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Also just like ... 10,000 hours of what? Do I need 10,000 hours of guitar to be a guitar expert? 10,000 hours of jazz guitar to be a jazz guitar expert? 10,000 hours of comping to be a comping expert?
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
What is an expert even?
I've put in 10,000 hours on jazz guitar, probably a couple times over. Not sure I'm an expert. Certainly not in the sense he leads you to believe in the book (I believe he argues at one point that people have become chess masters of other ranks with less than 10,000 hours but not grand masters, so he must be referring to the top fraction of a fraction of a percent of skilled players).
It's a nice little conversation starter, but it doesn't really make much sense on its face.
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04-14-2025 07:03 PM
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You clearly haven’t spent much time with opera singers. Originally Posted by Mick-7
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I think 10,000 hours is the buy in to get a restrained nod from a master. 10,000 more and they might tell you off for sounding too much like Wes Montgomery. 10,000 more and you too can teach at a provincial college and be talked over at your weekly restaurant residency. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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My quids worth - I think talent is very often a cop out word incurious people use.
Some people do sort of show up never having played a note with an innate knowledge of how to practice and a feel for the instrument, more than others. It’s a thing that happens. Obviously this still represents the start of a long process.
OTOH the main thing over the long term is a good process. Some people again seem to intuit what this is naturally.
This process is not rocket science and it’s useful at every level of ability - it has to do with things like SLOWING DOWN when you can’t do it and trying to hear the thing you are trying to play in your head before you play it. Working towards clear and achievable goals. Understanding what is a productive use of your time and what isn’t and the difference between true practice and playing the instrument.
And not giving up and noodling when you don’t get it (but also knowing when to park it and come back to it.)
This is all teachable- provided the student is interested. If you have both and some time to throw at it, I think you are bound to make strong progress.
But everyone I’ve taught hit a difficulty spike sooner or later.
There’s physical aptitude too which doesn’t necessarily translate to musical ability.
As for whether you’ll end up being a a star on the instrument - well charisma is a big part of that, and I’m afraid I can’t teach that lol. Some people do have that alchemy it’s true. That’s talent. Not the ability to play guitar well. In fact they are often more limited players because they can afford to be.
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The 10,000 hours metric comes from "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a very interesting read, but if you don't have time or inclination, I'll try to TLDR it for you: 10,000 hours is not prescriptive; it's observational. That is, putting in 10,000 hours doesn't necessarily make you great at something, but people who are great at that thing seem to have in common the trait that they put in 10,000 hours at that thing at an early age. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Gladwell originally wanted to understand why people that ate all the "wrong" things in a certain area of Italy lived long and healthy lives. They are the original "outliers." He then applied this concept to other fields in an attempt to understand why some people are successful and others aren't. He studied the lives of the Beatles, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, professional athletes, and others. He noticed that successful people have in common the opportunity and motivation to spend 10,000 hours of focused effort on their area of success before they were 21. Another success factor was being in the right place at the right time to have access to environments and people that could foster their growth in that area of expertise; for example, the Beatles did their 10,000 hours on the bandstand in Hamburg, and Bill Gates happened to have access to (and interest in) computers when he was 15 years old, at a time when many universities and corporations did not have computers.
Do take a look at this book - it's really entertaining and interesting.
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Steve Jones won the Chicago Marathon in the early 1980's. He averaged about 90-100 mile weeks of running. Much less than the top runners putting in 110-150 miles a week. Sometimes less is more but the guitar does not work exactly like that, but similar things can happen. Focused and pointed session with the right stuff is fine but sometimes just noodling endlessly around the guitar neck is not so productive. I know I have been there.
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I graduated high school and went to college in the late aughts, so I had to read Gladwell for so many random things. Originally Posted by starjasmine
Yeah I recall this. This is where the stuff about chess came in. He had some factual errors about when people became grand masters and that was where he drew the odd distinction between other classes of master and grandmasters that was a little hair-splitty.The 10,000 hours metric comes from "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a very interesting read, but if you don't have time or inclination, I'll try to TLDR it for you: 10,000 hours is not prescriptive; it's observational. That is, putting in 10,000 hours doesn't necessarily make you great at something, but people who are great at that thing seem to have in common the trait that they put in 10,000 hours at that thing at an early age.
