Don't Give Up on the Guitar, Fender Is Begging You
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I'd guess that a similar 90+% of beginners quit the clarinet, violin, piano, drums, etc.
If the macro trend of hobbyist guitar playing has declined, I think it's correlated with its lack of prominence in current music.
For curiosity's sake, I just clicked through the top songs on Billboard Hot 100 chart[1]. As of today November 22, 2016, the top 20 songs do not have any obvious guitars. It's all synths, electronic beats, and other artificial sound effects. The first song with obvious guitars is the country song "May We All" by Florida Georgia Line sitting at position 30.
In previous decades with higher guitar sales, you had the popularity of 50s Elvis, 60s Beatles, 70s Led Zeppelin, 80s hair metal bands, 90s Nirvana, etc. It's easier for guitar novices to stay motivated when everything on the radio had lots of guitars in it. At the moment, the zeitgeist is electronic music until guitars make a comeback in mainstream pop. However, it's possible guitars will never become fashionable again and will recede further into isolated genres like country and folk music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_numb...
I remember the guitar bands of the 90s being album bands, so I thought I'd do a quick check of today's Billboard Top 200 albums. But before I even got there, at the top of the search results was a news headline from today: "Metallica On Course for Sixth No. 1 Album on Billboard 200":
http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/7581705...
Now? Alternative bands (now labeled "indie") are increasingly all electronic -- how much guitar is in the Twenty One Pilots album currently on the charts, for instance? Hard rock is still on the charts (Avenged Sevenfold and In Flames among others have albums on the charts) but it's a shade less prominent. Country is probably the one genre in the US which is both very popular and has prominent guitar, but even that is more electronic than it used to be -- just listen to all the synth in certain Keith Urban tracks.
The synthesizer is now what rules pop music these days, in my opinion. Even hip hop, which always used electronics as long as I'm aware, reflects some of this change (a lot of hip-hop has abandoned samples in favor of pure synthesizer tracks).
This change makes sense to me. As long as you have a computer, you can nowadays download an entire studio for practically pennies, and start creating satisfactory loops fairly quickly. A guitar most likely will cost more and definitely will take a lot more practice to get to that "instant gratification" point.
I don't make much music anymore, but when I do play around I'm more likely to fire up some software & run some programmed synth sounds through the AmpliTube Fender effects plugins, than to grab my guitar & StealthPlug & Tube compressor & remember that I'm not actually very good at playing anyway...
Now? It's been like that since the 80s!
Guitar is a cross-over instrument in the sense that it can be used for rock, jazz, blues as well as classical. It's supported by a wide selection of composed music for all. Although electric guitar and classical guitar are not the same, learning one of them gives a huge amount of resources to learn the other.
I'm also of the opinion that if you are learning music to become a star, you aren't learning for the right reasons. If you become good enough to make money at it, that's awesome, but I don't know many musicians that do earn any money.
I don't practice often but as an adult I have a little disposable income to pay for a couple of guitars and an amp. I even picked up a cheap travel electric guitar with a built-in amp/speaker which is honestly awesome for noodling around over top of someone playing acoustic around a campfire or some such.
Not really trying to make any point I guess. I had vague dreams of fame and fortune but found that over time, it was still pretty rewarding to be able to play something even if I don't give it as much of my time as I might. It's a creative outlet, it can be a way to relax, and you know...occasionally, girls still dig it :)
I blame this soley on how piano is taught. Instead of focusing on music and sound, music teachers try to teach note names, sitting posture, curving your hands ect. You are sent of with the impression that you'd need years of daily practice to be half decent. This is an immediate turn-off. I want to play music, not memorize ridiculous memory tricks like ' every good boy does fine' .
I would imagine most people are trying to make new music and play existing music. 99% of ppl are not trying to become professional pianist. Yet music teachers just teach how they have been taught, with endless instructions about keeping your back straigt, keeping the curve in your fingers ect. This makes one feel like they are not "cut out" for music and they give up .
We need a new crop of music teachers that can take advantage of new midi instruments, iphone apps ect to teach music. Piano should be introduced much later one you have grasped the how notes sound, how chords sound, why you need them ect on a simpler interface instead of endless repetitions of twinkle, twinkle from day one. Classical music should not be taught to a hobbyist. Instruction should be fun from day one, you should be making new music from day one. Endless learning of grammar doesn't make one a good author.
[1] https://suzukiassociation.org/about/suzuki-method/instilling...
In my observation, classical music is not a turn-off for kids, if they are young enough that they don't have a strong sense of what is "cool." Reaching teenagers is a whole nother ball o' wax, and I suspect, is rarely as successful.
Part of Suzuki's ideology involved the parents. He expected them to be enthusiastic partners in their kids learning music. This can be a problem if: 1) The parents don't like classical music. Many people viscerally dislike it. 2) They oppose all structured musical education for whatever reason, including their own childhood experience.
I grew up when Suzuki was still controversial in the US, and my training (on the cello) was along classical European lines. Music is a huge part of my life, though I now play jazz on double bass almost exclusively. I'm not sure that the less structured approach to learning guitar actually leads to less attrition. Among people I know (for instance at my workplace) who still pursue an interest in music at any level, relatively few play the electric guitar. Without supporting evidence, I wouldn't assume that the supposedly structured, old-fashioned approach to teaching music is actually less successful in the long run.
I strongly disagree with using 'apps' to teach music, it's counter productive and you won't learn. To learn piano you need a piano (or keyboard) and a proper teacher that's it, you're also not limited to learning classical pieces. And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time, effort, patience and practice. There's no shortcuts.
This meme has to die. Do you think Djembe players in west African village learned chords and scales to come up awesome sounding percussions ? I've seen young kids come up sweet rhythms with zero musical training. You can create new music on day one, it's built into us. Chords and Scales should be used to understand and enhance what you can create, its not a prerequisite .
Ummm.. I don't think this is true. I think Djembe has open tone, closed tone, slap, base tone ect. I What about folk songs from India, how did they come up with it ? I am not arguing against music theory, I am arguing against saying music theory is prerequisite for creating music.
Music is nothing like a programming language, there is no compiler rejecting your bad music. Sure people have discovered what sounds good and what doesn't and turned it into some sort of theory but those are merely guidelines not syntax rules that are enforced by the compiler.
Rhythm is time.
Notes are wavelength, and in Western music we use a 12 note system to denote them, and musical theory is a shorthand used to denote the complex mathematical intervals at work in it. It's fascinating stuff, and if you're interested in learning more about it there's a great BBC series available on YouTube that describes what's happening in Western musical theory: How Music Works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnbOWi6f_IM
Suggesting that students don't need to learn basic music theory is kind of ridiculous. Can the human ears find the tonic/dominant/sub-dominant interval relationships on their own? Of course. That's part of the reason we find them so pleasing. You don't need music theory to hear. You need it to communicate with other musicians. Music is a group activity. It's an ongoing conversation in our culture. If you want to participate in the musical traditions of our society, you need to be able talk to other musicians.
This means different things for different traditions, but the amount of learning needed to get your feet under you in music is less than learning how how to play most video games or even the most basic syntax of a programming language.
Can we teach it better? Absolutely. But we still need to teach it.
And at that point you've learned to recreate a song you already know, and it's not a huge step to improvise from scratch on your own melody.
There's a huge body of potential source material for this approach, including folk/pop songs, oldies, scores from musicals (think Disney Renaissance era), and most contemporary religious music.
When I was a kid, I read Anne McCaffery's book Dragonsong, and thought that I should make up a tune for the lyrics of one of the songs that the protagonist writes. We had a piano available, so I came up with said tune. I couldn't have (and still couldn't) told you which key it's in, and, you know, I'm certainly not going to claim that it was a brilliant composition that will endure for the ages, but it wasn't dissonant and was, through trial and error, in some minor key or other.
Obviously, having a keyboard helps, since you are forced to only play notes on the chromatic scale somewhere.
Fuck the rules, make stuff, see what happens. Nothing truly creatively wonderful in your life gave a shit about the rules.
Get ready to learn over 200 illogical "hand positions" :).
Wait when did we start discussing emacs here?
If one has passed high school mathematics, the amount of music theory sufficient to compose typical pop tunes can be covered in about one day.
Diatonic scales, blues scale, intervals, 3-chords, some 4-chords, a hint of higher n-chords. Chord roles and examples of typical chord progressions. Something about bass lines and drum patterns.
It will probably not make you able to compose hit tunes, but you will learn enough terminology to understand what is going on.
100% agree on this! I believe the teacher's first interaction with a new student on piano should be asking what song(s) they like. If possible, start the instruction using that particular song because that's the juice that got them curious about the instrument in the first place!
