The article seems to imply that adults will find learning an instrument extremely difficult and will likely never become really proficient -- but suggests they should just lower their expectations and go ahead and try anyway, because the experience will be enriching. Is that really "not too late"?
As an adult trying to learn to play the piano, this is all rather depressing.
As someone who has taught music to adults, I can corroborate:
There is definitely a change in the brain that happens if you are heavily exposed to playing an instrument or otherwise making music at and before 11 to 12 years of age. Adults who do not have this are handicapped like they are missing some sort of sense. The difference is like the difference between an immigrant's adopted language and that same language as spoken by their children.
The former can work really, really hard and speak quite fluently and have the grammar and most of the accent tamed as to speak very elegantly and understandably, but they almost never get rid of the last vestiges of that accent.
If you want your children to truly learn music, then hang out with and have fun with people who do music effortlessly and for the sheer fun of it. This means that you go to jam sessions at private houses. Anything that remotely smells like a performance won't work the same way. Expose them to music done purely for the fun of it.
If you want to learn music as an adult, you have to learn how to hear again. The immigrant in the first example can think he's speaking perfectly, even though native speakers clearly hear that he is not. You have to learn how to hear again. You have to become directly aware sound stimulus, unfiltered through the higher-level notions you've developed about it. Then you have to correlate that with what happens when you manipulate your instrument. Keep doing that for 3 to 5 years.
I should add that, while I was exposed to music at an early age, I didn't really take joy in it until I discovered Irish Traditional music at the age of 19. I knew back then, that it would be impossible for me to accomplish much. I just thought if I could learn just this one tune. Then I learned a second tune. Then I went through a period of time when I was feverishly listening to tapes of myself and comparing what I heard myself play to recordings of masters for 8 hours a day sometimes. Eventually, I got good enough to teach at a school for Irish Music in the US and even qualified to compete at the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, which is basically the world competition.
My journey was two decades. The sooner you start, the more time you have to enjoy fluency!
Hey, there's an inspirational story there. Thanks!
I think your personal experience holds true in a lot of domains: start with something small you can wrap your head around, and then expand outward from there.
The thing is that you can't really see the distance to various goals until you start climbing up the path. It's like looking up the mountains from the coast; you'll see high peaks, some green in front, some white with snow in background; you know greenish ones are nearer, but they all seem as high. Only after you climb the first peak, you'll find that there are more peaks beyond that, and the white shiny peaks are far, far away beyond those previously unseen peaks.
Playing like professional players is like conquering those white shiny Himalayan peaks; it may not be impossible with huge efforts, but it's more likely that you run out of time.
In that sense, probably it's "too late". I started playing the piano when I was 11, but never pursued it professionally, and now at 39 I have so many pieces I want to play but know that I will never be able to finish before I die.
So, yes, if you are looking at the shiny peaks, you have to lower your expectation.
The secret is that the hidden peaks beyond the first ones are almost as rich as the shiny peaks. And you know what, most of your audiences won't be able to tell the difference between the shiny ones and those middle peaks. You can play at parties, or even participate in local concerts of hobby players. You'll be able to enjoy playing those pieces and the experience will be as satisfying.
I don't know about the "extremely" difficult part but certainly it is more difficult and you need to be realistic in your expectations. I learned piano when I was a kid, rather I was forced to by my parents, never really enjoyed it and was mainly parroting than really learning. Now I am trying to learn electric guitar and I am much more interested in learning about music theory, reading music, and how to practice effectively, etc than I ever was as a kid. The first piece my instructor gave me was "Ode to Joy" and I thought I would never learn to play it, but I got through it and then another piece and at some point something "clicked" and my ability to play shot up dramatically - not anywhere near what even a mediocre guitarist can play but much beyond where I was even a short time ago, so I can directly relate to the experience of this article. You may not be aware of the progress you're are actually making because it doesn't always happen in a nice smooth curve. Keep plugging away, you'll get there .
