As someone who runs a music label, ans has been doing this since 1999, it's not worth it to invest heavily into music. The people that make money in the industry, aren't the people that play the instruments.
It's a long gone dream of just making music that has turned into payola, social media corruption, fake audiences, and negative things like drug abuse, lip syncing, fraud, suicide and ghost writers. Don't wish it on your kids, there are countless kid stars that succumb to this toxic industry like Britney Spears, Aaron Carter, and Michael Jackson. For the rest, there's working at guitar center and ripping off others with overpriced music equipment to grant you a health-care-less descent into oblivion as a broke ex musician.
The players that give up may well be saving their own life, if not for a ton of frustration and false hope.
Agree. Avicii was also a rather high-profile case:
"When he stopped touring, he wanted to find a balance in life to be able to be happy and to do what he loved most – music. He really struggled with thoughts about Meaning, Life, Happiness. He could now not go on any longer. He wanted to find peace. Tim was not made for the business machine he found himself in"
"His manager, Arash Pournouri, admitted that he knew of Bergling's anxieties but refused to label them a problem of mental health"
They may not get as rich as pop stars -but they suffer lots of substance abuse (though many themselves likely think they are enjoying the substance abuse).
I've been a performing jazz musician for 40+ years. I've never heard of or observed heroin use, never been offered it. I doubt that jazz musicians are more or less likely to partake, than the population in general. Alcohol is a big problem.
I would suppose that the top-tier symphonies pay pretty well -- but making the cut there is probably the equivalent of a basketball player making the NBA.
You don't have to be a career rockstar to get personal satisfaction and enjoyment from playing instruments for yourself or with friends. When people quit as a child its really sad, because they deny themselves an opportunity for a lifelong hobby. Picking up the guitar again after I quit as a kid was the best thing I could do, but I still kick myself for not sticking through it all the years and all the potential experience I wasted playing tf2 instead.
I really hated to sound so grim... I've had some great experiences and I still do, nothing beats playing your music for crowds of people... The money is the problem. If you as a musician don't make it, there are others making it off of you. Scams are reampant. I just got an email from a fake Instagram account posing as a real journalist asking me for money for a feature in a big magazine...
To tell you the truth it's utterly depressing to be a musician with integrity after seeing the deep levels of corruption, usury, and depravity that happen in this industry... The wots part, is that tons of the people that act like they are rich are actually fat from it, and many people simply lie about success or buy it (trust fund babies).
I love playing mandolin, and i'm taking up fiddle now. Someday I hope to learn piano. It's is all in good fun.
My day job is programming. I'm lucky that I enjoy it as well, but there is only so much time I can write code in a day, and that is less than 8 hours (i'm glad for meetings for this reason, they prevent burn out) I get paid well for it.
I think the equation changed recently. Many more gigs, because so less people are playing an instrument to a certain level nowadays. Here in Hamburg Germany (with a population of 1.8m) there are maybe like two good pianists. It's actually relatively easy to earn money with music through concerts nowadays.
I don't know what the situation is like in Germany, but here in the US there are far more people who are good at music than there are jobs. There are a lot more than 2 great Pianists in Des Moines (population 700k). I'm pretty sure just out local universities' piano professors account for more than two, plus their students are presumably great in their own right (I have not checked to see what they have) I have to believe Hamburg has some form of university with great professors.
Okay, there are some great pianists. But not many that can organize a show. It was a bit tongue in cheek, but so many are feeling entitled and have no business skills.
Not anymore, but I did practice when I was. I know not everyone is wired the same way. I sympathize with kids that are pushed when they’re not into it.
I love playing but the idea of financial gain from it is laughable. I get lots of other benefits, though.
I imagine, like most other creative arts (e.g., programming), first you have to really want to do it, then that makes you learn how to do it, and if you wind up learning to do it well you may be able to make money at it. Maybe.
Same. I've played guitar for 22 years (mainly steel string acoustic), but last year started learning classical and I cannot get enough of it, even though I'm pretty shit at it. It's so much fun to learn, even though no one will ever hear it.
I would guess that the way music is recorded and produced now, session musicians are much less in demand, but I really don't know. Just seems that the ability to sit down and sight read a part and play it perfectly through in one or two takes is not really needed anymore, when songs are pieced together almost note by note in a computer/DAW.
Session musicians make sample CDs now mostly I would imagine. Sample services like splice have kind of gutted the worth of sample CDs, so that complicates life for session artists a lot I imagine.
Session playing is one of the better career paths in music performance, such as it is, because it rewards being a highly-skilled technician. Producers can do marvelous things in a DAW, but it's all sampling. If they want a live part and they want to sound like it, bringing in a player for an hour can be more cost-effective.
The problem is that you need superstar skills to pass the threshold of actually getting those gigs - you have to show up and just be able to nail things on the first take, and even improvise your part if asked.
If you aren't fussy about sound quality, then it's not really important how the part is played, but that's also why music has such a crisis as an economic activity; sequenced and prerecorded substitutes for live performance aren't timbrally the same, but they let you communicate all the structural information of the music. In a sense, it's like we replaced listening with reading, and that's a problem when so much of music is relatively similar.
Albeit the amount of work available has been in decline for decades and it's now a fraction of what it used to be, but there's still enough work to keep a core of the very best working almost full time in the remaining major recording studios (here in London at least).
I think you'd be surprised at how much music is still produced by composing, arranging for and recording real musicians. But London is still one of the best places on the planet to get that kind of work done so it's an admittedly skewed experience.
Oh, and there's more than just session musicians who need to sight read perfectly first time - that's just table-stakes for professional commercial musicians in my experience (source: am professional-level jazz trombonist).
I left the industry in 2013. I saw some of that toxicity and bleak future that you described.
This year I am starting to get back into a music side career, treating it like a bootstrapped startup. Using email marketing funnels to sell digital or CD, being cautious about investing into it. Haven’t proven it out yet, but I think I will enjoy trying.
If anything, it’s a good excuse to learn digital marketing, which would come in handy if I want to try selling anything else online.
Life as a musician is fun if you have cashflow from other sources or savings that pad you well from harsh life... It's a great way to kill time. When people cite corruption though, they're talking about the tolls on people who don't operate off of a safety net. It's important to keep the perspectives distinct. Most people don't have the luxury of being able to fail at something they work hard on, this is why I feel it's supremely important to be honest about music background and experience, which many artists aren't.
The majority of "successful" musicians in public life right now had industry connected family members, or prior wealth as an assist to their current career. Upward mobility (financially) without cash and connections is severely limited in today's music industry, as well as in many other professions like acting etc...
Working in the music industry shattered a lot of the glamorous illusions. I also learned that from peers who were chewed up and spit out by the major label machines.
For those 7 years, I was constantly broke, and being taken advantage of by people in the industry with more leverage.
Then I met someone in the office that thought it was crazy that I had a music career before I became a programmer. But it’s the same reason they’re in the office too! It’s really hard, and even if you have that special “it” factor, it can require more runway than most people are willing to give to get there.
> The people that make money in the industry, aren't the people that play the instruments.
I've got to say I'm legitimately shocked that anyone still thinks this. I can absolutely state 100% of my friends who play instruments don't do it for the money. Granted none of them are signed, but the point of music is not to get signed.
For me, it was the content. I stopped playing piano at 14, because my teacher really wanted me to play classical. Not a fan.
I came back to piano later by myself when I wanted to play video game music. Then I wanted to play stuff from movies, pop songs, etc. I started watching interesting videos on reharmonization and tried that on some pop hits to interesting effect. I wouldn’t say I “stopped” completely, but my relationship with the instrument is completely different than it was when I was taking full time lessons growing up. I’m at the point where I might take it up again, but I would have specific goals in mind now.
this was exactly what brought me back after i left as a kid
i've had an opportunity once to recommend this to a mother who asked me what kept me interested, as her kid was losing interest. i told her to get some scores for the games they were playing
You might be interested in ragtime video game covers. There are lots of videos of a ragtime piano player called Tom Brier who *sightreads* video game music notation. That is, he plays a score while reading it for the first time. He's incredibly skilled, it's awe-inspiring.
My kid asked to get her music lessons so she can play the music from Genshin Impact she really liked. Both from in-game as well as from recordings of orchestral performances Hoyo Labs organized. Happy parent :-)
If a kid already dislikes or is apathic to something (eg being forced to learn an instrument) then being forced into it by the parents will make him hate it for life.
"Some teachers find it’s their job to make students get better," Pappas says. "But what a teacher really needs to do is give their students the tools to make themselves better."
In my opinion, both approaches are wrong. The job of a good teacher is to make learning fun. Once you enjoy practicing, skill follows automatically.
I think this is deeply wrong, and it externalizes the impetus for practice.
I'm good at math not because some teacher in my youth made it fun. I'm good at math because I found the pedagogy and practice of it fun in and of itself. In fact, I've almost always found every attempt to "make math fun" to invariably be devoid of any real math content. If you don't enjoy the practice and struggle and discovery, and get motivation only from those rare, occasional breakthroughs in understanding or skill, you're not going to be good at it. Full stop. Sorry, that's not how the world works.
Math can pay the bills, or at least is. A prerequisite for most great jobs.
Most people will never make money with music, but they can enjoy playing it. As such music should be taught as fun first, and then the rest follows if and when needed.
Looking through roughly 100 of the same comment in this thread, I think the singlemindedness of the concept of "music" was a problem for many.
