Self Taught vs Non-Self Taught Musicians
 

As a self taught pianist of around 8 years who now studies music and takes personal lessons, I have had a bit of both worlds. Having years of experience in learning songs by ear, yet little experience with reading notation until just a few years ago, I am primarily an aural musician.

Although reading music is certainly essential is some cases, I think so many people neglect the ear and creativity which self taught musicians predominantly have. Maybe the key is to achieve a delicate balance of the two.

There are numerous points to be made on the subject and this is just something to start off with. What are your stories and opinions of self taught musicians in contrast with non-self taught?

Discuss!

Having been self taught, and playing stringed instruments for over 30 years, I rely solely on aural memory. It's all about conditioning, and that's how I've conditioned myself. My M.O. is based on the theory being that there will not always be a way to learn a song through some sort of visual medium.

I took weekly guitar lessons for about 6 or 7 years but my teacher always avoided typical training styles and instead designed his lessons around the importance of training your ear. Throughout the week he would have me write down a list of songs, from any artists, of any styles I wanted to learn, and for the first year or two we would spend the lessons learning the songs by ear and then transcribing our own tablature for it. Every once in a while he'd give me a song I'd never heard before to see if I could learn it on the spot. Once he was satisfied with my ability to learn by ear we moved on to learning theoretical and improvisational skills. He would spend a while running me through the minor, major, and harmonic scales and then once I knew them by memory he would teach me dozens of solo licks in each box before asking me to come up with my own. Eventually we moved on to using loop pedals and drum machines to build backing tracks in particular keys at the beginning of each lesson and then we'd spend the rest of the lesson trading off improvised solos over our track.

I found that sort of teaching style immensely helpful. It was really geared towards developing your own style, developing a quick and accurate ear, and left a huge amount of headroom for improvisation and creativity while still learning the theory necessary to write competent and cohesive music. I think it is essential to develop aural skills before theoretical knowledge if you plan on ever using that theoretical knowledge in a productive and creative way.

Self taught by ear and later by tab. Wished I'd learn to read though.

I took lessons for a little while when I was 16. Definitely helped speed up the process. Learned enough theory (i.e. Pentatonic scales) to play most of the stuff I was interested in back then. Would love to take more lessons and really get dialed in on modes and more exotic scales but I can do alright improving on most rock songs. Could not fake my way through Jazz though.

Very interesting to hear these replies.

In my eyes, notation provides us with a written musical language, which is surely a positive to anybody with a true musical passion. However I would certainly agree with you 'EPOCH6'. Before seriously thinking about learning music theory I feel that it is important to develop your ear to a certain degree, just listening to the sounds of the instrument and 'messing about' on it. When I started to learn songs by ear, I would listen to songs from video games and films for example, having to deconstruct the song in my mind, focusing on the bass, melody, harmony, percussion and sfx individually, before creating my own improvised arrangement of the song. This can definitely teach you much about different aspects of music - analysis, musical expression and to develop the confidence of knowing that there are no 'rules' in music. People who neglect this in the early stages and jump straight in to personal lessons run the risk of never developing a self reliance; they will always need somebody else to teach them and will never find their own path as they fear being 'wrong'. In addition, I have met countless people who tell me that they 'used' to have lessons but grew tired or become demotivated to carry on. This is far less common in self-taught musicians, in my experience.

Very good to hear of a guitar teacher who structures their lessons in such a way, placing the focal point on aural training as a foundation.

Also, 'Plankton' - Thats an interesting M.O and i agree that conditioning is the key.

It would be interesting to get some contrasting views and opinions from some non self-musicians which rely more on sheet music as opposed to improvisation etc.

I can't really speak much on this. So I will speak from the perspective of musicians I've talked to, both self taught and learning by ear, apposed to non-self taught...

I feel that self taught musicians tend to be more creative, better able to improvise on the spot. Non-self taught musicians can do most everything self taught musicians can, but I really feel that non-self taught maybe have a bit of an advantage in creative areas, improvisational ability.

