Learn To Read Music

[Bilbo]

Yes, I know. Here we go again.

There is, however, a point to this. I have been trying to work on getting a wider musical perspective recently as I am finding that my composing is suffering from a significant lack of useful and effective knowledge of harmony. I also play a lot nowadays with people who are a lot better than me and I am trying to 'catch up' as it were. I know the basics but I was finding that most of my tunes were following a very narrow pattern in terms of harmony and I wanted to find some other places to go. I also find my solos on gigs are clumsy and full of clinkers.

 

In an effort to address these shortcomings, and knowing that there is no such thing as a quick fix, I have spent a lot more time playing guitar recently and, more to the point of the thread, learning to read treble clef so that I can look at music which is fully formed instead of just bass lines. I have been at this for a few months now, using a few 'how to read guitar music' books and, intermittently, dipping into transcriptions by people like Pat Metheny, Al DiMeola and Ralph Towner (books of transcriptions that are, for me, quite challenging). As a result of this, I am seeing a considerable improvement in my guitar playing, my knowledge of the fretboard and the ways in which these master musicians put their tunes together. This concerted study has resulted in improvements in playing and understanding that I have not seen since I was able to practice more consistently when I was a kid (I am 54). I cannot sight read treble clef yet and my reading is still slow but I am beginning to find that I can find my way around pieces much more quickly than I used to without the hassle of playing things back and forth on a transcribe software interface. My technique is improving as well which is entirely a peripheral and unlooked for benefit.

 

I have said this before on here; for me, reading the dots is not about sight-reading on gigs. I need that occasionally but not often. For me, it is about being able to access vast quantities of study material quickly and effectively and learning to be a better more rounded musician.

[Staggering on]

I think your last sentence is a great summary and can be used when others claim that reading music destroys their creativity.I have a friend who is a fine guitar player but uses that excuse constantly and I don't want to argue the point with him too much and perhaps harm our friendship.Ironically, the other half of the folk duo he is in(his wife) is a good musician who can read well and could teach him if he wanted to learn.I guess whatever works for you and this is not intended as a put down for those who can't read music,I can't read TAB.

[Bilbo]

It certainly isn't a put down. It's just like Marcus Miller said, 'why wouldn't you'?

[Skol303]

I'm slowly learning to read... very slowly... but I'm getting there. As mentioned above, I have no interest in sight reading at gigs because I don't gig and mostly produce electronic music.

I'm interested because it helps me to access and better understanding the wealth of theory that's available once you're able to 'join the dots', so to speak. And I'm interested in that for the purpose of improving my composition chops.

It's also something to do whilst killing time on the long journeys that my job involves  

[Burns-bass]

Reading music is just a convenient and effective shorthand for conveying ideas. 

The belief that it inhibits creativity is just ignorant. 

Plus, it’s really quite simple to teach yourself.

[Bilbo]

You have to teach yourself. The 'learning how' is quite simple: notes, note values, accidentals, key signatures and rhythm. Could teach it in a couple of sessions. Learning to actually DO it is just sitting at home in a room banging away for years!.

[scalpy]

I know this sounds pretentious but I maintain the standard musical notation system is one of the pinnacles of human invention. Off to cook some quinoa now....

[fretmeister]

I'm learning to read. I'm doing the Jeff Berlin course and a few other things.

I'm glad I am. It makes things so much easier to understand and I'm only at a basic level.

I want to reach a stage where I could read stuff that is complex as the stuff I can work out by ear.

 

To me, not learning the language of music is almost in the same league as wanting to read a book but refusing to learn the written language that would allow not only the general gist of the story but all the fine nuances and subtleties that make a story great.

[Dad3353]

Not quite a rant, but a couple of frustrations which have 'bugged' me ever since I started to 'read' the dots, all those decades ago. I realise that it's been invented, and that it's now too late to do anything about it, but, if it was to be re-invented, there are a few things I could suggest to make it more palatable. Here we go, then...

Accidentals. What..? I would have not based the stave on the key of 'C', but given one line/space for each note, right from the start. It's true I play drums, and read pretty well for that instrument. Do we have accidentals for a drum score..? No, we don't. There is a line/space for each element (snare, bass drum, hi-hat etc...). There's a simplification worth considering, no..? Yes, the staves would be slightly wider, but when one reads a note, it's that note, not a sharpened or flattened one..!

