[schwartzworld]

> who could “do music”... were born, I felt, gifted in a way that I was not

Maybe it's true for some people but I generally think it isn't. The secret to being able to play an instrument is studying or practicing a little every day for 20 years. Some people get there faster but unless you have mobility issues, most people can learn enough of an instrument to have fun.

[bad_haircut72]

Its a spectrum. Mozart was a prodigy at 6. Most people are average, and almost everyone who is good practiced for years, but the people who are really good no doubt had some natural gift.

[Loughla]

I don't know about that with music. Outside of absolute prodigies, my experience with instruments is that the more you practice the better you get. It's not like sports where practice can only take you so far before genetics absolutely rules the field. So it strikes me that most people can be really really good, but only if they put the hours in.

You really can work your way into being a musical genius with an instrument. It just takes a lot of work. I actually like playing instruments for that reason. It's one of the few things where hard work has actual, measurable outcomes on time scales that you can observe.

[j_bum]

As someone with a BM in piano performance - I’m of the strong opinion that there’s a natural baseline and ceiling. Practice can only get you so far.

[ngriffiths]

One of my high school piano friends went on to become a concert pianist. The difference between him and the rest of us was that music was everything for him - its what he did to relax, his social life, his hobby, his work, and his passion. There were, like, some months where music felt almost like that for me but for him it always did. I think there's no mysterious talent you have to have, just a psychological problem. if you get genuine fulfillment in all areas of life just by thinking about and doing music all the time, the ceiling is much higher.

[j_bum]

Of course. I agree with you. You will only make it in that field if there’s literally nothing else you can imagine doing.

But there’s still a starting point and ceiling in intrinsic ability.

I’m curious why you think there’s no difference in inherent abilities? Some people are more “naturally” skilled at some things than others, at a baseline. You can look to see examples of this everywhere.

That doesn’t negate the dedication/sweat/tears of people who have high skill, but many of those people also started several miles ahead.

[ngriffiths]

I guess it's too extreme to say there's no difference, I just don't love the explanation of there being some hard ceiling because it seems like the real process is incredibly uncertain and unpredictable. There's a million little skills you have to learn as a pianist and also many brief moments where you suddenly grow a lot because you finally grasped something important. In other words I feel like the "ceiling" gets broken every once and a while, and the thing that separates the great musicians is they get satisfaction doing it even during the extremely frustrating times where you're stuck at some ceiling. Which also helps them maintain hope and curiosity and see the next step forward when it does finally come. It feels like the ceiling is often a psychological one, not a natural one!

[MengerSponge]

100% it's baseline, ceiling, and growth rate.

I switched from violin to voice and found more success with less effort.

[butlike]

Why not a Bbm?

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

It really depends on the person. I've been involved with music in some capacity basically my entire life. I can do pitch but I have never been able to maintain a tempo to save my life (to an almost morbid degree).

I could practice technical skill on an instrument to literally no end but ultimately anything I did outside of a several second stretch by myself was completely disoriented due to a total and complete inability to maintain a tempo even when it's provided to me.

So for me there is just a hard ceiling on my ability to ever perform. I could probably do better with digital music production if I invested the time and energy into it but I'll always have the handicap that I have and knowing that it's hard to even want to invest the time and energy into trying yet another path into music where I'll likely fall flat on my face again.

[brandall10]

Until my late 20s, I was bad with both pitch and rhythm despite playing guitar for over a dozen years. Then I took singing lessons with a professional opera singer for 9 months, one hour a week.

She stressed how important it was to record myself and listen back, in fact she encouraged me to do it for hours at a time. The immediate reaction the first few days of trying this was "holy crap, not only am I pitchy and can't hear it naturally, I'm constantly slowing down and speeding up like +/- 10bpm."

The experience was so distressing that I tried to quit my next lesson, but she pushed back with "Hey if you can hear it, you can fix it. It won't be tomorrow, or next week, or even next month. It could take a year. Improvement happens little by little. And I guarantee you'll see progress as it happens. But you have to put in the work."