I am on lunch break from work so I will elaborate once I am home.

TBH, there's not much difference in creativity. Whether you're self-taught or teacher-taught, you'll still experiment on your own if you're interested in creating your own music.

Yeah, you're either a creative person or you're not for the most part.

I suppose im touching on the fact that in my experience, musicians whom jump in to personal lessons too quickly end up giving up because of a lack of motivation or passion. This, i believe, is down to the teacher, prematurely introducing theory and notation. If the student does however continue, they are heavily influenced towards reading music notation with very little emphasis placed on creative improvisation and ear training which can later lead to a musician with an important element missing from their musical knowledge.

That is an interesting point 'Chula Vista', are we born with creativity? and to what extent can it be developed?

I agree. Sadly I'm not. Guess I'm left brained. I can learn and play any rock song you ask (within reason) but ask me to write a good song...

Not really. Most teachers do quite a bit of ear training. And again, if improvisation is your thing, you'll learn it by experimenting on your own, whether you've got a teacher or not.

In the end, we're all self-taught.

I was largely self-taught for about 8 years, but then began taking private lessons and studied contemporary music composition in school.

Yes, aural learning is the most important thing I've learned, but I'll be damned if my professor's didn't all think so too. Most of them were of the mind that transcription is the single most effective learning tool for a a musician, that nothing, absolutely nothing beats listening to other people's music and trying to figure it out.

So, I would say that yeah, aural learning and self-teaching is great, but that having SOME sort of experience guide you through that process is better, at least for most people.

honestly, the largest portion of what I learned in college was not in class, it was talking to professors, it was independent study, it was just being around a body of people, all of whom had some band, some record, some text, some tome of interesting knowledge to recommend.

And, let's be honest. Learning music theory (and I mean REALLY learning it, getting into all the detailed, nitty-gritty advanced stuff), is a huge step up in terms of exploring music. If nothing else, it's a great way to force yourself to explore new sounds that you may elsewise never have encountered.

I don't actually recommend the college route, i just did that because my parents were convinced that all my family's hardships stem from not having degrees. (And I never quiiiite finished up my last few credits and graduated, heh.)

BUT, I do recommend as highly as possible connecting yourself with experienced musicians, if not as formal teachers, than at least as friendly knowledge sources.

It's amazing when you spend 7 months trying to figure out some musical concept on your own, and then some guy with 40 years experience says, "Oh, that's quartal harmony, it's really simple and commonly used," and suddenly it all makes sense. Then you kick yourself for not having asked sooner.

So yeah, self-teach if you like, it a great way to learn, but don't forget that, for millenia, music has been taught carefully from teacher to student.

^
:clap: Nailed it.

Most teachers I've had have done MOSTLY ear-training, of one kind or another, unless they were specifically teaching a course in Music Theory. And even then, it was about 70% learning to recognize the sounds associated with the theory. I mean, it's music, how would you teach it without ear-training? That's like expecting to learn to paint without ever learning to mix colours. No, that's like learning to read but not being taught the phonetic sounds of letters...

So very, very, very true. Teachers are great, because they can say, "practice this, it's what you're trying to do," or maybe, "read this book, it explains the concept you're interested in," or especially, "listen to this album a few dozen times, you'll like it, it'll turn you on to new stuff."

But basically, all the really good learning you're going to get from your own experience.

And please don't drop $160,000 on a music degree, if what you want is to learn music. There are ways to learn without condemning yourself to debt for your entire life.

Having a base knowledge of music definitely helps understand what to do with it. However, I like the self taught approach because it allows me to play the instrument in the way that it speaks to me. I feel like sometimes, people learn themselves into a box with their instruments, and they're never aware that they could go outside of that box. That's what I'm afraid of. That being said, at this rate whenever I pick up a new instrument I can carry over things like rhythm, whether to go up or down, and melody (to a certain degree, since of how much intervals can differentiate from instrument to instrument), and that base knowledge came from my dad when I first picked up the guitar.

