Huh, that seems false to me? My sense is musicians routinely get to very high levels of skill in a new instrument quickly, if they have already mastered at least one instrument before (like enough to play in a band professionally in a new instrument).
6 months of practice is a long time!
I actually had a conversation about this exact thing with Ben (who plays guitar at an approximately professional level). I think our conversation landed on 6 months being roughly reasonable (but things would end up a bit rough because your physical muscles end up exhausted and we had some uncertainty on whether you could make up enough of the calendar time during which your muscles are recovering via learning other things, but you could definitely do it if you spread out those 6 months over a year).
Is this a distinction between expert and professional? For many fields, a merely professional level is way below an expert level, and for others that difference may just be less legible.
In my own case I saw your tweet and my thought was that a fifth skill is the “aura” of a notable politician or someone with a cult of personality, but it’s true that a merely “professional” politicians like a state assemblyman or city councilman may not have the same level of unreachable skills at all.
Is this a distinction between expert and professional? For many fields, a merely professional level is way below an expert level, and for others that difference may just be less legible.
Oh, I wasn’t super planning to make a strong distinction here. My current belief here is something like: If you have achieved expert level performance (as you define here) at one task then you can reach expert level performance in 6 months at another task in the same domain. If you’ve only achieved professional-level performance, then you can reach professional-level performance in a bit less than 6 months (but not much less)
But don’t expect pushing the frontier of that skill category to be as fast as learning a new task to the level you’ve already achieved somewhere else!
And then, to be clear, these things are very intelligence loaded. If you are in a domain that is so competitive that the experts are 4 SDs above average in intelligence, then don’t expect you can get there if you are not at least that smart! I am not saying there is a magic “become expert in any domain independently of your intelligence” button, merely that skill acquisition doesn’t take that long if you have learned related skills.
My sense is musicians routinely get to very high levels of skill in a new instrument quickly, if they have already mastered a bunch of instruments before (like enough to play in a band professionally in a new instrument).
I agree with the rest of your comment (6 months is a long time!) but this part seems to be moving the goal posts. A professional musician being able to learn an additional instrument quickly is not evidence that a non-musician designer[1] can.
Playing an instrument is definitely a physical skill! (In my model, whose epistemic status, to be clear is “schizo galaxy-brain model”)
Also, unfortunately I do think skills in the physical domain transfers somewhat less than in other domains (though my guess is still a decent amount, even between something like hockey and playing guitar). It’s not the domain I care the most about, so I didn’t go into details but clearly there is some muscle memory that will be kind of tricky to transfer (but again, I do actually expect really quite a bit of transfer).
There also a very important mental skill too. It’s not just learning to move your muscles precisely, correctly and in time. It’s also learning to hear and understand what you hear, to quickly identify what notes/chords/scales you’re hearing, what comes next, quickly generating a potentially good sounding melody and quickly understandibg of what notes it consists, what techniques need to be used to play it, where all its notes are on your instrument. Although this latter part probably cross-trains very very well between different instruments, but for a non-musician I expect it cannot be learned in 6 months.
Oh, but then you’re making a 5th category for “everything music related” :)
Ok, MAYBE someone who has already become an expert in a musical instrument and in music in general can become an expert in another musical instrument in 6 months if studying that full time, but am not at all sure about this.
So far I’ve been learning one musical instrument for 3 years, another for a year and another for a year. And I quite far from becoming an expert in any of them. Also, I doubt that you can productively practice it full time or even 4-5 hours a day because in my experience more practice per day gives diminishing returns—whether it’s because of muscles getting tired or because of brain capacity or because of boredom I don’t know.
Well, ok what I am sure of if that you have no experience in music, then becoming an expert in 6 months in any single instrument is impossible unless you’re born as a genius. This is how it is in my experience and this is what observe among musicians around me—nobody gets good quickly.
Oh, but then you’re making a 5th category for “everything music related” :)
I think the greatest skill transfer to music will be expert level performance at any other physical skill, but as I say here, I do think muscle memory is going to transfer less well than other things.
So far I’ve been learning one musical instrument for 3 years, another for a year and another for a year. And I quite far from becoming an expert in any of them.
I would be very surprised if you are anywhere close to 6 months of full-time deliberate practice in those 3 years? Also, do you have expert level performance in any other physical skill?
Perhaps related: I suspect there’s also a skill transfer from music to computer programming. Specifically, I’ve observed a few musicians to have a much easier time learning programming than I expected for an adult with no prior programming experience.
This might have something to do with —
Comfort with patterns, iteration, and structure. If this is the thing, I would expect knitters and fiber artists to have some of the same advantage; I don’t know if they do.
Comfort with deliberate practice itself. Many new programmers get frustrated with the amount of practice and heedfulness it actually requires to get good. Trained musicians are accustomed to acquiring skills and methods through deliberate practice.
A nexus between music, programming, and math. (One of the musicians I’m thinking of also was a math major.)
