Our best advice for young instrumentalists

Musical instruments
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So, let’s say a new instrumentalist comes along and asks you for your one best piece of advice on playing an instrument. What do you tell them?

Share your one best tip for each instrument you play! Whatever you think someone should study, listen to or pay attention to first — basically, anything. But it has to be the first thing you would say!

Mine for the bouzouki:
Don’t use too much force with your hands! We’re playing, not torturing ourselves! It’s easier to gradually increase the intensity than to start forcefully and then try to reduce it.

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I wouldn’t tell him anything specifically about the instrument. I’d tell him something that applies generally to any instrument he wants to learn.
“Go to a teacher”!!

Your advice is excellent. I must admit that, even after all these years, when I’m with our band, I still try to play softly. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t go to a teacher when I was first learning and cut my teeth in a group with other instruments where everyone was shouting (as were the tavern patrons who frequented the place we went to).

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I’d tell him!
Listen, watch, don’t talk.
The hardest thing is learning to listen.
When you know how to listen, your brain will force you to play.
Listen (actively) to everything.
TRAIN YOUR EARS!
Don’t rush—it takes years, this music! (As they say, “this cologne lasts for years” …)

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Train your ear. Learn rhythms, modes, scales and chords until, when you hear a song, it’s almost as though you can see it written down (painted—whatever, you get the idea, decoded).

Of course, this isn’t one of the first things a new instrumentalist masters. It will take them quite a while and many songs to learn it, and naturally they won’t be unable to play until then. But they should keep this goal in mind.

Well, no, I don’t agree. Teachers are of course useful, but they’re not the only way forward. In recent years there’s been a tendency to undervalue self-teaching. There shouldn’t be.

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I’m not undervaluing it. After all, I consider myself self-taught. I simply consider it less effective and efficient than learning with a teacher. For some people, the enjoyment may come from discovery, but discovery is a teaching method that is clearly slow and sometimes genuinely leads you down the wrong path. Because technique on an instrument develops through the targeted repetition of procedural knowledge, learning this kind of knowledge incorrectly is difficult to undo.

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One word only: Patience.-

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I don’t know… The pace depends on the student: whether they learn with a teacher or teach themselves, some race ahead while others fall behind. As for the success of each method, not all the best have come exclusively from learning with a teacher, nor have all those who had a teacher always progressed in the right way. (Let’s think of how many people we all know who, as children, were introduced to classical piano or classical guitar and eventually gave up music altogether… And we’re talking about a music education system tested over the centuries, one that produced all the giants of classical music. But even that isn’t infallible!)

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That’s it. Listen to old records and cover versions. Learn to distinguish the sound of each instrument and its role in the arrangement. Learn to recognise the sound of an open string as opposed to the other notes, and the sound produced when you play the string with your right hand near the fingerboard or near the bridge. And when you start playing with other people, listen to what the other instruments are playing and what the voices are saying; notice how your playing fits with theirs.

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I wanted him to go there. I’m always in favour of someone learning music as a discipline, with a teacher and so on, but it has its… side effects too! Especially when the bouzouki, for better or worse, isn’t just one style! Studying classical music will produce players who are all alike! I think it should be emphasised that, alongside Athens (the teacher), you must also move your own hand forward, because a teacher may give you the tools, but they can’t give you that certain something that will be uniquely yours. So I would, with apologies, Mr Founder, “upgrade” your advice to: “Find a teacher whose taste matches yours”.
I’m always talking about the bouzouki. The bouzouki isn’t the violin or the oud. It’s a simpler and fairly untamed instrument!
I’d also like us to discuss some simple playing tips that make a huge difference to your progress. I mean, of course, that you should listen and so on, but I think that’s effective over the long term and much more multifaceted than, for example, “use proper alternate picking” or “use a metronome”.
Another thing I’d say is that, when you reach a piece that’s difficult for your level, play it AS slowly as possible, so that the rhythm stays coherent—and it will come out much better!

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It takes a canny teacher to get across to you that this instrument isn’t «one thing», that it doesn’t have «one» way of being played, that all the greats had each developed their own style of playing, and that you too will gradually develop your own—which he won’t teach you (because it doesn’t exist yet; we’re waiting for you to create it), but he can show you the way there.

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Open string, great advice… It determines both the fingering and even the sound in one go.

