Learning a new instrument

[YogiKitti]

Hello all. I'm looking for thoughts about picking up a new instrument. I'm looking at either the fiddle or the banjo. I currently have a guitar and a ukulele which I am  average at playing. My dilemma is that I want to learn so many instruments, but I also want to be good at them. How many is too many? Should I try to forget my desires to play several instruments and only focus on one? I seem to want to have all the hobbies and am not great at deciding which ones I shouldn't try.

[Bracken_Joy]

Well, the expense question is the easiest to tackle:
-The start up cost is most expensive for each new instrument, BUT the beginning lessons you can get off youtube, whereas the more advanced you get, the harder it is to get around needing to pay for good quality lessons.

What this doesn't address is the emotional front. Do you need the thrill of variety and newness? Do you need the challenge of gaining expertise? There's a lot to be said for being a "jack of all trades", but expertise is also hard earned and has it's own merit.

Not one I can answer for you, unfortunately =\ Curious on other people's thoughts though.

[Meowmalade]

I learned how to play the fiddle for almost a year-- I had a friend who was a state champion fiddler and he gave me lessons.  I've played classical piano for most of my life and cannot play by ear for the life of me (I need music!), so I wanted to try something different and portable.

The pluses: since I had a music background, playing in tune and reading music wasn't hard!  I remember my cousin playing violin and sounding like a dying chicken  ;)

The minuses (some very specific to me): I have hyperhydrosis and my hands sweat excessively, especially when I exert effort.  Not good for a stringed instrument.  And I quickly realized that I will never be able to do vibrato with my left hand.  I decided after a while that since I have limited practice time, so I might as well focus on piano and play whatever I'm working on really well.  Over the last year, I've improved to the point where I really thought I could never play like this-- a good teacher really helps, too!  So I think that was a good choice for me.  Maybe you just need some goal to obsess over and make some progress on one of your current instruments!

And at least I sold the violin for more than I paid for it  :)

[RetiredAt63]

Mandolin is identical to violin for tuning, so might be easier to pick up if you already play guitar.  Anything that sounds good on violin sounds good on mandolin, and the sheet music is the same.  Plus you can get full chords (not possible on violin because of the bowing).

[GuitarStv]

It's best to focus on one instrument until you have a pretty solid grasp of technique and can effortlessly find chords/notes on it.  Otherwise you're just collecting instruments, not really learning to play them.  You want to be able to jam with other people, so if someone yells a chord progression out your fingers need to be able to immediately play that progression (and ideally to perform some simple lead improvisation over it) without really thinking about it.  If you've got that down, then by all means switch things up instrument wise.

Learning a new instrument can be fun, and can give you a different perspective when you come back to your original one.  For me, getting a good grasp of music theory is the most important part of the transition . . . if you have that you'll find the switch from one instrument to another to simply be mechanical (learning correct technique, and feel).

I learned guitar originally, but also play some passable bass, drums, mandolin, harmonica, and tenor guitar (very similar to a tenor banjo).  I've dicked around with a violin, but a fretless instrument is a whole different world . . . it seems to be a much bigger step to make than the others.  So, of the two instruments you've listed I'd suggest you check out the banjo first.  It's still fretted, picking isn't terribly different than the guitar, and the only new things you have to get used to are the drone string and the different tuning.

[YogiKitti]

There's a lot to be said for being a "jack of all trades", but expertise is also hard earned and has it's own merit.

I think this sums of perfectly what I'm struggling with. I can either become amazing at one or decent with many... but i'd like my cake and to eat it too.

Mandolin is identical to violin for tuning, so might be easier to pick up if you already play guitar.

I haven't had much exposure to the mandolin, but I will check it out! It seems based upon other's comments that a violin would be the more difficult instrument to learn.

Perhaps sticking to instruments similar to guitar, I can continue to improve my skills for each instrument while still learning something new. Really my hope was to learn some bluegrass music, and thought the banjo or fiddle would be perfect. I've found that there is quite a bit of bluegrass style playing for the ukulele, so that will be enough to learn until I can get my hands on a used banjo.