Also worth noting that this has been controversial in the years since he wrote Outliers. These are known as blue zones. They're a real thing, but a lot of pop science and health and wellness stuff has come out of what is essentially the project of demographers.Gladwell originally wanted to understand why people that ate all the "wrong" things in a certain area of Italy lived long and healthy lives. They are the original "outliers."
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It’s short, Gladwell is making a weak claim. Putting in the 10,000 hours is necessary, but not sufficient. Leaving open the door to talent also being a determining factor in what we deem “successful.” Originally Posted by starjasmine
If only Vincent van Gogh had put in those 10,000 hours before age 21, he might’ve become a good painter. But alas, he didn’t get going until years later.
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I have about the least amount of talent of anyone. I have put in a lot of work, I think, and haven't really gotten far.
I am pretty convinced that talent is real. But I think it's more a combination of early childhood experiences and some innate ability.
I contemplated going to music school in h.s., but I had a close personal friend who was/is a musical genius and I decided it would be a waste of time.
I have also had friends who picked up guitar and in one year were at a level beyond me.
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I'm in the hard work, rather than talent, camp.
I think the things that happen in the first few years of life - usually, in the case of folks who later get accused of having great natural talent, that's to do with parents or siblings who play or listen to a lot of music (or, say, play a lot of golf) and involve the baby at some way - along with determination and a work ethic will be the foundation on which expertise, and with luck, success can be built.
But hard work, and putting the hours in, is key. And, a little bit like sleeping, the hours put in early are more beneficial than the later ones. But if you only have the later ones, then you have to work with what you've got.
What's interesting ( to me, at least) is how only the players who consider themselves basic players (currently, at least, I'm sure some of us are still on the road to improvement ) have actually answered the how good do we think we are right now question.
The talent debate is always fun, but I would have found it interesting where players here, especially those who post their playing, rate themselves currently.
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Is there something you're not telling me Originally Posted by Christian Miller
? Some things have come easier to me than others, but I'd say I feel I've made steady progress since taking lessons with you - what? - three or so years ago. In fact, once I got a decent practice regime 2-3 years prior to that, I think I was making steady progress before that. I don't think I've hit a sustained 'plateau' since. Of course, I'll never be anything than a competent amateur on guitar, if I ever achieve that, but I see no reason why not so long as I keep at it and keep my health and faculties.
There's been mention of practicing long hours, particularly when one is young. Earlier Peter mentioned the advantage of a student feeling that practice is rewarding. When we're young, we can totally immerse ourselves in a subject and enjoy that immersion for its own sake. I think that's different than practicing as a means to say, the long term goal of becoming world famous, or whatever. When I was a teenager I got an early home computer and got into programming games. I sold them, and made a fair bit of money, but the motivation was that I enjoyed making the games, and I got good at it. I had a friend who every time we visited was sat with his guitar next to his record player learning Van Halen licks. He was a great guitarist. I always imagined he had a much better ear than me, but I never even tried to learn things by ear until Christian encouraged me to. Still think I'm probably starting out with less natural aptitude than he did, but I can't be sure.
I suspect ability in something complex like music (or computer game programming) is more difficult to quantify than in, say, running marathons or sprints. One can be a good musician in many different ways. Compare and contrast Lennon and Parker, for example. But it's pretty clear cut who the fastest 100m runner is. Consequently, whatever combination of talents that give a boost to making a good musician are likely more difficult to discern than those of a naturally gifted runner.
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The bold is mine, but I agree whole heartedly. I think I had the same friend. But here's the thing, his parents were musicians, they had a piano in the music room (the lounge, but this where was the music centre was, and where all the Van Halen learning took place) and long before Eruption was a twinkle in Eddie Van Halen's eye my friend and his family used to harmonise songs around that piano. I used to love listening to them sing Simon and Garfunkel songs. By the time he got a guitar at age twelve he already had a great ear. Originally Posted by CliffR
Who's to say, with a similar set of circumstances, you wouldn't have had such an ear, too? Like you say, you can't be sure. Listen to the Billy Strings / Rick Beato interview for another player who (I believe) developed a great ear because of all the music and singing he was exposed to in his very formative years.
Derek
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the concept of innate talent is as slippery as the concept of innate....anything
could someone have innate musical talent - but just happen never to sing a note or play an instrument?
(that's like - could someone be innately intelligent but never do anything which required them to exercise their intelligence? - or, could someone be innately friendly but just happen never to meet anyone they got on with? - could someone be innately sporty but just happen never to play any sports?)
