The reason for this is simply that we were never allowed to play the kind of music we liked. Which was, of course, rock. Or blues, or country. Or, really, anything with a beat.

Nope; it was all classical all the time. And piano lessons were the only time we were ever exposed to classical music otherwise, so we had no opportunity to learn to like it; it was just a source of frustration and boredom.

We weren't even allowed to pick a different instrument; it had to be piano. Because mom wanted us to be able to play the organ in church.

That nine years of lessons was the single biggest waste of time in my entire life, and I work for the government.

In order for a child to learn anything on their own, which is the way a musician has to learn, really, they have to be incentivized. They have to like what they're doing, at least some of the time. The product has to be meaningful. And in music, like so much else in education, whether the child is actually engaged with the process is just never considered.

Then we moved across the country and they said "Ok, you can quit piano."

In my new town I struck up a conversation on the school bus with two kids, one played bass and the other played drums. Said they would get together in the drummer's basement and "jam". "What's this 'jamming' you speak of?" I asked.

They invited me over and we played the one jazz-ish/blues tune I knew. I was hooked. Ran home and begged my parents to let me start lessons again, but this time rock/jazz. Since then I picked up guitar, bass, drums, a little alto sax, and continued studying piano. 40+ years later playing/making music is a huge part of my personal life.

I feel incredibly lucky that my folks didn't let me quit and that I met those two friends.

IMO, it's good to push your technical skills, but it's pointless if there's no internal reward. I happened to like classical music as a child, so I was frustrated when my first music school focussed on very simple arrangements of middle-of-the-road music. Switching to someone who taught (simple) Bach was much more rewarding, validating even. My parents did let me play whatever I felt like, though. I played my exercises, but also played popular music by ear (mainly for them, BTW).

So talent is one factor, which can be partially overcome by technical exercises, but interest in the music itself is what kept me playing.

If he didn't play the first 6years, he won't be able to enjoy "jamming" with friends

It took me a good decade after high school to find love in topics like geography, biology, history, some parts of physics etc. which were forced down my throat to frankly insane needless levels at school.

A lot of child's momentum is lost because a) teaching well consistently is hard and I see little effort to ie utilize modern psychology for improvement ; b) every kid is unique in many ways, differently developed at early years ; c) being a teacher is seriously underpaid and underappreciated so best leave or don't even start career in it ; d) traditional teaching topics go way too deep and focus more on encyclopaedical knowledge which is sort of obsolete in 2023 ; e) don't focus on properly useful stuff in ie high school like communication, team work, some basic psychology to grok people around you, understanding personal finances and taxation and probably many more reasons.

When my kids were taking music lessons the teacher would sometimes try to talk to me after the lesson and tell me what they did and wanted to discuss with me what to teach next and my reply was always the same - why are you having this conversation with me? It’s my kid that you have to keep engaged. I’ll keep paying for lessons as long as my kid wants to play. Discuss this with my kid.

"If he didn't play the first 6years, he won't be able to enjoy "jamming" with friends"

Have you ever learned something with passion vs were forced to?

When kids want to learn something, they are really, really fast at it, meaning he could have started learning at that moment. And you can do simple jamming, without a proper musical education.

I would love to have my parents Force that on me.

Now I'm here, would like to learn and play music but I don't have much time and music feels like a steep mountain to even start.

The guitar is in the basement.

Later on when I discovered rock and metal music I asked my parents for an electric guitar but they refused, saying I had to play the acoustic I had first and then I could ‘progress’ to electric. I was easily discouraged then so I gave up the idea.

I didnt end up getting an electric guitar and starting to play music seriously until after university when I had a job and could afford it easily myself. Now I play almost every day, learning new things, writing my own little pieces, and jamming with friends. Music is now one of the most fulfilling things in my life, and I believe one of my biggest regrets will be waiting so long to get started after I knew what I wanted!

Piano is a great instrument. Learning piano to a good level transfers to other instruments, because you learn much more than pressing keys. However it's extremely lonely, and therefore boring, to practicing some bullshit polka that nobody wants to hear. I went to lessons for 9 years, sat 7 grade exams, and promptly quit as soon as I left home. Lessons never taught me to jam, fill in, improvise. I found it monumentally boring, and only continued because I was good at it, and had a large sunken cost.

Looking at the Beatles documentary "Get Back", they were just kids with instruments who got to jam full-time. There are plenty of instrumentalists that absolutely kick their asses. What made them special was that they weren't afraid to pay what they wanted to play, and to experiment, together. (They also drove themselves to produce something important to a deadline)

Spring on a name brand second hand electric guitar for your kids you won't regret it. Electric guitars are basically inpossible to damage, and a second hand guitar will retain its value so you'll get those $500-800 bucks back when it turns out your kid wants to do something else. Higher quality guitars have lower action and more comfortable necks which makes them easier to play rewarding your kids more for their efforts.

The fret board isn't the same width.

The notes are in the same places, but that's about it for similarity.

Not when I'm playing Green Day covers on it, it's not.

Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMoHRidtQcw

(You're confusing the instrument with the music it's most commonly used to play)

Sure, you can play more or less the same things on both instruments, and anybody who plays electrical will be able to do something on an acoustic guitar and vice versa. But anybody who plays acoustic guitar will also be able to do something on a lute, a mandolin or heck even on a double bass. You will also be able to use your guitar to sound like an organ, a flute, or a synthesizer, with sufficient effect pedals.

For me what makes an instrument is the music it lends itself easily. Give a five year old who never played before an acoustic guitar with fresh strings and an electric guitar plugged into an amp and they will do completely different things with it, because the instruments lend itself to different things. Ironically an electric guitar can be much more direct, because you will hear every slight tiny movement of your fingers amplified. An acoustic guitar (with fresh strings) can be extremely articulate, but you have to put in more energy to produce these sounds.

I certainly see the amplifier as part of the instrument with the electrical guitar, and that alone makes a ton of difference between the two.

Electric and acoustic have a big overlap. Acoustic and classical have a big overlap. Electric and classical have only a tiny overlap.

