Episode 36 - Five Notes, Maisy Mouse and a Sacred Flute
Writing a kids’ TV theme using the major pentatonic… then mischievously repitching it into an Ethiopian-flavoured pentatonic (plus a sacred flute detour in Oslo).
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Hello, musically curious people 👋
This one’s a behind-the-scenes peek at something tiny that took a ridiculous amount of work: I wrote the theme song for My Friend Maisy, Sky Kids’ new 2D animated pre-school series based on Lucy Cousins’ Maisy books. The first six episodes popped out in December 2025 (earlier than expected), ahead of the wider 2026 rollout.
The musical core is the major pentatonic scale: five notes, no semitones rubbing against each other, and (handily) the exact reason you can bash your way around playground chimes and still sound like you’ve had lessons. I use that idea to talk about earworms, “musical palettes”, and what changes when you swap just two notes.
In this episode
How and why the major pentatonic is so universally friendly (and why it’s all over kids’ instruments and playgrounds).
The writing process for the My Friend Maisy theme — from colour-coded bells to the final 15–20 seconds of TV magic.
A field trip to Oslo Mela for an Entertaining Noises-style chat about the Colombian gaita with Mestizo Collective (including a proper demo).
How a pentatonic “palette swap” (major → Ethiopian-flavoured) changes the whole emotional identity.
Using Celemony Melodyne to repitch the same notes and prove the point.
Also in this episode
I also mention the live shows at Wilton’s Music Hall on 24th January 2026 — 2pm kids/family show and 7pm evening show.
Links & references
Boomwhackers (the colourful tubes that accidentally teach pentatonics)
Support the show
If you’d like to help keep the podcast independent, you can support it on Patreon.
And if you want occasional updates rather than algorithm roulette, the mailing list The Open Ear Dispatch lives at originofthepieces.com.
Stay musically curious,
Steve
Full transcript
Hello, my name's Steve Pretty. I'm a musician, composer and performer from London, and welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces.
This is the show that helps you to hear, understand and enjoy music in new ways. Hello, everyone, back in your ears again. Bit later than planned, sorry about that, but it's been a very busy few weeks.
I'm talking to you in December 2025. This is not a Christmas episode, no Christmas stuff going on. I will be talking a little bit more about a few bits I'm going to be doing over the festive period later on.
But yeah, it's just been a very, very busy few weeks since the last episode about Malatu Ostaque. I hope you really enjoyed that one. Dusted off an old interview from 2018.
Really enjoyed talking to Malatu back then and seeing his farewell tour gigs here. And do go back and check that out. There's also, there's a whole tune that we did with Malatu Darash that you can listen to on that and on my Patreon.
Yeah, so one of the reasons it's been busy the last few weeks is that unexpectedly, something I worked on over the last year or so kind of happened and launched much sooner than I'd anticipated. And that is that I wrote the theme song for a new kids TV show. Now those of you who've got young kids or who've had young kids in the last, well I suppose 15, 20 years, because the books have been around for a long time.
There's a TV show of The Maisy Books by Lucy Cousins, which are really beautiful kind of hand drawn books about a little mouse called Maisy. And I was asked to pitch on it. So in other words, to kind of hustle for the gig, to compose the theme song and the music for that show.
And in the end, I just ended up doing the theme song. But it's been an absolute delight to work on. It's something I've alluded to over the last few months.
It's one of the reasons that episodes sometimes get delayed, is that when something like a pitch comes in, it's a lot of work, right? And often it's completely unpaid, but the prize at the end is getting to score a big show or sometimes a game or whatever it might be. So yeah, you kind of have to drop everything and work on that.
So that's what's happened about a year ago. That's what happened. That's why things were a little bit delayed then.
And then here we are a year later. And I thought it was not going to come out till next year, but actually they put the first six episodes out just in time for Christmas here in 2025. So you can listen to it and watch it on Sky or on NOW TV in the UK.
I think it's going to be going international quite soon as well. And the rest of the episodes are going to be 52 episodes in that first series. And they're all being launched later in 2026.
