- > who could “do music”... were born, I felt, gifted in a way that I was not
Maybe it's true for some people but I generally think it isn't. The secret to being able to play an instrument is studying or practicing a little every day for 20 years. Some people get there faster but unless you have mobility issues, most people can learn enough of an instrument to have fun.
- Its a spectrum. Mozart was a prodigy at 6. Most people are average, and almost everyone who is good practiced for years, but the people who are really good no doubt had some natural gift.
- I don't know about that with music. Outside of absolute prodigies, my experience with instruments is that the more you practice the better you get. It's not like sports where practice can only take you so far before genetics absolutely rules the field. So it strikes me that most people can be really really good, but only if they put the hours in.
You really can work your way into being a musical genius with an instrument. It just takes a lot of work. I actually like playing instruments for that reason. It's one of the few things where hard work has actual, measurable outcomes on time scales that you can observe.
- It really depends on the person. I've been involved with music in some capacity basically my entire life. I can do pitch but I have never been able to maintain a tempo to save my life (to an almost morbid degree).
I could practice technical skill on an instrument to literally no end but ultimately anything I did outside of a several second stretch by myself was completely disoriented due to a total and complete inability to maintain a tempo even when it's provided to me.
So for me there is just a hard ceiling on my ability to ever perform. I could probably do better with digital music production if I invested the time and energy into it but I'll always have the handicap that I have and knowing that it's hard to even want to invest the time and energy into trying yet another path into music where I'll likely fall flat on my face again.
- Until my late 20s, I was bad with both pitch and rhythm despite playing guitar for over a dozen years. Then I took singing lessons with a professional opera singer for 9 months, one hour a week.
She stressed how important it was to record myself and listen back, in fact she encouraged me to do it for hours at a time. The immediate reaction the first few days of trying this was "holy crap, not only am I pitchy and can't hear it naturally, I'm constantly slowing down and speeding up like +/- 10bpm."
The experience was so distressing that I tried to quit my next lesson, but she pushed back with "Hey if you can hear it, you can fix it. It won't be tomorrow, or next week, or even next month. It could take a year. Improvement happens little by little. And I guarantee you'll see progress as it happens. But you have to put in the work."
After a few weeks of working up to it, I settled into a pattern of spending ~3-5 hours most weeknights in the darkness of my closet, recording myself playing Beatles songs along with an acoustic guitar into a 4-track. Usually just going back and forth over 4-8 bars of a song for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes another section, really just focusing on a couple songs like that. Toward the end of the session I'd attempt several full run throughs, get super frustrated (over increasingly minor issues), and end the session.
And she was right, by about the third month I was comfortable enough to perform in front of the person I was seeing, and by month five, I could get through a song with barely any mistakes, maybe one out of three chances. By the ninth month, after a 15 minute warmup, I could get through a 3 song stretch with just minor errors, enough not to totally embarrass myself at an open mic night.
At that point I felt I hit my goal and took a break from lessons. Never did an open mic night. Continued practicing a bit in my closest, but after a month or two I stopped as well.
And here 20 years later, my rhythm actually is pretty solid... I've been a consistent bedroom guitarist, and routinely record myself, and sometimes I don't bother with a metronome because it sounds that consistent. That said, I stopped singing and that ability is completely gone. But I am starting a similar process learning classical guitar.
So I go back to that original bit of advice with just about anything I try to tackle now... if you're self-aware of your issues, and can actually critically hear them in a recording, then there is a path forward.
- As someone with a BM in piano performance - I’m of the strong opinion that there’s a natural baseline and ceiling. Practice can only get you so far.
- One of my high school piano friends went on to become a concert pianist. The difference between him and the rest of us was that music was everything for him - its what he did to relax, his social life, his hobby, his work, and his passion. There were, like, some months where music felt almost like that for me but for him it always did. I think there's no mysterious talent you have to have, just a psychological problem. if you get genuine fulfillment in all areas of life just by thinking about and doing music all the time, the ceiling is much higher.
- Of course. I agree with you. You will only make it in that field if there’s literally nothing else you can imagine doing.
But there’s still a starting point and ceiling in intrinsic ability.
I’m curious why you think there’s no difference in inherent abilities? Some people are more “naturally” skilled at some things than others, at a baseline. You can look to see examples of this everywhere.
That doesn’t negate the dedication/sweat/tears of people who have high skill, but many of those people also started several miles ahead.
- 100% it's baseline, ceiling, and growth rate.
I switched from violin to voice and found more success with less effort.
- You will not match a symphony professional's talent if you start playing at 30. Even if you work hard. Even if you really want it. You don't have the time.
Work is great, but hard work doesn't yield the same reward to everyone on every instrument. Geniuses did hard work, but they often needed less at every step along the way. That means they advanced faster with the same effort. But that's okay! Learning an instrument for music's sake is a joy.