[imustachemystash]

I have been learning to play the violin for a year and a half now and it brings me so much joy.  I heard it takes 10 years to sound good when playing the violin, so it gives me something to look forward to.  I figure by the time I am FI , I will finally sound good on the violin will have all day to enjoy it.  I have an extra violin, so if you are in the Seattle area, you can borrow it to see if you like it!

[YogiKitti]

I have been learning to play the violin for a year and a half now and it brings me so much joy.  I heard it takes 10 years to sound good when playing the violin, so it gives me something to look forward to.  I figure by the time I am FI , I will finally sound good on the violin will have all day to enjoy it.  I have an extra violin, so if you are in the Seattle area, you can borrow it to see if you like it!

Thanks for the generous offer! Too bad I'm not :(. Since it takes so long to be good on the violin, does that mean you sound terrible until then?

[GuitarStv]

Yes.  Violin is one of the ugliest sounding instruments when played poorly.  Screeching cat meets shrieking seagull with a soupçon of screaming baby . . . all out of tune.

[cerat0n1a]

Not sure I have much to add, other than to confirm what other posters have said, from personal experience.

I'm in the "play several instruments not quite as well as if I'd just picked one at stuck at it" camp. I play banjo and mandolin (and several other instruments.) I'm now operating a one-in, one-out policy as there are 12+ instruments belonging to me in the house.

Would definitely agree that fiddle has a steep, steep learning curve. It really does take several years of solid practice to sound bearable on fiddle, whereas your existing guitar & uke skills will transfer quite well to banjo or mandolin.

I didn't start any kind of music until I was an adult. If I had my time on earth again, I would probably pick fiddle rather than any other instrument and just accept that I'd need to spend a few years honing my skills at home before playing with other people. Banjo & mandolin are great to play and listen to and a lot of my happiest moments have come from playing with other people, but the artistic possibilities and ways to express yourself are so much greater with the violin. It's certainly something that is on the list for when I eventually FIRE.

In terms of costs, you can pick up very good instruments for very reasonable prices - my handmade mandolin cost me less than US$500 and has given me probably approaching ten thousand hours of enjoyment. I doubt many people can say the same about one of their possessions. Do find someone who already plays when buying an instrument, if you can.

[Bracken_Joy]

Meowstache- IIRC, you live in the same city as me right? If you haven't been, I highly recommend "Trade Up Music" in Alberta Arts. I haven't been in a few years, but last time I went, they have great prices and very nice and knowledgable staff. Fun place to even just hang out and pick people's brains.

[GuitarStv]

the artistic possibilities and ways to express yourself are so much greater with the violin

Eh . . . I don't agree with this at all.  I've seen people express amazing artistic ability with a hacked up casio keyboard attached to a rewired speak and spell, with a home built three string guitar, and even just banging on garbage with some drum sticks.  Expression on an instrument is related to your creativity and mastery of it, not the choice of instrument.  Picking one instrument over another won't make you more expressive.

[cerat0n1a]

Eh . . . I don't agree with this at all.  I've seen people express amazing artistic ability with a hacked up casio keyboard attached to a rewired speak and spell, with a home built three string guitar, and even just banging on garbage with some drum sticks.  Expression on an instrument is related to your creativity and mastery of it, not the choice of instrument.  Picking one instrument over another won't make you more expressive.

I mostly play Irish & Scottish music, although I have played bluegrass/old time in the past. In these genres, the fiddle is widely acknowledged to be a superior instrument compared to say mandolin. Amazing mandolinists like Chris Thile or Mike Marshall are so good because they overcome the limitations of the instrument and produce works of great musicianship, but they would certainly acknowledge that there are things they simply cannot do.

 The violin has a much wider range of tones, dynamic range and can play a melody faster than is mechanically possible on a plucked instrument. Unlike a fretted instrument, it can easily play tones which are between notes and allows all kinds of ornamentation which is not possible on frets. The advantage that a mandolin has (in bluegrass) is that one can easily play chords and rhythm accompaniment which isn't the case on a fiddle, but that's a relatively limited role. Also, the mandolin is pretty quiet (as are guitars) in one is typically an unamplified, acoustic form of music.  Famous bluegrass mandolinists like Bill Monroe had to really thrash their instruments to compete with the rest of the band in terms of volume.

