My bedroom guitar playing allows me a tiny insight into the creative mindset and just occasionally allows me to play along with my heroes....on the other hand....I recognise my limits, admire and wonder how some of these artists came up with the material they do, chill out and just listen instead and retire the guitar to an ornament in the corner

Both approaches win as far as I am concerned....

I can't play. I can't sing. I may wish I could. I may even one day threaten to take up (delete, depending upon frame of mind) banjo/melodeon/bagpipes but until then I can wait to discover if I am just "following the herd". Its an expensive copycat affliction, if so.
By the way, I can't paint either, but I can still appreciate art. I enjoy books, but my first book isn't appearing quite round about now. If ever.
I can cook. Does that make me appreciate, say, Heston Blumenthal any the more?

and my answer is an emphatic 'no'. You don't have to play an instrument to be able to appreciate music, just as you don't have to be able to write a novel to enjoy reading.

In fact, playing an instrument (particularly electric guitar) can lead one up some dark, depressing alleys in terms of the music one listens to.

I used to play guitar a lot and often found myself admiring musicians who were technically brilliant purely because I knew, as a musician of sorts myself, how impossibly difficult it was to play the things they were playing. It was only with hindsight that I could admit that a lot of music I used to enjoy from a 'musician's standpoint' was in fact toe-curlingly awful...

A song like 'Be My Baby' wasn't made to be deconstructed by musicians for the quality of the playing... it's about stiring emotions in people, about making them feel glad to be alive. One doesn't have to have a Ph.D in Widdly-Widdly Studies to appreciate it...

I have tried on several occasions since my teens to try and learn an instrument, but have come to the conclusion that I have no musical ability. I've never even remotely considered the fact that I can't play to mean that I can't appreciate music, in fact knowing how hard it is (to me) gives me an added appreciation for a well crafted song/lyric/tune.

After all, I can appreciate a good film without having acted/directed one, and a good novel without writing one, so why should music be different?

...but guilty of transferrance? Yes!

It's an assumption that others enjoy and appreciate music the way you do. Will you have a deeper appreciation because you play? No. You will have a different one. Different not deeper. But then again, you'd have a different appreciation whether you played or not. Musical enjoyment is so subjective it's almost pointless to try to analyse it... one man's meat and all that!

Oh, and by the way, I speak as a player (bass, acoustic guitar, vocals), not a non player.

Yes, we can see the use of the tonic up to the IV and then the V, maybe to the minor II in a slow blues but is that necessary to adore the solo on Parisienne Walkways? No! Do we understand the musical devices being used... Yes. But whether that makes us enjoy music more is moot.

Go to the theatre and it's when you aren't aware of the ropes and pulleys that you get more involved in the narrative. The person I know who is most enraptured by music, particularly live music - like your friend - has never strummed. When I go to a show I sometimes have to remind myself not to analyse the lighting rig and stage set and just enjoy the spectacle. Worse still is another friend of mine who REALLY understands music - a professional musician, producer and writer he can be somehow unable to disengage from his producer mode... Play him a classic 60s soul track he'll just spend his time noticing that the singer is slightly flat on those high notes, that the hi-hat is overly highly mixed (probably due to careless mike placement) and that the horns came in slightly too late on the third and fifth choruses. Completely miss the emotion and energy of the performance (even though that's what he achieves in the studio in his day job).

Reminds me of those BMus students I went to Uni with who, after having three years of having understanding of music beaten in and enjoyment of it beaten out had completely lost their first love.

Anyway, back to the question... I'd say different not better. Yes, we may understand the mechanics more but that doesn't necessarily mean we enjoy it more or better.

I can't play anything although to be honet, other than the recorder at school I've never really tried. I did attempt the guitar but my fingers are too small to go across the neck of any normal size guitar. I can't sing despite having tried.

I don't follow the herd. Instead I just stand in awe of those who can play and sing and can do it well.

Well the reading/writing, painting/viewing analogy is pretty convincing but then again I have attempted to write fiction (worse than my guitar playing) and have no real interest in painting from either side of the easel.

I'm not suggesting that you have to be an amazing musician to appreciate music, as I have said I most definitely am not and all that stuff from Trevor about tonics went over my head (I remember my old guitar teacher telling me what they were but it's been pushed out of my brain by other stuff since).

What I'm talking about is a desire to make music, not a technical ability. It's that felling that grabs you whenever you see an instrument leaning against a wall, you just want to pick it up, pluck, bang it, bow it, bash it, whatever just to try and make music with it.

Retro and the Amorous, you seem to have that desire to play even if you weren't born with Robert Johnson's magic fingers or Miles Davis' cavernous musical brain.

