I’ve struggled to be musical all my life–took lessons, took college classes, did ear training, etc.
I think I finally cracked the code, and it’s surprisingly simple:
- Learn to play melodies by ear (starts with singing)
- Learn only enough theory to:
- know your way around your instrument (scales, arpeggios)
- understand chords
- understand song structure
- Experiment (ie have fun!)
The most anal formal exercise I’d recommend is learning to hear relative scale degrees (two very good apps available for that)–though I think that skill would be developed by transcribing (playing by ear), it’s helpful for your confidence level to have graded exercises you can have some success with.
But my experience with most of my music teachers is they fall into one of two traps:
For classical music, it’s:
- Learn how to translate written notes into notes on your instrument.
- Go to 1.
For instance: I was taking clarinet lessons and I remember my teacher saying goodbye to his last student–a kid–and the teacher said, “If you bring me the sheet music for it, we can learn to play it.” And I thought what a missed opportunity that was for that girl to learn to hear and transcribe music–obviously not a skill he thought was important to the teacher at all. And I’d understand now wanting to do that for piano, which is really complicated, but learning to play a melody by ear on a single note instrument is a very achievable goal, especially when you have someone that can tell you what key it’s in and what the first note is.
The trap for jazz music is:
- Learn what are the “right” notes to play.
- Play them in any random order.
I used to blame teachers for just being bad at their jobs, but I think students (and maybe parents/administrators) are also to blame.
I ran across a senior guy who was trying to get back into piano. He’d played for a few years and it was clear he had no idea of how to be musical–no idea of how to construct a simple bass line, no knowledge of how to define a chord. So I said, “Hey, I’ll work with you even though I don’t play piano, I think you need to learn this song and just play the root and the five in the left hand, and sing the melody while you play, and use a metronome.” What an amazing exercise I thought: it would help teach him timing, develop his ear, develop his feel, let him be expressive with his voice, let him embody the melody, lear to work the bass, etc. Aren’t I brilliant teacher?
You know what this guy did? He pulled out his phone to show me some recordings he did of him playing the song the way his music teacher had written it out for him; it was what I expected–just haltingly reading the music with no sense of time. I wasn’t sure, but I think he wanted me to praise him for playing such a complex piece.
For him, and maybe for a lot of students (and certainly for parents and administrators), they don’t actually want to master music, they want to impress people. And maybe for the musically disinclined, haltingly playing a complex written piece is more impressive than a 2-note bassline in time with an expressive voiceline sensitive to dynamic; since most people in charge of music education (parents and school administrators) don’t know music, maybe they would promote a teacher who taught the former and fire a teacher who taught the latter…
For jazz programs, I think they’ve got a lot of theory they’ve got to cram into the kids heads, and we can learn theory a lot faster than we can develop musically, so if you’re going to be judged on “performance” of your students, you’ll be rewarded for having them be able to pass essentially paper exams set to music more than for having them skillfully play pentatonic blues.
I don’t know what the answer is, but for some reason, actually mastering music is very low on the list for both teachers and students.
What’s all y’all’s experience with music and music education?
Hard disagree on your point regarding music theory. Learn as much music theory as possible because that’s the path to understanding what you’re playing and why musical sounds gravitate towards and away from each other the way they do.
If you’ve viewed theory as this abstract, academic set of “rules” designed to force you to play and write only in a certain way, this is just straight up wrong. It is not that and was never intended to be. If you wrote or played something that skirts your current understanding of music theory, and it’s still sounds good, great! Carry on. You may eventually come across a theoretical explanation for it, and if you never do, that’s okay too. It’s probably still out there somewhere.
I spent several decades as a professional musician. I can’t begin to count the number of dunderheads I’ve encountered who’d say, “I don’t want to learn theory. I think it’ll limit me.” Those people are morons. There’s no such thing as knowledge that makes you less knowledgeable. If you’re one of those people, I implore you to stop being one of those people. I’m much more impressed by intellectually honest people who’ll say, “I don’t want to learn theory because I can’t get my head around it, but I still love playing.” Then carry on, brother!
