Natural Talent vs. Practice and Determination

Mods, this may end up in IMHO territory, so feel free to move it over if appropriate.

I have always wanted to play the drums, but at 60 I figure I no longer have the capacity to learn something new as when I was a kid. (I have never touched a drum set, although I picked up the acoustic guitar as a kid and learned to play it fairly well.)

Not only would I want to learn to play the drums, but I would want to be really good at it, not just be average. I don’t think I have any natural talent toward drumming, but I would be highly motivated and would be willing to practice a lot, say 20 hours a week. There is no physical reason why I couldn’t play the drums that I know of.

So the questions is, can someone with no obvious natural talent become an excellent drummer if they practice enough, have determination and a really good teacher, or does being really good at something like the drums require innate talent and being young?

Is there an example of someone who picked up a musical skill after say age 50, wasn’t a natural, but eventually became a world class talent? I don’t think so, but I may just be ignorant.

Well, at the very least, practice will help them improve, and since most people can’t drum, it’ll be quite easy to become the best in your social circle.

Natural talent is **possibly **crucial to be a world class drummer, but do not forget, even Ringo Star had to practice a hell of a lot to reach his level.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book* Outliers*, postulates that a person needs 10,000 hours of practiceto become a master in a field. If that’s true, you can do it in less than 10 years!

However, Gladwell seems to think (or his views have been oversimplified to suggest) that natural talent doesn’t factor in at all. I’m not so sure. If you look at world-classl athletes, you see a pyramid of talent that shows the less-than-supremely gifted don’t make it to the top, no matter how long they stay in the game. Practice can’t make an athlete faster, and I don’t think it’s going to improve your gross and fine motor skills to the point where you become Keith Moon.

But as someone who’s in his 60’s, I say we all need a hobby. So what the hell. Enjoy yourself!

ETA: I’ve typed a hell of a lot more than 10,000 hours in my life, and I still make typos!:slight_smile:

There is a double-edged sword with that way of thinking. The optimistic view is that almost anyone can be extremely good at virtually any skill if they simply practice and work hard enough at it. It is a nice (but false as you say) thought in a way but it is also insulting in other ways. In any competitive endeavour, the field is littered with people that gave it everything they had and still didn’t make it. It is insulting to imply that they could have done better if they had simply tried harder, better or longer. Tell that to obsessive runners who cannot even begin to compete at the highest levels of Marathons for examples.

Drumming is something a lot of people can learn to do better than they currently do but that doesn’t mean that they will ever actually be good. I have no sense of rhythm and no musical ability whatsoever for example. I might be able to learn how to carry a few tunes if I practiced them long enough but I am simply not cut out to be a musician and neither are my kids. I do have some other skills that I make a living at that are really difficult to teach because I just know how to do them and always have at least since I was a child.

I have a stepbrother that was a semi-pro drummer in a pretty good band in Austin, TX. He got in his 10,000 hours of practice before he graduated high school because that was all he did after school night after night in his elaborate garage studio. He even got a Masters in music and is a reasonably good drummer by all accounts but he had to change fields to something completely different because, while he is a perfectly competent drummer, he is not one of the best and never will be. He didn’t fail at it at all but he never became as good or successful at it as he once thought he could be.

That said, if you want to take it up, just take some lessons and start banging away. Get some noise protection for both yourself and those unfortunate enough to be within earshot of you especially when you first start.

But if you have been listening to music while traveling, eg in a car,
you may have been doing some of those hours, by training to recognize (and therefore copy) the art of drumming.

There are other things to learnt over the years… eg Car driving… … training to perform simple actions of the hands not in unison. change gear, steer, indicator, wipers, horn… You have learnt to be able to quickly whip the hand out to do something like that… There’s more hours of practice completed.
Drumming ? well thats an Endurance event… well if you are also a long distance runner or swimmer or cyclist…

I suspect that the 10k hour thing means that you can be proficient at any task if you put 10k hours practicing it. This of course does require that you have the necessary prerequisite hardware to even perform the task, of course. You can’t become even a proficient golfer without the ability to stand up and swing a club.

If you want to be world class at something, that’s a totally different story. You almost certainly need certain innate biological traits to even compete, you probably need to start when young, etc. That’s how it is.