But in this case, to be forced to play only one kind of thing and then not be allowed to try something you want seems really hard. I'm sorry you had to go through that. Thanks for sharing.

Quick story about this comment resonating (pun intended) with me: My son is quietly coming and pulling out my electric guitar from my office room these days and strumming it randomly (just open strings). I haven't said anything except to be careful after he tried to walk it sideways through a door (screams internally in pain). He's watched me practice scales and the wanted to know how to play individual notes so I showed him and left it. A few days later I heard a tiny "ding" of a single note from him for the first time. Still haven't said anything. Maybe he'll love it, maybe he won't.

Basically, I'm going to keep your comment in my mind to not fall into the future trap of denying him something he really wants to try out just because I have some other hope for him. Even now, it'd be easy to jump on my son at this point and say "ho there child, I could send you to some classes now" and then get upset if he doesn't like it. It's really easy to fall for my own bias and whatnot. I'll remind myself to avoid doing that.

If you don't mind me asking, how old were you when you asked for an electric guitar initially?

I started classical music lessons very early as a kid. I was one of those weird kids that ended up liking classical music anyways, but I also had a deep love for movie soundtracks. My parents encouraged me to play anything I liked. Which I did -- movie soundtracks. They'd go around bragging to other parents how their little kid learned these soundtracks by ear too.

I still play to this day, and have branched out into many different genres. Them being supportive for the idea that this is an expression of myself, and praising my efforts, really cemented playing musical instruments as a core part of my identity.

Not a parent yet, but I hope I can pass along this chain of positivity to my own in the future.

Then one day, my cousin bought me a discography CD pack of Rush CDs. I heard Fly By Night and I knew I HAD to learn to play it. That resulted in about a five year streak of obsessive Rush disorder. I was again, hooked. Now on more advanced music. I wanted to learn all the songs. I even formed a little tribute band with a few other people.

Now, I have a classical guitar sitting next to the couch and I sometimes come and sit and just noodle around. Just enjoy the sounds, the feel of the strings against my fingers, the satisfaction of discovering an assembly of notes to play that sound special.

It's been about 15 years now. Not once did I think I needed to learn something on the guitar because somebody told me I had to. I always learned something in pursuit of learning the next song.

Nope! Class time rolled around and it was forty five minutes of posture posture posture and finger movements. Mrs. Bell didn’t care about the interesting music I had created, she just wanted me to tick off silly boxes and follow “the plan”.

I’ve barely touched a piano since.

I've switched to guitar on my own initiative, started jamming, playing in bands, composing my own music with friends - and it was such fun.

Never touched piano since then.

Reading through other comments here makes me think that as humans we suck at teaching music to children.

I did pick up an old classical guitar at a girlfriend's house and started on Simon and Garfunkel and Beatles, and have been playing guitar (and bass, mandolin, slide guitar and lap steel) for the past 45 years, so the music was there!

Having brought up 3 kids, it is sometimes hard to know when to encourage them to push through on something and when to let it die.

The technique is important, but it's often for nothing if it's not in support of a distinct musical voice.

That environment was horribly discouraging and, in retrospect, weirdly competitive. I dropped the piano for 5 years almost completely. Still, like a lot of my friends from that program, I came back to piano as a hobby, and I really appreciate the education I got.

I also think it made me a better person in a lot of ways.

In contrast, my little brother was enrolled to drum after he developed interest, in jazz. He has the friends who are passionate with the same kind of music. He built several bands. Not only the music itself, he developed love for analogs, obsessed with building instruments and speakers.

I guess the timing of interest development relative to the push to the direction, and having the right people to reinforce your passion is imperative to the optimal development of "click" to music.

The problem for me has not been the kind of music I had to play. My problem is I only learned to perfectly play a song with sheet paper, by repeating it over and over again in the course of a few months until every tiny little detail was perfect. That's because I was prepared to play in front of a large audience, where you are supposed to play perfectly.

What I never learned was how to improvise a somewhat-okay song, or play somewhat ok a song from sheet paper. Those skills could have made it enjoyable to play piano for myself or in a social setting where perfection is not expected.

But since I never learned those skills, the piano in my family house sit unused, and even the keyboard I bought for myself is collecting dust in a closet.

"You're gonna understand when you grow up" they said.

NOPE

> Which was, of course, rock.

Nowadays, you can see rock prodigy kids playing guitar on YouTube. Sometimes I wonder how they feel about their instrument and the music they play. Do they even like it?

Same net result as yourself, none of us continued with our music studies once we were old enough to make our own decisions. In fact, a lot of the social climbing associated with how it all started is something we've rebelled against the most.

The horror cases like GP's "9 years" are essentially a miscalibration, failing to recognize a suitable stopping point.

"Cheap babysitting" is not it. Lessons are short and more expensive than childcare. Enforcement of practice time is a hassle (and a balancing act!)

To be fair, additional exposure may not have helped! I played several instruments as a kid / young adult, almost all of it classical or adjacent (old European music). My parents took us to the symphony. It just isn't what I like to listen to and wasn't motivating enough to keep my interested as a teen.

After fifteen years without making music at all, I've started picking up instruments again in the last two years. I've been playing (some) classical music, not because I like it, but because there's a lot of it for the instruments I've chosen and it's fun to play.

My parents had the same reaction with computers: programming is stupid therefore you can't enjoy programming at such a young age, the parents decide for you. 30 years later, I still love programming and would never do anything else in my life.

Edit: When I think about it, the greatest music players on earth have an almost religious or orgasmic experience while playing music, while our parents saw that as yet another chore equivalent to what was taught at school. It's ridiculous.

Now that I have a copy of ableton I love playing around with wave synths, learning music theory, samplers, automation, the bitcrusher, etc and don’t even have to consciously set aside time to do so, I just do it as easily as opening a video game.