I sing, I play guitar. The one thing I really wish I could do is drum. I can't. But believe me, I listen more intently to the drums than anything else. Ringo, Steve White, Bonzo, Charlie Watts, they are my musical heroes. Therefore, the lack of being able to do something actually enhances my appreciation of those who can do it. So, you are wrong, and your mate, who can't play is right.

and I listen to songs differntly as I have a tendancy to split a lot of contemporary and classic "rock" songs into individual instruments. It's a real bloody pain and I wish I didn't.

When I'm thowing shapes to funk/soul/hardcore or nu-twodubponyandapacketofcrisps I get with the groove of the bass and drums.

I've helped make amateur (in every respect)films, literally everything from scripting to catering (I paid for the biscuits!) and that has given me some insight into how bloody difficult it really is. "Cut! Cut! Someones turned on a light outside! It burns on camera like a total eclipse!"

That doesn't mean I understand films better than anyone else I just understand them differently. I can appreciate why some choices are made and not others. My experiences have made me more forgiving. Whenever I hear people scoffing at films, any film, I always think "You try it."

My judgement as to what is "good" is certainly no sharper than anyone elses or indeed any more sharp than it was prior to my filmmaking experiences.

on "how" you appreciate and listen to music.
If you just want to experience the emotion, rush, thrill and feel of music, then no, of course you don't need to have any experience of playing.

If you are more interesting in analysis or production or how a song sounds then yes, it does help to have some experience in playing.

Do you like art, going to galleries, are you good at painting? If not, can you still appreciate art? Personally I just love the emotion of music, I'm not so concerned with the technical side of it or over-analyzing it.

In the realm of rock and pop, it is rare to find musicians who started out with anything more than a rudimentary grasp of music theory, but this in no way diminished their ability to make great music.

The Beatles, for one. McCartney may have learnt a lot about harmony, composition etc over the ensuing years, but I doubt very much that he could have known much when 'Love Me Do' went into the charts...

I have too seen the deleterious effect of knowledge and ability on appreciation, just as Trevor describes. And whilst Niks may be correct in suggesting I have a "desire" to play, (I would say more an aspiration) maybe it is best left that way. The answers so far would suggest so. And maybe my choices of instrument are deliberate, so as to remove me from the temptation of analysing quite how easy/flat/wrong the guitar, organ, sax or trumpet I am listening to is. But I don't either really feel John Kirkpatrick*, Mike Katz or Bela Fleck will actually ever have much to worry about.....
*Even being around musicians can sour ones appreciation: a melodeon touting friend routinely rubbishes all players from Sharon Shannon to John Jones for playing one handed, i.e. only the big buttons, ignoring the other side........(One for Commoner to respond to?)

I've made several attempts to learn to play musical instruments, mainly in the rhythm section (OK, so even if successful, I'd only be hanging about with musicians, I know, I know!), with my only partial success being on the drumkit. My usual problem is lack of patience: it's not enough for me to be able to play minor and major scales in any key on the electric bass; I want to be able to play the bassline of Chic's "Good Times" NOW! And I want my tabla playing to sound as though it should be accompanying Ravi Shankar, not like a one-year-old hitting a saucepan! Even my bodhran playing doesn't manage the fluid articulation of Flook's John Joe Kelly (my bodhran hero). It sounds like a clumsy 50-year-old hitting a bathtub with a leek. But I really don't care, I enjoy my futile attempts to conjure up just the merest whiff of the magic that my favourite bands can summon at will. And when I manage that simplest of basslines - "Psycho Killer" - my face lights up, and just for a few seconds I AM Tina Weymouth. Er, in a manner of speaking...

I can't play guitar much, but I can bash out a few tunes on a piano, and also dabble with a few other instruments... but that has no real bearing on my appreciation of music. It's all about what I listen to and enjoy, not what I can play, or try to play.

...so that I could hear music the way I did before I started learning to play around the age of 15. I didn't distinguish between different instruments, hell I'm not sure I even could tell the difference between strings and synths to be honest; they both made a great sound that I loved.

And the other not so great knock on affect of being a musician was that I started to listen to bands that were working in a similar field to whatever I was working on. Not great because any inspiration you may be taking from what you're listening to starts feeding on itself eventually.

I've been on something of a break from being a musician this past year and it's been great because I've been enjoying music as a fan again. Instead of dissecting every snare drum hit or production trick.

Personally I think the non musicians have the upper hand here I'm afraid.

I'm a player and I don't think it gets in the way of my enjoyment of music, though maybe from a technical point of view I can appreciate something which I know is well tricky ...however something doesn't have to be well tricky to be wonderful as many have said. I do realise though, that I have a deep seated and immovable contempt for poseur pseudo musicians who are more in it for the glam, makeup, flouncing around and generally being "stars" rather than musicians. And I may well be missing something, but my muso core despises them and I can't do much about it. Nor do I wish to! Which is probably snobby and elitist or something.

ps - I do agree that uber real musicians can have a problem - my piano teacher, Royal College prize winner etc, finds it very hard to enjoy music which is not technically perfect, simply because all those years of honing her skills to perfection have removed the ability to enjoy a spontaneous, technically dodgy but nonetheless stunning performance.

makeup, flouncing around and generally being "stars" rather than musicians"....

