There are so many good youtubers who teach music now, really happy that kids nowadays get all these amazing teachers for free online cuz I sure as hell didn't haha
I play English folk music on the fiddle, and was taught by a chap in my village. No qualifications, no knowledge of musical theory, he couldn't even read sheet music. And I tell you, I looked forward every week to his lessons. The man was so full of passion and love for the history of English folk music that I hung on his every word, noticed the minutiae of his technique. I wanted so *badly* to impress him, just to be like him. And where am I now? Well, I can't read sheet music, and I can't play any classical pieces of music. I don't hold my violin 'correctly'. But I can play an instrument and musical style I love with competence and passion. That should be the end goal of any music student.
The difference between a violin and a fiddle is in the person playing it. A violinist trains them self to be a robot, following their instructions precisely and accurately A fiddler plays music. Fiddles are cool, violins are lame.
lobsterbark As a folk player now receiving classical training, I can see both sides and couldn't disagree more. Folk styles allow for more immediate creativity and classical music is less accessible , but classical music is about finding expression through limitation, much like other art forms where you work with a specific medium. Yes, there are plenty of violinists (some are colleagues of mine) that basically just play data entry, but equally I've played with fiddlers who just saw the damn tune out with no musicality. To say that folk is superior to classical styles is to ignore the fundamental artistic differences of the two traditions. Preference is fine, everyone has a preference, but one isn't better or worse than the other
We learn to read and write after we’ve mastered speech. But the standard of terrible music instruction is to learn an entirely new and unintuitive writing system before we have any real idea what it means
@@winstonchurchill624 Well, maybe "mastered" is the wrong word, but four-year-olds have an intuitive understanding of syntax, and know enough words that reading makes sense.
This is a way to learn a new language. You watch video and hear ppl talks in that language. After a month or two, you know what the sound means in that language. And then you can try to make the same sound to express the message
The Yamaha method of teaching music follows pretty much what you describe. First let the kids learn the various sounds (Do re mi fa so la ti do) and once they kind of get it, gently introduce them to sight reading of notes.
I remember we had a week of school trips once. One day, we played African drums, with a teacher from Kenya. It was really fun! He told us to improvise, and just enjoy the music. Later that week, we played African drums again, but with a teacher who had lived here all his life. He told us the exact ways we had to do things, because "else it would be offensive to Africans."
Offensive? The offensive of Berlin was offensive, who in the right mind would honestly think "Oh, he's not born in Africa and he is playing the *african* drums imperfectly, thus I should feel insulted" Come on people, find something more interesting to do than try to be annoyed by normal behaviour...
Although at this point he or she probably doesn't need to be born in Africa nor have african parents to be considered african, maybe an european or southern-american somebody can just identify himsel as african and the political corectness would make us have to consider him african
YES!! I took pro guitar lessons and quit after 3 months. I thought to myself, "Well, I guess I won't be playing guitar". Then, one day, I sat with my friend who played, and learned more in a hour than I had in 3 months.
totally agree, when i did music in school i had a friend who stuttered badly, he was a drummer but one day the teacher randomly picked people to sing and picked him as one, he refused. Another thing i found was that the teacher would favour students who already knew how to play rather than actually teaching and getting students interested in instruments and making music.
*Another thing i found was that the teacher would favour students who already knew how to play rather than actually teaching and getting students interested in instruments and making music.* That is sadly, most teachers.
I've had two music teachers waaaaay back when I was in school... The first one was pretty good, he made the class fun. The second one expected absolute perfection, and any missed note was called out with obvious scorn instead of gently pointed out... and of course, everything we played sounded like a funeral dirge.
@@zacktoor1591 I missed a field trip for band, so it was just me, my friend, and the substitute from hell. I pulled my trumpet out of the case and was just holding it with one hand while I got my music out with the other hand, and she saw me and was like "NEVER HOLD YOUR TRUMPET WITH JUST ONE HAND!!!" Then she grabbed my hands and moved them to the "proper way." And then she did the same for my friend, who plays the saxophone. And we practicing, and if even one note was a little bit wrong, she made us stop completely and start all over again. It was so annoying.
Thankfully having had an identical experience, with terrible tutors for the instruments I tried to pick up, I kinda 'fell' into playing bass for one of the school bands simply because I was useless at singing and we didn't have a bassist. I learned to sight read 15 years later because it had a purpose for me... and at no point did it prevent me from having a lot of fun. It's sad given how rewarding and enjoyable playing an instrument can be that so many get put off by this, had I just gone by the 'taught' experience I'd not be playing now
Thomas Bowers You're right, the teachers are a key factor in this. But often times it's not their fault. I can attest to the absolute number one priority simply being that the child has fun. If the child isn't having fun, then it's a complete waste of time. There are of course different ways to have fun, and it's not always easy to see for the parents to see what's best. But really they need to listen to their kids, because the wrong teacher, no matter how skilled at teaching he or she is, can ruin everything. So they've got to try different teachers, and the moment the child really likes one, that's the one they've got to stick with until the child decides to move on.
Not just music teachers. I enjoyed playing tennis until I had my first tennis lesson. Slowing the game down to teach me all these minute detailed technical techniques was not what I wanted from playing tennis. I just wanted to hit the ball back and forth. There is a way to teach how to play properly without making it boring and draining the spirit from people who are interested in the thing. Getting overly technical on the first day of lessons is not how you do it. Going in at the angle of "this is how you can have MORE fun with this sport/instrument/whatever, by doing THIS thing that the pros do." It's like when I taught someone how to play yugioh. If I went in showing him all the pro skills and techniques from the beginning, I would have just scared him from the game. Instead, I started with the most simple very first format, and just played with the simplest rules. Then we can go from there to learn the more complicated formats, WHILE HAVING FUN.
I had an art teacher who didn't teach art. Sad, she was a wonderful lady otherwise. At the same school I had a teacher in Music Appreciation. He too was wondderful. He taught us the workings of music, instruments, how to listen and pick out various facets of music of many kinds. In short it was satisfying and quite fun. About thirty years later, one day I was standing in que at a big post office. My grandmother was with me. It turned out that this teacher was just in front of me. I was quite happy to introduce my grandmother to him. I told him how he changed my life. I think he was quite surprised. But I want him to feel appreciated; and for Nana to know I ebjoyed SOMETHING in school. Thanks Lindy. This was fun.
We had an art teacher who was just a bully. He would mark stuff we'd done by scrawling stuff like 'NO!!!!' or 'RUBBISH!!!' on it, or he'd stand up and simply tip everything we'd done into a bin. He was awful. There was another art teacher who was rather fierce - but here's the thing - everyone loved him. He was good at his job and knew about art. One day, a few years after I had left school, I met this teacher in the town library. I asked him how he was and he told me that he had been sacked from the school - he got so fed up of the other art teacher's bullying of the pupils (this was the late 1970's; things were very different then), that he shouted at the other teacher to 'Shut up and be a teacher'. The other teacher told him to 'Mind his own business', at which point, the not-bully teacher strode over and knocked the bully out. In front of two classes full of kids. Wish I'd seen that.
Make it fun! This might be a wider school problem (I can of-course only talk about my schools in Germany): Suck fun out of every interesting topic. Among my favorite is Geography. It is supposed to be about foreign countries and how hills and stuff form and Geological columns and all this neat things. But most of the time they forced us to memorize stupid maps. I do not care where the Kilimandscharo is in relation to the Nil. If I ever get to Africa I will look it up on a map. If I care.
it's important to note that what you describe might not be fun for other people, while learning about world and where each country or biggest hill is, might be fun for someone else. And I'd say having a general knowledge of the world and it's countries etc. is a good knowledge to have.
As a musician I totally agree. Ive always been a singer, and in highschool I was very involved with musical theatre. Later on I taught myself to play guitar, and that was the point when I really found the joy of music. It's led me to believe that the key element of teaching music is to first express the joy that it is. Once you have that foundation of true enjoyment, you're far more interested and willing to learn
At school, what I learned in music class was that instruments are expensive so we couldn't have any. Woodwork was the same. (They could've solved both problems at once by getting s to make basic instruments.) I don't remember being taught anything at all in Art class, and only two things in PE (this is how you throw a discus, and this is how you throw a javelin - one time each.) In RE, I learned that other religions existed. In English Lit, we did war poets(!) and Hobson's Choice - ie anti-nationalism, and gender/class power struggles. I was interested in science, but my maths was weak. I've since realized that that's because they didn't teach us the first thing - literally. And when you don't know the first thing, everything you learn is strange and difficult, and progress is slow.
Similar story for me Maths: General stuff, basically 'okay, this is what you need to pass the GCSE. English Lit: See maths. English Lang: Romeo and Juliet, then a lot of poems written by some awful poets about giving birth, being a foreigner in the UK, and a single sonnet by Shakespeare. Biology: See Maths. We did get to dissect a fish. Chemistry: Health & Safety, plus, See Maths. No practicals, all theory. Physics: See Chemistry. History: The rise of Nazi Germany, Life at home during WW1, and the wild west (The boring parts covering how women were vital for early settlers) RE (replaced halfway through with Philosophy and Ethics): Other religions exist and they are wonderful, how a lot of people have unfounded hatred for religions they don't understand, and then they just showed us the Omen when they switched over for 'yeah, this is pretty much what evil is' PE: How to get beaten up by 6 people and walk away from it whilst the two teachers were distracted by the girl. Later confirmed to have falsified a lot of their documentation. ART: Manga/Anime is a horrible reductive art style and you should never do anything reductive until you have mastered the classical form. Music: Absolutely nothing, since the teacher spent the entire time hitting on the girls. He was arrested after his second year, and they sold off all the musical instruments besides the grand piano that was then stuck in the reception on show, with no one being allowed to touch it. And they wondered why attendance was abysmal at best, and 90ish% of my year walked away with Us in their GCSEs.
@Srithor I can read music but I don't most of the time. Training yourself to play by ear is way more useful and can be done on the fly. I feel sorry for those that have to go by sheet music. They're missing out on the most fun and expressive part of being a musicain: being able to improvise. It is the single most impirtant skill I'll ever learnt.
I disagree with that. Expressing your painful weights through painful and weighty expression gives you a path to confront them through. Expression should be a means to express anything, in whatever way, and it not being fun enough at any particular moment isn't a problem. However forbidding it from being fun, or sad or even damn near torturous can be. Sure, we can't let the kids stab each other to death, or open a medieval torture dungeon, or let them experiment with the gallon of LSD mister Popo found in a milk jug, but any type of expression should have it's place, and we shouldn't limit ourselves except for making sure we don't take it very extremely far.
@Srithor it is most definitely _not_ true that sheet music is less important in jazz. Being able to improvise is an important skill, but playing in a Big Band it's only a tiny part of any individual musician's work.
What splendid timing, Lloyd. This video came just in time since I have my first adult music lesson in 2 weeks. I'm quite excited but since I have absolutely the same experiences as you, I'm also a bit worried whether the teacher will be a proper TEACHER or just a paid goon to instil the doctrine of "the right and approved way of playing the instrument in the tradition of the 4th battalion of stickinarse" into me. At school the music teachers were also P.E. teachers and combined the two subjects into a insanely strong mutant of "I don't give a damn, here are some notes, I toss you a ball, now do whatever, I'll be over at my car sippin bear while noone's watching". And the few times my family had the tiny bit of money to pay for a private teacher she was as joyless and life draining as you described. Nevertheless this video and our replies shall be warnings to any educator in the field to not succumb to this way and at the same time we recognize and praise the various GOOD and talented pedagogical teachers out there. We thank you! Please be an inspiration to your colleagues. We'll see how it goes in 2 weeks when for the first time I'll touch and hopefully SOMEHOW play the violin hahaha! All the best!
I went to a Church of England school in Juniors, and I kid you not that within a week of joining in year three some 6 of us were called to the headteacher because we were “gifted” and told to learn how to play an instrument for the Church. Needless to say that made me put off from music for a good few years until I discovered rather too late in Senior school Oasis and decided to pick up a bass. My teacher- I make no exaggeration- set fire to a grade book in front of me and we learned with him playing guitar whatever song I wanted or he thought was cool. Absolute legend to me. I’m heading into my final year in School next year, and I hate how one moment of attempted indoctrination had lead to me learning so late. You are completely right Lloyd. Music is ruined for kids by boring morons who are transfixed on getting it right and not having fun.
cerperalpurpose 100% agreed. Basically the same thing happened to me. There must be so many kids out there who would enjoy making music a lot more and would continue to make it if number one priority was for them to have fun.
That happened in my high school also, but the people they picked wern't even the best in the class, it was very bizzare. The teachers then felt pressured to bring these kids the best grades, but sometimes they didn't work hard enough for it, ya know? Meanwhile students who were struggling were ignored. Yeah, I do believ your story, unfortunatly. I'm Welsh, however, not English, so this was a Welsh school.
@@asgdhgsfhrfgfd1170 I realized the same thing years ago. Now I have my students compose their own music for their big year-end concert. They come up with some very strange ideas, and I think they learn more from those projects than everything else we do combined.
more rants, please. These are one of my favourites. Oh, and I feel about the same with learning a language and starting with difficult things like learning all the ins and outs of grammar.. okay, fine.. I know the grammar now, but I can't speak the language at all.. great.
I'm often thinking about that. I think that most people try to remember a foreign word/thing as the translation. But i'm find it far more easy to just connect that to a picture instead. Maybe the grammar or wording isnt perfect that way, but i think that it is far more easy to "correct". Its far more important to unterstand what somebody said(or mean!). So its more like having multiple words for one thing. Often encounter a problem with people who where raised with 2 languages. They sometimes having the problem that they mix up that words. Could be connected the two things. Because as a child i think you too thinking about a "picture" instead of a word.