Another thing to consider is what you're playing. If you're an (pauses to say as unpretentiously as possible) avant-garde improvisation multi-instrumentalist (****) like myself, my approach definitely works wonders for what you can do on your instrument. But if you want to play classical music on the piano, lessons would be the route to go. In the long run, it doesn't really matter as long as you make some interesting music.

One of the drawbacks of being self taught, with years of experience, is that I really couldn't tell you a lot about theory, modes, or anything technical music-wise. I can tell you what key something is in, or what chords are being played, but when it comes to theory, and the nitty gritty (as described above), I'm clueless. Not because I'm against injecting that knowledge into anyone's musical arsenal, but because I've never felt the need to have to learn any of it. I'm the type of person that likes simple, and steer far away from over analyzing anything, unless it's a necessary evil. I've given lessons, but I can only take the kids I teach so far in the technical side of it.

Good article here:

Creativity Can be Learned

Then start by writing a bunch of bad songs. Eventually you'll get better at it.

Even having taken lessons for many years and having endured the rather boring technical depths to some extent, for me at least, it doesn't stick around for very long. I've been out of lessons for probably about 4 years now, consistently writing music and playing in groups, yet most of the technical knowledge has vanished from my mind, only the muscle memory remains. I think for the vast majority of musicians, especially in rock and blues, all of that theory is more of an exercise in control and precision, it serves to train your brain to always be in key, and to be able to gracefully recover when your fingers do drift elsewhere, the vocabulary of musical theory only ever seemed useful in a teacher / student scenario. I've never come across a situation where I've been writing music with some other people and felt the urge to go "Okay fellas, I think this section of the bridge should be contained within the Phrygian mode". I could see that being useful or practical in maybe a jazz band with a dozen or more members, but in most areas of music I think musicians are making a conscious effort to avoid boxing themselves into rigid theoretical structures, concerning yourself primarily with theory when writing music seems to harm creativity more than bolster it. So I don't think you missed much, besides maybe something to bull**** about with pretentious music students over a glass of wine at a jazz concerto (no offense to genuinely brilliant jazz musicians), you seem to be doing just fine without the tedious nomenclature.

I learned how to read music for trumpet by memorizing what fingering I needed, rather than the note names. I play a lot by ear, and experiment on piano by ear, but I'd like to actually understand music theory.
But hey, Louis Armstrong learned trumpet all by ear, so..

Well, thank you. I immersed myself into the guitar scene many moons ago, and diligently sought out and emulated many of the greats, which is where a lot of my instinctual musical knowledge comes from. That, and spending countless hours in front of a TV, or radio playing along with whatever comes out of the speakers. I've learned, and then forgotten, hundreds, if not thousands of songs in 3-5 minutes, only to have them pushed into the back of my memory in the same sitting. I can recall some of what I figured out at times, but the fact that I even played through it at all is still a benefit in itself.

Maybe when I retire, I'll finally sit down and learn the fundamentals of theory and kind of 'connect the dots' so to speak. Then I'll go find me a pretentious jazz nerd and put him to the test.

I use to do that all the time. It's such an excellent learning tool. To this day I can pretty competently play along to any style of music with the only real exceptions being hard core bebop and chicken picking country.

Ugh. Thats a rough one. Zakk Wylde (along with all the other greats like Roy Clark, Buck Owens, etc.) blew me away when I first heard "Farm Fiddlin".

I've been trying to learn chicken picking since I got my new telecaster. So brutal, especially after spending your whole musical life addicted to the pick.

I'd say the primary difference is that self-taught musicians have to obviously push themselves. Nobody's doing it for them, and that kind of motivation outlives what might be instilled by a tutor. It can be difficult to stay focused on the hobby if you don't have an established environment to engage in it.

