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I’ve been reflecting on how I’ve taught myself music over the years. *Do* I know music? I know enough of it to have been paid to play it, though I still probably know less than a few % of what professional musos and even serious enthusiasts know. Huge deficits and gaps. And yet https://t.co/GRNHn9iqwf
Nobody in my family was musical or had any background. I’ve never taken a lesson. If someone else in that position was Very Serious about becoming a musician, they could conceivably be better than me on every front in about 2-3 years of concerted, directed, smart effort. And yet
All I did, really, was pick up a guitar at around the age of 14, noodle around stupidly, look up stuff on the Internet and in books, noodle around more stupidly still, and over the course of a decade or so, yeah I can play. And even sing, sorta. Not too terribly
My musical knowledge and ability is this sort of scrappy junkyard mess. Extremely incoherent, extremely haphazard, inelegant, clunky. And yet. And that whole experience in turn I guess has informed my approach to learning... anything
Practically everything is just a bunch of stuff. And the stuff is made up of other stuff, and there’s relationships between them. You take one thing and you fiddle around with it, try it in different contexts, move it up and down and turn it inside out and you start to understand
The very cool thing that almost invariably happens is- once you learn a few different things within some context of system, you’ll often discover that some of those things are actually the same as other things. The total number of things you need to know *decreases*. Exhilarating
Like... for eg, there’s a relationship between music (patterns in time) and visual art (patterns in space) and they have the same principles - contrast, rhythm, etc. Once you realise they’re the same thing, learning one thing means learning the corresponding thing simultaneously
Music isn’t actually my primary interest - the thing I’m probably most into is the art of words. But/and I’ve always had a distaste for the idea of forcing yourself to learn esoteric vocabulary - it’s so much more interesting imo to better understand the words you already use
80-99% of creativity is some form of “take X and make it Y”, where the choices for X and Y are something refreshing and different. Once you realise everything is a remix, you can let go of 95%+ of creative anxiety and focus on tinkering https://t.co/pjHFdTeZuD
Small pattern-facts like these are the some of the best facts - in language, in music, in any domain. They refactor your perception, enable playfulness, experimentation. I’m reminded of Ben Zander saying, of Chopin, “the job of the C is to make the B sad” https://t.co/0NUPXVKkgc
Pattern recognition is often what separates a beautiful thing from an indescipherable mess. Being able to know what you’re looking for makes things much more comprehensible. A good teacher points and says, do you notice...? And when the student makes the connection themselves, 💥
Watch a classroom get enlightened in a couple of minutes https://t.co/7vfUZ2Y421
The hat means an S fell out https://t.co/9EZd8x0uf0 https://t.co/w766jOiSpG
intervals https://t.co/Yz4epH0VAF
It took me 15 years to realize this: if you practice singing along to your musical instrument, and you play melodies you know on the instrument while singing along, you develop an intuitive feel for the intervals on the instrument then you can practice without your instrument
The hat means an S fell out https://t.co/9EZd8x0uf0 https://t.co/w766jOiSpG
intervals https://t.co/Yz4epH0VAF
It took me 15 years to realize this: if you practice singing along to your musical instrument, and you play melodies you know on the instrument while singing along, you develop an intuitive feel for the intervals on the instrument then you can practice without your instrument