More book please, you scamming liar Lindy, you chucklefuck, I think your BACKERS are still "In Search of Hannibal " €154,710 down the fucking drain That's a little over US $202,489 Nikolas Lloyd and Christopher Steininger have scammed from their backers
Go back to learning music, and do it YOUR way. The reason I still play (totally amateur) is because I was self-taught and had enough interest to pursue it on my own.
Damned right. I started learning guitar in my 40s with the goal of one day being good enough to play covers in a pub band and have folk enjoy it. When I achieved that it was more enjoyable by far than paying off my first mortgage.
I've had two piano teachers in the past, o e when I was 10 or 11, and one when I was 14. Both were so extremely boring that I've basically done what you've done, and taught myself. It's ten times more fun than the excruciating exercises they made me do.
I spent eight years learning the viola in grade school. I started having ptsd flashbacks when you talked about setting the instrument down and focusing on the sheet music. Even after we were allowed to play, we still weren't allowed to really *play* with them. If we did anything other than sight read, we were doing it wrong. I still have my viola even though I haven't touched it in ten years. Now that I'm in larps and historical reenactments, I might pick it up again and be a bard.
I took up the viola over 30 years after giving up the clarinet after being told I was rubbish. It is great fun, give it another go. Look up April Verch for some inspirational fiddling and just apply it to the viola, 5 notes lower.
yes! larping with instruments is so much fun! You barely even have to play it if you're not wanting to as it makes a fantastic prop (and people are remiss to attack you if you have a non-larp weapon in hand)
it had to be said. often techers, so it seams, pick up their "profession" because they learned early on they can force respect and attention. what they, mostly, dont know is that they never left school - so to say. THEY didnt learn their lessons . and "they" ( most of them) steal it- the lesson- the essence- from CHILDREN and teenagers. and...get paid for it and earn the props. the world is topsy turvy. it seems downright evil. but that is not anyones doing. thats how it always has been. mostly. why isnt there ONE f... decent politician ?? 1 out of 100 maybe. same "laws" apply. sigh, faith, brotherhood,and...he said it, joy, joy is pretty convincing. cant argue against joy. good point Mr. Beige !! bravo
That's the old joke, isn't it? What is the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? With a drum machine, you only have to punch the information in ONCE.
As a young person who has recently escaped the soul crushing world of piano lessons I totally agree. Also I play the tuba and am in one of the best youth brass bands on the UK and that feeling of playing in a group with friends is one of the best feelings in the world. So I agree. But also plz do the longer form history videos
Also from the UK. Had a piano teacher as a kid and one as an adult. The adult one moaned that I wasn't a kid while the kid one made me play the same darn nursery rhyme for a year.
Thanks a lot for bringing this up! I completely agree with you about the core of your argument: learning g should be FUN! Specially for kids! I’m a teacher and I’m an advocate of having fun in class. I’ve been fortunate enough to work around the world and even now I still find that most of my colleagues believe that it’s ok for students to “struggle” and suffer in class and that if the learning gets to lay back or “fun” it means two things: the children are not really learning and the teacher is not really trying(as you can imagine I’m the target of criticism in the community of teachers for making sets in my lessons to have “too much” fun. I strongly believe that even horrible subjects can more easily learned if we make sure there is an element of fun in the lesson.
Oh man, I agree with you so much! I love music, I can't imagine my life without it, it may be one of the reasons I'm still alive, and yet all the music teachers I've had in my life managed to take all the fun away from it. Maybe except one, who didn't suck completely. My first music teacher ever told me as a kid that I had no music ear and threw me off the class. Being a good teacher is a skill, and sadly, many music teachers seem to lack it completely. Some are a complete nightmare. What a terrible shame.
As a music production teacher this is so true. Most teachers focus on perfecting technical skills and have no focus on personal motivation and keeping things fun for the student! If you’re not having fun your not gonna spend the time it takes to get good!
I had a piano teacher like that when I was a kid (around 10 years old). Instead of playing songs I actually enjoyed and teaching me how to play them or how to listen to the music first and then figure out the notes. She instead forced me to play shit like "Mary had a little lamb" for hours on end. Even today whenever I hear that song I actually cringe, it became psychological torture! Later when I was around 16 I took guitar lessons with a really awesome guy who used to be in a band during the 70's. At the beginning of every lesson he would ask me what was my current favourite song, I would tell him and he'd do a quick search on his laptop, find the track, we'd listen together, and without fail he'd pick up the tune extremely quickly and we'd spend the whole lesson learning to play at least the main melody. To this day I can't play piano for shit but if you give me a guitar I can play Paranoid by Black Sabbath in its entirety (minus the solos) pretty well! Just goes to show how teaching methods can produce wildly different results from the same student.
I can relate to the Mary Had a Lamb thing. I was playing piano for 5 years and got nowehre except for nursery rhymes. I was 16 and I was embrassed to play because what self-respecting 16 year old would play Mary had a little lamb in front of their freinds or family? Made me very insecure about my music. But, I had a teacher recently who was basically 'wha, it's so hard teacing an adult'. Annoyed the heck out of me. Finding a teacher as an adult is so darn difficult.
This really surprised me. I always thought, my bad experience was related to the music schooling habits in GDR back in the 80ies. First tried piano and it ended up exactly as described. When I gave up after about half a year, I had not even played any single part of a fun song. Then wanted to try guitar later, but was not even accepted because I had to pass a singing audition first. Never could sing...
Top tips if you see theory lessons: 1, the circle of fifths is pointless on guitar so ignore anyone talking about it. 2, modes are just starting the same scale on a different note, ignore all the theory about how it works because it's irrelevant. Yeah this video applies to many guitar lessons too.
There's immense joy in creating music, what's not fun is reciting music exactly as written, the way it's written, just for the sake of authenticity. I'm glad I spent 6 years learning to play properly before going to music university
I mean the whole reading thing comes with practice. All you need to do is take some fun little pieces and read them. Start easy and go along with the level of the student. I always enjoyed playing new stuff and just musically formulate an easy piece and by doing this at the ends of every lesson (me playing the euphonium and my teacher accompanying on the piano) i became much better at reading while having fun. And now i can use the skill to just take up a sheet and play easy stuff with friends and of course it will really help any rehearsals that you haven't had so much time to prepare...
Our last drummer died by choking on vomit. Not his vomit, someone else’s. Then the next one, he died in a bizarre gardening accident. The police decided it was best to leave the case, unsolved.
learning music isn't fun if you're working hard enough at it. Playing the stuff you've learned is fun after the fact. Noodling aimlessly on guitar or creating is fun. The actual learning is frustrating and a grind. It's like climbing a mountain. It sucks a fat one while you're going up but it's worth it for the view at the top
You not playing an instrument does not mean that you cannot/do not create music. Oh, and Drums *do* count. Give yourself some credit. If you would like to play a melodic instrument, I would encourage you to pick one up and teach yourself. You seem like the type of person who could accomplish that. Your familiarity, subconscious or not, with musical tradition and tropes (what you call "musicality") would be a great boon. You should learn hurdy-gurdy. That would be freakin' awesome. "Sight reading" has a specific meaning, and it requires the ability to read music but also relies on knowledge of patterns and tropes, similar to being able to predict what will happen when listening to a piece of music. It's akin to a live script reading of a drama, reading and, potentially, interacting with others without analyzing and sounding out every word. You read it as a flow, often predictively, and anticipate what others might do. Reading music is important in Western instrumental music* (particularly if you were playing something like clarinet). If you were studying as part of an ensemble, which would probably be the default for learning clarinet, then that would be outright traditional. It's great to be able to play a piece of music with a group of people that no one has ever heard, seen, or otherwise been aware of. It sounds like your teachers focused too little on repertoire. This is a common gripe for young learners, and, as you discovered, one of the chief reasons why they quit. They came to *play* and just aren't, right? If I'm guessing the era when you studied, then this was much more common, and there was far less attention to repertoire. There *must* be a balance among reading, technical skills, and musicianship skills (repertoire, musicality, etc.). In parallel, teachers must have "work" in appropriate mixture with fun. There is *much* tedium in gaining basic proficiency (the typical first 1-2 years of study). Reading is the worst because it's not actually playing, but it's also the quickest obstacle to surmount overall. (it's just seems like very high...boring wall for most students). In any case, it's a shame your teachers were poor at that balancing act. There's a lot of training and resources these days to address this. Education is much more "student centric" now. *There are a lot of caveats here. As a historian, I know you know there's a lot to unpack in that statement. I question myself whether that history mostly lived and died mostly during parts of the 19th and 20th centuries with the middle and upper classes. Most of music history has traditionally been about the elite, and the idea of "mass" music literacy is probably a relic of the 19th and early 20th centuries when pianos and sheet music were much more widespread. I'm not so sure reading music is that important anymore, particularly with how separated "classical" music has become from most people's lives. That being said, it was and is still a strong, primary influence on Western, formal music education.
I’m in my 20’s so from a different era to the one discussed in the video and to be honest it sounded very similar to my experience. Less than 20% of the lesson would involve actually using the instrument. I appreciate there’s always got to be boring parts to learning any skill but there was little to no enjoyment at all. Maybe I just had a bad school or teacher but it does sound like we had similar experiences probably 30 years apart.
Sharing this with my fellow music educators! As professionals and aspiring professionals, we value our tedious fundamentals and excersizes. The fire in us has already been lit and we want to get better. We're willing to put tedious hours into technique excersizes and etude books to get there. It's easy to forget though that sixth graders and beginners just want to make music. A lot of my colleagues, being from competitive Texas music programs, are big proponents of highly fundamentalist and disciplined teaching styles at the beginning level, as if they want to skip the beginner phase altogether (spoiler alert: beginners will sound like beginners regardless). It's so much more effective to get students passionate first, so that they actually want to get out that Arbans book (giant book of technique excersizes for brass) and start shedding it. Don't start the day with scales! Show them a great performance instead. Most middle school music students don't even know what a professional on their instrument is even supposed to sound like. It does so much more for them to have that ideal sound in their head before they play.
In my entire secondary school career, I never once even laid hands on an instrument. Music lessons mainly consisted of copying down the plots of operas from the board into exercise books. An absolute, total and unmitigated waste of everyone's time.
My music class was much the same, except I had seperate piano lessons. My usual music teacher was kind of bad, he eventually quit halfway through the year because they changed the syllabus to contain real music theory.
This is quite a good analysis - and it holds true for learning in general. Life is fascinating and children typically want to learn. The possibility to do so joyfully is key.
As a musician myself, i can understand where you are coming from. However sigh treading (and more so music theory in general) is an EXTREMELY important concept in music and progressing as a musician. While yes you could teach your student to just play some notes in order, it would leave the student unaware of what they are actually playing, and it would be very difficult to learn new and harder pieces. Also in your point about how pieces were made intentionally to be hard to predict, they do this to get you used to playing different and odd rhythms that would turn up in harder pieces so that when you see them you could play them very easily. Jazz musicians, believe it or not, actually go through the same practice and get so good at music theory that they can memorize scales, arpeggiate in different manors based on the music and play generally on the fly. This isn't because they just started fiddling around with it but rather because they put thousands grueling hours into leaning music and music theory
This. Some teachers overdo it but you *need to learn how to read music* because otherwise your rate of improvement slows to almost a halt. You have to challenge yourself at some point.
Sure it's important. transposing is also important. doing roman numeral analysis is also important, but these aren't things you teach a kid who's starting up. at least get him to, you know, play the instrument a bit first. otherwise he'll not know what he's reading.
Yeah, sight reading is a sucker but it's an important part of my skill set as a fiddler. Also harmony and counterpoint classes, hate those, but they help inform my understanding of the music I'm tryna play. If musicians could get away without theory, we wouldn't spend so much time killing our souls studying it
personally I'd say these kinds of exercises made me a case of someone knowing /about/ music theory without actually knowing it. like all the components are there but not a single music teacher was able to convey to me how to actually use any of it
This is the shit he's talking about. Most people just want to learn to play some music, not become a musician. I could play the trombone pretty well, but I couldn't sight-read worth a damn. Once I'd gone over the song slowly and made some notes on it I could play it, but I'm not going to be able to play it the first time I see it. The sight-reading military drills eventually turned me off music. Just because you do arithmetic doesn't mean you need to drill and practice higher mathematics. And just because you play music doesn't mean you need to hone the technical skills of a musician.
