Woodpeckers, rats, and other pesky problems at the BSR. Plus, Steve shares his thoughts on wrestling today, and what it'd take to get him back in the squared circle with Bret Hart!
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altiger Show. Today on the James Altiger Show. So originally, I brought Jeff Lerner on to help me with, one of the side hustle Fridays. I hope you listened to this one. It was so valuable. It was, about a week or so ago, about how to set up a digital agency. I'm even trying to tell my own daughters, if you wanna make money and start a business, but you don't have a lot of start up money, start a digital agency. That's how I started my first business in the nineties with 0 money. I started a digital agency, and I asked on Jeff Lerner, who had his own digital agency just fairly recently. He had, you know, 50 employees and tens of thousands of clients. I asked him to come on to Side Hustle Fridays to explain it, but we started talking before we started recording for Side Hustle Fridays, and he told me he had dropped out of high school to be a jazz pianist. And so I wanted to hear all about this, not only about dropping out of high school, which I fully respected, but also what are the skills needed to learn. He he said he didn't even start playing the piano till he was 16 or 17, and within 2 or 3 years, he was a professional jazz pianist. So I wanted to find out how did he learn it so fast? What are the skills to become, like, a great improviser on the piano or music? Like, how did he learn music theory? Did he have a magical ear, which he didn't? And he told me and it was just a fascinating story. So we're releasing it as a podcast. So here's the jazz pianist. So actually, Jeff, first before we start, to be a jazz piano player, did you have to be really good at like improv? Yeah. That was the name of the game, pretty much. Like, could you hear a song, like a TV theme song and just like start riffing around it on the piano? Yeah. I mean, yeah. That was my That was my skill or did you have an ear? Did did you did you was that talent or skill? Like, did you have an ear right from the beginning or did you have to build that skill? I definitely had to build it. I mean, I had enough aptitude that I knew it would be worth investing the time like I wouldn't try for years and not get it. I knew that, but you still have to build it. I'll tell you how I train my ear. I'll tell you quickly because I know it's not what we're here to talk about, but so there's only 12 intervals. Right? There's like, you know, a half step, a whole step, a minor third, a major third, a 4th, you know, and so on. And every one of those intervals, we all have the ability to know what those intervals sound like. We just don't usually know the name for it. And I'll give you an example, like if I do you know the song like, like, The Way You Look Tonight, Frank Sinatra. Someday when I'm down in the low yeah. Someday, dah dah. Like, if I said, like, me the melody from that song, you you could get the first two notes. Right? Yeah. You just may not realize you just sang a perfect 5th. I see. So you what what would you do? Would you just So I I came up with a song for every interval. So, like like a half step, like for a lease, like, me for a lease. That's a half step. So I just memorized the first two notes of a song for every single interval and that's how over time I conditioned myself to just kinda learn what the intervals sound sounded like. First, it was what they sounded like and eventually it became what they felt like. Well, what do you mean? So you so like with Fur Elise, you would just remember those two notes and then what would you do? You would riff then would you memorize the next two notes? Or Well, it's it's kind of like language. Like, initially, you you learn the specific symbols and how to cluster them together to form words and and eventually, it just becomes automatic and it flows and you create speech. Right? So so that was those were my building blocks, were intervals and then, you know, more advanced combinations of intervals become chords. But, I do also have to know the key everything was in. Right? You'd have to know the interval plus the key. Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. There's more to it than just stacking intervals. But, you know, it's all it's all math, but you have to train your ear to hear the math. But, I mean, we could talk all about it at length, but I was very methodical. I had flashcards. I didn't start playing till I was 17 years old. So and I was professional by 20. Wow. And I was and I became a professional musician because I didn't want to ever have to get a job. And I'm, like, this is something I can do to get paid enough to live. And, so, I went on a I dropped out of high school and I went full on 10 hours a day self taught. I will become a professional musician but I know I'm already 10 years behind. So how can I be as efficient and as effective as possible? I had flashcards. I mean, you could be like, Jeff, tell me, you know, rattle off the notes of the c sharp melodic minor scale and I'll just do it. I mean, I I learned the math because one of the things I realized is my hands are always going to be a decade behind. You know, the the the the mechanics of playing the piano are something that it's so much easier to start developing before you go through puberty. Uh-huh. Because then as your muscles and your your connective tissues