)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (45:53.251)
Yeah, you mentioned, and I love this, you mentioned that all of the information is readily available for free. So our job as instructors is not to deliver the information, it’s just to help figure out how this information is useful. And I’m gonna bring it back to something that I said in the very beginning and honestly it was.
Something I was kind of contemplating like, man, how does Tony do this? How does he create a community and a culture with his students online? Because that is something that I do at my school, because we’re a rock school, right? And it’s very easy for me to look at this and what I do in the business that I run and say, like, this is way more about getting people together.
than it is about teaching them music as weird as it sounds right but there’s it’s way more about that and but now I’m I’m I’m really seeing how you’re and and to be quite honest like I I think about online instruction and I think like how do they do that how like if it’s just instruction like
Tony (47:13.039)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (47:13.4)
There’s all sorts of videos, but you are creating a community because what you’re doing is you’re leaning into that creativity. You’re creating connections with the other students. You’re creating an opportunity for people to share ideas with the information that is available and that’s been presented and looking at it in new ways and creative ways. So I totally get it now.
Tony (47:29.488)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (47:37.808)
Yeah, they need time to, like, just, I’m sure you have all these experiences where they get to play together and be in the room and talk together. And so that’s really important. And a thing that’s missing from a lot of like online courses where you’re just watching a video and you don’t really ask questions. But we have a Discord community and we’ve got a general chat there that’s called Around the Campfire, kind of named after our creating classes. And students go there and they share things. And you give them channels to have, to discuss whatever they want.
John Kozicki (47:51.619)
Yeah.
Tony (48:07.589)
So it’s very compartmentalized and everybody feels like they can have access to information. And even if they don’t get to come to class, I’m like, I’m still gonna post my notes to class recordings. And if they’ve gotten used to like…
like what my notes look like, they can look at that and kind of know what we covered in class. And then they can ask here online. So I, that’s, that’s more for them, you know, and then the live classes is where I am. I mean, I’m still present there, but I don’t live in the discord world as much because I’m doing all the other stuff, the trying to get the, the, voice out. See, this is the problem with not the problem, but this is just the stage that I’m in now where I had a lot of time to create.
John Kozicki (48:25.218)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (48:41.1)
Right.
Tony (48:52.188)
and build this, but as you start to share it with the world, now you got to be careful because you start making business decisions and they can sometimes compete with the creative decisions of where you want to go. Anyways, going off track a little bit, but I think you’re absolutely right. Having something where they can come together. We build community playlists every month based on a theme where each member gets to contribute their own.
We have a class on Fridays that’s called Green Room, where we just hang out and we usually listen to the playlist. Sometimes we have guest performers come in or guest teachers come in and give a, you know, just share the time with us. And that follows our office hours class, which is just open channel for discussion. like Friday is like a really nice community day for us. Day through Thursday is listening and creating classes all week. End of class, office hours for all your questions.
John Kozicki (49:43.874)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (49:50.704)
take any question, it’s not like a lottery system. If you ask a question, it’s getting answered. And then we just hang out and we talk and we give space. And then they’ve got the discord to share things all weekend too. And that’s where they’re posting their recordings. Sometimes we encourage them to share it monthly. So it does take work to do it in an online setting. And I think, I don’t think it would work without a live component. The fact that I do teach live two hours every day is really, it’s not just a video course.
John Kozicki (50:17.4)
Mm-hmm.
Tony (50:20.623)
I’m really here. I want to know how you’re receiving these instructions. There’s always space for students to share and give feedback. And if they don’t want to do it live there, they can do it later after class. So it’s just finding all of the bridges. If there’s any hesitation or you’re trying to make it easy for people to, you want them to grow their comfort zone, but
John Kozicki (50:20.792)
Right. Yeah.
Tony (50:47.355)
you want to make it easy for them to be able to share things. Now everybody’s comfortable talking in a live class, so they stay quiet. But they’ll ask the question later. Or maybe they’ll book a private lesson, because I still do that too. They might book a private lesson so they can talk to me one on one, kind of just sharpen up their thinking. And then, cool, I might see a student like once every other month or once every three months. I don’t see them one on one all that often, but the opportunity is there. And it should be there in a situation like that.
John Kozicki (50:52.428)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
John Kozicki (51:13.708)
Yeah, I love this, Tony. I love it. You’re doing something really unique and in yeah, in in a way that like it honestly makes sense to me, you know, I again being from more that in person world with my school and seeing the value and as as like technology advances and AI advances and information is all out there.
Tony (51:19.301)
Thanks.
Tony (51:32.282)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (51:42.126)
reframing what the value is in music lessons and what we provide as instructors is really important. So I think it’s really cool that you found this very unique way of doing that still in the online space that works for you and it works for the students. So good on you, man. I think we’re gonna bring this one home, because I love how you answered that last question.
Tony (52:05.925)
Yes.
John Kozicki (52:11.448)
Popmatics.com is the website, is that correct? All right, and I know you’re big on, is it TikTok? You’re big on TikTok if people wanna follow you there.
Tony (52:14.553)
Yep, that’s the spot.
Tony (52:22.151)
That’s the platform where they give me the most attention. YouTube’s doing okay too. And we have a YouTube channel there. Mostly posting daily shorts though, but TikTok would be the place if people have it. But if not, you can find us on YouTube also.
John Kozicki (52:37.546)
All right, cool. Well, Tony, it was a pleasure having you on the show and we will see everyone next time.
Tony (52:43.92)
Thanks, John.