Why, in modern advanced 1st world society, do we seem to demonize having fun. It almost seems like we’ve determined that for you to learn something it has to be boring, while in reality its actually the exact opposite. We seriously need to overcome that annoying part of our culture. Its holding us back.
there is a problem with this video, and you explain it masterfully at 7:10 basically it boils down to: "once you have mastered your instrument, then you learn how to master it" I am not a musician, in fact I learnt guitar through just looking at people playing and imitating them, however i am a visual artist. I get that a lot of people get turned off from the arts by very boring exercises and seemingly pointless repetition, and there are indeed HORRIBLE art teachers around the world. However let us think about it deeper, why would 100% of your teachers focus on sight reading? there is no large government mandate telling music teachers how to teach music. This leaves us with 3 possiblities: 1.- every music teacher is in a big wide conspiracy to drive people away from music, perhaps in fear of competition. 2.- every music teacher is an idiot, who only teaches that way perhaps because of tradition, but it really doesn't work and no one has noticed in the past 300 years. 3.- perhaps, they know something you don't. I would like you to stop and think about each option, think about what is more likely: that the training of a skill, such as playing an instrument, should be fun and teachers just don't get it? or that perhaps fun is the result of a long process of incremental boring and simple steps? Using myself as an example, when learning guitar, i learnt the FUN way! i would go on to watch people play, read books on folk music where they tell you the strumming pattern and the chords (i had to look up the chords on a chart because, really, learning how to BUILD the chords and why chords are the way they are was not fun at all) so i would learn to play 10-12 songs i liked, and i would sing away, and MY GOODNESS was it fun! i would play all my songs and i would even create some songs of my own...yet when it came the time to play more complicated songs, i found myself in the middle of people talking about individual notes on each string, and modifying the chords with all sorts of numbers and symbols that i could not understand, i was not able to find the notes on my instrument, i was able to have a lot of fun with it playing my chords, but if you asked me to play a C# note i wouldn't be able to do it.... you see these people knew how to read notes, and how to construct the chords, and therefore how to modify them and were able to do many MANY more things with the instrument than i did, and 100% of them, had learnt in the boring way; spending hours upon hours just learning to find the notes, learning very basic tunes and using them as ways to learn more basic knowledge that seemed boring and pointless.... but as these kept building on top of one another, they began to find themselves playing all sorts of tunes and adding all sorts of flavors, and not only on guitar! they could apply a lot of that knowledge to piano, and clarinet, and violin! and have fun with all of them too. Then I learnt how to draw, and it was a 7 year grind of thousands of hours of drawing straight lines, and cubes and circles, learning anatomy and perspective, i wanted to draw dragons! but now i understood that i needed to eat my vegetables first. I am no master of arts, I am still in the middle of my learning as an artist, but i can tell you, that fun is TREMENDOUSLY OVERRATED, If you want to lark around and have fun, do it, it's totally alright, but if you want to master a skill you're gonna have to do it the slow way.
The issue here is, you can teach technicality (which I agree is important) but you can do so without patronising or boring the student, it's about being a good teacher who engaged the student. It isn't either or, you can do both, and should.
The problem is, that the teachers Lloyd is referring to only teach one way to master an instrument, when there are other, more fun and organic ways to learn. Many of the greatest guitarists, of all kinds of different musical genres have no ability to read music. You don't have to know music theory, or sight-read notation to master an instrument. Yes, it takes a long time either way, but if you stick at one instrument for long enough, you will eventually develop a musical understanding that's entirely your own. Some even go on to develop completely unique systems of tuning and playing their instruments.
@@Stettafire I think this is going away from the point lloyd makes and that i try to dispute; that "technicality" is not something important for learning or "mastering" an instrument, and that it should not be taught until later on, what he describes as "fun" is basically skipping the boring parts and getting on with playing music. I propose that the boring stuff is in fact very important for learning the skill. What you are describing is true, i think teachers should make their darn best to make it fun to learn, because these things are boring enough as they are, but the point of the video is not "these teachers are bad because they didn't make this exercise fun" but rather "these teachers are bad because they didn't teach me how to do fun stuff". I reiterate, i agree with your statement, but no one is saying that teachers should be patronising and boring, just that they should teach the boring stuff. TL;DR: good for you, i agree, but it has nothing to do with what im saying
Totally agree! Same experience when learning a new language. Instead of having fun and trying to speak and understand it, they start with all the rules and exceptions to the rules....
Infinite poop. You sit on the toilet to poop, but the poop never stops coming out of your butt. You have to start flushing the toilet every two minutes to keep up. You try to pinch your butt closed but that makes your insides hurt. The poop accelerates. You call 911. The paramedics call for doctors. The doctors call for specialists. The story trends on Twitter. You turn down talk show appearances. Your septic tank fails. People form a cult. Your toilet is finished. Volunteers arrive with buckets and shovels. You are completely used to the smell. The poop accelerates. You are moved to a stepladder with a hole in the top step. The poop accelerates. The shovelers abandon the buckets and shovel directly out the window. The poop accelerates. A candlelight vigil forms around your house. One of the workers falls over and can't free himself. The poop accelerates. A priest knocks over the stepladder and tackles you out the window. You land in the pile. The poop accelerates. The force now propels you forward and upward. Vigil goers grab at your legs. The poop ignites from their candles. The Facebook live event hits 1 million viewers. The poop accelerates. You are 30 feet (9.14 m) in the air. The fire engulfs the vigil and your house. 60 feet (18.29 m). The poop accelerates. The torrent underneath you is deafening. 5 million Facebook live viewers. You try to close up shop but your butthole disintegrated long ago. 120 feet (36.58 m) up. Your house explodes. The poop accelerates. 1000 feet (304.8 m). You are now tracked on radar. You try to change your angle of ascent but you should have thought of that way earlier. The poop accelerates. 4,000 feet (0 m). NORAD upgrades to DEFCON 3. Concentric circles of fire engulf your city. The poop accelerates. You have broken the sound barrier. 30,000 feet (0 m). You no longer take in enough oxygen to sustain consciousness. 60,000 feet (0 m). CNN is reporting on all the world records you've broken. 200,000 feet (0 m). You are no longer alive. The poop accelerates. Your body disintegrates but your poop contrail remains. NASA can no longer track you. You break the light-speed barrier and we can no longer bear witness. The poop accelerates. Forever.
I remember having these feelings when I first started music, but It all comes down to “playing through the pain”. A line me and my fellow musicians would say to each other. Usually because our fingers were bleeding but sometimes in the context of pushing through the song (mistakes). Playing an instrument is a physical thing. It takes practice. And it’s up to you to discover your own musical abilities. Great, thought provoking videos! Thank you so much!
That's the thing though, people want to learn how to play music, not how to be a musician. There should be some middle ground somewhere, but it seems all teachers want to prepare you for is being in an orchestra.
I've never saw you before. But I like you!! It was painful seeing my kids love of music crushed for 'grades'. My son now plays drums with a really chill teacher who looks like he's hungover most of the time. And my daughter plays violin with a really fun loving teacher.
The problem is, music schools teach the profession of musician and most teachers are from that environment so sight reading is the thing that gets you work and can be tested on an exam.
Classical musicians aren't real musicians imo. At least most of them aren't, the ones that are are musicians on the side. Playing naturally with a band is not even remotely the same as playing in an orchestra.
Sounds like both of you don't know any classical musicians or have some especially colored impressions of them, because everything you've said about them not being artists or real musicians is patently false.
@@Awaclus What? Since when is a producer a part of a band? In most bands I know members of, if a producer told them how to play they would tell them to fuck off.
Asgdhgs Fhrfgfd and I would add teachers. As not everybody has the skill(innate or learned) to transmit in an appropriate way the necessary knowledge to another human. I would say that this three areas of expertise can be represented in a ven diagram of three intersected circles and people fall in any of those seven areas.
@@Awaclus That's the case with pop music, but not in many other genres. Or at least, it's much less common in other genres. Producers thinking they were supposed to meddle with things like that has ruined so many albums. The Talking Heads is a classic example of an awesome band that sounds terrible on all their recordings because producers messed with the aesthetic.
Found your story really insteresting, I'm starting as a music teacher and it is tough when you play for 20 years to imagine how a begginer will approach what you teach. I mean where you start of will vary from person to person, and maybe your teachers had no pacience to find out what you wanted, or didn't care about teaching. It's a shame, because you do really seem to have good ears for tuning and tempo. Knowing what you want to play is also key, it is very different to teach someone to play on an orchestra, as in a rock band, funk band, folk, ska, etc.. I'll say it's never too late to start, and it's really fun, specially when you play with friends. Theory should come slowly and should be enjoyable because it lets you do interesting things.
Hey LB, I've always loved your content and I just got a puppy, so I've been putting on your videos for him while I am in class and your talking helps keep him from getting lonely. So thank you! I was thinking it would be cool if you did a video on ancient dogs or dogs in whatever part of history you prefer, I think Peter (the puppy) would love to learn the history of his people, as would I! Have a great day and thanks for the awesome content!
I agree whole-heartedly and must include 'History' in that list because being of Scottish decent, we had nothing but the Jacobite Rebellion rammed down our necks and not the industrial Revolution that was happening along side said Rebellion and 'Latin', where I got some much needed sleep on hot afternoons and 'English' for the "Classics" we were introduced to in High School as being of no use in the 'Modern World' and the lack of enthusiasm shown by the rest of the class in those drawn out, monotone recitations of Shakespearian drivel and the ridicule when I tried to be "theatrical" and was duly disabused by my teacher for "larking around; how dare I" and my class mates. I was the understudy for "Oliver" in the school musical but my voice broke just in time to kick the last fun out of any school life I had. Teaching can't be easy. [Edit: Removal of asterices and spelling mistakes. (Plural of asterix, I was led to believe)]
Yeah jesus christ.. something is wrong with people liking maths. They are always boring, humorless and moronic (teachers). But good at numbers I guess.
You make really really good points, in this I recognised why I dropped out of music lessons in the first place. It should be about what the kid wants to be able to do, not what the teachers want that kid to be able to do!
My first music teacher in school was highly conceited and totally lacked the skills to teach a class. Essentially, the handful of kids who could already play instruments got together and made a band, got their own practise room, got time off other classes to jam, and were overtly treated as special. The rest of us cabbages got a handful of aural training exercises and learned some 40 year old pop songs which sounded like arse because most of the people playing had no motivation, and our teacher had such a short fuse that we got an angry rant most every lesson. It was one of the most frustrating experiences and cemented my sense that I was an inferior musician, despite longing to be in a band. The following years, I tried taking music as a high school subject but because my learning was so stunted from a lack of rudimentary learning, those lessons were even more frustrating despite having a competent teacher at that time. I sunk into deep depression feeling like my passion was a joke because I couldn't pick out an interval that everybody else seemed to. I guess artistic disciplines tend to fall behind the curve in terms of optimality, perhaps because there isn't a large industry pressure for schools to produce excellent musicians in great number. The skilled pupils get cherry picked young, and the rest are left to feel like they just don't have that 'magic'.
Can relate. I know this exactly. My music teachers were making everything so technical that, as a child, I didn't even realise that music was an art form and good music is defined by how nice it sounds, not how technically well it is performed.
ScienceTube Perfect is indeed the enemy of good. Rick Beato made a video with that message and it really struck a chord with me. I had one great teacher, but my parents thought that I was learning so fast that I should get a new, "better" teacher. They didn't stop to think that maybe the reason for my learning speed was because I was enjoying working with my other teacher. They didn't ask me. My next teacher was very good, don't get me wrong. Maybe a few years later I might've really liked working with him. But no matter good of a teacher he was, he was simply the wrong one. So I stopped enjoying making music, and today I don't make any. Nowadays I only listen to music, because that's the only way for me to enjoy it.
@@michael43216 Well... not necessarily. Sure, it does help if you know what you're doing. But all the technical skill in the world won't turn an ugly piece of art beautiful, and (especially in music) there are some beautiful pieces of art that you don't need a lot of skill to replicate at all. Anyway, that's not what my comment was about. I'm not saying that noone should learn technique, ever. Obviously, you need to learn at least the basics of a craft before you can really experience it. But art should not be done for the technique, nor should teaching art focus *only* (or even primarily) on the technique. It's simply true that there is no objective value to art, because art is done purely for our enjoyment, and so its value is entirely subjective. Focussing on the technique imposes an objective standard on something that is objectively subjective. That sucks the fun right out of it. Or at least for me it did. I'm not an artist. I'm shit at drawing, I'm shit at singing. I may be less shit at playing piano than I am now if I hadn't stopped when I was, maybe, 12, but I had. I can read musical notation, but I can't hit a note by reading it. I can't identify the instruments in a piece of music. But these are the things that my music teachers in school focused on, and the art teachers just told us to do random projects which I hated, so I got the impression that art was simply something to be avoided at all costs. Locked away in museums and art galleries where snobby art fans would be kept busy and, more importantly, far away from me. After I left school a few years ago, though, I started to sing along to songs I liked. I wanted to draw maps or capture scenes for a pen-and-paper roleplaying game. I have *no technique at all* and still, the things I drew turned out decently. I discovered that I do like singing, just not a shit song that a shit teacher had prepared and I had no connection to, to teach us to read musical notation. It may not be technically well done, but it's art and I like it, so *fuck the technique!* That's how I rediscovered my love for art that had been absolutely deleted by bad music and art teachers. So no, technique really is largely irrelevant (at least from the point on where you are able to experiment for yourself, and that is a very, very low bar). The *only* thing that matters is that it's fun. If you have fun mechanically running down a complicated musical composition, then good for you. It's not for me, thanks.
@Mariano Mazza Nope, a plain white painted vase can be technically good, but boring and disregarded because it doesn't do anything for the viewer. No, true power is in expression. Technicality helps, sure, but it's only 50% of the story. Even outside the arts, knowing how an array works is darn useless to a programmer if they don't have the creativity to know when to use, or not to use it. Technical knowledge without creativity (i.e the ability to think outside the box) will only get you so far in life.
I can't recall having a so unfunf experience getting teched in music, as you and quite a bunch of comentors describe and consider sight reading, and being able to read and understand the theory of music is tremndously helpful, if you want to play in/organize an ensemble exceeding roundabout 7 different voices. But it's a sad truth, that you seldom get tought how to make music just by lisening and trying out what works and what dosen't (improvisation). It's pretty close to learning a new language, and especially in classical music, you, sadly, don't learn to speak before you learn to read. The best way imho is, learn to speak (play your instrument) first, after you got the basics, learn to read and write, then properly learn the grammar (chords, musical structure, ie basics of composing).
Same problem with my computing master degree, boring horrible stuff, instead of fun, exciting things! It should be a criminal offense to scar children with bad teaching...
I really agree with this, I'm learning to play the bagpipes right now and I really love it, I thank my teacher for having the patient with me and there enthusiasm, if the teacher loves to play and wants others to share there enthusiasm then you will want to learn, that's at least my experience
I wanted to get into piano, but when I went to the teacher with my mother and played the one piece I already could play and liked (The Flohwalzer) the teacher told me that it's trash and we won't be playing none of that. Which was basically a death sentence for my musical ambitions at that point.