Danny Gatton is a master of that. They don't call him the humbler for nothing. It's just a matter of using pick and fingers:

I took lessons for about three and a half years for guitar, and I think that I wouldnt be anywhere near where I am now, and probably wouldn't even know where to start with songwriting. The way my lessons would always go would be, I'd pick up a song show it to my teacher and we'd learn it together. Usually between songs he'd teach me techniques and scales and I'd slowly progress on those. Eventually I got to the point where he'd show me a scale, play some chords and I would improv over it for the full half an hour switching off with my teacher. At the end I was learning jazz, and that really got me ready for playing for jazz band and being able to think a lot quicker on my feet, so even if I didn't fully form the chord I could manage, and my improvising had come a long way. Right now I'm taking a really extended break, but I hope to get back into it soon.

Ever checked out Albert Lee?

I don't understand. Why a dozen or more? The mode you play in jazz is the mode you play whether you're soloing, dueting, trio, quartet, etc. Doesn't matter how many people there are. And, yes, jazz musicians make great use of modes in every possible way. D Dorian, for example, is very common. Miles Davis's "So What" requires the bass to play D Dorian. It's a minor mode but it's NOT a minor scale and that's a very important distinction. So if you're playing a piece and the leader tells you, "It's D Dorian." You have to know what that means. You start playing in D minor and you're going to be sent home because you'll be playing out of tune. Even a mediocre jazz musician knows how to play D Dorian.

That is simply not true. If you write your ideas down, you SEE it and it inspires enhancing the melody and fleshing it out. When you write with a guitar on your lap trying to come up with something and you find yourself making the same predictable chord changes, try writing it down and looking at those notes and all sorts of ideas start flowing. But you have to know your scales, chords and modes.

What about actually PLAYING the music rather than discussing it with a bunch of pretentious music students (which you will NEVER find at a jazz gig)? I can play by ear AND off the sheet. When you can write it down or read it off the sheet, it ADDS a dimension to you musical vocabulary. It's absurd to think it would detract. That's like saying knowing differential calculus hurts structural engineers more than it helps. It may be beyond the intellectual grasp of hacks but it is essential to an engineer. I wouldn't dare drive over a bridge built by an engineer who didn't have his theory down.

Re: the actual education and its relation to musical prowess. Playing something 'perfectly' according to the tabs or sheet (or writing your own) versus free-handing, is gonna be really awesome and well done but lack the mistakes giving music character. Many great sounds in individual tracks were originally mistakes. I ultimately lean towards self-taught as superior.

The dirty, little secret of pop music is that is dependent on arrangers. When you listen to Paul McCartney or David Bowie or Prince and you're thinking, "This guy was a genius to think of all this!" He actually didn't. The guy who thought of it was an arranger--in this case, a highly skilled theoretician/composer/musician named Clare Fischer. Fischer was a Detroit-area jazz and classical artist who got into arranging as a way of making money. He also arranged for highly skilled musicians as Dizzy Gillespie and he was Herbie Hancock's musical hero. When these guys wrote a song, they would play it for Fischer and would tell him, "I want a sax solo here" or "I need string orchestration here." And Fischer would write it and assemble the musicians he wanted to play on it. Sometimes they handed him bare skeletons of songs and let him do his thing to put flesh on them and give them life. By rights, he deserved co-writing credits on many of these songs.

All this stuff about "The Beatles couldn't read and they were great" is all well and good but the Beatles also had George Martin who knew his music theory behind them producing and arranging their material and they knew they could do without him and kept him for the entire run of the band's existence. There never would have been an "Eleanor Rigby" without skilled writers and readers to get those strings right--that wasn't done by ear or by people making fortuitous mistakes.