For much of the same reason the piano was absolutely indispensable to the composers, as Charles Rosen observed in the first chapter of his Piano Notes:

>The utility of the piano for composing was its neutral and uniform tone color: in theory (although not in reality) the tone quality of the bass is the same as the treble. In any case, the change in tone color over the whole range of the piano is, or should be, gradual and continuous (there are breaks, of course, when the notes go from one string in the bass to two and then to three in the treble). The monochrome piano might be used therefore just for its arrangements of pitches, and the quality of the sound could-absurdly in many cases-be considered secondary.

>Keyboard instruments are the only ones able to realize and control the entire texture of Western polyphonic music.

Of course, the question then becomes, why has the piano held on as a mark of bourgeoisie pretensions when the prestige of the classical tradition has ran aground in the 20th century, and pretty much collapsed in the 21st. The rich and powerful in the west today do not, as a rule, promote their love of classical music nowadays as a status symbol. Elon Musk dated Grimes, presumably at least partially enamored by her reputation as a musician; he did not date a violin virtuoso or a operatic soprano, maybe because he has no emotional connection or particular interest for that type of music. Richard Taruskin has shown that the last US president who at least pretended to a taste in classical music was Nixon, and the electorate certainly did not notice the absence ever since, although there have been notably musical presidents like Clinton. It seems convenient to at least pretend that classical music still enjoys some of its prestige purely for the purposes of using it as a whipping boy and distract the snobbery between genres which has since morphed into snobbery inside each genre. I will be very surprised if someone asserts that classical music forms part of the culture of the elites today. How much does an orchestral musician make? How much is a ticket to a Paul McCartney concert?

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 to judge your own progress. I've started recording short videos during lessons which I can show to students weeks or months later when they're expressing frustration with their progress.

3. You have to enjoy practicing, since you have to pick up the instrument most days to maintain the dexterity, callouses, etc. It's very easy for a pushy parent to beat the joy out of practicing.

4. You have to understand the difference between playing that song you can play great, and practicing something you suck at so you improve. It's very easy to stagnate if you only play.

Really it boils down to, you're going to suck for a while, then you're going to think you suck even when you don't, and you have to keep enjoying the process even when you think you suck.

/edit formatting

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 effort and practice and no-one wanted to be around when I was playing (and I can't blame them). It's super discouraging to have spent that much time and effectively have nothing to show for it—nothing that sounds at least OK, even to you when you record it and play it back.

A couple half-assed months on guitar or piano can get you to, "hey, that sounds pretty good!" and get people to start singing along to whatever you're playing.

You can't do a pop- or folk- or standard-tune sing-along with a damn saxophone. I mean, you can, but nobody wants to unless your playing is so good you could go pro.

I think the difference is that they're good accompaniment instruments, and can play chords. Plus there's very little technique to learn to achieve acceptable & reasonably consistent tone.

Now, I'm sure getting to the point of being able to play solo instrumentals that anyone cares to hear on either of those, is much harder (I was getting there on the guitar at my peak, but still hadn't achieved it), but there's just nothing for most other instruments, as far as natural encouragement or reward from others, until you're awesome at them.

As a guitarist I found piano even easier to sound decent as there is no real threat of accidentally muting anything or plucking at a weird angle. But if you’re musically inclined its pretty easy to tell who has dedicated the time to learning it well.

Timbre, vibrato and dynamic control over a single note mean that people will pay to listen to a beautiful singer or sax play a single line of music but my god does a pianist or guitarist have to work to keep up with that.

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.

The lack of french horn players in pop/rock bands was part of why I quit playing. The neighbors complaining about my practicing didn't help. Yamaha's Silent Brass system worked pretty well while I still had one.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-puL9FrZms

https://sanjoseukeclub.org/song_book.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9YLOlUa7ro

https://youtu.be/D5V4mtZ-0qg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYhcN8p4yhg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gyxeXW_2T8

You'd definitely want to check out the second hand market if getting started in woodwind.

They talked about how electronic music would lower the barrier to making music, and remove all that tedious time spent on the mechanics of playing an instrument, allowing people to focus on the music itself.

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

― Ira Glass

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.

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.

But I am now teaching myself standard notation because I am running up against the limit of tab. I keep having to go back and forth between someone actually playing the piece and the tab so I can get the rhythm, and sometimes I'll find I internalise a rhythm incorrectly and then one day when I'm listening to the piece played by a pro it clicks and I realise I've been playing it wrong this whole time.

There are sites like https://www.classtab.org/ which try to add this rhythmic information to tab, but I don't think it works all that well.

Honestly at this point I wish I'd started with standard notation, or at least learnt both at the same time.

I don't think you can sight-read tabs, AFAIK sight-reading means being able to play something without seeing or hearing it before, and tabs don't have rhythm information.

> Honestly at this point I wish I'd started with standard notation, or at least learnt both at the same time.

Well, it would have required the same (or more effort) then, couple of months should hardly make a difference. Good luck!

Most voices, which we play in our music club fit on 1 to 4 sheets. This is the amount of sheets, which can be conveniently put on our music stands. Any more means page turning during a piece or multiple music stands.

A less dense format would mean that it does not find on four sheets on a music stand anymore. We would have to swap out paper binders for an electronic solution. This on one hand is expensive and on the otherhand bothersome. Paper with all its limitations just works. Electronic devices need to be charged, kept up to date, break easily, etc. Doing something offline lets me relax and focus easier.

That said I think tablets will become an increasingly better alternative for paper based sheet music. I don't like the glowing comparatively small displays though. Looking forward to big e-ink tablets running a general purpose OS.

A club member's setup is cool. He has an area dedicated to music in his house. Inbetween a dozen hardware synthesizers there is a master keyboard and behind it a big screen, which can be (at least in theory) used for configuring the synthesizers and display sheet music. This setup is expensive and stationary though and thus not a good fit for performing or playing music in a club.

I did not like sheet music in the beginning, but honestly I cannot think of a strictly better format to teach people how to perform a piece of music. I think a piano roll projected via AR technology would be a good contendor, but the technology is not there yet.