So it depends on just where your threshold is regarding drumming as to whether it’s worth your time to try.

Do you need to be good enough at it that you can perform in a garage band playing cover songs? Possible.

Do you need to be good enough that you can make money doing it?
Marginally possible - need to put in thousands of hours, probably.

Do you need to be good enough that you can make a living doing it?
Probably not - society only needs a small number of drummers since we have recordings, etc.

Do you want to be a world famous rock star drummer among the top 100 in the world?
Not happening.

Thanks for the feedback. No, I’m not seriously thinking of trying to become a professional studio drummer, but whether it’s even possible, given that I’m not young and I don’t have an innate talent, was the real question.

I might be able to become a competent drummer if I practice for 10,000 hours, but that’s a lot of work just to become competent at something. I don’t know how many hours Ringo Starr practiced before he became world class, but I’m guessing it came easily to him because of innate talent, something I will never have.

I wish I had a natural musical talent of some kind, but I don’t. Luckily I was able to do write software programs which led to a successful career. Had I tried to make it in the music business I would have starved and never have progressed past mediocre, which is a tough way to make a living.

I have a brother-in-law who works in the music business, has a band, and is a very talented lead guitarist. He doesn’t make a lot of money, but his wife works at Google and supports his passion, which is music.

A point that often gets overlooked in the “10,000 hours” discussions:

You’ll need both to be very good at something and to enjoy it a lot to have any good chance of putting in those 10,000 hours. And these two are related.

You could start with enormous enthusiasm, but if you don’t see yourself making progress at a decent rate, you’re probably going to lose enough of that enthusiasm that, after a couple thousand hours you decide maybe there are better ways to spend the remaining 8000.

Or you might want to look at a different way - play drums like a little kid! They’re enthusiastic but no one would call them excellent. But at least they’re having a good time. So who (besides yourself) cares if you’re any good - you’ve got an excellent excuse to do something you like. Everyone else will chalk it up to a crazy middle-age thing if you suck.

It’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish with a lot of practice. Will practice alone make you a world-class practitioner of X? Probably not. But can you get better than 90% of people in the world? Probably. It’s the last 10% that makes the difference between a skilled person and a true master, and that’s the 10% that requires a lifetime of dedication and a lot of natural talent.

In something like the Olympics, you’re watching a competition between the top 0.1% or less of people. But if you can run a marathon in under five hours you’re already in a very exclusive club. And that’s a very realizable goal for a majority of able-bodied people.

You may have innate talent with the drums that’s unrealized. The only way to know for sure is to go for it.

I’d be weary to take anything Gladwell says at face value.

In this particular instance, recent research does not appear to support this conclusion. See for instance this NYT story. A meta analysis of studies on deliberate practice found that, depending on the field, it explained at most 26% of the variance in performance.

You can read the actual paper here.

The authors note that how you practice is more important than how much you practice. Furthermore, there appears to be an “optimal development period.” People who start learning languages very young are at an advantage over those who don’t, but for chess, players who started at a later age were actually better than those who started very young.

Abilities that are in great part inherited, like general intelligence and working memory have shown to be good predictors of performance. For instance:

Another important point the authors make is that practice has a larger effect when the task is highly predictable. For instance, running vs. responding to an emergency.

Ive played various instruments for over 30 years, and i conclude, if you don’t have a natural talent for given insrtument/hobby/vocation or industry, you will be just average, regardless of study.

I am really good at some things, but cannot achieve any more than passable at others no mater what.

The hard realities of it all. :wink:

I think there’s a big difference between being very good at something and being a world class talent.

For example, if you imagine in chess; with the right coaching and determination pretty much anyone could go from not even knowing how the pieces move to having an 1800 rating and be able to beat 99.9% of people including everyone at their local chess club, I’m positive of that.
But if you want to beat 99.999% of players and be world class, well, you need to have started from childhood and competed against top players from an early age (I’m obviously talking about the modern day here; obviously the game has not always been that professional).

And that brings the obvious question of why specifically you want to attain this level. There are plenty of tracks that will sound great, will be fun to play, and your friends will enjoy that are not technically difficult. If you’re not interested in having that, and only want to learn a skill if you can be l33t at it, then I doubt you will ever gain any proficiency at all.