grow, they're they're already pliable and they're already doing those things. Because I was 10 years behind, I knew that I had to be better up here because I would never be as good down here. That's so interesting. And then, so did it get to a point where you would hear a song and you would say, oh, okay. That's a c sharp, minor 5th or whatever? Yeah. I never I never fully nailed perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is the one thing that I truly do believe is either you got it or you don't. But, what I got good at is referential pitch placement. Like, right now, I was listening to a song this morning that was, Mercy by Muse. I was listening to it at the gym. I can still hear it, and I happen to know it starts on the 4 chord in g, which means I'm still I still have a c ringing in my my ear, so to speak. So I have a reference point and I'll have it for the rest of the day. So I could tell you any other note, I could tell you any other chord. But if you give me if I if I don't hear any music for a week, for example, I lose that. Would you, let's say you're a professional, but you have a fake book. So if someone said, hey, play, you know, whatever. I don't know. But Yeah. Play Misty. Play The Way You Look Tonight. Play What A Wonderful World. Play yeah. That's what I mean. Book is just like the chords, and then how would you start thinking about coming up with the song around those chords? Like, you had a kind of a standard bunch of, oh, okay. They're gonna, this is a minor third. I would see. Here's what I usually play for that. Yeah. Yeah. You learn every note in relationship to every other note in any possible combination of all notes. You you learn you attribute a specific mathematical function, and some people don't learn this way. Some people I think are much more instinctive than me. I understood music intellectually before I really internalized it. It's just my process. So, yeah, I mean, if I have a tune, what a wonderful world, I just I mean, now I know that when it goes, when it hits that note, it lifts and it goes to a it does a 36251 cadence. So if I know what key we're in, I know what that is. I know what are the logical substitutions for those chords. I know what are the interesting color tones you can add on top of those chords to jazz it up. Like like, let's say it was just real basic. Like, it says a c chord is kind of the the scale the backbone of a song. What would you how would you start to enhance that? You know, typically, the first thing you do is you add a 7th. So so, your basic major triad is is 1 3 5. It's the root, the 3rd, and the 5th of any whatever key you are in. So C, E, G. Yes. So if I want to kind of start to spice it up a little, I might, first thing I would probably do is add a B, which is the 7th. Yeah. And that's going to immediately soften it and give it a little more of a jazz feel. Now, if I add a if I add a b flat, I'm actually I'm out of the key at that point. Now, what I've done is I've created the dominant chord. I've slipped into f major. So as soon as I turn the b to a b flat, it wants to resolve to f, which is the 4 chord. But so so, you know, but I might add like an f sharp to a c chord and that's going to give it this spacey it's called the Lydian mode. It's going to give it like this spacey feel that you hear in like classic rock music. I could add an a which would be the 6 and then it's gonna sound like more like Scott Joplin, like ragtime major 6 chords. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I can geek it. I can go from there. I mean, there's a lot I could add a c sharp, which is gonna give you a minor 9th, which is the most dissonant interval and it's gonna sound like a wrong note unless you resolve it creatively, then it sounds really cool. What do you mean by resolve it? Like, because you can't use any note. Like, let's say, you you you do the b flat. So now you're in the f chord. What does it mean to resolve in a pleasant way? So, you know, there's the loaded interval. I mean, you sound like you know it enough about music to be dangerous. I could read I read music for piano as a kid, but not, you know, in 30 years. So so the really the key to understanding how music tends to cycle through, or I would say a key, it's kind of like maybe the most basic element of tension and resolution, is, what they call tritones, which is a flatted 5th. And so, if you take a C chord, C, E, G, and you add the minor 7th, which is B Flat, the reason it wants to resolve is because the relationship between the E and the B Flat is a is a minor 5th. It's a tritone. That interval wants to it either wants to collapse in or it wants to expand out. So the the natural think about it. If you take and and you are you following, like, you can picture that kind of c e g b flat? Yeah. And the e and the b flat is what's called a tritone and it wants to collapse in. So when it collapses in, if you take an e and move it up and a b flat move it down, what do you get? Like a f or a g? You get an F and an A. And, that is the first and the third of the F Major chord. So, that tritone is really dissonant, and it wants to collapse in. And, that is actually why the dominant chord, which is when you make the 7th minor, why it wants to collapse to a major four chord because that tritone just releases. The the language is is esoteric. It's hard to describe, but that is No. No. But that's interesting. So so and, sorry for the questions on this, but