For other uses, the density is the thing and it can't be replaced by anything. Sheet music has syntax and structure in a way that makes it possible to learn to read it by chunks, unlike let's say piano roll.

As a lefty, I recall I was still in an awkward enough phase that when shopping for an electric I couldn’t decide on getting a left or right model, they both felt equally awkward, so just continued using right. Pretty sure I wasn’t able to barre chord. Things ramped up quickly once I started with the 2nd instructor.

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".

People are starved for the human touch in music that comes for free with any live performance. In most of the US there is so much focus on mega pop stars executing perfectly planned shows with exorbitant ticket prices that there is little exposure to real improvisation. My hope is that people jamming together for fun can regain its place as a cultural staple in this century, but it seems like the barriers are higher than ever.

Perhaps what are needed are methods to determine the approach that will work best with a given child.

As a child who loved classical music, I hated getting comments from my relatives that I should play them some rock or jazz. I just wanted to do my own thing. Honestly, it's also a very different style of playing - I later learned some jazz piano (to appease them) and it's less demanding on your fine motor control ("tone color") and more about playing precisely on beat, which I found a lot less fun.

Notes, reading sheet music can come much later (if at all).

Two or three chords on either the guitar or piano is an easy start and will open up a world of songs for the learner.

I watched my daughters take lessons and tediously work through reading sheet music, learning scales... I thought it was no wonder they hated it, and no longer play an instrument.

I had an interesting night some years ago interacting with a Google piano ML available online. It would broadly mirror your input is a sort of call and response way. Even with only a qwerty keyboard (i.e. home row) and really elementary melody/stacatto it was remarkably pleasing. Relatedly, This could be one reason I anticipate great potential with GPT-like tutors.

But as you improve, it's like it becomes more and more self-sustaining. At some point, it stops feeling like a chore and actually feels kind of pleasureful to just pick up and play something, anything, for a few minutes.

That said, I've been playing guitar for 20 years now, I have certainly improved and enjoy playing, but there's always room for improvement. And to continue improving, still has some of a frustrating element to it. I suppose that's just how it is when it comes to improvement. No pain no gain, as some people say.

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 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 from those and will be able to find my way around without starting from scratch.

Even after a decade of not speaking Mandarin, I decayed massively but didn't go back to zero even though I really had lost so much vocab and fluency.

My takeaway after really honing the skill of learning itself is that it's most efficient to learn in super intensive bursts, especially if you don't expect to be able to keep up frequent practice.

Skiing is probably the most relatable skill that many people learn but rarely practice. Living in a foreign country and learning the local language is another example.

Bringing it back to music, after taking almost 8 years out of the piano my scales didn't really drop below 150bpm for quavers but I was able to get to 250+ in a single focused practise session. Skill reacquisition is very fast, which is why weight lifters always report that getting back to PB is considerably faster second time around (weightlifting low-key being the skill of muscle recruitment)

You get way more attention for low skill drawings than music too.

I was a drummer. I was first attracted to the status of it - it was the only instrument in our school band that you needed to try out for. I didn't make the first cut, so I got lessons, then I made it next year. I kept the lessons for a while, but at some point I got bored and stopped lessons - there were only so many paradiddle variations I wanted to learn. There was no vision for me anymore.

Then, I got into rock music and thought that looked awesome, and I had a burst of new motivation that lasted for several years through college.

Then I accepted I wasn't going to be a famous rock drummer (or at least, the opportunity cost vs other things was no longer looking worth it), and shifted my time toward other things in life.

I like the idea of trying a different instrument. I know I would suck for a while so I haven't committed to it. Maybe when my kid gets older that would provide more motivation to bond with him.

I think that's just crucial, I never would have stuck with it just sweating it out in the basement. You aren't a musician if you aren't playing with other people and in front of audiences.

I hate playing with others and stick with jam tracks for accompaniment. I never play in front of others either. Super awkward.

I do occasionally put a recording on YouTube, but the listens are never more than a dozen per year, and I don’t promote it ever. Not sure how I get the listens that I do get.

Not sure what it is I’m doing, but apparently it’s not making music. I do love what I do, and find the craftsmanship and technique as pleasurable as any video game.

Do it cos you like it (like anything else) and that is the reason.

That’s a terrible attitude. There are plenty of, for example, solo piano players who love playing, but aren’t interested in either being in a band or being a celebrity playing for other people. They are every bit a musician as you are.

Solo piano players have recitals, or make and share recordings of themselves, or do things that aren’t solo too. I stand by the idea that musicianship is a thing that involves other people, at least in some manner or another.

I think kids should play music that reaches other people or they aren’t likely to actually become musicians.

Not sure how controversial that actually is, I’m mostly just making a tree falling in the forest argument.

They're not good for absolute beginners because it can't give you feedback on the bad physical habits that lead to repetitive strain injuries, or just make it hard to play.

Once you're past that point, you're usually far enough to find a tab or chord sheet and figure it out.

For a motivated intermediate level student there can be value in the smooth difficulty progression and forced introduction of new concepts, but that's a pretty small window where they add value.

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 on your kids, there are countless kid stars that succumb to this toxic industry like Britney Spears, Aaron Carter, and Michael Jackson. For the rest, there's working at guitar center and ripping off others with overpriced music equipment to grant you a health-care-less descent into oblivion as a broke ex musician.

The players that give up may well be saving their own life, if not for a ton of frustration and false hope.

To tell you the truth it's utterly depressing to be a musician with integrity after seeing the deep levels of corruption, usury, and depravity that happen in this industry... The wots part, is that tons of the people that act like they are rich are actually fat from it, and many people simply lie about success or buy it (trust fund babies).

I love playing mandolin, and i'm taking up fiddle now. Someday I hope to learn piano. It's is all in good fun.

My day job is programming. I'm lucky that I enjoy it as well, but there is only so much time I can write code in a day, and that is less than 8 hours (i'm glad for meetings for this reason, they prevent burn out) I get paid well for it.

  And bluGill doesn't mind, if he doesn't make the scene.
  He's got a daytime job, he's doing alright.

