Difficult one to answer. Besides brain and inborn talent (and in no particular order).
Education, from school—to private lessons—to music education books—to other musicians willing to share tips and tricks—to self discovery—to experience performing for live audiences to make a living for decades. This includes theory, performance, arranging and learning how to sing and play sax, wind synth, flute, bass, guitar, drums, and keyboard synth.
Yikes, you certainly have a bunch of resources that run a large gamut.
I doubt I have the time to explore all this but maybe that's what it takes to really master the domain.
The more you involve yourself, the more you learn.
I haven't figured out how to master music yet. The more I learn, and the better I get, the more I see that I want to learn to make what I do even better. Plus, I have several instruments to learn new skills on.
I have some recommendations for every musician who plays in a modern, pop music of any kind.
- Learn how to read music
- Learn basic music theory
- Learn to play drums, at least the first dozen or so rudiments. That will tell you how to listen to drums, which will help you play all other instruments in a group
- Learn to play and memorize at least these scales and their arpeggios on your chosen non-drum instrument: major, natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor, major pentatonic and minor pentatonic. If you are not playing a transposing instrument like a guitar, learn them in all 12 keys. Since music is made from segments of these, when playing, your fingers will find these without a lot of brain work from you.
- Listen to singers in all genres of music. Not the words but the inflections, pitch bends, dynamics and so on. This will teach you how to sing on your instrument.
- Listen to different genres of music.
- Listen to each instrument in a great song from start to finish. When you have that down, listen to how the parts each musician plays interacts with each other.
- Find a good teacher when starting out, who will teach you the right (easy) way to play your instrument. Learning bad habits is a lot easier than breaking bad habits so you can play better.
- Have fun when playing. OK, practice is not work, but it's repetition and not nearly as much fun as playing the song. But once you learn the song, and it's 'under your fingers', turn the language part of your brain off, and just have fun. If you are having fun, the audience will hear that. They don't call it playing music for nothing.
All this makes the beginning of learning slower, but once down, everything from then on will go much, much quicker, and in the long run, you will be farther ahead of yourself if you didn't learn these basics first.
Let me explain about the drums. We moved to a then small town when I was midterm in the 6th grade. In the 7th, I joined the band. All the instruments were already rented, so the new people got a practice pad and a pair of drumsticks. How disappointing, because I wanted to play baritone horn (Euphonium).
Then the tenor sax player's family moved, and the band director asked who would like to play sax. I had already moved up the drum ranks, and was so enthusiastic about any melodic instrument, the band director picked me.
In retrospect, both were the best things that could have happened to me. (1) since drums are the foundation of most pop music forms, it gave me that and (2) saxophone is much more commercial than Baritone Horn. Not too many baritone players get gigs.
I've played sax and drums in band but also learned flute, wind synthesizer, bass, guitar, and keyboard synths plus I learned to sing lead vocals. I've played all of these in bands, too.
With my theory, and music arranging classes, it all primed me to make user styles for Band-in-a-Box. That started as a hobby and with the help of Peter Gannon turned into a business.
If I live to be 200 years old, I figure there will still be new musical adventures to learn around the next corner.
Insights and incites by Notes ♫
Norton Music
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