Wow. I mean... if you are still writting the letter name of the note so you know what to play. I think most good music readers will tell you there is no thinking of the letter name of the note. When I read music I'm singing the notes in my head. There's no alphabet going on there.
It's reflexive to me to hear the note and the letter at the same time. It becomes relevant when I want to transpose, but I also use the letters to figure out what other notes/arpeggios might go with what I'm playing - that's how it's filed in my brain (by letter as well as by sound). This may be because I play instruments that are not tuned just to concert C (tenor sax). When I see a chart, I can hear the music in my head, but I'm also listing out those notes. I like knowing what key I'm in, and figuring out what chords are involved without having to see them listed out - I don't know how I'd do that without the letters.
I don't write the notes out to know what to play (I'd use tab if I wanted to do a note-by-note thing), but I do like knowing quickly what's in a specific chord and not just in a chord in general (for example, what's in a Dm7 and not just how a m7 is structured in general).
So yesterday, when the guitar player said his new composition had these five chords in the verse, my brain generated a list of letters (not sounds). I think people do it differently, is my point.
On a different topic, I'm betting the
OP knows a bit more theory than he realizes. Music theory is confusing because there are so many different aspects to it. One way of referring to a particular set of notes or ideas is used in one context, for a particular purpose, and then another way is used for some other reason. To get the biggest benefit out of Talkbass or any theory book, it's important to keep learning the proper terminology for things. Don't stop or get hung up if it seems inconsistent or confusing at first.
We're rereading our college textbook on music theory - it's very different for me this time, because of the bass playing (last time through, I was thinking mainly keyboard). The author lists three kinds of minor scales but, because it's early in the book, says nothing of their relationship to modes or why we need to have three kinds of minor scales.
The answer lies in "this is how Western music works." It may be true that "music has no rules," but Western music certainly has rules (all of which can be broken, but I think it needs to be poetic, not just breaking rules for the sheer heck of it). Every local folk music culture has rules as well, even atonal or avant garde music generates its own rules. I love Western music (and a lot of Eastern music can be understood or talked about using Western theory, and is talked about that way in much of ethnomusicology).
For me, understanding the underlying mathematic principles (including the relationship of Western and other scales to the physical waveforms of sound) has been really inspiring, this time through the theory. Simple stuff, like someone saying, play "I and V" takes on new meaning when you begin to really look hard at V and why it's called "perfect" and what role it plays in so many different aspects of harmony. The fact that the V is 7 half-steps up from the root (and standard tuning on the bass places emphasizes the IVth - or 5 half-steps) still gives me much to think about. The major dyad is 4 half-steps and the minor dyad is 3 half-steps (if I'm remembering correctly). It's hard to find music anywhere in the world that doesn't play off those last two intervals. So there's a lot of music in just those 7 half-steps between the root and the perfect 5th.
Right before I read this thread, I was pondering how v is halfway in the octave - and how halfway isn't "perfect" the way V is.
A lot of you play much more intuitively than I do, I'm sure - but I really like knowing why one sound leaves the music feeling unresolved, another makes it resolve, etc. I don't compose, but I play with two guitar players who do, and it's helpful for me to understand why they did what they did. When we sometimes reconstruct a song to add a bridge or something, my knowledge about what key the thing is in and what chords/pitches might work in a bridge can be helpful. To broaden some songs, we transpose as well, something that I find the letters really helpful in doing.
Upshot is that I use letters and numbers, a lot. Eventually, every line I play will be stored in my head in terms of various numbers (intervals and relative harmony) and notes (letters). It's slow going, I wish I were faster at picking things up and remembering them some other way, but I truly enjoy it.
Ran into a guitar player (somewhat well-known) at a store in the Valley who had the geometric symbols for certain intervals (from Pythagorus, actually) beautifully tatooed on his forearm and we got to talking about the number "9" in music (I am usually only working with numbers up to 7!) and in fifteen minutes, he taught me so much about 3's and 9's (and sixes).
I like musicians who explore the esoteric aspects of the Western tradition - Pythagorus made every student learn music and intervals. Interestingly, the "3" issue involves one of those minor scales that the music theory book thinks is so important. The tats of course just looked tribal - and I see them in tribal art from Navajo to Aborigine.
/end rambling
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