"When he stopped touring, he wanted to find a balance in life to be able to be happy and to do what he loved most – music. He really struggled with thoughts about Meaning, Life, Happiness. He could now not go on any longer. He wanted to find peace. Tim was not made for the business machine he found himself in"

"His manager, Arash Pournouri, admitted that he knew of Bergling's anxieties but refused to label them a problem of mental health"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicii#Death

I imagine, like most other creative arts (e.g., programming), first you have to really want to do it, then that makes you learn how to do it, and if you wind up learning to do it well you may be able to make money at it. Maybe.

Although there's one thing in common among them all -- it's difficult to make good money.

There is a reason why most musicians will tell you to stay far away from heroin even if they are quite the partakers of almost everything else.

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"

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.

Albeit the amount of work available has been in decline for decades and it's now a fraction of what it used to be, but there's still enough work to keep a core of the very best working almost full time in the remaining major recording studios (here in London at least).

I think you'd be surprised at how much music is still produced by composing, arranging for and recording real musicians. But London is still one of the best places on the planet to get that kind of work done so it's an admittedly skewed experience.

Oh, and there's more than just session musicians who need to sight read perfectly first time - that's just table-stakes for professional commercial musicians in my experience (source: am professional-level jazz trombonist).

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 excuse to learn digital marketing, which would come in handy if I want to try selling anything else online.

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...

Working in the music industry shattered a lot of the glamorous illusions. I also learned that from peers who were chewed up and spit out by the major label machines.

For those 7 years, I was constantly broke, and being taken advantage of by people in the industry with more leverage.

Then I met someone in the office that thought it was crazy that I had a music career before I became a programmer. But it’s the same reason they’re in the office too! It’s really hard, and even if you have that special “it” factor, it can require more runway than most people are willing to give to get there.

I've got to say I'm legitimately shocked that anyone still thinks this. I can absolutely state 100% of my friends who play instruments don't do it for the money. Granted none of them are signed, but the point of music is not to get signed.

The absolute critical thing for learning, the thing a teach and/or parent must do to make a child successful, is not just giving tools. You have to inspire a child to love music. You have to plant in them the seed of desire to create beautiful sound. And you have to make it fun to do. Otherwise it is just another boring chore, with no clear internalized goal.

When we wanted our children to learn to play an instrument, we spent months playing Bach and Mozzart for them, and explaining what was going on in the music. We played our instruments around them, and let them investigate them. Eventually they started asking us how they could make their own music, and that's when we began lessons.

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

How many young kids actually, genuinely want to play a violin/flute/clarinet? I'd wager very, very few. I don't think it is the teaching method at fault here, it's just that probably very few kids want to play an instrument.

Of course kids will quit boring/tedious stuff when they are not forced/compelled to continue. You can't just opt out of learning maths (at least in the UK you can't anyway), but music "lessons" are obviously optional (in the UK there is/was music classes that taught theory, reading music notation etc to the entire class, but not how to play a specific instrument).

My kids are still too young, but when it happens I am strongly going to lobby for them learning an instrument that at least has the possibility of them seeming cool to their peers (so e.g. guitar or drums or whatever) and so something they are more likely to want to continue, rather than forcing Mozart + oboe on a 14 year old or whatever.

It is instead parents that often push their kids into lessons. One point I don't see mentioned much here: you want your kids to be inspired, and there are lots of ways to do that. But, I think it's equally if not more important as the parent to BE INSPIRING to them re: music.

I was first trained on saxophone, flipped to drums, and can dabble on guitar and piano. I don't know if I chose saxophone when I was in elementary school, but it was an option, and I chose it to some degree. But my dad was all over it in a good way. He numerous saxophone-playing friends from his own days playing the keys in bands. He helped me acquire an old and unique sax that really made care to maintain and play it. He suggested I play along with certain songs he liked. And he came to all of my recitals as well.

So, I never resisted it because my parents forced me. That said, I did get bored of a more classical way of playing and tried for quite some time to flip my saxophone playing to jazz.

Ultimately, I flipped to drums because I had been banging on things with some good rhythm for my entire life. It was just natural, and I knew that I had mostly found the instrument that fit me. By that point, I was old enough to start playing in bands and that was what fueled many more years of truly enjoyable performance.

2. Some people do give up on technical subjects and other practice-intensive pursuits at a young age, for various reasons, all similar to music.

3. Young people are goaded into trying music much more frequently than other pursuits, and parents tend to be more persistent about it.

This is because they know if you gave kids the choice to give up maths or whatever and do something fun instead then they would :)

Music isn't as communal anymore unless you have a friend or family that plays. I find it difficult to find an on ramp to playing with people. I don't know what good enough is because all I've been hearing in every song since I was 5 has been "perfect".

In my view there's no silver bullet that will reduce the attrition rate for kids learning to play music, and I think no reason to believe that classical lessons are even significantly better or worse than any other approach.

As mentioned in the article, being part of a musical family helps, but is not a silver bullet. The musician parents tend to be more laid back about it, more patient about progress, less focused on competition. Very few of them express an interest in their kids pursuing music careers, though it sometimes happens anyway. Most just talk about the lifelong enjoyment of music.

Every instrument has a unique learning curve. Yeah, the violin. Guitar and piano are no easier to play at a high level, but can at least produce a decent tone from the beginning.

One thing that might help a bit is starting kids younger, before they are old enough to be self conscious about sucking. Those kids also get chances to play with other kids, and everybody applauds.

I have no aspirations of a music career, but I do get paid to play, and my main band has a small but loyal following. If you have a day job, as I do, you can pick and choose among different aspects of the music business. For instance I have no interest in making or selling recordings, touring, or being famous. I do expect to play with fairly high caliber musicians.

The early stages of Suzuki-method, of course, emphasize ear training. When the kid reaches 6 or so (early reading stage), they also start to learn to read music -- and by then they are likely playing Vivaldi concertos, learned by ear, so ear-training is well established. Eventually my kiddo also learned to sight-read.