I'm always joking with my drummer friend - "What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians but isn't one? A drummer!" But seriously, some of the most talented musicians I've met are drummers.
Hey Lloyd, couldn't agree more. I just graduated with a first class degree in music and never even tried to sight read music until the age of 16. The approach you describe is something that I'm going to dedicate my work to remove! I remember teaching some 7 year olds piano as a substitute teacher and recoiled at the horror of the boring swill they were being forced through. Next week I came back after transcribing some Minecraft music and that song from Frozen - you should've seen their little faces light up! It had parents coming into school to ask after the new teacher because it had such an effect... A bit sad that this was the state of things but very encouraging that people reacted so positively to a more celebratory approach to music pedagogy!
I feel you man. It is very hard finding a teacher who passionately cares for the medium and wants to teach. In order for this to work, the student has to want to do it too. The best part though is when you put a lot of effort into it, they believe in you as you progress.
You don't count drums? Sounds like Lindybeige is a closet guitarist or bass player to me. "You're in a Band?" "Yes." "How many guys in your band?" "Three musicians and a drummer". BAM.
My goodness this strikes a chord with me. I was given the Trumpet to learn as a child, played it for 10 years with the type of teaching you describe, increasing my ability at a negligible rate due to how little I cared for the instrument. At no point was I told to seek out music and tunes involving the instrument that I LIKED and bring them back to try and learn, it was all soulless exercises and theory with no desire to play. When I was 18, after quitting the Trumpet, I went out and bought a bass guitar, a teach-yourself-how book, and after one weekend of working out the basics, taught myself how to play by playing by ear along to the CDs of music I really loved. Three years later I'd got so much enjoyment out of the instrument I'd played so much in that time that i was proficient enough to be playing in a band getting overseas gigs and producing albums.
This is extremely relatable. In high school marching band, our band director only cared about winning competitions. We worked hard and got some trophies, but it wasn’t fun. Sure we were supposedly “more skilled” than the other schools, but they were the actually winners because they were actually having fun.
I take a big portion of joy out of your rhetorical skills. The expression of voice and face, sometimes even of the whole body is very entertaining to watch. I think you could be a great actor. (Of course the content of the rant is good aswell)
@@Awaclus Must not be a universal thing. I moved through several schools all over my country because of my father's job and I can't say that was true for me.
@@Awaclus Nope, at every school I had different music teachers. None was what you'd call a successful one, but mere school teachers. I know of at least one that tried to be part of the national orchestra, but didn't made the cut. Of the others, in retrospective, I can't say they were teachers out of "love for teaching"
History teachers go through much the same thing. It's the bain of every history lover's existence to hear people say "Oh, I don't like history, it's boring." And that largely comes down to the way history is taught in primary/elementary and high schools: Memorizing names and dates. That is literally the worst way to teach history! Yes, it's important to know who did what, where and when (and if you're lucky, why). But what good does that do if that's all you absorb? And if you're bored out of your gourd and only there because you have to be, you're not even going to absorb that much! I for one, and I know you too Lindy, prefer to look at history as just that: "Hi, story"! History is filled with all manner of incredible stories, from the grand in scale like the Tsars of Russia or the birth of the Industrial Revolution, to singular events and characters: Ever looked up the life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, hm? Guy was amazing, what a feckin' unit! How about some action? Got the Battle of Saragarhi right here. You want horror? Two words: Murder. Hotel. run by H. H. Holmes, America's first serial killer. Too dark for you, want something more uplifting? We got the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 right up the street. You like adventures on the high seas? Boom! Voyage of the SMS Seeadler, the world's last fighting sail. You're welcome. Love Titanic but sick of Leo DeCaprio? I don't blame you. Try the Wreck of the SS Central America on for size. Need your hope in humanity restored? The Christmas Truce. Enjoy. You want comedy? We got comedy! The Voyage of the Damned, the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron. Wasn't meant to be funny at the time, but after reading or hearing about it you will either piss your pants laughing... or possibly question if sanity actually exists in this world. Think you got us stumped for your love of absolute mindfucks? Think again, we got Rasputin up in this house! History is only boring if you make it boring, like Lindy's experience with learning music. If you teach it in a fun way, then people will have fun with it and learn a lot more.
Possibly the most civil rant I have come across... and I agree entirely. I have an admittedly miserable belief that contrary to reasonable expectation the kind of person who generally becomes a teacher is the kind of person who also has a special talent for making whatever they do an utterly joyless exercise for everyone around them. That singular teacher most of us fondly remember as being 'great' and 'inspiring' was actually just a rare perfectly ordinary person thrown in to stark relief by comparison with their inspiration-sapping peers. This is especially obvious with music because everybody knows music is enjoyable and all the musical people they have ever met, who aren't teachers, are obviously and infectiously passionate about their business... ...I find it very telling that as I get older, and memories of school grow dim, that I grow increasingly interested in everything around me and even find myself wanting to know more about things I previously thought I had no interest in... ...I suspect most of us are by nature continually and eternally curious about everything and get real fulfilment from learning. But it can take many years, if ever, for the teacher-induced scars to heal enough for us to rediscover that native curiosity. While I did my duty at school and did well out of necessity because that was required to reach my goals I am also very much aware that virtually all the rich enjoyment I got from learning, even then, was done in my own time. To sum-up I have to ask what kind of inhuman mind came up with the clip-board? Worse yet what kind of of person could reduce any school trip to miserable monotony and break any nascent interest in their charges by the simple expedient of issuing those damnable devices? I'll tell you - teachers!
The reason that they want to teach you how to sight read first is probably so they can just stick you with homework instead of putting in the effort of actually teaching someone an instrument. Then again maybe I'm biased since I'm a guitar player and sheet music is our natural enemy.
I totally agree with you! There is a notion held by most that pursuits like music, academics and athletics are only achievable by a few prodigal students. Therefore teachers suck all the joy out of lessons so that, by design, only a rare breed of student will find any value in it. When the common child fails to show interest we tell ourselves "Maybe my child just wasn't born a musician". Nonsense! As a maths teacher I feel strongly about this. Growing up I hated maths classes until, in university, I fell in love with the beauty of mathematics. I endeavor to motivate my students with some of the amazing things maths tells us about the universe. Much like music, maths is typically taught by asking students to solve equations in the way the textbook outlines. This is like teaching sheet music before even hearing the instrument or toying around with it. We are failing the next generation with lazy, uninspiring teaching that is teaching kids that unless they are a prodigy they shouldn't bother trying.
People misinterpret all the work that there is behind expression. As every aspect of human life, music is incredibly complex and a science on itself. You can be a great musician without music theory if you're gifted but for most of us it comes with hard work for a few minutes of fun.
Duuuude, I totally think the same way. I was studying Jazz piano at the town academy and really couldn't sightread. But my piano teacher was very patient with me and just taught me the tunes by playing them. I got an electric guitar for christmas later and within a few months stopped playing piano. I practiced every day, sometimes up to four hours at a time and really could shred. All without theoretics. It was the most fun and dedication i've ever had from/in something.
Very true, I also find there is an increasing stigma around it. That it is nerdy etc. I.E. at my school we would have every year, "The Battle of The Bands" every year it used to be so popular that some groups couldn't even get on the line up, by the time I left the school there wasn't enough people in the entire school to make up half a Battle of bands concert so it was scrapped. We also had a choir of a few hundred and same for the Orchestra and now it's 30 ish.
I've noticed this kind of thing here, in france, as well. while music isn't a part of school (okay, it might be, but, like... it's just a joke), I am in a band with mostly middle-aged adults (I'm not, as you can tell) and a few old people. the kids leave for studies, couples break up (people take marriage less seriously in France), and other people die of old age... when I came in, there were easily fourty people but now, we're struggling to be 20. But it isn't just music. I feel like people are getting less and less happy. less merchants sell at local markets, there are less communal parties... people don't go out of their way to have fun anymore. my theory is that the soul-sucking race to the bottom started by America is making people more and more stressed out and wages relative to cost of living has gone down, again making people more and more reluctant to spend money on enjoying life.
Really? Maybe my school is a bit biased because my school band plays in the Rose Bowl parade, but being in the band here in Ohio was actually considered cool. A lot of the kids who’d be considered “popular” were band kids. But again, my school didn’t really have popular and unpopular people. Everyone was pretty cool with everyone else. I just assumed that was the way schools were in most modern 1st world suburbs. I thought that hardcore bullying and shaming people was more of a thing during our parents generation, like if you were growing up in the 80s or 90s.
@@Bolt99K Well I'm in the UK, and that bascially means you have to make fun (bascially just banter) of everyone for everything no matter how minor it is. And yeah there wasn't any popular kids stuff but there were obvious unwritten rules for people to just not give people ammunition. Bascially just think The Inbetweeners.
Lloyd you genuinely seem like such a decent person - someone I would absolutely love to sit down with, have a pint and chat about I dunno - the Poloponnesian War or something. Just an interesting individual that I think someone could ramble on with for hours on end - good on you sir and thank you for such brilliant content!
My advice for new musicians is always the same: Playing an instrument is hard. Really, REALLY hard... if you want to master your instrument, you're looking at a lifetime of difficult, frustrating practice , and in order to do that, you have to love it. I think that's where traditional music teachers go wrong. They focus on the technical and theoretical side and don't give kids a chance to have fun and fall in love with their instrument. If you let a kid have fun, learn a few tunes, play songs they know and like...they're way more likely to stick at it and be motivated to learn the technical side later because they'll want to get better.
Completely agree. I suffered through two years of guitar school when I was 12-14. I was a good kid back then, but by second year I started skipping classes, got mediocre grades and basically almost stoppped playing music altogether. I gave up going there after that, and started teaching myself through online lessons, tabs of my favourite songs and basic trial and error. Two years later I bought an electric guitar joined a band, and also started to experiment on my sister's piano. Now it's been over a decade, and I still pick up a guitar almost every day to play some tunes, just for the joy of it, and I occasionally sit with my friends for a jam session as well. No pressure, no stress, just fun.
Preach, Lloyd, preach. Sightreading literally everything killed music for me. We'd work on four or five songs for a concert from sightreading it alone, having never heard the damn piece played. It was really bad for me because my parents had made me into a musical shut-in living on a farm where all we listened to was pop country. In marching band, where we played reasonably contemporary music, I had the bass line for "Thriller" and had never heard it before. Whinge over
There are so many good youtubers who teach music now, really happy that kids nowadays get all these amazing teachers for free online cuz I sure as hell didn't haha
Why progress a child when you can have them drawing treble clefs and earning you £20 per hour or whatever.
I play English folk music on the fiddle, and was taught by a chap in my village. No qualifications, no knowledge of musical theory, he couldn't even read sheet music.
And I tell you, I looked forward every week to his lessons. The man was so full of passion and love for the history of English folk music that I hung on his every word, noticed the minutiae of his technique. I wanted so *badly* to impress him, just to be like him.
And where am I now? Well, I can't read sheet music, and I can't play any classical pieces of music. I don't hold my violin 'correctly'. But I can play an instrument and musical style I love with competence and passion. That should be the end goal of any music student.
The difference between a violin and a fiddle is in the person playing it. A violinist trains them self to be a robot, following their instructions precisely and accurately
A fiddler plays music. Fiddles are cool, violins are lame.
lobsterbark As a folk player now receiving classical training, I can see both sides and couldn't disagree more. Folk styles allow for more immediate creativity and classical music is less accessible , but classical music is about finding expression through limitation, much like other art forms where you work with a specific medium. Yes, there are plenty of violinists (some are colleagues of mine) that basically just play data entry, but equally I've played with fiddlers who just saw the damn tune out with no musicality. To say that folk is superior to classical styles is to ignore the fundamental artistic differences of the two traditions. Preference is fine, everyone has a preference, but one isn't better or worse than the other
@@lobsterbark
BACH BWV 1052
Fiddles are cool, violins are also cool.
for the love of -God- Music, man!
100% agree.
We learn to read and write after we’ve mastered speech.
But the standard of terrible music instruction is to learn an entirely new and unintuitive writing system before we have any real idea what it means
AgentTasmania So are you saying that four-year-olds have mastered speech?
@@winstonchurchill624 Well, maybe "mastered" is the wrong word, but four-year-olds have an intuitive understanding of syntax, and know enough words that reading makes sense.
This is a way to learn a new language. You watch video and hear ppl talks in that language. After a month or two, you know what the sound means in that language. And then you can try to make the same sound to express the message
The Yamaha method of teaching music follows pretty much what you describe. First let the kids learn the various sounds (Do re mi fa so la ti do) and once they kind of get it, gently introduce them to sight reading of notes.
Same with learning a second language (at least here in America)
I remember we had a week of school trips once. One day, we played African drums, with a teacher from Kenya. It was really fun! He told us to improvise, and just enjoy the music.
Later that week, we played African drums again, but with a teacher who had lived here all his life. He told us the exact ways we had to do things, because "else it would be offensive to Africans."
Nederland....
@@tammesikkema5322 G E K O L O N I S E E R D
Offensive? The offensive of Berlin was offensive, who in the right mind would honestly think "Oh, he's not born in Africa and he is playing the *african* drums imperfectly, thus I should feel insulted"
Come on people, find something more interesting to do than try to be annoyed by normal behaviour...
Who in the right mind and born in Africa, that is
Although at this point he or she probably doesn't need to be born in Africa nor have african parents to be considered african, maybe an european or southern-american somebody can just identify himsel as african and the political corectness would make us have to consider him african
YES!! I took pro guitar lessons and quit after 3 months. I thought to myself, "Well, I guess I won't be playing guitar". Then, one day, I sat with my friend who played, and learned more in a hour than I had in 3 months.
totally agree, when i did music in school i had a friend who stuttered badly, he was a drummer but one day the teacher randomly picked people to sing and picked him as one, he refused.