Theory and composition don't require performance ability. Transcription or mixing are other choices for people who have great ears and technical ability but perhaps poor biomechanics or dexterity. The playing of music by oneself is only one pillar of many in the vast field of music, and yet the way we do it is such an unappealing gauntlet of private "use it or lose it" that what child wouldn't rather be elsewhere with friends?
Put another way, I think capable, broad-minded teachers are the greatest barrier to producing capable musicians.
I wouldn't even say that the point of music teachers is to do anything about music. It's life mentoring, with adults who have different experiences and ideas than your parents do.
Practicing an instrument is a way to learn how to get into a flow state
No. It's completely possible to have fun, practice and damage you. Practice has to meaningful, safe and hundred more things beginners and kids have no idea about. It's exactly about giving students (safe) tools they need.
PS. I have played music since I was 5, had even some professional career and stopped when I was 30.
I was all set to quit growing up until I discovered gamemusicthemes.com. I had a blast playing my favorite video game music and coercing my piano teacher to play some of the more difficult stuff. Even now, I have a binder of sheet music from that site that I play from time to time.
My parents have never heard of the site even to this day. If you ask them, I'm just naturally hard-working and passionate.
I've been teaching beginning guitar lessons for about seven years. Guitar is a little different in that, outside of classical guitar, there's very little traditional pedagogy, but from experience I think these things are generally true about most instruments.
1. When you start learning you sound terrible... for a long time. It's very difficult to stay motivated when you can hear your problems.
2. It's very difficult to judge your own progress. I've started recording short videos during lessons which I can show to students weeks or months later when they're expressing frustration with their progress.
3. You have to enjoy practicing, since you have to pick up the instrument most days to maintain the dexterity, callouses, etc. It's very easy for a pushy parent to beat the joy out of practicing.
4. You have to understand the difference between playing that song you can play great, and practicing something you suck at so you improve. It's very easy to stagnate if you only play.
Really it boils down to, you're going to suck for a while, then you're going to think you suck even when you don't, and you have to keep enjoying the process even when you think you suck.
Exercise is the same way, lots of effort to stay in the same place. I like to believe that maintenance work makes me better, even though the numbers don't really change. At least it gets easier to keep it up over time.
Your dexterity is lost without practice, but I find that the new licks, chord progressions and other ideas you add to your repertoire to be used in improvisation stick around. This to me is far more valuable than the dexterity which I can reacquire in no time. My jazz voicings today are far better than they were at a time when I practiced a lot more piano.
I gave up piano, was spending all my practice time just keeping level but not progressing. Switched to drawing art (mostly nsfw). Takes far less work imo and I don’t seem to regress in skill after taking a break.
You get way more attention for low skill drawings than music too.
> It's like trying to go up an escalator that's going down, if you stop you come back to point 0.
I think it's more nuanced than that, you don't go back to zero, the decay is exponential so the drop is most brutal at the front of the curve:
My experience with skill acquisition, you have to hit a checkpoint and bed it in while in a learning phase.
Eg Now that I grok cycling/skiing/wakeboarding, I can take years away from those and will be able to find my way around without starting from scratch.
Even after a decade of not speaking Mandarin, I decayed massively but didn't go back to zero even though I really had lost so much vocab and fluency.
My takeaway after really honing the skill of learning itself is that it's most efficient to learn in super intensive bursts, especially if you don't expect to be able to keep up frequent practice.
Skiing is probably the most relatable skill that many people learn but rarely practice. Living in a foreign country and learning the local language is another example.
Bringing it back to music, after taking almost 8 years out of the piano my scales didn't really drop below 150bpm for quavers but I was able to get to 250+ in a single focused practise session. Skill reacquisition is very fast, which is why weight lifters always report that getting back to PB is considerably faster second time around (weightlifting low-key being the skill of muscle recruitment)
Supporting your exponential hypothesis, I noticed after my 5 year break from piano that I could still play scales at pretty much exactly the same speed, and I still had a lot of the muscle memory. My teacher when I was in school had me doing them in 16th notes (semiquavers?) at 160-180 bpm before I stopped.
I've found it surprisingly low effort to get good enough at guitar and, in fact, piano, that you can start to see social rewards, i.e. people actually want you to play, at least a little.
Meanwhile I put in more hours and had far more formal instruction at a woodwind than either of those combined and... yeah, nobody wanted to hear that shit, it sounds awful (cringe-inducing, even) unless you're excellent. Years of effort and practice and no-one wanted to be around when I was playing (and I can't blame them). It's super discouraging to have spent that much time and effectively have nothing to show for it—nothing that sounds at least OK, even to you when you record it and play it back.
A couple half-assed months on guitar or piano can get you to, "hey, that sounds pretty good!" and get people to start singing along to whatever you're playing.
You can't do a pop- or folk- or standard-tune sing-along with a damn saxophone. I mean, you can, but nobody wants to unless your playing is so good you could go pro.
I think the difference is that they're good accompaniment instruments, and can play chords. Plus there's very little technique to learn to achieve acceptable & reasonably consistent tone.
Now, I'm sure getting to the point of being able to play solo instrumentals that anyone cares to hear on either of those, is much harder (I was getting there on the guitar at my peak, but still hadn't achieved it), but there's just nothing for most other instruments, as far as natural encouragement or reward from others, until you're awesome at them.
> I've found it surprisingly low effort to get good enough at guitar and, in fact, piano, that you can start to see social rewards, i.e. people actually want you to play, at least a little.
Also surprisingly low cost for a pretty good instrument. $250 dollars will get you a pretty good solid top steel string acoustic guitar (Yamaha FS800 or FG800, Fender CC60 or CD60, half a dozen models from Orangewood) or solid top classical guitar (Cordoba C3, Yamaha CG122).
Piano costs a bit more, but $500 or so should do it for a pretty good beginner instrument.
By pretty good I mean an instrument that sounds good and has a good feel so that you don't have to struggle to play it (beyond the struggling inherent in being a beginner even if you were playing on a professional concert level instrument) and it won't make you learn any bad habits you'll have to unlearn if you continue and move up to a better instrument.
> Meanwhile I put in more hours and had far more formal instruction at a woodwind than either of those combined and... yeah, nobody wanted to hear that shit, it sounds awful (cringe-inducing, even) unless you're excellent
Plus woodwinds and other orchestra instruments seem to be way more expensive. I'd guess that stops a lot of people who might have been interested in taking them up.
I checked at my local music store and student oboes for example start at around $3000. Clarinets around $1000. Tubas around $4000. Wow.
They are even small enough that you can just get a whole bunch of them and tune them each to a different open chord and then just switch ukuleles as the chords change in your song as the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain did in this hilarious version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore" [1].
Oboes are just expensive instruments. Tons of small moving parts, low worldwide volume. If you think that's bad, though, low end English Horns (1.5x longer oboe) start at $6000.
Also, many orchestras have only 2 oboe players. I don't think I've ever seen a pop/rock band with an oboe in it.
The lack of french horn players in pop/rock bands was part of why I quit playing. The neighbors complaining about my practicing didn't help. Yamaha's Silent Brass system worked pretty well while I still had one.
This is why guitar is considered a folk instrument. I think that’s what’s cool about guitar—-its low floor but high ceiling. You can strum open chords or on the other end learn difficult pieces on classical guitar. Similar to what you shared, classical guitarists will tell you nobody cares when they’re playing something super difficult. Sometimes people just can’t tell the effort it takes and don’t relate to the piece being played.
As a guitarist I found piano even easier to sound decent as there is no real threat of accidentally muting anything or plucking at a weird angle. But if you’re musically inclined its pretty easy to tell who has dedicated the time to learning it well.
Was mildly triggered by your comment at first, being a pianist, but on reflection you're right. The skill floor for the piano is objectively lower thanks to being percussive. But my god is it difficult trying to sing with a percussive instrument while also accompanying yourself with and extra 2-3 voices.
Timbre, vibrato and dynamic control over a single note mean that people will pay to listen to a beautiful singer or sax play a single line of music but my god does a pianist or guitarist have to work to keep up with that.
I think a big part of it is you can sound good playing piano quietly. It's hard to play a woodwind quietly and sound good. Yes, the pros can certainly do it, but it's a difficult skill to master. They're instruments designed to project without electronic amplification.
I've played both piano and guitar for many years now, and the distinction I'd make is that piano is easier to start out on than guitar, but harder to get good at--in the long run the difficulty of mastery is probably about the same on both, but they have different learning curves.
I can't find the quote, but I reminded of something from an early electronic music pioneer.
They talked about how electronic music would lower the barrier to making music, and remove all that tedious time spent on the mechanics of playing an instrument, allowing people to focus on the music itself.
Also you have to play with other people. I'm a lifelong musician and former professional musician, and I was always in bands, both school and rock bands with friends, right from when I started playing.
I think that's just crucial, I never would have stuck with it just sweating it out in the basement. You aren't a musician if you aren't playing with other people and in front of audiences.
> You aren't a musician if you aren't playing with other people and in front of audiences.
That’s a terrible attitude. There are plenty of, for example, solo piano players who love playing, but aren’t interested in either being in a band or being a celebrity playing for other people. They are every bit a musician as you are.
I didn’t say they had to be a celebrity. But to be a musician you have to actually produce music, its among the performing arts.
Solo piano players have recitals, or make and share recordings of themselves, or do things that aren’t solo too. I stand by the idea that musicianship is a thing that involves other people, at least in some manner or another.
Good to know I’m not a musician even though I play two different instruments 3-4 hours a week each.
I hate playing with others and stick with jam tracks for accompaniment. I never play in front of others either. Super awkward.