Right. And there’s something illustrative here about the difference between our OP’s two example careers.

Software : good software produces actual real world wealth. Whether it be a piece of control code that drives a piece of factory machinery making manufactured goods with value, or a piece of accounting software that allows a company to more optimally use the capital invested in them, it has value in itself.

More importantly, there’s no upper limit. Theoretically you could write a piece of software to autonomously perform virtually any physical task and most mental ones. However, you need armies of people to do it, and exponentially more people the more complex the software needs to be.

So “just” being an 1800 rated coder, using the chess scale, has immense value and is worth hundreds of thousands a year. Even a mediocre programmer is worth right around 100k at the current rates.

Music : Humans can only enjoy a single song at a time, and there’s a finite number of songs that will be popular at a given moment. This phenomena has something to do with the fact that music is a social activity. So a few ultra popular artists become smash hits and everyone else can barely make a living, if that.

:smiley:

Not that I’m disagreeing, necessarily, but it’s very hard to tell from the outside looking in how much of an athlete’s success is due to ‘natural talent’ and how much is due to practice. Without a doubt it requires some of both, but in what measure is hard to determine. I have played, coached and instructed (and been instructed) on baseball virtually all of my life. Much of my instruction has come from current and former MLB players. All of them study and practice a ridiculous amount. For example, Albert Pujols makes hitting look natural, but he hits 300+ baseballs every single day. I have been instructed by people who self admitted having little natural talent for the game, but played in the major leagues for years beacause they put in the time and effort. I have never seen any one, regardless of talent level, reach the top of their sport without practice.

The best way of telling how much of each a person has is to have them teach someone else. People with higher natural talent often make poor teachers because they have less insight into how they do what they do - it’s natural to them. People who have to study, practice and work at a skill are usually much better at passing that skill on to others.

Actually, it can. Learning and practicing fundamentals and technique does increase how fast one can run, as can stretching and strengthening specific muscles through training and repetition. I know what you were saying, some things cannot be improved through practice - I can’t get taller by practicing being tall - but running ain’t one!

So, dolphinboy, select a drum instructor who had to work harder than most to be successful and see how far you can go!

I’ve been teaching the piano for 20 years now. What I found:

People without talent but lots of motivation and determination can play quite well. They rarely miss a key, they can keep time, and they efficiently follow instructions.
Yet, they can never master the instrument. 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 hours, they make no difference. To be a musician, you need to be able to do many more things than simply to hit the right key at the right time.

You need to be able to decide how to interpret a piece. People without talent rely on their teacher for that. When they grow up and no longer enjoy lessons, they play what they have learned, as they have learned it. They never try out new interpretations, and most of them never learn a new piece.

You need to be able to adapt to new musical situations at a moment’s notice. Play the song in a different key. Play it faster or slower. Omit a part. Defer a voice to another instrument rather than playing every note in the sheet.

You need to be able to create music out of thin air, without preparation. Not necessarily true for other instruments, but a pianist MUST be able to improvise an accompainment to a melody, on the spot, even if he has never heard that melody before in his life, if he hopes to be of any use as a répétiteur.

You need to be able to hear a song, and immediately play it back on your instrument, without the help of sheet music.

All these things can, in theory, be learned and mastered, even by the untalented. But, since they are separate skills, they would have to invest 10,000 hours into each and every one of them. Someone with talent can be proficient at all this as early as 15 years of age.

Now, to offer consolation to the untalented, I have to concede that the talented are, more often than not, plagued by laziness and arrogance, preventing them from acquiring necessary techniques.

Hephzibah Menuhin was described as having an “almost preternatural talent for practicing”. She was, apparently, really really good at it from a young age.

To the OP - for no investment, other than a little bit of your time, you may find something interesting at http://www.studydrums.com/index.html

I’m pretty sure Gladwell and Anders Ericsson, whose work Gladwell was discussing, both stressed the importance of meaningful practice. Gladwell mentions that a good indicator of how well figure skaters will develop is how often they fall attempting things in practice. After I gave my son my copy of the book he informed me that his bass playing had experienced a quantum leap because he realized that he was just perfecting stuff he was good at and not trying stuff he couldn’t do.