Yes, Mozart's Sonata 16 K545[1] is an enduring staple of typical piano instruction but while it's a decent tune, that classical piece is not the music that made the student want to learn the piano. It's more likely the student was sparked by something mainstream like Adele's "Someone Like You"[2]. As a bonus, that Adele song happens to be easier than the Mozart piece. Please don't kill the budding pianist with Mozart and piano drills if that isn't what he/she likes.
For some reason, it's blasphemy to let beginning piano students practice on real pop songs. (Possibly due to emphasis on sight reading sheet music of which there is more of it available for classical pieces.) This is less a problem with guitars because more kids are self-taught, lessons are informal, and every guitarist shamelessly attempts whatever is currently on the radio.
If you want comfortable arrangements that a beginner will stand a chance of being able to make it through, you have go to back to hits from before 1965 or so. That's what I've been doing myself, but to a lot of people that's not too different than asking them to play something from 1765.
0) Someone already came up with a classical piano repertoire that perfectly increases in difficulty from "Primary" to Grade 10, in neat, progressive steps. If you look for sheet music for that Adele song, I guarantee you you'll never find a version that's appropriate for each of those levels. You might find several versions, each somewhere in the middle of that range, but no one will spend the time to interpret "Someone Like You" in eleven different ways--from an 8-bar melody up to some 15-page virtuosic piece--and then repeat that for every other song in the top 100. Can't even crowd-source that effort due to copyright.
1) You're vastly overestimating what a complete beginner can do. Remember, these are normally 5 year old kids with barely enough motor control to hold a pencil properly, no concept of beats or rhythm, etc. Pop music is usually easier, but it still takes years to work up to that Adele song. "What about adult students?" Adult students are even worse for quitting things early because it'll still take months to play anything remotely interesting and there's no one forcing them to continue. Proof: note how many adults will join and then quit the gym between New Years and February 1st because they're not seeing results quick enough.
2) To build on the above, piano has the shortest possible path to making in-tune sounds. Think how long it takes to learn to play even a single note on an oboe. You need the many lectures on posture and finger position--not to mention tons of boring practice!--just to stop squeaking.
3) How do you go about teaching Adele without explaining note names, how counting works (fractions!), and all the associated music theory? "I play, you copy?" That's not considered good music education. Kids get decent at rote memorization of finger patterns, and then plateuau at that (very, very low) level.
4) Beginners already start with "fun" music like Old McDonald, London Bridge, etc. Most of it is lame, but then again, kids might find recently-mainstream music like N'Sync lame too. Fashion moves pretty fast. On that note, copyright/royalties on modern music are a pretty good barrier to just playing whatever you want. (And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.)
5) Trust me, teachers are intimately aware of the fine balance between motivating their kids with fun repertoire and actually teaching them something. Vocal teachers probably work that fine line the hardest since every pop song is fair game.
6) Pop songs in addition to classical repertoire is fine; not a single music teacher will object to this. My mother held three recitals a year (popular, christmas, classical) and kids held free reign over repertoire selection in two of the three (and the third was mostly a "trial run" of the pieces they'd have to play anyway for their upcoming piano exams). Pop songs as a replacement for classical repertoire is not fine. Adele wasn't thinking about teaching you anything about fingering or expression marks when she wrote her songs. On the other hand, Chopin/Liszt/Czerny/Debussy/etc. were writing with exactly those concerns in mind when they wrote their Etudes (read "studies"). They're written to be lyrical and interesting, but also to focus your practice towards a specific, technical challenge (perhaps one etude is just about fast arpeggios for the right hand, another etude for long trills with the weak fingers of the left hand, etc.)
7) Along the same lines, "classical" education isn't just Classical-era music, like Mozart. Good teachers want to expose you to lots of styles. Yes, every pianist has to play Bach--even if you hate Bach--because it's instrumental to learning about polyphony. But somewhere in that repertoire book there'll also be jazzy music, latin music, cinematic-style music, etc. written by still-living composers (although probably not as modern as Adele). In RCM books you'll find that kind of thing in sections 'D' and 'E'.
8) And yes, nobody likes scales, but drills are drills; you just have to accept that some parts are laborious and annoying. Athletes spend time running between plastic pylons and sweating it out at the gym because you can't efficiently build fundamentals just by playing games. You need a good mix of performance and practice. If you're only looking to "have fun", you can just stick to pick-up games with your friends (or teach yourself how to strum a few guitar chords), but if you're taking professional lessons in something there's an implied expectation that you're there to improve.
Obviously music is there to be enjoyed. And I'm certainly not claiming that traditional music education can't be improved. I just wanted to make the point that teachers already try to balance motivation with other goals, and that no activity worth doing is "all fun, all the time".
>" Adult students are even worse for quitting things early because it'll still take months to play anything remotely interesting
Do you think adults should start with Piano at all. I know you can come up really cool sounds music in Ableton within months. There are plugins which make sure you are always playing in key. You can even use those pad things with chromatic layout, which is much more logical, and do fun stuff like pitch bends.
> piano has the shortest possible path to making in-tune sounds.
prbly true for traditional instruments. I would start with a computer or an iphone app. No lectures on postures needed.
>How do you go about teaching Adele without explaining note names
Even kids can tell if something is 'going up/staying the same/going down' . Give them the root note and let try to replicate it on the keyboard. Let them come up with their own 'system'. Don't ruin their natural curiosity of discovery by telling them note names and stuff.
>And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.
I totally disagree with here, like a lot. Even beginners can start playing 'by ear'. Countless people have learnt just by playing by ear. you can play kumbaya by ear within couple of hours of piano instruction. Surely everyone must try to play by ear before they spent years on piano lessons.
That's fine. Music is music; do what you enjoy. I'm not saying you need to take piano lessons to enjoy music, or compose music. I'm saying you probably need to take piano lessons to (efficiently) learn to play the piano effectively.
> Even kids can tell if something is 'going up/staying the same/going down'.
Actually that's not as easy for kids as you'd think. Anyway, what you're talking about here is ear training (melody playback, specifically), and that's already integrated into every classical music program. I was talking about trying to play a complete, two-hand, Adele piece on the piano by reading sheet music. At that point you'd definitely have to know a bunch of music theory already.
> Let them come up with their own 'system'. Don't ruin their natural curiosity of discovery by telling them note names and stuff.
Sure. And for consistency, forget about BEDMAS; let's give kids the axioms of ZFC set theory and get them to just work their way on up to arithmetic on their own. (Also, parents, don't forget to pay $50 an hour, every hour, while your kid tries to discover the concept of a square root on their own.)
I'm kidding. But look, music teachers already try to push students towards as much discovery, creativity, expressivity, and musicality as the students can muster. Pop songs aren't a panacea for the motivation problem.
> Countless people have learnt just by playing by ear.
Like I said above, I didn't mean stumbling through a chopsticks or kumbaya melody by ear; I meant transcribing a full Adele song. Or anything you would reasonably hear on the radio or see in a movie.
Playing around, composing, improvising, etc. while simultaneously taking music lessons (or at least studying from a book) is great. Fantastic. I recommend that to everyone. But if your goal is to learn how to play the piano and you're trying to do it with no music theory or classical education whatsoever, you... just won't make efficient progress. I don't know how else to put it. You'll learn something, sure, but you'd learn it faster with the teacher and the teaching system.
that's fair. Not sure why parents still force their kids to learn piano, an instrument so divorced from their digital reality. Parents probably have some romantic fantasies about piano or its just lack of knowledge and availability of new style music programs.
This is nonsense. There are near-infinite varieties of non-Bach music to teach polyphony. Even the "chopsticks" song demonstrates polyphony. If you meant counterpoint instead polyphony to demonstrate the left and right hands playing two independent melodies interwoven with each other, Bach may be reasonable. It depends.
>And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.
This is terrible advice. It's misguided. You can have any student at any young age explore "playing by ear" in the first 10 minutes of the first day of the lesson. When a 4-year-old preschooler listens to her mother hum a tune and is asked if he/she can hum it back... that is playing by ear! The child's ears heard the notes and the child's vocal cords hummed it back. With a piano, it's fingers instead of vocal cords. Deliberately delaying any joy of playing by ear until a later "advanced" lesson has no basis in pedagogy.
> "all fun, all the time".
I don't claim that all invested time into skill building is fun. My emphasis is that joy of the activity must be used as the gateway drug to the mundane drills and boring classical pieces. If joy means informal pop songs or the simple intro piano to Frozen's "Let it Go"... then start with that. If the student is happy and motivated, the door can then further be opened to Bach, Chopin, Art Tatum, etc.