In the days before recording, music couldn't be transmitted or preserved without someone to write it down and someone else to read and play it and it really hasn't changed. Music is ultimately dependent on readers, writers and theoreticians. They carry the torch for everyone else. Without them behind the scenes, what's up front sounds mediocre and amateurish. I once was sitting with a bunch of skilled folk musicians--all skilled readers--and one's birthday was that day. When it was revealed, they broke into "Happy Birthday" which they spontaneously sang in perfect harmony. It's in their blood. It demonstrates the difference between real musicians and everyone else.

Maybe that's why so much of pop has turned to crap. Less and less skilled people in the business so that even ones with good ideas can't communicate them effectively and have to settle for substandard pap. Just give it a hip-hop beat and maybe no one will notice how bad it really is. And the sad thing is, most people don't anymore.

I got carried away, especially with the shots fired at jazz, I was overly cynical there and came across as pretty ignorant. I agree with everything you're saying, and I'm not trying to discredit the significance of musical theory or its utility in writing, the general consensus we've all been agreeing upon in this thread is that both theoretical training and improvisational skill / self-learning are crucial in writing excellent creative music. I'm only concerned that musicians who have only experienced rigid classical training, being relentlessly coached to play from the sheet, won't develop the improvisational skills that are so helpful in writing music with strong creative personality and identity. Coming from a rock and blues background I've become so attracted to the idea of writing with a sort of organised chaos approach. I've always found the flexibility of having four or five members or whatever in the same room together, each with a reasonably solid foundational knowledge of music theory, sporadically trading off ideas with each other, improvising as they go, copy/pasting and altering each other's ideas together and letting the structure of the track form naturally over the course of the writing session. I believe that is a healthier environment for encouraging creativity than a composer writing a song and having his or her ensemble of whatever population learn it from the sheet. Obviously the well trained engineer with a strong professional background in structural engineering is going to build a more sophisticated, complex, and safe bridge, but it's the eccentric engineer who builds the florescent green bridge with swing sets hanging from the underside and trees planted upon each pillar who's bridge will be remembered.

You have to remember, though, that there's always money involved. If you're hired to design a bridge, you design it the way they want it designed and you do it within the budget constraints they hand you. Good luck getting someone to pay for a fluorescent green bridge with swings. In classical music back in the day, it was no different. As a composer, you had to find a patron--some king or duke or prince--who hired you to compose and you composed what he told you to compose because he was paying your bills. And if he didn't like what you did, he trashed it and that was that. If he said to remove the love song from the opera he commissioned and you felt it was the very centerpiece of the thing--too bad--you took it out because he was paying for it. Maybe future generations would have agreed with you but they'll never hear it and that might cause some to even say you weren't all that great but it wasn't your call. You did what you were paid to do.

You take that bass I had commissioned if you saw that thread I posted--the guy who built it loved doing it because I gave him the chance to really stretch his creativity. But I also had to pay for it. I paid substantially more than a normal bass would have cost (and they ain't cheap). People might look at most of his basses and say there is nothing remarkable about them--they sound good but the designs were pretty generic. But that's not his fault, he designed what he was commissioned to design because his clients were not willing to pay for extra. But my bass would show those people they were wrong about him. If I had gone to someone else, they would have rated that person as superior to my luthier but that's not necessarily the case--it's more dependent on who the benefactors are. Lots of factors involved.

To show you how good some of these guys in the music biz are, here is a Bernard Hermann score for the first Twilight Zone episode. The thing is, this is not the original music but a later recreation as the original score is lost. But you can't tell the difference, it sounds exactly same. The director used Hermann's original charts, sheet music and notes to recreate it (I have it on CD and it's all explained in the liner notes). That's way more than I can do. I even know musical directors from colleges in the area who couldn't do it and they are WAY more skilled than I am. Just shows you how good some of these people are.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaBDx7S5pao

^^^^

Beautiful piece of music.

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.)

---------------------------------

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.

Whoa.

Does this Zack guy know what they're saying, I mean are they the real deal, all knowledgeable and such, or is this just some person that likes to be long winded and really doesn't know what they're talking about?

