Disclaimer - I’m not a musician, but I always wanted to learn to play an instrument. I have some experience with a guitar and drums. Currently, I’m learning to play piano.
Thank you for the kind words, but I’m not the musician. I have a background in STEM, so it makes it easier for me understand the music but I lack in the creative part. I can recreate the music but I struggle to make something on my own. Having said that, I truly enjoy the piano learning experience.
For me it’s the other way around, i can’t read sheet music, or do anything with that. Still it makes us both a musician! :) And to approach it from a theoretic perspective gives a lot of opportunities as well, first do the piano, then go into synthesizers and sound synthesis and BAM all the STEM aspects are needed again. ;)
You sound like me. STEM background, though I have been playing music from an early age. I’m good at transcribing what I hear down to sheet music, but ask me to generate anything original or creative and I can’t do anything.
Composing doesn’t mean that you’re turning on the random number generator in your head and come up with something without any external input.
You will hear many melodies throughout your life. Your brain isn’t a perfect storage device, but rather just mushes them together.
If your brain then reproduces mush between multiple songs and you write that down as sheet music, that’s most the creativity you need.
You won’t transcribe the mush perfectly and even if you did, it always sounds better in one’s head than it does when written down. But then you clean that up, take out the rough edges, try to make it a bit richer than what your brain told you about and after a while you’ve genuinely got a thing of your own. Alternatively, you may also just need to scrap a snippet of mush, if it just does not work (which happens a lot).
Ultimately, perseverance and understanding the theory get you much farther than any creativity could.
Disclaimer - I’m not a musician, but I always wanted to learn to play an instrument. I have some experience with a guitar and drums. Currently, I’m learning to play piano.
You are still a musician, no barrier to entry! :)
Always good to be able to play some piano!
Thank you for the kind words, but I’m not the musician. I have a background in STEM, so it makes it easier for me understand the music but I lack in the creative part. I can recreate the music but I struggle to make something on my own. Having said that, I truly enjoy the piano learning experience.
For me it’s the other way around, i can’t read sheet music, or do anything with that. Still it makes us both a musician! :) And to approach it from a theoretic perspective gives a lot of opportunities as well, first do the piano, then go into synthesizers and sound synthesis and BAM all the STEM aspects are needed again. ;)
Seems like we’re the two sides of the same coin :)
You sound like me. STEM background, though I have been playing music from an early age. I’m good at transcribing what I hear down to sheet music, but ask me to generate anything original or creative and I can’t do anything.
Composing doesn’t mean that you’re turning on the random number generator in your head and come up with something without any external input.
You will hear many melodies throughout your life. Your brain isn’t a perfect storage device, but rather just mushes them together.
If your brain then reproduces mush between multiple songs and you write that down as sheet music, that’s most the creativity you need.
You won’t transcribe the mush perfectly and even if you did, it always sounds better in one’s head than it does when written down. But then you clean that up, take out the rough edges, try to make it a bit richer than what your brain told you about and after a while you’ve genuinely got a thing of your own. Alternatively, you may also just need to scrap a snippet of mush, if it just does not work (which happens a lot).
Ultimately, perseverance and understanding the theory get you much farther than any creativity could.