Another thing i found was that the teacher would favour students who already knew how to play rather than actually teaching and getting students interested in instruments and making music.
kiardo the First same
*Another thing i found was that the teacher would favour students who already knew how to play rather than actually teaching and getting students interested in instruments and making music.*
That is sadly, most teachers.
My music teacher was extremely biased towards the people who could already sing.
I've had two music teachers waaaaay back when I was in school... The first one was pretty good, he made the class fun. The second one expected absolute perfection, and any missed note was called out with obvious scorn instead of gently pointed out... and of course, everything we played sounded like a funeral dirge.
@@zacktoor1591 I missed a field trip for band, so it was just me, my friend, and the substitute from hell. I pulled my trumpet out of the case and was just holding it with one hand while I got my music out with the other hand, and she saw me and was like "NEVER HOLD YOUR TRUMPET WITH JUST ONE HAND!!!" Then she grabbed my hands and moved them to the "proper way." And then she did the same for my friend, who plays the saxophone. And we practicing, and if even one note was a little bit wrong, she made us stop completely and start all over again. It was so annoying.
Thankfully having had an identical experience, with terrible tutors for the instruments I tried to pick up, I kinda 'fell' into playing bass for one of the school bands simply because I was useless at singing and we didn't have a bassist. I learned to sight read 15 years later because it had a purpose for me... and at no point did it prevent me from having a lot of fun.
It's sad given how rewarding and enjoyable playing an instrument can be that so many get put off by this, had I just gone by the 'taught' experience I'd not be playing now
Some music teachers do drain all the fun out of it
Ace Rimmer Some of my teachers in Holland are actually amazing but I’ve had some rubish ones
Thomas Bowers You're right, the teachers are a key factor in this. But often times it's not their fault. I can attest to the absolute number one priority simply being that the child has fun. If the child isn't having fun, then it's a complete waste of time. There are of course different ways to have fun, and it's not always easy to see for the parents to see what's best. But really they need to listen to their kids, because the wrong teacher, no matter how skilled at teaching he or she is, can ruin everything. So they've got to try different teachers, and the moment the child really likes one, that's the one they've got to stick with until the child decides to move on.
some are very good at making music fun i have had some good and some bad teachers
emphasis on "SOME"
Not just music teachers. I enjoyed playing tennis until I had my first tennis lesson. Slowing the game down to teach me all these minute detailed technical techniques was not what I wanted from playing tennis. I just wanted to hit the ball back and forth.
There is a way to teach how to play properly without making it boring and draining the spirit from people who are interested in the thing. Getting overly technical on the first day of lessons is not how you do it. Going in at the angle of "this is how you can have MORE fun with this sport/instrument/whatever, by doing THIS thing that the pros do."
It's like when I taught someone how to play yugioh. If I went in showing him all the pro skills and techniques from the beginning, I would have just scared him from the game. Instead, I started with the most simple very first format, and just played with the simplest rules. Then we can go from there to learn the more complicated formats, WHILE HAVING FUN.
I had an art teacher who didn't teach art. Sad, she was a wonderful lady otherwise.
At the same school I had a teacher in Music Appreciation. He too was wondderful. He taught us the workings of music, instruments, how to listen and pick out various facets of music of many kinds. In short it was satisfying and quite fun. About thirty years later, one day I was standing in que at a big post office. My grandmother was with me. It turned out that this teacher was just in front of me. I was quite happy to introduce my grandmother to him. I told him how he changed my life. I think he was quite surprised. But I want him to feel appreciated; and for Nana to know I ebjoyed SOMETHING in school.
Thanks Lindy. This was fun.
We had an art teacher who was just a bully. He would mark stuff we'd done by scrawling stuff like 'NO!!!!' or 'RUBBISH!!!' on it, or he'd stand up and simply tip everything we'd done into a bin. He was awful. There was another art teacher who was rather fierce - but here's the thing - everyone loved him. He was good at his job and knew about art. One day, a few years after I had left school, I met this teacher in the town library. I asked him how he was and he told me that he had been sacked from the school - he got so fed up of the other art teacher's bullying of the pupils (this was the late 1970's; things were very different then), that he shouted at the other teacher to 'Shut up and be a teacher'. The other teacher told him to 'Mind his own business', at which point, the not-bully teacher strode over and knocked the bully out. In front of two classes full of kids. Wish I'd seen that.
Make it fun!
This might be a wider school problem (I can of-course only talk about my schools in Germany): Suck fun out of every interesting topic.
Among my favorite is Geography. It is supposed to be about foreign countries and how hills and stuff form and Geological columns and all this neat things. But most of the time they forced us to memorize stupid maps. I do not care where the Kilimandscharo is in relation to the Nil. If I ever get to Africa I will look it up on a map. If I care.
it's important to note that what you describe might not be fun for other people, while learning about world and where each country or biggest hill is, might be fun for someone else. And I'd say having a general knowledge of the world and it's countries etc. is a good knowledge to have.
As a musician I totally agree. Ive always been a singer, and in highschool I was very involved with musical theatre. Later on I taught myself to play guitar, and that was the point when I really found the joy of music. It's led me to believe that the key element of teaching music is to first express the joy that it is. Once you have that foundation of true enjoyment, you're far more interested and willing to learn
Hoorah! Another rant! I’ve been waiting for him to post one of these.
now for the film reviews!
Lindybeige does the only rants on UA-cam that I actually enjoy hearing. Perhaps it’s because they’re intelligent.😂
@@Transgender-ProphetMohammed maybe the last ep of got is some good material for him...
Huzzah!
I'd like him to rant about how he scammed you all for €154,710
for that fake comic
At school, what I learned in music class was that instruments are expensive so we couldn't have any. Woodwork was the same. (They could've solved both problems at once by getting s to make basic instruments.) I don't remember being taught anything at all in Art class, and only two things in PE (this is how you throw a discus, and this is how you throw a javelin - one time each.) In RE, I learned that other religions existed. In English Lit, we did war poets(!) and Hobson's Choice - ie anti-nationalism, and gender/class power struggles.
I was interested in science, but my maths was weak. I've since realized that that's because
they didn't teach us the first thing - literally. And when you don't know the first thing, everything you learn is strange and difficult, and progress is slow.
Similar story for me
Maths: General stuff, basically 'okay, this is what you need to pass the GCSE.
English Lit: See maths.
English Lang: Romeo and Juliet, then a lot of poems written by some awful poets about giving birth, being a foreigner in the UK, and a single sonnet by Shakespeare.
Biology: See Maths. We did get to dissect a fish.
Chemistry: Health & Safety, plus, See Maths. No practicals, all theory.
Physics: See Chemistry.
History: The rise of Nazi Germany, Life at home during WW1, and the wild west (The boring parts covering how women were vital for early settlers)
RE (replaced halfway through with Philosophy and Ethics): Other religions exist and they are wonderful, how a lot of people have unfounded hatred for religions they don't understand, and then they just showed us the Omen when they switched over for 'yeah, this is pretty much what evil is'
PE: How to get beaten up by 6 people and walk away from it whilst the two teachers were distracted by the girl. Later confirmed to have falsified a lot of their documentation.
ART: Manga/Anime is a horrible reductive art style and you should never do anything reductive until you have mastered the classical form.
Music: Absolutely nothing, since the teacher spent the entire time hitting on the girls. He was arrested after his second year, and they sold off all the musical instruments besides the grand piano that was then stuck in the reception on show, with no one being allowed to touch it.
And they wondered why attendance was abysmal at best, and 90ish% of my year walked away with Us in their GCSEs.
Bless you. Expression should be fun and fulfilling, not painful and weighty
@Srithor Piss off. Ear training is *the* fundamental musical skill. Reading music is a poor substitute.
@Srithor I can read music but I don't most of the time. Training yourself to play by ear is way more useful and can be done on the fly. I feel sorry for those that have to go by sheet music. They're missing out on the most fun and expressive part of being a musicain: being able to improvise. It is the single most impirtant skill I'll ever learnt.
I disagree with that. Expressing your painful weights through painful and weighty expression gives you a path to confront them through. Expression should be a means to express anything, in whatever way, and it not being fun enough at any particular moment isn't a problem. However forbidding it from being fun, or sad or even damn near torturous can be.
Sure, we can't let the kids stab each other to death, or open a medieval torture dungeon, or let them experiment with the gallon of LSD mister Popo found in a milk jug, but any type of expression should have it's place, and we shouldn't limit ourselves except for making sure we don't take it very extremely far.
If parents register a child for clarinet lessons, they should be jailed for child abuse.
@Srithor it is most definitely _not_ true that sheet music is less important in jazz. Being able to improvise is an important skill, but playing in a Big Band it's only a tiny part of any individual musician's work.
What splendid timing, Lloyd. This video came just in time since I have my first adult music lesson in 2 weeks. I'm quite excited but since I have absolutely the same experiences as you, I'm also a bit worried whether the teacher will be a proper TEACHER or just a paid goon to instil the doctrine of "the right and approved way of playing the instrument in the tradition of the 4th battalion of stickinarse" into me.
At school the music teachers were also P.E. teachers and combined the two subjects into a insanely strong mutant of "I don't give a damn, here are some notes, I toss you a ball, now do whatever, I'll be over at my car sippin bear while noone's watching". And the few times my family had the tiny bit of money to pay for a private teacher she was as joyless and life draining as you described.
Nevertheless this video and our replies shall be warnings to any educator in the field to not succumb to this way and at the same time we recognize and praise the various GOOD and talented pedagogical teachers out there. We thank you! Please be an inspiration to your colleagues.
We'll see how it goes in 2 weeks when for the first time I'll touch and hopefully SOMEHOW play the violin hahaha!
All the best!
I went to a Church of England school in Juniors, and I kid you not that within a week of joining in year three some 6 of us were called to the headteacher because we were “gifted” and told to learn how to play an instrument for the Church. Needless to say that made me put off from music for a good few years until I discovered rather too late in Senior school Oasis and decided to pick up a bass. My teacher- I make no exaggeration- set fire to a grade book in front of me and we learned with him playing guitar whatever song I wanted or he thought was cool. Absolute legend to me. I’m heading into my final year in School next year, and I hate how one moment of attempted indoctrination had lead to me learning so late. You are completely right Lloyd. Music is ruined for kids by boring morons who are transfixed on getting it right and not having fun.
cerperalpurpose 100% agreed. Basically the same thing happened to me. There must be so many kids out there who would enjoy making music a lot more and would continue to make it if number one priority was for them to have fun.
It's worth reflecting that the teacher who forces you to draw neat treble clefs is NOT performing in an orchestra.
That happened in my high school also, but the people they picked wern't even the best in the class, it was very bizzare. The teachers then felt pressured to bring these kids the best grades, but sometimes they didn't work hard enough for it, ya know? Meanwhile students who were struggling were ignored.
Yeah, I do believ your story, unfortunatly. I'm Welsh, however, not English, so this was a Welsh school.
@@asgdhgsfhrfgfd1170 I realized the same thing years ago. Now I have my students compose their own music for their big year-end concert. They come up with some very strange ideas, and I think they learn more from those projects than everything else we do combined.
"Oh Captain, my Captain!"
damn it, he's describing exactly my experience with music teachers when i was a kid and why i've never ever tried to approach an instrument since
more rants, please. These are one of my favourites. Oh, and I feel about the same with learning a language and starting with difficult things like learning all the ins and outs of grammar.. okay, fine.. I know the grammar now, but I can't speak the language at all.. great.
I'm often thinking about that. I think that most people try to remember a foreign word/thing as the translation.
But i'm find it far more easy to just connect that to a picture instead. Maybe the grammar or wording isnt perfect that way, but i think that it is far more easy to "correct". Its far more important to unterstand what somebody said(or mean!).
So its more like having multiple words for one thing.
Often encounter a problem with people who where raised with 2 languages. They sometimes having the problem that they mix up that words. Could be connected the two things. Because as a child i think you too thinking about a "picture" instead of a word.
Oops I made a similar comment above bevore I read yours.
More book please, you scamming liar
Lindy, you chucklefuck, I think your BACKERS are still "In Search of Hannibal
"
€154,710
down the fucking drain
That's a little over US $202,489 Nikolas Lloyd and Christopher Steininger have scammed from their backers
There’s playing and there’s practice.
One of those is fun.
The other is required to make the other fun.
Mustakrakish you can make practice not painful
@@dcllaw677 Well, sure. Didn't say it had to suck, only that it's required.
Go back to learning music, and do it YOUR way.
The reason I still play (totally amateur) is because I was self-taught and had enough interest to pursue it on my own.
Damned right. I started learning guitar in my 40s with the goal of one day being good enough to play covers in a pub band and have folk enjoy it. When I achieved that it was more enjoyable by far than paying off my first mortgage.
I've had two piano teachers in the past, o e when I was 10 or 11, and one when I was 14. Both were so extremely boring that I've basically done what you've done, and taught myself. It's ten times more fun than the excruciating exercises they made me do.
I play triangle like a boss.
"Just blow stuff up" of course Lloyd had to say that.
I spent eight years learning the viola in grade school. I started having ptsd flashbacks when you talked about setting the instrument down and focusing on the sheet music. Even after we were allowed to play, we still weren't allowed to really *play* with them. If we did anything other than sight read, we were doing it wrong.
I still have my viola even though I haven't touched it in ten years. Now that I'm in larps and historical reenactments, I might pick it up again and be a bard.
The thing that gets me is a lot of musicians go from memory anyway.