Don't get upset now, Zack. That's just me attempting to be playful, or poke fun with no ill intent meant. I tried reading all that, but I couldn't keep my focus long enough. I am up all night, you see, and so this time of morning, I'm not too good at sticking with anything for...oh look, it's raining again.

I have been avoiding this thread like the plague....My credentials are simple: I am a (so far) lifetime working musician - as in, its my job

First and foremost is understanding what the OP is asking -- The thread title is decieving because Post 1 is really asking about the differences between reading music (the "schooled" musician) and playing by ear (the "street" musician)...It is NOT about self-taught vs taught.....I can both play by ear AND read music AND I know music theory out the wazoo BUT I am all self-taught. Get it? :)

One of the biggest differences is the approach of each discipline....Players who learned by reading usually approach music LINEAR, as in they are taught to follow the sheet in front of them from start to finish. They tend to be more accurate as sheet players follow a defined score and have the added advantage of all playing with each other accurately with minimal (or no) rehearsal if all competent readers following the same score....but, as musicians, they learned music and how to play their instruments with a LINEAR mindset

Conversely, Ear players tend to learn music MODULAR, as in they learn the sections as individual parts (intro, verse, bridge,chorus,etc) and assemble the music to their liking, sometimes exactly like the original but often not as to suit their own needs. Because ears can vary from person to person, they have a higher susceptibility to play inaccurate but they have advantages that pro veteran players learn over time, such as telegraphing chord changes (feeling where the next chord is by how the music sounds) and being able to improv or change impromptu...They learn to play with other players by body language, eye contact, and basic "heads-up ball". To take that one-step further, players that can NOT read BUT know music theory have the Nashville Numbering System at their disposal, which allow ear players to follow quick charts like readers using the Major Scale as a "road map" (Ionian, although I have had charts where "7" is the flatted 7 a la Mixolydian is used) to improv parts together quickly and efficiently like readers... It is also possible to follow many Real Book-style charts knowing theory alone

Here is where it gets screwy: Ear players cant play in a pit orchestra for the reasons stated above: a specific score is written for whatever is going on stage and must be performed with accuracy. This is why sheet music players get some of the better paying gigs - gigs like Disney have a pre-requisite to be able to sight read

But where many readers fall apart on is the ability to jam - to be able to deliver the correct feel into a situation with no music in front of them -- I have seen some incredible sheet players fall apart like a Dollar Store toy at a Blues Jam -- and cant even get through a simple I - IV - V blues shuffle

...but the biggest issue is mainly the LINEAR vs MODULAR way of thinking. A case in point happened during Christmas 2013 when the showband I was playing in was doing a very well paying Corporate Christmas party, and hired on a horn section that we normally do not use....We were playing "Shining Star" by Earth, Wind, and Fire and the guitarist, who was singing the song, saw that we had a full dancefloor so he gave the international sign to keep it going (finger whirling in the air). The guitarist, keyboard player, myself (bass), and drummer all took the cue (eye-contact mentioned above) and went back to the verse. However, the horn players, following their sheet music and completely oblivious to the fact that we went back to the verse, just kept reading their sheet music, and drove straight (LINEAR, remember?) off the cliff, doing all the outro parts without paying attention to the guitarist - or hearing the rest of the band for that matter - go back to the first verse

The moral of this story is the answer: do BOTH or at least have a good working knowlege of both-- thats how I have worked for so long. Many of the names thrown around in this thread in previous posts to support someone's argument are guys that can do BOTH. If you are a reader, take the sheet music away and go to a blues jam. Talk to working musicians that play by ear and understand their philosophies and trade secrets. If you are an ear player, teach yourself how to read a little but at the very least- and I cant stress this enough: LEARN MUSIC THEORY and Chord Construction - Not only will you discover an amazing bag of new chops and your old ones will make better sense, but you will also be able to follow Nashville Numbers and many Real Book-style charts :)

Elvis Presley sometimes never did a song live the same way twice -- same for James Brown, Tom Jones, SRV, and many many others....You, as a musician had to be able to know the parts of a song, be able to execute them with precision (LINEAR), but also be able to be flexible enough to anticipate any impromptu changes by Elvis or James Brown or whoever if they feel the moment to take it somewhere else (MODULAR)

hope this helps

I'm stupidly long-winded in conversation. Get some alcohol in me, and then ask me a nice, convoluted question, and the conversation takes care of itself for the next thirty minutes, minimum. It's a vice, I apologize!