Also, do you have expert level performance in any other physical skill?
Nope
I would be very surprised if you are anywhere close to 6 months of full-time deliberate practice in those 3 years?
So, a year has 255 working days. So half a year is 255⁄2 times 8 = 1020 hours of working time if we assume 8 hours per day. Yes, I probably do have approximately that amount of practice under my belt, maybe a little more. Also I’m not sure that 8 hours of deliberate practice per day for half a year in music learning is possible and is good for you.
So, a year has 255 working days. So half a year is 255⁄2 times 8 = 1020 hours of working time if we assume 8 hours per day. Yes, I probably do have approximately that amount of practice under my belt, maybe a little more. Also I’m not sure that 8 hours of deliberate practice per day for half a year in music learning is possible and is good for you.
A year has at least 300 working days, and a day has at least 10 working hours (more like 11), at the time investment level I am talking about here. The 6 months is meant as a lower bound if you tried really hard, not as the thing that you would get if you worked a normal 9-5 and took two weekend days on this. So the right number I was anchoring on is more like 1800.
Oh, god, sorry, I also just remembered. You might be thinking of “professional level” or “expert level” as the kind of absurd thing that people aspire to when they want to be orchestral musicians. Like, get a job for nothing else but their musical skill.
I think in the case of musical instruments the skill thresholds are much higher than I was thinking here.
Because there are so few jobs for being a professional concert musicians, I think the lengths people have to go to to reach that level are much higher than what I meant here for “professional”. Like, I was thinking of the level of “professional” as “went to a top university for an undergraduate degree in a specialization and then ~2 years of work experience” not what I think is standard for professional music careers, which I think tends to be “start at the age of 5, practice as a half-time job almost all the way through your teens, and engage in deliberate practice all-throughout, then transition to full-time in your early 20s, all-throughout with extreme training regimes”.
I don’t actually quite know how this world works, but my model is definitely because supply for full-time musicians so vastly outstrips demand, that the competition here is much harsher, and the usual terms will be confusing.
Then my model definitely doesn’t predict you would reach expert-level performance in 6 months of deliberate practice! That’s like the whole point of the model!
By “cannot … any” do you mean “there are no instruments you can” or “there are instruments you cannot”? The former seems completely wrong to me, you definitely can become an expert in playing the kazoo or the triangle in 6 months. (Even if you mean the latter, I think there are very few instruments you can’t become an expert in in 6 months, if you have no other job and no children and can spend 80 hours a week on it.)
I mean for most instruments you cannot, with exceptions like the triangle. About kazoo—isn’t basically vocals with an extra sound effect? So its difficulty would be bounder from below by the difficulty of learning to sing.
You could totally learn to play a brass instrument in 6 months if it was your full-time job. I’m less sure you could competently play violin in that time period, although 6 months is a lot of practice time if it’s actually your main priority.
Counterexample: you cannot become an expert in playing any musical instrument in 6 months. (unless you’re a freaking genius)
Huh, that seems false to me? My sense is musicians routinely get to very high levels of skill in a new instrument quickly, if they have already mastered at least one instrument before (like enough to play in a band professionally in a new instrument).
6 months of practice is a long time!
I actually had a conversation about this exact thing with Ben (who plays guitar at an approximately professional level). I think our conversation landed on 6 months being roughly reasonable (but things would end up a bit rough because your physical muscles end up exhausted and we had some uncertainty on whether you could make up enough of the calendar time during which your muscles are recovering via learning other things, but you could definitely do it if you spread out those 6 months over a year).
Is this a distinction between expert and professional? For many fields, a merely professional level is way below an expert level, and for others that difference may just be less legible.
In my own case I saw your tweet and my thought was that a fifth skill is the “aura” of a notable politician or someone with a cult of personality, but it’s true that a merely “professional” politicians like a state assemblyman or city councilman may not have the same level of unreachable skills at all.
Oh, I wasn’t super planning to make a strong distinction here. My current belief here is something like: If you have achieved expert level performance (as you define here) at one task then you can reach expert level performance in 6 months at another task in the same domain. If you’ve only achieved professional-level performance, then you can reach professional-level performance in a bit less than 6 months (but not much less)
But don’t expect pushing the frontier of that skill category to be as fast as learning a new task to the level you’ve already achieved somewhere else!
And then, to be clear, these things are very intelligence loaded. If you are in a domain that is so competitive that the experts are 4 SDs above average in intelligence, then don’t expect you can get there if you are not at least that smart! I am not saying there is a magic “become expert in any domain independently of your intelligence” button, merely that skill acquisition doesn’t take that long if you have learned related skills.
I agree with the rest of your comment (6 months is a long time!) but this part seems to be moving the goal posts. A professional musician being able to learn an additional instrument quickly is not evidence that a non-musician designer[1] can.
Or is musician a subclass of athlete?