Yes, sorry, polyphony was a bad choice of words. I'm not even talking about polyphony or counterpoint as musical concepts--you can certainly get the gist of these without years of playing Bach--I mean it more like this: they put those four part fugues in the repertoire because it's an excellent technical exercise for student pianists. It's easy to just play the notes, but much harder to bring out the melody as it bounces around the four voices, especially as it goes into the left hand and the weaker fingers of either hand, and more so when the voices overlap. In fact the whole thing teaches voicing in general.
> Improvising... is terrible advice.
Vocal call/response is different. I meant that it's a non-starter to expect a five year old (or an average fifteen year old, by the way) to listen to a random song on the radio and just improv what they hear on a piano with no sheet music. Hell, I've been playing for like 27 years and it would take me ages to transcribe by ear some random Chopin prelude that I could otherwise easily sight read (well... one of the easier ones anyway).
> If joy means informal pop songs... then start with that.
This is what I mean; you don't start with even "songs". I'm a fully grown adult. Reasonably good musician, I think. Played piano my whole life, trombone in high school, picked up flamenco guitar on my own. A few years ago I was left alone for a few hours with a clarinet; do you know what I accomplished after like 3 straight hours of practice? I could barely get through "London bridge is falling down", and I considered that an achievement.
My point is that you have to deal with the motivation problem well before you're anywhere near playing "Let it Go". And when you're ready to play a real pop song, trust me, your teacher will let you do anything you want if it'll get you to practice.
My parents had no idea that jazz was my main musical interest.
Posture is important so you don't hurt yourself while sitting on a backless piano bench for hours on end. Finger position is important because playing with splayed fingers will limit your repertoire down the road. The best way to prevent bad habits is preventing them from forming in the first place.
The same goes with guitar. I don't teach, but I could and I can assure you that the two exercises I would begin students with would be pretty bad, but so fundamental that it'd be inexcusable of me to not teach them this stuff.
Do a down strum on each one count while I count to 4 and repeat. This is surprisingly difficult to do when you first start. This one is actually pretty fun and can make people laugh at themselves.
Hold your fret hand on your lap, then try to make a C chord. Pick each string from bottom to top. If one of the strings don't ring out, fix your hand and keep down picking until each string rings out. Keep doing this until you get it right on the first time five times. Got C? Lets work on G. I'm actually surprised at how many experienced musicians can't do this.
Yes, it is hard, yes it is work, but it's no different than programming. Nothing worth having is given to you.
You could easily make the same argument for any discipline. Chemistry shouldn't be about learning boring periodic tables, it should be fun explosions. 99% of ppl are not trying to become professional novelists, so English classes should focus on comic books.
If some give up along the way because they don't enjoy it, so what? I gave up on baseball at a young age because I didn't like it and wasn't good at it. Does it matter?
Your teachers know and understand stuff you're years away from grasping as a beginner. Its not about being "professional" but rather having the proper foundations upon which you can build knowledge and muscle memory. Its about spending the least amount of effort at any point in your practice so it becomes actually effective. Its about having a logical progression where each new concept adds up to existing knowledge (music theory is VERY well structured in that regard.)
I personally dread that new crop of teachers using MIDI/apps to teach music. This is anything but teaching music - its teaching MIDI and apps. You dont learn to ride a bike by downloading an app or playing "bike simulator" - its just obvious.
Saying "endless learning of grammar" and other forms of "oh god, I have to put in effort?!" mentalities show off a very shallow understanding of the domain - this is what you expect a teenager to say when looking at his courses because he's years away from understanding why they're useful. Sorry to sound harsh but its just how it comes out as.
Down the road an ability to bang off a tune at a party is far more useful to a beginner than knowledge of music theory. Makes people happier too!
So while we'd have scales and chords to practice, we'd also have songs to play at parties and whatnot from the beginning.
What I didn't realize at the time is that practicing chords and scales not only builds knowledge of how notes sounds and relate to each other, it also builds muscle memory and makes you play with less and less effort until it becomes effortless. At which point the songs you learned really, really start to shine.
Its easy to dismiss practice as boring and "only for professionals" but once you start seeing what it yields you realize it is incredibly important to any musician.
Much like reading a book from an author who understands grammar and has a large vocabulary is a much richer experience than reading a book from someone who hasn't put the effort in learning it all.
Not only that, understanding the grammar makes you appreciate the works of others on a much deeper level. Same goes for understanding music theory - it improves your listening experience.
The songs I had to learn were obscure classical pieces. It was all so horrifically boring, and GOD FORBID if I ever just sat down at the piano and played around, making sound that interested me or trying to replicate something I heard on the radio. That was "unstructured time" on the instrument and was counterproductive to "real" practice.
I absolutely hated every single second of it, and finally quit in a huge blowout fight with my mom when I was about 9 years old, and just refused to keep playing.
As a teenager, I taught myself to play bass, and spent my 20's playing in bands, working in music, touring and all that good stuff. I still play bass and guitar constantly and I've never had any formal instruction in either instrument, but honestly I really wish I had kept playing the piano. The problem was, the way kids are taught, the same way I was, seems designed to make it as repellent as humanly possible.
It would be so easy to make piano interesting, and more importantly, FUN to practice and play, but the old-school approach, making kids play garbage they have no interest in, yelling at them over and over about sitting up straight, is the worst possible way to go about it.
They don't put you through all that out of some perverted wish to make you suffer. They do because they know what's at the other end of that practice.
I do agree not all teachers are good teachers (if you get yelled at, you DEFINITELY have a mediocre teacher) - teaching is first and foremost about transmitting a passion, then explaining the theory which holds it up. And in order to do so you've got to figure out what your student's interests are.
You get people interested in the instrument first by giving them a taste of how they can actually play things they like. Let them explore and have fun. Point out problems they might have with technique, but do it within the framework of getting them where THEY want to be, playing what THEY want to play.
Don't force focus on theory and reading sheet music. When you're a kid who just wants to play something cool that shit is boring and it sucks. Once you get a handle on the instrument and really get passionate about it the theory end starts to become interesting on its own.
Seriously, these teachers didn't know a damn thing I don't know now, and there's a much better way to go about this.
> You get people interested in the instrument first by giving them a taste of how they can actually play things they like.
That can work, but its very dangerous for the student to develop bad habits in doing so - which are then next to impossible to undo to learn the proper method required to play effortlessly. My first year in music school was basically unlearning everything I learned before. Not fun. I saw a lot of people giving up right there.
Learning to read and write text is boring and sucks, yet absolutely nobody will argue its useless. Once you realize the world of possibilities knowing how to read/write opens - you forget it was a pain to learn. You're even thankful for the people who forced you to learn it. Everyone learns it, even if only a handful push it all the way to university as their major.
Music should be the same, it looks alien to teach theory and posture because its not the norm like teaching how to read is. But when you think about it people saw reading the very same way when only the elite had access to this knowledge. Promoting a culture of anti-intellectualism does nobody a service.
> Seriously, these teachers didn't know a damn thing I don't know now
I very highly doubt that, simply because its impossible for you to know what they knew, and they most likely knew a whole lot more than they made it seem when teaching you.
I used to look down on non-readers, but have had to re-think that attitude, simply due to the reality of how music gets played by a lot of people.
But the parent is talking about the electric bass, which I also play. There are plenty of successful electric bassists who never read a single dot off a page. A lot of music is performed without having a written bass part, or improvised from abbreviated notations such as chord charts, Nashville numbers, etc.
Also, it's hard to get motivated to learn reading, when your preferred genre has no written repertoire. Written charts are used in the studio, but seldom by working bands.
A problem with reading is that it's a long learning curve -- especially for adults who already know how to play -- and not much use for it unless you can do it at a fairly advanced level and seek out work that requires it. So, the so called "reader gigs" are covered by a cadre of players who specialize in that kind of work, including myself.
As a jazz musician, I live in two worlds. When I play in larger ensembles, or bands that have heavily composed / arranged repertoire, then I do a lot of reading. But when it's a jazz combo playing standards, I don't even bring a music stand.
There are plenty of counterexamples. My kids have both done quite well with traditional training, as have I. They are both at the top level of the local youth orchestra program. They love classical music, especially the modern stuff. One is also exploring fiddling, the other, singing.
But I've talked to parents, and have told them: The classical thing is great, but if it doesn't work, don't force it to the point where it becomes miserable. Try something else. And just like we don't know why some people seem to learn programming more easily than others, we don't know why some musicians can learn to read. It's kind of a strange skill.
Oddly enough, I've also played electric bass live in front of paying audiences, though the double bass has become my main instrument. Every instrument has its own requirements and learning curve, and each of us gravitates to the instrument that works for our temperament and interests, that change over time. I'm grateful for my classical technique and fluent sight-reading ability, because they figure into the instrument and music that I happen to enjoy playing.
In the Suzuki method, which is favored today, they don't focus on theory or sheet music until the kids have already been playing for a while.