Thanks for the encouragement :) I am indeed still plugging away, even if the process is not as easy or as fast as I would like. And it is fun nonetheless -- I am in love with the instrument: its size, the physical immediacy of the sound it produces, the charming ease with which you can play in C. It would be nice to think that I'll end up actually being good some day, though. We'll see.
Have you gone back to the piano as you learn guitar? It's arguably the ideal instrument for theory...
One reason I decided on the guitar is that my apt is too small for a piano - even the electric keyboard variety at this point. What little I did pick up as a kid has helped somewhat though in learning guitar. Someday I'd like to go back to it.
One of the hidden pleasures I've discovered about learning new things is that it instils a much finer appreciation of the thing that you are learning. For me that alone is usually more than worth the effort of learning.
Also I've learned not to push too hard and to focus on the journey rather than the goal, but that's also something I've also had to work extremely hard at.
I started taking violin lessons with my (then) 5-year-old daughter. We've been going once a week for two years now (I'm 37), and it's a lot of fun, precisely because I had no previous experience with musical instruments, and so I had no expectations for myself. Additionally, it's a nice excuse to spend some time with your kid.
It sounds like your daughter's being taught with the Suzuki Method, which is fine to get started with, but you will want to switch her to a better teacher soon. Suzuki will train her ears, which is important, but that's about all it's good for. It's designed so that kids reaquit shortly after they enter high school, and it leaves them mostly unable to sight-read.
Background: I am a violinist, playing professionally at weddings and such about once a month (full-time student), and I started on Suzuki.
btw, my father (who also had very little musical training) forced me to improvise (make up music as I went) for five minutes every day, even if it didn't sound good. Today I am quite good at musical improvisation, a skill that is no longer really taught in the classical school of music. I don't know if my dad's method would work for everyone, but I'd recommend it.
That is very inspiring and yes, it does seem like a great way to connect with your kids and at the same time teaching them the value of hard work (when I was little, I remember thinking my parents just knew everything, with little thought to how hard they worked to gain that knowledge).
On a separate note, are you any good? Are you better than your 5 year old?
Heh heh... well... I find we go back and forth, although I would imagine there would be some inflection point at which she'll start rapidly getting better than me.
I've been learning guitar for the last few years, never having had much musical training as a kid. I fiddle around with it most evenings, just trying to play stuff I like, not taking it too seriously, and I've gotten good enough to enjoy it. I'll never be as good as [insert guitar hero here]. So what? Most nights, my place has the best free live music within miles.
I watched GroundHog Day in my mid-30s and was inspired to learn the piano. Stop laughing at the back. The fact is that you don't have to be good to enjoy yourself.
If you like Groundhog Day that much, you should check out the novel it was loosely inspired by, The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P.D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky isn't known as a novelist (he became a guru type) but up until the end where it gets a bit doctrinal, I thought it was a thoroughly delightful book. It's also a psychological tour de force, but I don't want to spoil the story by explaining why.
There's so much room for interpretation in this movie it's hard to know where to start. Consider, for instance, the fact that Murray's character apparently spends decades in this state.
"Hawkins says fear of failure is a big issue for his adult students: "We don't want to be seen as incompetent or struggling with a task, because we are so competent in so many areas of our life. We do so many things well, so to start with something we don't do well is a real challenge.""
What I did in college was to run the guitar through a digital effects board and then into my cheapo computer speakers (which could be set to reasonable volume levels) or into headphones. Sound quality isn't as great, of course, but the digital stuff doesn't really care how loud you play and sounds about the same at all volume levels. You could get some pretty decent tones out of the higher-end effects boards, too.
If you want sweet tube amp sound, you're basically out of luck. That's caused by the power tubes and speakers distorting (not the pre-amp tubes), so you've gotta crank them up to 11.
There're also some products available that cut the power ratings on standard amplifiers. When I was into this stuff around 1998, your options were basically limited to YellowJackets (which let you substitute 18W EL84 tubes for EL34 amplifiers, like 50W and 100W Marshalls) and the PowerSink, which was an induction coil that would bleed off excess power as heat before it reached the speaker. Both of these would only cut the noise level from "will blow your eardrums out" to "will annoy the neighbors", and so weren't really suitable for apartments or dorms. Since then, I've heard that a bunch of manufacturers have wised up that there's a huge market in low-power tube amps, and it looks like you may be able to find 1-5W tube amps out there now.
