Music education: thoughts and experiences?

Keyboards, synthesizers.. I've kinda always been into atonal or microtonal sounds. I do it mostly for my own enjoyment really I just like messing with sound :3 I am working on some less sequenced and more tonal stuff, it's all without computers though. I can kinda play a didgeridoo too

Ah yeah that is kind of a bummer that you have no where to play, I think every community should have a square or something, where people can rent it for cheap for a few hours or a day or whatever, and perform their music or poetry or play or whatever. I guess we did have that, at some time, it needs a comeback I think. That would expose more people to music, they could just come and go at their leisure. People could also welcome others to play with them if they like.

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.

Rock on brotha. 🤘🏻

How do you do microtones on a keyboard? How did you get into that?

The closest assemblage of buildings and sidewalks to me is mostly dead, I never see anyone playing, with the exception of Saturdays when an obnoxious hispanic church group entertains the homeless people camped out in the park near the bus stop with their portable speaker Jesus karaoke.

We hardy have any foot traffic. Can't wait for ICE to disappear so we can get back to normal.

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.

I've been playing guitar for decades but I'm also very musical. I've never really learned, or even really used musical theory outside of someone telling me what chord they're playing. But now that I'm older I want to learn more theory as I'm sure it will help my playing.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I do call out chords. Even without formal training, I still know the basics. It gets dicey when it comes to more advanced stuff like minor thirds, etc. When it comes to that, I switch to show-and-tell by playing the chord for the other members to hear and calling out individual notes.

Funny enough, in our last rehearsal, someone finally spoke up and said it was peculiar that I was calling verses “stanzas” and pre-choruses as “refrains”, which apparently aren’t terms being used regularly anymore. I didn’t realize because that’s how I learned to call them and have used it all my life.

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.