All that being said, music is, at its core, a uniquely human way of expressing the human condition. And we are all allowed to use it in any way we like for whatever reasons we choose, selfish or otherwise. We’re allowed to excel at it. We’re allowed to suck at it. We’re allowed to love that music that everyone else hates. Every musical sound is meaningful. And if a music teacher is failing to make that the core of their instruction, then that music teacher is failing, period.
I absolutely do appreciate theory, but I think the theory should follow the music. That is to say, the musician should have an aural appreciation of what the sound is.
For Jazz, that means being able to transcribe a solo before worrying about the analysis. There’s a huge difference between being able to do a harmonic analysis and actually being able to hear the changes. And I feel like music theory-heavy types assume that learning the theory will teach you the sound, and for a lot of people it doesn’t.
Which feeds into another theory of mine of why music education sucks: the people who thrive under it are actually people who excel DESPITE the education; that is they have good ears and are willing to experiment and learn how the sounds work. That’s much harder to teach and if a student doesn’t “get it”, they’re discouraged and quit.
I’m proposing a musical system that focuses on developing musical SKILLS before developing knowledge. Ultimately you want both, but I see way too many teachers willing to teach knowledge INSTEAD of skills.
I think this is the Suzuki method–kids don’t learn to read until they can play by ear.
but I think the theory should follow the music.
My friend, it does. That’s has always been its purpose. That’s one of the points I’m trying to make. If your teachers never made that clear to you, they owe you an apology. And yes, I’m fully aware that there are musicians who place theory above practice. You don’t have to take them seriously.
I get it - if I’m reading you right you’ve come to the conclusion that ear training isn’t being given the focus it deserves. Which may be your experience but I feel like in the larger musical world aural skills are highly valued. Yeah, I’ve seen many “highly trained” kids who can sight read their ass off but freeze when you take their sheet music away. It’s common. Their teachers failed them. The music education system at large is a very fragmented thing. It’s filled with microcosms created by short-sighted instructors who value X over Y. In the performing world that I lived in, we were all ear people. We had to be. That was the way you survived on our stage. There’s lots of that happening out there. If you think you can devise a system that doesn’t currently exist that hammers that home, I’d be the first person to encourage you to do so.
I went to a party with a paid piano player who could play any sheet music you put in front of him. He played all the notes correctly but it sounded like absolute shit to me. Since then, “You played all the right notes,” is the highest form of insult I can deliver to a musician. I feel like that’s the end goal of a lot of music education.
Your suggestion that I create a competing music education system is kind of hostile and defensive and weird. I’m just a middle-aged guy playing some songs on guitar and wishing he had more time for clarinet. If you’re an educator, I’m glad you’re out there creating musicians and not trained monkeys; we’re on the same side.
But, since I have you here, I’ve been listening to a lot of samba and bossa nova lately and it’s got a lot of stuff I don’t understand. Any good resources for understanding what’s going on with all that random b5 stuff? I think it’s tri-tone substitution mostly, but I’m having trouble absorbing it.
Your suggestion that I create a competing music education system is kind of hostile and defensive and weird.
I probably misread what you were saying up there. No hostility intended.
I’m retired out of music now. I work in the industrial sector and do music on the side. And I’ve learned a lot more about music since escaping academia that I’d never have gotten, and encountered people who have similarly broken away from the formalized, conservatory educational attitudes and grown as performers.
Regarding your question about samba and bossa nova, I’m not very experienced with those styles. You’d likely find instructional videos or articles out there that can explain what’s going on harmonically better than I could. I’m mostly a rock guy lol.
A few years ago I had what I affectionally call my “psychotic break” where I started to realize that society is largely in service to systems that benefit themselves at the expense of individual happiness and diversity.
Music education is just one of many institutions out there squelching the human spirit.
Thanks for the conversation. I’ll keep learning theory alongside music.
