Music education: thoughts and experiences?

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.

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!!!

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.

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.

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.

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?

Oh, I remember stanza and refrains. I didn't know they'd fallen out of fashion.

But, yes, definitely one advantage of theory is a common language that makes communication easier.

I do think it's odd, though, that you haven't learned it. I've run across a few people who play be ear, and every time I've tried to explain something to them, even as simple as ("oh, that's was a cool chord, what is it? OK, I think that would be a sus4", they kind of tune out. It seems so accessible to me, but I think some people's brains just don't like it on a fundamental level. There's a very talented guitarist i run into at open mics, great ear, sings harmony at the drop of a hat, and I tried to explain something really simple stuff to him, with his consent, before he confessed he just has some kind of learning disability about it and it was always a struggle.

Which I totally get, because learning to play by ear for me is really hard; but unlike theory, learning to play by ear gets you a lot farther towards your immediate musical goals, so overcoming whatever block you have to learn theory, there's just less motivation for it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I do concede that knowing theory enough to have a common language makes it easier. There were times, like the show band I mentioned, where that would've made it way easier to exchange notes. But at the same time, those kinds of groups (hired guns) are mostly at the level where you are expected to already know the material by rehearsal time.

Another example would be when I joined a new band that was starting up, and the primary songwriter was formally educated and was already in a semi-popular band in my city. Now that was a time I felt inadequate, because when he wanted us to do something, I couldn't just simply translate what he was saying into my instrument. On the other hand, I was also a member of a long time prog rock band with technical players, but we didn't have to resort to "theory" to communicate, and we got along fine. Everyone was pretty good with playing by ear, so a show-and-tell approach wasn't a detriment.

As to the tuning out, I don't necessarily "tune out" or ignore it. It's just that I'm at a point in my life that music isn't a primary career for me, and even if I still play with bands and release solo music regularly, I have so much going on with responsibilities that I choose to spend the already little free time I have to just enjoy playing/making music. I guess it's also why the more complicated stuff I write, I just do myself as a solo artist because I can enact my vision without dealing with anyone else.

What's Goa trance ?