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| Moderated by: Tony Provencher, Richard Hefner | Page:   1 2 3 |
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| Who can read music? Who can read tabs? | Rate Topic |
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| Posted: Sun Feb 4th, 2007 12:14 am |
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41st Post |
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1four5 Approved 
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You can also apply the same approach to any other song. All you have to do is identity the structure of the tune (that really boils down to the rhythm and the chord progression) and take it from there. We agree Patrick! What you wrote is all I've ever done. I probably did everything backwards from the start, making up progressions and writing simple songs after learning hotel California on a guitar, and using those chords in every other way I could think of. It was a long time before I learned anyone else's music...I was having too much fun making up my own...in the process learning chords, chords and more chords and chords I still don't know the name of and every dirivitive of every chord in every position in every inversion I could think of and I'm still learning. Not by name, not by key or any of that...but by playing. A LOT. I was shocked...when my friends wanted to start a band...they give me a lyric sheet, we pencil in some chords and off we go...amazing how all that other stuff just falls into place. Several times through a song and you start finding the inversions that sound cool with the other instruments, but not getting on someone else groove, and you got riffs that fit right in and sometime melody notes work into it...sometimes not...sometimes you find the songs original hook...sometime you make up a new one and the song becomes yours, and although everyone knows the song, aint no one else playing it like you. It's also a lot of fun when we choose new sets and work out songs we haven't played in awhile. There are somewhere around 150-200 songs in our set book and we use 25-30 of them every month...I hardly ever play a song the same twice, and trying to remember how we played it last time around always lends itself to finding new and different and better ways to play them. It's also wonderfull to play with 3 other people who think the same way and encourage fun and free thinking and new ideas. I still can't read a lick of music. TAB to me is worse than decifering high school algebra, and I don't want to sacrifice my playing time to do it. I don't understand music theory at all...but that does not mean I don't know what I need,to find any chord in any key when I need it. It's amazing how playing a lot makes things like chord progressions and key positions and paterns along with their respective scales and stuff like that second nature and you hardly even think about it any more. You just play and don't assign theory or math or science or lables or stuff like that to it. At least I don't. I'm having the time of my life now...doing it my way, picking up my instruments and just playing. We played a Christmas program at a church, and unknwown to me, there was a bluegrass musician in the audience. Afterwards he came up to me with a huge grin and said WOW MAN...that was great, I aint never seen no one ever play a banjo like that with 4 finger rolls and all chording in any key. Very refreshing. This aint my first try at music. I got a guitar in my late teens. I got some booksand some cassette tapes and man I was gonna be a star. I remember it took me a couple weeks to learn Everly Brother's "All I have to do is Dream" note for fricking note using TAB. It was a pain in the keester, I was so sick of that song I never wanted to hear it again, and I though that if that's what I had to go through for every song I wanted to play...not to mention all the theory/scale/exersize uninteresting barely explained totally alien extreamly boring...I got better things to do like chase women and drink...so the guitar went into the closet for over 20 years. Gosh...if only someone would have showed me 3 chords...the pentatonic scale and told me to makes some cool stuff up...I know for a fact my life would have been much different. 
____________________ These are the good times! |
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| Posted: Sun Feb 4th, 2007 01:18 am |
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42nd Post |
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Patrick_Costello Approved
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I started trying trying to learn "Dream" and a few other oldies when I was starting out on the guitar but nothing was making any sense. I was cutting shcool one day hanging out in this sleazy music store just outside of town and I ran into a guy who had just finished a tour backing up a bunch of 50's and 60's acts on a cruise ship. He ran me through a bunch of the chord progressions and then pointed out that his cruise ship job was a lousy gig because, "all of these songs are the same." Before he left I got him to help me figure out the chord progression to Walk Don't Run on the banjo - and that led him to rant about how almost every Ventures tune was the same. I can still remember how shocked I was by his cynicism - but even back then I was was glad he had such a "been there, done that" attitude going because he opened my eyes to how music really worked. That Walk Don't Run lick - make an F chord anywhere on the fretboard, move it down the neck (towards the nut) a whole step (in other words, skip a fret), move it down the neck another whole step then move it down the neck a half step. For example, make and F at the tenth fret, the eighth, the sixth and the fifth. I spent hours move that to different places on the fretboard - and then I started doing the same sort of thing with every other song or lick I ran across. Later on when I started messing around with learning how to read music having a grasp of how to move things around the fretboard was a huge help because I was able to grasp notation from a more abstract viewpoint. It's actually pretty easy to read music. All you have to do is imagine a string of letters from A to G repeating itself over and over again. ABCDEFGABCDEFGABCDEFGABCDEFG Then imagine that same string of letters running up and down the page. A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G Your G Clef - that funky squiggle at the beginning of a piece of music is there