Rock on brotha. 🤘🏻
One of my kids started to play the piano at about 13. By the age of 18, he was playing pieces that were Royal Conservatory grade 10 level, and he was accepted into several universities.
He only had one hour of lessons a week during those 4 years of high school, but usually practiced 2 to 3 hours a day, without any pushing on my part. In some of his lessons he wouldn’t even touch the keyboard, they would just analyze a piece of music or discuss the theory behind it.
In university, the professors sometimes told other students to watch him play. His technique, they said, was not great (he himself admits that playing scales early on would have helped), but his feeling was superb.
One of the absurds things I’ve noticed is teaching how to play instruments to people who do not listen to music regularly — and thus did not develop their musical taste yet — and do not know what to play. In my experience, learning an instrument for the sake of knowing how to play it, rather than to play music that you like is not very productive.
So, we end up with what you described: kids who know how to play the Good Stuff™ because their parents wanted to, but hate it.
If you want the absolute music basics, the kids educational program, GCompris, has a bunch of musical related games and activities:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=gcompris+music&ia=images&iax=images
(Under the penguin&gears category, and then click on ‘music’.)
I’ll never forget arguing with my music teachers who said there are “rules” to music. I still refuse to care. There are guidelines. The rest is heart and humanity. A feeling. An emotion.
Music is what you want it to be for you. I like OP’s guide. Learn some basics, lean into what you hear and feel. Experiment. It’s art. If it sounds good to you, if it strikes something you desire to feel, then it’s good.
Sounds a bit like the movie Good Morning Vietnam. where the supervisor is raking Robin William’s character for not following the rules of comedy.
My thing is that the music should follow the lyrics of the song. There’s a beatuiful spanish song about forgetting. I’ve heard a lot of wonderful versions of it, but they all finish normally. Why not, I thought, since it’s about forgetting, just abandon the verse in the middle and drift around a bit out of key and finish on a suspended chord somewhere? Nobody’s going to stop me.
There’s also something I’m seeing in a lot of different walks of lifes. Learning “knowledge” is how a lot of people gain their legitimacy; in order to make themselves more important, they need to make their knowledge more important than it ought to be.
My musical education was based on the most boring theory and boring exercices, and psychological violence.
It took me 30 years to understand that music is about expressing emotions, not masturbating over theory that made no sense to me. Once you are free in your head, you can have fun, because music is supposed to be fun.
The random weedhead that is playing 3 chords on his cheap guitar is a better musician than the 10 years old pianist genius who is bullied or forced to play by his parents.
Every student has his own method to learn, but you must want to learn to achieve anything. Sorry for being bitter or not making any sense.
I feel ya. I never had violence done to me, but I was pushed into theory and complexity before my ear was ready and it was just a constant feeling of not being good enough.
It would be like taking someone through three semesters of calculus before they can do basic arithmetic. Sure, they understand the theory, but all their soltuions will be wrong.
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How would you start to learn?
I think I’d recommend learning how chords work, then the chord wheel, then figuring out the songs you already know how to play. Like when I realized that thing I’ve been hearing in a bunch of songs was the IV-major to IV-minor (playing Fmajor to Fminor to C Major, for instance).
If you want to apply it to your instrument, a very useful exercise was learning scales and arpeggios, but I find it’s best to do it WITHOUT sheet music, figure it out in your head. The arpeggios will teach you where the notes of the chord are.
If you’re super lazy, figure out what the scale degrees are for every string on C A G E D open chords and that will give you a pretty good working knowledge all over the fret board when you can recognize the shapes…
and it goes without saying you’ll need to know the notes you’re playing. Start with the open strings, then where else to find those open string notes (usually on the seventh fret on the next string or the fifth fret on the string above). I find this help you immediately have an anchor between the nut and the 12th fret from which you can get your bearings instead of learning each fret sequentially.
Boy howdy, yeah, I guess it’s a lot to learn, but I’d probably happily trade our knowledge bases because what you know is hard for me to learn and what I know was easy for me to learn.
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One of the most important pillars of learning music is too often overlooked: learning to play stuff you like.
