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:

  1. Learn to play melodies by ear (starts with singing)
  2. Learn only enough theory to:
  • know your way around your instrument (scales, arpeggios)
  • understand chords
  • understand song structure
  1. 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:

  1. Learn how to translate written notes into notes on your instrument.
  2. 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:

  1. Learn what are the “right” notes to play.
  2. 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?

  • cloudskipper@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    17 hours ago

    It’s getting a bit more popular these days, some of them have them built in, on synthesizers you have an oscillator pitch or frequency control that you can set from 0 Hz to 20 kHz sometimes, so you can set that up however. I have a Squarp Pyramid that has some microtonal scales built in, so I can play them on my MIDI keyboard and it uses that scale for the MIDI instrument I have selected.

    I got into it through ambient music. People like Brian Eno, Steve Roach, Vidna Obmana, Steve Hillage, Richard James, Taylor Dupree, lots of IDM too.

    Yeah that’s what I’m saying, would be good to have a place, but then I guess before you have that you have to have a culture that respects and would keep that place clean for everyone else. That’s really sad to hear I hope things get better than normal soon.

    • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2·
      17 hours ago

      How about a pedal for pitch changes? I remember those wheels from the 80’s and always found them super cheesy.

      I often had Music for Airports on a loop, but its never effected me musically… maybe I should listen more carefully.

      Third spaces (restaurants, plazas, etc.) are famously and quite rapidly disappearing. Everyone stays at home until they work then they go back home again. Covid accelerated it, but a lot of our ability to entertain ourselves with devices is driving this isolation… Then you decide you do finally go out and meet people to find there’s nobody left to meet, so you go back home and pop in a DVD.

      • cloudskipper@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        16 hours ago

        Oh yep, I have several Eventide harmonizer pedals, notably Pitch Factor for that kind of thing. Before I had an Alexander Marshmallow which is a real fun pitch shifter, a Meris Hedra and Red Panda Particle (granular) but I had to sell a bunch of stuff recently so I cut down on my pedals a lot.

        Well, that’s a good album, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it the best ambient album or anything, it’s just the “first” or whatever. There’s a vast spectrum of ambient music from light to dark to quiet to walls of noise.

        I agree with you on the last part, and I’m just as guilty about it so I can’t say a word, I just let it happen because I really thought everyone being online and talking would lead to a new universal understanding and world peace. Well, not quite that, but something near it at least. I suppose I’ve always had high expectations perhaps.

        • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.worksOP
          2·
          16 hours ago

          Do you ever explore traditional microtonal music? I think India’s pretty famous for its 24 note octave or some shit.

          I used to listen to an NPR show called Music from the Hearts of Space. I loved it. But because I only play traditional instruments, I guess there’s not much room in my head for saying, “I wonder if I could play that.”

          There’s definitely a movement building. People are becoming more and more aware of the individual costs of social isolation. You can start with Bowling Alone, a pre-internet-era book about how society was getting more and more isolated… but I think the social tolerance of the captialist ordering of society is rapidly coming to and end.

          • cloudskipper@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1·
            14 hours ago

            Yes :) I listen to a lot of goa trance which uses a lot of those scales, also a lot of psychedelic trance, psy dub, has a lot of different influences and uses a lot of those different scales. I think a lot of them are using loops and stuff because I don’t think the majority of them have sarod, sitar and tambura players in their studios lol. Those instruments are also quite expensive. I would love to sit down with a sitar or a gayageum which is a Korean type of zither, there’s lots of cool youtube videos of people playing cover songs on them haha.

            Oh that’s a lovely show, I never got to listen to it live really but I have a bunch of recordings. There are all sorts of MIDI controllers nowadays, like wind controllers, that take your breath and finger positions and turn it into MIDI notes and velocity. Many other cool gesture controllers too. So chances are if you know an instrument there is a MIDI controller that can covert it to something a synthesizer can understand if it were to interest you.

            I hope so, I’m ready at least, I dunno about you but I was an early adopter to all this junk so maybe it will just take some time for others to catch up. Thanks, I will check out the book it sounds familiar and interesting.

            • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.worksOP
              2·
              13 hours ago

              I got a Roland EWI–it was actually my breakthrough instrument. Since my ear was good enough to figure out the root of the song (thanks to some work with some apps), I just transposed that EWI to the song and started transcribing away… I really recommend it because you can play literally any song you know and your knowledge of relative pitch is reinforced because it always has the same position (and I’m gonna go ahead and drag traditional music education for shoving students into learning multiple keys before the ear’s developed (like, seriously, fuck recorders; they sound like shit and the only reason people use them is because it can play all 12 notes; you’re much better off handing out penny whistles which lock people into a 7-tone scale in one or two keys until they have a stable sense of relative pitch, then give them a real instrument to learn).

              If you’re in the mood, you can turn any guitar into a microtonal instrument. Just remove the frets, fill the gaps, and make some adjustable frets with loops of wire. I think that’s how the original lutes were. Or just go entirely fretless–I think that’s how the Turkish Oud works. Or play slide, which doesn’t require any modification other than maybe raising the strings.

              There’s also any of the bowed string instruments… but that’s getting into territory where you’d have to learn a lot of technique, which might not be your bag.

              Keep your eye out on Facebook Marketplace. Lots of weird stuff turns up there. ]