How Long Will It Take?

 

Music instruction videos are useful to the extent that they help people envision how they can play something by essentially looking in the mirror, but looking at somebody else playing. But music goes well beyond that: if you really want to increase skill as a musician, you have to do the work. 

One of the hardest things about music is teaching sight-reading and getting past the notion that reading is just looking at the lines and spaces and figuring out where to play those notes on their instrument. What's more difficult is teaching the reading of rhythms. You can't do it with a video because it involves actually showing people how to interpret rests and ties in real time, because it literally involves real-time work independently. A video can be rudimentally interesting but acquisition of skill is typically slower and more gradual. The question becomes whether people are going to put in the work. I wouldn’t think so these days because people want convenience and reward and want things to come quickly. [“Discuss punishment by reward”]  

A common question on Quora is how long things take: “How long will it take me to learn all the skills that I need to know in order to be a good guitar player?” People are sniffing it out in the beginning to assess whether something is worth pursuing by how long it's going to take. At the very least, it is something that might take several months or several years. It takes as long as it takes, and everybody is different. If you're resistant, it can seem to take forever: you'll keep thinking about doing it and won't be motivated because it involves potential failure. Sometimes I try to do cold readings, and it's difficult and unmotivating–and you wonder why I’m doing it.  Watching someone else doing it effortlessly is easier and perhaps might motivate us–thus the allure of video.

We’ve now completely made the shift to a video-based culture, and learning is now primarily done with videos, animations, and Powerpoint. I don't think they go far enough for music. At some point, you have to stop watching them and do the actual work. Videos leave that part out and allow people to cut to the chase as quickly as possible to extract whatever information they need in the moment and move on to the next thing. There's this race to the future where we have to absorb everything as quickly as possible in order for us to feel satisfied–and we never are. How we get satisfied now is to get attention and to quantify that attention with followers and likes, and people resort to begging for them. It's pretty crazy but it's become the norm. People are looking in the wrong places, and consequently, our skills as a civilization are going to devolve–or simply evolve. People are going to be as knowledgeable and smart as they ever were in human history; they were just smarter and more knowledgeable in different ways in the past. And so we're changing that metric with a decision point by asking, “When do I need to stop watching videos and concentrate on improving skills?”. But we’ve become inured by the idea that we aren't making progress unless the numbers add up. Consequently, people are dissuaded from doing things if they can't get immediate satisfaction. This is a difficult thing now, and it can be defeating. As a creative person, you have to have a lot of courage and willpower to continue doing the things that you do just because they're interesting. But the question becomes, will anybody else think it's interesting? People don't really want to capitulate to the whims of others just to create content that other people like. But it’s become crucial. Therefore, the artist has to square what they think is interesting and what other people think is interesting. #riff

11/30/2022

[11/30/2025: I’m of two minds about skill. The skill is to know when to use skill, or what skills to apply. Now the skill is attention for your YouTube channel, regardless of the content, or the content has to relate to popular flavors. I see this as ending in burnout because of the hamster wheel effect. People like your videos, so you keep making them again and again. You’re good at it, but it’s not good for you].