This is very much true. I've played saxophone with lots of pleasure for many years without being able to read notes properly (spell notes would be more accurate). But I've found that being able to read notes is a useful skill and once I've decided on something like that I tend to plod away at it until I get it, I'm a pretty slow learner but I have good stamina which is what usually gets me to the end of the race. As long as I'm enjoying myself it will work out fine.
The main takeaway from your comment is that whatever you do with music should be fun, to make sure you don't destroy your motivation. And just like there is fun in being able to improvise there can also be fun in being able to play some piece perfectly (which, as you can see from the linked video I still had a long way to go with on that piece when I made the recording, it is actually much better now :) ).
Incidentally, the biggest consumer of the software in my house is my son Luca, who has taught himself a whole raft of pieces that he likes, he learns far faster than I do and his confidence is impressive, huge jumps from one end of the keyboard to the other without ever looking down, and all that with nothing but the software to guide him. He tends to come to me with some piece he wants to play, we find a youtube video, I extract the mp3, turn it into a score, we polish the score until it looks and sounds just right and then he's off to the races. Floors me every time how fast he will master something and how confident he is when playing.
"The main takeaway from your comment is that whatever you do with music should be fun, to make sure you don't destroy your motivation.”
Absolutely. As a child, I encountered both music and maths in a way that destroyed any idea that they could be fun. I took piano lessons for eight years and got to a fairly advanced amateur level, but the emphasis on theory and having to play exactly what was written on the page led to me eventually hating it, and I haven’t touched a piano since.
I later took up guitar, and discovered that I just like making stuff up, and seldom play anything exactly the same way twice. I think that now a little more understanding of the underpinnings might give me more to play with, but I still have a rather visceral reaction when I see written music...
This very much mirrors my own experience as a child (violin, piano), the later on saxophone was a lot of fun and now piano again, but this time without guidance just enjoying myself figuring it all out and using my software skills to help me.
That’s great! I certainly don’t mean to say that there’s something wrong with playing specific pieces. The fact that you’re creating the scores yourself sounds great, as it should make it clear to your son that there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” way to play. If your son continues to be interested in playing, maybe consider encouraging him to learn some melodies on his own by just listening to a recording.
Yes, absolutely, I show him how to make variations on the pieces he knows, adding ornaments, stripping it down to chord changes, harmonizing with it when playing back a recording and changing the timing and so on. Music is like paint for time, you can mix it and apply it any way you want.
I get the intent of what you're saying, but the reality is there are definitely "righter" and "wronger" ways to play. Music is incredibly mathematical, and the piano even more so. Written music provides input and queues to things like phrasing, fingering and the patterns that are often harder to decipher by ear. The true beauty to me is that we can use rules and technique to produce something that sounds so organic and pure. That's probably what also drives my deep love of computers and software.
The main takeaway from your comment is that whatever you do with music should be fun, to make sure you don't destroy your motivation. And just like there is fun in being able to improvise there can also be fun in being able to play some piece perfectly (which, as you can see from the linked video I still had a long way to go with on that piece when I made the recording, it is actually much better now :) ).
Incidentally, the biggest consumer of the software in my house is my son Luca, who has taught himself a whole raft of pieces that he likes, he learns far faster than I do and his confidence is impressive, huge jumps from one end of the keyboard to the other without ever looking down, and all that with nothing but the software to guide him. He tends to come to me with some piece he wants to play, we find a youtube video, I extract the mp3, turn it into a score, we polish the score until it looks and sounds just right and then he's off to the races. Floors me every time how fast he will master something and how confident he is when playing.