She also didn't believe in using mnemonics to memorize notes - that knowledge would just come from repetition. Though she did hit me pretty hard when I messed up so not sure if that's good or bad.
For examples of this effect in language learning, check out the writings of All Japanese All The Time, and for this in fitness, see Crossfit where the group setting and competitive features provide additional motivation and is wildly successful.
Of course, this doesn't ONLY apply to those things. This is also the secret of success for unschooling. As far as I have heard unschooled kids have the effortless joy of learning whatever they want at their own pace end up going much deeper on subjects that are of interest to them, and in the end they end up only 1 grade level behind their peers who went through 12 years of relative suffering.
My hypothesis is that the "old-school approach" works for adults but is directly at-odds with teaching children.
As an adult human being of average IQ, you can keep "proper posture", note names, etc. all in mind quite easily as you learn, such that it then needs relatively little reinforcement and you can quickly get to playing music.
As a child, focusing on one thing makes you instantly revert to your "natural behaviour" in every other respect. You can pose, or put your hands on the right keys, but you don't have enough executive control to keep track of both.
The simple solution: stop trying to teach kids piano; start trying to teach adults piano (and encouraging adults to learn piano.)
From that experience I feel having fun is very important, and so is repetition. But also seemingfully boring practice session in class probably helped setting foundation as well.
Some pain in learning process is not probably unavoidable and could even be beneficial but then it's very hard to keep yourself motivated enough to continue when it's not compulsory.
Even the guy wanting a half decent melody on a midi controller needs to understand to some degree the relations between those notes, both in melodic and harmonic terms. Otherwise the best he can do is hit random notes and hope it sounds good then wondering why it does sound good and being unable to apply that to different situations.
If I never learn how to write, how am I going to produce an essay?
...and then experimenting with short snatches of melody in the attempt to replicate the effect under different conditions, gradually reinventing music theory themselves; and then coming later in life to the study that gives names to the library of intuitions they've built, finally being able to talk about them with people—but happy that they did in fact build the intuition first rather than just carrying around the bulky handles to the concepts without first seeing the use.
Or maybe that's just me.
Its the same for engineering - if you don't read the existing work in the space of the problem you're trying to solve, chances are you'll spend years doing what could've taken weeks.
Heck, I'd go further: for a lot of people, all they really want to do is to be able to "peck" notes out well-enough—and have enough understanding of theory—to compose music in some sort of software.
Personally—and this applies to quite a few people I've talked to, as well—I don't give a one whit about my ability to play live, any more than a novelist cares about being able to improvise stories live. I want to build songs on a canvas, laying down one melodic brush-stroke at a time. It's only what happens when I hit "play" that matters.
I've never ran into any type of music-teaching paradigm that has even vaguely addressed my needs as a student.
Poor hand and back posture can lead to very serious injury, potentially even the loss of mobility. Of all the tedium of learning to play the piano, this is one area you should not skip.
Further, you need to learn note names so you can communicate with others about your music. You need to learn good fingering or you'll never be able to play fast, and your fingers will be tripping over themselves all the time.
All of them asked for their $40 and then asked me to bring in music I liked so I could memorize a few songs without any explanation for what was going on.
Being able to write out passages from your favorite book doesn't either. Even if you can write out Ulysses from memory.
Having a strong knowledge of the rules of language and the structure of story will make you a better author.
How do you explain the booming popularity of the ukulele then?
Sure, they're nothing great but they work for learning to play and screwing around with your friends in the basement or around a campfire (which is probably all you'd be doing with a uke as well if you're a beginner).
The $90 Ukes I'm talking about are brand new.
"Detractors have predicted the death of the electric guitar for years, pointing to the rise of rap and electronic dance music on pop charts.
But Mooney isn't worried. More women are playing guitar these days, he said—something he credits largely to Taylor Swift—and Fender now sees as many women as men playing the acoustic guitar, if not the electric(...)"
This "profound correlation" is suggested in the article itself.
Outside of supplier issues, which are not mentioned in the article, the idea that the music landscape is changing and that is affecting the sales is straightforward. I don't want to discount the work that the grandparent post put into listening to the top 30 songs for a single HN comment, but the idea is more than reasonable, it is a clear choice.
On the grandparent comment, maybe we should look at YouTube or Spotify's lists of the top tracks as well. BB does take in the streaming and digital services for the calculation [0] but the YT tracks may be less skewed to the older set. Radio play is strongly associated with car drivers, an older cohort, while YT can be considered to be less skewed in that direction, though it has it's own problems like everything else.
[0] https://www.customchannels.net/billboard-hot-100-music-chart...
Rock definitely is less popular now in the charts, but its worth mentioning that a lot of guitar-styles tend to get eaten up the whole Indie/DIY scene, which still has prominent guitar-work and rock-based styles. Again, perhaps not as much as the 90s, but the analysis above seems much more damning than it needs to be.
I imagine Fender is unhappy with this anyway as Indie types are very much into buying used and vintage guitars, which means no profit margin for Fender. Fender sold a hypothetical guitar in 1975 and made, say, $25. They see nothing of a recent re-sale that can be thousands of dollars easy, perhaps even tens of thousands in rare cases.
I think if companies like Fender want to survive they need to do what Apple did and make their own stores to sell their own brand and to sell/broker vintage fender guitars and amps.
Learning to play an instrument is hard and like anything else that is hard, you need to put in the work to reap the rewards.
Goal: Get players through first song.
Solution: Package with each guitar a mini songbook written in guitar tablature, not sheet music, containing a small collection of classic, canonical three-chord songs demographically targeted towards age of buyers. It could be a page or two front and back. Something physical they can take out of the packaging in the middle of the floor and start working through right there. Include a link to youtube videos of instructors playing them, but really it's about the piece of paper they can look at right there and go.
How does the article make me feel? Makes me feel super excited to the nth degree! As the article states, it's a pretty big milestone to play your first coherent song, but in most people, they never get there and quit. We have a low entry, high ceiling instrument that gets you playing right away. We are trying to disaggregate almost every part of the guitar, but when you actually play it, you can play the entire song from day 1, check out the video if you haven't!
The problem was stated by an OEM selling traditional guitars, who needed their new customers to learn their first song so they purchase again in the future.
This is a non-scaling, costly solution that does a worse job of tackling the problem. The goal is to sell more Fender Stratocasters, not have your customers buy a non-guitar from somebody else. Maybe a good solution for a different problem, but not for the problem we're addressing here.
I've been playing guitar for over 40 years. I've bought plenty in my day, along with mandolins, a banjo, and a few other instruments. Not a single one included anything but a truss rod wrench. Not a "getting started" guide, nothing. The instrument industry relies upon others to make the new purchase accessible, which will hopefully result in repeat business. And that's just asinine. Nearly 70 years in business and it has never occurred to anyone to include some bootstrapping documentation so that your new customer enjoys their purchase even more? You're hoping the stoner salesperson at the music store fixes them up with suitable material instead of just taking the commission and calling it a day?
Partner with an online lessons company. Put a little pamphlet in there as suggested by parent. "Here's four chords that will get you through a lot of rock songs." Something other than a truss rod wrench and a hardy "good luck".
EDIT: oh, and for fsck's sake, do whatever you need to do to make sure that guitars are properly setup before they ever see a customer's hands. Guitars aren't quite as bad, but I've purchased some used low-end mandolins recently that I gather the owner bought online, meaning it was shipped from China and the original box was not opened until it showed up on someone's doorstep. One of them I would describe as unplayable as it was. Strings were a mile high; I'll bet I cut half the nut down. Another one was better quality and playable as-is, for small values of "playable". An hour or so cutting the nut down, setting the bridge, etc., and it turned out to be a nice little player. But a beginner with no callouses on their fingers wouldn't last long on either of those mandolins as they were sold. It's like trying to do Couch-to-5K with lead weights on your ankles.
Seems almost insane in hindsight, doesn't it?
oh, and for fsck's sake, do whatever you need to do to make sure that guitars are properly setup before they ever see a customer's hands.
Good point. To this end, a link to a free cross-platform guitar tuner app would get a beginner 99% of the way there after unboxing.
Instructions:
Before playing for the first time and learning a song on the included song-sheet, make sure it is properly tuned. Go to freefenderguitartuner.com to download our free guitar tuning app to your phone, or find one you like better in your phone's app store.
(Then app walks you through turning the tuner heads to the proper note).
Off to the races.
In the article: "The industry's challenge—or opportunity—is getting people to commit for life," said Andy Mooney, Fender's chief executive officer. "A pretty big milestone for someone adopting any form of instrument is getting them through the first song."
