> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I really love the “brief moments” part too. I believe growth (maturation, skill improvement, etc.) happens in discrete moments that is then reinforced by practice (or lost by the lack thereof).
> stuck at some ceiling… next step forward
Then they weren’t at their ceiling :) they were at a local minimum of optimization. And getting out of a local minimum is insanely rewarding, regardless of the skill.
And maybe you’re right - maybe there is no hard ceiling. But there are learning rates and diminishing returns involved. It might take me 10x longer to get from the 95% percentile than 96% percentile, and then 100x to get to 96.5%. (Obviously percentiles are quite abstract for art). Maybe we can always improve given the right practice and guidance, even if the improvement is marginal. I just define the marginal returns area as a “ceiling”.
But… all of this can co-exist with “natural” baselines of talent.
I hate to admit that I will never be as “good” of a pianist as Martha Argerich… but I just won’t be, no matter how much I practice. I also will never be able to run as fast as Noah Lyles, no matter how much I train.
And that’s ok.
I think there is a tendency to fight back against the idea of natural talent/skill because this idea can diminish the extreme hard work it takes to hone and develop talent.
Noah Lyles could outrun 99% of us without training, but he had to dedicate his life to beat the last 1%. Most people probably don’t realize/understand how much dedication it takes to climb that final mountain.
But “inherent” talent is still a real thing. If we knew “why”.
My final thought is that high baselines can often be counterproductive for growth. Anyway, thanks for chatting about this with me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
It's funny to think how much effort was put into preventing bootlegging, when now everything is being recorded all the time.
The few bands that didn't care or even encouraged it reaped the benefits. I was a huge Ween fan in the 90s and bootlegged a show of theirs myself. Camera and recording devices were allowed and the result was a tremendous amount of live content available online. For some bands this might not matter, but they rarely played the same set list twice and often played songs differently from show to show. In the early internet days, there was more ween content online than you could ever hope to listen to.
As a student in the 90s I worked security for the student concert group on campus. We had to frisk people for Jello Briafa (Dead Kennedys) spoken word performance. I found a couple of tape decks, but those were allowed.
They still put a lot of effort sometimes. I saw Dave Chapelle in NYC and they made us put our phones in these pouches which were unsealed on exiting the show.
Effort is still being put into it. Just this weekend YouTube put the 4K Coachella streams behind SABR. I could still get 1080p easily but 4K required some fanangling.
Aren't the stakes a little different with an iPhone that you have for picture taking and entertainment vs the systems that manage your trajectory and life support?
The fact that a handful of devices hasn't failed is hardly proof that they can't. Hell, I've driven thousands of times and never actually NEEDED my seatbelt.
>>The fact that a handful of devices hasn't failed is hardly proof that they can't.
Again, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just challenging OP's assertion that any device with no radiation hardening will "immediately" fail, which clearly isn't the case with these devices. That's not me saying that radiation hardening isn't needed, quite the opposite.
I always tell people the secret to learning guitar fast is to practice for a minimum of 5 minutes a every day for 20 years. It's simultaneously a gross oversimplification while also literally being the only way to do it.
In some genres there are an infinite number. Most of the music regular people listen to is diatonic though and uses either power chords or triads, and then there are not that many options.
If you don't have probable cause and you don't have a warrant, it's not an arrest and you aren't law enforcement. You're subbing in some words yourself.
I agree that the software industry should expect a major upheaval. Developers won’t be replaced by LLMs, but it’s extremely likely that software as a product will become less valuable. You can already vibe code solutions you would’ve otherwise had to pay for. As tools come out that take advantage of this, it’s going to just get easier to spin the app you want up instead of paying for someone else’s. Which is pretty cool if you aren’t already a software developer.
> have a fundamental problem with human expression.
How up to date is this opinion of yours? Expression on guitar is pretty intuitive, but modern electronic instrument manufacturers have been working on this problem and created modes of expression that definitely solve this problem.
For example, EWIs allow you to use breath control for expression with many of the same techniques available on actual wind instruments. Also many synths now have features like polyphonic aftertouch, pitch/mod wheels, which allow you to add expression to a note while it is playing. Apps and hardware exist which allow you to use novel methods of capturing motion or other forms of expression. And most modern synths/midi controllers allow you to decide what parameters are affected.
> Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical
That's an affectation. I can stand on my tiptoes and close my eyes when bending up a note on the synth the same as I can on the guitar. Neither affects the sound, and both are a conscious decision to project an appearance of "I'm really shredding"
> With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.
That can apply to any instrument once you "electrify" it. What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect processing? I play guitar, keys and trumpet, and while I agree that a casio keyboard has limited expression options, your opinion doesn't sound researched.
> What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect
The difference lies in the pickup! On those other instruments you will be using a contact mic (piezo-transducer) wheras the solid body guitar is using an inductive coil.
The contact mic is going to pickup only physical resonance whereas the the coil is measuring an electromagnetic field. Plucking the steel string induces a change in voltage in the coil. This means that the coil can pickup all sorts of interesting electromagnetic interference from the tube amplifier that is all frequency dependent and involve that in whatever feedback loops are occuring.
So the difference in expression is in the oscillator type?
Are we using the same definition of "expressive"? I play synth, guitar and trumpet, and the trumpet is by far the most expressive of the three, both musically and physically. You have basically all the same options for expression that you do with a human voice (vibrato, dynamics, glissando, etc) plus the expressive techniques offered by the instrument mechanics (for example: half-valving, trills, lip slurs, using a plunger as a LPF).
Sure you need a microphone or contact mic, but again that's just your source of your oscillator. After that, sound design is just sound design. I'm not saying everybody should play electric trumpet, but it's just absurd to make blanket statements like "electric guitar is the most expressive electronic instrument".
My whole point is about comparing electric/electronic instruments. I NEVER said that the guitar is the best acoustic instrument. I explained how there is a difference between the way a guitar works with a coil pickup versus other instruments with a contact mic but you don't care.
I don't really want to keep arguing with you. You can win the thread if you want. Congratulations!
> I NEVER said that the guitar is the best acoustic instrument.
Me neither? This thread was about expressiveness. I asked the OP why they think guitar is more expressive than anything else and you responded with information about how pickups interact with amps.
Typical modern practice would be to have a pedal board with all interconnects and power set up and fixed. Hendrix didn’t do that, but EVH did. And now the internet is full of people posting their pedalboards (P&W people especially).
But you still have to plug in from the right with the guitar cord, and from the left for the card to the amp. So I dunno, my theory may be bogus. But this pattern got established very early on, by the late 60s st the latest.
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.
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