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As a Hobby Jazz guitar player, I think enjoyment is the most important part of playing the guitar. IMHO, enjoyment encourages me to play more.
Let's make it fun.
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Yes, yes and yes. Think of all the great athletes that existed before the invention of the sports they were most talented in. What sports would Michael Jordan have been playing in the year 1850? Originally Posted by Groyniad
What if the 17-year-old Paul McCartney had gotten a woman pregnant and had to take a job as a teacher? He would’ve been a decent musician in his spare time, perhaps, but none of us would have known him, and his talent would have remained fairly undeveloped.
There’s also the Bobby Fisher phenomenon, someone who was superbly and insanely gifted in one specific area, but in every other area of life seemed unremarkable at best, and evidently obscenely skewed in his thinking. Had he not encountered the game of chess at an early age, nobody would have known about his talent.
Which reminds me of the Mark Twain short story, Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. We learn that in the cosmic realm, on all those millions of other planets, there were zillions of writers who were far greater and more gifted than Shakespeare, but we never knew of them on our little planet Earth.
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I wouldn't lose any sleep over not being able to do that. Sounds like a bit of a party trick - which isn't to say you shouldn't develop your ears and musical memory, just that that specific ability isn't really relevant to the real world, is it? It's like the classical orchestras who perform from memory, it's a bit of a pointless ability because it makes no difference to the listener. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
I'd say this debate is pretty much moot. I mean, I don't doubt that people have talent and innate ability etc. it's just that it's more interesting to me that all the greats were and are single-minded and driven to practice from a young age, which is inseparable from whatever innate ability they have.
I'm also reminded of Miles Davis saying that people would bring him tunes with loads of chords in them, and him saying he couldn't play them... I guess he preferred modal tunes at that point which has its own challenges, so I guess there is something to said for playing to ones strengths...
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I would say the drive to practice intelligently and with discipline is very largely connected to innate ability. When you receive positive reinforcement from your efforts (because you’re kinda good), you want to keep going. You hit the ball, you win the one-on-one game, you impress your peers or teachers, and you want to do it again. Originally Posted by James W
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Yeah and the idea that we have any idea what talent or innate ability or genius or mastery is is kind of silly. Originally Posted by James W
Ive been getting back into some of Ethan Iversons old stuff and he wrote a long piece about McCoy Tyner and spent a solid two thousand words just quoting from all the mediocre and downright negative reviews he got while he was playing.
And McCoy is not just “a great” but bordering on world-historical genius great. So we’re idiots.
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I think if you get negative reviews it's a sign of having arrived. If you are a mere mortal, no-one will bother to pull you down...
Probably doesn't feel like that.
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Nerding out here--
Insofar as musical activity is rooted in various neuromuscular abilities, something we might as well call "talent" obviously contributes to the observed outcomes. And insofar as various kinds of perceptual/memory abilities feed into producing music, ditto. These traits are not evenly distributed across a population, nor are they all lined up in ways that optimize musical activities. So, yeah, talent matters.
But insofar as complex activities need to be assembled and practiced repeatedly, just having "talent" is where one starts, and the outcomes will depend on the mix of talent and practice.
Which is to say, pretty much what the consensus of the previous three pages of comments seems to be.
And it applies to pretty much any skill set. I'm a pretty respectable writer and have been since high school--that is, I have a facility with words and language constructs. I also have been a voracious reader since age five or so, which means my linguistic hopper has always been pretty full. And my educational life has been one that demanded a lot of demanding verbal activities, particularly writing. So for most of my 80 years, I've been finding the right words, putting sentences together, constructing arguments, organizing bodies of information, and generally cranking out copy.
I had very little formal training in these areas (beyond K-12 grammar and sentence diagramming and such), though I eventually had to think about them when I started teaching and needed to figure out how to break out the skills and activities that stand behind "writing" and how to get others to acquire or improve them, which I mostly did by examining my own processes and reading up on those of others (all those English comp textbooks).
