Zack

The thing is, most self-taught musicians just plod along playing three-chord strumming guitar, or pounding out bland keyboard arrangements. Most trained musicians plod along playing more complicated sheet music and composing more complicated yet derivative music.

Creativity is something which is poorly understood, and THAT is the difference you are referring to.

Also, modern classical training is going to so VASTLY increase what you can do with your instrument(s) that in whatever style you choose, you will have the physical adeptness with your instrument to make it REALLY sing whatever you want it to, regardless of whether that's Renaissance chamber music, Jazz, Country, or Avante-Garde Neo-classicism.

Therein is the downside. The more serious and widely-versed the musicians you want to play with are, the more language they have. That's basically what most music theory is, unless you are really composing. It's a language. If you can identify chords and keys and scales and rhythms, you're good in most pop-oriented genres, because you can actually TALK to the other musicians about what you're doing or wanting to do. For more complex genres, more complex lingo is needed.

Not to know theory or read music at all and to try to play in professional settings with professional, well-rounded musicians, would be like being on Michelangelo's team painting the Sistine Chapel and not knowing anything about perspective, or the names of colours. You might be great, but you wouldn't he able to communicate to you what to do, and you wouldn't be able to communicate back with input.

Modality is usually only discussed in the West in Jazz and in classical music. If you're in classical music, you DO know about modes, and you DO compose with them in mind constantly.

And you cannot, simply CANNOT play any jazz from the past hundred years without a strong mastery of at LEAST the seven diatonic modes, but in most cases at a minimum also the modes of melodic minor, harmonic minor, diminished/altered scales, and hopefully a few other interesting ones as well. It's just such a basic part of jazz. You also need to be familiar with the corresponding extended chords that these modes reference, with a ton of varieties of each of these many, many chords, with how these chords tend to progress.

On top of that, you should probably be able to transpose all of that crap in your head on the fly. That requires training. A. Lot. Of. Training.

I have met jazz musicians who couldn't read music, but only a very few, and they were still top-of-the game when it came to applied theory. Also, they could slowly pick their way through sheet music, when I say the couldn't read, I mean they couldn't read fluently. It's like that kid in middle school who would spend twenty minutes agonizingly sounding out a page of in class reading.

But yeah, if you want to play pop-based or folk-based genres, and you don't want to get into arranging or producing and just leave that to others, you don't need theory.

If you want to get into any more complex genres, you CAN do it without theory, but not as well, and even in the lower rungs, you'll be missing a leg, trying to keep up with people who have both.

Plus, if you're trying to play with other people, it's severely limiting. I had a performance a while back that I was trying to find a stand-in guitarist for. I approached a guy I knew, who was EXTREMELY talented, on of the best jazz guys in my area. He said yes enthusiastically, and I was thrilled. Turned out he couldn't read music, so he couldn't learn any of the charts in time, and I would have had to have made him a recording of each one to go home and study. It just wasn't possible, so I settled for an inferior guitarist who COULD read, who could speak the language, because she could actually learn the material.

I felt like a jerk, but the guy was totally understanding. He got that i wanted him in, but he actually came to me and said, "Hey, I've been trying, but I'm just not going to be able to do it in time."

Early in his life, yeah. But then he got the riverboat gig, learned to read music, and was pretty versed in theory by the time he left his teens. By the time any of his recordings were made, he was as much a theory guys as the rest of them.

I've seen a bunch of photocopies of his original manuscripts. The guy had absolutely HORRIBLE penmanship, but once you deciphered his chicken scratch, he was definitely writing with a strong theory base.

You need that drive either way. I've had students, and seen students with and without that drive. Those with get great. Those without never do. In my experience, and in my general knowledge, formal music education doesn't drag you along, trying to get you to succeed. It says, "Here's a ****ton of work you're going to need to do, and be proficient at doing. I don't care if you keep up, but if you don't then get out."

The school I went to has a reputation as the hippest place to learn music from real musicians, rather than college profs in this area. (Though it is a college and they are Profs with lame ol' PhDs and all... Oh well...)

Anyway, Freshman class is usually only 60-70 students. Most of them end up failing their jury at the end of the year and being required to repeat freshman year or drop out. A few do it several times.

Sophomore year is generally more like 15-20 students. Maybe two thirds of those pass their Jury and make it to Junior year.

Junior year is about 10 students, most years.

