Comment by jeremiep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeremiep | Hacker News Reader

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I strongly disagree. What you're suggesting leads to really mediocre practice and that in the long run will get people to give up because they've reached a plateau they set upon themselves without realizing it.

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.

I had two of the world's worst piano teachers as a young kid. Everything was exactly the boring nonsense in the parent comment. There was honestly more focus on posture than on actually making sound come out of the piano.

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.

That pretty much sums up what I said earlier: your teachers know and understand things you're years away from grasping.

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.

But see, that's the point I'm trying to make. Having the benefit of hindsight as someone who actually went on to recording records and regularly playing live in front of paying audiences, my teachers were focused on ENTIRELY the wrong things.

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.

Theres probably a better way to go through it, but at some point you HAVE to learn the language. Theory and reading sheet music are incredibly important (more so than most people realize) especially if you'd like to have a large musical repertoire.

> 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'm a fluent sight reader, and it does figure into the kind of work that I get hired for, even as a part time musician without a music degree.

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.

It could very well be that different kids respond to different ways of teaching. Also, I think that a really good teacher adapts to the temperament of each kid, and some teachers are just not suited to teach the youngest kids.

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.

I suspect there's probably a balance - my Russian trained piano teacher was tough, but also threw a lot of music in front of me. We played easy songs in the beginning eventually building in complexity and a lot of variety with theory mixed in. There was never a strong focus on posture or anything like that.

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.

Music, language learning and fitness all fall into this category of things that are difficult because they require so much regular investment, are optional in every day life, but anyone could in theory do them. For things like this, the number one factor any teacher or system should be optimizing for is motivation. No matter how important every other goal is, if you don't optimize for motivation people will just never learn. If you can't make it fun, don't even bother trying to teach most people, because only those with a burning passion will make it across that hump where it begins to have a real impact.

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.

> The problem was, the way kids are taught, the same way I was, seems designed to make it as repellent as humanly possible.

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.)

This reminds me of my elementary school years. This was in school in Japan I had to learn recorder. I sucked at it for first three years or so, felt that classroom instruction took me nowhere getting good at it. There was a student who was good at piano routinely played after the class was over. For some reason, five others, including myself joined and started playing their recorder to that music, every time after the music class. In couple of months, I was one of the best recorder players in the class.

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.

The people you are talking about giving up when they plateau are likely the same people that would have given up when forced to learn the grammar. The net result is a similar number of people at the higher level but the people at the beginner level have more ability to generate music.

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!

One doesn't prevent the other! I was lucky that my music teachers found it important for us to both learn theory every week, but also a complete song matching our skills level.

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.

I think you're mistaking technical virtuosity and hand-eye coordination for musical talent. There's nothing wrong with being an accomplished concert pianist, but most people learning probably just want to be able to play a half-decent melody on a midi controller and lay a sick beat on it. And if you're going to say that that's not worthy, you're getting into the comparative judging of genres, which is just silly.

I didn't talk about virtuosity and talent, I talked about learning. What you learn is completely independent of musical genres, technical difficulty or even talent. Its the foundation which allows you to reason about these things and build all your knowledge and experiences upon.

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?

> Otherwise the best he can do is hit random notes and hope it sounds good then wondering why it does sound good

...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.

I find that theory helps you reach intuition much, much faster for whats already out there, and then you're equipped to reach out into truly new areas.

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.

> most people learning probably just want to be able to play a half-decent melody on a midi controller and lay a sick beat on it

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.

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