I took up the viola over 30 years after giving up the clarinet after being told I was rubbish. It is great fun, give it another go. Look up April Verch for some inspirational fiddling and just apply it to the viola, 5 notes lower.
yes! larping with instruments is so much fun! You barely even have to play it if you're not wanting to as it makes a fantastic prop (and people are remiss to attack you if you have a non-larp weapon in hand)
@@gordonlawrence4749 yea because they spent the thousands of hours it takes to learn music theory so they can arpeggiate on the fly
@@aidansweeney9909 Nope. I was doing that drumming after about 40 hours practice and only a little more for guitar.
it had to be said. often techers, so it seams, pick up their "profession" because they learned early on they can force respect and attention. what they, mostly, dont know is that they never left school - so to say. THEY didnt learn their lessons . and "they" ( most of them) steal it- the lesson- the essence- from CHILDREN and teenagers. and...get paid for it and earn the props. the world is topsy turvy. it seems downright evil. but that is not anyones doing. thats how it always has been. mostly. why isnt there ONE f... decent politician ?? 1 out of 100 maybe. same "laws" apply. sigh, faith, brotherhood,and...he said it, joy, joy is pretty convincing. cant argue against joy. good point Mr. Beige !! bravo
The gentleman is correct;
Drums don't count
I feel his pain, that's why I taught my self the harmonica, which also doesn't count.
That's the old joke, isn't it? What is the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? With a drum machine, you only have to punch the information in ONCE.
Barry Lucas Bro, the harmonica 100% counts.
My only hope of achieving an A level on an instrument is the Triangle, savior to the musically challenged
Thank you! Just, thank you... As someone who had several music teachers growing up the message was "it will be fun once you are good..."
As a young person who has recently escaped the soul crushing world of piano lessons I totally agree. Also I play the tuba and am in one of the best youth brass bands on the UK and that feeling of playing in a group with friends is one of the best feelings in the world. So I agree. But also plz do the longer form history videos
Also from the UK. Had a piano teacher as a kid and one as an adult. The adult one moaned that I wasn't a kid while the kid one made me play the same darn nursery rhyme for a year.
Thanks a lot for bringing this up! I completely agree with you about the core of your argument: learning g should be FUN! Specially for kids! I’m a teacher and I’m an advocate of having fun in class. I’ve been fortunate enough to work around the world and even now I still find that most of my colleagues believe that it’s ok for students to “struggle” and suffer in class and that if the learning gets to lay back or “fun” it means two things: the children are not really learning and the teacher is not really trying(as you can imagine I’m the target of criticism in the community of teachers for making sets in my lessons to have “too much” fun. I strongly believe that even horrible subjects can more easily learned if we make sure there is an element of fun in the lesson.
every educator should have to take the oath: first do not bore.
But what if they're a drilling instructor? ;)
@@calamusgladiofortior2814 holy shit, you're right! ;)
Pupils too.
In music and Art
This is actually the only channel on which I turned the bell notifications on.
Thanks for reminding me!
You are one of the most important assets to the common man on this site.
We appreciate you.
Oh man, I agree with you so much! I love music, I can't imagine my life without it, it may be one of the reasons I'm still alive, and yet all the music teachers I've had in my life managed to take all the fun away from it. Maybe except one, who didn't suck completely. My first music teacher ever told me as a kid that I had no music ear and threw me off the class. Being a good teacher is a skill, and sadly, many music teachers seem to lack it completely. Some are a complete nightmare. What a terrible shame.
Your experience matches my own perfectly. Public school music education is painful. They try to teach you to read music before playing it lol
As a music production teacher this is so true. Most teachers focus on perfecting technical skills and have no focus on personal motivation and keeping things fun for the student! If you’re not having fun your not gonna spend the time it takes to get good!
I had a piano teacher like that when I was a kid (around 10 years old). Instead of playing songs I actually enjoyed and teaching me how to play them or how to listen to the music first and then figure out the notes. She instead forced me to play shit like "Mary had a little lamb" for hours on end. Even today whenever I hear that song I actually cringe, it became psychological torture!
Later when I was around 16 I took guitar lessons with a really awesome guy who used to be in a band during the 70's. At the beginning of every lesson he would ask me what was my current favourite song, I would tell him and he'd do a quick search on his laptop, find the track, we'd listen together, and without fail he'd pick up the tune extremely quickly and we'd spend the whole lesson learning to play at least the main melody. To this day I can't play piano for shit but if you give me a guitar I can play Paranoid by Black Sabbath in its entirety (minus the solos) pretty well! Just goes to show how teaching methods can produce wildly different results from the same student.
I can relate to the Mary Had a Lamb thing. I was playing piano for 5 years and got nowehre except for nursery rhymes. I was 16 and I was embrassed to play because what self-respecting 16 year old would play Mary had a little lamb in front of their freinds or family? Made me very insecure about my music. But, I had a teacher recently who was basically 'wha, it's so hard teacing an adult'. Annoyed the heck out of me. Finding a teacher as an adult is so darn difficult.
This really surprised me. I always thought, my bad experience was related to the music schooling habits in GDR back in the 80ies.
First tried piano and it ended up exactly as described. When I gave up after about half a year, I had not even played any single part of a fun song.
Then wanted to try guitar later, but was not even accepted because I had to pass a singing audition first. Never could sing...
I've had the exact problem, untill I used thé blessing that is UA-cam and learned guitar on my one
Top tips if you see theory lessons: 1, the circle of fifths is pointless on guitar so ignore anyone talking about it. 2, modes are just starting the same scale on a different note, ignore all the theory about how it works because it's irrelevant. Yeah this video applies to many guitar lessons too.
There's immense joy in creating music, what's not fun is reciting music exactly as written, the way it's written, just for the sake of authenticity. I'm glad I spent 6 years learning to play properly before going to music university
i wouldn't even teach you to sight read
I mean the whole reading thing comes with practice. All you need to do is take some fun little pieces and read them. Start easy and go along with the level of the student. I always enjoyed playing new stuff and just musically formulate an easy piece and by doing this at the ends of every lesson (me playing the euphonium and my teacher accompanying on the piano) i became much better at reading while having fun. And now i can use the skill to just take up a sheet and play easy stuff with friends and of course it will really help any rehearsals that you haven't had so much time to prepare...
Our last drummer died by choking on vomit. Not his vomit, someone else’s.
Then the next one, he died in a bizarre gardening accident. The police decided it was best to leave the case, unsolved.
Lol
learning music isn't fun if you're working hard enough at it. Playing the stuff you've learned is fun after the fact. Noodling aimlessly on guitar or creating is fun. The actual learning is frustrating and a grind. It's like climbing a mountain. It sucks a fat one while you're going up but it's worth it for the view at the top
You not playing an instrument does not mean that you cannot/do not create music. Oh, and Drums *do* count. Give yourself some credit. If you would like to play a melodic instrument, I would encourage you to pick one up and teach yourself. You seem like the type of person who could accomplish that. Your familiarity, subconscious or not, with musical tradition and tropes (what you call "musicality") would be a great boon. You should learn hurdy-gurdy. That would be freakin' awesome.
"Sight reading" has a specific meaning, and it requires the ability to read music but also relies on knowledge of patterns and tropes, similar to being able to predict what will happen when listening to a piece of music. It's akin to a live script reading of a drama, reading and, potentially, interacting with others without analyzing and sounding out every word. You read it as a flow, often predictively, and anticipate what others might do. Reading music is important in Western instrumental music* (particularly if you were playing something like clarinet). If you were studying as part of an ensemble, which would probably be the default for learning clarinet, then that would be outright traditional. It's great to be able to play a piece of music with a group of people that no one has ever heard, seen, or otherwise been aware of.
It sounds like your teachers focused too little on repertoire. This is a common gripe for young learners, and, as you discovered, one of the chief reasons why they quit. They came to *play* and just aren't, right? If I'm guessing the era when you studied, then this was much more common, and there was far less attention to repertoire. There *must* be a balance among reading, technical skills, and musicianship skills (repertoire, musicality, etc.). In parallel, teachers must have "work" in appropriate mixture with fun. There is *much* tedium in gaining basic proficiency (the typical first 1-2 years of study). Reading is the worst because it's not actually playing, but it's also the quickest obstacle to surmount overall. (it's just seems like very high...boring wall for most students). In any case, it's a shame your teachers were poor at that balancing act. There's a lot of training and resources these days to address this. Education is much more "student centric" now.
*There are a lot of caveats here. As a historian, I know you know there's a lot to unpack in that statement. I question myself whether that history mostly lived and died mostly during parts of the 19th and 20th centuries with the middle and upper classes. Most of music history has traditionally been about the elite, and the idea of "mass" music literacy is probably a relic of the 19th and early 20th centuries when pianos and sheet music were much more widespread. I'm not so sure reading music is that important anymore, particularly with how separated "classical" music has become from most people's lives. That being said, it was and is still a strong, primary influence on Western, formal music education.
I’m in my 20’s so from a different era to the one discussed in the video and to be honest it sounded very similar to my experience.
Less than 20% of the lesson would involve actually using the instrument. I appreciate there’s always got to be boring parts to learning any skill but there was little to no enjoyment at all.
Maybe I just had a bad school or teacher but it does sound like we had similar experiences probably 30 years apart.
Sharing this with my fellow music educators! As professionals and aspiring professionals, we value our tedious fundamentals and excersizes. The fire in us has already been lit and we want to get better. We're willing to put tedious hours into technique excersizes and etude books to get there. It's easy to forget though that sixth graders and beginners just want to make music.
A lot of my colleagues, being from competitive Texas music programs, are big proponents of highly fundamentalist and disciplined teaching styles at the beginning level, as if they want to skip the beginner phase altogether (spoiler alert: beginners will sound like beginners regardless). It's so much more effective to get students passionate first, so that they actually want to get out that Arbans book (giant book of technique excersizes for brass) and start shedding it. Don't start the day with scales! Show them a great performance instead. Most middle school music students don't even know what a professional on their instrument is even supposed to sound like. It does so much more for them to have that ideal sound in their head before they play.
In my entire secondary school career, I never once even laid hands on an instrument. Music lessons mainly consisted of copying down the plots of operas from the board into exercise books.
An absolute, total and unmitigated waste of everyone's time.
My music class was much the same, except I had seperate piano lessons. My usual music teacher was kind of bad, he eventually quit halfway through the year because they changed the syllabus to contain real music theory.
You can't teach a class of 30 students how to each play instruments individually, schools focus on theory as they should.
This is quite a good analysis - and it holds true for learning in general. Life is fascinating and children typically want to learn. The possibility to do so joyfully is key.
As a musician myself, i can understand where you are coming from. However sigh treading (and more so music theory in general) is an EXTREMELY important concept in music and progressing as a musician. While yes you could teach your student to just play some notes in order, it would leave the student unaware of what they are actually playing, and it would be very difficult to learn new and harder pieces.
Also in your point about how pieces were made intentionally to be hard to predict, they do this to get you used to playing different and odd rhythms that would turn up in harder pieces so that when you see them you could play them very easily. Jazz musicians, believe it or not, actually go through the same practice and get so good at music theory that they can memorize scales, arpeggiate in different manors based on the music and play generally on the fly. This isn't because they just started fiddling around with it but rather because they put thousands grueling hours into leaning music and music theory
This. Some teachers overdo it but you *need to learn how to read music* because otherwise your rate of improvement slows to almost a halt. You have to challenge yourself at some point.
Sure it's important. transposing is also important. doing roman numeral analysis is also important, but these aren't things you teach a kid who's starting up. at least get him to, you know, play the instrument a bit first. otherwise he'll not know what he's reading.
Yeah, sight reading is a sucker but it's an important part of my skill set as a fiddler. Also harmony and counterpoint classes, hate those, but they help inform my understanding of the music I'm tryna play. If musicians could get away without theory, we wouldn't spend so much time killing our souls studying it
personally I'd say these kinds of exercises made me a case of someone knowing /about/ music theory without actually knowing it. like all the components are there but not a single music teacher was able to convey to me how to actually use any of it
This is the shit he's talking about. Most people just want to learn to play some music, not become a musician. I could play the trombone pretty well, but I couldn't sight-read worth a damn. Once I'd gone over the song slowly and made some notes on it I could play it, but I'm not going to be able to play it the first time I see it. The sight-reading military drills eventually turned me off music.
Just because you do arithmetic doesn't mean you need to drill and practice higher mathematics. And just because you play music doesn't mean you need to hone the technical skills of a musician.
Why, in modern advanced 1st world society, do we seem to demonize having fun. It almost seems like we’ve determined that for you to learn something it has to be boring, while in reality its actually the exact opposite. We seriously need to overcome that annoying part of our culture. Its holding us back.
there is a problem with this video, and you explain it masterfully at 7:10
basically it boils down to:
"once you have mastered your instrument, then you learn how to master it"
I am not a musician, in fact I learnt guitar through just looking at people playing and imitating them, however i am a visual artist. I get that a lot of people get turned off from the arts by very boring exercises and seemingly pointless repetition, and there are indeed HORRIBLE art teachers around the world. However let us think about it deeper, why would 100% of your teachers focus on sight reading? there is no large government mandate telling music teachers how to teach music. This leaves us with 3 possiblities:
1.- every music teacher is in a big wide conspiracy to drive people away from music, perhaps in fear of competition.
2.- every music teacher is an idiot, who only teaches that way perhaps because of tradition, but it really doesn't work and no one has noticed in the past 300 years.
3.- perhaps, they know something you don't.
I would like you to stop and think about each option, think about what is more likely: that the training of a skill, such as playing an instrument, should be fun and teachers just don't get it? or that perhaps fun is the result of a long process of incremental boring and simple steps?