This is our solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0yyTun_MQs
Statistically when it comes to most things I'm almost always an outlier and I'm unsure as to why that is. Perhaps I'm just a willful person. Ever since I first heard Oasis' Live Forever I wanted to become Liam Gallagher or Noel. Things happened in my life that made it impossible for me to pursue that dream. Then, two years and 11 months ago I thought to myself: hey, nobody is producing radio friendly (pop(ular)) rock'n'roll anymore. I saw it as an opportunity and gave myself three years to write my first song. The fact during these years I never once heard a decent rock'n'roll song on the radio motivated me enourmously to continue practicing. So, six hours a day for almost three years. Practice practice practice. I even called in sick once from my programming gig because I thought I was so near a billboard #1 that, well, I could quit my day job. Well, three years later and I think I am dangerously close to a Swedish top list #1 ;)
Anyways good luck on producing. So agree with practice practice practice.
If I just go by the bands I saw at a local camping/music festival this past summer, probably 85% of them at least featured a guitar and more than half were some variant of the typical guitar/bass guitar/drums/keyboard setup.
Granted a lot of them do weird, unholy, and awesome things with those traditional rock band setups but they're definitely around in the indie world even while the pop world finds studio samples, synths, sequencers, and DAWs to be more efficient at producing guaranteed radio/club hits.
Or coding. How many people pick up a "How to make a video game" book or tutorial and get flabbergasted at all the learning, practice, time, and work you need to do just to get something very basic working?
These are classic motivation and personality/talent problems. The guitar is just as unforgiving as the compiler, unless your goal is to learn a few chords and 'fake' your way through a song, the same way you get can RPG Maker and 'fake' your way into a playable game.
I have an entry-level guitar collecting dust and I think ultimately its because I just don't care a lot about making music, find it tedious, and the work needed to get something that sounds remotely like your favorite artists is difficult. Even if it did come more naturally it still wouldn't be a significant part of my life. The problem is its hard to know this until after you've bought the instrument and had lessons and tried your hand at it, thus all these things collecting dust in basements and pawn shops. I think this is a normal and healthy part of being a curious person. We all laugh at the failed musicians and coders, but at least they tried and some of them tried and succeeded greatly. We can't have an Elvis or Beatles without millions of basements full of dusty guitars. Only the .001% are successful professionally.
At some stage on the guitar your left hand (assuming right-handed player) has to start doing some really unnatural and difficult things for you to be able to play anything interesting. Then there's the fact that notes are found in multiple places on the fret board and certain sets of notes cannot be played effectively unless you switch your left hand to those other "magical" positions.
Then there's the need for precise placement of the left hand fingers as they land on the string/fret in order to avoid making weird noises.
If you are learning classical guitar, there's keeping your fingernails to the right length and shape and constantly having to fiddle with them. If you don't have good nail genetics (my case) you have to resort to nail strengthening magic cures and even such extreme solutions as painting on a couple of layers or epoxy onto your nails to thicken them up and allow you to play without them breaking.
For example, my right hand's thumb fingernail is weak and quickly develops this little notch where it contacts the string. I have been suffering with this since I was a kid. It's a pain in the ass. I've done some crazy things at times to deal with it, like bonding a thin piece of carbon fiber sting to the very edge of my nail.
Being creative and improvisational with the guitar is hard and takes a lot of work and study. You need to get past all of the above and that means at least a year, if not two, of daily (and correct) practice.
Piano is easier. You remove a lot of the instrument and musician "organic" factors the guitar introduces. With proper hand position and fingering progression can be steady. It is a one-to-one relationship between note and key, which makes it magical when compared to the guitar. Chords and arpeggios written for piano are generally within the domain on a single hand. Even if it takes two, it's no big deal.
I truly think that someone can achieve much more satisfying results by practicing piano one-half to one-quarter of the time of someone achieving equivalent results with guitar. And, ultimately, I think this is the reason so many people quit guitar early, it can be very frustrating when compared to the piano.
However, playing johnny ramone style 3 chord punk in a band is, as you know, just not that difficult. So, I think it's not just the inherent complexity of the instrument, but also the context you are trying to make music in.
Whereas with guitar any novice can learn the pentatonic scale and then play on anything on the radio, by just starting playing that scale from a random fret and changing until it's in key with the song. All scales are the same on guitar, just starting from a different fret. You can go really far in composition in guitar without knowing which note you're playing, but just scales and chords positions.
In terms of barrier-to-entry, I'd agree. There's a greater requirement for dexterity in the left hand (assuming traditional layout) to get a good, consistent tone from the instrument, and much more "up front" difficulty in learning.
As experience grows, however, piano opens up a wealth of incredibly challenging literature, for example Bach's Overture in the French Style, Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, and Balakirev's Islamey.
So the "progression curves" of the two instruments, for want of a better phrase, are very different, and certainly look like they favour piano for ease-of-entry.
I always wondered why the guitar is hold in a way so that the left hand is the one that does the complicated movements.
If you think about it, unlike the piano, the guitar, for the most part, requires both hands to play a note.
That the human brain can do this at the speeds seen in experienced guitarists is pretty amazing.
Then there is the high end collector market, who spend the big bucks, and often purchase multiple guitars to stash away. Most guitar companies (such as Fender) try to become the 'be all and end all' across this range. Fender do have a high end custom shop to cater for the more wealthy or boutique market, but at the end of the day, they are spread pretty thin with their Mexican range, USA Standard range, Custom shop range etc.
The biggest problem with the low end market is that kids these days just don't seem to realise the work ethic required to become proficient at guitar. I've played for over 40 years, I have two young sons who play, and I have done some teaching. Lots of kids seem to think that they can be playing at a performance level after only a couple of lessons (perhaps Guitar Hero has something to do with that?), and they quickly become disenchanted and lose interest once they realise the gruelling (boring) practice routine that they have to repeat over and over again in order to build muscle memory etc.
But for a lot of beginners who approach me, I try and model the same thing I do when learning a new programming language, i.e. the best way to learn - REALLY learn - a new language is to actually build something with it. Which is why I find that it is useful to get a kid to tell me his favourite song, and just work out the melody or the riff to the song and build on that, just to keep their interest going and make the inconvenience of the other exercises less of a burden.
The world is also sadly lacking in 'guitar heroes' these days. Not the game, but actual players. Guys like Hendrix, Page and Clapton inspired kids in the 60's and 70's. Van Halen etc. in the 80's, but then the guitar solo ceased to be a central 'thing' in most bands. Modern guitar players like Joe Bonamassa, Guthrie Govan or Julian Lage etc. just don't pull the crowds in like they used to.
That's not just kids and guitar, it's everyone and everything. Most people have a high-level concept of "I would like to be good at X" without actually liking X, they just like the perks that come with being good at it. These people quit after realizing how much effort it's going to be, be it playing an instrument, programming or woodworking.
> the best way to learn - REALLY learn - a new language is to actually build something with it
That's the best way to learn anything, i.e. to like the process of learning, and the best way to like the process of learning is to work on something you like working on. Nobody likes doing scales, even though they're necessary, so you have to intersperse it with something that will keep people practicing.
Were you teaching 30 years ago? I suspect that people didn't have much of a work ethic back then, either - but you weren't teaching them, so you didn't realize it.
I do see a distinct different in the motivation between then and now. Back then, the kids usually had a particular player they wanted to emulate, or an album of songs they wanted to learn. Yes quite a few of them found that they couldn't play like their hero straight away and gave up, but their motivation seemed to be different.
Most kids I see today seem to want to do it because they just think it will be a 'cool' thing to do. Perhaps they think it is an easy way to pick up members of the opposite sex or something? A few of my son's friends see him play (my son is VERY good) and want to be like him, but when they realise how much work it takes (my son plays for 2 to 4 hours per day, every single day), they rapidly lose interest.
I would be pretty certain that has been the case since the the 1960s.
Back then, they had less entertainment to get fixated on. When you only get one magazine per week and maybe a few releases to listen to over and over, it's easy to pick up the guitar and practice for a while.
Nowadays, the entire knowledge of the world and legions of videogames and brain-candy are literally one tap away. It's the same for all activities requiring concentration or long practice, they are being phased out by the immediacy of electronic content. Similar cultural changes happened when people moved from complex poetry (scarce and expensive books, which you would analyze for months and would require extensive education to appreciate) to serialized novels (frequent updates on cheaper media, requiring less formal education to appreciate).
This is missing out the vast midrange of working musicians (or erstwhile working musicians who still play a lot privately).
In the Fender world, collectors might buy old or particularly prestigious models, but your standard MIA Strat is a working guitar that won't necessarily appreciate in value but isn't typically bought by beginners (or collectors, for that matter). Same with many other brands (such as those you'd see played by guitar bands); while Ibanez or Jackson might have a relatively cheap model aimed at beginners, they also make rock-solid working guitars that you see played in your local bar or club, or in studio, or on stadium stages, but not in a collector's vault.
