"Talent" and "being born with it"

[WI Short Scaler]

Playing an instrument is alot like vocals, IMO. You either have some natural inclination for it or you don't.

I learned early on I had no inclination toward sports, no matter how I tried to practice or participate with others. I'm slow and uncoordinated, just how it is. And unfortunately our kids are the same. But where I chose to invest my time in music all 3 of my kids chose art because they are fantastic artists. My wife and I? Not so much.

Every person has a natural inclination toward something, they just have to find out what it is.

 

[p12bassnut]

Talent comes with hard work but that said talent seems to be gained easier/faster with some people.
How many here find math (pick any subject) easy to understand and apply and how many always struggled with it ?
As in everything in life, some things are harder to internalize than others but that doesn't mean all can't enjoy the benefits of the subject in question.
JMHO

 

[dkelley]

Talent is real. I was born with it. Some of my friends were not. It makes a huge difference... it's like a cheat in a game. However, many people can get good at music through brute force learning/practicing, sometimes seemingly against all odds.

There are those who simply cannot do music though - incapable of counting measures and feeling rhythm, even if you skip pitch by teaching them exactly what notes to play on a pre-tuned instrument.

 

[fishdude101101]

I really disagree. Not everyone, and certainly not most people, can excel at a particular task no matter how much work they put in. It’s genetics. You can be great at some things with no effort and suck at some things despite years of hard work. You can get better if you work at it, but that’s not universal.

Agree. I have played with people who from day one had great ears for transcribing songs. Ear training would have been a waste for them. They just heard things better. Others just have more dexterity than others. Some people are just smarter than others and will grasp theory more quickly.

 

[fishdude101101]

Disagree. Some people dont have a good ear and will never have “it”. Same goes for sports. I was a good athlete when I was young and a low handicap golfer now. There are just people who will never be good at certain things and others that can get good quickly at something. God given talent as my mom always says

Agree. I'm not physically gifted so I have a ceiling on my bass playing. However I have a technically demanding job that others struggle with and I churn better results than most with almost zero effort. I just roll in a breeze through and my coworkers spend their evenings hitting the books and in the lab.

 

[JimmyM]

I really disagree. Not everyone, and certainly not most people, can excel at a particular task no matter how much work they put in. It’s genetics. You can be great at some things with no effort and suck at some things despite years of hard work. You can get better if you work at it, but that’s not universal.

Ya, I'm not going to be a great NBA player just because I work at it. At some point, natural talent has to enter into it.

 

[Gaolee]

I really disagree. Not everyone, and certainly not most people, can excel at a particular task no matter how much work they put in. It’s genetics. You can be great at some things with no effort and suck at some things despite years of hard work. You can get better if you work at it, but that’s not universal.

Yes, this. No matter how hard I work, I'll never be LeBron James. That takes nothing away from the amount of work a person like him put in to use and hone the abilities he was born with. The same thing goes for music and just about any other human pursuit. Some people are academically challenged. All the work in the world will not turn those people into Steven Hawkins. We all have a degree of ability in one thing or another, and less ability in other things. It's what you do with it that matters, not what you are born with so much, although what you are born with will put certain hard and soft limits on what you can and cannot accomplish, depending on how much or little ability you are born with.

 

[And I]

Musical talent is a thing, and genetics are involved. It's not the only thing, but it is definitely a thing.

 

[getbent]

"Talented? If you say so, but I think I was just dumb enough to keep doing it this long. Practice makes less awful."

 

[ToneMonkey]

Personally, I differentiate “talent” from “ability.” I do not use them synonymously, even though most dictionaries do.

Talent is innate aptitude. Ability is acquired any number of ways. Virtuoso ability is almost always the convergence of talent and hard work/dedication.

Some folks like myself can acquire a respectable amount of ability even though we don’t have much raw talent. Love spurs us on to work really hard.

I can spot ability pretty easily. Can the person play/sing in tune and with good rhythm? Talent is harder to spot. Usually I have to know the person. For example, Lady Gaga definitely has ability. No question about it. But how much of that ability is the result of innate aptitude? I can’t tell from a distance. She might have just worked her ass off.

 

[kringle77]

So here is something I have been thinking about.

I got talking to one guy some weeks ago about instruments and I have mentioned that I play the bass.

His response was something akin to 'i wish I was that talented'.

Being talented...

I don't think having talent is a thing. I think with practice, repetition, studying and playing you can be as skilled at music and playing and instrument as anyone else.

I was watching an interview with Jaco Pastorius and he said that he was born with "it", and you know, maybe he was... But then he said he spent hours upon hours just practicing and playing and studying.

I personally do not believe in talent, it's just work. I would say that I do not have any ability that I have had when I was born, instead I practice and put the hours in and eventually i get better.