Completely agree that one can make amazing music on all kinds of things, I've seen and heard fantastic music in Africa on homemade instruments and I've made my own cigarbox guitars. But it would be crazy to pretend that these instruments have the same possibilities as a fiddle (or even a flute).

[GuitarStv]

You can easily play tones between notes on most fretted instrument.  Wiggle your fretting finger a bit.  Slide your fretting finger up or down the fretboard a bit.  Bend the string up or down.  Holy shit.  Micro-tonal stuff!  You want to get really wacky, pull the frets from your instrument.  I've seen a lot of electric basses where people have done this to sound more like an acoustic bass.

You can play a melody much faster on a piano than you can on any stringed instrument.  That doesn't make stringed instruments less expressive.  Speed doesn't equal expression, and it's possible to learn to flat or finger pick just about anything incredibly fast given time woodshedding it.

The argument about quiet instruments is a bit silly.  A guitar is quieter than a mandolin, yet I understand that some enterprising individuals have managed to use them as lead instruments . . . you might have had a valid point two hundred years ago, but with the huge choice (piezos, mini mics, magnetic pickups, full sized microphones, synth versions of the instruments, etc.) available for someone to amplify their instrument today it's certainly not an issue any more.

What you've listed are a few differences between instruments.  Yes, differences exist.  Some instruments are more chordal, some are capable only of single notes, some are capable of microtonal stuff, some are bowed, some are plucked, some are blown.  They do not control how expressive you can be on the instrument though.  You and the music that you write are the one in charge of that.  Don't limit yourself to a little box based on norms that someone else decided should exist for the type of music that you play!

[2ndTimer]

I am paying attention to this thread because I recently began playing the piano and discovered I love music.  The problem is that I can't take the piano camping with me and I miss it.  That means eventually I will have to take up something more portable like the flute or the guitar.  So I am listening hard to people's experiences.

[YogiKitti]

Meowstache- IIRC, you live in the same city as me right? If you haven't been, I highly recommend "Trade Up Music" in Alberta Arts. I haven't been in a few years, but last time I went, they have great prices and very nice and knowledgable staff. Fun place to even just hang out and pick people's brains.

No I live in Japan. What have you that impression? I'm only asking because I get an unusually high number of people guessing where I grew up. I find it weird I give off a certain city's vibe or something.

[Meowmalade]

Meowstache- IIRC, you live in the same city as me right? If you haven't been, I highly recommend "Trade Up Music" in Alberta Arts. I haven't been in a few years, but last time I went, they have great prices and very nice and knowledgable staff. Fun place to even just hang out and pick people's brains.

No I live in Japan. What have you that impression? I'm only asking because I get an unusually high number of people guessing where I grew up. I find it weird I give off a certain city's vibe or something.

I think she might have confused you for me :)

[2ndTimer]

I have confused Meowstache and Meowmalade too. 

[YogiKitti]

Oh that makes sense.

[Bracken_Joy]

Meowstache- IIRC, you live in the same city as me right? If you haven't been, I highly recommend "Trade Up Music" in Alberta Arts. I haven't been in a few years, but last time I went, they have great prices and very nice and knowledgable staff. Fun place to even just hang out and pick people's brains.

No I live in Japan. What have you that impression? I'm only asking because I get an unusually high number of people guessing where I grew up. I find it weird I give off a certain city's vibe or something.

I think she might have confused you for me :)

I did indeed! Haha, that would be why. Different Meow, different kitty pic. My bad!

[YogiKitti]

I am paying attention to this thread because I recently began playing the piano and discovered I love music.  The problem is that I can't take the piano camping with me and I miss it.  That means eventually I will have to take up something more portable like the flute or the guitar.  So I am listening hard to people's experiences.

I also want to play while camping. It would be awesome to get a group to camp AND jam with.

[Meowmalade]

I also want to play while camping. It would be awesome to get a group to camp AND jam with.

I've been to a bunch of folk festivals (the kind where you camp out for a few days) and was always super-jealous of the people who got together to jam.  I actually ended up making friends with a bunch of that crowd through something else, but the most I can do is sing, if I happen to know the song.  It's so awesome to be able to hang out and just make music though.