As for the mid range, or 'working musicians guitars', it wouldn't surprise me if these were 'break even' or loss leaders for them. Most working musicians I know have a mid range workhorse guitar they use on bar gigs and open mics, but they also usually tend to have a high end guitar or two that they use for wedding gigs or purely for recording/private playing.
Prestige brands like Gibson, Fender and PRS rely to a significant extent on the "rich dentist" market of collectors, but most other brands don't sell significant quantities of super-premium guitars. Top-shelf guitars are often halo products, used to elevate the prestige of more affordable mid-range guitars. Having a "custom shop" in America or Japan is often treated as a marketing expense rather than a profit center.
Musical toys - things like Guitar Hero. Instant gratification, very limited musical content.
Entry-level instruments - cheap-ish, poor quality, fine for beginners, basically disposable because they're (ironically) difficult to play and don't sound great.
Prosumer instruments - some minor compromises, not particularly affordable, but not so insanely expensive they're out of the reach of anyone who really wants/needs them. This notch covers a range from good enough to rather fine.
High-end professional and collector instruments - no compromise, nicely finished, often insanely overpriced. The good ones can raise production values a notch or two over the prosumer level, but they're utterly wasted on anyone with average talent. The silly ones are just for show and bragging rights.
The MI firms love collectors because they'll drop five figures on instruments they can't really play. And they'll do it over and over.
Meanwhile name professionals tend to get handed prosumer or sometimes collector instruments for free as part of an endorsement deal or even just on the off-chance the item will appear in a photo. (I used to know a film composer before he moved to Hollywood, and he was always getting offered the latest gear for nothing, even before he was that big a name.)
I suspect this is one of the reasons for the cited 90% quit rate. If it's something you're not sure you'll have an aptitude for or even like, you're probably not going to invest much in your first guitar. But the result of that is an instrument that's far more difficult to get to make nice sounds. AFAIK, guitar is the worst for this - other instruments at the entry level might not have great sound, but aren't going to be downright hard to play.
This is why I heartily recommend to anyone trying to learn to pick-up a mid-range guitar used. You get much higher quality and the price is usually comparble to a "cheap" beginner one.
Music on the other hand is where you have to learn syntax of ruby for around 5 yrs and then learn activerecord for 5 yrs before you think you can build a website. This is not true but that how music teachers tell you that it is, perhaps so you can keep coming back for more lessons ?
Anyone in particular for more recent artists (guitarists in particular) who you'd at least tip a hat to?
About heroes, don't you think the whole music industry, culture even has faded ? I don't feel anything like the days of Queen at Wembley, Dire Straits, Police, even festivals seeems to be down to mundane and not as glowing as before (granted 1: I wasn't born for these, 2: generation bias can be at play). From 50s to 70s there was a pioneering vibe there.
About teaching, how do you blend theory after the "play your favorite melody" stage ? not a critical question, just curious.
Today, I find not a lot has changed, except the sites where I used to go to find tablature are now charging for the same material.
I'd like to pay for quality transcription of music (like the official music books) but available online or in an app.
I have been thinking about implementing a github-style website for tabs but it seems that the interest for tab sites is slowly fading away.
Really think it's a dumb move to sue people for putting out tabs, but there you go .
And no, I'm not ashamed to do this; I was one of the lots of guys that submitted gp3 in early 2000's by manually transcribing them; later these community-generated tabs were takend down (DMCA I guess) but I was dumbfounded when I learned that some companies were selling access to the tabs.
But maybe you never found the alternative, which was a program that was basically a midi player that display all chords and notes in timed bars and play the music, with all the instruments split up.
You always knew the quality was good, since you could have the computer play the track to check it out before practising.
I don't remember what program I used back then, but this looks like a spiritual descendant, though I am not recommending anything:
If you're of my age (I'm similar age to Troy Grady, 45), then the free cracking the code videos on YouTube are a good watch anyway - entertaining as well as the story of playing guitar that I largely paralleled (but never found the solution that he did, alas, until now).
songsster.com
It's free, it's like Wikipedia in that anyone can edit it (so crappy transcriptions get replaced eventually by better ones), it even plays the song for you. The only bad thing is that it uses Flash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvVe1iKltAw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gINDDDo3do8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW1s84p17ec
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cimqPFZvo4c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7My5IpEzVM
Huh? I can only imagine that they meant s/acoustic/classical/, because both acoustics and electrics have steel strings (and, of course, steel strings on an acoustic have significantly higher tension than those on an electric). Classicals have nylon strings.
I think it is because I don't have particularly strong nails, so they always broke very close to the flesh, so I'd have to do fingerpicking with my actual fingertips.
Most of the pain on the left hand, in contrast, was related to lack of muscle strength. After a few days of practicing it would be gone.
How much sunlight exposure do you get? My fingernails were also very weak until I started supplementing vitamin D, which made them grow noticeably thicker and stronger. I think a lot of people here spend most of their time indoors so they're at higher risk of vitamin D deficiency.
I would say electric guitar is more comfortable for most people than acoustic, even nylon, as the actions tends to be harder.
Anecdotally I found acoustic guitars to hurt my fingers more than electric - both wired with steel strings. Yet to play with nylon.
But look at any entry level (sub $200) guitar and the biggest problems aren't going to be the type of strings, but rather the height of the action (distance from the strings to the fretboard), uneven frets or warped necks - all of which would even make a pro player curse and struggle.
Which is why whenever a parent or friend approaches me to ask what guitar they should buy their kids, I always say to avoid the really cheap ones and go for the mid range ones, which usually have markedly better build quality. That way also, when little Johnny or Susie decides guitar is not for them, there is better resale value in a mid range guitar.
The situation has improved drastically in recent years. The no-brand department store guitars are still awful, but there are plenty of perfectly playable guitars at the ~$200 mark. Chinese-made guitars used to be unplayable junk, but they're now producing excellent instruments in the $200-$1000 range, matching or even surpassing Korean guitars.
Some brands are far better than others in this respect - I've seen a fair number of unplayable Squiers and Epiphones, but I don't think I've ever seen a genuinely bad Yamaha Pacifica.
Back in the '60s and probably all the way to the '90s. There was a reward for young men to pick up that guitar.
If you played it enough and you got good, you could be a rockstar. And, yes, I suppose you have to start at the bottom, playing in small bands and doing gigs for peanuts but you could work your way to the top and be successful.
I can't imagine that incentive exists anymore for the average kid who doesn't love the idea of playing guitar for the joy of being a musician, but rather, for the promise of fame, money and girls. Especially if they are ugly dudes, like the members of Kiss, or Ted Nugent or all the guys from Metallica, or Tommy Lee etc, etc.
Which means, so what if you learned to play the guitar and you learned it well? How lucrative is it to be a lead guitarist these days? Do you have a good chance of getting a sweet record deal as a guitarists these days? Or will you be relegated to be the in the background, letting all your talent and potential be squandered playing pop song arrangements for Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande? Well either that or you can remain indie, beloved by many people whose financial support barely sustains you and always obscured by the shiny pop talent.
I think the modern version of the rockstar today is the DJ. It's much more rewarding to learn to be a DJ (or a producer for that matter) and whether it be for the fame, the money or the girls.
I'd hazard a guess that most people don't stick with guitar because they don't have anyone to jam with. As a kid, I started playing in bands way before I got serious about practicing music as a discipline, and most musicians I know fall into this category.
I am not trying to undervalue the benefit of practice: in my 20s I practiced 3-6 hours a day pretty much every day. But, that was long after I had been working professionally as a musician and playing in bands.
Granted the 1970s set the bar of what good "guitar tone" sounds like, but no one has even tried to raise the bar as far as making it even better. As a result we still amplifiers that create blocking distortion, and we still have guitars that have intonation problems, and we still have guitars that pick up electrical noise. And why can't I change my amplifier settings from my pedalboard? That's some clever Adruino programming and some digital potentiometers.
None of these are particularly hard problems to solve, but it's frustrating as and engineer and musician to be stuck in another world.
Everything above is an opinion, not a fact, so take as you will.
Another factor: from the 1950s to the early 2000s pop music heroes more often than not could also play guitar. I grew up in the 80s, and learned to play bass starting at age 16 by intently listening to cassettes of The Beatles, Who, Led Zep, U2, REM and the Sex Pistols so I could play with my friends and explore a new dimension of the music I loved. I was never a hotshot player, but did play in lots of cover and original bands through my late teens and 20s and some of my best friends today are people I played with decades ago.
My tween & teen kids have almost no interest in guitar-based pop music, although my daughter's middle school music curriculum included a segment on "90s music" which later prompted her to ask me, "Dad, did you know there was a song about a sweater unraveling?" (man, that made me feel old). They do listen to modern-day pop music, though, and sometimes to pop from previous decades that is not guitar-centric (Michael Jackson, etc.)