I do occasionally put a recording on YouTube, but the listens are never more than a dozen per year, and I don’t promote it ever. Not sure how I get the listens that I do get.
Not sure what it is I’m doing, but apparently it’s not making music. I do love what I do, and find the craftsmanship and technique as pleasurable as any video game.
The context of the story here is kids and music, we’re not talking about people who no longer really bother with worrying about an audience we are talking about kids.
I think kids should play music that reaches other people or they aren’t likely to actually become musicians.
Not sure how controversial that actually is, I’m mostly just making a tree falling in the forest argument.
I agree you should play with other people, but disagree entirely that you aren't a musician if you don't check those boxes. Maybe what you mean is "performer" and even then I'm not sure the logic holds.
I think learning software has been transformative in this space, at least for baseline technical skills and coordination. Hopefully in the future the software will be able to give you feedback on stuff like tone and posture as well.
My experience with students that have used various learning software has been mixed.
They're not good for absolute beginners because it can't give you feedback on the bad physical habits that lead to repetitive strain injuries, or just make it hard to play.
Once you're past that point, you're usually far enough to find a tab or chord sheet and figure it out.
For a motivated intermediate level student there can be value in the smooth difficulty progression and forced introduction of new concepts, but that's a pretty small window where they add value.
As a guitar player for over 30 years now, it's fascinating how quickly you can teach something like Smoke on the Water or Whole Lotta Love in the span of a few minutes to someone who has never picked up the instrument... sure the timing/fretting is off but it's close enough that their face will light up.
To underscore your overall point, I took lessons in 2 phases:
1) At 10 years old, had a cheap classical guitar. Did 8 'proper' lessons, went home on the 8th one crying after being sent home to learn Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.
2) At 14 years old picked up a guitar mag with a tab for Living Colour's "Type", which is almost as simple as something like Smoke on the Water. After learning a couple dozen more songs like this my parents purchased a Squire strat and signed me up for lessons with a dude who looked like Jerry Cantrell. Practiced 5 hours a day, and after 9 months stopped going as it appeared I had outclassed my instructor.
As to your #1 point, I'd humbly disagree. I was in a guitar center with less than a year under under my belt noodling and some guy walked to compliment my playing and see if I was in a band he could check out. My practice partner was similar, went on to win our battle of the bands and dropped out his freshman year of college to helm a critically acclaimed jam band for several years (at their height they spent 3 months touring w/ Phish).
Nowadays with the power of online tools kids can get frighteningly good very quick, and some within a few years to session pro level playing in a myriad of styles. Bedroom guitarists that become obsessed with the likes of Guthrie Govan and Tim Henson.
Do you appreciate those 8 lessons from where you were 10? In a way, you'd played guitar for 5 years when you strolled into that Guitar Center and started noodling.
Would 8 lessons be enough to build that muscle memory though? It is pretty remarkable, though, how long muscle memory can last. I haven't played piano seriously since university except for occasionally noodling on my mom or sister's piano when visiting, and old repertoire seems to flow out of my fingers. Maybe a bit more rusty than when I was taking lessons in my teens, but still there somehow 20 years later.
If nothing else, being exposed to something for a short time has the effect of removing some of the fear of the unknown, at least. You might not be able to repeat any of the stuff you learned, but you'll go into it with a lot less fear the second time, and that's incredibly helpful. And I'm sure some of that stuff will come back to you, too.
We’re talking a sum total of possibly 20 hours playing as a child over the course of a couple months.
As a lefty, I recall I was still in an awkward enough phase that when shopping for an electric I couldn’t decide on getting a left or right model, they both felt equally awkward, so just continued using right. Pretty sure I wasn’t able to barre chord. Things ramped up quickly once I started with the 2nd instructor.
A lot of people fluent in sheet music don't appreciate how incomprehensible and information-dense it really is. If you just want to play a song, it's the wrong way to go.
I'm a fluent reader, and I agree with you. Conventional notation has its use cases, but if you don't fall into one of them, then you're better off without it.
Playing "classical" music is the most familiar use case. I belong to a 19-piece jazz ensemble, which involves a hybrid of composed and improvised music, and everything we play is from sheet music. I'm the bassist, and my parts are a mixture of conventional notation and chord symbols. In this environment, tabulature is actually useless -- no arranger knows how to write it, and nobody can read it at performance speed.
On the other hand, there's very little sheet music in rock and contemporary genres except in some situations such as studio / commercial work. A complaint I've read about tabulature is that a lot of tabs found online are inaccurate. There's also a school of thought that relying on tabs is an impediment to learning how to play by ear.
Learning to read from day one is how I was taught, but it's no longer the preferred method. For instance, the Suzuki method has kids start out playing entirely by ear. Reading comes later.
I can sight read tab to a pretty high level, e.g. I was able to sight read my way through most of Capricho Árabe at first glance if that means anything to anyone. I just started teaching myself classical guitar in August and I've completely fallen in love, it's all I listen to and I practise hours per day.
But I am now teaching myself standard notation because I am running up against the limit of tab. I keep having to go back and forth between someone actually playing the piece and the tab so I can get the rhythm, and sometimes I'll find I internalise a rhythm incorrectly and then one day when I'm listening to the piece played by a pro it clicks and I realise I've been playing it wrong this whole time.
There are sites like https://www.classtab.org/ which try to add this rhythmic information to tab, but I don't think it works all that well.
Honestly at this point I wish I'd started with standard notation, or at least learnt both at the same time.
I don't think you can sight-read tabs, AFAIK sight-reading means being able to play something without seeing or hearing it before, and tabs don't have rhythm information.
> Honestly at this point I wish I'd started with standard notation, or at least learnt both at the same time.
Well, it would have required the same (or more effort) then, couple of months should hardly make a difference. Good luck!
Guitar is in a tricky spot because tabs give you information sheet music doesn't, which voicing to use (is it called that) i.e which string to play a given note on.
Lead sheets are great, they are not dense and get the most important parts across.
For other uses, the density is the thing and it can't be replaced by anything. Sheet music has syntax and structure in a way that makes it possible to learn to read it by chunks, unlike let's say piano roll.
I have come to like sheet music - in part, because of its density.
Most voices, which we play in our music club fit on 1 to 4 sheets. This is the amount of sheets, which can be conveniently put on our music stands. Any more means page turning during a piece or multiple music stands.
A less dense format would mean that it does not find on four sheets on a music stand anymore. We would have to swap out paper binders for an electronic solution. This on one hand is expensive and on the otherhand bothersome. Paper with all its limitations just works. Electronic devices need to be charged, kept up to date, break easily, etc. Doing something offline lets me relax and focus easier.
That said I think tablets will become an increasingly better alternative for paper based sheet music. I don't like the glowing comparatively small displays though. Looking forward to big e-ink tablets running a general purpose OS.
A club member's setup is cool. He has an area dedicated to music in his house. Inbetween a dozen hardware synthesizers there is a master keyboard and behind it a big screen, which can be (at least in theory) used for configuring the synthesizers and display sheet music. This setup is expensive and stationary though and thus not a good fit for performing or playing music in a club.
I did not like sheet music in the beginning, but honestly I cannot think of a strictly better format to teach people how to perform a piece of music. I think a piano roll projected via AR technology would be a good contendor, but the technology is not there yet.
100% agree. You need something motivating to push through the wall of sucking. And it can fluctuate throughout life.
I was a drummer. I was first attracted to the status of it - it was the only instrument in our school band that you needed to try out for. I didn't make the first cut, so I got lessons, then I made it next year. I kept the lessons for a while, but at some point I got bored and stopped lessons - there were only so many paradiddle variations I wanted to learn. There was no vision for me anymore.
Then, I got into rock music and thought that looked awesome, and I had a burst of new motivation that lasted for several years through college.
Then I accepted I wasn't going to be a famous rock drummer (or at least, the opportunity cost vs other things was no longer looking worth it), and shifted my time toward other things in life.
I like the idea of trying a different instrument. I know I would suck for a while so I haven't committed to it. Maybe when my kid gets older that would provide more motivation to bond with him.
Early learning should be focused on musicality and improvisation, not refined performance technique. Historically, even music in the so-called 'classical' tradition was mostly improvised. It's only in the late 19th century or so that technically virtuosic-performance playing of old repertoire became the only known standard of quality; but what those pieces of music were intended for originally was something quite different.
There'a been a comparatively recent revival in classical improvisation largely focusing on the partimenti and solfeggi tradition, that arguably points to a better way of teaching even 'ordinary' music performance as well. After all, even a "proper", non-robotic performance of a piece cannot be achieved without some appreciation for the musicality of "how the piece goes".
I agree. The idea of perfectly reproducing a performance note for note may have been impressive before recorded music, but now it's the boring default. When people talk about a "song" they really mean a particular recording of a single performance played metronomically over a grid.
People are starved for the human touch in music that comes for free with any live performance. In most of the US there is so much focus on mega pop stars executing perfectly planned shows with exorbitant ticket prices that there is little exposure to real improvisation. My hope is that people jamming together for fun can regain its place as a cultural staple in this century, but it seems like the barriers are higher than ever.
This also tends to be my view because improvisation is what I enjoy doing musically the most, but my daughter (12 yo) takes piano lessons which are quite typical in their structure (Conservatory) and has no interest in improvisation, and in fact, has resisted my attempts to get her to try it. She's obsessed with classical music and practices all the time with no prompting (and is now able to play quite beautifully), so of course, I haven't continued trying to change what she's doing.