for a reason. If you look at it you will notice that the spiral ends on a line. The clef is there to point out the G line. once you have the reference point of that G line you know that the space below it has to be F and the space above it has to be A. A B C D E F *G* A B C D E F The only place where it gets tricky is when you go to translate that to the fretboard. You see, we add sharps and flats into standard notation with the key signature or by writing them directly on the staff (we call those notes accidentals). On the fretboard we have to account for sharps and flats. The difference is that the layout of the staff is set up to represent the seven note names while your fretboard follows all twelve notes. The cool thing is that the twelve notes are easy to understand. Write out the letters from A to G: ABCDEFG Now put a slash bewteen each letter. A | B | C | D | E | F | G | Now we have to take two of those slashes away. Why? Because there is no half-step (you can look up half-steps in A Book Of Five Rings) between B and C: A | B C | D | E | F | G | And there is no half step between E and F. A | B C | D | E F | G | Now I want you to repeat after me: "A, half-step, B, C, half-step, D, half-step, E, F, half-step, G, half-step, A" Say it over and over again a few times. Write donw this pattern on a piece of paper ( A | B C | D | E F | G |, grab your banjo, guitar or whatever and pick a string at random and make a mark over whatever note that string is tuned to let's say it's the first string on a banjo in G tuning: * A | B C | D | E F | G | If the string is tuned to D then fretting at the first fret will give you the half step between D and E. Fretting at the second fret will give you an E and the third fret . . . You can figure out your other strings - but don't think of it as memorizing notes. Just play around with it and get a feel for how things are laid out. Once you get used to that idea you can look at a piece of music in standard notation a plunk out a rough melody. Once you have that rough melody you can ditch the notation and work up the rest on your own. So it's not complicated, people just make it complicated. -Patrick
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| Posted: Fri Feb 9th, 2007 02:25 am |
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43rd Post |
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Lyle Konigsberg Approved 
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I've read a lot of interesting comments in this thread, so just for a change I'll add my boring comments. READING MUSIC - As far as reading music, I started paying French horn in 5th grade. For those not familiar with this perverse instrument, it has a fairly large range (about four octaves) so that you have to be able to read both treble and bass clef. To complicate matters, modern horns are pitched in F major, but orchestral horn parts in the 1700s and 1800s were written in all kinds of different keys. This means if you play in an orchestra (which I did late in high school and early in college) that you have to know how to transpose on the fly. So French horn turns out to be quite the musical notation workout. READING TABS - I started playing banjo in 7th grade, and immediately started with tablature. I can read both, but my preference is for standard music notation. This is because I also play fiddle, where tablature works pretty badly, and because a lot of my time on banjo is spent trying to play fiddle tunes (particularly from 19th century collections and from O'Neill's collection). I like the freedom of being able to figure out how to get the melody on banjo using techniques that work for me, as opposed to having someone dictate where I should use an "alternate string P-O" or whatnot. Of late, I have been writing tabs in case others want to submit to my particular tyrannies. ENTER THE EAR - There have been a lot of comments of late about "jams" and "circles." I've played in quite a few of these, and we have one (strictly OT, no BG) every first Wednesday in Knoxville at a local coffeehouse. I was just there last night, and started making some mental notes. As many of the comments at ezFolk relate more to chord structure, I'm going to focus more on melody. Chord structure is pretty useless if you are playing fiddle or fretless banjo where chords that aren't simple (barres or requiring only two fingers) are very high risk maneuers. So here goes: 1. Listen to a lot of recordings. If you hear a song enough you should be able to hum or sing it. Once you know what key the song is in figure out how to play the melody by first humming/singing a bit and then reproducing the melody on your fiddle, or banjo, or... 2. But how do you figure out the melody? This is largely experience. OT music has some very, very common motifs. So once you know Whiskey Before Breakfast it isn't that far a stretch to Wind that Shakes the Barley. 3. Work at least a bit on playing songs in the "wrong" key. You've learned Mississippi Sawyer in "D" (where "everyone" plays it). Can you play it in "G" (where Foghorn plays it)? Switching between some keys is trivial on banjo (slap on a capo or take it off) and fiddle (dropping a fifth just moves everything down to the next lower strings). Anyhow, the reason for playing songs in the "wrong" keys is so you won't freak when you're in a "circle" or "jam" and your "right" key isn't what other people use. Playing in alternate keys also gives you more experience in picking out tunes (and in this case ones that you already "know"). 4. When you are playing in a "circle" it is quite permissible to plunk or scratch softly along, just loud enough so you can hear if you are getting the melody correct, but not so loud as to disrupt the song. It makes more sense to do this than to admit defeat. 5. Circles are usually pretty democratic, so if people ask you for a tune start listing off ones that you know until there is a glimmer of recognition. BUT, there are some unspoken rules of etiquette here. First, banjos typically rule the roost as far as key changes, so if the group has been playing in D it is probably best to list off more D tunes. You can suggest moving into a different key, but if you start listing a bunch of tunes that are in different keys the banjo players will hate you. Also, you should mostly stay with the genre the group is playing. You're unlikely to convince a group of southern Appalachian OT musicians that it is time to play a slip jig. 6. Never ever practice! Just play... it is supposed to be fun, no?
