Standard Notation?? Is it a must???

[slybass3000]

Wow the last few posts are very...
phllosi..phylozo..phyly, no.. philosofi.. philosophical,yes philosophical !!!
piouf...
SB

[Pacman]

Originally Posted by JimmyM

A very moronic culture, but a culture nonetheless. Well, only the ones of us who play for a living are moronic...the ones with day jobs are smart.

Care to explain yourself, jimmy? I play for a living, and don't consider myself a moron at all....

[WarPig]

Okay guys......esp Jimmy......point taken. I think my initial point was distorted as the thread got longer......I was looking for theory knowledge, but is standard notation a foregone conclusion to acquire this information.

As I see....YES....is the short answer. Many thanks to those who posted to encourage my along this route. The staff is not entirely foreign to me, so proceding is not an entire drag.

Since the first few replies started coming in I've spent a few hours whaming out some basic blues & rhythm parts from a Leonard book on notiation. I can see it will be possible, there's light in the distance......I'm hoping I get more than just names and terms for the stuff I've been doing by ear for years.........CHEERS!!!!!
david

[Daniel Baskin]

I'm glad that you made the right choice.


(Btw, Rich, I was playing devil's advocate. ALL I was saying was that tab has some advantages over standard notation, but they are nothing compared to vice versa. )

[Richard Lindsey]

Originally Posted by Daniel Baskin

I'm glad that you made the right choice.


(Btw, Rich, I was playing devil's advocate. ALL I was saying was that tab has some advantages over standard notation, but they are nothing compared to vice versa. )

[JimmyM]

Jon Packard, I stand by what I said. You have to be a moron to try to make a living with music. And you have to be an even bigger moron to stick with it after it's abundantly clear that you have not been singled out to make a fortune with it. There are so many easier, better and safer ways of making a living that making music for a living seems like a very poor choice.

Having said that, what do -I- do for a living???

[Pacman]

I dunno Jimmy - I make a good living as a musician. Own my house, two cars, plenty for vacations, etc. Health and dental benefits....and a pension! I'm no moron, baby!

[jazzbo]

My teacher makes a living playing. He's very happy with his life, as well he has every reason to be. The last thing I would ever call him is a moron. Jimmy, I think you're quite wrong on this one.

[Richard Lindsey]

I'm guessing that Jimmy may not have meant that remark quite the way it's being taken. To me it seemed to be more in the category of mordant self-deprecation--since Jimmy apparently does this for a living and would therefore be a "moron" by his own standards.

[JimmyM]

Thank you for getting it, Richard. I do indeed play music for a living. I don't do badly either. But it's a far cry from the living you can make with a good straight job. True, it's better than working at 7-11 (which I've done before, too), but it doesn't mean it's a good job. I've found it a pretty lousy job at times. At least with a 7-11 gig you make a steady paycheck. I have a bad week and the mortgage is in jeopardy. I get no insurance or pension from it unless I buy my own. Knowing the right people makes all the difference between making good money and starving, no matter how good you are. And unless I branch out and get into promotion and production (which I've started to do recently), I can pretty much count on earning the same amount of money year after year with no chance for advancement.

Moronic? Maybe not. Do you have to be smart to make a living with it? Absolutely not. Is it the smartest way to make a living? Not by a longshot.

[BenLoy]

Okay, we're all morons! Scott Thunes said so!

Back to WarPig's original post.

Originally Posted by WarPig

Is there a GOOD book on theory development written for TAB?
Tab is cool, its far less confusing, and when you look at tab - you're looking at your fretboard.
OR , should I just slug it out and do the work with standard notation?

You can't learn theory without understanding standard notation. It's the only way such information can be communicated.

You can't show four-part classical harmony or counterpoint in tab on the 4-string bass without using fingerings that require four separate arms.

You can't really illustrate chord extensions and their uses using tab for a 4 or 5 string. You can show how to finger them and where all the chord tones are, and you can certainly play triple-stops that outline the important color tones. However, illustrating why they sound the way they do really requires an instrument that has a wide enough range to play every chord tone simultaneously and displace some of them by more than an octave. When a chord has more than 4 notes in it, you're gonna have to start omitting some of them when trying to play them on a bass, which is fine if you already understand it but confusing if you're learning about harmony.

Studying the piano (enough to bang out the notes, anyway) and reading standard notation is imperative. There's much, much more to music than the 4-string's 3 octave range (harmonics, too, yes I know).

[cassanova]

[quote=JimmyM]I stand by what I said. You have to be a moron to try to make a living with music. And you have to be an even bigger moron to stick with it after it's abundantly clear that you have not been singled out to make a fortune with it.

I made a living playing music for many years. I am definately not a moron. I do agree that there were many times that I'd had made more anually working a day job than playing bass, but playing the bass is what I wanted to do for my living. Sometimes its not about making a fortune, fame, and all that stuff, sometimes its about just doing what makes you happy to earn whatever living you can.


There are so many easier, better and safer ways of making a living that making music for a living seems like a very poor choice.

Only if you suck or live in a town with a very poor music scene.

[JimmyM]

OK, playing music for a living is the single greatest job ever created, and everyone who does it is a genius. I give up at trying to be humorous on here anymore.