quietnote's Will Crawford on achievable mindfulness

Self-care is currently experiencing an explosion in popularity, with the wellness industry worth up to £2.8 trillion worldwide. Mindfulness and meditation take centre stage, but what does ‘mindfulness’ really mean? Must we all clear our schedules to allow for a ten-step mindfulness routine, or is there a more achievable way to feel zen now and then? I sat down with Will Crawford, classical guitarist and creator of quietnote, an online platform providing music-led mindfulness resources, to find out how musicians can get the most out of their practice using mindfulness.

Could you give us some background on your career so far?

I didn’t take A level or GCSE music because I never realised that you could make a career in classical music. I was halfway through sixth form when I realised that I wanted to do something more creative and work within the artistic sector. At the time I had a wonderful classical guitar teacher who pointed me towards the idea of a conservatoire, so I took a year out of education to commit to the classical guitar then started at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

I had started practicing mindfulness at about the age of 17 and it helped me a lot throughout my degree. I saw a lot of connections and similarities between my mindfulness and my music practices - when I was playing music, it had a similar feel to when I was meditating, and likewise when I was meditating it felt the same as when I was really focused on playing.

In my fourth year at Conservatoire we had a final project. I was originally planning on doing a concerto for this but as Covid made the live element impossible, I came up with the idea of bringing my personal mindfulness practise to my classical guitar practice for this project. I started quietnote, which is a company all about helping people better understand and benefit from the health and wellbeing aspects of mindfulness using the familiarity and comfort of music.

I got to the end of my degree last year and had plans to go on to do a masters in guitar and carry on that route, but the company had been so successful in its first year and I was enjoying it so much that I’ve just kept going with it.

How has the company evolved since your graduation in June 2021?

The two main streams for quietnote are the in-person sessions which I run: workshops and live courses - some six weeks long, others just an introduction for an hour – and the other stream is an online subscription to quietnote where you can access pieces of music which I’ve specifically composed to act as the guide to meditations and mindfulness exercises.

People often say they don’t have time for mindfulness, but we've all got a favorite song, our life is already accompanied by some form of soundtrack. People will give quietnote a go because it's something new, it's something interesting and it's so far proving to be really effective.

What problems can mindfulness help improve?

People often have the misconception that mindfulness is there to get rid of your stress or your anxiety and solve your problem but it's not. It's more about helping you to see it in a different light and gain some perspective. Mindfulness is all about management for me personally.

As well as being great for your mental health, mindfulness is also really useful when it comes to helping you focus. I find the mindfulness exercises that I do just before I start to practise help me find an anchor and make each practice session as productive as possible.

The self-care and mindfulness market is quite flooded at the moment, and it seems quite product-driven. Are there any tips that you can give that for people just wanting to dip their toe in and see if mindfulness is for them?

On the one hand it's wonderful that the mindfulness and health and wellbeing industry is booming because it means there are lots of people interested in it. However, the negative side to that is that there's so much out there that people start to feel overwhelmed and start to feel pressured to do it. Feeling like you have to meditate can have the opposite effect because it can cause more stress and tension.

A lot of meditation refers to what's called an anchor, bringing you into the present moment. Traditional practices use breathing as an anchor, or a mantra or repeated phrase to say or think. quietnote uses music as the anchor. My tip to anyone would be to find a moment in your day to put everything down, turn your emails off and just really concentrate and listen to a piece of music. When you listen to a piece of music in this way you have to be right in the moment, and if that isn't mindfulness, and if that isn't meditating, I don't know what it is.

We also do something called a body scan which is quite a regular meditation practice. You focus on breathing in and breathing out and every time you breathe out, imagine gravity is getting slightly more intense and heavier, and let the body relax bit by bit. You can feel the tension melting away.

You also teach – how does this impact your practice?

The practice of quietnote is definitely for anyone and everyone, it's not targeted at a specific age or social group at all, it's for anyone wanting to take care of their mental health and wellbeing. Having experience of teaching the guitar really helps me understand what's going on with young people and it's really inspiring to see when children are really focused - it's so mindful because they're so in the moment, they're so in the zone.

You mentioned the similarities between your music practice and your spirituality practices. Are there any ways that practising musicians can bring mindfulness into their practice?

Firstly, I think as a musician and having been through the Conservatoire process I know what it's like when you've got so much music to take on you just feel overwhelmed. At the same time as wanting to learn all this music, you want to learn it to a really high standard because you don't want to deliver a bad performance. So, the big question was how can you get the most productivity out of that practise time?

After doing a few simple mindfulness exercises focusing on the breath to gain concentration to start my practise, I would recommend starting by playing a piece of music just to enjoy it before getting into the really hard nitty gritty stuff. Playing stuff I really enjoy helps me to connect to why I'm doing this and think about the bigger picture.

It's also so important as a musician, when you've got all these different things happening, to take care of your health and wellbeing in general because if you haven't taken care of your health, you're not going to be able to perform well because your whole body needs to be in tune. Finding a self-care routine through meditation or mindfulness or whatever works for you is really important.

The most difficult thing about mindfulness for anyone is showing up. The hardest part of any practice is the first step and that's so true. It takes an awful lot of bad stuff to send us into a mental breakdown, but it only takes a tiny bit of good stuff to really pick us up. My biggest piece of advice to anyone would be to just find those little moments throughout the day to do a small technique.

Mindfulness is a personal practise. You can't get it wrong. You can't be bad at mindfulness if you're trying. Of course, you're going to have better experiences and more difficult experiences, but actually just showing up and giving it a go is all we can do sometimes.

Will Crawford will be running a Music and Mindfulness session on 9 July at Cheltenham Town Hall as part of Cheltenham Music Festival. You can book tickets here.

You can find out more about quietnote here.