But you can listen to it and watch the first six episodes right now on Sky or on NOW TV. So I'm really proud of the theme. I'm going to be talking about it a lot today because it relates to a lot of the stuff that we've been dealing with in the show.
I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to say about it actually, because it is based on a pentatonic scale. Now that's something that I referred to a bit in a slightly different context with the Malatu episode, episode 35. But I'm going to develop that out a bit more and take you through the process of writing a theme song, but particularly the process of using that scale.
It's a very iconic scale that is, I think, one of those things that sticks in your head. And before we go any further, I should play the theme. Now, having fallen foul of the licensing police for a track that I wrote and is the theme song for this show, and Hackney Collery Band put out with Angelique Kidjo, somehow that got taken down.
I'm still working on trying to get that back, but that's for another day. But having been through that process, I was very keen not to get a copyright strike on this. So I've talked to Sky about it in BBC Studios who co-produced it, and I'm pleased to say that I've been clear to use this.
So here is the opening credits and the closing credits for My Friend Maisy, which you can watch now on Sky or Now TV in the UK.
My friend Maisie! Whee! Hello, I'm Maisie.
And these are my friends. Bye bye!
Bye!
Yippee!
What will we do today?
There we go, so short little 15, 22nd theme there, but you won't believe how much work goes into that. Lots of back and forth with the producers and the production team and everyone. But yeah, I'm really, really pleased it's out in the wild now, and yeah, I hope you enjoy it.
My plan with it was that it was kind of catchy and a bit of an earworm, so apologies parents, if you've got young kids who are really into it, that theme might be going around your head as it has been for me and my family for the last year or so. But in the second half of the show, I'm going to delve into why that is, some of the nuts and bolts of how that's put together and why that is, again, referring to this pentatonic scale might sound a little bit niche, a little bit technical, but actually, I think there's some really interesting universal truths we can learn about music from that. So that's going to be the second half of the show.
It's going to take us into TV land, Maisy land and my kids' school playground even. So that's going to be a lot of fun in the second half of the show. But while we're talking about kids shows, I should just give a quick plug to my kids show on the 24th of January.
This is the first of the Origin of the Pieces kids shows that I've done. Bit of an experiment, but I'm really, really excited about it. We've got two shows that day, the 2pm show and then the 7pm show, which is the standard sort of evening show, which is aimed more at older kids and adults.
The daytime show is for kids, I would say age five and up. I mean, younger kids might get something out of it as well, but really, yeah, probably about five and up is about right. And the guests we've got are absolutely amazing.
We've got the 16 piece Dan Spanner Big Band, which is a full big band with saxes, trumpets, trombones, rhythm section of drums, bass, piano and Dan leading it. And Dan has got a background in circus and in protest music and we're gonna be touching on both those things in the show, particularly the evening show. But in the daytime, the kids are gonna get a chance to direct the band if they want to and there's gonna be a lot of fun audience interaction, a lot of sort of fun playful games and stuff in that show as well as just some great performances from the band.
But also the other guest we have is this amazing DJ called DJ Steady. Now believe it or not DJ Steady is 10 years old. She's already played Ibiza, she's played the Ministry of Sound.
I saw a festival over the summer and I didn't know who was on, I just thought wow, I'm really liking what's going on there. It's a really heavy jungle and drum and bass set. I was in that mood, it was kind of later on in the evening.
Really great set coming out and then I looked up and said, wait, is that a 10 year old DJing? So I was already really interested in it before I found out that she was 10. And then when I found out she was 10 and this incredible history she's already got at such a young age, I thought I have to book her for the kids show, this is perfect, she's brilliant.
So DJ Steady is going to be there as well, she's going to be talking about what it means to be a DJ, how she got into jungle and drum and bass so young, and doing some demos and hopefully joining the band for a couple of little bits as well, for the DJ big band mashup. And so lots of other fun surprises as well. Anyway, I'm going to stop the plug there, but it's 2 p.m. show for kids and families, I'm really, really excited about that first one, and then the evening show at 7 p.m. We might even, in fact, for the kids show, do a big band version of this Maisy theme that we're going to be talking about later in the show.