Hovering before my eyes is a spectral image of Nick Rhodes...

Disturbing...

the idea that those who've never had the desire to play and 'claim to love music' are 'just following the herd' is pretty objectionable really. I would say that you build an understanding of music through learning about it and experiencing it. Learning about it to me means learning about the culture behind it, reading about it, why it came about, it's history, what the artist's intentions were, how it was made (not necessarily technically but more the ideas that were involved and who did what). Then again you can over-analyse and an emotional response clearly comes first, but through this process you understand and appreciate it so much more(sorry if stating the obvious). You can't get the same depth of understanding through a casual relationship with it. I don't see that by trying to sing better (I can't) I'll have a deeper understanding of music.

I think there are some types of music that are more interesting to musicians than non-musicians. I'm mostly thinking of the more obscure shades of jazz just now - where the musicians are impressed by the technical prowess, use of unusual modes, etc., whilst non-musicians (and people who enjoy listening to music) can find such things a bit dull.

I feel the same way when I listen to things like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher or BT - I'm admiring how clever their programming and synth work is, whilst those around me have their hands over their ears wondering when the tune will start.

I think the place where good musicians become good artists is where you can interest both groups of people, so that the music has as emotional content as well as being technically interesting. I'm sure we can all think of a piece of music that has a great emotional punch even if it's very simple. Sometimes it has great emotional punch because it is very simple.

...to an extent. I sometimes try to reproduce keyboard sounds (Moogs/Mellotrons/VCS3 etc.), work out keyboard solos/motifs from 70s rock albums or Hammond riffs from old 60s tracks but I'm never all that great at it. Doesn't stop me from loving the music though.

When it comes to 'shred guitar' albums, though, it's curious because it appears to be one of the few types of music I know of that does seem solely aimed at showing off musical dexterity. Nevertheless, Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Satriani all sold a lot of albums in the 1980s so it can't just be guitarists buying them...can it? Some people just genuinely like listening to it, I guess.

I started learning guitar a couple of years back through the encouragement of a guitar playing friend. It does give me a slightly different perspective from before, but I don't think it has had any effect on my love of music. I do find myself paying a lot more attention to what guitarists are actually doing at gigs. I'm still trying to work out how Chuck Prophet manages to switch between finger picking and using a plectrum without dropping the plectrum.
I'm currently reading "This Is Your Brain On Music" by Daniel Levitin. Levitin is a former record producer who is now a neuroscientist. Levitin argues you don't need to play or even understand music to enjoy it. He makes the point that we are all experts on what WE like.

am a pro musicain and a multi-instrumentalist so for what it's worth i think...

msicians obviously have a better understanding of how music is constructed. it's much easier for them to ascertain what an individual instrument is doing within a complex arrangement or identify why something works when another thing doesn't - harmonically, rhythmically, whatever.

but who cares?

unless you're making music this is entirely irrelevant, isn't it? all that really matters is whether music speaks to you, touches you, GETS to you.

i found music to be an infinitely more magical thing before i learned to deconstruct it - in fact i often wish i'd never learned to play so i could appreciate it much more than i can - or at least in a different way. don't get me wrong - there are still pieces of music that can have me in tears within about 30 seconds - 'blue in green' by miles davis being a good example of this but i have a dreadful tendency to pull it all to pieces before i even let myself listen and feel it.

have had many conversations with other players about this and it seems a remarkably common theme.

so if you REALLY love music don't learn to play it - it'll change the way you hear it..

however if you enjoy playing your own music there's nothing quite like that either! but i see them as very seprate worlds...

Carwash has a really good point here. I think - based on my own experience - that the less you know about the process of making and marketing music, the more you are able to just plain enjoy it.

Having at various stages over the last 25 years been a musician, composer, record shop assistant, music journalist, record company executive and radio music producer has certainly given me the ability to recognize a good tune when I hear one. I can analyze almost any song and put it in its correct historical context, and quite possibly make a witty point about its obvious tonal similarity to a rarely heard Momus track.

Like most fortysomething rock nerds who grew up on a diet of Pink Floyd, early U2 and British guitar rock in general I love Ok Computer, but when I listen to it I always wonder why nobody seems to care about the fact that one of the piano bits in Karma Police sounds so much like the main piano theme in Sexy Sadie. Does this make me a "better" listener than the guy next to me who just, you know, ENJOYS the rush he gets from the bloody song?

