"You're gonna understand when you grow up" they said.
NOPE
Then we moved across the country and they said "Ok, you can quit piano."
In my new town I struck up a conversation on the school bus with two kids, one played bass and the other played drums. Said they would get together in the drummer's basement and "jam". "What's this 'jamming' you speak of?" I asked.
They invited me over and we played the one jazz-ish/blues tune I knew. I was hooked. Ran home and begged my parents to let me start lessons again, but this time rock/jazz. Since then I picked up guitar, bass, drums, a little alto sax, and continued studying piano. 40+ years later playing/making music is a huge part of my personal life.
I feel incredibly lucky that my folks didn't let me quit and that I met those two friends.
If he didn't play the first 6years, he won't be able to enjoy "jamming" with friends
"If he didn't play the first 6years, he won't be able to enjoy "jamming" with friends"
Have you ever learned something with passion vs were forced to?
When kids want to learn something, they are really, really fast at it, meaning he could have started learning at that moment. And you can do simple jamming, without a proper musical education.
It took me a good decade after high school to find love in topics like geography, biology, history, some parts of physics etc. which were forced down my throat to frankly insane needless levels at school.
A lot of child's momentum is lost because a) teaching well consistently is hard and I see little effort to ie utilize modern psychology for improvement ; b) every kid is unique in many ways, differently developed at early years ; c) being a teacher is seriously underpaid and underappreciated so best leave or don't even start career in it ; d) traditional teaching topics go way too deep and focus more on encyclopaedical knowledge which is sort of obsolete in 2023 ; e) don't focus on properly useful stuff in ie high school like communication, team work, some basic psychology to grok people around you, understanding personal finances and taxation and probably many more reasons.
When my kids were taking music lessons the teacher would sometimes try to talk to me after the lesson and tell me what they did and wanted to discuss with me what to teach next and my reply was always the same - why are you having this conversation with me? It’s my kid that you have to keep engaged. I’ll keep paying for lessons as long as my kid wants to play. Discuss this with my kid.
I would love to have my parents Force that on me.
Now I'm here, would like to learn and play music but I don't have much time and music feels like a steep mountain to even start.
The guitar is in the basement.
IMO, it's good to push your technical skills, but it's pointless if there's no internal reward. I happened to like classical music as a child, so I was frustrated when my first music school focussed on very simple arrangements of middle-of-the-road music. Switching to someone who taught (simple) Bach was much more rewarding, validating even. My parents did let me play whatever I felt like, though. I played my exercises, but also played popular music by ear (mainly for them, BTW).
So talent is one factor, which can be partially overcome by technical exercises, but interest in the music itself is what kept me playing.
To be fair, additional exposure may not have helped! I played several instruments as a kid / young adult, almost all of it classical or adjacent (old European music). My parents took us to the symphony. It just isn't what I like to listen to and wasn't motivating enough to keep my interested as a teen.
After fifteen years without making music at all, I've started picking up instruments again in the last two years. I've been playing (some) classical music, not because I like it, but because there's a lot of it for the instruments I've chosen and it's fun to play.
Then one day, my cousin bought me a discography CD pack of Rush CDs. I heard Fly By Night and I knew I HAD to learn to play it. That resulted in about a five year streak of obsessive Rush disorder. I was again, hooked. Now on more advanced music. I wanted to learn all the songs. I even formed a little tribute band with a few other people.
Now, I have a classical guitar sitting next to the couch and I sometimes come and sit and just noodle around. Just enjoy the sounds, the feel of the strings against my fingers, the satisfaction of discovering an assembly of notes to play that sound special.
It's been about 15 years now. Not once did I think I needed to learn something on the guitar because somebody told me I had to. I always learned something in pursuit of learning the next song.
I started classical music lessons very early as a kid. I was one of those weird kids that ended up liking classical music anyways, but I also had a deep love for movie soundtracks. My parents encouraged me to play anything I liked. Which I did -- movie soundtracks. They'd go around bragging to other parents how their little kid learned these soundtracks by ear too.
I still play to this day, and have branched out into many different genres. Them being supportive for the idea that this is an expression of myself, and praising my efforts, really cemented playing musical instruments as a core part of my identity.
Not a parent yet, but I hope I can pass along this chain of positivity to my own in the future.
Nope! Class time rolled around and it was forty five minutes of posture posture posture and finger movements. Mrs. Bell didn’t care about the interesting music I had created, she just wanted me to tick off silly boxes and follow “the plan”.
I’ve barely touched a piano since.
