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

thewalrus.ca

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

#121

Post by pclmulqdq »

djtango wrote: post #108
boredemployee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 f…

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.

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

#123

Post by Baeocystin »

flycaliguy wrote: post #76
tzs wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ukulele is even quicker, kid sized and you can hang it on your wall for art when you’ve moved on.

The San Jose Ukulele Club is a bunch of nice folks, if you're in the area.

https://sanjoseukeclub.org/song_book.html

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

#124

Post by loeg »

tzs wrote: post #73
yamtaddle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> 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…

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.

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

#125

Post by loeg »

cyberbanjo wrote: post #78
tzs wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Flutes are more affordable and easier to get a nice tone out of than clarinets or tubas.

You can get a good (wood) student recorder for ~$250. I guess recorders are technically flutes :-).

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

#127

Post by djtango »

loeg wrote: post #120
djtango wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.

Totally fair. My fiancee plays flute and I was quite blown away by the intricacies required even playing at even an intermediate level

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

#128

Post by djtango »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #121
djtango wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

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.

That's some serious scale speeds there...

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

#129

Post by analog31 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #118
JKCalhoun wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree: TABS == good, sheet music == bad. (For beginners, anyway.)

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.

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

#130

Post by sometimes_all »

When I was young, I used to play the tabla (Indian percussion instrument). Loved playing it, but to continue learning I had to give multipe written exams for at least 5 years dealing with the history of Indian classical music in a language I wasn't comfortable with. The history was boring, and the textbooks were in a convoluted formal language.

What used to be a very enjoyable hobby turned into a chore, which I didn't have too much time for when the all-important tenth grade exams came nearer. So I stopped practicing altogether. Haven't missed it much.

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