What the genre of music that you think would be easiest for a regular joe with a lot of dedication and a little time could pick up enough to entertain you – enough that you’d think about buying their music but not necessarily go through with it.
For me, it’s power pop. While it partially is a deliberate emulation of very simple rock writing, it seems like it would be easy to not only be a good musician that emulated mediocre musicians, it seems like it would be easy to actually be an entertaining musician with power pop.
It’s drums don’t seem as demanding as metal, and it vocals don’t seem as demanding as indie, and it definitely is not as hard to play as jazz. Furthermore, since I don’t like a lot of country or rap, it’s easier to entertain me with it.
Which isn’t to say it doesn’t take songwriting to write good lyrics or come up with inventive, short guitar soloes, but sometimes you don’t even need that to make listenable rock.
Ahhh, I did forget about folk/singer songwriter style music. While it’s not as entertaining to me as power pop, it’s probably a lot easier to play if you take some time to learnt the basics. So those suggestions probably tie mine as far as my list goes.
There are certain varieties of avant garde music, like Harry Partridge and John Cage’s stuff, which while “complex,” don’t necessarily have the same need to be finger fast and jacked at an instrument. Especially for pieces with chance elements.
Alternatively, you can always sing church hymns! Those tend to be simple for the needs of the people. We tend to sing them together when the church choir has our Christmas party. I’m the only one close to a professional (besides the organist), and we sound great.
The easiest thing to me seems to be the pop piano balad. They litterally just play chords. You just play the chord again and again until the next chord change, and sing on top of it.
I actually find it hard not to play little riffs off the melody.
Same. A solo artist with an acoustic is one of my great pleasures in life. While I wouldn’t wish my singing on my worst enemy, the guitar portion is usually not difficult to play well.
I like BigT’s answer – I think pop piano is pretty easy. Just play the chords.
Blues is hard – if you’re going to play it right. Aretha was no slouch, and neither was Billy Preston. It either comes off good or it’s bad. You have to have the whole blaclk church thing, if you want to do a good piano blues, which is not that easy to cop if you do it right.
the Irish music is hard to play too – deceptively simple.
Yeah, I guess, but probably most people (and musicians) would just say, “Wotta cliche!” I guess everybody “plays” a blues in their shower now and again, and probably underestimates that there’s a big difference between Otis Spann and everybody else!
If I had a music school, though, that would the basic core cirriculum – see if the slow ones wash out and leave spot for the ones who have something they can build on.