But throughout -- it has to be kept fun. Yeah a constant diet of classical is great for teaching skills, but you want to use those skills on fun stuff. The lucky thing about violin is the huge body of traditional fiddle music from several cultures, and also jazz fiddle. And the local Suzuki teachers put on a weekend fiddle camp every year that was hugely fun as a camp experience over-and-above the music activities.

Anyway, kid developed life-long love of music, still plays pretty much every day, after coming home from day-job as an engineer.

He's still playing at 29. Still sounds good. Still enjoying it.

He played simple songs at first, then more complicated ones. They were appropriate for where he was at, and he was happy to play them.

They taught by ear, didn't read music for years. So he could work on sounding good from the start.

Something he learned early was deliberate practice, where you go very slowly thru the song making sure each phrase sounds good. Then you speed it up and string the phrases together. In a few days you're playing full speed and sounding good.

See, you never want to practice playing it badly. That trains you into playing bad music, and you have to undo the damage you just did to yourself.

- 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 forth like that and I took music lessons until I went to college.

- I think bands are a big part of why kids stick with music. 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.

It all paid off - I landed in tech somewhat bc DS&A and OOD == music scales and chord progressions, programming == creativity with known safe bounds like like in music. And I can find bands to play with until I’m old.

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 without an audience. And we weren't even that good at the instruments, really!

But our teachers didn't front-load that in the curriculum—I played for three or four years in junior high and high school before getting to do any of it at all—and anyone struggling in the middle or lower tiers of the class didn't get the opportunity. Some of them might have loved it and, you know, been motivated to try harder. If it'd been the main thing we did, instead of a rare activity, I'd probably have tried a lot harder, myself.

  What's the difference between a squirrel and a french horn player in the back of a cab? The squirrel is probably going to a gig.

  "Later in the evening as you lie awake in bed
  With the echoes from the amplifiers ringin' in your head"

Now I can play crappy jazz in Christmas parties, whatever is regionally in fashion at bars where I live, and enjoy it all.

tldr find a band for your kid I guess

They are. I don't know about numbers but kids getting together and singing with a guitar, bass, drums and maybe a keyboard still happens.

And possibly the parents too.

In my opinion, both approaches are wrong. The job of a good teacher is to make learning fun. Once you enjoy practicing, skill follows automatically.

I'm good at math not because some teacher in my youth made it fun. I'm good at math because I found the pedagogy and practice of it fun in and of itself. In fact, I've almost always found every attempt to "make math fun" to invariably be devoid of any real math content. If you don't enjoy the practice and struggle and discovery, and get motivation only from those rare, occasional breakthroughs in understanding or skill, you're not going to be good at it. Full stop. Sorry, that's not how the world works.

Most people will never make money with music, but they can enjoy playing it. As such music should be taught as fun first, and then the rest follows if and when needed.

Theory and composition don't require performance ability. Transcription or mixing are other choices for people who have great ears and technical ability but perhaps poor biomechanics or dexterity. The playing of music by oneself is only one pillar of many in the vast field of music, and yet the way we do it is such an unappealing gauntlet of private "use it or lose it" that what child wouldn't rather be elsewhere with friends?

Put another way, I think capable, broad-minded teachers are the greatest barrier to producing capable musicians.

PS. I have played music since I was 5, had even some professional career and stopped when I was 30.

Practicing an instrument is a way to learn how to get into a flow state

I wish I’d understood this as a younger person. I might have learned a lot of things.

The long-term progression. Nothing happens in a practice session. But each day you might notice that there is something you can do a little bit better than before. And over months you can notice even more. It's great to see some progress, but it's really over a long time scale. This year I can do more advanced patterns in the left hand than I could last year (!) etc.

And it takes time to learn something new. I found an excruciatingly beautiful melody. I worked for two weeks to learn the song and I made it through the first line - the first six bars. That was great. Then the rest of the song followed, maybe two more weeks for the further 16 bars, and then a few more weeks for the other half of the song (mostly a repeat of the previous with some differences).

I moved and the teacher my parents found that I could walk to only selected pieces that I didn't like which were technically difficult, but didn't sound good to me even after I learned them. She had to figure out what level I was and go through boring books of theory that moved way too slowly. I only much later found out you could buy sheet music of artists I actually liked.

I quit lessons and started composing instead, moving that to the computer when I got an Amiga 1000.

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.

Since I don't play anymore, and she moved away anyway, I have a more relaxed attitude about it. I also meet lots and lots of people who studied, but now don't play either.

It really isn't that satisfying for a lot of people, let's face it. If it is for you, that's great and I'm genuinely happy for you. But there's nothing wrong with not wanting to play. It doesn't mean there was any fault in your teachers or your learning methods. Now you pick up your instrument or sit down at it, and everything's difficult. Pieces you used to play are now impossible.

In the old days, playing music and listening to music were much more closely related. Nowadays, you can hear a much better version of the Goldberg Variations than you'll ever manage to play (and if that statement doesn't fit you, I apologize). You can hear guitar solos that you have no hope of ever playing. Furthermore, your friends most likely don't want to hear you. Once you've made them smile with your Smoke on the Water riff they'll politely move on.

I think it's a good thing to have done. It makes you appreciate the music you listen to, much much more. But if you don't practice anymore, don't feel bad about it.

I spent a bunch of time talking to my Dad who learned to play under those conditions. It is a real difference from the generations that have quality recording by technically proficient musicians easily available.

Overly generalizing here. All things in life is either instantly gratifying but in long term harmful or initially grinding but in long term joyful. How are children supposed to know something will be fun 10 years, 20 years down the road? They either pick up from parent/peers/school or us parent imposed our version of "later it will be cool" on them.

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.

Reasons:

- I don't really enjoy the whole stuff very much. It involves a lot of boring practices. I still remember that back in the day, when everyone was enjoying holidays and weekends I had to practice 4+ hours every day. My parents were very pushy about this so very quickly it's a complete chore for me, except for occasions.

