pizzicato7's comments

The short answer is it feels effing awesome to have that kind of instinctive ability to hear something, and play it back, instantly and accurately.

However, it's a bit more nuanced than that. Playing the notes accurately is only one aspect of playing music. Playing the notes accurately and expressively is really what you're aiming for.

There are a couple of distinct skills you can build to do this:

1. Training your ear to recognize chords and melody notes. This requires a lot of active listening to music, and learning music theory, so you can recognize what's being played.

2. Building the motor skills on your instrument so you can play many kinds chords and notes, instinctively. This requires hundreds (or thousands) of hours of practice.

Then the trick is putting the two together: listening to music, recognizing the chords and notes being played, and then playing them back yourself on your instrument.

Now the harmonium is a relatively simple and limited instrument consisting of a bellows and a small keyboard (usually 2.5-3.5 octaves). Most of the "chords" on this instrument are actually played with the bellows blowing air over banks of reeds. So you don't really need to build a lot of muscle memory to play chords (as you would on a piano). And melodies on the harmonium are typically played slowly.

So learning to play the harmonium won't take as much practice as say a piano or a guitar would. You could get quite good at the harmonium with say 500 hours of practice, which is not actually that long.

In terms of practical steps, I'd probably watch a lot of harmonium videos on YouTube and try to get your harmonium to sound like what they're playing in the video.

One major difficulty you're going to have is that different harmoniums can sound quite different, depending on how many reed banks a harmonium has, how many octaves its keyboard has, whether various stops are pulled out, etc.

So I don't think it'll be easy to truly sound just like what you're hearing because the variation between your harmonium and the other harmoniums out there is quite big.

Hope this is helpful!

Me: I'm a classically trained pianist and I've owned and played harmoniums in the past.

I think this article misses a key point. It's not all just about a lack of relevant role models.

Today, there are so many things competing for a kids' time - social media and messaging, mobile apps, video games, Netflix - that kids are choosing other activities instead of solitary, frustrating hours practicing guitar technique.

To become a proficient amateur-level guitarist, it takes around 2,000 hours of practice. That's equivalent to an hour a day, EVERY SINGLE DAY, for 5-1/2 years.

90% of kids learning guitar quit in the first 2 months (according to Fender) - most before they can play their first song well. The first few weeks are particularly brutal - it sounds horrible, it's painful on your fingers, and takes hours just get your first chord down.

In one sentence: it's just too hard to learn for the vast majority of people - and it's always been this way. But the difference is that these days, most kids would rather play Pokemon Go or Snapchat - and for kids who are musically inclined, it's so much easier and faster to become a DJ or producer than an instrumentalist, thanks to GarageBand and VirtualDJ and other easy-to-use software apps.

So a lot of musical kids are choosing that route. Why spend thousands of hours alone in your bedroom when you can be DJ'ing your first party in a few weeks?

So, how do we solve the problem of getting more kids to learn instruments, particularly the guitar? Some people have put lights on the fretboard (Fretlight, Gtar, Poputar) but in 25 years, that hasn't proven to make it much easier to learn. Others have gamified the experience (Rocksmith, Yousician) - but the learning curve is still extremely steep.

My company, Magic Instruments, has a different approach. We make it fundamentally easier to learn. Instead of starting by learning traditional guitar chord fingerings, we enable people to start playing chords using just one finger. This gives beginners an instantly positive musical experience - you can start strumming and playing your favorite songs from day one, and start jamming with others in a band in your first week. We then transition people over to learning traditional chords at their own pace.

We've seen 9 year old kids form a band in a few hours. Our hope is that we can inspire these kids to have a passion for practicing music, which will enable them to persevere for the thousands of hours of practice it takes to build the muscle memory to become guitarists.