Thoughts: Music as a Hobby
I've been dabbling with music stuff for almost a year now and honestly I still suck at it. I've rented guitars and drums, I've played with VSTs and DAWs -- I even bought myself a hardware synth since my last post on the topic!
However I can still only play a handful of songs, my grasp on theory is tenuous at best, and I've failed every listening test I've tried (even ones just listening for a single note). Despite this I can sincerely say that I love this hobby.
My hobbies have always been goal oriented. Writing a piece of software, drawing a specific picture, playing single-player narrative games -- these are all things that have a roughly concrete end state. With my attention span and wide interest pool I frequently fail to get to that state, leaving me often feeling like I've failed.
I have discovered that music, on the other hand, can be an ephemeral act of creativity for me. Of course you can always produce a song or compose a finished piece -- those things of course exist within music -- but since I've started spending a lot of time watching people online with their instruments and gear and software I've come to realize that many musicians (and amateur music people like me) simply enjoy the act of making organized noises.
After work I'll sometimes sit at my little station and plug in some wires and throw on some pre-made drum loop, then I'll tweak some knobs and put a weird lead sound together and flip on and off different recorded loops and just jam. It's garbage, but it does something to the soul to be actively making something, even temporarily, that is some semblance of music.
I saw a post mastodon recently that I can't find now which philosophizes that music (or art, in general) is a human behavior -- innate to us like making a nest is to birds.
I have no innate talent in music. Starting as late as I have (and at the rate that I'm going) I don't believe I'll ever be a particularly good musician, but this discovery of the joy of making music (or sounds, at least) has been a revelation that I'm grateful to have had.