Perhaps what are needed are methods to determine the approach that will work best with a given child.
I disagree with you, and I think that if your daughter has found something she likes doing with the instrument, you should encourage that, even if it's not what you wanted or expected.
As a child who loved classical music, I hated getting comments from my relatives that I should play them some rock or jazz. I just wanted to do my own thing. Honestly, it's also a very different style of playing - I later learned some jazz piano (to appease them) and it's less demanding on your fine motor control ("tone color") and more about playing precisely on beat, which I found a lot less fun.
I think you misread the parent post. They said that they stopped trying to encourage their daughter to improvise, because she took naturally to classical music and doesn't seem to care about improvisation.
Perhaps it's because it's how I taught myself, but I am in the camp that chords should be taught first (guitar or piano).
Notes, reading sheet music can come much later (if at all).
Two or three chords on either the guitar or piano is an easy start and will open up a world of songs for the learner.
I watched my daughters take lessons and tediously work through reading sheet music, learning scales... I thought it was no wonder they hated it, and no longer play an instrument.
I once attended a workshop by a guy who had been a salesperson for Piano I, Piano II etc books. He noted that sales of those fell off geometrically for each successive book. So he basically advocated/hawked an improv and "fakebook first" approach, as a means to make enjoyment [potentially] primary.
I had an interesting night some years ago interacting with a Google piano ML available online. It would broadly mirror your input is a sort of call and response way. Even with only a qwerty keyboard (i.e. home row) and really elementary melody/stacatto it was remarkably pleasing. Relatedly, This could be one reason I anticipate great potential with GPT-like tutors.
People always look at the end results, want it, but don't see how much work and practice it takes to get there. It's always the motivation to overcome the difficult frustrating parts in the beginning, that is the hardest part. This is true for most anything: learning an instrument, learning how to program something the first time, learning how to draw art, many different crafts and sports...
But as you improve, it's like it becomes more and more self-sustaining. At some point, it stops feeling like a chore and actually feels kind of pleasureful to just pick up and play something, anything, for a few minutes.
That said, I've been playing guitar for 20 years now, I have certainly improved and enjoy playing, but there's always room for improvement. And to continue improving, still has some of a frustrating element to it. I suppose that's just how it is when it comes to improvement. No pain no gain, as some people say.
What I think is also very important is to have a love of music. Have a band you really like. Have a bunch of songs you really want to learn to play.
Playing an instrument takes just as much listening as playing.
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I've seen that quote before but this time I'm laughing at the assumption in, "we have good taste".
I think he means that you get into creative work because you have an awareness of what you like and a desire to make more of it. But the use of the word "good" amuses me.
I was a classically trained Oboist as a child and I had some excellent teachers, but they only taught me to play and sight read pieces with technical perfection. Needless to say this was not fun and so I quit halfway through highschool. I ended up picking up the electric bass a couple years later and enjoyed it because there were no expectations and I could just learn and play on my own. As a kid lessons can just feel like a chore/school.
That is a serious flaw in how music is taught. Or maybe all the educators are right and I am off-base, but I had the same issue.
By Jr year in high school I was a pretty good trumpet player, and thought I was hot shit (dont all trumpet players though). Then I took music theory as an elective and realized that kids who noodle on guitar and only perform at the talent show had a better grasp on how music works and ability to create than I had despite being in a formal music program for years and having a private tutor etc.
Part of it I think is that wind instruments can only play one note at a time and classical music is on sheet music anyways, so keys end up just being a modifier that you keep in mind and chords are something that the other sections of the band do rather than just you. But I still wonder why even the fundamentals of how music works was not covered beyond what you need to know to read and count standard notation.
Some introductory piano was required for music theory and by the end of the class I could jam with great mediocrity but classical trumpet playing was never fun for me again after that.
My son started cello at four, at a local music school for kids. Preucil School of Music
He's still playing at 29. Still sounds good. Still enjoying it.
He played simple songs at first, then more complicated ones. They were appropriate for where he was at, and he was happy to play them.
They taught by ear, didn't read music for years. So he could work on sounding good from the start.
Something he learned early was deliberate practice, where you go very slowly thru the song making sure each phrase sounds good. Then you speed it up and string the phrases together. In a few days you're playing full speed and sounding good.
See, you never want to practice playing it badly. That trains you into playing bad music, and you have to undo the damage you just did to yourself.
- matching content to interests. I took classical guitar, my guitar teacher realized I was really into blues (way into very capable rock guitar), so I learned classical for the theory and enjoyment of pieces e2e, and blues for a significantly growing interest as a “rock kid.” The more solid electric guitar I learned, the more I realized the classical background was making me good, and it played back and forth like that and I took music lessons until I went to college.
- I think bands are a big part of why kids stick with music. The happiest times in my life growing up were the 2 hr jams after school. Option to find bar bands is what keeps me playing as an adult as well. I don’t know if high school bands are still out there with all the tech now? Def curious.
It all paid off - I landed in tech somewhat bc DS&A and OOD == music scales and chord progressions, programming == creativity with known safe bounds like like in music. And I can find bands to play with until I’m old.
Best thing I ever did for my musical avocation was to join a party band. Technically we sucked. But we gigged; we had fans who enjoyed our gigs; and while I had been in award-winning more classically-oriented formations, they didn't ever lead to international tours, nor did they never give the rush that an audience screaming for an encore does.
What's the difference between a squirrel and a french horn player in the back of a cab? The squirrel is probably going to a gig.
"Later in the evening as you lie awake in bed
With the echoes from the amplifiers ringin' in your head"
Yes can relate. Started with a powerchord punk band, ended with playing the Dead. First realizing a pentatonic scale can unlock the inner Jimmy Page in all of us is the step off point.
Now I can play crappy jazz in Christmas parties, whatever is regionally in fashion at bars where I live, and enjoy it all.
> The happiest times in my life growing up were the 2 hr jams after school. Option to find bar bands is what keeps me playing as an adult as well. I don’t know if high school bands are still out there with all the tech now? Def curious.
Small-group (3-5 players) playing, which I only got to do once I was sorta-OK, was the only part of school band I enjoyed. It was transcendently good. Better-than-sex good, even without an audience. And we weren't even that good at the instruments, really!
But our teachers didn't front-load that in the curriculum—I played for three or four years in junior high and high school before getting to do any of it at all—and anyone struggling in the middle or lower tiers of the class didn't get the opportunity. Some of them might have loved it and, you know, been motivated to try harder. If it'd been the main thing we did, instead of a rare activity, I'd probably have tried a lot harder, myself.
Ya it’s def interesting. Seems like folks hit on a basket of scales and chords == ready for a band at various points and somewhat randomly. Def credit my teacher with realizing I was trending one way and pushing me into the blues early.
Playing music for me is a deep, deep state of being. If all goes well it is a bit like what I feel when programming when I am in the flow, but even more direct and imidiate.
But it took me quite some time to get there, especially without teachers. But compared to my neighbor who learned the same instrument aince she was a kid I could just sit there and play. Without notes she did not know what to do. "Just explore the instrument" seemed like a wild and undoable prompt to her.
My believe is that many kids who go into music, imagined something else than it turned out to be. My believe is also that many music schools teach things in the wrong order. They teach you how to speak before you know how to make a sound. Even after more than a decade of playing I still find new ways to make my instruments sound.
> Music lessons—like many activities taken up during our youth—rest heavily on the student–teacher–parent triad. “Some teachers find it’s their job to make students get better,” Pappas says. “But what a teacher really needs to do is give their students the tools to make themselves better.”
The absolute critical thing for learning, the thing a teach and/or parent must do to make a child successful, is not just giving tools. You have to inspire a child to love music. You have to plant in them the seed of desire to create beautiful sound. And you have to make it fun to do. Otherwise it is just another boring chore, with no clear internalized goal.
When we wanted our children to learn to play an instrument, we spent months playing Bach and Mozzart for them, and explaining what was going on in the music. We played our instruments around them, and let them investigate them. Eventually they started asking us how they could make their own music, and that's when we began lessons.
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
I quit because I hated the music I was asked to play. When I was 5, I started piano with an amazing teacher (a local college professor) and made serious progress, both in skills and learning things like chord theory over the next four years. He would write out every piece I was to learn by hand in my book when I was getting started
I moved and the teacher my parents found that I could walk to only selected pieces that I didn't like which were technically difficult, but didn't sound good to me even after I learned them. She had to figure out what level I was and go through boring books of theory that moved way too slowly. I only much later found out you could buy sheet music of artists I actually liked.
I quit lessons and started composing instead, moving that to the computer when I got an Amiga 1000.
I mean, you're right. Many quit, because they don't see the point. Which, in turn, reflects to some of the problems: the kids' reasons to do it in the first place, which is often just force from the parents, and the second is lack of incentives and/or meaningful positive feedback. So, from a quitting kid's point of view, it's pointless. They don't get anything out of it. And we're wired to get rid of things that we don't get anything out of.
I sort of agree. There is a lot of pointless cultist behavior around music.
For example: concerts. Music delivered in concerts is technically in every way worse then recorded. People are going to concerts to listen to music that is technically worse in every way. What this tells me and should tell you is that most people aren't only liking the music. There's a bunch of stuff around the music that they like, and the music itself is but one factor.
Additionally all music has very very common themes. If lyrics are involved the, lyrics tend to be revolved around Love or Power or Tragedy. This pattern of common themes indicates that music is biased biologically. It's used for very specific purposes in human biology, it is not some universal art form like say painting.