The technique is important, but it's often for nothing if it's not in support of a distinct musical voice.
I've switched to guitar on my own initiative, started jamming, playing in bands, composing my own music with friends - and it was such fun.
Never touched piano since then.
Reading through other comments here makes me think that as humans we suck at teaching music to children.
I did pick up an old classical guitar at a girlfriend's house and started on Simon and Garfunkel and Beatles, and have been playing guitar (and bass, mandolin, slide guitar and lap steel) for the past 45 years, so the music was there!
Having brought up 3 kids, it is sometimes hard to know when to encourage them to push through on something and when to let it die.
That environment was horribly discouraging and, in retrospect, weirdly competitive. I dropped the piano for 5 years almost completely. Still, like a lot of my friends from that program, I came back to piano as a hobby, and I really appreciate the education I got.
I also think it made me a better person in a lot of ways.
Same net result as yourself, none of us continued with our music studies once we were old enough to make our own decisions. In fact, a lot of the social climbing associated with how it all started is something we've rebelled against the most.
Later on when I discovered rock and metal music I asked my parents for an electric guitar but they refused, saying I had to play the acoustic I had first and then I could ‘progress’ to electric. I was easily discouraged then so I gave up the idea.
I didnt end up getting an electric guitar and starting to play music seriously until after university when I had a job and could afford it easily myself. Now I play almost every day, learning new things, writing my own little pieces, and jamming with friends. Music is now one of the most fulfilling things in my life, and I believe one of my biggest regrets will be waiting so long to get started after I knew what I wanted!
Spring on a name brand second hand electric guitar for your kids you won't regret it. Electric guitars are basically inpossible to damage, and a second hand guitar will retain its value so you'll get those $500-800 bucks back when it turns out your kid wants to do something else. Higher quality guitars have lower action and more comfortable necks which makes them easier to play rewarding your kids more for their efforts.
The fret board isn't the same width.
The notes are in the same places, but that's about it for similarity.
Not when I'm playing Green Day covers on it, it's not.
Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMoHRidtQcw
(You're confusing the instrument with the music it's most commonly used to play)
Sure, you can play more or less the same things on both instruments, and anybody who plays electrical will be able to do something on an acoustic guitar and vice versa. But anybody who plays acoustic guitar will also be able to do something on a lute, a mandolin or heck even on a double bass. You will also be able to use your guitar to sound like an organ, a flute, or a synthesizer, with sufficient effect pedals.
For me what makes an instrument is the music it lends itself easily. Give a five year old who never played before an acoustic guitar with fresh strings and an electric guitar plugged into an amp and they will do completely different things with it, because the instruments lend itself to different things. Ironically an electric guitar can be much more direct, because you will hear every slight tiny movement of your fingers amplified. An acoustic guitar (with fresh strings) can be extremely articulate, but you have to put in more energy to produce these sounds.
I certainly see the amplifier as part of the instrument with the electrical guitar, and that alone makes a ton of difference between the two.
Electric and acoustic have a big overlap. Acoustic and classical have a big overlap. Electric and classical have only a tiny overlap.
Piano is a great instrument. Learning to play at a good level (I'm talking 9 years of practice, exams that test you on music notation, timing, ear etc transfers to other instruments. However it's extremely lonely, and therefore boring, to practicing some bullshit polka that nobody wants to hear. I went to lessons for 9 years, sat 7 grade exams, and quit as soon as I left home. Lessons never taught me to jam, fill in, improvise.
Looking at the Beatles documentary "Get Back", they were just kids with instruments who got to jam full-time. There are plenty of instrumentalists that absolutely kick their asses. What made them special was that they weren't afraid to pay what they wanted to play, and to experiment, together. (They also drove themselves to produce something important to a deadline)
But in this case, to be forced to play only one kind of thing and then not be allowed to try something you want seems really hard. I'm sorry you had to go through that. Thanks for sharing.
Quick story about this comment resonating (pun intended) with me: My son is quietly coming and pulling out my electric guitar from my office room these days and strumming it randomly (just open strings). I haven't said anything except to be careful after he tried to walk it sideways through a door (screams internally in pain). He's watched me practice scales and the wanted to know how to play individual notes so I showed him and left it. A few days later I heard a tiny "ding" of a single note from him for the first time. Still haven't said anything. Maybe he'll love it, maybe he won't.