____________________ ezFolk page: http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/1084/ Some Tabs at: http://lylewk.home.comcast.net/ |
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| Posted: Fri Feb 9th, 2007 03:21 pm |
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44th Post |
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Philj200 Approved 
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"So once you know Whiskey Before Breakfast it isn't that far a stretch to Wind that Shakes the Barley." --Was that a pun? "Switching between some keys is trivial on banjo (slap on a capo or take it off" --Which is why fiddle players tend to get their way. Which is usally A, D or G in that order. "and fiddle (dropping a fifth just moves everything down to the next lower strings)" --As long as you going from from A to D, G to C the tuning logic lets you go higher of lower by a string. But when you're going from G to A on a fiddle, things get a little dicier. All the open strings are gone. Or A to E? Or when you're working with a singer who just has to sing a song in A-flat... followed by a song in B-flat. Then you better rehearse and learn to play the notes you usually pass through on your way to better know territory.
____________________ My MP3 Section: http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/1143/ My Myspace area: http://myspace.com/philj200 |
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| Posted: Thu Jun 4th, 2009 07:45 pm |
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45th Post |
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Jim Yates Approved 
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I was looking through the back posts and found this 2007 thread and decided to revive it. Most of the people here have been talking about using standard music notation or tab as a learning tool. There are other uses for written records of music. I use music (for most instruments) or tab (for banjo - same reason as Brad) in order to remember something I have played or composed that I don't want to forget. I also use them to comunicate with my fellow musicians. I enjoy composing 2 and 3 part harmonies and counter melodies for songs and tunes. Some of these do NOT sound as good when the players are allowed to improvise and mess with the timing, therefore I write out the parts. I must confess that I also teach with tabs and standard notation. I find my students are more comfortable when they have a reference to what we talked about during the lesson. I guess this could be a tape, but fewer of my students own tape recorders these days. Students are praised when they come up with their own interpretations or improvements on what I have given them Another topic - Tabs written on the computer are often without any kind of rhythm notation. I find that students who have tried to learn from these often have a very weird idea of what a song should sound like. Tab was originally used for lute notation and was revived by Pete Seeger in his old red banjo book. This was easy to read, since timing notation was included. Regarding Phil's original post:"I guess if you want to learn to play a piece one way, tablature will get you there. But with all the thinking done by someone else, moving passed the written tab to improvisations and jamming could be difficult. To me, it comes donw to standard music notation presents you with a song. You have to figure out how to play it. Tablature teaches you to play a song exactly one way. And that way, by definition, is not your own." I'm not sure how music notation restricts a player any more than tab, other than being limited to one instrument. Both can be interpreted and improvised on just as easily as the other. Last edited on Thu Jun 4th, 2009 07:47 pm by Jim Yates ____________________ Jim http://www.myspace.com/jimyates http://www.myspace.com/mapleleafchampionjugband |
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| Posted: Thu Jun 4th, 2009 08:08 pm |
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46th Post |
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Will Approved 
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Philj200 wrote: Or when you're working with a singer who just has to sing a song in A-flat... followed by a song in B-flat. Then you better rehearse and learn to play the notes you usually pass through on your way to better know territory. Johnny Cash often recorded in A-flat. I think James Taylor's version of "You've Got A Friend" is also in A-flat. But, then, Fame = Clout, as far as getting a band to play in an odd key.
____________________ Will http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/297/ Loose Change & Friends http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/245/ http://loosechangeandfriends.com The Earth Tones http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/337/ A Bunch Of Coconuts http://abunchofcoconuts.com |
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| Posted: Thu Jun 4th, 2009 10:34 pm |
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47th Post |
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Philj200 Approved
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Many singers who play a fretted instrument also tune down a fret. Finger E major, get E-Flat Major. Makes catering to a singer easier. Alsomakes playing horns a sanity saving experience.
____________________ My MP3 Section: http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/1143/ My Myspace area: http://myspace.com/philj200 |
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