Theory is a useful skill for understanding how to think and talk about music. Training you ears to match pitches (not identify), and identify chords and scales will help you quickly follow what’s happening. Learning to read sheet music is a powerful tool for building and keeping a repertoire. Having fun and being creative is essential to enjoying music.
But we should never forget the basic concept of learning from music itself.
Learning songs/pieces/tunes/progressions from the masters and from the people who inspire us is essential to developing musicianship, feeling, song structure, style, chords, natural melodic phrasing, and so much more. And if you’re someone with an ambition to compose music, can you really expect to compose great music without first learning some other songs? (…Possibly. Sure. And maybe you could develop a totally unique style that way. But it’s not going to be the best path for everyone.)
So, do it all. Learn some theory, jam fearlessly and have fun, learn how to read, write some songs, etc. But didn’t forget to simply learn some songs!!!
Playing what you like is the reason I think there are so many more adult guitarists out there than violin players. Classical music, which dominates formal music education, is trapped in some serious weirdness.
No major disagreements with you, but I will quibble a little bit about what constitutes “ear training.” I think any time someone is listening to what they’re hearing, playing it on their instrument, and thinking about what it means, they are engaging in ear training.
For instance: given the choice between a student who spent 100 hours learning all their intervals in abstraction and the student who spent 100 hours transcribing songs they know and loved, I’d bet good money the second student will be more accomplished.
I’m also kind of torn on reading music. I always struggled with it on guitar (where notes can appear in multiple places), and I find I learn songs easier when I think in terms of chord shapes, and this is a skill I picked up through some rather arduous arepegio practice without sheet music. I feel like a dependence on sheet music robs you of an understanding of chord shapes if you lean on it too much. For instance, with arpeggios, the way I practice is I need to know where in the scale all the arpeggios lie, whereas if I were just reading the notes off a sheet, I could be blissfully unaware of what I’m playing. These Big Book Of Scales with everything written out sort of drive me mad. You should be able to build the scales by ear, and if you can’t, maybe you shouldn’t be practicing different keys yet. When I’m building scales on clariinet, I’m saying, “Ok, so this is where the third is in this key” in addition to knowing the name of the note and how to play it.
(Similar problem with the Big Book of Guitar Chords. Learning where the root 3rd 5th and seventh of just five chord shapes will instantly give you the ability to play major, minor, dominant and major sevents, and flat fives up and down the neck.)
But I think I should give music reading another chance now that I’ve developed my ears some.
To me, ear training is any exercise which improves your listening skills. But also when I studied music in college it meant practicing both identification and sight-singing of intervals, chords, and melodies. However you go about it, it’s about improving your ability to hear what’s happening in a song, I think.
As a guitarist myself, I also think the “geometry” of learning chord and scale shapes is extremely valid and probably the best way to think about things. Our instrument has notes laid out on a grid and we can and should take advantage of that by thinking about things in a way that pianists and horn players can’t!
I found that I was able to get a lot better just by learning multiple shapes on different parts of the need or with roots on different strings. (For example, if you learn e-minor pentatonic on the open string / 12th fret, that is a great too. But if you also learn it on the 9th fret with the root on the A string, now you’ve got a tool that covers the majority of the neck.)
And when it comes to reading… Reading music takes many forms: standard sheet music notation, guitar tabs, lead sheets, MIDI, etc. ALL of these are imperfect and imprecise formats for notating music that gloss over the nuances found in real performances to some degree.
A lot of intermediate classical musicians seem to fall into the trap of thinking that the sheet music IS the music itself (in the case of MIDI it can be, somewhat), instead of being an additional tool for learning and remembering musical ideas. Written music is imperfect.
I need to be sensitive to how other people learn, but also ask that music educators return that same favor to their students. For me, interval identification was total hell and its why I dropped out of music theory class.