Using myself as an example, when learning guitar, i learnt the FUN way! i would go on to watch people play, read books on folk music where they tell you the strumming pattern and the chords (i had to look up the chords on a chart because, really, learning how to BUILD the chords and why chords are the way they are was not fun at all) so i would learn to play 10-12 songs i liked, and i would sing away, and MY GOODNESS was it fun! i would play all my songs and i would even create some songs of my own...yet when it came the time to play more complicated songs, i found myself in the middle of people talking about individual notes on each string, and modifying the chords with all sorts of numbers and symbols that i could not understand, i was not able to find the notes on my instrument, i was able to have a lot of fun with it playing my chords, but if you asked me to play a C# note i wouldn't be able to do it.... you see these people knew how to read notes, and how to construct the chords, and therefore how to modify them and were able to do many MANY more things with the instrument than i did, and 100% of them, had learnt in the boring way; spending hours upon hours just learning to find the notes, learning very basic tunes and using them as ways to learn more basic knowledge that seemed boring and pointless.... but as these kept building on top of one another, they began to find themselves playing all sorts of tunes and adding all sorts of flavors, and not only on guitar! they could apply a lot of that knowledge to piano, and clarinet, and violin! and have fun with all of them too.
Then I learnt how to draw, and it was a 7 year grind of thousands of hours of drawing straight lines, and cubes and circles, learning anatomy and perspective, i wanted to draw dragons! but now i understood that i needed to eat my vegetables first. I am no master of arts, I am still in the middle of my learning as an artist, but i can tell you, that fun is TREMENDOUSLY OVERRATED, If you want to lark around and have fun, do it, it's totally alright, but if you want to master a skill you're gonna have to do it the slow way.
The issue here is, you can teach technicality (which I agree is important) but you can do so without patronising or boring the student, it's about being a good teacher who engaged the student. It isn't either or, you can do both, and should.
The problem is, that the teachers Lloyd is referring to only teach one way to master an instrument, when there are other, more fun and organic ways to learn. Many of the greatest guitarists, of all kinds of different musical genres have no ability to read music.
You don't have to know music theory, or sight-read notation to master an instrument. Yes, it takes a long time either way, but if you stick at one instrument for long enough, you will eventually develop a musical understanding that's entirely your own. Some even go on to develop completely unique systems of tuning and playing their instruments.
@@Stettafire I think this is going away from the point lloyd makes and that i try to dispute; that "technicality" is not something important for learning or "mastering" an instrument, and that it should not be taught until later on, what he describes as "fun" is basically skipping the boring parts and getting on with playing music. I propose that the boring stuff is in fact very important for learning the skill.
What you are describing is true, i think teachers should make their darn best to make it fun to learn, because these things are boring enough as they are, but the point of the video is not "these teachers are bad because they didn't make this exercise fun" but rather "these teachers are bad because they didn't teach me how to do fun stuff".
I reiterate, i agree with your statement, but no one is saying that teachers should be patronising and boring, just that they should teach the boring stuff.
TL;DR: good for you, i agree, but it has nothing to do with what im saying
Totally agree! Same experience when learning a new language. Instead of having fun and trying to speak and understand it, they start with all the rules and exceptions to the rules....
Did JK Simmons throw a chair at you because you weren't at his tempo?
Infinite poop. You sit on the toilet to poop, but the poop never stops coming out of your butt. You have to start flushing the toilet every two minutes to keep up. You try to pinch your butt closed but that makes your insides hurt. The poop accelerates. You call 911. The paramedics call for doctors. The doctors call for specialists. The story trends on Twitter. You turn down talk show appearances. Your septic tank fails. People form a cult. Your toilet is finished. Volunteers arrive with buckets and shovels. You are completely used to the smell. The poop accelerates. You are moved to a stepladder with a hole in the top step. The poop accelerates. The shovelers abandon the buckets and shovel directly out the window. The poop accelerates. A candlelight vigil forms around your house. One of the workers falls over and can't free himself. The poop accelerates. A priest knocks over the stepladder and tackles you out the window. You land in the pile. The poop accelerates. The force now propels you forward and upward. Vigil goers grab at your legs. The poop ignites from their candles. The Facebook live event hits 1 million viewers. The poop accelerates. You are 30 feet (9.14 m) in the air. The fire engulfs the vigil and your house. 60 feet (18.29 m). The poop accelerates. The torrent underneath you is deafening. 5 million Facebook live viewers. You try to close up shop but your butthole disintegrated long ago. 120 feet (36.58 m) up. Your house explodes. The poop accelerates. 1000 feet (304.8 m). You are now tracked on radar. You try to change your angle of ascent but you should have thought of that way earlier. The poop accelerates. 4,000 feet (0 m). NORAD upgrades to DEFCON 3. Concentric circles of fire engulf your city. The poop accelerates. You have broken the sound barrier. 30,000 feet (0 m). You no longer take in enough oxygen to sustain consciousness. 60,000 feet (0 m). CNN is reporting on all the world records you've broken. 200,000 feet (0 m). You are no longer alive. The poop accelerates. Your body disintegrates but your poop contrail remains. NASA can no longer track you. You break the light-speed barrier and we can no longer bear witness. The poop accelerates. Forever.
Simmons: *Throws chair*
Lloyd: "Oh, that won't do, now will it?"
@@ZeroDisturbed "The poop accelerates. Forever."
Just like your comment, in fact ;-)
I remember having these feelings when I first started music, but It all comes down to “playing through the pain”. A line me and my fellow musicians would say to each other. Usually because our fingers were bleeding but sometimes in the context of pushing through the song (mistakes). Playing an instrument is a physical thing. It takes practice. And it’s up to you to discover your own musical abilities. Great, thought provoking videos! Thank you so much!
That's the thing though, people want to learn how to play music, not how to be a musician. There should be some middle ground somewhere, but it seems all teachers want to prepare you for is being in an orchestra.
So far there's 3.1K likes and 42 music teachers following.
114 music teachers now
Bluebelle51 could be drummers as well in regard to Lloyd’s intro
I've never saw you before. But I like you!! It was painful seeing my kids love of music crushed for 'grades'.
My son now plays drums with a really chill teacher who looks like he's hungover most of the time. And my daughter plays violin with a really fun loving teacher.
The problem is, music schools teach the profession of musician and most teachers are from that environment so sight reading is the thing that gets you work and can be tested on an exam.
Classical musicians aren't real musicians imo. At least most of them aren't, the ones that are are musicians on the side. Playing naturally with a band is not even remotely the same as playing in an orchestra.
Sounds like both of you don't know any classical musicians or have some especially colored impressions of them, because everything you've said about them not being artists or real musicians is patently false.
@@Awaclus What? Since when is a producer a part of a band? In most bands I know members of, if a producer told them how to play they would tell them to fuck off.
Asgdhgs Fhrfgfd and I would add teachers. As not everybody has the skill(innate or learned) to transmit in an appropriate way the necessary knowledge to another human.
I would say that this three areas of expertise can be represented in a ven diagram of three intersected circles and people fall in any of those seven areas.
@@Awaclus That's the case with pop music, but not in many other genres. Or at least, it's much less common in other genres.
Producers thinking they were supposed to meddle with things like that has ruined so many albums. The Talking Heads is a classic example of an awesome band that sounds terrible on all their recordings because producers messed with the aesthetic.
Found your story really insteresting, I'm starting as a music teacher and it is tough when you play for 20 years to imagine how a begginer will approach what you teach. I mean where you start of will vary from person to person, and maybe your teachers had no pacience to find out what you wanted, or didn't care about teaching. It's a shame, because you do really seem to have good ears for tuning and tempo.
Knowing what you want to play is also key, it is very different to teach someone to play on an orchestra, as in a rock band, funk band, folk, ska, etc..
I'll say it's never too late to start, and it's really fun, specially when you play with friends. Theory should come slowly and should be enjoyable because it lets you do interesting things.
This video just became the comment section for that dance video
Hey LB, I've always loved your content and I just got a puppy, so I've been putting on your videos for him while I am in class and your talking helps keep him from getting lonely. So thank you! I was thinking it would be cool if you did a video on ancient dogs or dogs in whatever part of history you prefer, I think Peter (the puppy) would love to learn the history of his people, as would I! Have a great day and thanks for the awesome content!
I wanted to comment on his dance video so I came here.
This video really opened some doors for my music study and teaching my kids, thank you.
Now exchange every "Music" in this rant with "Maths" - still valid.
Huh, I don't seem to remember the math lesson where my teacher went "dubalee-dabelee-dibalee" but maybe I just wasn't paying attention
I agree whole-heartedly and must include 'History' in that list because being of Scottish decent, we had nothing but the Jacobite Rebellion rammed down our necks and not the industrial Revolution that was happening along side said Rebellion and 'Latin', where I got some much needed sleep on hot afternoons and 'English' for the "Classics" we were introduced to in High School as being of no use in the 'Modern World' and the lack of enthusiasm shown by the rest of the class in those drawn out, monotone recitations of Shakespearian drivel and the ridicule when I tried to be "theatrical" and was duly disabused by my teacher for "larking around; how dare I" and my class mates.
I was the understudy for "Oliver" in the school musical but my voice broke just in time to kick the last fun out of any school life I had.
Teaching can't be easy.
[Edit: Removal of asterices and spelling mistakes. (Plural of asterix, I was led to believe)]
As a physicist and a musician, yes. YES
I couldn’t agree more. 👍🏼
Yeah jesus christ.. something is wrong with people liking maths. They are always boring, humorless and moronic (teachers). But good at numbers I guess.
You make really really good points, in this I recognised why I dropped out of music lessons in the first place. It should be about what the kid wants to be able to do, not what the teachers want that kid to be able to do!
Lindy doing a Charleston dance would complete my life
ua-cam.com/video/HdgCq1IGmsY/v-deo.html
My first music teacher in school was highly conceited and totally lacked the skills to teach a class. Essentially, the handful of kids who could already play instruments got together and made a band, got their own practise room, got time off other classes to jam, and were overtly treated as special. The rest of us cabbages got a handful of aural training exercises and learned some 40 year old pop songs which sounded like arse because most of the people playing had no motivation, and our teacher had such a short fuse that we got an angry rant most every lesson.
It was one of the most frustrating experiences and cemented my sense that I was an inferior musician, despite longing to be in a band.
The following years, I tried taking music as a high school subject but because my learning was so stunted from a lack of rudimentary learning, those lessons were even more frustrating despite having a competent teacher at that time. I sunk into deep depression feeling like my passion was a joke because I couldn't pick out an interval that everybody else seemed to.
I guess artistic disciplines tend to fall behind the curve in terms of optimality, perhaps because there isn't a large industry pressure for schools to produce excellent musicians in great number. The skilled pupils get cherry picked young, and the rest are left to feel like they just don't have that 'magic'.
2 uploads in one week? Impossible!
Rants don't count, they are spontaneously self-created.
ikr, I would have thought he'd be super busy working on the €154,710 comic he promised his backers 2 years ago
But no
i didn't watch this till now because i thought it was an old video... MORE RANTS PLEASE
1wsx10 same
Can relate. I know this exactly. My music teachers were making everything so technical that, as a child, I didn't even realise that music was an art form and good music is defined by how nice it sounds, not how technically well it is performed.
ScienceTube Perfect is indeed the enemy of good. Rick Beato made a video with that message and it really struck a chord with me. I had one great teacher, but my parents thought that I was learning so fast that I should get a new, "better" teacher. They didn't stop to think that maybe the reason for my learning speed was because I was enjoying working with my other teacher. They didn't ask me. My next teacher was very good, don't get me wrong. Maybe a few years later I might've really liked working with him. But no matter good of a teacher he was, he was simply the wrong one. So I stopped enjoying making music, and today I don't make any. Nowadays I only listen to music, because that's the only way for me to enjoy it.
It sounds nice because it's technically well performed. Apply to all arts.
@@michael43216
Well... not necessarily. Sure, it does help if you know what you're doing. But all the technical skill in the world won't turn an ugly piece of art beautiful, and (especially in music) there are some beautiful pieces of art that you don't need a lot of skill to replicate at all.
Anyway, that's not what my comment was about. I'm not saying that noone should learn technique, ever. Obviously, you need to learn at least the basics of a craft before you can really experience it. But art should not be done for the technique, nor should teaching art focus *only* (or even primarily) on the technique. It's simply true that there is no objective value to art, because art is done purely for our enjoyment, and so its value is entirely subjective. Focussing on the technique imposes an objective standard on something that is objectively subjective. That sucks the fun right out of it.
Or at least for me it did. I'm not an artist. I'm shit at drawing, I'm shit at singing. I may be less shit at playing piano than I am now if I hadn't stopped when I was, maybe, 12, but I had. I can read musical notation, but I can't hit a note by reading it. I can't identify the instruments in a piece of music. But these are the things that my music teachers in school focused on, and the art teachers just told us to do random projects which I hated, so I got the impression that art was simply something to be avoided at all costs. Locked away in museums and art galleries where snobby art fans would be kept busy and, more importantly, far away from me.
After I left school a few years ago, though, I started to sing along to songs I liked. I wanted to draw maps or capture scenes for a pen-and-paper roleplaying game. I have *no technique at all* and still, the things I drew turned out decently. I discovered that I do like singing, just not a shit song that a shit teacher had prepared and I had no connection to, to teach us to read musical notation. It may not be technically well done, but it's art and I like it, so *fuck the technique!* That's how I rediscovered my love for art that had been absolutely deleted by bad music and art teachers.
So no, technique really is largely irrelevant (at least from the point on where you are able to experiment for yourself, and that is a very, very low bar). The *only* thing that matters is that it's fun. If you have fun mechanically running down a complicated musical composition, then good for you. It's not for me, thanks.
@Mariano Mazza Nope, a plain white painted vase can be technically good, but boring and disregarded because it doesn't do anything for the viewer. No, true power is in expression. Technicality helps, sure, but it's only 50% of the story.