[RetiredAt63]

I've been doing mostly Celtic/folk on my mandolin - tunes are fine, some chords are killers.  I figure another 10 years or so and I should be decent.
If you like violin, one advantage of learning mandolin first is that it is fretted and picked, like guitar, but as I said earlier, the tuning is the same as the violin. So once you know where your fingers go, it would be easier to shift.  The downside is that you can do full chords on a mandolin, but the bow means that two strings are your maximum at the same time with the violin.  Anne Lindsay plays both; it was seeing her play with the Jim Cuddy band that got me started on mandolin instead of guitar when I retired and had enough time free to practice every day.
As someone who studied piano to Toronto Conservatory Grade 7 level when I was a kid, i found the hardest thing was to switch from keyboard to strings - my mind kept picturing the keyboard and I had to think hard about what string and what fret was what note - on a keyboard it was automatic.  But pianos aren't portable, and a violin is play only, while mandolin/guitar/banjo/whatever means that you can play and sing at the same time.  How radical!

[2ndTimer]

Fascinated to find that I am not the only person who fantasizes about making music while camping.  Are we on our way to Camp Musical Mustache?

[GuitarStv]

This one time . . . at band camp . . . I learned to Vanguard.

[YogiKitti]

Fascinated to find that I am not the only person who fantasizes about making music while camping.  Are we on our way to Camp Musical Mustache?

Camp MMMM!

[Drifterrider]

Hello all. I'm looking for thoughts about picking up a new instrument. I'm looking at either the fiddle or the banjo. I currently have a guitar and a ukulele which I am  average at playing. My dilemma is that I want to learn so many instruments, but I also want to be good at them. How many is too many? Should I try to forget my desires to play several instruments and only focus on one? I seem to want to have all the hobbies and am not great at deciding which ones I shouldn't try.

Pick the least expensive next one to try.  Are you ADD?  The question is not an insult: do you jump from one thing to another?  If so, Pick the least expensive next one to try :)   You can rent some instruments.

[Astreja]

I'm a mostly-reformed Collector of Musical Instruments and at one time had a frightful number of things I wasn't playing, so when I started uncluttering the house I decided to re-home the instruments by selling or donating them so that they would get played.

Over the past 5 years I've evicted a bodhran (Irish drum), penny whistle, alto recorder, soprano recorder, 4 guitars (electric, classical, 12-string, and 5-string bass), some drumsticks, and a violin. I kept one keyboard, upgraded another one, and gave two more to a friend, and I saved up and purchased a professional-grade B flat clarinet, keeping my student clarinet for outdoor concerts and as a backup.  (I've subsequently added an alto clarinet, a flute and an alto sax to the mix, and adopted a Yamaha acoustic guitar that someone had put out with the trash.)

The motivation for doing this wasn't just that I wanted someone else to have a go at the instruments; I wanted to get good at clarinet, which I've been studying for nearly 12 years now.  It was just too frustrating to be mediocre on 8 instruments, when what I wanted was to be highly competent on 1 or 2 of them.  I had to resign myself to the fact that there simply wasn't enough time in the day to practice them all, decided that clarinet was the direction I wanted to go, and committed to it.

As I see it, Meowstache, banjo is a closer fit with the fretted instruments you already know and would be easier to get up to speed on.  It also seems to be less common than fiddle and would add a unique musical texture if you're jamming in a group.

Fiddle has its merits, but speaking as an adult beginner (took up violin in early 40s and got my Grade 3 Royal Conservatory before deciding that I really didn't like it all that much), it has a steep learning curve and requires a particularly keen ear and fine muscle control of the left hand.  It's also not great if you're prone to shoulder problems.

Whichever one you pick, or even if you decide to skip new instruments and take guitar or ukulele to a higher level, consider investing in a few months of private lessons with a good teacher.  What may take you a month to figure out may be something that a teacher can explain to you in 5-10 minutes.
 

[YogiKitti]

I'm a mostly-reformed Collector of Musical Instruments and at one time had a frightful number of things I wasn't playing, so when I started uncluttering the house I decided to re-home the instruments by selling or donating them so that they would get played.

Great personal insight! I can see myself becoming a collector of unplayed instruments if I let loose. I decided to stay with the ukulele until I happen across a great deal on a banjo. I also now have to prove to myself that getting another instrument is worth it by continually improving on the ukulele.