On the other hand, the apps and other tools that are now available to everyone--not to mention the ability to connect with like-minded people--can spark different types of musical creativity, collaboration, and insights. I did a double take a few months ago while listening to a radio special about Philip Glass and my son casually remarked that one of his pieces from the late 1960s "sounds like 'My Singing Monsters'." I hope my kids do get interested in creating music and find an opportunity to collaborate, but I accept that it may not involve rock music.
Instruments take space, and some amount of separation from neighbors (and other household members) seems necessary for practicing to be socially acceptable.
How does children's music practice work in tiny apartments with paper-thin walls? Do European parents rent space in communal practice rooms or something?
Odd. Good thought, thanks closeparen.
This should scale to apartments, but in the dog eat dog world of urban living those little windowless rooms are probably be rented out for thousands of dollars per month.
I used to work with a guy who smoked (yeah I'm old, nobody smokes anymore) but the point is if he spent fifteen minutes every hour on smoke break I should be able to take my flute to work and get in a quick practice session maybe twice a day.
Bought so many beginner materials and they're fucking awful. I can't understand jack shit.
The closest I got to sticking to anything were the eMedia programs, at least the acoustic one. I bought the metal one but I'm not sure it works anymore on current Macs and I didn't want to rebuy it.
Bought a piano and the situation is even more dire.
Music is awful for self teaching. Absolutely awful.
https://pianowithjonny.com It's awesome :-) I'm playing passable blues riffs and have taught myself to read music with the help of some free apps (Music Tutor on iOS).
There's also a great series of books by Joseph Alexander for the guitar (fretboard fluency, etc). Definitely worth checking out.
For me, the most important thing has always been motivation. Right now I want to be able to walk into a bar/hotel/train station and bash out "Great Balls of Fire" a la Goose in Top Gun. So damned cool... :-D
Moving on from the beginner-intermediate level, I recommend TrueFire. They offer a huge range of video lessons from expert tutors in most genres. An all-access pass costs $19/mo, which is outrageously good value IMO.
If music was a video game no one would buy it, because the reward curve is so unrewarding.
At some point you have to accept that unless you're in the 0.01% of the population with genius-level talent, you will only ever make slow progress towards a distant goal. Because that's how it is for everyone who isn't a genius.
The people who can play are the ones who started as embryos, and/or are motivated to keep at it. Not everyone has that motivation or that background, and that's fine too.
At age 50, when I took up piano lessons again, it was _so_ much easier. After 30 years of working, staying on-task for a 30-60 minute practice session was a piece of cake.
Also, a good teacher ($), a good instrument ($ to $$$), and a tolerant family all really help.
Thanks for the lead.
I play bass with Rocksmith. I play 2 player with my partner (she plays guitar). Its a lot of fun and you do get better.
As a plus the cable doubles as a generic 1/4 plug to usb interface you can use with a lot of software.
Rocksmith has video tutorials as well.
"Men, Women and Guitars in Romantic England"
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/series/men-women-and-guitars-in-rom...
(I almost didn't find the video - it's at the top of each lecture page, I thought that's a static image.)
The lectures are also available on their Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/GreshamCollege/videos
> ...it has been almost universally forgotten that there was an intense guitar craze in England
> between about 1800 and 1835, spanning the lifetimes of Keats, Byron, Shelley and Coleridge, and a
> craze whose history has never been traced. Histories of English music and society in the
> nineteenth century continue to be written as if it never happened, and yet the instrument was
> cultivated from the royal family in the person of Princess Charlotte (d. 1817) down to the
> poorest laundress.
> This is much more than the story of an instrument and its music: the rise of romanticism, the
> creation of an urban poor hungry for self improvement, the proliferation of newspapers,
> serialised fiction and printed sheet music, the social position of women and other aspects of
> English society and culture in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars all have a place within it.What's hard, though, are things like actually moving to the next step. Are you even practicing correctly, continually pushing yourself to new heights, or are you defaulting to the riffs or melodies that you like to play because they're easier?
The hardest part for me, currently, is trying to learn music theory on my own. I've tried getting into the creative side, writing songs and melodies, but so far, that process isn't very fun at all because of my lack of knowledge in scales, chords, and progressions.
For learning chord progressions, learn all the basic major and minor chords, then experiment with putting them together. There's a lot of joy to be had in that simple exercise, and with practice, you'll start to get an intuitive sense about it. Once that starts to make sense, you can start looking into the more unusual variants on chords.
Also, lessons can be fun, especially early on, because a teacher can point you in a specific direction for practicing that will cause you to grow.
As someone who is currently learning piano and music theory as an adult, I can recommend the youtube channel of Shawn Cheek. This guy has posted something like 3000 videos on various piano and music theory subjects. A good starting point would be his series on the Circle of Fifths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdF-uIeM33o
I find this guy to be an excellent teacher, I like his teaching style, and could listen to his accent all day :)
The electric guitar requires an amplifier, and to use an amplifier in a low volume requires strict discipline. Sometimes I use over-ears headphones which while gives me a more clean sound it does not have the same feeling, and you cannot share the music with other people. It's specially bad when I'm playing with other people.
Apartments/Condos in US have paper-thin walls, they are becoming more common, it creates an extra difficultly to learn to play instruments, specially drums, bass and electric guitars.
I can genuinely say that for about $100 a person can get a PC or Mac sound card that enables 1/4" guitar line-in, probably comes with ProSumer level amp modeling and a DAW license, a set of headphones, and explore a world of tone and recording and jamming along. I also completely agree that doing so is very, very different than filling a room with the din of a jangly tune or distorted growl. Finding a practice space though is as old as I can remember, because between parents, room mates, neighbors...police...people tend to like listening to music but not the practicing part it takes to get good haha.
I have given up on buying new guitars from Fender, Martin, Gibson and the other big names that peddle overpriced kit justified by the name stamped on it alone.
There's no reason their kit needs to be as expensive as it is. Lower end guitars from other brands are fine for beginners. Yeah Fender has $200ish Strat and Tele clones. But you can find those all over CL thanks to the focus of this article.
The days of arena rock are probably long gone. Fender wants to encourage people to take up guitar? Then get off your high horse and cut prices?
It's a piece of Americana most Americans can't even afford. It's their own damn fault.
Instead, I got a knockoff Les Paul style from a Korean company called Agile. It's not quite as nice as the high end Les Pauls but for under $400? Hell yeah and it sounds/plays better than the Epiphones of similar price.
Also got a Squier Jaguar off Craigslist for $150 because I always wanted a Jag...just not enough to shell out for the really nice ones.
Add in a cheap travel electric for campfire jam sessions, an absolutely crap bass that I only have because it was $10 at Goodwill (seriously the strings I bought for it cost more) and the cheap acoustic I bought for $50 as my first guitar in 1992 and I've got more than I really need for the occasional practice or just because I have a song stuck in my head and want to play along with the album for the hell of it.
The classic fender stratocaster is around $400 iirc.
It's a great guitar for the price and that is by no
means a high end guitar or high end fender.
What I'd really like to see is Fender or some other company develop something like a SmartGuitar. I feel like there's a lot of potential to improve the ergonomics, accessibility and functionality if the strings were replaced with a multi-touch input surface with haptic feedback. Maybe the pick could be replaced with an input device that included an accelerometer, pressure sensitivity, and haptic feedback. On the software side the possibilities are endless. The multi-touch input could be 'auto-corrected' to make the fingering of complex chords more forgiving.
Guitar is quite easy to play wrong; you can go a long way without learning proper form. I imagine having somebody show you proper posture, thumb placement, etc. would have helped you out. Nobody that wants to play rock music is going to learn sitting like this, though http://www.learnclassicalguitar.com/images/Playing-Position-...
Barre chords are a large stepping stone for a lot of people, but there are a few techniques to doing them. Why not look at YouTube for guidance here?
It's a contraption that attaches to the neck of the guitar and enables those with clumsy fingers to play chords.
I was fortunate to grow up with parents that played various instruments. Mom played the piano. Dad played the guitar and clarinet. Grandparents played the piano and the pipe organ at church. We kids were encouraged to pick an instrument we liked, and even though we didn't have much money, lessons were always something my parents figured out how to pay for. In return, we were expected to take it seriously, and learn both the instrument and the meaning of a commitment to something difficult. I took piano lessons from age 5 until 12, when they agreed that I could stop piano lessons if I took up another instrument, so I played the violin for 5 years with the public school's music & orchestra program. I quit playing altogether about the time I started driving, because having a car meant having a job, and that took the time I was using to practice.