Another thing is that lyrics are horrible at conveying a point. Written text or normal speech is better yet tons of people are irrationally totally into lyrics that are "deep". Try writing a song about the point I'm conveying here and you'll see that it misses the point of music. The point of music is definitely not in communicating deep or complex messages. The point is to convey stupidly simple messages. Literally. All lyrics/poetry convey significantly more simple and stupider messages then plain text. You can't argue with this logically.
My theory is this. Music in human biology is for several things:
-It's used as a mating call. (love songs)
-It's used to promote group closeness and confidence (concerts)
-It's used as a group mourning thing (singing at a funeral)
-It's used to project power (Rock songs Rap songs)
This is why it's bullshit. It's rarely just about the music itself and it's more about the emotions and behavior music promotes. We're all falling into typical biological tropes and mistaking it for beauty. You are designed to like music the same way we're all designed to like fucking.
There is a rather small group though that does appreciate music for it's intrinsic properties: The mathematicians (I'm not part of this group). The people who like the music purely because of the patterns. Some people like stuff like fugues. When I listened to Bachs fugue after reading GEB, it sounded like pure crap to my ears, and it didn't trigger any associated emotions with the bullet points I made above. I think these people are biologically wired differently. Most people won't like what they like... Either way, typically this group is into music that is closer to or is classical music.
But still the group above sometimes still goes to live performance symphonies and stuff like that, which tells me again that it's not purely the music they are liking.
The music and athletic pipelines are similar in that a really large number of kids enter the funnel and a vanishingly few come out the other end as well paid pros.
Pretty much the same with art.
That said, there is reward in the pleasure non pros can have in music, art and sports. But these people will need to have day jobs.
Nowadays the proliferation of easily available music online tends to smother music making at home.
Half a century ago, most every middle class home and school classroom had a piano.
Yep, there's a love/hate relationship with practicing, plus its imposition on the rest of the household.
My SO got a classical musical "high-end" education (as both her sisters). She stopped around the age of 15. Her sister stopped as well as teen. Her other sister is about to start a real professional/international classical career.
The foundation for such a career starts usually around the age of 5 or 6 and its *lots* of studying and playing. When you are not able to play like at least 4 hours every day you just can stop. There are times where you have to exercise 8, 10 or more hours until <insert body part> gets bloody.
Their parents are professional musicians too. The work just never stops. They both get like 4-6 hours sleep a day. That while teaching (university), learning/memorizing new lassic pieces and making sure the kids do the same while also making sure they get to casts and performances all over the world (at least at some state, before you have to attent to national auditions.) Sure because they are teaching as well, you dont have to do that, I guess.
Anectodal. Between 4-8 years old I took piano, guitar and solfege classes. I first went to a state conservatory when I was 4 and they told my parents i was super talented and I should go there. My mom did not like how strict they were and was afraid I would get traumatized so I took private classes.
I hated every minute of all of them. I would barely (mostly never) touch the homework until the next class and the teacher would just (i presume to keep receiving money from my parents) go along with it. I went through books called Beyer (2 of them), Czerny and Hanon. They were boring as hell.
What they never taught me was how to make my own music. Now I'm into electronic music I am just practicing scales and chords and voicings by myself on top of drum patterns I write myself and I can't get enough of it!
I think the main problem is that parents just wants their children to be classy and do recitals and just perform in front of guests and stuff and children hate that shit, and I guess the teachers just want the fucking money.
I was forced into music as a kid, because marching band was the least terrible way to get the fine arts and athletic credits I needed. By all accounts, I wasn't terrible at it (often got 1st chair, etc), but I hated it. The problem is the performance aspect. I'm an extreme introvert and always have been. Doing something in order to be seen/heard doing it is basically torture.
The article never really seems to consider that the kids just don't enjoy it. "The parents suck the fun out", or "the lack of freedom makes it boring". No. It's just not enjoyable on its own merits.
> The final piece I learned with any aplomb was Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major with a Sam Franko cadenza. The cadenza was a little beyond me: the fingering too tricky, my apathy too high. Playing it was like trying to grasp something just out of reach; with the next stretch, my ligaments would tear and bones would pop out of their sockets. This caused my teacher, my mother, and me angst in no small measure.
Mozart 3 is the first Mozart many violin students study, and this is where a lot of my violin mates quit, too. The problem---apart from the general problem with violin education---is that Mozart requires too much maturity in musicality. There's a reason major violin competitions usually require a Mozart piece at certain rounds, despite the relatively low technical difficulty compared with Romantic concertos or show pieces. The transparency of Mozart is a true test on how well a player understand the music, know how to phrase, and express themselves in an interesting but not peculiar way. A technically well-played Mozart can still sound like monotonous misery if the player doesn't have the ability to interpret it. So, it really only works for goal-oriented students (I've gotta win this competition), and is a chore for a lot of other students.
(And I say this as a big fan of Mozart's music)
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I wasn't a Suzuki kid, but a thing that I felt really envious about, is that a proper Suzuki method encourages playing with your peers to a degree. A Suzuki teacher is supposed to arrange duets, recitals, etc., and it is just much more fun to play with and for your friends, instead of the guy in the mirror.
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I'd like to point out that most of us don't retain every single hobby we attempted as a child. It is a natural outcome of growth, where we understand ourselves better, and learn to achieve happiness in a more strategic manner. I've seen questions by teenagers on violin forums, of such a kind: "I'm entering med school, and I'll be too busy to practice the violin. What should I do?" And just like some wise teachers pointed out, it's easier to be a doctor and an amateur violinist, than the other way around, so focus on your study first, and pick up the violin later when your life is less stressful.
It's fine to give up, for a while, or forever, or replace it with something else. There are many paths towards music, some are much easier or cheaper than others, and even music itself is not the only path to happiness anyway.
We all want to have unlimited time and have mastered all the skills in the world, but we don't have unlimited time, and most of the road to mastery is too long and too hard. It's worth it to sit down with yourself and ask whether this is something you really want, or is it merely the avoidance of cutting a sunken cost.
I started learning to play the piano and training in Tae Kwon Do at around the same age. There's a similarity in both skills, in that you need to practice all the time, learn the drills; be they scales and playing Baa Baa Black Sheep, or Poomsae and running through three step sparing.
Today I'd struggle to find middle C on a keyboard, but I do run my own Freestyle Martial Arts club. The difference was not parental pressure. Mum made me go to both classes, and made me practice both piano and martial arts at home. I hated doing both. I would feign illness or injury not to go.
My TKD instructor was nothing short of inspiring though. He was an Olympic coach and really put effort into training me. My piano teacher pulled my mum aside after a lesson, before I'd even gone for grade one, and told her that he saw no hope in me, and that she should stop lessons.
I don't really know what I'm trying to say here other than my instructors faith in me had more of an influence than any particular pedagogical approach.
I played trumpet, baritone, and tuba from elementary through high school. Learning how to play well was a grind for years and I didn't really start to enjoy it until I reached high school and was a part of a good ensemble.
It's definitely not fun when you and everyone around you is bad. Having a horrible teacher for a few years along the way didn't help either and drove most of my classmates to quit.
I do miss it and part of me wishes I had continued in college because I would have really enjoyed the challenge. But I was tired of "band cliques" and wanted to move on.
The number of people who have a go at playing music professionally far exceeds the number of people who end up making a living doing so. The majority of aspiring professional musicians end up as...music teachers.
Of those that do make a go of it, the majority are probably playing in wedding bands or something similar. The proportion who end up joining a professional symphony orchestra, make a good living from being a singer-songwriter, or in a jazz band (say) is vanishingly small.
If you don't care about making a living from it and just want to play as a hobby, it's a demanding one if you want to be good enough so that people will voluntarily listen to you. You have to put in a lot of practice just to maintain your skills.
As such, is it really that surprising that most people give it away at some point?
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadIt's a long gone dream of just making music that has turned into payola, social media corruption, fake audiences, and negative things like drug abuse, lip syncing, fraud, suicide and ghost writers. Don't wish it on your kids, there are countless kid stars that succumb to this toxic industry like Britney Spears, Aaron Carter, and Michael Jackson. For the rest, there's working at guitar center and ripping off others with overpriced music equipment to grant you a health-care-less descent into oblivion as a broke ex musician.
The players that give up may well be saving their own life, if not for a ton of frustration and false hope.
"When he stopped touring, he wanted to find a balance in life to be able to be happy and to do what he loved most – music. He really struggled with thoughts about Meaning, Life, Happiness. He could now not go on any longer. He wanted to find peace. Tim was not made for the business machine he found himself in"
"His manager, Arash Pournouri, admitted that he knew of Bergling's anxieties but refused to label them a problem of mental health"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicii#Death
Although there's one thing in common among them all -- it's difficult to make good money.
There is a reason why most musicians will tell you to stay far away from heroin even if they are quite the partakers of almost everything else.
To tell you the truth it's utterly depressing to be a musician with integrity after seeing the deep levels of corruption, usury, and depravity that happen in this industry... The wots part, is that tons of the people that act like they are rich are actually fat from it, and many people simply lie about success or buy it (trust fund babies).
I love playing mandolin, and i'm taking up fiddle now. Someday I hope to learn piano. It's is all in good fun.
My day job is programming. I'm lucky that I enjoy it as well, but there is only so much time I can write code in a day, and that is less than 8 hours (i'm glad for meetings for this reason, they prevent burn out) I get paid well for it.
I imagine, like most other creative arts (e.g., programming), first you have to really want to do it, then that makes you learn how to do it, and if you wind up learning to do it well you may be able to make money at it. Maybe.