The whole concept of being talented and someone telling me that I am talented is lowkey insulting because it implies that I havent worked hard for my ability to play, which I have.

Do you share similar views on this? Or do you believe something else?

Thanks!

I think that “talent” is really just someone being very interested in something and they then focus their time and energy on that thing.

 

[MustangWally]

Interesting thread. I regard myself as a journeyman musician - I am not particularly gifted but through stubbornness and hard work I can play OK. I have known (heck we all probably have) folks who can pick up anything and make it sound great - they don't need to even rehearse, they just have sheer talent, but those folks are (at my guess anyways) a tiny percentage of working musicians.

There is a famous quote regarding luck: "the harder I work the luckier I get" and I would suggest that it could be paraphrased to suit this topic, something like "the harder I work the more talented I get"

 

[groooooove]

i've thought about this topic a lot.

after years of knowing lots of musicians, teaching countless kids to play instruments, and just experience in general, my unconventional conclusion is:

mozart was the one and the only "born" talented musician. it's in the music. the writing demonstrates it from his early childhood.

everyone else falls in love with working at it. without that drive, folks don't become master players. folks with "natural" feel are special, but i think that comes from being surrounded by the language of that music. Jaco is a great example of this, he absorbed what he listened to.

it'd be easy to look at jaco and go "what a talented natural," but then when you look into it he grew up in a house where really great records were always on, the music scene was happening, and he was into it. he developed his thing, but that groove was a cultural development.

chick corea, beethoven, billy sheehan, whoever or whatever we look at as "talent" i think is the product of a deep love for the process, and work at that process.

...aside from mozart. that kid was special.

 

[Yonni]

I got halfway through thus thread then skipped to the end TLR.

in case it hasn’t been mentioned, tjis has been scientifically proven that generic markers can predispose people towards different levels of innate ability. For example, there are markers that, if you are born with one would give you an advantage in sport aptitude over others. It is highly unlikely that you would get two which would make you exceptional and the odds against getting three are 14 billion to 1. Talent, or innate anolity exists.

 

[Paul McCarty]

So here is something I have been thinking about.

I got talking to one guy some weeks ago about instruments and I have mentioned that I play the bass.

His response was something akin to 'i wish I was that talented'.

Being talented...

I don't think having talent is a thing. I think with practice, repetition, studying and playing you can be as skilled at music and playing and instrument as anyone else.

I was watching an interview with Jaco Pastorius and he said that he was born with "it", and you know, maybe he was... But then he said he spent hours upon hours just practicing and playing and studying.

I personally do not believe in talent, it's just work. I would say that I do not have any ability that I have had when I was born, instead I practice and put the hours in and eventually i get better.

The whole concept of being talented and someone telling me that I am talented is lowkey insulting because it implies that I havent worked hard for my ability to play, which I have.

Do you share similar views on this? Or do you believe something else?

Thanks!

Something I repeated religiously to my youth teams when I coached years ago:

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

That said, one can certainly get a leg up on the competition by having an environment provided by parents early in life that is conducive to the goal they set for the child's future. If they are lucky enough to have both support and unconditional encouragement (as well as financial means) as a small child, any task can be mastered in ones lifetime. Tiger Woods is but one of those examples.

 

[ACRock]

It's just hard work and lots of practice? Really?

 

[JohnMCA72]

Talent is what you start with. Whatever work you put in adds to it to create ability.

Talent can only take you so far. Hard work can overcome lack of talent, but only to a point. Neither talent nor work is binary; both are measured on a broad scale. Even extreme levels of talent & hard work are no guarantee of success, & other factors such as luck are involved.

 

[Gerald Bayley]

Talent matters but I’ve never met anybody that put their 10,000 hours in on a skill and still really sucked at said skill. Music is a thing you can definitely get ahead at by being a “gym rat”.

 

[Fun With Dirt]

Talent is just a predisposition. Sure, some people have a lot of talent to start with but without the work, just like athletes that try to rely purely on their talent and never really develop skill they get left behind with a viciousness when they hit "the big leagues". The big leagues are filled with people that were born with lots of talent on down to those that had almost no talent. ...but the one thing they all have in common is the work put in. Like being attractive will maybe start the conversation but it doesn't keep it going. I am not discounting talent at all. It's great if you got it, you envy it if you don't. It straight pisses you off when you see someone with all the talent in the world piss it away.

 

[MustangWally]

It straight pisses you off when you see someone with all the talent in the world piss it away.

Amen to that. I knew a couple guys (one guitarist, one keyboard player) back when I was a kid and they were both amazing: they could pick up any song in minutes, do creative solos, sing really well and in short do it all. But both were content to just cruise along and do the minimum amount of work. "They coulda been contenders!"