Want to learn the dots - best way?

[Telebass]

Title says it all, really.

What's the best way for an old fart to learn to read music?

[thepurpleblob]

[quote name='Telebass' post='329796' date='Nov 15 2008, 07:19 PM']Title says it all, really.

What's the best way for an old fart to learn to read music?[/quote]

Depends what you mean. Reading music is pretty easy, you can learn the mechanics in minutes almost. However, learning to sight read a part is a different matter entirely and can take years to get competent at. You are probably aiming at somewhere in between. The best advice I can give for learning to read music is to write some. If you take some parts you know and try to notate them it really is a good workout. If you can get hold of some notation software, they usually can play it back to you so you know it's correct. I think Finale do a freebee version - actually I see it's not free now, but ten bucks shouldn't hurt too much :-)

[url="http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/"]http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/[/url]

Other than that, try playing from the dots. There's some good resources on the web for this.. here's one of my faves:

[url="http://thelibster.com/bass/"]http://thelibster.com/bass/[/url]

[Telebass]

Have got Notepad 2008, and am working on it...It's the timing aspect that is worst; can sort out the actual notes a bit already. That last site looks interesting - thanks!

[thepurpleblob]

[quote name='Telebass' post='329816' date='Nov 15 2008, 07:58 PM']Have got Notepad 2008, and am working on it...It's the timing aspect that is worst; can sort out the actual notes a bit already. That last site looks interesting - thanks![/quote]

I know... the timing *is* the worst. Try transcribing simple rock stuff, don't go for mad syncopated stuff. Status Quo not Radiohead I think the problem is that rock music (for want of a better word) was never written down so, in some pieces, the timing can get very complicated indeed. Much more so than classical stuff.

[Alun]

[quote name='Telebass' post='329816' date='Nov 15 2008, 07:58 PM']Have got Notepad 2008, and am working on it...It's the timing aspect that is worst; can sort out the actual notes a bit already. That last site looks interesting - thanks![/quote]

As far as rhythm reading goes, I would stress counting the subdivisions eg an 8th note is two 16ths, a dotted 8th is 3 and so on. For sight reading that sort of stuff I sometimes disregard the barlines and think purely in terms of each note's duration so if there was a run of 4 dotted eight notes, I'd be thinking "123, 123, 123, 123"rather than "OK, first note on the beat, second one on the last 16th of beat one, second one on the and of 2, etc". It's not necessarily the "right2 way to do it but I find it really useful for on the spot moments :-)

The other thing I'd recommend is getting used to how a particular grouping sounds - so knowing that an eighth and two 16ths is "dun-du-du" like the classic steve Harris gallop rather than reading each note. This comes back to the old "music as a language" theory as we look at a word as a whole, not as individual letters, eg cat instead oif C.A.T - same principle with these rhythms.

Cheers
Alun

[~tl]

This is a good trainer for getting used to the notes on the stave:

[url="http://www.musictheory.net/trainers/html/id82_en.html"]http://www.musictheory.net/trainers/html/id82_en.html[/url]

Actually, the whole site's pretty good. There are trainers for intervals and things like that too...

[url="http://www.musictheory.net/"]http://www.musictheory.net/[/url]

[Delberthot]

I teach using the Rockschool books, especially for people who want to learn to read. It covers a variety of styles.

It seemed the best laid out and obvious choice for me when I began teaching. Each exercise has a corresponding track on the CD you get with it to show you how to do it. If you're doing it yourself you do have to be careful that you don't listen to the CD track often enough to end up simply copying it rather than reading the dots.

[Bilbo]

Rufus Reid - The Evolving Bassist - simply laid out, it will give you the stuff you need to make sense of the thing and then you can move in any direction you see fit.