I would guess that the way music is recorded and produced now, session musicians are much less in demand, but I really don't know. Just seems that the ability to sit down and sight read a part and play it perfectly through in one or two takes is not really needed anymore, when songs are pieced together almost note by note in a computer/DAW.
"Before Pro Tools, there were pros"
The problem is that you need superstar skills to pass the threshold of actually getting those gigs - you have to show up and just be able to nail things on the first take, and even improvise your part if asked.
If you aren't fussy about sound quality, then it's not really important how the part is played, but that's also why music has such a crisis as an economic activity; sequenced and prerecorded substitutes for live performance aren't timbrally the same, but they let you communicate all the structural information of the music. In a sense, it's like we replaced listening with reading, and that's a problem when so much of music is relatively similar.
Albeit the amount of work available has been in decline for decades and it's now a fraction of what it used to be, but there's still enough work to keep a core of the very best working almost full time in the remaining major recording studios (here in London at least).
I think you'd be surprised at how much music is still produced by composing, arranging for and recording real musicians. But London is still one of the best places on the planet to get that kind of work done so it's an admittedly skewed experience.
Oh, and there's more than just session musicians who need to sight read perfectly first time - that's just table-stakes for professional commercial musicians in my experience (source: am professional-level jazz trombonist).
I left the industry in 2013. I saw some of that toxicity and bleak future that you described.
This year I am starting to get back into a music side career, treating it like a bootstrapped startup. Using email marketing funnels to sell digital or CD, being cautious about investing into it. Haven’t proven it out yet, but I think I will enjoy trying.
If anything, it’s a good excuse to learn digital marketing, which would come in handy if I want to try selling anything else online.
The majority of "successful" musicians in public life right now had industry connected family members, or prior wealth as an assist to their current career. Upward mobility (financially) without cash and connections is severely limited in today's music industry, as well as in many other professions like acting etc...
Working in the music industry shattered a lot of the glamorous illusions. I also learned that from peers who were chewed up and spit out by the major label machines.
For those 7 years, I was constantly broke, and being taken advantage of by people in the industry with more leverage.
Then I met someone in the office that thought it was crazy that I had a music career before I became a programmer. But it’s the same reason they’re in the office too! It’s really hard, and even if you have that special “it” factor, it can require more runway than most people are willing to give to get there.
I've got to say I'm legitimately shocked that anyone still thinks this. I can absolutely state 100% of my friends who play instruments don't do it for the money. Granted none of them are signed, but the point of music is not to get signed.
I came back to piano later by myself when I wanted to play video game music. Then I wanted to play stuff from movies, pop songs, etc. I started watching interesting videos on reharmonization and tried that on some pop hits to interesting effect. I wouldn’t say I “stopped” completely, but my relationship with the instrument is completely different than it was when I was taking full time lessons growing up. I’m at the point where I might take it up again, but I would have specific goals in mind now.
i've had an opportunity once to recommend this to a mother who asked me what kept me interested, as her kid was losing interest. i told her to get some scores for the games they were playing
https://youtu.be/ffwVKDP8nzQ
And possibly the parents too.
In my opinion, both approaches are wrong. The job of a good teacher is to make learning fun. Once you enjoy practicing, skill follows automatically.
I'm good at math not because some teacher in my youth made it fun. I'm good at math because I found the pedagogy and practice of it fun in and of itself. In fact, I've almost always found every attempt to "make math fun" to invariably be devoid of any real math content. If you don't enjoy the practice and struggle and discovery, and get motivation only from those rare, occasional breakthroughs in understanding or skill, you're not going to be good at it. Full stop. Sorry, that's not how the world works.
Most people will never make money with music, but they can enjoy playing it. As such music should be taught as fun first, and then the rest follows if and when needed.
Theory and composition don't require performance ability. Transcription or mixing are other choices for people who have great ears and technical ability but perhaps poor biomechanics or dexterity. The playing of music by oneself is only one pillar of many in the vast field of music, and yet the way we do it is such an unappealing gauntlet of private "use it or lose it" that what child wouldn't rather be elsewhere with friends?
Put another way, I think capable, broad-minded teachers are the greatest barrier to producing capable musicians.
Practicing an instrument is a way to learn how to get into a flow state
PS. I have played music since I was 5, had even some professional career and stopped when I was 30.
My parents have never heard of the site even to this day. If you ask them, I'm just naturally hard-working and passionate.
1. When you start learning you sound terrible... for a long time. It's very difficult to stay motivated when you can hear your problems.
2. It's very difficult to judge your own progress. I've started recording short videos during lessons which I can show to students weeks or months later when they're expressing frustration with their progress.
3. You have to enjoy practicing, since you have to pick up the instrument most days to maintain the dexterity, callouses, etc. It's very easy for a pushy parent to beat the joy out of practicing.
4. You have to understand the difference between playing that song you can play great, and practicing something you suck at so you improve. It's very easy to stagnate if you only play.
Really it boils down to, you're going to suck for a while, then you're going to think you suck even when you don't, and you have to keep enjoying the process even when you think you suck.
/edit formatting
I practice piano (jazz improvisation), and I have mix of love and hate with practicing.
You basically spent lots of energy for little to no improvement at all lol, playing scales, arpeggios, etc.
And if you stay like 1 month without practicing you waste a lot of time trying to go back where you stopped.
It's like trying to go up an escalator that's going down, if you stop you come back to point 0.
You get way more attention for low skill drawings than music too.
I think it's more nuanced than that, you don't go back to zero, the decay is exponential so the drop is most brutal at the front of the curve:
My experience with skill acquisition, you have to hit a checkpoint and bed it in while in a learning phase.
Eg Now that I grok cycling/skiing/wakeboarding, I can take years away from those and will be able to find my way around without starting from scratch.
Even after a decade of not speaking Mandarin, I decayed massively but didn't go back to zero even though I really had lost so much vocab and fluency.
My takeaway after really honing the skill of learning itself is that it's most efficient to learn in super intensive bursts, especially if you don't expect to be able to keep up frequent practice.
Skiing is probably the most relatable skill that many people learn but rarely practice. Living in a foreign country and learning the local language is another example.
Bringing it back to music, after taking almost 8 years out of the piano my scales didn't really drop below 150bpm for quavers but I was able to get to 250+ in a single focused practise session. Skill reacquisition is very fast, which is why weight lifters always report that getting back to PB is considerably faster second time around (weightlifting low-key being the skill of muscle recruitment)
Meanwhile I put in more hours and had far more formal instruction at a woodwind than either of those combined and... yeah, nobody wanted to hear that shit, it sounds awful (cringe-inducing, even) unless you're excellent. Years of effort and practice and no-one wanted to be around when I was playing (and I can't blame them). It's super discouraging to have spent that much time and effectively have nothing to show for it—nothing that sounds at least OK, even to you when you record it and play it back.
A couple half-assed months on guitar or piano can get you to, "hey, that sounds pretty good!" and get people to start singing along to whatever you're playing.
You can't do a pop- or folk- or standard-tune sing-along with a damn saxophone. I mean, you can, but nobody wants to unless your playing is so good you could go pro.
I think the difference is that they're good accompaniment instruments, and can play chords. Plus there's very little technique to learn to achieve acceptable & reasonably consistent tone.
Now, I'm sure getting to the point of being able to play solo instrumentals that anyone cares to hear on either of those, is much harder (I was getting there on the guitar at my peak, but still hadn't achieved it), but there's just nothing for most other instruments, as far as natural encouragement or reward from others, until you're awesome at them.
Also surprisingly low cost for a pretty good instrument. $250 dollars will get you a pretty good solid top steel string acoustic guitar (Yamaha FS800 or FG800, Fender CC60 or CD60, half a dozen models from Orangewood) or solid top classical guitar (Cordoba C3, Yamaha CG122).
Piano costs a bit more, but $500 or so should do it for a pretty good beginner instrument.
By pretty good I mean an instrument that sounds good and has a good feel so that you don't have to struggle to play it (beyond the struggling inherent in being a beginner even if you were playing on a professional concert level instrument) and it won't make you learn any bad habits you'll have to unlearn if you continue and move up to a better instrument.
> Meanwhile I put in more hours and had far more formal instruction at a woodwind than either of those combined and... yeah, nobody wanted to hear that shit, it sounds awful (cringe-inducing, even) unless you're excellent
Plus woodwinds and other orchestra instruments seem to be way more expensive. I'd guess that stops a lot of people who might have been interested in taking them up.
I checked at my local music store and student oboes for example start at around $3000. Clarinets around $1000. Tubas around $4000. Wow.
https://sanjoseukeclub.org/song_book.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9YLOlUa7ro
https://youtu.be/D5V4mtZ-0qg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYhcN8p4yhg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gyxeXW_2T8
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-puL9FrZms
The lack of french horn players in pop/rock bands was part of why I quit playing. The neighbors complaining about my practicing didn't help. Yamaha's Silent Brass system worked pretty well while I still had one.
You'd definitely want to check out the second hand market if getting started in woodwind.
As a guitarist I found piano even easier to sound decent as there is no real threat of accidentally muting anything or plucking at a weird angle. But if you’re musically inclined its pretty easy to tell who has dedicated the time to learning it well.
Timbre, vibrato and dynamic control over a single note mean that people will pay to listen to a beautiful singer or sax play a single line of music but my god does a pianist or guitarist have to work to keep up with that.
They talked about how electronic music would lower the barrier to making music, and remove all that tedious time spent on the mechanics of playing an instrument, allowing people to focus on the music itself.
