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Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

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Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#51

Post by sdwr »

boredemployee wrote: post #20
ehaskins wrote: post #14

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…

I can relate a lot to what you said. 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…

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.

Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#52

Post by dogman144 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #45
dogman144 wrote: post #23

It’s about - 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 fo…

> 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 witho…

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.

Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#53

Post by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 »

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.

Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#54

Post by entropie »

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 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.

Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#55

Post by brandall10 »

ehaskins wrote: post #14

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…

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.

Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#56

Post by winternett »

jcpst wrote: post #40
winternett wrote: post #2

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…

You can choose to work outside the industry. 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…

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...

Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#57

Post by jabroni_salad »

MDGeist wrote: post #18

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 fee…

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.

Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#58

Post by winternett »

SoftTalker wrote: post #19
winternett wrote: post #2

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…

Are session musicians still a thing? 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"

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.

Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#59

Post by asimovfan »

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.

Re: Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

#60

Post by flax »

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.

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