Regarding what I talk about, I know some stuff, I don't know most stuff, I dunno, I guess google what I write and see how many facts check out, and see how much rings true to your own experiences and understanding?

But mostly I'm just incapable of being succinct.

Ain't been pissed of by strangers on the interwebs yet, ain't planning to be. Actually, I think I've been pissed maybe three times in my brief life? I'm definitely a slow burn kind of guy...

Honestly, re-reading the first post, he mentions reading in passing, almost by way of an example of the "schooled" musician, and then uses creativity and the trained ear as examples of skills gained by self-teaching, and he definitely begins by explaining a bit about reading and learning aurally, however, the title and the final, clearly worded question asks:

"What are your stories and opinions of self taught musicians in contrast with non-self taught?"

That makes me think the OP was really asking generally about stories and opinions on self-taught versus taught by others, and merely using reading and creativity and aural as examples. The OP jumps back in later talking about theory, analysis, etc. I think his/her emphasis of reading is most likely because (s)he is new to the whole shebang, and notation is what (s)he has mainly experienced.

The thing that still strikes me as odd, is how many people seem to associate self-taught with not knowing anything about theory or notation, and formal study with lack of improvisation and a huge reliance on notation, and apparently a complete disinterest in exploring music on their own. Maybe in some cases, but in my area, the people around me who sort of liked music and dabbled in it were not the ones who tried to get some formal education on the subject.

The ones who cared enough to track down teachers or audition for schools were the ones with the real drive to be musicians, and they all wrote their own music, experimented, loved to improv.

Granted, I went to a Jazz and Contemporary music program, so obviously there was a sliiiiight emphasis on improvisation. (Given, I went for the contemporary classical music composition, so I got away with less improv, but hey, ya know...)

I was self-taught for a few years, and was so obsessed, that eventually I decided to draw on local talent, and got a teacher. He taught me a ton of stuff, but I think the only music we ever read through was some Bach. The rest of the time he was teaching me how to pick apart Joe Satriani, Coheed and Cambria, Pain of Salvation, giving me tips on songwriting, helping me harmonize things by ear.

The next guitar teacher I got was actually a prof from the local college, but our high school had a program where you could take one "course" for free per year. Apparently private guitar lessons counted as course, so I got free college private instruction early, weeee! Anyway, that guy was that guy was the one who called me "babe" (as well as "hot dog"???) and made me do all the weird improvisation practice, that I mentioned earlier.

The third private instructor I had was a lot more theory based, but he still almost never broke out anything notated, he just gave me cool systems for experimenting with chord types, bass-melody, bass-chord-melody playing styles, etc.

The last private instructor I had was a guitarist but he taught me in composition. This was the first instructor who had a focus on notated music, after a good 8 years of private and college music education. Also, we did a fair bit experimenting with non-notated Spectral Harmony too, in Pure Data, a graphical audio coding program.

So yeah, that's my stupidly long-winded way of saying that getting someone to help you explore music doesn't have to mean Mrs. Badcrumble sits you down at the keyboard and forces you to learn all of the Well-Tempered Clavier. I suppose it CAN, but not in my experience...

Haha, glad you saw the humor in my post and didn't take offense.

I'm a bit long winded myself at times, and that's without alcohol, by the way. And it's not like I don't agree with some of what you say, you do make sense. But I just can't read all of that post of yours that you wrote up.