I'm really curious. And then we'll Go on. So you so let's say, I don't know what Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is. I feel like that's like a c chord. Yeah. And that's another 5th. That I think that was actually the tune I used for a 5th. That's a 5th. And so so let's say you're if something's in the c chord, what what do you mean? You just hit, like, after you after you play the c chord, you just go straight to a b flat, and then how do you how do you kind of melodically resolve? Like, what does again, what does it mean? Like, I I hear what you're saying. Like, it it wants to move into the the, f or the a, but how do you do that so it's musical? So it feels like it's still part of the song that that's you're still saying the language of the song. Yeah. I mean, I think you, you know, a lot of it is driven by the idiom, like, twinkle twinkle little star nursery rhyme type tune. You know, kids sing along. You want to keep it pretty basic. I mean, I mean, that the the the a, the 6th. You know, theoretically, you'd probably just keep it over the c major triad. Mhmm. Because a lot of harmonic shifting isn't gonna feel very nursery rhymey. Right? It's not gonna feel like kids music. But that's okay. I'm just thinking from a jazz perspective. Yeah. But if you wanted to be, like, real crazy, if you wanted to be bluesy, you would make that a the third of a dominant, of an F minor, or sorry, an F dominant chord. So it would be like a dominant 4 chord. If you wanted to be, you know, classic Rocky, you might move it up to a D Major, make it the 5th of a D Major chord because then you are going to bring in that F Sharp which is going to have that open Lydian sound against the C original key of C. You know, you could make it the root of an A dominant chord which would become what's called the secondary dominant that wants to resolve to D minor which is the 2. So So what would that sound like? Can, if you can rub I know it's not easy to do it with just No. Hey. I mean, listen. Do you guys have time? Like, I dude, I love this stuff. If you're not in a hurry No. No. I'll make this like a little mini podcast. Oh, is he gonna break out his? Oh, no. Is that a Steinway? Yeah. K. So So that's like one option. That's like a pretty tonal option. So you got your C, G. So that's just taking the chords that you might see in a big book and simply playing them with some effect. Yeah. And the the what I did though is I took I expanded the chord. So I took a this is called an inversion. So by moving the bass from the root to the 3rd, I create what's called a first inversion, and then I open the chord up by doing 5th root 5th. So the only place the 3rd exists is in the bass, and that gives kind of an, again, a lighter feel that And so, you know, everything is just has a a feel about it. So in that if you if you were like, hey. Play play twinkle twinkle little star. And then I might wanna blues it up. So what I did was I took the 4 chord, but I flatted the 7th. So wait. So the 4 chord the the f chord, what what's the 4 chord in this case? It's f it would be f major, but I took I added an e flat. And I could I could I could also go so now I've kinda that's like a gospel move. F 7. Move the bass up to an f sharp, make it an f sharp diminished, and then, like, and then so there I go to, like, a minor 4, which has a certain feel inside of a major key. So minor 4, in this case, would be f, a flat. What would the minor 4 be? Minor 4 6 would be f, a flat, c, and d, which is actually an inversion of a half diminished chord on the 2 d, f, a flat, c. And that just has you know, this this would be like a gospel treatment. That would probably work well, And I could even go secondary dominant. With so now I'm on an a 7 and then I would go 251. 2 what do you mean 251? So 25 is gonna be a d minor chord followed by a g dominant chord. And then instead of going to the 1, I could there's some false resolutions. That's cool. So what what was that first chord in the false resolution? That was an a flat major chord. So it's a my it's a you take the minor 6 and build a major triad off of it, and then the 3rd of that chord is the root of your key. And because you're using an a flat, which implies a minor tonality, but it's still a major chord, it kinda gives it this weird this weird shift. So, again, let me do that from scratch. And especially even on this chord, if I flap the 7th, what did I do? Well, in which I remember what I did? Man, that's great. And so when you're playing one key at a time, you're just playing the keys of the chord? Like, sometimes you play the chord and sometimes you play the keys of the chord. Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, the beautiful thing about the piano is you can be the bass player, the the melody player, and the rhythm, you know, the fill player at the same time. So I'm I'm thinking baseline. I mean, I could do, You know, walk the baseline. Right? And then you always gotta hold down the melody because if you lose the melody, nobody knows what you're playing anymore unless you're unless you're You know? So so when you hold the melody alright. Like, for instance, the first note's c. So you're playing around with the c chord, then the second note's g. And do you play the do you start playing with the g chord? Or No. Because the g is still part of the c chord. And because I know I'm going to a, which is part of the 4 chord, it means if I'm still on a note that's in the c chord and I know I'm going to a note that could that would fit in the 4 chord, it gives me an opportunity to set up that that c 7 to f resolution. So but I could. I could go I mean, it it would be a little weird to go straight to the 5. That that would be a more basic treatment to just go so, yeah, once you once you learn all the intervallic and harmonic implications of different chord functions within a key and then you learn how those chords operate within certain genres, then it, you know, becomes like a playground. And so what what could I what could I read? So obviously those fake books which give you all the skeleton of all these songs. What would be a good thing to learn, like you were saying, to give it a gospel feel, to give it a jazz feel, to to walk the melody and that kind of give it a really jazzy feel. Like you said, you learned spent a lot of time learning the intellectual aspects. I could start there. I taught myself out of a book called The Jazz Piano Book by a guy named Mark Levine. And you know, look there's a zillion books. I'm not going to say it's the best or the most inclusive, but I will tell you that like 95% of what I know about basic theory and how to apply it stylistically to different ways of playing the piano, I learned from that book. That's really great. And it's I mean, I spent a year, like, studying that like you would study like an anatomy book for medical school. I mean, it was obsessive. How many hours a day? 8 plus. Wow. 8. I dropped out of high school. I told my parents there's nothing for me in high school. I want to play piano. I'm not going to go get a job. Save your money. Don't send me to college. Just buy up. And they I said, but if you get me a piano, that would really help. Were they, were they like, Jeff, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. You got to get a high school degree. They had been through the wringer with me so much at that point. I think they were just excited to see me excited about something. And you hadn't even they were they like, Jeff, you don't even know you can't even play 3 notes on a piano. Well, I could play 3 notes, but I just couldn't play like 30 notes. I mean, I I had played guitar previously. Like, I could sit down and kind of clunk out Mary Had a Little Lamb. Like, I was one of those total amateurs, but, yeah, I mean, there was some skepticism, but What about your friends? Like, did you feel any peer pressure to say like, did they say, hey. Oh, yeah. Everybody thought I was insane. Everybody thought I was completely insane. How did you have the inner guts to ignore friends, teachers, parents, guidance counselors, history, everything? Yeah. Like common sense. I don't have a great answer for that, man. Just fierce, a fierce independent streak. I've always been someone who responds really, I don't know. I don't know if it's good or bad, but I respond aggressively to being told that I can't do things. So the people that may have been trying to protect me were actually making it worse, by telling me that it wasn't a good idea and I wouldn't be able to do it. It just became like, I will show you. And at the end of the day, you know, I just knew I had one job when I was 16 years old. I worked at a law firm for 3 weeks. I was miserable. Everybody else there was miserable. And this is a high end law firm. You know, there's people here making $1,000,000 a year, nobody's smiling. So, I'm like, well, clearly that's not the solution. So, I'm going to at least be free and make music. So, while you were studying 8 hours a day, were you doing anything else for a living or studying or? No. My parents essentially had told me we're, you know, we were committed to paying for your life until you were 18. You know, you're a high school student. And now you're you're 16 and you've decided you want to be a piano player, so you've got 2 years. Well and so after 1 year, how good were you? I was good enough to get a very crappy gig where they paid me with a plate of food. Alright. And then after 2 years? I don't know. I wasn't really that much better. I just intellectually, I was better, but it just takes time for things to become natural, you know. When I was 20, it's the first time I actually remember playing and people being like, Hey, that guy is pretty good, You know? And, and when I was but when I was 17 no, I guess when I was 18, I started trying to audition for the piano performance department at University of Houston. And, you know, I was like, this I wasn't even dealing with the fact that I didn't finish high school. I was just like, well, if I'm good, they'll let me in. And I got denied and I got denied 6 semesters in a row. So it took me 3 years. But after 3 years of being self taught and actually going and finishing my GED on my own, I was able to actually get in, and I ended up getting a full scholarship in jazz piano performance and never ended up paying for school. Wow. So then you after all those years of studying on your own, you then studied it and got a degree in it. I did. Yeah. I graduated with a a degree in in music music composition with an emphasis in jazz piano performance because they didn't actually offer a jazz piano degree. Otherwise, I would have just done that, but and then I minored in in finance too to make my because my dad's a money manager, so I thought he'd be happy. So so if someone wanted to, basically I hate to use the phrase, but skip the line on, you know, spending 3 years