So there's a little teaser for you. Anyway, before we go any further with that, My Friend Maisy theme and diving into pentatonic scales and how they work and what makes them catchy and what we can learn about music in a kind of universal sense from some of those ideas, I'm going to take a quick diversion to Norway via Colombia. Quite an indirect route for an interview that I did with the brilliant Mestizo Collective back in 2024.
I was working at the Mela Festival, brilliant free world music festival that happens on the very beautiful location of the harbour in Oslo. And the Mestizo Collective were playing there as well. And the musicians from London and from Colombia, so I knew some of the London musicians.
But then as they were warming up and as they were sound checking, I heard this incredible sound coming out. And I thought, wow, what's this? And I went in and knocked on the dressing room and said, oh, do you mind if I ask what this is?
And it was the Colombian Gaiter. And it's such a beautiful, interesting woodwind instrument that I had to know a bit more about it. And so I spoke to El León Pardo from the Mestizo Collective back in 2024.
And we're going to take a little diversion to learn all about the Gaiter.
And then we've just played with Mestizo.
Fantastic show. Really, really loved the show. And you opened, you started the show with these flutes, and I heard you warming up earlier, and I thought, I've got to talk to you about this.
Can you tell me what this is?
Yeah, well, this instrument...
The caeta, te columbine, We see the real name. So the Spanish, when they arrived in Latin America, they thought it looked like a pipe, a pack pipe. So that's why they call it caita, which is pack pipe in Spanish.
So it comes from an Indian, an indigenous tribe called Cogis. I hope there's a ritual. Okay, so this is La Embra.
Si. So there's two flutes. So one of them is the female, this one here.
And then there's the male one, only has two holes. And this one plays the melody, the female, and the male accompanies. And I think he is the female, and he is the male.
And you opened the show with these two playing together, right?
Yes.
This is a beautiful way to open the show. And so you said it was a ritual instrument. What was it used for, and is it still used for that now?
So it represents the duality of good and bad, male and female. So in the 20th century, then it started to fuse the African elements and with this Africa and the Spanish side as well. Okay, so then the new format was that appeared and it was three gaitas with drums and vocals.
So it goes as a perfect triangle because you have the drums coming from Africa, then the Spanish side is the voice, which is like flamenco, And then you have the indigenous part, which is the idea.
And could you, we just describe it. It's a long pipe, long tube made of wood. What kind of wood is this?
Originally, it was a cactus. This is cedar.
Okay, we can see them. And it has a black.
Si, esta parte es cera de abejas con carbón natural molido.
Aha, so this is a beef wax.
Ah, okay.
With charcoal oil mixed.
Si, en esta parte, digamos que se mantiene el material original.
Aha, this is the original material.
Y de esta parte, que es la embocadura del instrumento, al principio se utilizaba pluma de pato o de pavo.
So at first, they used to use feathers, duck feathers, duck feathers, but now...
Plastico. Y se le hizo como este, forma para poderla quitar antejera fija.
Aha, that's good. So they've made it so you can take it out.
And this is, you blow through this eye, I see, I see. It used to be made from a hollow feather. It's interesting.
And we can't go any further without hearing some. Would you mind playing a little bit?
Yeah, yeah. That would be great.
Yeah, that was beautiful. It's got a very airy sound to it, right? It's really, but very, it's still quite loud to the flute.
Yeah, it's really, really beautiful. And it, yeah, integrated so nicely here. And you have, how many holes is this?
Five, five holes. But this hole is only from this. If I use these holes, they're already in a tune, a normal tune.
But we use only four holes, and it's a Dorian mode.
Oh, okay, okay. So yeah, so for people listening at home who don't know what that means, that would be, one way of thinking about that is the notes of the piano, but starting on the D. So, yeah, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D.
Okay, okay. Beautiful. Thank you so much.
We've got to go and play, and I think there's another interview going on. Thank you, Philippe, Philippe Dupont-Ville for translating from the podcast.
