To me, talent implies that you pick up a skill more easily than the typical person; I.e. it comes naturally. You can do it via intuition. One could say, perhaps, Paul McCartney was talented, whereas George Harrison was less so- even though he became a fine guitar player and writer he really really had to struggle and work at it. A high high level of talent becomes prodigious; your Mozarts and such. I was talented. Music and instruments are easy to me. It all makes sense, the way a talented mathematician intuits the relationships between numbers.

 

I'm not talented as a musician. That's why I became an audio engineer.

 

Yes, yes I do. Unfortunately I'm still searching for what at though!

 

If you can make money with music, you have talent.
If no one knows about you, you are just one of 8 billion self proclaimed artists on the planet.
Making money means many things.

 

But that says nothing about the quality of the music. There aren't 8 billion self-proclaimed artists/musicians.
You can have talent, but if your audience is impoverished, they won't have money to spend on art, only on basic necessities.
There are many people who share their know-how, songs, presets, etc. for free as open source, freeware, etc.!

 

Last edited: May 16, 2025 at 5:30 PM

I agree with this statement but the talent is actually at marketing and making money, not necessarily music (although it certainly could be). But history is littered famous musicians and artists who were considered failures during their lifetime.

 

We have a lot of talented people here who can't make a living from music; they give guitar or piano lessons. Many bands in our music scene have a perfectly normal day job, and their concerts are well-attended! Many make music for fun.

 

Seldom will ever cop to being talented because everyone wants to think they've earned it and didn't just get lucky.

Of course, a person who is top-tier in anything did earn it with tons of hard work. But they also got lucky with talent which provides their hard work a foundation that isn't afforded to everyone. It's not mutually exclusive.

You can practice your way into better coordination, but you can't take a wholly uncoordinated person and have them practice their way into grandmastery. There will always be someone who was born with a coordination edge genetically who trained just as much as the uncoordinated person. That person has a synergy which will always outperform the try-hards.

 

Last edited: May 16, 2025 at 8:21 PM

You haven't ever seen two kids who were raised in the same family and the same environment, and neither of them deliberately practice singing, but one can sing much better than the other?

What explains that discrepancy?

 

What is learning ability if not a natural skill?

 

yes, im very talented musically, naturally very creative and have always been considered to have really good taste all my life

there are a lot of musically talented people in the world though. a lot of the time ive found they dont have good taste though. so they end up making songs and decisions musically that arent that great or are just to show their talented, so they dont go too far despite their talent. while others use their talent to execute the ideas of others with better taste so they can make a living with their skill

this isnt athletics, ideas and taste rule in the arts and you cant really teach taste in my experience. people either get it, copy you, are late to get it or are just confused

 

Without then taking both of these kids and giving them formal instruction for, say 6 months, I don't think we can say much of them in the moment other than one sings better. Could be the only difference is kid 1's approach just happens to align closer to good technique. Does that also display some intuitive quality? I think we'd have to give some measure of instruction to both for a reasonable amount of time to find out. Kid 2 might be the next Mike Patton, but his brother kicked a ball into his face when they were 5 and he has a deviated septum not yet corrected.

I'm in the innate talent camp but also don't think that head start (be it prodigal levels or just able to find the 1) is what makes you talented in the end.

A kid who sings better than his brother but has never received any instruction is not going to be impressive for long. Steve Ray was stupidly talented, you're not learning his abilities to his skill level from a book... but if Stevie as a kid doesn't spend every waking moment thinking about or playing music from something like 8 on.... he never learns how to become Stevie either. I would credit obsessive practicing and learning that started almost 20 years before Double Trouble was a band at least a little.

On the other end, Prince was notorious for pushing his band members well beyond what they thought was their limit. Many of these people have had notable careers outside the of Prince Universe and have credited him with 'bringing them to another level' kinda stuff. While there were a gazillion of them, a good number were also childhood friends and unknowns (even after Prince became a known entity). Unless Minneapolis was conducting eugenic experiments with musicians and Prince also just happened to only find those offspring, it would seem to me that a mix of environment and education (formal or not) plays a significant role in assessing talent beyond childhood.

To be fair, you're also never getting into that environment if you can't find the 1. And if you can't find the 1 by the time you're 20... I think we can formally establish you are not and never were talented

 

I have no musical training but I am able to work out songs by ear (guitar, bass, keyboards, drum patterns) within minutes. I wouldn't say I'm talented, just lucky to have this ability. When I hear a sound (be it orchestral, synth, guitar fx etc.) my brain will come up with a riff or sequence that fits the sound and I build songs around that.

 

Why would you say that having an inate ability which you are lucky to have isn't a talent? There are people who have taken ear training courses and deliverately practiced that skillset for years who still cannot do that effectively.

It might be a talent which is still undeveloped, or pertains to a skill which hasn't yet reached mastery, but it's still a natural state of being signficantly better than average without anything deliberately done to get there.

 

There is an important distinction to be made. There is Raw natural talent and the mould of talent created by showbiz to sell pleasurable experiences to the masses.
A superficially talented person with no skill or passion to back it up is just as meaningless as the word.

Gene Kelly, Elvis, Stevie Ray- Vaughan , Hendrix, Cobain, Nat King Cole, Sinatra, James Dean , Prince, Aretha , Amy Winehouse , Lady Gaga have / had so much raw talent in every sense of the word it was / is sickening.
In the modern music world you only need 25% of this elusive substance and the rest can be synthesised.

In the arts, a technical role like lighting designer or FOH engineer that can be studied requires more than a learned skillset, it requires an obsessive love of the medium to be able to survive the industries fluxuating trends and tech.
In the acting world if you dont have IT you probably won't ever have IT !

That said your version of what talent means or looks like could differ greatly from mine...

 

Last edited: May 17, 2025 at 8:24 AM

Talent Definition
- The ability or capacity to achieve something in a particular field that not everyone is capable of
- A term for a person with a gift in a particular field

If you discover that you particularly like or enjoy doing something, then nurture your talent so that it doesn't atrophy.

 

Thank you for touching on this topic, but reducing everything to "yes" or "no" answers is an oversimplification of complex things...
let's clarify: was Vivaldi talented? There is hardly a person who will say no,
but in fact Vivaldi died in a foreign country under the fence, forgotten by everyone...
or another example, Georges Bizet wrote some kind of opera and even waited for its premiere, but it failed miserably... Bizet died in poverty, but then his opera Carmen became the standard of classical opera music and has been triumphantly marching on opera stages all over the world for 150 years.
The same can be said about the pop scene, there are talented performers and authors, but, at the top, basically, there are those who have fallen on the choice of the major labels... so, these questions are very subjective.
PS. I put "yes"
2PS. One of my familiar songwriter wrote
You don't choose the music,
But, music chooses you

 

I compensate for my lack of talent by possessing an encyclopaedic knowledge of recorded music dating back to the 1920's. Knowing what sounds good, and what to "borrow" beats talent IMO

 

I think talent is just repeating something consistently for so long that you don't even have to think about it, it just becomes second nature. To me its like a math problem... part memorization, part pattern recognition and part understanding the logic behind it. You can apply that to just about anything and you'll develop some form of "talent".

 

"I have a talent for recognizing talent...and you, baby, have talent!".