Even outside the arts, knowing how an array works is darn useless to a programmer if they don't have the creativity to know when to use, or not to use it. Technical knowledge without creativity (i.e the ability to think outside the box) will only get you so far in life.
@@sciencetube4574
I am an artists. Clasical guitarrist, composer, teacher, performer.
So, yeah.
I can't recall having a so unfunf experience getting teched in music, as you and quite a bunch of comentors describe and consider sight reading, and being able to read and understand the theory of music is tremndously helpful, if you want to play in/organize an ensemble exceeding roundabout 7 different voices. But it's a sad truth, that you seldom get tought how to make music just by lisening and trying out what works and what dosen't (improvisation). It's pretty close to learning a new language, and especially in classical music, you, sadly, don't learn to speak before you learn to read. The best way imho is, learn to speak (play your instrument) first, after you got the basics, learn to read and write, then properly learn the grammar (chords, musical structure, ie basics of composing).
why are his new vid comments disabled? I wanted to call him handsome but now I can't :'(
Same problem with my computing master degree, boring horrible stuff, instead of fun, exciting things!
It should be a criminal offense to scar children with bad teaching...
Please can you do a video on the British expeditions to Somaliland 1901-1920 or the ‘mad mullah’
I really agree with this, I'm learning to play the bagpipes right now and I really love it, I thank my teacher for having the patient with me and there enthusiasm, if the teacher loves to play and wants others to share there enthusiasm then you will want to learn, that's at least my experience
I wanted to get into piano, but when I went to the teacher with my mother and played the one piece I already could play and liked (The Flohwalzer) the teacher told me that it's trash and we won't be playing none of that. Which was basically a death sentence for my musical ambitions at that point.
Thank you Lindy!!! This has given me more confidence to try and relearn some instruments as I get older! It should be fun and I never got that!
"You don't count drums"
I'll just take that as a personal insult, thank you :D
I'm always joking with my drummer friend - "What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians but isn't one? A drummer!" But seriously, some of the most talented musicians I've met are drummers.
Hey Lloyd, couldn't agree more. I just graduated with a first class degree in music and never even tried to sight read music until the age of 16. The approach you describe is something that I'm going to dedicate my work to remove! I remember teaching some 7 year olds piano as a substitute teacher and recoiled at the horror of the boring swill they were being forced through. Next week I came back after transcribing some Minecraft music and that song from Frozen - you should've seen their little faces light up! It had parents coming into school to ask after the new teacher because it had such an effect... A bit sad that this was the state of things but very encouraging that people reacted so positively to a more celebratory approach to music pedagogy!
Jamming is fun, but all the music teachers I ever encountered seemed to frown upon it a great deal.
A real shame.
My music teacher is recording an EP with me based on building from improvised jams together lol
@@josephrohrbach1588 Dang, you are one lucky spud.
@@sandwich2473 quite
I feel you man. It is very hard finding a teacher who passionately cares for the medium and wants to teach. In order for this to work, the student has to want to do it too. The best part though is when you put a lot of effort into it, they believe in you as you progress.
You don't count drums? Sounds like Lindybeige is a closet guitarist or bass player to me. "You're in a Band?" "Yes." "How many guys in your band?" "Three musicians and a drummer". BAM.
Isn't the joke usually that the bassist is the one that just hangs around with musicians??
@@hammer_ttk i thought it was the drummer
There's a venue near me I've gigged a couple of times. On the stage door is a sign saying..."All drummers must be accompanied by an adult."
The joke is the drummers are not musicians lol.
@@ElvisRocking1 maybe you could explain what people mean when they say "wooosh"?
My goodness this strikes a chord with me. I was given the Trumpet to learn as a child, played it for 10 years with the type of teaching you describe, increasing my ability at a negligible rate due to how little I cared for the instrument. At no point was I told to seek out music and tunes involving the instrument that I LIKED and bring them back to try and learn, it was all soulless exercises and theory with no desire to play.
When I was 18, after quitting the Trumpet, I went out and bought a bass guitar, a teach-yourself-how book, and after one weekend of working out the basics, taught myself how to play by playing by ear along to the CDs of music I really loved.
Three years later I'd got so much enjoyment out of the instrument I'd played so much in that time that i was proficient enough to be playing in a band getting overseas gigs and producing albums.
why disabled comments in the new youtube video ???
This is extremely relatable. In high school marching band, our band director only cared about winning competitions. We worked hard and got some trophies, but it wasn’t fun. Sure we were supposedly “more skilled” than the other schools, but they were the actually winners because they were actually having fun.
Piano party trick: freestyle a rythm and only use the black keys, it always sounds good
It's almost like a pentatonic scale is foolproof
Play a single chord with your left hand as well, if you want to be fancy.
Yeah and watch the 'real' musicians cross their arms and snicker amongst themselves lol
I take a big portion of joy out of your rhetorical skills. The expression of voice and face, sometimes even of the whole body is very entertaining to watch. I think you could be a great actor.
(Of course the content of the rant is good aswell)
Maybe it's to sabotage the competition so they won't have to fight over professional orchestra positions.
There's a reason they're not successful musicians at that point but mere music teachers anyway.
@@Mtonazzi as the saying goes " Those who cant, Teach " :)
@@Awaclus Must not be a universal thing. I moved through several schools all over my country because of my father's job and I can't say that was true for me.
@@Awaclus Nope, at every school I had different music teachers. None was what you'd call a successful one, but mere school teachers.
I know of at least one that tried to be part of the national orchestra, but didn't made the cut. Of the others, in retrospective, I can't say they were teachers out of "love for teaching"
History teachers go through much the same thing. It's the bain of every history lover's existence to hear people say "Oh, I don't like history, it's boring." And that largely comes down to the way history is taught in primary/elementary and high schools: Memorizing names and dates. That is literally the worst way to teach history! Yes, it's important to know who did what, where and when (and if you're lucky, why). But what good does that do if that's all you absorb? And if you're bored out of your gourd and only there because you have to be, you're not even going to absorb that much!
I for one, and I know you too Lindy, prefer to look at history as just that: "Hi, story"! History is filled with all manner of incredible stories, from the grand in scale like the Tsars of Russia or the birth of the Industrial Revolution, to singular events and characters:
Ever looked up the life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, hm? Guy was amazing, what a feckin' unit!
How about some action? Got the Battle of Saragarhi right here.
You want horror? Two words: Murder. Hotel. run by H. H. Holmes, America's first serial killer.
Too dark for you, want something more uplifting? We got the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 right up the street.
You like adventures on the high seas? Boom! Voyage of the SMS Seeadler, the world's last fighting sail. You're welcome.
Love Titanic but sick of Leo DeCaprio? I don't blame you. Try the Wreck of the SS Central America on for size.
Need your hope in humanity restored? The Christmas Truce. Enjoy.
You want comedy? We got comedy! The Voyage of the Damned, the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron. Wasn't meant to be funny at the time, but after reading or hearing about it you will either piss your pants laughing... or possibly question if sanity actually exists in this world.
Think you got us stumped for your love of absolute mindfucks? Think again, we got Rasputin up in this house!
History is only boring if you make it boring, like Lindy's experience with learning music. If you teach it in a fun way, then people will have fun with it and learn a lot more.
Language lessons should be fun as well and so should History lessons! All lessons should be fun actually...
Possibly the most civil rant I have come across... and I agree entirely.
I have an admittedly miserable belief that contrary to reasonable expectation the kind of person who generally becomes a teacher is the kind of person who also has a special talent for making whatever they do an utterly joyless exercise for everyone around them. That singular teacher most of us fondly remember as being 'great' and 'inspiring' was actually just a rare perfectly ordinary person thrown in to stark relief by comparison with their inspiration-sapping peers.
This is especially obvious with music because everybody knows music is enjoyable and all the musical people they have ever met, who aren't teachers, are obviously and infectiously passionate about their business...
...I find it very telling that as I get older, and memories of school grow dim, that I grow increasingly interested in everything around me and even find myself wanting to know more about things I previously thought I had no interest in...
...I suspect most of us are by nature continually and eternally curious about everything and get real fulfilment from learning. But it can take many years, if ever, for the teacher-induced scars to heal enough for us to rediscover that native curiosity.
While I did my duty at school and did well out of necessity because that was required to reach my goals I am also very much aware that virtually all the rich enjoyment I got from learning, even then, was done in my own time.
To sum-up I have to ask what kind of inhuman mind came up with the clip-board? Worse yet what kind of of person could reduce any school trip to miserable monotony and break any nascent interest in their charges by the simple expedient of issuing those damnable devices? I'll tell you - teachers!
The reason that they want to teach you how to sight read first is probably so they can just stick you with homework instead of putting in the effort of actually teaching someone an instrument. Then again maybe I'm biased since I'm a guitar player and sheet music is our natural enemy.
I totally agree with you! There is a notion held by most that pursuits like music, academics and athletics are only achievable by a few prodigal students. Therefore teachers suck all the joy out of lessons so that, by design, only a rare breed of student will find any value in it. When the common child fails to show interest we tell ourselves "Maybe my child just wasn't born a musician". Nonsense!
As a maths teacher I feel strongly about this. Growing up I hated maths classes until, in university, I fell in love with the beauty of mathematics. I endeavor to motivate my students with some of the amazing things maths tells us about the universe. Much like music, maths is typically taught by asking students to solve equations in the way the textbook outlines. This is like teaching sheet music before even hearing the instrument or toying around with it.
We are failing the next generation with lazy, uninspiring teaching that is teaching kids that unless they are a prodigy they shouldn't bother trying.
People misinterpret all the work that there is behind expression. As every aspect of human life, music is incredibly complex and a science on itself. You can be a great musician without music theory if you're gifted but for most of us it comes with hard work for a few minutes of fun.
Duuuude, I totally think the same way. I was studying Jazz piano at the town academy and really couldn't sightread. But my piano teacher was very patient with me and just taught me the tunes by playing them. I got an electric guitar for christmas later and within a few months stopped playing piano. I practiced every day, sometimes up to four hours at a time and really could shred. All without theoretics. It was the most fun and dedication i've ever had from/in something.
Very true, I also find there is an increasing stigma around it. That it is nerdy etc.
I.E. at my school we would have every year, "The Battle of The Bands" every year it used to be so popular that some groups couldn't even get on the line up, by the time I left the school there wasn't enough people in the entire school to make up half a Battle of bands concert so it was scrapped.
We also had a choir of a few hundred and same for the Orchestra and now it's 30 ish.
I've noticed this kind of thing here, in france, as well. while music isn't a part of school (okay, it might be, but, like... it's just a joke), I am in a band with mostly middle-aged adults (I'm not, as you can tell) and a few old people. the kids leave for studies, couples break up (people take marriage less seriously in France), and other people die of old age... when I came in, there were easily fourty people but now, we're struggling to be 20.
But it isn't just music. I feel like people are getting less and less happy. less merchants sell at local markets, there are less communal parties... people don't go out of their way to have fun anymore.
my theory is that the soul-sucking race to the bottom started by America is making people more and more stressed out and wages relative to cost of living has gone down, again making people more and more reluctant to spend money on enjoying life.
Really?
Maybe my school is a bit biased because my school band plays in the Rose Bowl parade, but being in the band here in Ohio was actually considered cool. A lot of the kids who’d be considered “popular” were band kids. But again, my school didn’t really have popular and unpopular people. Everyone was pretty cool with everyone else. I just assumed that was the way schools were in most modern 1st world suburbs. I thought that hardcore bullying and shaming people was more of a thing during our parents generation, like if you were growing up in the 80s or 90s.
@@Bolt99K Well I'm in the UK, and that bascially means you have to make fun (bascially just banter) of everyone for everything no matter how minor it is. And yeah there wasn't any popular kids stuff but there were obvious unwritten rules for people to just not give people ammunition. Bascially just think The Inbetweeners.
I faintly recall you making this same point in another one of your videos. Glad to see you still stick to your guns
To anyone who can or can't play, and likes music;
The Music Lesson (audiobook), by Victor Wooten is well worth a listen.
Lloyd you genuinely seem like such a decent person - someone I would absolutely love to sit down with, have a pint and chat about I dunno - the Poloponnesian War or something. Just an interesting individual that I think someone could ramble on with for hours on end - good on you sir and thank you for such brilliant content!
My advice for new musicians is always the same: Playing an instrument is hard. Really, REALLY hard... if you want to master your instrument, you're looking at a lifetime of difficult, frustrating practice , and in order to do that, you have to love it.
I think that's where traditional music teachers go wrong. They focus on the technical and theoretical side and don't give kids a chance to have fun and fall in love with their instrument. If you let a kid have fun, learn a few tunes, play songs they know and like...they're way more likely to stick at it and be motivated to learn the technical side later because they'll want to get better.
Completely agree.
I suffered through two years of guitar school when I was 12-14. I was a good kid back then, but by second year I started skipping classes, got mediocre grades and basically almost stoppped playing music altogether. I gave up going there after that, and started teaching myself through online lessons, tabs of my favourite songs and basic trial and error. Two years later I bought an electric guitar joined a band, and also started to experiment on my sister's piano. Now it's been over a decade, and I still pick up a guitar almost every day to play some tunes, just for the joy of it, and I occasionally sit with my friends for a jam session as well. No pressure, no stress, just fun.
Finnally, A man who recognizes the illegitimacy of percussion.
Preach, Lloyd, preach.
Sightreading literally everything killed music for me.
We'd work on four or five songs for a concert from sightreading it alone, having never heard the damn piece played.
It was really bad for me because my parents had made me into a musical shut-in living on a farm where all we listened to was pop country. In marching band, where we played reasonably contemporary music, I had the bass line for "Thriller" and had never heard it before.
Whinge over