Some of you might recognize that tune. That is one of the first tunes that people seem to play on the piano when they're kids. And that's because it's all just the black notes.
So you go up the three black notes. For those of you who know the piano keyboard, that's starting on F sharp. And then up and down those black notes.
Now, you may have guessed that that is the pentatonic scale, right? That is the sound of pentatonic scale. We've got the first note here, which is this F sharp.
So that is one, one, two, three.
And that's the sound of what we call the major pentatonic scale. Now, don't worry, I'm not going to get super deep into scale theory or anything here. But as I referenced last time, this idea of a five note scale as opposed to a major scale, minor scale or various other scales that have got seven notes, maybe eight notes, more notes basically than five.
This is quite a universal thing that we find in all sorts of places in the world. It's a very, very important component of folk music from a lot of places. Last episode we talked about Malatu pentatonix or Ethiopian pentatonix, which I'm going to talk a bit more about shortly.
But we also hear it in music of, for example, China. It's very, very associated with China and other parts of Asia. You hear it a lot in lots of parts of Africa as well as Ethiopia, that we've already talked about.
You hear it in Scottish folk music, Irish folk music, a lot of European music. That's the major pentatonic there, but really the idea of any five note scale. In other words, a scale within an octave, within this, that has only five notes.
Now, if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify, I'm playing a melodica here so you can see the keyboard as I'm doing that. And then there, of course, that is the black notes, but we can move that onto other notes in the keyboard. So for the rest of this episode, we're gonna move that same pattern onto the white notes, but the same principle applies.
So don't worry too much about the technicalities of that, but you'll be able to hear that this is the same pattern, just in a different pitch.
So that is the pentatonic scale. Now, the reason that that is relevant for today's episode, when I'm talking about the My Friend Maisy theme, is that when I got that pitch through, and I read through all the stuff, and of course I know the Maisy books because I read them to my kids when they were younger, I thought this world that Lucy Cousins has created with those books is so, it's primary colours, it's bright, it's fun, it's playful, and it's accessible. And one of the things that I think about sometimes when I think about those primary colours is what you get in kids musical toys.
So I've got a whole variety of different kids musical toys. There's Boom Whackers, which are kind of hollow plastic tubes, which you bash on stuff and make a pitched noise according to their colour. So the red is C for example, and I think orange is D and so on.
And so there's those. I've also got a set of little push bells, which in fact I did actually use that in the early stages of developing this theme song. I use those quite a lot.
So let's just cut to a little video of me recording this. It's probably about 2am, about a year ago when I was working on this pitch.
Yeah, and you can see, if you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, you can see that those are also colour coded in the same colours, red for C and so on. And this carries right through to school playgrounds, right? What's really interesting about playgrounds in parks or whatever is that these days, I'm really pleased to say that they've often got quite interesting musical stuff going on in them.
And one of the things that many of them have is this pentatonic scale. Yeah, so when I was coming up with an idea for how to score this show, this show that is based on these books, which are very bright primary colours, fun and accessible, and it's for quite young kids, it's aimed at, I think, about three year olds, I thought, well, what is associated with childhood? And it is this pentatonic scale.
Now what that means is very conveniently that this, the whole Maisy theme can be played on kids' playground equipment, or on these little push bells, or on these boomwhackers that many schools have, that it can be played with those. It can be, the whole melody can be played just with those, which is quite fun. And I was delighted to discover that my own kids' school playground has got a pentatonic tubular bell wacky thing in it.
When I was working on this episode earlier in the week, I asked the teachers if I could just film myself recording the Maisy theme. So here I am, playing the Maisy theme on the tubular bells in the kids' playground. I'm here at my kids' school, just after I dropped them off at school.
And what have they got but a perfect illustration of the pentatonic scale. And yeah, you find these in a lot of kids' playgrounds.
And it blends together really nicely. You've got this nice long sustain on these notes. And the reason they all sound nice together is for all of the same reasons we're talking about in this episode.
