I read somewhere that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become good at something. I would respectfully suggest that “good” is relative. I doubt that I have that many hours of practice on any musical instrument, including piccolo and flute, which I played professionally for four years as a Navy musician. After four years of playing several hours each day, was I good? Yes. Was I a world-class musician? Not by a long shot.
All of this thinking came about because I have recently (like for the past week or so) been trying to get my oboe “chops” together well enough to make it through several short, easy passages in a Cole Porter show I am playing, You Never Know. There is one ballad that opens with an oboe solo. I played it on flute, but it hasn’t the same impact as it would if I could play it on oboe. So I have been working at it for a couple of days.
And I got to asking myself, how many actual hours of practice do I have “under my belt” on oboe? I am going to use my professional engineering judgment and say maybe one hundred hours. (As professional engineers, we learn early on in our career never to say, “wild-ass guess”; always use the phrase “engineering judgment”.) So then I got to wondering , REALLY, how many hours have I spent practicing flute? I started flute in the fourth grade. We were supposed to practice daily, for one half hour per day. That would be about one hundred eighty hours a year. But, like most kids who are not internally driven to excel, there were days I skipped. So I probably averaged about one hundred forty hours a year. By the time I graduated from high school, I was competent on flute, but not what I would call good. (Even though I thought I was.) So, in nine years, or about twelve hundred hours of practice, I became competent on flute.
Having started saxophone the summer following eighth grade, I wasn’t nearly as good on sax as I was on flute. That didn’t occur until several years after I was released from active duty in the Navy. So off-hand, I’d guess it was about the time I had hit the twelve hundred hour mark for practice time. Saxophone went more quickly than flute, because there are many fingerings that are the same. I suspect it took me about the same length of time to reach a reasonable level of competency on clarinet, though I'd be the first to admit, my clarinet playing is definitely marginally competent.
Okay, I say to myself, it takes ME about a twelve hundred hours on an instrument to become good enough to suit ME. That’s good to know. I’m sixty eight. By the time I get old enough that I won’t be able to play anymore, I should be starting to become acceptable on oboe (and bassoon, since I’ve also been fussing with that a bit, lately).
It’s always nice to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and to be able to convince oneself that it isn’t an oncoming locomotive.
All of this thinking came about because I have recently (like for the past week or so) been trying to get my oboe “chops” together well enough to make it through several short, easy passages in a Cole Porter show I am playing, You Never Know. There is one ballad that opens with an oboe solo. I played it on flute, but it hasn’t the same impact as it would if I could play it on oboe. So I have been working at it for a couple of days.
And I got to asking myself, how many actual hours of practice do I have “under my belt” on oboe? I am going to use my professional engineering judgment and say maybe one hundred hours. (As professional engineers, we learn early on in our career never to say, “wild-ass guess”; always use the phrase “engineering judgment”.) So then I got to wondering , REALLY, how many hours have I spent practicing flute? I started flute in the fourth grade. We were supposed to practice daily, for one half hour per day. That would be about one hundred eighty hours a year. But, like most kids who are not internally driven to excel, there were days I skipped. So I probably averaged about one hundred forty hours a year. By the time I graduated from high school, I was competent on flute, but not what I would call good. (Even though I thought I was.) So, in nine years, or about twelve hundred hours of practice, I became competent on flute.
Having started saxophone the summer following eighth grade, I wasn’t nearly as good on sax as I was on flute. That didn’t occur until several years after I was released from active duty in the Navy. So off-hand, I’d guess it was about the time I had hit the twelve hundred hour mark for practice time. Saxophone went more quickly than flute, because there are many fingerings that are the same. I suspect it took me about the same length of time to reach a reasonable level of competency on clarinet, though I'd be the first to admit, my clarinet playing is definitely marginally competent.
Okay, I say to myself, it takes ME about a twelve hundred hours on an instrument to become good enough to suit ME. That’s good to know. I’m sixty eight. By the time I get old enough that I won’t be able to play anymore, I should be starting to become acceptable on oboe (and bassoon, since I’ve also been fussing with that a bit, lately).
It’s always nice to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and to be able to convince oneself that it isn’t an oncoming locomotive.
