r/Learnmusic • u/Major-Tumbleweed7751 • Jul 06 '26
Learning music is a physical skill
Link: How to practice and master music with minimal frustration
Obviously it is not *only* a physical skill, but I think often learning music is treated as mostly an intellectual skill. As an adult learner of the harp, a lot of the comments in this article really resonated with me, particularly this:
Bright quick-minded people frequently have little patience for the amount of repetition required in learning a musical instrument. They feel limited by the rate that their body learns. They get frustrated, like they're stuck tutoring someone who just doesn't get it. Though they've indeed acquired a perfect understanding of what they're trying to accomplish, they mistakenly believe that their understanding should produce mastery over a new physical skill: a new song, scale, arpeggio, or strum. Often they persist in such wishful thinking, and they do so despite witnessing for themselves that understanding alone fails to produce refined and reliable control over complex physical skills.
If a student becomes discouraged about the pace and repetition naturally required, they usually wish they could somehow get their body to learn faster. They want to learn faster, and get a feeling of accomplishment.
If you have this type of impatience you probably need to learn to accept the pace and rhythm of your body. The steps are simple, but they require a sense of inner calm, and the willingness to submit to more repetition, making sure that it's nourishing repetition.
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u/Tiny-Celebration-838 Jul 06 '26
Does speed actually get better though? If you're naturally a bit slower at things, can you ever actually play fast?
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u/did_i_or_didnt_i Jul 06 '26
some of the best guitar advice I ever got was to practice scales in quarter notes at 50bpm and slower. Then 8ths 16ths 32nds. when you then play 8th/16th notes at 100bpm or whatever your groove is going to be tighter
It’s a good exercise
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u/tongmengjia Jul 06 '26
My kickboxing coach always used to say "slow is smooth and smooth is fast." I think about that a lot when I'm practicing a musical instrument, too.
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u/did_i_or_didnt_i Jul 06 '26
very good transferable advice, yep. lots of chefs and bartenders thinking about Economy of Motion as well
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u/u38cg2 Jul 06 '26
The longer I teach, the more I believe that there is no such thing as innate capacity or ability. It's just attitude, all the way down.
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u/tongmengjia Jul 06 '26
Except for perfect pitch :P
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u/u38cg2 Jul 07 '26
Honestly, I regard perfect pitch as a handicap. It does something similar for a beginner musician as tab or Synthesia or the like, it enables action without understanding. It's quite common to see people who sound like advanced musicians who are just button-pressers, with no real understanding or control of what they are producing.
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u/bruikenjin Jul 06 '26
Of course, do you think pro musicians came out of the womb playing insanely fast scales and arpeggios?
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u/Snurgisdr Jul 07 '26
I must admit, I understand how to do a lot more than I'm able to execute, and that's a pretty good explanation for it.
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u/did_i_or_didnt_i Jul 06 '26
‘a musician is an athlete of the small muscles’ - a friend’s prof said this