And because you find these in kids' playgrounds a lot and it's the elemental scale that we all know so deeply and so well, that's the first thing I thought of when I was composing the theme for Maisy, which is this.
There we go, so that's how I came up with the Maisy theme, and you can play it in any kids' playground across the land. Yeah, so it's quite a fun thing that it started off inspired by kids' musical equipment, and what that now means is that now it's out in the world, and people can listen to it. If they like the theme, they can go and play it, and they can play it on the black notes of a piano or keyboard or anything, or they can play it in their playground equipment, on the boomwhackers, bells or anything else they might have at school, which is quite fun, doesn't require a lot of knowledge, which was the idea.
I'm a big fan of trying to democratise music making and the music listening as well, active listening, and so that was a big part of what I wanted to do with it. So that was where the idea came from and developed. So I'm just gonna play the scale, and you can hear me playing it on the kids' equipment, and then you can hear me playing the theme tune, I'm just gonna run those next to each other, and then I'm gonna replay the theme song from the show, and you'll see what I mean.
Whee! Hello, I'm Maisie. And these are my friends.
Bye bye! Bye!
Yippee!
What will we do today?
There you go, so it sort of really maps across those things. Now, I don't want to go too technical here, but the important thing to understand about this so-called major pentatonic scale sound is the reason it works so well is that we don't have what we might think of in, for example, a major scale as what are called avoid notes. In other words, again, if I've got the keyboard here, I've got the melodica that I'm going to demonstrate this on, if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify, you can see, when I start the scale from here, which is a C, if you go up the white notes to the next C, which is here.
Sorry, I'm trying to do it at a funny angle. You can see that there are a couple of places in that scale where there's not a black note between the two white notes. And that means that we have there what's called an interval of a semitone.
(*plays*) Is a smaller jump than (*plays*) and here as well. (*plays*) And you will notice that the pentatonic scale that I've just been talking about, it misses those notes out. So here we go.
(*plays*) So there are no semitones next to each other in the pentatonic scale, as opposed to the major scale.
So we missed those, what are called avoid notes out. And that means, because often a semitone, if you sustain two notes that are a semitone apart, that can feel quite clashy, it can feel like the waveforms of those notes are overlapping and kind of getting in the way of each other. And what happens is you get this kind of funny vibration, which is essentially the root of what dissonance is.
All right, that's a semitone going next to each other. Here as well. Whereas with a tone, the dissonance of a tone, we don't get quite such a pronounced, what I call a kind of beating or rubbing of the two notes.
You can hear that there, here's a semitone. Here's a tone. Here's a semitone.
Yeah, that's a tone.
So, there's maybe a slight dissonance, there's a slight, you know, they're still close to each other, but we don't get that same kind of vibratey sound that you get when two notes are a semitone apart rather than a tone. And what that means is we don't have those so-called avoid notes within a major pentatonic scale. So that means that basically everything sounds good, which is why, if you just play, again, going back to the black notes, if we transpose that back up to the black notes.
You can play around the black notes to your heart's content, and nothing's going to sound sort of funny or crunchy or dissonant or bad because of that exact thing that I was just saying. There's no semitones within that. Now, I love semitones, I love dissonance.
It's a really, really important part of what music is. But actually, when it comes to constructing melodies, these particular melodies that are sometimes played on more resonant instruments. So here, again, I'm thinking if we go back to the example of the kids' school playground, there you've got these bells, these tubes, these metal tubes, which are very resonant.
They ring out. And in other words, one sound carries over into the next sound. So if you play one, it then as you play the next one, the first sound is still going.
And that means that you're not getting that clash that you would if they were semitones. They all sound quite nice together, which is why you can just sort of poodle about on those sorts of instruments. And it all sounds good because you've got that sustain, which means that one's hanging over into the next, but it doesn't matter because one hang over into the next actually sounds quite nice.
So that becomes a characteristic of the sound. So that is why the major pentatonic is so interesting. And so kind of semi-universal really, is because everything sounds nice together.