The boring thing that I got the most mileage out of was practicing identifying relative pitches, which I think it probably the most applicable to music people play and also what I think most people–more capable than me–are incidentally picking up along the way with intervals. And the reason I was able to do that was I ran into some apps that let me do it in my spare time in ways that were fun and accessible; if I had to go to a computer lab to do it, I doubt I would have put the time in.
But an even more practical exercise is getting a karaoke track and singing chord degrees as it goes along… I really need to spend more time doing that.
Another quirk I have is I’m garbage at visualization. If I could pull up an image of a staff with some notes marked out, I’m sure reading music would be much more meaningful to me. Like if I could picture a key signature and just go up four notes to find the fifth, for instance, that would be great. But my brain just doesn’t have the capacity to do that. The positions and physicality of the guitar are much easier for me to understand (like how the fifth is found on the string directly above or down +2).
On clarinet, I build a model of each key in my head, so I know where everything is, and I know how to flat and sharp every note, so it’s not too hard to handle accidentals.
Even if I was playing piano, I’d still have the same brain, so I’d probably be building patterns, there, too, instead of manipulating mental sheet music, but the benefits of reading on piano are more accessible than for guitar.
One thing I’ve been able to experiment with since improving my ear is single-string playing, which lets me be a lot more expressive with single lines, and maybe what I’d recommend for an ear-first beginner over position playing.
Why is the root of your e minor pentatonic starting on F#? Did you mean seventh fret?
But, yeah, maybe to repeat myself, accumulating frets in sequential order is a painful way to go. Better to have some anchors you can instantly recognize and the the math from there. I think my method is to figure everything out on my own, and then to laboriously figure it out every time on my own, until I finally have it memorized. Then, if I forget, I know how to get there again. The other approach is memorize everything by rote, flash card style, but then if you forget, you’re fucked.
There is more to learn in music than you will have time. This is true even if you start as a kid and become a professional who spends 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year on learning music. As such there is no one “best” method and thinking there is, is the first mistake you can make.
The only thing I can state with confidence is time is important. You will not get good at anything without lots of practice. If you give me something specific you want to do/learn then I can give you a plan to get there (in some cases a good one, in others someone else can do better), but in the end you need to put in the time. If you do the time you will be better than someone who hasn’t in that subject - but that does not make your better or worse than that other person overall, only in that area.
Time I think is the main factor in shitty music education; that is to say, educators ask themselves: what is the most impressive thing I can teach this group of average students to do in the least possible amount of time that will impress their and school administrators the most? I know! I’ll teach them to play a lot of notes on their instrument!
And from that, all the other problems flow…
No, the biggest problem is most of the students won’t practice.
Playing a lot of notes on their instrument would be a massive improvement. Depending on the goals it might even be a good thing to teach.
Maybe even more reason to hook them into music practice that is personally rewarding?
Though I’ve heard ipad kids are quite beyond reach.
That is impossible. Everyone starts with “Twinkle twinkle little star” (or a similarly very easy tune) and that sound horrible. There is no way to make this rewarding, you have to force yourself through it - then the next 4-5 songs. Only after you have done this much can you find practice rewarding - until then you are bad and you know it.
As for iPad kids - while the thing has changed, the complaint has changed, the sentiment has been expressed since prehistory times. Most kids grow up just fine, just like every other generation.
How about teaching kids to sing before you teach them to play an instrument? I think that’s a luxury the system can not afford.
I’m hesitant to be an old men yelling at clouds, but the research is showing that this coming generation is the first to perform more poorly than their parents academically. It also matches with anecdotal evidence from teachers. People are also complaining about programmers graduating from programming schools without knowing how to program because LLMs are doing all the heavy lifting, not to mention how much of music production nowadays doesn’t require any musical knowledge at all–just how to operate software. The window for the dedication required to learn an instrument is getting smaller.
Teaching to sing has the same problem. Other than likely kids have done enough singing before (while learning to talk) that they have got over the worst of it.
Singing doesn’t generalize to any other instrument any more than anything else either. If you want to play piano you have to practice the piano.
That doesn’t match my experience at all.
If I can’t sing it, I can’t play it–or I shouldn’t play it because pushing buttons in the right order is not what music is.