- I hate memorizing stuffs. But for music performance you got to memorize most of the stuffs you are going to perform. I was very nervous about this. I won a few minor prizes but never enjoyed the process. I only wanted to play for myself, not for an audience.

- I was not that talented anyway. There were tons of promising kid and I was just one of them.

BTW I never practiced piano again afterwards. It has been over two decades. I might pick it up again and hopefully can play some Well Tempered Clavier again (I managed to play a few of them before I dropped it) -- although I stopped practicing, I have grown up enough to enjoy Bach, the most romantic composer in the world.

My parents have never heard of the site even to this day. If you ask them, I'm just naturally hard-working and passionate.

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.

But it took me quite some time to get there, especially without teachers. But compared to my neighbor who learned the same instrument aince she was a kid I could just sit there and play. Without notes she did not know what to do. "Just explore the instrument" seemed like a wild and undoable prompt to her.

My believe is that many kids who go into music, imagined something else than it turned out to be. My believe is also that many music schools teach things in the wrong order. They teach you how to speak before you know how to make a sound. Even after more than a decade of playing I still find new ways to make my instruments sound.

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?

Since my parents were divorced I was able to talk to my Mom about it. She got me a cheap used bass. I was so happy- it felt like I was meant to be a bass player. I played it every day. Wrote songs, learned songs. Eventually I earned a B.M. and had a music career.

Growing up in a family that didn’t play music, I’m not sure how I feel about pushing music lessons on my kids. No one made me do it, but no one could stop me either.

I just try to have gear available for them to mess with. If they get that drive to be a musician, I’ll be there to help.

I came back to piano later by myself when I wanted to play video game music. Then I wanted to play stuff from movies, pop songs, etc. I started watching interesting videos on reharmonization and tried that on some pop hits to interesting effect. I wouldn’t say I “stopped” completely, but my relationship with the instrument is completely different than it was when I was taking full time lessons growing up. I’m at the point where I might take it up again, but I would have specific goals in mind now.

https://youtu.be/ffwVKDP8nzQ

i've had an opportunity once to recommend this to a mother who asked me what kept me interested, as her kid was losing interest. i told her to get some scores for the games they were playing

I don't mean playing together as an ensemble where the music is already written - though that is important. I mean PLAYING and improvising. Exploring. Simply having fun. Developing your ear, not only for your instrument, but how to listen and react to your collaborators. Making mistakes. Going off-road and being wildly experimental. That's such an important component of what makes music wonderful. Even if you don't have an audience to perform to, and even if you and your friends are objectively terrible it is FUN to express yourself and to synchronize with your friends and have a laugh when you do something satisfying.

As you all mature you become tuned-in to your band. You work as a unit. You surprise each other. You keep each other fresh. You learn to listen deeper and deeper. You discover ways to interpret the same composition several different ways. It becomes a playground.

Perhaps most importantly, there are ZERO RULES. Nobody dies if you play the wrong chord. So you go big. You learn to take risks and occasionally you surprise yourself with what's possible. Music (and perhaps art and creativity in general) demonstrate that so much in life is malleable. That things don't have to be a certain way. That most of it is open to negotiation.

Today I'd struggle to find middle C on a keyboard, but I do run my own Freestyle Martial Arts club. The difference was not parental pressure. Mum made me go to both classes, and made me practice both piano and martial arts at home. I hated doing both. I would feign illness or injury not to go.

My TKD instructor was nothing short of inspiring though. He was an Olympic coach and really put effort into training me. My piano teacher pulled my mum aside after a lesson, before I'd even gone for grade one, and told her that he saw no hope in me, and that she should stop lessons.

I don't really know what I'm trying to say here other than my instructors faith in me had more of an influence than any particular pedagogical approach.

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 <insert body part> 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.

I still play a bit of piano, but I'm no-where near as good as when I was practicing regularly when I was young. I've also picked up guitar a bit, but I'm just chording there, too.

That said, I play to have fun, to entertain my son, or just to belt out a fun tune.

In my view, music is whatever you want it to be - you play what you want, and if it appeals to people, they will listen. Of course there's knowledge to be passed on (harmony, scales, patterns of rhythm) - but that's all it is - knowledge, which might help a player to better express what they want. A lot of music education treats these concepts as holy writ, which they are most definitely not.

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.

It's definitely not fun when you and everyone around you is bad. Having a horrible teacher for a few years along the way didn't help either and drove most of my classmates to quit.

I do miss it and part of me wishes I had continued in college because I would have really enjoyed the challenge. But I was tired of "band cliques" and wanted to move on.

1) act impressed when she plays 2) get my own and let her see how I learn to play it

(I tried borrowing hers but she’s very territorial about her guitar.)

These are not high stakes but it would be so nice to see it go somewhere.

What do?

Learning to sing and strum chords at the same time was a transformative experience for me and incredible bang-for-buck compared to learning piano, because that immediately unlocks being able to perform most pop songs with chords. Someone above posted a great collection of pop songs written for ukulele that I can't wait to try playing tomorrow: https://sanjoseukeclub.org/song_book.html

You can do the same on the piano, with comparable effort to the guitar! Some songs are more amenable to piano accompaniment than others - ballads work great.

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.

As a result of this, the child will end up having a hatred towards the musical form and will never even try to give 100%, and without trying no-one can know that they have talent.

A solution to this would be to make it only optional - but then again there'd be the lazy talented ones who don't want to try anything

This seems to apply in other fields as well by the way; the correspondence to "the YOLO guy" for example is striking.

I went through with it: https://magarshak.com/piano

And what was the point in the end? Classical music doesn’t have the fan base it used to.

One can choose to do what one is kinda bad at.

Then see how to create a variant of it.

Fricking scales and theory. Totally the wrong way to grab peoples attention.

1. Judgment hinders learning and many teachers judge some sounds as terrible, bad, or wrong. Acceptance of all sounds is the key, which requires deep deprogramming for many, and doing it just in the context of music is harder than doing it in daily life. Unlearn judgment in both supports unleashing in both contexts.