I have for some years now had a sneaking suspicion that it´s actually the other way around. Then again I would have made a lousy carpenter, waiter or surgeon so it´s probably all for the best anyway.

Clearly the dumbfounded, cow-eyed majority, who can’t play an instrument, should be made to stand at the back at gigs, so that the people who can play and therefore have a more sophisticated aesthetic sense can enjoy an unimpeded view of the musicians onstage.

My first conscious experience of music, beyond lullabies and whatever squeaks and rattles I could get out of my Fisher Price toys, came via the radio on our kitchen windowsill. I can vividly recall hearing Strawberry Fields, If You Leave Me Now and Suicide is Painless, and thinking that they were beautiful.

My appreciation of these songs is the purest response to music I will ever have in my life; it being formed with little past experience upon which to base my evaluation and no thought given to who made the music or how it was made. I doubt there is anyone posting on this blog who didn’t have some kind of similar experience in their formative years.

Undoubtedly the ability to play an instrument may change a person’s perception of music but, aesthetically speaking, do you really appreciate it more just because you can play the chords to Wonderwall?

are you really lumping Strawberry Fields in with the other 2 classics mentioned, unless of course you mean the excellent and vastly superior Candy flip version.........?

None intended.

when i was 14, in fact gave up the piano completely, going back to it during my college years when i just got sick of hearing things, wanting to be able to play them, and having the block that "i don't play piano cos i've given up"

Best thing i ever did. I started to download chord arrangements from t'internet, and even now, in my own living room which has sky plus, wii, playstation 3 and a massive shelf of books'n'dvds, it's the piano gets nearly the most attention.

Does it affect my ability to appreciate music? does it buggery. It cheeses me off, i suppose, that i can't make my rickety 80 year old upright sound as 'happy' as the piano does on 'bright side of the road' or as out of tune on it does on 'Shut Up' by Madness, or that I can't play like Nicky Hopkins or Chuck Leavell can, but soddit. I don't care. I can't explain what it is that makes music have an effect on me. I think, perhaps, i'll defer to m'learned friends in the dance troupe Dee Lite. Groove is in the Heart...and it doesn't matter a fiddlers feck if you can play an A7dmin9 chord or not.

will shed light on some aspects in a way that might not be apparent otherwise, like whether a song was written on a piano or guitar or how good someone's technical playing really is. So yes, I'd say it can help one's understanding to an extent but does it make you enjoy it more? Who knows?! I personally hate dancing but it seems to appeal to a lot of people so it must affect them in a different way to me : )

*edit - It just occurred to me that I neglected to make a very important point during my post, so please indulge me. There is a huge difference between self-taught musicians and trained ones. Often, I think, a self-taught musician will have learned because they have an insatiable desire to understand more deeply what they are listening to (and want to contribute) whereas a trained musician might just have been forced to go to lessons by their parents. A brilliant concert pianist might not have the first idea about 'groove' but will technically be able to play any dots that are put in front of them. If one has a burning desire to pick up a guitar and teach themself how to play it they will do so, but otherwise it's a more mathematical approach from what I gather. I know a couple of classically trained musicians who don't know their arse from their elbow when it comes to Rock and Roll. They just absolutely don't get it, and if they had an ear that would have allowed them to have taught themselves then I'm sure they would have done that and would not have been able to process (or be bothered with) what they were supposed to have been learning in class.

oh for god's sake not this old chestnut. I cant sing, I cant play; I havent gone a long way. Im not sure why this only seems to occur in the world of popular music. no one seems to berate someone for reading a novel if they havent written one, nor seeing a great film if they havent directed one but why do some musos think that they have some superior insight over those that dont play and dont choose to play is beyond me. get over yourself man...

I think that one of the flaws in the argument is the apparently implied assumption that to make good records it's necessary to be a good musician. The Ramones proved that that wasn't the case. The opposite is also shaky in that it is generally accepted that Jimi Hendrix was a brilliant guitarist but that's no good to me when he insisted on making some of the most godawful records ever.

I have played the guitar badly on and off for 10 years or so now and I think the relationship i have with music because of it is almost symbiotic. When I hear some new music that I really love, that really captures my imagination it inspires me to get the guitar out, blow the dust off and have a jolly good session, this then leads me to listen to more music and old favourites. In this way the playing stimulates the listening and vice versa.

I can't see how it is essential to play music to listen though, isn't the art of a musician to create something other people want to listen to...there are plenty of guitarists out there who write music for musicians alone...i bet there aren't too many none guitarists at a yngwie malmsteen gig...

I play guitar, bass etc and have a pretty good technical understanding of music. I'd say it can make you pick up on different things and enjoy other elements, but I don't know that it makes me enjoy hearing music more.

To an extent, it can actually take something away, as songs no longer contain the magical changes beyond my comprehension which they once did.