How would you count this out?

[warnergt]

How would you count out this second measure?
You can hear it here: RockBassLine3.mp3

[carl h.]

1&2&3&4&1(2)&(3)&4e&

[velascorp]

It's counted 1, and , and 4-e -and.

[BritPicker]

I just do it half-time. Pat my foot every 8th note (it helps to pencil-mark the 8th notes on the line). Start off slow.

1e&a.. counting is just too hard. I've never managed to count meaningfully or read it like that.

Tapping the 8ths and pattern recognition is much more fruitful, and akin to how one reads text as a fluent reader.

I learned all this from Carol Kaye books, think its good advice.

[BritPicker]

The mp3 has more notes in bar 2 (7) than the music (6 notes), btw.

[warnergt]

Carl, that's what I thought. I encountered a little disagreement/
confusion with someone about it last night.
I don't know about you but it's still next to impossible for me
to count it and play it at the same time. Once I hear it, I know
I can play it no problem.

BritPicker, I hear only six notes in the second measure of the MP3 file.

Here's what the counting looks like:

[Febs]

Originally Posted by warnergt

Carl, that's what I thought. I encountered a little disagreement/
confusion with someone about it last night.
I don't know about you but it's still next to impossible for me
to count it and play it at the same time. Once I hear it, I know
I can play it no problem.

This is the key. Learning to read music is much like learning to read written language. You don't start off by reading entire sentences at one time. You start by learning the sounds associated with individual individual letters, and then eventually putting those letters and their respective sounds together to form words, and then putting the words together to form sentences. At first, it is a slow process, because you need to think about every letter and its associated sound and putting them together. Eventually, however, you learn to recognize words without having to think about the individual sounds that comprise them.

You can approach reading music the same way. Break the measure you are having difficulty with into smaller parts. Learn the sounds associated with each rhythmic pattern, and then put the component parts back together. With practice, you will learn the sounds that are associated with each rhythmic pattern without having to "count out" each note in your head in real time as you play.

For example, take measure two of your example, and draw a line separating the measure into four equal beats. Count the measure in 16th notes, but only play the fourth beat: 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a. Do you hear that the fourth beat is a a pattern that sounds like "da da dum" (sorry, it's tough to write sounds in text, but I hope you get what I'm saying). Learn the sound associated with that pattern in much the same way you learned the sound associated with each letter when you were learning to read. With practice, you will get to the point where you will recognize the 16th-16th-8th figure as "da da dum" without having to consciously think "4 e &".

[onymousillusion]

I'm trying to learn to read music so a quick question. How do you know for the 'a' note you are playing the 5th fret is not meant to be played on the 2nd string?

[mambo4]

Originally Posted by onymousillusion

I'm trying to learn to read music so a quick question. How do you know for the 'a' note you are playing the 5th fret is not meant to be played on the 2nd string?

You don't, without any fingering markings.

Which actual string/fret is up to the player, and you usually go with what is the most comfortable or what keeps your left hand in the same position.
Less commonly, to simply go by what tone you want, as A sounds different open, at the 5th fret or at the 10th fret on a low B string.

[Fergie Fulton]

The key to it is learning to play on the beat and recognise the phrasing/grouping of everthing else and internalise that phrasing/grouping.

The count is at its simplest, 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 etc,
but you have to realise that you cannot concentrate on counting, you concentrate on playing. Some groupings/phrasing are almost immpossible to count so you have to see the notes in the phrasing/group and treat them as one. The phrasing/group may have 8th and 16ths so you have to recogonise their phrasing/grouping.

Easy way to do this is to write out the phrasing/grouping on a single staff line, now the task is about the timing not the notes being played. Once you learn the timing, and can internalise that to recognise that phrasing or grouping then all you do is read the notes that apply to the phrasing/grouping.

When looking over a score for the first time i would look for repetition of phrasing/groupings in bars. Then i would look for individual items, then i would see how they compare to any phrasing/grouping. If i learn to feel a single phrase/grouping that appears many times, i do not need to really practise the notes, but how the phrasing/grouping interacts with the notes and the best fingering patterns to move fluidly through the piece.

In music scores if you look you will see phrasing and groupings repeat with regular frequency, what you do is learn how the feel, then apply the notes that corrospond. Think of it as reading this post, many words are repeated, you recognise the words and how to pronounce them because you recognise how the letters are grouped and the phrasing of those letter to make the word...ph=f in the word phrasing or that fre-quen-cy is pronounced frequency, or pro-noun-ced is pronounced, and so on. Music is the same principal.

[onymousillusion]

Thank you mambo4.

[mambo4]

Originally Posted by Fergie Fulton

Once you learn the timing, and can internalise that to recognise that phrasing or grouping then all you do is read the notes that apply to the phrasing/grouping.

This reminds me of something I stumbled across while goggling "rhythmic vocabulary" -tho I can't recall where I saw it now. The upshot of the article was that mid- twentieth century music education publishers standardized their rhythmic notation to make use of eight basic two- beat groupings, rhythmic 'words' if you will, determined to be easiest for students to read. (It also helped that most band music then was a 2-beat feel)

I extrapolated their basic set into 8 "8th note words" and 8 "16th note words". A great deal of complex rhythms can be broken down into these phrases. Keep in mind that any given note can also be replaced with a rest. And of course this is not at all complete, but a good base for further reading practice.

[Fergie Fulton]

Originally Posted by mambo4

This reminds me of something I stumbled across while goggling "rhythmic vocabulary" -tho I can't recall where I saw it now. The upshot of the article was that mid- twentieth century music education publishers standardized their rhythmic notation to make use of eight basic two- beat groupings, rhythmic 'words' if you will, determined to be easiest for students to read. (It also helped that most band music then was a 2-beat feel)

I extrapolated their basic set into 8 "8th note words" and 8 "16th note words". A great deal of complex rhythms can be broken down into these phrases. Keep in mind that any given note can also be replaced with a rest. And of course this is not at all complete, but a good base for further reading practice.

Thanks for the info Mambo, i did not realise there was concerted change, i just believed it to be the best way to learn.
The time sig. is one of the main things that will change the rhythm of any phrase that is played within a piece of music so to that end we were taught to regard notes and especially groups of nots as words We would transcribe phrases on to a single staff line and learn to play them rhythmicly, then for fun we would move them to different lines to create new notes within that phrasing ( sometimes even turning the music up-side down and playing it). As it is when we were younger the games had a lesson behind them in that it taught us to internalise an see rhythm, rather than hear it, leaving us free to deal with the pitch of the notes as written on the staff rather than how they play.
The B E A T example i have used in previous threads along these lines is the same idea of learning to internalise ideas, and is similar to the visual 1&2&3&4 examples in the shaded block parts of you example....great visuals by the way.

p.s. Another game we done was to take the song, write it's melody on a single staff line as a rhythm and try and guess what it was. Cryptic clues were given for a deduction in points to help the game along, but as i remember it was very interesting in how many songs we could get. But looking back i would suppose we all had the same sort of thinking, so a certain element of that game was the way we thought in our choices.