Next 'anomaly': bar lines. What..? What, exactly, are they for..? If a note is to be played for a certain length, just use the symbol for that length. A bar line..? Oh no..! Now we have to 'tie' the note into the next bar, to get the n° of beats in the bar correct. What for..? Just play the length of note written, and the beat will take care of itself. I can see the point of having a numbered reference, for when the conductor says 'OK, from 152, fortissimo please...'. What other purpose do they serve except confuse things..? Play each note as it's written, the length that's written, and dispose of this extraneous clutter. That would get more folks interested in playing music from dots, instead of deciphering a redundant and out-dated code.

There, I've said it, and it's tired m..... Zzzzzz Zzzzzzz Zzzzzz

Edited January 17, 2018 by Dad3353

[DJpullchord]

I can never remember the bleedin’ key signatures.

[Bilbo]

1 minute ago, DJpullchord said:

I can never remember the bleedin’ key signatures.

Invent a key signature acronym.

 

Flats = Boys Eat And Drink Guiness Crisps Freely

Sharps = Frank Carson Gets Dad An Elephant Bugle

 

...or whatever sits easily in your mind.

 

[bubinga5]

4 hours ago, Bilbo said:

It certainly isn't a put down. It's just like Marcus Miller said, 'why wouldn't you'?

I wonder if he's asked Andrew Gouche that.

[Dan Dare]

1 hour ago, Bilbo said:

Invent a key signature acronym.

 

Flats = Boys Eat And Drink Guiness Crisps Freely

Sharps = Frank Carson Gets Dad An Elephant Bugle

 

...or whatever sits easily in your mind.

 

Wrong way round, surely? C = no sharps or flats, g = one sharp, F = one flat and so on.

[Dan Dare]

More generally, would anyone claim learning to read language "stifled their creativity"? It's the same with music. A lot of defensiveness around the topic in my experience.

[Lozz196]

I used to be able to read bass music quite easily, guitar not so well but enough to get by. It`s how I learned to play, I went to a few lessons, learned what the notes were and where they were on the fret-board, then went away and armed with that knowledge and a couple of song-books taught myself how to play my two - then - fave albums. I`m sure I could have learned by ear but I`m glad I learned the way I did. In song-writing it really helps me to this day. To anyone intending on learning a musical instrument, learn how to read music for it would be one of my top tips.

[JapanAxe]

2 hours ago, Bilbo said:

Boys Eat And Drink Guiness Crisps Freely

Frank Carson Gets Dad An Elephant Bugle

You've been using Google translate on Behringer manuals again haven't you?

[scalpy]

1 hour ago, Dan Dare said:

Wrong way round, surely? C = no sharps or flats, g = one sharp, F = one flat and so on.

You are right but this mnemonic refers to the order the sharps and flats appear- C = no sharps/ flats, F major= one flat, B etc. 

[fretmeister]

3 hours ago, Dad3353 said:

Not quite a rant, but a couple of frustrations which have 'bugged' me ever since I started to 'read' the dots, all those decades ago. I realise that it's been invented, and that it's now too late to do anything about it, but, if it was to be re-invented, there are a few things I could suggest to make it more palatable. Here we go, then...

Accidentals. What..? I would have not based the stave on the key of 'C', but given one line/space for each note, right from the start. It's true I play drums, and read pretty well for that instrument. Do we have accidentals for a drum score..? No, we don't. There is a line/space for each element (snare, bass drum, hi-hat etc...). There's a simplification worth considering, no..? Yes, the staves would be slightly wider, but when one reads a note, it's that note, not a sharpened or flattened one..!

Next 'anomaly': bar lines. What..? What, exactly, are they for..? If a note is to be played for a certain length, just use the symbol for that length. A bar line..? Oh no..! Now we have to 'tie' the note into the next bar, to get the n° of beats in the bar correct. What for..? Just play the length of note written, and the beat will take care of itself. I can see the point of having a numbered reference, for when the conductor says 'OK, from 152, fortissimo please...'. What other purpose do they serve except confuse things..? Play each note as it's written, the length that's written, and dispose of this extraneous clutter. That would get more folks interested in playing music from dots, instead of deciphering a redundant and out-dated code.