There are definitely many more low-power tube amps available now. There are some really neat ones in the 1.5 watt config. Even still, I think there is room in the market for more.
If you already have a larger tube amp for gigs and are obsessive about the tube tone, I'd recommend searching for "power scaling" and "amp attenuator." You'd be very surprised with the sounds you can achieve at decent volumes. You can buy amps with power scaling built in or you can retrofit the circuit. Attenuators vary in quality, but they are easy to use external devices. I'm addicted to tube amps...and I used to like playing in my office in downtown Chicago to blow off steam. I often used a 30 watt amp with an Air Brake (attenuator) and I never got into any trouble because of the noise. I was able to use the same amp to play a gig in Grant Park on a Saturday and then to play in my 10 X 12' office on Monday.
You can also do it through your computer, just google "free amp sim" and you'll find plenty. The only catch is that you'll usually need a music program that supports VST.
I played the violin from my 8th to about my 16th year. Then other interests took over (programming, hanging out with friends, you know, the same story everyone has).
After about ten years I finally picked it up again. I was afraid that I'd lost all the skill I'd developed and after a day or two of playing this seemed justified.
However, I stuck with it and after a week some of it started to come back.
The violin has a very piercing sound (as in : goes through walls) and if you're practicing and making mistakes this makes it worse (on your neighbors especially).
I bought a damper first, but this didn't nullify the effects enough.
Then I bought an electric violin. Because it doesn't have a soundboard, it's very quiet. I can plug a headset in and just practice/play for myself. The sound isn't the same as an acoustic violin, but it's ideal for practice.
I assume there's a way you can do the same for the guitar, either by plugging a headset directly into the guitar or by redirecting the output from the amp to a headset.
Look into it, being able to practice/play at anytime has worked out well for me.
Build a pocket amp and use headphones (if you have a pair of headphones with a 1/4 inch jack you can just plug them directly into the guitar. It'll be really quiet without using any amplification though).
Either that or get a Pignose and don't turn it up too loud. I think Marshall makes a baby sized amp as well.
There are tons of little solid-state amps that have headphone outs and will give you a good sound. (The Roland MicroCube, for example, is a very popular choice. I even have one, and I'm normally a boutique tube amp snob.)
There are also little battery-powered headphone amps that clip onto your belt, but they tend to really suck sound-wise. Something like a MicroCube would be a better investment if you think you'll stick with it for any length of time.
nostrademons mentioned above playing around headphones so I'll also throw in suggestions for Guitarport or Guitarrig, computer-interfaced amp modeling solutions which output to headphones or speakers.
I learned the cello for one year when I was 7 (ah, free music schools in the USSR, one thing I do miss about that country...) I've had a renewed interest in learning it since one of my favorite bands is Apocalyptica. But for now, I don't have the time or money for private music lessons.
just buy a second hand cello. You'll be surprised how much you remember, and while you may have lost the rapid learning ability you have at 7, you might find you now associate practising more with fun than homework :)
At 27 (not that old I know) I'm often on the road for work. I played sax for years as a kid but I haven't picked one up in at least 12 years.
Recently I taught myself blues harp (harmonica) because it's something I can slip in my bag. With the help of web sites and gritting my teeth I'm getting pretty good. I'm now learning the accordion as well and plan to start on the trumpet some time in 2009.
I love music and there is something wonderful about being able to make it your own again. I would really recommend picking and instrument up whatever you age. The harmonica was a great introduction for me because it's cheap, easy and my wife could put up with me playing it.
I've always wanted to play the bassoon but it seemed too expensive an instrument to purchase so until last year I had not played a single note. That really bugged me until finally I accepted that I didn't need to buy one, I could just rent from the local music store. It's a puzzle of an instrument - your thumbs control ~12 keys - but half the fun was figuring some of those nuances out by trial and error.
As an adult trying to learn to play the piano, this is all rather depressing.