Basically, I'm going to keep your comment in my mind to not fall into the future trap of denying him something he really wants to try out just because I have some other hope for him. Even now, it'd be easy to jump on my son at this point and say "ho there child, I could send you to some classes now" and then get upset if he doesn't like it. It's really easy to fall for my own bias and whatnot. I'll remind myself to avoid doing that.
If you don't mind me asking, how old were you when you asked for an electric guitar initially?
The horror cases like GP's "9 years" are essentially a miscalibration, failing to recognize a suitable stopping point.
"Cheap babysitting" is not it. Lessons are short and more expensive than childcare. Enforcement of practice time is a hassle (and a balancing act!)
> Which was, of course, rock.
Nowadays, you can see rock prodigy kids playing guitar on YouTube. Sometimes I wonder how they feel about their instrument and the music they play. Do they even like it?
In contrast, my little brother was enrolled to drum after he developed interest, in jazz. He has the friends who are passionate with the same kind of music. He built several bands. Not only the music itself, he developed love for analogs, obsessed with building instruments and speakers.
I guess the timing of interest development relative to the push to the direction, and having the right people to reinforce your passion is imperative to the optimal development of "click" to music.
For much of the same reason the piano was absolutely indispensable to the composers, as Charles Rosen observed in the first chapter of his Piano Notes:
>The utility of the piano for composing was its neutral and uniform tone color: in theory (although not in reality) the tone quality of the bass is the same as the treble. In any case, the change in tone color over the whole range of the piano is, or should be, gradual and continuous (there are breaks, of course, when the notes go from one string in the bass to two and then to three in the treble). The monochrome piano might be used therefore just for its arrangements of pitches, and the quality of the sound could-absurdly in many cases-be considered secondary.
>Keyboard instruments are the only ones able to realize and control the entire texture of Western polyphonic music.
Of course, the question then becomes, why has the piano held on as a mark of bourgeoisie pretensions when the prestige of the classical tradition has ran aground in the 20th century, and pretty much collapsed in the 21st. The rich and powerful in the west today do not, as a rule, promote their love of classical music nowadays as a status symbol. Elon Musk dated Grimes, presumably at least partially enamored by her reputation as a musician; he did not date a violin virtuoso or a operatic soprano, maybe because he has no emotional connection or particular interest for that type of music. Richard Taruskin has shown that the last US president who at least pretended to a taste in classical music was Nixon, and the electorate certainly did not notice the absence ever since, although there have been notably musical presidents like Clinton. It seems convenient to at least pretend that classical music still enjoys some of its prestige purely for the purposes of using it as a whipping boy and distract the snobbery between genres which has since morphed into snobbery inside each genre. I will be very surprised if someone asserts that classical music forms part of the culture of the elites today. How much does an orchestral musician make? How much is a ticket to a Paul McCartney concert?
The problem for me has not been the kind of music I had to play. My problem is I only learned to perfectly play a song with sheet paper, by repeating it over and over again in the course of a few months until every tiny little detail was perfect. That's because I was prepared to play in front of a large audience, where you are supposed to play perfectly.
What I never learned was how to improvise a somewhat-okay song, or play somewhat ok a song from sheet paper. Those skills could have made it enjoyable to play piano for myself or in a social setting where perfection is not expected.
But since I never learned those skills, the piano in my family house sit unused, and even the keyboard I bought for myself is collecting dust in a closet.
Now that I have a copy of ableton I love playing around with wave synths, learning music theory, samplers, automation, the bitcrusher, etc and don’t even have to consciously set aside time to do so, I just do it as easily as opening a video game.
My parents had the same reaction with computers: programming is stupid therefore you can't enjoy programming at such a young age, the parents decide for you. 30 years later, I still love programming and would never do anything else in my life.
Edit: When I think about it, the greatest music players on earth have an almost religious or orgasmic experience while playing music, while our parents saw that as yet another chore equivalent to what was taught at school. It's ridiculous.
The reason for this is simply that we were never allowed to play the kind of music we liked. Which was, of course, rock. Or swing. Or, really, anything with a beat.
It was all classical all the time. And piano lessons were the only time we were ever exposed to classical music otherwise, so we had no opportunity to learn to like it; it was just a source of frustration and boredom.
We weren't even allowed to pick a different instrument; it had to be piano. Because mom wanted us to be able to play the organ in church.
That nine years of lessons was the single biggest waste of time in my entire life, and I work for the government.
In order for a child to learn anything on their own, which is the way a musician has to learn, really, they have to be incentivized. They have to like what they're doing, at least some of the time. The product has to be meaningful. And in music, like so much else in education, whether the child is actually engaged with the process is just never considered.