I've found it surprisingly low effort to get good enough at guitar and, in fact, piano, that you can start to see social rewards, i.e. people actually want you to play, at least a little.
Meanwhile I put in more hours and had far more formal instruction at a woodwind than either of those combined and... yeah, nobody wanted to hear that shit, it sounds awful (cringe-inducing, even) unless you're excellent. Years of effort and practice and no-one wanted to be around when I was playing (and I can't blame them). It's super discouraging to have spent that much time and effectively have nothing to show for it—nothing that sounds at least OK, even to you when you record it and play it back.
A couple half-assed months on guitar or piano can get you to, "hey, that sounds pretty good!" and get people to start singing along to whatever you're playing.
You can't do a pop- or folk- or standard-tune sing-along with a damn saxophone. I mean, you can, but nobody wants to unless your playing is so good you could go pro.
I think the difference is that they're good accompaniment instruments, and can play chords. Plus there's very little technique to learn to achieve acceptable & reasonably consistent tone.
Now, I'm sure getting to the point of being able to play solo instrumentals that anyone cares to hear on either of those, is much harder (I was getting there on the guitar at my peak, but still hadn't achieved it), but there's just nothing for most other instruments, as far as natural encouragement or reward from others, until you're awesome at them.
This is why guitar is considered a folk instrument. I think that’s what’s cool about guitar—-its low floor but high ceiling. You can strum open chords or on the other end learn difficult pieces on classical guitar. Similar to what you shared, classical guitarists will tell you nobody cares when they’re playing something super difficult. Sometimes people just can’t tell the effort it takes and don’t relate to the piece being played.
As a guitarist I found piano even easier to sound decent as there is no real threat of accidentally muting anything or plucking at a weird angle. But if you’re musically inclined its pretty easy to tell who has dedicated the time to learning it well.
Was mildly triggered by your comment at first, being a pianist, but on reflection you're right. The skill floor for the piano is objectively lower thanks to being percussive. But my god is it difficult trying to sing with a percussive instrument while also accompanying yourself with and extra 2-3 voices.
Timbre, vibrato and dynamic control over a single note mean that people will pay to listen to a beautiful singer or sax play a single line of music but my god does a pianist or guitarist have to work to keep up with that.
I think a big part of it is you can sound good playing piano quietly. It's hard to play a woodwind quietly and sound good. Yes, the pros can certainly do it, but it's a difficult skill to master. They're instruments designed to project without electronic amplification.
I've played both piano and guitar for many years now, and the distinction I'd make is that piano is easier to start out on than guitar, but harder to get good at--in the long run the difficulty of mastery is probably about the same on both, but they have different learning curves.
> I've found it surprisingly low effort to get good enough at guitar and, in fact, piano, that you can start to see social rewards, i.e. people actually want you to play, at least a little.
Also surprisingly low cost for a pretty good instrument. $250 dollars will get you a pretty good solid top steel string acoustic guitar (Yamaha FS800 or FG800, Fender CC60 or CD60, half a dozen models from Orangewood) or solid top classical guitar (Cordoba C3, Yamaha CG122).
Piano costs a bit more, but $500 or so should do it for a pretty good beginner instrument.
By pretty good I mean an instrument that sounds good and has a good feel so that you don't have to struggle to play it (beyond the struggling inherent in being a beginner even if you were playing on a professional concert level instrument) and it won't make you learn any bad habits you'll have to unlearn if you continue and move up to a better instrument.
> Meanwhile I put in more hours and had far more formal instruction at a woodwind than either of those combined and... yeah, nobody wanted to hear that shit, it sounds awful (cringe-inducing, even) unless you're excellent
Plus woodwinds and other orchestra instruments seem to be way more expensive. I'd guess that stops a lot of people who might have been interested in taking them up.
I checked at my local music store and student oboes for example start at around $3000. Clarinets around $1000. Tubas around $4000. Wow.
Oboes are just expensive instruments. Tons of small moving parts, low worldwide volume. If you think that's bad, though, low end English Horns (1.5x longer oboe) start at $6000.
Also, many orchestras have only 2 oboe players. I don't think I've ever seen a pop/rock band with an oboe in it.
The lack of french horn players in pop/rock bands was part of why I quit playing. The neighbors complaining about my practicing didn't help. Yamaha's Silent Brass system worked pretty well while I still had one.
They are even small enough that you can just get a whole bunch of them and tune them each to a different open chord and then just switch ukuleles as the chords change in your song as the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain did in this hilarious version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore" [1].
I can't find the quote, but I reminded of something from an early electronic music pioneer.
They talked about how electronic music would lower the barrier to making music, and remove all that tedious time spent on the mechanics of playing an instrument, allowing people to focus on the music itself.
Meanwhile I put in more hours and had far more formal instruction at a woodwind than either of those combined and... yeah, nobody wanted to hear that shit, it sounds awful (cringe-inducing, even) unless you're excellent. Years of effort and practice and no-one wanted to be around when I was playing (and I can't blame them). It's super discouraging to have spent that much time and effectively have nothing to show for it—nothing that sounds at least OK, even to you when you record it and play it back.
A couple half-assed months on guitar or piano can get you to, "hey, that sounds pretty good!" and get people to start singing along to whatever you're playing.
You can't do a pop- or folk- or standard-tune sing-along with a damn saxophone. I mean, you can, but nobody wants to unless your playing is so good you could go pro.
I think the difference is that they're good accompaniment instruments, and can play chords. Plus there's very little technique to learn to achieve acceptable & reasonably consistent tone.
Now, I'm sure getting to the point of being able to play solo instrumentals that anyone cares to hear on either of those, is much harder (I was getting there on the guitar at my peak, but still hadn't achieved it), but there's just nothing for most other instruments, as far as natural encouragement or reward from others, until you're awesome at them.