I think that's just crucial, I never would have stuck with it just sweating it out in the basement. You aren't a musician if you aren't playing with other people and in front of audiences.
That’s a terrible attitude. There are plenty of, for example, solo piano players who love playing, but aren’t interested in either being in a band or being a celebrity playing for other people. They are every bit a musician as you are.
Solo piano players have recitals, or make and share recordings of themselves, or do things that aren’t solo too. I stand by the idea that musicianship is a thing that involves other people, at least in some manner or another.
I hate playing with others and stick with jam tracks for accompaniment. I never play in front of others either. Super awkward.
I do occasionally put a recording on YouTube, but the listens are never more than a dozen per year, and I don’t promote it ever. Not sure how I get the listens that I do get.
Not sure what it is I’m doing, but apparently it’s not making music. I do love what I do, and find the craftsmanship and technique as pleasurable as any video game.
Do it cos you like it (like anything else) and that is the reason.
I think kids should play music that reaches other people or they aren’t likely to actually become musicians.
Not sure how controversial that actually is, I’m mostly just making a tree falling in the forest argument.
They're not good for absolute beginners because it can't give you feedback on the bad physical habits that lead to repetitive strain injuries, or just make it hard to play.
Once you're past that point, you're usually far enough to find a tab or chord sheet and figure it out.
For a motivated intermediate level student there can be value in the smooth difficulty progression and forced introduction of new concepts, but that's a pretty small window where they add value.
To underscore your overall point, I took lessons in 2 phases:
1) At 10 years old, had a cheap classical guitar. Did 8 'proper' lessons, went home on the 8th one crying after being sent home to learn Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.
2) At 14 years old picked up a guitar mag with a tab for Living Colour's "Type", which is almost as simple as something like Smoke on the Water. After learning a couple dozen more songs like this my parents purchased a Squire strat and signed me up for lessons with a dude who looked like Jerry Cantrell. Practiced 5 hours a day, and after 9 months stopped going as it appeared I had outclassed my instructor.
As to your #1 point, I'd humbly disagree. I was in a guitar center with less than a year under under my belt noodling and some guy walked to compliment my playing and see if I was in a band he could check out. My practice partner was similar, went on to win our battle of the bands and dropped out his freshman year of college to helm a critically acclaimed jam band for several years (at their height they spent 3 months touring w/ Phish).
Nowadays with the power of online tools kids can get frighteningly good very quick, and some within a few years to session pro level playing in a myriad of styles. Bedroom guitarists that become obsessed with the likes of Guthrie Govan and Tim Henson.
As a lefty, I recall I was still in an awkward enough phase that when shopping for an electric I couldn’t decide on getting a left or right model, they both felt equally awkward, so just continued using right. Pretty sure I wasn’t able to barre chord. Things ramped up quickly once I started with the 2nd instructor.
Playing "classical" music is the most familiar use case. I belong to a 19-piece jazz ensemble, which involves a hybrid of composed and improvised music, and everything we play is from sheet music. I'm the bassist, and my parts are a mixture of conventional notation and chord symbols. In this environment, tabulature is actually useless -- no arranger knows how to write it, and nobody can read it at performance speed.
On the other hand, there's very little sheet music in rock and contemporary genres except in some situations such as studio / commercial work. A complaint I've read about tabulature is that a lot of tabs found online are inaccurate. There's also a school of thought that relying on tabs is an impediment to learning how to play by ear.
Learning to read from day one is how I was taught, but it's no longer the preferred method. For instance, the Suzuki method has kids start out playing entirely by ear. Reading comes later.
But I am now teaching myself standard notation because I am running up against the limit of tab. I keep having to go back and forth between someone actually playing the piece and the tab so I can get the rhythm, and sometimes I'll find I internalise a rhythm incorrectly and then one day when I'm listening to the piece played by a pro it clicks and I realise I've been playing it wrong this whole time.
There are sites like https://www.classtab.org/ which try to add this rhythmic information to tab, but I don't think it works all that well.
Honestly at this point I wish I'd started with standard notation, or at least learnt both at the same time.
I don't think you can sight-read tabs, AFAIK sight-reading means being able to play something without seeing or hearing it before, and tabs don't have rhythm information.
> Honestly at this point I wish I'd started with standard notation, or at least learnt both at the same time.
Well, it would have required the same (or more effort) then, couple of months should hardly make a difference. Good luck!
For other uses, the density is the thing and it can't be replaced by anything. Sheet music has syntax and structure in a way that makes it possible to learn to read it by chunks, unlike let's say piano roll.
Most voices, which we play in our music club fit on 1 to 4 sheets. This is the amount of sheets, which can be conveniently put on our music stands. Any more means page turning during a piece or multiple music stands.
A less dense format would mean that it does not find on four sheets on a music stand anymore. We would have to swap out paper binders for an electronic solution. This on one hand is expensive and on the otherhand bothersome. Paper with all its limitations just works. Electronic devices need to be charged, kept up to date, break easily, etc. Doing something offline lets me relax and focus easier.
That said I think tablets will become an increasingly better alternative for paper based sheet music. I don't like the glowing comparatively small displays though. Looking forward to big e-ink tablets running a general purpose OS.
A club member's setup is cool. He has an area dedicated to music in his house. Inbetween a dozen hardware synthesizers there is a master keyboard and behind it a big screen, which can be (at least in theory) used for configuring the synthesizers and display sheet music. This setup is expensive and stationary though and thus not a good fit for performing or playing music in a club.
I did not like sheet music in the beginning, but honestly I cannot think of a strictly better format to teach people how to perform a piece of music. I think a piano roll projected via AR technology would be a good contendor, but the technology is not there yet.
I was a drummer. I was first attracted to the status of it - it was the only instrument in our school band that you needed to try out for. I didn't make the first cut, so I got lessons, then I made it next year. I kept the lessons for a while, but at some point I got bored and stopped lessons - there were only so many paradiddle variations I wanted to learn. There was no vision for me anymore.
Then, I got into rock music and thought that looked awesome, and I had a burst of new motivation that lasted for several years through college.
Then I accepted I wasn't going to be a famous rock drummer (or at least, the opportunity cost vs other things was no longer looking worth it), and shifted my time toward other things in life.
I like the idea of trying a different instrument. I know I would suck for a while so I haven't committed to it. Maybe when my kid gets older that would provide more motivation to bond with him.
There'a been a comparatively recent revival in classical improvisation largely focusing on the partimenti and solfeggi tradition, that arguably points to a better way of teaching even 'ordinary' music performance as well. After all, even a "proper", non-robotic performance of a piece cannot be achieved without some appreciation for the musicality of "how the piece goes".
People are starved for the human touch in music that comes for free with any live performance. In most of the US there is so much focus on mega pop stars executing perfectly planned shows with exorbitant ticket prices that there is little exposure to real improvisation. My hope is that people jamming together for fun can regain its place as a cultural staple in this century, but it seems like the barriers are higher than ever.
Perhaps what are needed are methods to determine the approach that will work best with a given child.
As a child who loved classical music, I hated getting comments from my relatives that I should play them some rock or jazz. I just wanted to do my own thing. Honestly, it's also a very different style of playing - I later learned some jazz piano (to appease them) and it's less demanding on your fine motor control ("tone color") and more about playing precisely on beat, which I found a lot less fun.
Notes, reading sheet music can come much later (if at all).
Two or three chords on either the guitar or piano is an easy start and will open up a world of songs for the learner.
I watched my daughters take lessons and tediously work through reading sheet music, learning scales... I thought it was no wonder they hated it, and no longer play an instrument.
I had an interesting night some years ago interacting with a Google piano ML available online. It would broadly mirror your input is a sort of call and response way. Even with only a qwerty keyboard (i.e. home row) and really elementary melody/stacatto it was remarkably pleasing. Relatedly, This could be one reason I anticipate great potential with GPT-like tutors.
But as you improve, it's like it becomes more and more self-sustaining. At some point, it stops feeling like a chore and actually feels kind of pleasureful to just pick up and play something, anything, for a few minutes.
That said, I've been playing guitar for 20 years now, I have certainly improved and enjoy playing, but there's always room for improvement. And to continue improving, still has some of a frustrating element to it. I suppose that's just how it is when it comes to improvement. No pain no gain, as some people say.
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass
I think he means that you get into creative work because you have an awareness of what you like and a desire to make more of it. But the use of the word "good" amuses me.
By Jr year in high school I was a pretty good trumpet player, and thought I was hot shit (dont all trumpet players though). Then I took music theory as an elective and realized that kids who noodle on guitar and only perform at the talent show had a better grasp on how music works and ability to create than I had despite being in a formal music program for years and having a private tutor etc.
Part of it I think is that wind instruments can only play one note at a time and classical music is on sheet music anyways, so keys end up just being a modifier that you keep in mind and chords are something that the other sections of the band do rather than just you. But I still wonder why even the fundamentals of how music works was not covered beyond what you need to know to read and count standard notation.
Some introductory piano was required for music theory and by the end of the class I could jam with great mediocrity but classical trumpet playing was never fun for me again after that.
He's still playing at 29. Still sounds good. Still enjoying it.
He played simple songs at first, then more complicated ones. They were appropriate for where he was at, and he was happy to play them.
They taught by ear, didn't read music for years. So he could work on sounding good from the start.
Something he learned early was deliberate practice, where you go very slowly thru the song making sure each phrase sounds good. Then you speed it up and string the phrases together. In a few days you're playing full speed and sounding good.
