The difference between playing and practicing.
You do too much of one and not enough of the other.
Being an instrumentalist is very different from being a musician. What are some of the differences? Why do so many beginner would-be instrumentalists drop out of their lessons after only a short period of time? Honestly, not everyone is meant to be an instrumentalist. In today's music world, the odds of a beginner instrumentalist ever becoming a real working musician, are almost non-existent.
What is the difference between playing and practicing?
Playing is what you know, practicing is what you don't know. It's that simple. Can playing be considered a form of practicing? Not really. Playing is something you do as an end-result to the time you've put into your practice. This could be for a handful of songs you already know how to play, or some scales you've been incorporating into your improvisation - you know, things you already can do without a whole lot of effort. The word "practicing" by its very definition requires effort.
Practicing means wood-shedding to learn and memorizing fifty to a hundred pop songs for a gig you just got this weekend because the bass player is out sick. Practicing means shutting off the rest of the world while you labor over every chord for the five songs your guitar teacher gave you to work on that week. Practicing means believing in reaching an attainable goal in those seven days. It means understanding that unconditional commitment builds solid confidence. It means understanding that making excuses as to why you practice, is much more important than why you don’t practice.
How do real working musicians get so good at what they do?
In two words: "unconditional commitment". When was the last time you were unconditionally committed to anything other than maybe your job or your family? Musicians know no other way than to commit to their craft - without hesitation, without distraction and without condition. There is a lifestyle choice that is made in the early stages of learning how to play an instrument. This usually happens in those formidable years of childhood into early teens. Most of the musicians I've known my entire life, started learning how to play their instruments in their early teenage years.
I started taking guitar lessons when I was 13 years old. The guitar became my voice, my identity. When you are a teenage kid going through those awkward stages of adolescence, having any kind of meaningful identity as an individual, is terribly important for any kid. When I realized that I could actually play my guitar well, it was like I possessed some sort of magic power that nobody else knew. This magic power became addicting. I had my identity. I was known as a guitar player. I was considered one of the cool kids in school. My best friends simply had to get used to the idea that I was always going to be with my guitar, either practicing or playing it.
I practiced endless hours. I used to literally play one album after another in my bedroom, trying to learn and memorize all of the parts to every song. It was what I knew how to do well because it just made sense to me. Nobody ever had to tell me to go practice my guitar lessons. I wanted to practice as much as I could so I could keep getting better. I was inventive and resourceful as a kid. I wore out cassette tapes all the time. I recorded everything I did, just so I could play it back and hear what I sounded like. It was far more important to me to get it as close as possible to the song, so that nobody would ever be able to tell the difference. It might be one eight-measure lead guitar solo from Peter Frampton or finding all of the correct chords to an Eagles song. It didn't matter what it was. I wanted to get it right.
Kids or adults. Which is more likely to commit to their instrument?
I think you already know the answer to this question. When I get a call from a potential adult student who wants to learn how to play the guitar, they usually have no financial issues with being able to afford lessons with me. That's because the majority of my adult students are well-educated, successful individuals. But, one day, they reached an age when they realize that they've done everything they can do to be comfortably successful in their life…yet, they are bored. Guess how many times I've been told by a prospective adult student the following selling points. "I've always liked music and my wife got me a guitar for my birthday." Or, "It was either the guitar or take up golf." Or, "All of our kids have moved out and gotten married, and now, we're empty nesters."
The huge majority of my adult students usually contact me when they have reached a turning point in their life where they are trying to find a way to hold on to some part of their youth. Honestly, I don't know any better way to do this than to learn how to play the songs of our youth on a guitar. If I didn't already play the guitar, that would be the first reason I would have to want to learn how to play.
Unfortunately, this idea looks great on paper. Adults have adult brains; and there isn't much room left for new stuff. I would have to say that in all of the years that I have been teaching, I might see one out of every twenty adult students actually commit to their lessons and stay with me for more than a year. The rest will always find ways to quit. I don’t think it's self-sabotage as much as they simply have many more important “life” commitments that are significantly higher in priority than learning how to play the guitar. When they find out just how much commitment is involved in learning how to play an instrument, they don’t always have the same motivation as they did when they were a younger.