2. Forcing material or a certain learning progression is a denial of autonomy. This also hinders learning. Much easier to joyfully engage with chosen material in the ways one wants. If someone wants to learn a specific song, I help them learn it. If they want to learn by watching a video of someone playing that song over and over, sometimes playing along, sometimes not, I'm right there with them.

3. Sticking to culturally familiar sounds. This is a way to teach music within a box of sorts. Diversity of exposure widens perspectives and allows for more creativity. Playing Sun Ra for students and saying "this is also music" is a way to widen their perspectives easily.

4.Shallow listening training. Learning to mindfully listen is an important skill, especially for learning music. Teaching mindfulness practices (not necessarily mindfulness meditation, unless ready to help them through trauma...get some EMDR buzzers and scripts and practice on yourself first) such as mindful walking, looking at trees and contemplating different ways to interpret "looking at the space between branches," and mindful breathing/eating/pooping can help students develop the ability to focus (helps with rhythm & keeping time), become more connected with their body, and allow for better recall of music. Deep listening is a form of practice.

5. Set ways of doing things, like how to hold and play the guitar. When the 2-year old we care for was asked one day to show how to hold the guitar that was as long as their body, they showed how they could play it in 5 or 6 different positions/postures, some of which involved it being upside down. Nobody taught them that and nobody told them "that's not how you hold a guitar!" They learned through free exploration. My first time watching Marshall Allen play saxophone was a few years ago. Watching him scrape the keys with the back of his hand made me realize how stuck I was in my ways of thinking about technique.

6. Insisting on keeping time. This is a notoriously difficult thing for many people with ADHD and the music teaching cultures I've encountered have always insisted on the ability. I've been told most of my life nobody would ever play with me if I couldn't keep time. I'm willing to play with people who can't keep time, so this is no longer true. Do not teach it any longer and recognize that people playing out of time in experiments will eventually sync up. If you stop the music before then, it keeps them from getting to practice resync'ing, which keeps them stuck. Acceptance is key here, too.

The 4-year old I conceived and nurture plays every instrument ťhey find and sings their own tunes with their own lyrics. This is without pushing them toward any of it. They can jam on the drums with people who've been playing music for years and who are jamming around a fire. I've been teaching myself music for 6 years after 19 years of not playing because I was stuck in anxiety and automated judgment, shame, and frustration around playing music.

I look forward to the way music is typically taught changing drastically in the coming years so we can start hearing much wilder stuff than what we're getting now.

Mozart 3 is the first Mozart many violin students study, and this is where a lot of my violin mates quit, too. The problem---apart from the general problem with violin education---is that Mozart requires too much maturity in musicality. There's a reason major violin competitions usually require a Mozart piece at certain rounds, despite the relatively low technical difficulty compared with Romantic concertos or show pieces. The transparency of Mozart is a true test on how well a player understand the music, know how to phrase, and express themselves in an interesting but not peculiar way. A technically well-played Mozart can still sound like monotonous misery if the player doesn't have the ability to interpret it. So, it really only works for goal-oriented students (I've gotta win this competition), and is a chore for a lot of other students.

(And I say this as a big fan of Mozart's music)

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I wasn't a Suzuki kid, but a thing that I felt really envious about, is that a proper Suzuki method encourages playing with your peers to a degree. A Suzuki teacher is supposed to arrange duets, recitals, etc., and it is just much more fun to play with and for your friends, instead of the guy in the mirror.

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I'd like to point out that most of us don't retain every single hobby we attempted as a child. It is a natural outcome of growth, where we understand ourselves better, and learn to achieve happiness in a more strategic manner. I've seen questions by teenagers on violin forums, of such a kind: "I'm entering med school, and I'll be too busy to practice the violin. What should I do?" And just like some wise teachers pointed out, it's easier to be a doctor and an amateur violinist, than the other way around, so focus on your study first, and pick up the violin later when your life is less stressful.

It's fine to give up, for a while, or forever, or replace it with something else. There are many paths towards music, some are much easier or cheaper than others, and even music itself is not the only path to happiness anyway.

We all want to have unlimited time and have mastered all the skills in the world, but we don't have unlimited time, and most of the road to mastery is too long and too hard. It's worth it to sit down with yourself and ask whether this is something you really want, or is it merely the avoidance of cutting a sunken cost.

For example: concerts. Music delivered in concerts is technically in every way worse then recorded. People are going to concerts to listen to music that is technically worse in every way. What this tells me and should tell you is that most people aren't only liking the music. There's a bunch of stuff around the music that they like, and the music itself is but one factor.

Additionally all music has very very common themes. If lyrics are involved the, lyrics tend to be revolved around Love or Power or Tragedy. This pattern of common themes indicates that music is biased biologically. It's used for very specific purposes in human biology, it is not some universal art form like say painting.

Another thing is that lyrics are horrible at conveying a point. Written text or normal speech is better yet tons of people are irrationally totally into lyrics that are "deep". Try writing a song about the point I'm conveying here and you'll see that it misses the point of music. The point of music is definitely not in communicating deep or complex messages. The point is to convey stupidly simple messages. Literally. All lyrics/poetry convey significantly more simple and stupider messages then plain text. You can't argue with this logically.

My theory is this. Music in human biology is for several things:

  -It's used as a mating call. (love songs)
  -It's used to promote group closeness and confidence (concerts)
  -It's used as a group mourning thing (singing at a funeral)
  -It's used to project power (Rock songs Rap songs)

There is a rather small group though that does appreciate music for it's intrinsic properties: The mathematicians (I'm not part of this group). The people who like the music purely because of the patterns. Some people like stuff like fugues. When I listened to Bachs fugue after reading GEB, it sounded like pure crap to my ears, and it didn't trigger any associated emotions with the bullet points I made above. I think these people are biologically wired differently. Most people won't like what they like... Either way, typically this group is into music that is closer to or is classical music.

But still the group above sometimes still goes to live performance symphonies and stuff like that, which tells me again that it's not purely the music they are liking.