Playing an instrument is definitely a physical skill! (In my model, whose epistemic status, to be clear is “schizo galaxy-brain model”)
Also, unfortunately I do think skills in the physical domain transfers somewhat less than in other domains (though my guess is still a decent amount, even between something like hockey and playing guitar). It’s not the domain I care the most about, so I didn’t go into details but clearly there is some muscle memory that will be kind of tricky to transfer (but again, I do actually expect really quite a bit of transfer).
There also a very important mental skill too. It’s not just learning to move your muscles precisely, correctly and in time. It’s also learning to hear and understand what you hear, to quickly identify what notes/chords/scales you’re hearing, what comes next, quickly generating a potentially good sounding melody and quickly understandibg of what notes it consists, what techniques need to be used to play it, where all its notes are on your instrument. Although this latter part probably cross-trains very very well between different instruments, but for a non-musician I expect it cannot be learned in 6 months.
Oh, but then you’re making a 5th category for “everything music related” :)
Ok, MAYBE someone who has already become an expert in a musical instrument and in music in general can become an expert in another musical instrument in 6 months if studying that full time, but am not at all sure about this.
So far I’ve been learning one musical instrument for 3 years, another for a year and another for a year. And I quite far from becoming an expert in any of them. Also, I doubt that you can productively practice it full time or even 4-5 hours a day because in my experience more practice per day gives diminishing returns—whether it’s because of muscles getting tired or because of brain capacity or because of boredom I don’t know.
Well, ok what I am sure of if that you have no experience in music, then becoming an expert in 6 months in any single instrument is impossible unless you’re born as a genius. This is how it is in my experience and this is what observe among musicians around me—nobody gets good quickly.
I think the greatest skill transfer to music will be expert level performance at any other physical skill, but as I say here, I do think muscle memory is going to transfer less well than other things.
I would be very surprised if you are anywhere close to 6 months of full-time deliberate practice in those 3 years? Also, do you have expert level performance in any other physical skill?
Perhaps related: I suspect there’s also a skill transfer from music to computer programming. Specifically, I’ve observed a few musicians to have a much easier time learning programming than I expected for an adult with no prior programming experience.
This might have something to do with —
Comfort with patterns, iteration, and structure. If this is the thing, I would expect knitters and fiber artists to have some of the same advantage; I don’t know if they do.
Comfort with deliberate practice itself. Many new programmers get frustrated with the amount of practice and heedfulness it actually requires to get good. Trained musicians are accustomed to acquiring skills and methods through deliberate practice.
A nexus between music, programming, and math. (One of the musicians I’m thinking of also was a math major.)
Nope
So, a year has 255 working days. So half a year is 255⁄2 times 8 = 1020 hours of working time if we assume 8 hours per day. Yes, I probably do have approximately that amount of practice under my belt, maybe a little more. Also I’m not sure that 8 hours of deliberate practice per day for half a year in music learning is possible and is good for you.
A year has at least 300 working days, and a day has at least 10 working hours (more like 11), at the time investment level I am talking about here. The 6 months is meant as a lower bound if you tried really hard, not as the thing that you would get if you worked a normal 9-5 and took two weekend days on this. So the right number I was anchoring on is more like 1800.
Oh, god, sorry, I also just remembered. You might be thinking of “professional level” or “expert level” as the kind of absurd thing that people aspire to when they want to be orchestral musicians. Like, get a job for nothing else but their musical skill.
I think in the case of musical instruments the skill thresholds are much higher than I was thinking here.
Because there are so few jobs for being a professional concert musicians, I think the lengths people have to go to to reach that level are much higher than what I meant here for “professional”. Like, I was thinking of the level of “professional” as “went to a top university for an undergraduate degree in a specialization and then ~2 years of work experience” not what I think is standard for professional music careers, which I think tends to be “start at the age of 5, practice as a half-time job almost all the way through your teens, and engage in deliberate practice all-throughout, then transition to full-time in your early 20s, all-throughout with extreme training regimes”.
I don’t actually quite know how this world works, but my model is definitely because supply for full-time musicians so vastly outstrips demand, that the competition here is much harsher, and the usual terms will be confusing.
Then my model definitely doesn’t predict you would reach expert-level performance in 6 months of deliberate practice! That’s like the whole point of the model!
By “cannot … any” do you mean “there are no instruments you can” or “there are instruments you cannot”? The former seems completely wrong to me, you definitely can become an expert in playing the kazoo or the triangle in 6 months. (Even if you mean the latter, I think there are very few instruments you can’t become an expert in in 6 months, if you have no other job and no children and can spend 80 hours a week on it.)
I mean for most instruments you cannot, with exceptions like the triangle. About kazoo—isn’t basically vocals with an extra sound effect? So its difficulty would be bounder from below by the difficulty of learning to sing.
You could totally learn to play a brass instrument in 6 months if it was your full-time job. I’m less sure you could competently play violin in that time period, although 6 months is a lot of practice time if it’s actually your main priority.