Proficiency In Illiteracy

Reading music can be very difficult and of course it varies from person to person to how proficiently they can play or how fast they can get it.  If you want to be proficient in reading music you need to be able to spend a lot of time on music.  Think about this: students that enroll in the band program here at the high school are usually ones that have been in band for their whole school career.  Once they get to high school they really start to get into it.  They can read music but not like a master yet.  They can probably read a music sheet but can’t go in deeper and explain the sheet or be able to go through the piece without a simple mistake.  They have already gone through most likely 6+ years.  Imagine how long it would take you to read music on your own without the help of musically adept from an institution.  Not a whole lot of people have that time.  

When I went through a search on google to find out how long it would take for someone to be able to learn a music piece proficiently when they haven’t taken music lessons, the typical answer of a decent song was around 1 year.  That’s one year to learn one song.  When I learn a song proficiently, it doesn’t take me more than an hour.  There are other and more efficient ways to learning songs musically.