It's a nice, nice, easy thing. What's interesting about that is that I think of scales of any sort or we can call them modes or scales. I think of them as each having an identity, a very distinct identity.
You can think of them, I suppose, as different palettes. If you're thinking with an art metaphor, you can think of having one palette of, in this case, the major pentatonic would be a palette of primary colours. You might then switch that palette out, keeping some of those colours maybe, but then changing a couple of them, you would get a very different painting if you painted with those two slightly different hues than the primary colour palette.
And that's the way I think of it with music. So we were talking about mulatu and Ethiopian pentatonics last week. Now, all that's happened there is that we've changed two notes in that pentatonic scale.
Instead of doing this, let me just go back to the Melodica. We do this. And here we go.
So that is a semitone. And up here when we go.
Another semitone. So we've gone from having no semitones to having two semitones. Everything else is the same.
So here's the major sound.
And then we move to.
Which is a completely different feel, and it can be quite hard to hear in isolation. But if I play a little phrase with the melodica.
It's got an entirely different sound, even though all we've done is just change a couple of notes very subtly to. (*trumpet playing*) Very, very different feel, entirely different feel. So I'm switching out those two colours out of the five, if you like, and suddenly everything feels and sounds different.
Now, what I thought might be fun is to try and do exactly that using the wonders of modern technology with a piece of software called Melodyne. It's a very clever piece of music software, and what it allows you to do is to repitch things after the fact. So first of all, I'm going to go into Melodyne, and I'm going to change how that tubular belt in the kids playground sounds.
If I do exactly that, I change the third note. So again, for those of you with a more musical background, technical musical background, I'm going to go from C, D, rather than to E, I'm going to go to E flat, yeah? And same with the A, rather than it being an A natural.
So major pentatonic would be C, D, E, G, A, but I'm going to change the E and the A, I'm just going to lower them down, so an E flat and an A flat, right? So that's going to go from sounding like this, which is the major pentatonic in the playground, to this, which is the tizitin minor pentatonic from Ethiopia.
Just totally different feel, right? And all we've done is just tweak those things. Now, of course, what we can do is we can then, the Maisy theme that I played on that tubular bell in the playground, we can do the same with that.
So why don't we see how that sounds?
Again, quite different. If I'd pitch that for the Kids TV show, I don't think I'd have got the gig. I mean, I really like that sound.
I've worked, again, having worked with Mulatu and being a jazz musician, I love leaning into those slight discrepancies of pitch. The slight crunchiness is really beautiful. And I really, really think that's an incredibly expressive and wonderful sound, but it's not right for a primary colors kids show.
And so what happens in fact, I think let's go all in, and why don't we try and re-pitch the entire Maisy theme in tizitamina. In other words, in this Ethiopian mulatu mode. Let's try that.
Yeah, so quite a different sound, right? Let's go back to the original. Here's the original.
Hello, I'm Maisie. And these are my friends.
And this is our world, where we can do anything.
What will we do today?
So the thing about this is I think it says something quite profound about how we listen, but also how we think about music and scales and all the rest of it. Because I think once you start to think of melodies and harmonies being constructed out of these scales, as if we think of them as having an identity, each one having an identity, having a different palette, having a different flavor, whatever analogy you want to use, and switching those out, then it suddenly becomes not about the technical language of music, whether it's a flattened third, whether it's this, that or the other, it becomes about a different feel, a different identity to the sound that you're going for. And certainly as a composer, when I go into pitching for a kids TV show, that's what I'm thinking about.
Of course, I've got a lot of technical knowledge as well, but what I'm thinking about is how does the identity of this show, whether it's primary colours or whether it's something more gritty and dramatic, how does that map on to my musical understanding? But there, I'm thinking again about palettes. I'm thinking about is this a primary palette, primary colour palette?
Is this something with a bit more nuance and subtlety? Is it a very dark palette? So that's the way I'm thinking.
And the reason I think that that's important in terms of this show is that the whole reason this show exists was because people come up to me after gigs with Hackney Colliery Band or whoever else. I'd be at the merch desk or at the bar and they would say, okay, yeah, I love playing an instrument when I was a kid. I really regret giving it up now.