Anybody can learn an instrument well enough to enjoy it. They can probably learn it well enough to play in a community orchestra. They can learn it well enough to appreciate what the pros do.
- It's also extremely nonlinear. I look back on my years of studying piano and the first 7 or so as a kid were basically screwing around compared to the next two, when there was this huge breakthrough. Then another couple years at that level until another huge breakthrough. It's funny, the first one was a breakthrough that came from a great teacher and was sort of a realization that music was way much more deep and interesting than I ever imagined. The second one was barely musical at all, it was just finding a super vibrant music community. If not for some random luck, mindshifts and social experiences like that, I would've quit a fraction of the way in.
- People are born with different levels of aptitude, motor skill, and learning rate. Some people also work very hard at their studies. For the people who reach the top levels in instrumental performance, you find invariably that they were both born with a high aptitude and spent a great amount of time and energy to get there.
- it's common with the arts in general. People often attribute to being gifted what are entirely learnable, physical skills. Singing in particular, it's astonishing how quickly you can teach someone to sing well even if they think they sound like a cat in a blender. Unless you have actual damage to your hearing or vocal chords, 99% of the people who think they're tone deaf just haven't learned to listen.
It's a great pedagogical experience just to show people how much of a difference deliberate practice makes.
- It's especially gratifying (in my experience) to sing in a choir. I've been in the same chamber vocal group[1] for almost 20 years, and it has enriched my life in so many ways. I count the other members of the group as some of my closest friends.
Many areas have ensembles with a range of experience levels and commitment requirements. Now is a great time to look up local ensembles and see when they hold auditions (most of them are probably within the next few months).
- i've sung since discovering choir and acapella at age 16. gave it up right after college. never thought i'd return to it again.
discovery this year is despite being almost 40 and obviously busy/an engineer/founder who will never make it professionally, you CAN still find outlets to indulge in the creative side and perform for others! https://x.com/swyx/status/2043217991589102027
its scary but it stretches you in new ways and yeah, it keeps you young and optimistic that you can do things you've never done!
- It's interesting how many people I know who jump instantly from hobby to thinking about hustling, Etsy, Patreon, fame, etc. and the thought that they'll never be good enough to go pro is a real barrier. You don't need to monetize your joy.
- err ok but i wasnt saying to monetize (not that you were saying it)
- I have been annoyed for some time that there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in society by which people who cannot sing are taught en masse how to sing. We spend so much time in school music classes "singing" with no actual instructions as to how to do it correctly.
I genuinely wonder how some people are able to sing properly while others cannot. Those who can sing, where did they learn it at?
- Church is how most people learn to sing in a group setting
- Great post, and I instantly recognised the lyric; love Enya <3
- Are you talking about "How can I keep from singing"? I mean, I guess Enya has a version but it's also just a pretty standard church hymn.
- I'd not heard the Enya rendition of that hymn before I followed the link from TFA and I honestly don't care for that rendition at all.
- For me the question often is, how can I keep from singing badly on recordings? I've had enough vocal lessons to know that I'm not a naturally great singer. I have poor tone, even worse control, and my vibrato sounds ... bad.
Time adjustments: I use Logic's "flex time" for this. Having your vocals land crisply on the beats you're aiming for really improves the sound of things musically. It also helps in the next step.
Comping: Comping is where you create a good composite track out of a bunch of mediocre ones. Swipe-to-comp in Logic is pretty great, the way it does auto fades between comp sections to avoid zero-line crossing clicks and pops really helps.
Tuning: I use flex in Logic. I try not to overdo it, you can easily introduce bad-sounding tuning artifacts if you're not careful. I have to force myself to not attempt to tune every note, just the really wrong ones. It helps to map out the notes of the melody that's in your head on another instrument.
Double up: Once you have a bunch of unique tuned comps that are mostly time aligned to each other, you can thicken the sound a lot by layering them. Choruses need big vocals right? You can use your extra tuned and tightened tracks to double (or triple, quadruple) up your vocals and pan them left/right to make them sound bigger and better. Because they're unique tracks and not copies this will sound wide, and because you left in some minor timing slop, it will sound tight, but not robotic. You can also use doubles in non-chorus parts to emphasize certain words or phrases.
Harmony: Harmony tracks can really sweeten and thicken a vocal. It'll definitely help to learn some music theory to understand the right notes for your harmony parts, but you can also just do it by ear. I take a one of my comps, and push the notes around with tuning software so it becomes a harmony against the lead vocal. Sometimes these extreme tuned artificial harmonies can sound robotic, but if you blend them in subtly and/or play with the formants they can work well. If not, you can use them as a guide track to re-record organic parts, but that's more work. Use harmony parts the same way you might use doubles.
Even if you can't sing well, you can still make pretty good vocal music these days using technology.