If you can’t match pitch with your voice, you’re going to have a harder time on an instrument.
Singing arpegios and scales against a drone or chords helps me internalized the sounds in a way playing on my instrument never did. You don’t need any musical knowledge to play G B D over a G chord–a monkey can do it. That’s what I used to do in my jazz theory classess–played ii-V-I obsessively on the guitar, but it never helped a damn. I had to sing it to really learn it (and even still, it’s a work in progress).
Edit: Even if someone can sing and play a melody doesn’t necessarily mean they understand how it works on the instrument, because they might know how the songs sounds and also as a collection of abstract finger patterns without ever making the connection between the sound and the instrument.
So, humor me, assuming a beginner can sing Mary Had a Little Lamb, what would happen if you taught them: a) a scale b) the first note of the melody on that scale
Homework: c) figure out the rest of the melody on your own?
I think the situation is less dire for popular music, all the bass teachers I’ve had had me doing rhythm exercises and practice playing by ear etc.; and that’s in genres were a pretty high percentage of students are going to end up playing in some kind of group, so they’re very likely to just learn/practice to be musical by doing (with varying success).
I think a big issue for most genres and instruments is that students don’t get interested in learning an instrument because of simple stuff, but because they listened to some awesome, exciting music that prominently features their instrument. That leads to a general tendency to try and learn complicated, difficult to play pieces before they’re ready, and teachers often encourage this behavior.
Guilty! I remember my first and only week with bass… thought I’d teach myself Long Distance Runaround.
Pop is pretty decent in that you can make modifications to it to simplify it and as long as you have a nice melody going and the chords more or less match, it works well enough.
Ive never been interested in music really but I went to a grade school with a music teacher that worked hard on the chorus and used solfage. I have a hard time matching a piano note but if I have a human in my section who is always on note I can match them and learn the song from them. I have some ability to match the piano its not totally gone and that with solfage will get me by but will take longer. I enjoy being in a chorus, choir, etc but often times its at a school and the professors want you to do more music which is kinda annoying. Im like look. I like doing it but im just not a musician. Im an instrument and you can have me be part or not.
Matching notes is a pretty important skill; it’s great that you can match a human voice. It’s just practice learning how the piano sounds. If you want to practice pitch matching, grab a keyboard app and go to town; there’s usually a bunch of other sound options so you can learn to match other instruments, too.
Solfege with muovable Do is THE BOMB of ear training, I think, because it teaches you that Ti always sounds like Ti in whatever key you’re in. (Which is partially why I think learning multiple keys on an instrument too soon is destructive).
There’s two great apps for that I can recommend: Functional Ear Trainer and/or Sonofield. I think you’d like Sonofeld better because it has more of a vocal sound, is more pared down, has better gamification and a better UI. Both at least available for Android. I’m not sure if Sonofeld solfege yet–it was just doing numbers last I checked in, but it’s simple enough to translate scale degreees to solfege (Do is 1 Mi is 3 Sol is 5, etc, sharps and flats are later down the line)
Just a few minutes a day and you’ll be able to recognize some ptiches in a few weeks (applying it to live music takes quite a bit longer).
yeah and I get advice like this but I really just am stuck in my ways musically. I love working with a good conductor who uses solfege and the related hand movements (basically really up down, softer, louder) in a chorus. Its great if you have someone who is awsome and acts an anchor (the person who is always on the right pitch and you know if you are on a different one you are wrong and need to adjust.). thats basically the limit of what I am motivated to do musically. Honestly Im not sure if I will ever have the time to be in a proper chorus but you never know. Often times its just opportunity. location and time working with whatever your doing in life atm.
One of my struggles is how my expectations are different than other peoples.
When I was in chorus I hated being in the position you’re in–needing to depend on others to know what the note was. It made me feel really insecure and awful and its why I’m not in a choir anymore.
I also find little games with achievable goals fun, so if I can play a game in my spare toilet moments that will improve me musically, I’m happy to do it.