learning the math. Like like, when I was a kid, I spent 10 years taking piano lessons, but just learning how to sight read, which is very unfulfilling, ultimately, I found. And I always wanted to, like, ever since I was a kid, do, like, kind of what you just did, like, that kind of style. What would be, like, a shortcut so I don't have to spend 8 hours a day for 3 years? Yeah. I mean, I I was I was, I mean, you know, there's a difference between wanting to go play a gig where you have to go sit there for 2, 3 or 4 hours and play one song after the other, after the other, and take requests, and chat with people while you're playing. That's another level. But if you just want to be able to play enough for personal fulfillment, you can do it in a year. If you just a year of and frankly, what I've learned since is if I had practiced 2 to 4 hours a day with great focus and intention, it would have done probably just as much as 8 to 10 hours a day. There is a major point of diminishing returns, cognitively for me, for anybody I think with music. I just was I was boreddesperateon a mission, so I went overkill. But in a few hours a day for a year, you could get I would imagine you could get to where you could hear a tune on the radio, pick it out, add some chords to it, and and have a lot of fun and impress your friends. So let's say I'm gonna shortcut that now. So let's say I had a fake book, so I have I don't have to pick out, you know, the critical parts just by hearing. I it's all written out for me. And let's say I focus on one genre. Like, clearly, you know the languages of every genre. This is gospel. This is blues. This is jazz. If I was to kind of make a hammer so that everything's a a a nail. Right. Be like the the genre you would pick to just really study that and those chord transitions and so on. I would probably go rock unless you have a deep passion. Well, the problem with classical music is it's so fleshed out in terms of ornamentation and and complexity. There's really no way to just do it really simple. Rock music, you can be super simple with. I mean, you can sit down and play a Beatles tune and have great fun doing, you know, the equivalent of of strumming a guitar where you are just holding basic chord shapes, you know, with your hands and just playing them and and, you know, the the first not sort of inescapable piece of complexity that you're going to have to deal with to do that is you're going to have to get to where you can play a chord and using mostly these three fingers still play the melody. While I guess, actually, that's not true. At a most basic level, you could just play the chord with your left hand in a root position, meaning meaning you've got the the the root of the chord at the bottom and then just play the melody with your right hand and have a great fun. Yeah. Actually, I don't even know I don't even know that you have to spread it across your 2 hands. Just play chords with your left hand and the melody with your right hand, and you could be rocking in a few months. And and with the melody, is that where you're doing all the transitions? Like, you're gonna play the the 7th and the the minor 4th and Well, to do that stuff is probably creating a little more coordination between the hands because sometimes you're creating 3, 4, you know, 4, 5, 6 note chords. But, again, that's why rock is nice because rock doesn't use a lot of these color tones that complicate the chord structures. You could basically play 90% of rock tunes with just major or minor chords in your left hand and the melody in your right hand. Yeah. But I like what you were doing with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with all these different transitions. Does that Well, you gotta you gotta pick your poison. You said you wanted it you wanna you want the shortcut or you wanna do the hard thing? Is that the super hard thing? Is there, like, some is that, like, just learning, oh, it's okay to go from the major to the the the, you know, 4th, minor and then back to the, you know, and then resolve it and then go back to the melody or whatever. Like, what are those what what's that language? I mean, jazz is such a great place to start because it's all theory based. Like, it's it's actually I mean, people, I think, tend to dismiss jazz. It's like it's this fringe thing that like poor Black people started doing a 100 years ago and, you know, whatever people's worldview is. Dude, jazz is sick. It is like genius level stuff where they took the math that started to emerge from musical theater and they basically just said, how far can we take this? But the cool thing about it is when you're learning the jazz basics, you're actually you're learning the real principles that drive music because any any music form that's based on the ability to improvise has to be based on principles rather than memorization. Mhmm. And that's what's so powerful about jazz to me is you learn why things do what they do and why they sound how they sound. And when you start to do that, then you have the ability that you're talking about to to, you know, treat it like a like a language, like a like a creation. And so so do you think I can learn that from the jazz piano book? I did. Excellent. Well, this is great. This is this is a mini podcast right now. Right? Yeah. Alright. Well well, thanks for that, Jeff. And now we're gonna talk about what you did after being a a jazz pianist. So, Jay, that's a a cut on that.
