Do You Need Natural Talent To Succeed In Learning Music?
If you’ve been playing music for a while or are thinking about starting, you’ve probably heard the tired, sweaty, worn-out doctrine that is Natural Talent. How you must have it in order to become really great at music. How you must be born with it as there is no other way of acquiring it; it is simply an accident of birth to those privileged elites.
“You need natural talent – to be born with it – to become good at music,” I’m sure you’ve heard this many times in movies, TV shows, from other musicians (amateur and professional), etc., so it must be true, right?
Yes, because doctors are born with how to perform open-heart surgery, engineers are born with formulae in their brains to begin building things with, and musicians are just born knowing where to place their hands at such a speed to create the notes that create the exact feelings they want to express… It takes many years of practice just to get good at communicating through language exactly what you mean so why on Earth do people just assume it’s a case of have/have not? Music is unlike sports where you need a proper physiological build in order to perform better than others not so fortunate to be born with the right bone structure.
And yet for all the cases I could make against Natural Talent, it actually exists. So what exactly is Natural Talent? And what does that mean for you?
Natural Talent is the ability of knowing what to do, in what order, at what time, and getting it right every time. Natural Talent is nothing more than correctly guessing more often than not what you are supposed to be focusing on and then doing it. As evidence I submit two particular types of musicians: the self-taught professional and the parental or teacher taught professional.
Self-taught professionals
In interviews these types confess to not knowing exactly how they did it, they practiced and practiced and practiced and slowly put pieces into place. They slowly figured out what worked and what didn’t.
Parental or teacher-taught professionals
These types will tell you that they knew they were going to become really good at music. Those with parents as professionals were typically made to practice only when their parent could watch and help them. This is what I have explained above as installing Natural Talent, that the musician in training is taught what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and to do it correctly.
By looking at these two types, it is easy to see that those that succeed and become really good at playing or creating music are those that have figured out the right way of doing things or, at the very least, have practiced doing the wrong things so much that they have become good at them.
I used to tell my students that Natural Talent doesn’t exist. Now I tell them that it does exist, and I am going to install it in to them so that they know what to practice, when, in what order, and to practice it correctly every time. This ensures that they know what to do, and that they become the guitar players that they want to be.
About the author:
Bryce Gorman runs a guitar school in Lethbridge Alberta, with a passion for helping his students become the best players they can be! If you are interested in taking Guitar Lessons In Lethbridge, Alberta, then be sure to contact Bryce!