My graduating class was 4 students. 3 of them actually graduated. (I was the loser who dropped out!)

Those teachers aren't dragging kids along, they're providing music education for anyone who can keep up. They'll tell you what to study, but they aren't going to follow you home to make you do it, and they aren't going to check in when you skip out on class or lessons.

Difference being, a well trained musician can add that character intentionally. They don't have to screw up to make something unusual. I had nearly an entire semester where my private instructor didn't teach me anything, he would just come in, turn on a record, and tell me to "play stuff, babe," and then have me drag the tempo until I fell just a little behind the beat, and have me stay there, or play at faster and faster tempos until I was ending phrases a bar early, and then slowly drop it back. Or play and make sure I never started a phrase and ended a phrase in the same places in the measure. Or never play the tonic note. Or only play tonic harmonies over all the chords, and to play them with enough surety and creativity to make them work.

My point is, most people think music education is learning to name notes and read music and identify chords and write Bach chorals.

That's what you need to learn BEFORE you get to school. Music education assumes you already have a basic understanding and some technical ability for them to work with. They're not giving lessons on how to play an instrument, they're giving lessons on how to be a musician.

And there's a BIG difference between someone who can play an instrument and a musician. And I don't mean that the difference is theory and music reading, either...

All the Beatles did especially earlier on, basically, was come up with some chords, lrics, and melody, esentially song writing. George Martin came up with all the cool innovative stuff, the orchestrations, the production, those fancy hamronies ABOVE the melody, etc; it was all him pulling from his trainging in Classical Composition.

I know he's always called the "fifth" Beatle, but he really was more like the first Beatle. Honestly, he thought the Beatles were boring and pretty unskilled, but he liked their voices. George Martin WAS the Beatles, and I'm pretty sure that without him, no one would ever have known who they were.

Their break-out songs weren't even their own, they were tracks Martin made them do. Not saying that the intense training outweighed the complete lack of training, but it seemed to be what the people of the world wanted to hear.

That's a common viewpoint, but not a particularly worrisome one, I think. Classical music training is not necessarily playing Bach and Brahms and Beethoven. It can be, but "Classical" Music in the past 150 years or so, has become the strangest, most outside the box "genre" there is, especially since the Post-WWII era...

The "rigid" classical training (which granted, I do not have) is only in the technical sense nowadays. Students learn speed, they learn precision, they learn the physical athletic ability to play absolutely ANYTHING they want to play. Most contemporary classical musicians can and do play other stuff, too. They don't all go home and mindlessly hone the same four-bar passage to perfection every night. A lot of them go home and jam out with their neighborhood Blues buddies. They just do it with extreme prowess.

Also, Improvisation (Excuse me *couch,* adopt snobby face, "aleatoric music" or "indeterminism") has been a huge, famous part of Classical music for almost as long as it's been part of jazz.

Also also, until about 200 years ago, improvisation was expected of ALL classical musicians, and composers actually wrote stuff expecting performers to improvise on it.

Also Also Also, a huge amount of formal training is actually in Jazz, or even rock, pop, blues, folk, etc.

In fact, Folk musics, (from which blues and all modern varieties of rock, pop, EDM, whatever descend), in a technical sense, is music which is handed down with extremely rigid strictures of preservation, and "doing it exactly like it's always been done," whereas Classical music has for hundreds of years been about pushing boundaries and progressing and trying out new and bizarre things. A lot of what sounds stuffy now was the hippest, most outrageous music, in it's day. And most classical music of the past 120 years, the general public never even hears...

Even today, the few blues formats and song structures are so, so much more limiting than even the stuffiest of classical or jazz forms.

Very true, but the untrained eccentric engineers bridge might be remembered because it collapsed in under a month, whereas the trained eccentric engineer builds that crazy-*** bridge, but knows how to do it both with MORE innovation, because he knows more about what's already been done, AND his bridge will last, so that not only is it famous and remembered 200 years later, but people still drive across it.

(The metaphor being that eccentric but sloppy music might make a splash, but eccentric but schooled music makes a splash that people still listen to decades or centuries later.)

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Well there we go, I've always been a "don't go to music school, it's pointless and will indebt you for life" kind of guy, and this thread has got me defending formal education.

That said, get a structured music education, but get it through skilled private instructors, and the recommended books and recordings from them and other musicians you know, don't pay $20,000-200,000 for the piece of paper.

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