My musical evolution was something like that, except that I do not have what feels to me like an exceptional set of musical "talents" beyond a decent sense of time and a sticky memory for musical phrases and harmonic structures. So long after I was a thoroughly competent writer (my mid twenties), I was still a pretty limited guitarist. What made the development curve bend sharply upward after age 50 was playing on a regular basis with others who also guided and pushed me and somehow got me to connect the contents of my musical hopper (decades of listening hard to everything) to musical activity--new tunes, demanding genres, in-the-moment recognitions and choices. Thirty years on, it is still strange and wonderful to me that playing a lot of standards has made it easier for me to hear what's going on in--to hear through--say, a Haydn symphony or quartet--music that I was listening to long before I started playing out. Or maybe after the hopper gets full enough, pattern recognition gets easier. (I still can't explicitly apply the sonata-form theory I read about decades ago to what I'm hearing--it just makes sense to me while I'm hearing it. I'm a bit better at the naming of parts for the various jazz-standards in my hearing repertory.)
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What? Humans making pronouncements on things we are incapable of understanding. That is part of our condition, and we see it on this forum all the time. Sometimes we cannot describe things like talent, but we know it when we see it. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
I know it when I see it - Wikipedia
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One thing that has been brought up here is teaching.
My father was a Juilliard-trained classical vocalist (he also played clarinet in the Army Air Corps band in WWII) who sang opera professionally for many years of his life. He actually would have preferred to be a lieder singer, but because of his attractiveness and stage presence, he was sought after in the opera world.
He also taught voice at Juilliard and Sarah Lawrence College, and, as many classically-trained vocalists do, continued to study singing his entire life. His last teacher (Dan) was someone whom he had known for many years; they had come up together, and had been friends a long time. This man had developed a training technique that was very successful, and had many successful students.
At his first lesson, which my father recorded (and which lasted many hours, due to lots of catching-up time) my father ruminated on why Dan was so much more successful at teaching than he had been. Dan had a ready answer: "You never had to learn how to sing!"
It was because singing came much more easily to my father (who had a much more successful career than Dan, who nonetheless did have a singing career, helped by an ability to instantly sight-read the most eclectic 12-tone composition). Dan had to spend a lot of time figuring out how singing worked, and he went into the biology and the physics of it.
My father had more talent (along with the dedication and studying) as a singer; Dan had more talent (along with dedication and research) as a teacher. They both had remarkable singing voices, lovely to listen to.
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There are times when I am happy I'm an amateur and see no point in grinding away. Music is fun. If I felt compelled to accelerate my slow melt up in skill with constant and disciplined focus to profitable practice, transcription, and other tedious things, it would not be fun. Since there is no financial gain, not much an artistic outlet, and I'm not drawn to promotion into the next tier of the player hierarchy I'll continue the slow plod into jazz guitar obscurity. Small town gigging to backing tracks will continue. And I will make literally 10's of dollars a month on a wonderful hobby.
I know how good and/or talented I am more or less. And I'm pretty satisfied to have come this far. I'm grateful to not be one of the driven.
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Teaching, especially an art, is an interesting process, since the correlation between the subject matter/skill set and the achievement level of the teacher is so variable. I think that part of it is the knowing-that/knowing-how distinction: I know that a novel or poem can operate in such and such a way (how a poem means, in John Ciardi's phrase) even though I have not written a novel*, but I really can't know how, from the practitioner's point of view. a novel gets written. On the other hand, I can report on what novelists have described as their processes. Add that to my analytical/audience-side experience of literature and I'm pretty sure that I'd be a more than decent teacher of creative writing--I know how novels and poems work and can articulate it pretty clearly.
* I have written and published poetry, but I'm still not entirely sure what goes on inside me when I write it**. Once it's outside me, though, the trained lit teacher side provides the critique that propels revision, sometimes for years at a stretch. An anecdote that I might have posted here before: When I was in grad school, the university hired the prominent Irish poet Thomas Kinsella, who offered a seminar-level creative writing course in poetry that attracted all the ambitious young lit guys (no gals, for some reason). On the first day, Tom had us all read a sample of our work, and his response, after a thoughtful pause, was, "Perhaps we should spend the rest of the term reading some poetry." Not ours, and not his, either. And that's what we did, guided by our mentor's relentless focus on what the poems actually said, whether the effects they were attempting were working, whether they were honest. It was a master class in reading poetry, and it was clearly intended to shape our reading and revision of our own work. (And it's one reason I have, over the intervening fifty-plus years, produced so little poetry that I think of as finished and adequate. The competition is really stiff, and this shit is hard.)
** Because inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
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Definitely similar. There's little better than having a master tell you how they listen to music and what they hear. Listening is an art in itself. Originally Posted by RLetson
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