There, I've said it, and it's tired m..... Zzzzzz Zzzzzzz Zzzzzz

Bar lines give the pulse. It’s why 2/2 sounds different from 4/4 and 3/4 different from 6/8 even if the notes land in the same place.

 

They are vital. And that’s before we get to rehearsal situations of “start at bar 38 please”

[scalpy]

Just now, fretmeister said:

Bar lines give the pulse. It’s why 2/2 sounds different from 4/4 and 3/4 different from 6/8 even if the notes land in the same place.

 

They are vital. And that’s before we get to rehearsal situations of “start at bar 38 please”

In my trumpet playing days we did the Mozart piano concerto. Slow movement has a 100 bar rest. One rehearsal I counted them all religiously, 95 2 3 4 etc, picked up my instrument to play and the conductor stopped us all, and said, right back to bar 23. Not a happy bunny.

[Dad3353]

25 minutes ago, fretmeister said:

Bar lines give the pulse. It’s why 2/2 sounds different from 4/4 and 3/4 different from 6/8 even if the notes land in the same place.

 

They are vital. And that’s before we get to rehearsal situations of “start at bar 38 please”

How does that work with tied notes, then..? What happens to 'pulse' there..? OK, keep the bar lines (although, as a drummer, I've never 'pulsed' with 'em...), but leave the tied notes out. If a bar is 4 beats (for instance...), and a note last 6 beats, use a dotted semibreve, instead of tying a semibreve with a minim over the bar line. Why not..?

I agree (and wrote as much...) concerning referencing a place in the piece ('OK, from 152, fortissimo please...').

Edited January 17, 2018 by Dad3353

[paul_c2]

29 minutes ago, scalpy said:

In my trumpet playing days we did the Mozart piano concerto. Slow movement has a 100 bar rest. One rehearsal I counted them all religiously, 95 2 3 4 etc, picked up my instrument to play and the conductor stopped us all, and said, right back to bar 23. Not a happy bunny.

I hear you, brother:

[paul_c2]

10 minutes ago, Dad3353 said:

How does that work with tied notes, then..? What happens to 'pulse' there..? OK, keep the bar lines (although, as a drummer, I've never 'pulsed' with 'em...), but leave the tied notes out. If a bar is 4 beats (for instance, and a note last 6 beats, use a dotted semibreve, instead of tying a semibreve with a minim over the bar line. Why not..?

I agree (and wrote as much...) concerning referencing a place in the piece ('OK, from 152, fortissimo please...').

That's syncopation, and is distinctive in that some/all notes deliberately don't fall on "the pulse" as defined by the time signature. But it still requires a time signature to communicate to the musician where the (silent, possibly, if nobody is playing on it) pulse is. In theory you could rewrite each time it occurs by eg 1 bar of 6/4 then 1 bar of 2/4 but in practice if you did that, it would end up a complete mess and be much harder to read/understand.

[paul_c2]

3 hours ago, DJpullchord said:

I can never remember the bleedin’ key signatures.

The circle of fifths is your friend. In addition to listing the key signatures in order of increasing sharps/flats depending on the direction, you'll notice that this is the same order (albeit displaced) the sharps/flats occur in. It has other uses too, and once some of the elements of music theory "click into place" it can be applied to many other areas.

[Dad3353]

2 minutes ago, paul_c2 said:

That's syncopation...

OK, OK; keep the pulse, or syncopation or whatever, keep the bar lines, but play the notes at their written length, that's all. Why do they have to slavishly fit into this artificial frame of bar lines..? What, musically, would be the difference if a dotted semibreve was written instead of a semibreve tied to a minim..? That's the key factor for me, not the lines as such. It's the tied notes I don't see a reason for.

[paul_c2]

What would happen is it would confuse the musicians who are expecting each bar (of, for example, 4/4) to contain 4x crotchets, instead of 6. And also what would you put into the next bar? Just two crotchets? The way it would be done properly, so it could be understood, is to have one bar of 6/4 then one bar of 2/4. But its an inelegant way to do it, requires more thinking time, and looks messier.

At the end of the day the standard notation is merely a tool for communicating the music to the people expected to play it. And if sight reading, or reading/playing it after not too much practice (which often happens in commercial and recording situations), you want the sheet music to be laid out according to the standardised rules, as easy to follow as possible, and not cause or introduce any issues of its own.