But when I was about 13, 14, I got to this point where I had to study theory and then I ended up doing sport instead or going off and studying something else or getting into dating girls or boys or whatever. And so I kind of got distracted and so stopped practicing it. And often one of the reasons for that is that theory can feel very dry.
And I totally understand that. And the thing that was different for me, I think, at that age, was that I, for better or worse, started getting into jazz around then. And I realized at that point what the point of practicing scales was.
Because the way scales are often taught is very dry. It's like, OK, you've got to practice this and this key and major this and minor that and diminish that and the other. You don't understand how that relates to creating music or improvising music or understanding music or hearing it.
And for me, I was very lucky at that age, suddenly, I made that connection and that really stayed with me. It was quite a profound shift. And it's one that I've continued to explore to this day because now I find that scales really interesting, not for their own sake, not for their own technical sake, but because each one has a completely different sound, a completely different feel and identity to it.
And that is something that is very, very powerful and I think can carry through, even if you're not playing an instrument now. The thing I always say is when people say, oh, I wish I was musical, but I don't play an instrument. It's like, you don't need to play an instrument to be musical.
What that is, is instrumental technique. And that is great. And I encourage everyone to learn an instrument.
It's an amazing thing to do. You will never regret learning an instrument. So please do that.
But the technique of learning an instrument is related to, but separate from musicality and understanding music and engaging your ears in an active and profound way. So that's why I wanted to dig a little bit into pentatonic scales today and talk a little bit more technically than I normally do is to, for exactly that reason, to try and kind of unlock that idea that these things don't need to be scary. If you think of them as identities that you can then shift around by doing, making small changes, then that is a much, I think, healthier way of understanding what music is and the way it's put together.
Anyway, so that's a pentatonic episode of the show. So do go and check out My Friend Maisy on Sky and Now TV in the UK. I'm not sure if it's international yet, but it certainly will be next year.
It will be in other territories as well, so I'm sure you can check it out. When it comes out more fully next year. That's about it for today.
My huge thanks to my guest, the Mestizo Collective earlier, who did that beautiful Geiter demonstration and lovely music from Oslo via Columbia. And I'm gonna be taking a little break now for Christmas and New Year. Gonna be coming back in the New Year.
But please do, if you're not following me already on social media, at Steve Pretty, I'm gonna be doing a little treat over the Christmas period. So do watch out there. Again, it's kind of related to this idea of how to listen, basically.
So if you like today's episode, do make sure you follow me on socials at Steve Pretty. Meanwhile, I'm gonna do another plug for Wiltons. I'm super excited about that show.
It's 24th of January. Perfect Christmas gift, if you haven't got any Christmas gifts yet, for either adults in the evening or families in the daytime, 2pm, yeah, do come to that show. If you go to originofthepieces.com, then you can find all the details there.
There's a live tab and you can go in there and find all the tickets or on the Wiltons website as well. Use your thing to sign up to my Patreon and there's loads of good stuff coming up there, more stuff coming up over Christmas there as well. Patreon really helps me to make the show, to keep it flourishing and independent and as regular as I can make it.
If you go to originofthepieces.com, then you can find out the details there or you can also find it on Patreon. And if you search for originofthepieces.com, you can sign up for nothing. And that just gets you some extra bonus bits behind the scenes.
But if you can pay £1, £5 or as much as you can afford, then again, that really helps me out. Meanwhile, have a great Christmas if you're listening to this before Christmas. And I will speak to you in the new year, first or second week of the new year.
I'm going to be beavering away behind the scenes for the next few weeks, but yeah, no episode for a little while now. So thank you very much for your attentions this year. 2026 is going to be a really big year for this show and all sorts of other stuff that I'm doing.
So yeah, if you've liked what you've heard in the last few episodes, then do stay tuned and charge your podcast feeds and sign up to the mailing list on the website and all of that business, it all really helps. I will speak to you in the new year and meanwhile, stay Musically Curious. Bye.