See, you never want to practice playing it badly. That trains you into playing bad music, and you have to undo the damage you just did to yourself.
- matching content to interests. I took classical guitar, my guitar teacher realized I was really into blues (way into very capable rock guitar), so I learned classical for the theory and enjoyment of pieces e2e, and blues for a significantly growing interest as a “rock kid.” The more solid electric guitar I learned, the more I realized the classical background was making me good, and it played back and forth like that and I took music lessons until I went to college.
- I think bands are a big part of why kids stick with music. The happiest times in my life growing up were the 2 hr jams after school. Option to find bar bands is what keeps me playing as an adult as well. I don’t know if high school bands are still out there with all the tech now? Def curious.
It all paid off - I landed in tech somewhat bc DS&A and OOD == music scales and chord progressions, programming == creativity with known safe bounds like like in music. And I can find bands to play with until I’m old.
They are. I don't know about numbers but kids getting together and singing with a guitar, bass, drums and maybe a keyboard still happens.
Now I can play crappy jazz in Christmas parties, whatever is regionally in fashion at bars where I live, and enjoy it all.
tldr find a band for your kid I guess
Small-group (3-5 players) playing, which I only got to do once I was sorta-OK, was the only part of school band I enjoyed. It was transcendently good. Better-than-sex good, even without an audience. And we weren't even that good at the instruments, really!
But our teachers didn't front-load that in the curriculum—I played for three or four years in junior high and high school before getting to do any of it at all—and anyone struggling in the middle or lower tiers of the class didn't get the opportunity. Some of them might have loved it and, you know, been motivated to try harder. If it'd been the main thing we did, instead of a rare activity, I'd probably have tried a lot harder, myself.
But it took me quite some time to get there, especially without teachers. But compared to my neighbor who learned the same instrument aince she was a kid I could just sit there and play. Without notes she did not know what to do. "Just explore the instrument" seemed like a wild and undoable prompt to her.
My believe is that many kids who go into music, imagined something else than it turned out to be. My believe is also that many music schools teach things in the wrong order. They teach you how to speak before you know how to make a sound. Even after more than a decade of playing I still find new ways to make my instruments sound.
The absolute critical thing for learning, the thing a teach and/or parent must do to make a child successful, is not just giving tools. You have to inspire a child to love music. You have to plant in them the seed of desire to create beautiful sound. And you have to make it fun to do. Otherwise it is just another boring chore, with no clear internalized goal.
When we wanted our children to learn to play an instrument, we spent months playing Bach and Mozzart for them, and explaining what was going on in the music. We played our instruments around them, and let them investigate them. Eventually they started asking us how they could make their own music, and that's when we began lessons.
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
I moved and the teacher my parents found that I could walk to only selected pieces that I didn't like which were technically difficult, but didn't sound good to me even after I learned them. She had to figure out what level I was and go through boring books of theory that moved way too slowly. I only much later found out you could buy sheet music of artists I actually liked.
I quit lessons and started composing instead, moving that to the computer when I got an Amiga 1000.
For example: concerts. Music delivered in concerts is technically in every way worse then recorded. People are going to concerts to listen to music that is technically worse in every way. What this tells me and should tell you is that most people aren't only liking the music. There's a bunch of stuff around the music that they like, and the music itself is but one factor.
Additionally all music has very very common themes. If lyrics are involved the, lyrics tend to be revolved around Love or Power or Tragedy. This pattern of common themes indicates that music is biased biologically. It's used for very specific purposes in human biology, it is not some universal art form like say painting.
Another thing is that lyrics are horrible at conveying a point. Written text or normal speech is better yet tons of people are irrationally totally into lyrics that are "deep". Try writing a song about the point I'm conveying here and you'll see that it misses the point of music. The point of music is definitely not in communicating deep or complex messages. The point is to convey stupidly simple messages. Literally. All lyrics/poetry convey significantly more simple and stupider messages then plain text. You can't argue with this logically.
My theory is this. Music in human biology is for several things:
This is why it's bullshit. It's rarely just about the music itself and it's more about the emotions and behavior music promotes. We're all falling into typical biological tropes and mistaking it for beauty. You are designed to like music the same way we're all designed to like fucking.There is a rather small group though that does appreciate music for it's intrinsic properties: The mathematicians (I'm not part of this group). The people who like the music purely because of the patterns. Some people like stuff like fugues. When I listened to Bachs fugue after reading GEB, it sounded like pure crap to my ears, and it didn't trigger any associated emotions with the bullet points I made above. I think these people are biologically wired differently. Most people won't like what they like... Either way, typically this group is into music that is closer to or is classical music.
But still the group above sometimes still goes to live performance symphonies and stuff like that, which tells me again that it's not purely the music they are liking.
Pretty much the same with art.
That said, there is reward in the pleasure non pros can have in music, art and sports. But these people will need to have day jobs.
Nowadays the proliferation of easily available music online tends to smother music making at home.
Half a century ago, most every middle class home and school classroom had a piano.
Yep, there's a love/hate relationship with practicing, plus its imposition on the rest of the household.
The foundation for such a career starts usually around the age of 5 or 6 and its *lots* of studying and playing. When you are not able to play like at least 4 hours every day you just can stop. There are times where you have to exercise 8, 10 or more hours until <insert body part> gets bloody.
Their parents are professional musicians too. The work just never stops. They both get like 4-6 hours sleep a day. That while teaching (university), learning/memorizing new lassic pieces and making sure the kids do the same while also making sure they get to casts and performances all over the world (at least at some state, before you have to attent to national auditions.) Sure because they are teaching as well, you dont have to do that, I guess.
I hated every minute of all of them. I would barely (mostly never) touch the homework until the next class and the teacher would just (i presume to keep receiving money from my parents) go along with it. I went through books called Beyer (2 of them), Czerny and Hanon. They were boring as hell.
What they never taught me was how to make my own music. Now I'm into electronic music I am just practicing scales and chords and voicings by myself on top of drum patterns I write myself and I can't get enough of it!
I think the main problem is that parents just wants their children to be classy and do recitals and just perform in front of guests and stuff and children hate that shit, and I guess the teachers just want the fucking money.
The article never really seems to consider that the kids just don't enjoy it. "The parents suck the fun out", or "the lack of freedom makes it boring". No. It's just not enjoyable on its own merits.
Mozart 3 is the first Mozart many violin students study, and this is where a lot of my violin mates quit, too. The problem---apart from the general problem with violin education---is that Mozart requires too much maturity in musicality. There's a reason major violin competitions usually require a Mozart piece at certain rounds, despite the relatively low technical difficulty compared with Romantic concertos or show pieces. The transparency of Mozart is a true test on how well a player understand the music, know how to phrase, and express themselves in an interesting but not peculiar way. A technically well-played Mozart can still sound like monotonous misery if the player doesn't have the ability to interpret it. So, it really only works for goal-oriented students (I've gotta win this competition), and is a chore for a lot of other students.
(And I say this as a big fan of Mozart's music)
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I wasn't a Suzuki kid, but a thing that I felt really envious about, is that a proper Suzuki method encourages playing with your peers to a degree. A Suzuki teacher is supposed to arrange duets, recitals, etc., and it is just much more fun to play with and for your friends, instead of the guy in the mirror.
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I'd like to point out that most of us don't retain every single hobby we attempted as a child. It is a natural outcome of growth, where we understand ourselves better, and learn to achieve happiness in a more strategic manner. I've seen questions by teenagers on violin forums, of such a kind: "I'm entering med school, and I'll be too busy to practice the violin. What should I do?" And just like some wise teachers pointed out, it's easier to be a doctor and an amateur violinist, than the other way around, so focus on your study first, and pick up the violin later when your life is less stressful.
It's fine to give up, for a while, or forever, or replace it with something else. There are many paths towards music, some are much easier or cheaper than others, and even music itself is not the only path to happiness anyway.
We all want to have unlimited time and have mastered all the skills in the world, but we don't have unlimited time, and most of the road to mastery is too long and too hard. It's worth it to sit down with yourself and ask whether this is something you really want, or is it merely the avoidance of cutting a sunken cost.
Today I'd struggle to find middle C on a keyboard, but I do run my own Freestyle Martial Arts club. The difference was not parental pressure. Mum made me go to both classes, and made me practice both piano and martial arts at home. I hated doing both. I would feign illness or injury not to go.
My TKD instructor was nothing short of inspiring though. He was an Olympic coach and really put effort into training me. My piano teacher pulled my mum aside after a lesson, before I'd even gone for grade one, and told her that he saw no hope in me, and that she should stop lessons.
I don't really know what I'm trying to say here other than my instructors faith in me had more of an influence than any particular pedagogical approach.
It's definitely not fun when you and everyone around you is bad. Having a horrible teacher for a few years along the way didn't help either and drove most of my classmates to quit.
I do miss it and part of me wishes I had continued in college because I would have really enjoyed the challenge. But I was tired of "band cliques" and wanted to move on.
The number of people who have a go at playing music professionally far exceeds the number of people who end up making a living doing so. The majority of aspiring professional musicians end up as...music teachers.
Of those that do make a go of it, the majority are probably playing in wedding bands or something similar. The proportion who end up joining a professional symphony orchestra, make a good living from being a singer-songwriter, or in a jazz band (say) is vanishingly small.
If you don't care about making a living from it and just want to play as a hobby, it's a demanding one if you want to be good enough so that people will voluntarily listen to you. You have to put in a lot of practice just to maintain your skills.
As such, is it really that surprising that most people give it away at some point?