After a few weeks of working up to it, I settled into a pattern of spending ~3-5 hours most weeknights in the darkness of my closet, recording myself playing Beatles songs along with an acoustic guitar into a 4-track. Usually just going back and forth over 4-8 bars of a song for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes another section, really just focusing on a couple songs like that. Toward the end of the session I'd attempt several full run throughs, get super frustrated (over increasingly minor issues), and end the session.

And she was right, by about the third month I was comfortable enough to perform in front of the person I was seeing, and by month five, I could get through a song with barely any mistakes, maybe one out of three chances. By the ninth month, after a 15 minute warmup, I could get through a 3 song stretch with just minor errors, enough not to totally embarrass myself at an open mic night.

At that point I felt I hit my goal and took a break from lessons. Never did an open mic night. Continued practicing a bit in my closest, but after a month or two I stopped as well.

And here 20 years later, my rhythm actually is pretty solid... I've been a consistent bedroom guitarist, and routinely record myself, and sometimes I don't bother with a metronome because it sounds that consistent. That said, I stopped singing and that ability is completely gone. But I am starting a similar process learning classical guitar.

So I go back to that original bit of advice with just about anything I try to tackle now... if you're self-aware of your issues, and can actually critically hear them in a recording, then there is a path forward.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

Hmmm. I might have to try that.

But also fwiw I'm so bad at tempo that even my heart can't hold a tempo.

So I'll definitely give it a shot but I'm pretty doubtful I'll ever meaningfully maintain a pace or tempo.

[brandall10]

Understood, but to be clear, I felt the same way after I heard how off I was, as if maybe there was something defective with my brain.

Just start small, record 4 bars of something, play it back. Use a metronome to gauge the actual amount of drift. See if you can hear what the metronome is telling you. Try to improve it with a few more attempts, then call it a day.

Try again after a good night's rest. Over time you should be able to naturally feel when you're slowing down or speeding up.

[dubbie99]

I am the same way. I am a music lover, I am good with pitch, can accurately tune a guitar from new strings to within a few cents with no reference. But I can barely clap along with a metronome for more than a few bars. I have had years of lessons but my lack of rhythm really makes it almost impossible to progress despite putting in a lot of practice. My wife who plays guitar for fun will walk up while I am laboring over a piece that I have been working on for weeks and do a better job after two tries. It’s really demoralising! It feels like most people can do rhythm like walking or breathing, but for me it takes 100% CPU and leaves little for anything else.

[MengerSponge]

You will not match a symphony professional's talent if you start playing at 30. Even if you work hard. Even if you really want it. You don't have the time.

Work is great, but hard work doesn't yield the same reward to everyone on every instrument. Geniuses did hard work, but they often needed less at every step along the way. That means they advanced faster with the same effort. But that's okay! Learning an instrument for music's sake is a joy.

Anybody can learn an instrument well enough to enjoy it. They can probably learn it well enough to play in a community orchestra. They can learn it well enough to appreciate what the pros do.

[estimator7292]

Your experience is not universal truth.

My experience tells me that one can spend years at an instrument and still lack the fundamental capacity to be an artist.

I've spent years playing different instruments. I'm pretty good at it, I can get proficient at new instruments pretty quickly. However, my ability tops out at reproducing music. There's a fundamental creative spark, some subtly different neurology, that allows some people to create art, to express the intangible through music. I don't have that. I simply can't connect with music or art the way an artist does. I see the mechanics underneath and that's as far as my brain goes.

It's incredibly silly to assert anyone can study into a master musician. There is such a thing as innate talent that simply can't be acquired, and that talent is the thing that makes an artist.

Conversely, as an engineer, I do have that talent. It's been obvious my entire life, the same way an artist's talent becomes obvious early on. The way I approach problems is fundamentally different from the way someone who simply studied thinks about things. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking and experiencing the world.

Look around you at the varied shapes and sizes and varieties of humans. Some humans are natually huge and powerful, some are small and nimble. A 4'8 ballet dancer can't "just" learn to be a 6'4 bodybuilder, physiology just doesn't work like that. Small humans can't get big, and big humans can't get small. Big humans are stronger than small ones, and small humans can never get as strong as big ones.