When I was in my middle teenage years, I had a paper route after school. That was my one and only pressing responsibility. I had chores at home and homework after dinner. I didn't have to worry about paying bills or buying groceries or any of the other millions of things my parents had to do as the adults in our house. I was a kid, and I had “kid” responsibilities. This meant that I still had plenty of room inside my brain to be a kid. That extra room was what I used to learn how to play the guitar and the bass guitar. I'd finish my paper route, eat dinner, take the trash to the curb, finish my homework, then I would grab my guitar and practice nonstop for the next few hours until it was time to go to bed. This was my life from about ages 13 to 17. All I ever did was practice and play my guitars. I knew early on that playing music was going to be a huge part of my life. Unfortunately, I never made it to college to get any real music education or degree. I didn't come from a world where those types of prospects were readily or financially available to me. Instead, I went to work full time, right out of high school. Music became secondary to me growing up and becoming a working, responsible adult man. It wasn't until many years later that I came back to music and began playing in local bands around Orlando. I started teaching guitar lessons at a local music store in 1996.
What is the difference between instrumentalists today as opposed to long ago?
There are many differences in the way we learned how to play our instruments back in the day, opposed to the way young instrumentalists are learning today. Back in the 1970's, we didn't have access to the internet or social media because neither one of those things existed. We had sheet music, books, teachers, radios and tape recorders. This was how we trained our ears to listen to music and immediately recognize what was happening in a song. We learned to recognize common patterns, chords and melodies just by hearing them. We made our own jam tracks onto cassette tapes. We wrote down chord charts in spiral notebooks for the dozens of songs we'd figured out. If we learned how to play a guitar solo, we showed our friends by playing along with the song and hitting each note. My friends back then were very tough to impress, which motivated me to practice even more of whatever I was working on, until I couldn't get it wrong.
The internet has taken away huge portions of the guesswork and the laboring over a part in a song for hours on end. Now, anyone can find just about anything that will help them play their instruments better, without ever having to be resourceful or creative in experimenting with trying to learn how to play a song completely by hearing it, or with zero visual aids. The internet and social media have become the ultimate tools for any would-be teenage instrumentalist to far exceed the same expectations of a teenager fifty years ago; and in a fraction of the time.
Unfortunately, even with all of the music information ever known to mankind readily available at our fingertips, people still find ways to make excuses as to why they don't practice or commit themselves to their instruments. We didn't have lessons videos to watch until the 1980's, and most of those were garbage.
What is the best way for someone to become a better instrumentalist?
You have got to play with other people. I don't care if it's you on a guitar and someone else on a piano or a flute. Collaboration is by far the best way to get better. When you have a four-hour jam session with your buddies, in the drummer's basement on a Sunday afternoon, the bonding that takes place is like forming a gang. You're sharing an effort together as a team. Nobody ever wants to be the weakest link in the chain of a band, so it becomes a sort of contest to see who can play their part in a song, the best. You learn that being in a band is not all about you. You learn what it's like to play well with others, even if it takes seemingly endless rehearsals to do so. That investment of time and energy is what gives us that confidence to become better instrumentalists, and maybe even eventually becoming real working musicians.
So, maybe that's what is lacking for most people who walk away from learning their instrument. They are not being challenged by their peers. They are not creating enough confidence in themselves to want to keep getting better. I was lucky. I grew up in a time when just about every friend I had, played an instrument. I started playing in bands when I was 14 years old. They weren't good bands, and nothing ever came from them, but it was the start of many more bands to come. The more bands I played in, the better I got and the better the musicians got.
Playing in a band or just out on your back porch.
When you meet a real musician, you can usually tell that music is the air they breathe. It's unconditional. They know no other way to be. Music makes sense to them in a much deeper, more profound way than someone who just “likes” music. Music is a language, just like any other language. Musicians have paid their lifetime dues. They have played in all of the bands, all of the gigs, all of the thousands of miles of traveling, all of the crappy motels and Denny's restaurants at three o'clock in the morning. It's a life choice that every musician makes both willingly and maybe sometimes even in the most dire of hesitation. A musician understands what is required. If it means playing in a open mic night band at a the local bar and grill or on a huge stage in front of thousands of spectators, a gig is a gig is a gig. If it means playing out on the back porch with your drinking buddies on a Saturday night, it means building memories and bonding with your friends. Most of my adult students really have no designs on playing gigs on a stage in front of an audience. Playing some Eagles or Beatles on the back porch is reason enough to practice as much as you can so you can play well, even if its for a crowd of two.
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