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

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.

> 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.

A few points:

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?

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".

Musical and muscle patterns that form in your mind at a young age don't disappear, they just wait for their time