Why is it unthinkable for humans to be different on the inside? If our outward physiology is so wildly varied, why is it impossible for internal physiology and neurology to be exactly as varied between individuals?

Innate talent exists. Everyone has different mixes of talent, and not all of them can be learned. There's nothing wrong with admitting that. It's part of the beauty of the human species. And realistically our species wouldn't have evolved to this point without a wide mix of specialized individuals.

Claiming that everyone can be Mozart if they just work harder really cheapens the whole thing. That implies talent is interchangeable with effort, and it definitely is not. If you can work past that childish crutch, you can see the awe in a human who was born to do something at the very highest level.

[ngriffiths]

It's also extremely nonlinear. I look back on my years of studying piano and the first 7 or so as a kid were basically screwing around compared to the next two, when there was this huge breakthrough. Then another couple years at that level until another huge breakthrough. It's funny, the first one was a breakthrough that came from a great teacher and was sort of a realization that music was way much more deep and interesting than I ever imagined. The second one was barely musical at all, it was just finding a super vibrant music community. If not for some random luck, mindshifts and social experiences like that, I would've quit a fraction of the way in.

[MisterTea]

> Maybe it's true for some people but I generally think it isn't.

To me, it's about passion. I am passionate about computing so I make it a point to set aside time to learn about it. Someone who is very passionate may be obsessed and their life revolves around it. Those people usually do well as I consider that "Finding your true calling." or they may burn out and spiral.

In high school I knew a guy who was a musician, not because he carried around a guitar but because he could not put it down. He loved playing. One groggy high school morning, sitting at the cafeteria table, waiting for classes to start, he rolls in, hops on the table sitting cross legged on top, states "I just wrote this song this morning" then started playing and singing. That right there is a passionate person - in front of a high school cafeteria packed he busked with no fucks given. Years later I looked him up and he is a professional musician. True passion and found his calling early.

And then there are people who play for the joy of playing and might never play professionally or live. Its just a fun hobby for them that fills them with joy.

[butlike]

You can cultivate passion, in my experience. It's easy-ish to think back to childhood and say: "oh, my love of drawing started when I was a child." But that was 20 years ago. The love of drawing has had 20 years to develop. Now, if I play the parent role to myself and start a new music hobby, imagine what I'll say in 20 years. I'll probably say: "I'm pretty passionate about music, my love for it has been growing over the last 20 years."

[icepush]

People are born with different levels of aptitude, motor skill, and learning rate. Some people also work very hard at their studies. For the people who reach the top levels in instrumental performance, you find invariably that they were both born with a high aptitude and spent a great amount of time and energy to get there.

[jbritton]

I believe I’m tone deaf. There is no test for this. I am color blind, but I have the most favorable form of red/green color blindness which means for the most part I see all colors, but I fail the tests. Likewise I hear tones, and can distinguish tones. I can play something and know if I have hit the wrong key. However, I have practiced long enough to know I’m tone deficient and that knowledge really affects one’s desire to practice. I see little kids on YouTube that already have more talent than I could ever achieve. I really don’t see myself ever being able to pick up anything complicated by ear. If it’s transcribed correctly then sure it’s doable with sufficient practice. I can’t hear a chord and know what chord it is. I have dabbled with my guitar for 30 years. I frequently struggle to know when frequency goes up vs down. I can’t sing in key. I can barely tune a guitar by ear. It’s usually off a little bit though and it takes me a very long time. The song “Back in Black” has this little bit at the beginning G E D B and then sort of an A bend. Whatever Angus does with that A note I just can’t figure out. I have tried it a thousand times.

[Barrin92]

it's common with the arts in general. People often attribute to being gifted what are entirely learnable, physical skills. Singing in particular, it's astonishing how quickly you can teach someone to sing well even if they think they sound like a cat in a blender. Unless you have actual damage to your hearing or vocal chords, 99% of the people who think they're tone deaf just haven't learned to listen.

It's a great pedagogical experience just to show people how much of a difference deliberate practice makes.