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It’s a system that has itself changed over the centuries. The guitar, for example, has always been an accompanying instrument, not solely a solo instrument. Both in the Baroque period and in the 19th century, with Sor, who also wrote songs (seguidillas), not just sonatas and fantasias, as well as Paganini’s countless violin solos accompanied by guitar, and so on. The more recent emphasis on solo playing alone is a legacy of Segovia and the 20th century, as well as of the “division” of the guitar’s heritage into folk and classical traditions. And that is what causes many people to give up music, when the choice is soloist or nothing.

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@stavros_k’s view on the subject of classical guitar will be very interesting. He’s an excellent virtuoso and a real expert, and I think he once told me that this is indeed a feature of the last hundred to hundred and fifty years. Plus, that the Andalusian element somehow entered classical guitar through Segovia and a few others (?). But I could be wrong here.

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A bold observation. The most interesting bouzouki players I’ve seen taught themselves. In the sense that they had no teacher. I’m talking, of course, about a small group of self-taught musicians who are exceptionally talented and accomplished players. I’m talking about today, because in the old days almost everyone was self-taught anyway.

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Well, if we’re honest, someone who’s been an established bouzouki player for, say, 20 years wouldn’t have found it so easy to find a teacher when they were young who was properly trained, as they would today. Nor would every family have been willing to pay for bouzouki lessons for their child. Today there’s a much greater supply, a significantly higher chance of finding a properly qualified teacher, and the stigma has been completely removed.

Because music schools and Arta are part of the picture.

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Prioritise the picking hand (rhythm and tone), and let it guide the other hand on the fretboard.

I wholeheartedly agree about both staying relaxed and using your ear.

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Personally, I’d simply tell him, “You should like it” … regardless of the instrument.

What I mean is that, whatever instrument you’re trying to learn, you should also like the songs that feature it. For example, I play the three-course bouzouki and the oud, and I also listen to and enjoy the corresponding songs. But I don’t like the four-course bouzouki at all, nor the post-war rebetiko/laïko repertoire.

So I try to play the things I like. I didn’t say, “Ah, I’ll learn the bouzouki in general.”

I think the most important thing is to really love it deep down, and you’ll manage it.

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@anestakos asked:

I’m going to depart slightly from his point about what we would say first (what is most important), because perhaps many things are important to an equal degree!

I also consider the above advice important.
I’ll share a personal experience on this subject. Some years ago, I decided to learn the clarinet because I’m involved in a traditional dance group and had some familiarity with the music. In other words, I decided to dive into a huge musical world, but unfortunately my experience began and ended with the dance lessons I attended. I didn’t listen to traditional clarinet music at home, play it in the car, or choose to listen to it. This was in contrast to rebetiko, which is constantly ringing in my ears (even in my sleep when I’ve been playing a song on the bouzouki for a few days). In other words, I was musically uneducated in this genre. I remember that the clarinet teacher would play songs he considered very well-known, and I didn’t know them. I like listening to it on occasion, but I never immersed myself in active listening as I do with rebetiko. The result is that I didn’t continue with it (at least for the time being).
So, I believe that regularly listening whenever possible (at home, at work, for entertainment, in the car), wherever one can, probably makes all the difference!

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Very true.

But of course, the solution isn’t “to learn to play the clarinet, I’ll listen to clarinet music all the time”. It works the other way around: “since I was listening to clarinet music all the time anyway (or bouzouki, or whatever), the natural outcome was that I learned to play it myself too”.

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Now that we’re on the subject, I’ve done that too during some autistic meltdowns.

Years ago, I noticed that when I listened to Pontic music, I couldn’t make head or tail of it: not a single note, not a single rhythm, not a single word—just an irritating whine with no coherence, no development, no difference from one piece to the next. And I thought, I need to learn how to listen to it. I put all the Pontic music I had scattered across various records, along with a couple of entirely Pontic albums, onto one or two cassette tapes, and for a while I played them and listened to them incessantly. Not to learn how to play it, but to learn how to listen to it.

Eventually it became unbearable and I stopped. (Imagine listening day and night to music you don’t like, don’t understand, and which nobody has even forced on you!!) It worked, though. It didn’t produce immediate results, but later, when I came across some piece of information such as “the tik is in five”, I could search the tapes, find a tik, say, “Ah, that’s it! I remember it”, then search for the five-beat rhythm amid the chaos of the daouli and the lyra, and so, little by little—in combination with a few arrangements of Pontic songs I knew, which were closer to my own ear—the picture began to become clearer.

I did the same thing with Cretan music: “Why does it say syrtos here, kondylies there, something else over there, but they all sound the same?” I put all the syrtoi on one cassette, all the kondylies on another, and so on, and again (with less self-torture) I learned how to listen to those too.

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