FRANCISCO CHAVES
B l o g
Expert vs Jack of All trades
Part 1: Learning instruments
Sometimes, you see that person who can play the guitar, piano, drums, bagpipes, saxophone and a bit of maracas and then you ask yourself: "I wish I could do that!" (1)
Actually, you can! It's not that hard as you think it is. According to Josh Kaufman (2), you don't need more than twenty hours of practice time to do it.
Let's say in a month, you spend one hour every day learning a new instrument and the next month you change to a new one. To make it even easier, you don't need to practice every day. You can practice 2 days and then rest a day, doing an average of 20 hours per month. After a year, you can play twelve new instruments at a reasonable level! Can you imagine how awesome would that be!?
Practice ideas
Josh Kaufmann breaks it down for you and gives you a series of steps to become "reasonably good" at any skill:
1. Deconstruct the skill - Break the skill down into its most basic parts. Which parts are necessary for hitting the goal you have? For example, if your goal is to play a song that only uses basic chords on the guitar, then you don't need to learn scales to accomplish it.
2. Learn enough to self correct - Learn enough to realize when you're making mistakes.
3. Remove barriers to practice - Turn off your phone, unplug the TV. Put your guitar, piano, saxophone, in the middle of your room, not behind your stack of dirty laundry.
4. Practice for at least 20 hours - Commit to 20 hours from the start. You're going to be frustrated at times, so committing beforehand will help you push through the frustration.
After doing these series of steps, for sure you will notice some changes after only 20 hours of practice time.
Focusing your energy
Or, perhaps, should you be focusing more on your specific instrument? The one you really like, perfecting it to absolute mastery and stop wasting time on superficial stuff? What to do with only 24 hours per day to spend?
I ask myself this question all the time. I studied classical guitar for many years, but I also play the bass and a tiny bit of piano. I was spending most of time studying the classical guitar. Then, playing the bass came a bit natural to me because of the similarity of the instruments. Also, with the bass, I could play in other settings, like a wind orchestra. Or having fun playing a simple walking bass line in a jazz group.
Knowing what to do depends a lot on your taste and your musical goals. For example, in the world of classical music, performers start to play from an early age a particular instrument, and then they perfect it to mastery. Usually, they don't play more than one or two instruments. Some rare examples like Julia Fischer (3) do occur. She is a rare phenomena in the classical music world. She is able to play the piano and the violin at an incredibly high level.
Amateur vs Professional
For me, playing a lot of stuff and just improvising and finding my way on a ukulele, for example, is a lot of fun. I recommend it specially for amateurs but it makes it harder to make a career out of it. Imagine you play 1 hour of guitar, 1 hour of piano and 1 hour of drums every day. Your friend plays only two hours of guitar per day and nothing else. You devoted more time to music but your friend probably will do better than you on the guitar. Imagine you want to hire a guitarist to play in an event, which one would you call? Now you start to see the problem.
It is fine when you just enjoy music and are in it as an amateur. "Amateur" actually is a word derived from french. "amour" means love and the "amateur" is the one who makes something "out of love". This is contrasted by the "professional". It is interesting to see how examining languages, we can discover fascinating things about the world.
So, should you be a professional? Or an amateur? It depends on the situation. Sometimes you just want to have fun. You play around an old xylophone that you found in your parent's house attic. Other times, you must devote serious time to improve your musical skills in a particular instrument. Switching instruments gives you fantastic musical skills, but not necessarily technical ones. By playing other instruments you can start thinking outside the box. You start to make weird combinations, maybe even discover new ways of playing!
You can be professional and play lots of instruments
David Bowie could play the guitar, keyboards, saxophone and the harmonica. Of course people don't praise him for his "harmonica skills", but for his "musical" and "artistic" skills. Besides being a musician he was also an actor. Playing different instruments, having studied art and design in his youth, allowed him to innovate and do what nobody had done before.
So, you don't need to feel bad for playing a lot of instruments instead of trying to perfect one. If you want to be a professional musician, it is useful to have a particular skill that you can do really well. Then you try to expand your horizons and your creativity by playing other instruments and, why not, other genres of music.
As a guitarist, I played classical music, fado, pop songs, flamenco, rock, jazz and many other genres. I am for sure not the best at every single one of those styles, but I can play them. I have fun doing it and it inspires me a lot. It also improves my guitar playing because I need to learn so many different techniques. That makes me versatile and can be an advantage even in the job market.
Which instrument should I learn first?
Some instruments are easier to learn if you can already play other instruments. Being able to play the guitar, allows me to quickly learn ukulele, bass, mandolin or even violin! If I wanted to learn the violin or cello I could focus only on the bowing technique because I already know (kind of) how to put my fingers on the left hand. That would save a lot of time and I would learn faster compared to someone starting from scratch.
Learning piano can help you make an easy transition to other instruments that use keyboards like the organ or synthesizers.
In classical music, it is also common that some wind players double instruments. Usually a oboist can also play the English horn and a saxophone player can play a whole range of saxophones from soprano to baritone.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you can go wherever your passion leads you. May it be playing only one instrument to perfect mastery or just go wild and play everything! Here is a video by Mysteryguitarman (4) playing 90 instruments to inspire you.
Useful links / Sources:
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-instrumentalist
2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY
3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je3tLgvubb8