Fast forward many years, through college, and a decade afterwards. I don't have the room for a real piano; keyboards & digital pianos just aren't the same for me. The violin is something I don't really enjoy any longer, especially without an orchestra to play in, and I do not have the time for such an endeavor.
In college, I fell in love with classical and flamenco guitar. Figuring that another instrument wouldn't be terrible to learn, since I already knew how to read music, I picked up a $200-ish classical guitar, some books of chords, and attempted to teach myself. After that miserable failure, I then attempted to find someone who could teach the style of guitar I wanted to learn, and teach it to someone who wasn't a little kid.
That turned out to be a nearly impossible task, and I think that's a big point of failure. The teaching methods out there have a focus on "kid music" to the exclusion of nearly everything else. On top of that, there is the assumption by most teachers that wanting to play guitar means you want to play rock 'n roll or pop-country. Those that don't assume that fall into the trap of thinking that you want to play in a gospel band. None of them were willing to sit down and teach the fundamentals without pushing me into playing extremely simplified versions of music I hate.
So my guitar sits in its case, in the back of the closet, unused. I gave up. Not because it was too much work. Because no one wants to teach what I want to know.
Plus, there's possibly nothing more irritating than a novice guitarist hacking away on an electric quitar.
Plugged right into the guitar and let you connect headphones for non-obnoxious practice. Even had some overdrive built in (although it sounded like crap). Of course then I just plugged the headphone-out into the aux-in on my boom box and had something approaching an amp. Plus it had a mic-input so I could record one part to tape via the phone-out, then use a walkman or other tape player to play into the mic-in while playing the second part over top and recording out to my amp/boombox.
Fun times with crappy guitar playing :)
(this was the headphone amp in question) https://i.sli.mg/yVbr0J.jpg
Increasingly kids make and listen to electronic music.
Akai, Ableton, Traktor, etc. do not share this problem.
[1] Ibanez SR400, funny enough, I used to love high end brands made by Ibanez designer; smooth like butter in every way
[2] as counterintuitive as it can be, Fender bass are larger, heavier, thicker than others, but you don't feel it while playing. It's not tiring. And you get a pinch of the famous Fender sound, beautiful mediums (even unplugged) and a tiny growl.
Rocksmith got me back into guitar after playing on and off for my teens.
and I bought an american deluxe tele earlier this year. The system works.
> And people quit electric guitars more often than acoustic ones, he said, because of the pain factor: Steel strings hurt delicate hands.
Wat.
Another headwind for Fender et al. is the supply of used guitars, from which guitar makers make exactly 0 USD.
And with due respect to current rock acts, the corpus of rock music is so extensive that originality probably doesn't exist - a situation any fan of classical music knows too well.
That said, I have a few guitars and look forward to buying and selling a few more. I use Rocksmith to learn songs and techniques. The other apps probably work as well or better. Still not a great or even good player, but my playing is better now than when I started.
And suffering no illusions of rock stardom. It's closer to meditation.
As though making music and playing music were the same thing...
I call BS.
As in, local CraigsList "closet clean outs" will perhaps be the new "Pawnshop Find" because the seller doesn't take the time to research the item and a savvy watcher shows up, does the deal in cash, and moves along. Free-market and all. But, people who choose to go to sites like Reddit and ask "Hey found this how much is it worth?" have a much better chance of receiving market value, whatever that may be. Personally I think a lot of used guitars are woefully over priced and I'd enjoy watching the market change a bit more.
So let me counter it by saying "you gotta see this chick".
https://www.youtube.com/user/malabar777
Who plays a competitors product ;-) The Fender article was correct, women play now too...
Maybe guitar stores should start tossing in a free set of good strings with every new purchase. This would keep the complaints down, I think. Long term, a guitarist will keep going back for the good string as well.
But Fender as a brand is facing a few issues.
First, the death of the rock star, so to speak, but more specifically, the death of the 70s rock star. There are so many brands to choose from that are equally as good, if not far superior, to Fender for the price point. Fender is still riding on the Strat and Tele, looks that haven't been updated for many years, and the quality of the pickups haven't kept up with the times, especially on the lower end models.
When you are talking about the low-end, meaning guitars up to $500 or so, Fender doesn't offer much that is convincing. For $500, you can buy an Epiphone SG or Les Paul + Orange practice amp for about that price point. It's hard to argue here considering this is a professional grade setup that one would keep and use for their entire life, really.
People quit playing music because playing music is really hard. Even if you are only going to strum C-G-E all your life, getting good at strumming those chords takes considerable practice and conviction. If you want to play leads well, that's a huge rabbit hole.
I think that every musician I've met is plain and simple, a music junky. This was much easier to spot in the old days, as this person would carry around a binder of CDs and read liner notes on the bus. Today, it is harder to spot, but the dead giveaway is someone who lives and breathes music naturally. This person listens to Lady Gaga with the same zeal as they listen to Led Zepelin. This person is now interested in discovering who inspired their favorite bands and they leap down a crazy rabbit hole and try to figure out why the heck all of the shredders are covering Bach, Beethoven, and Paganini. After all of this, they are excited to show you a brand new song by the Junior Boys they discovered on YouTube. If you don't "get" why this person has a wide and apparently conflicting taste in music, you have a natural musician on your hands and get that music instrument.
I don't know, I may be overstating the spirit of a musician, but honestly, I've never met one who didn't have some surprising influences and tastes, and I never met one who couldn't appreciate a night of eclectic open mics. The point is, to play music, you have to be willing to suffer, which includes chopping your fingers up on guitar strings or putting ice on your crimped next from holding a violin for 3 hours. It takes an innate drive and desire that is inexplicable to those who left their instruments for the dust.
Unfortunately, Fender can't make a musician, but they can still sell guitars to those who want to try it out, and that's not a bad thing.
This is happening because of the death of the 'mom and pop' music stores and the rise of the big chain retailers.
Back when I started playing (>40 years ago) the stores I used to go into used to replace the strings, and setup the guitar for whoever bought it. They even used to offer the first one or two string changes for free (just buy the strings, and they would put it on).
Quite often, they would have a guitar teacher or two working out of a room in the store, so that new buyers could tee up some lessons (or get a free trial lesson). It was a good symbiotic relationship backed up by good old fashioned service.
Unfortunately, the ease of buying good guitars online anonymously has changed the landscape a lot.
I now live in Austin and there is a healthy amount of small shops around town who carry a decent selection* of guitars made by local luthiers along with big brands, plus the strings are half-priced.
*I'm assuming they are decent. I play left-handed, so can't speak of the quality.
This may be a very problematic study, but I think it's good to laugh at because it tends to reinforce the supposition / superstition / myth about the attractiveness of guitarists:
http://www.mensfitness.com/life/entertainment/study-women-mo...
It's a well worn joke that playing to impress non-musicians is a very lucrative career path - playing to impress other musicians leads to poverty more than likely.
Maybe not in other markets - actually I see there are lots of complaints about that - import taxes, etc, making it nearly impossible for passionate players to get even reasonable models for prices less than a cheap beater car. That's a genuine problem I think, but not that players don't have enough colors to choose from. Really? Nah...
Also it's strange to me that real, loud & proud rock & roll is still very American and very present with a group like Black Stone Cherry[1], and yet they seem to do best overseas (England, Europe), not in the US. I've seen them several times live and they bring it - like groove rock, thunderous sync of bass, guitar & guitar and then vocal melodies - but I don't see them having any crossover appeal to pop or country, so they go where the audiences are. As a result, the Chris Robinson signature PRS guitar is actually not slated for US market distribution - only England and Europe. Business decisions like this add up. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFmIlJUYXeo
The flip side though is maybe the guitarist market has been oversaturated - "a dime a dozen" was the joke we tossed around. Guitar does have a steep learning curve, a lot more like the decibel scale in how it's logarithmic in many ways. Reaching 80% proficiency is staggeringly different than 95% from what I've seen. That's part of the fun of the frustration with the guitar - hard to play, takes maintenance, pisses off the neighbors, heavy to carry around, and then you get people assuming you are a party-all-night-sleep-all-day rock star wannabe, which hey, may be true.
The web has been wonderful for guitar. Tabs. Easy access to streaming songs. Excellent teachers like www.JustinGuitar.com who are constantly being discovered by new people searching for ways to improve. It's great!!!
Pretty funny an article about Fender starts off referencing the memorable "Sweet Child O' Mine" which was famously crafted by Slash on a Les Paul. I'd gotten wind when John Mayer left in 2015 that changes at Fender were afoot (he since signed with PRS). Something about a Beats executive joining the board and that having an effect on the company's direction (the can be fact checked, the result is simply speculation however). Not having enough guitar heroes go go around might be a valid issue though...I still miss Dimebag Darrell.