Learning to read music: Am I slowing myself down?

[Gorilla Monsoon]

My approach was ill-informed and 100% self inspired. I mapped dang near every bass cord on 8x10 poster board in a fret board pictorial and taped them to the hanging duct work above the cabinets in my L shaped kitchen. I'd play something i liked and look for the corresponding cord lain out on one of the 8x10's and have at it. I eventually wore out the linoleum flooring on that inner perimeter of my kitchen. No lie. Eventually i moved those 8x10's in corresponding order to the typical cords in what i was listening to so that my back was to the wall facing them. I don't recall ever playing a single scale. I did this for 3-5 years. Later, the concept of roots and tonics sunk in by osmosis. Later, i delved into the Circle of Fifths and gained a better understanding of theory. THEN, I got a fretless 5 string, having adopted a "play by feel/ear" approach and after quite some time fell into Malcolm Gladwell's 8,000 hour observation wherein after 8,000 hours, i became proficient by near default. It took almost 30 years. Not recommended, to be sure but for me the thought of sight reading and lessons would have probably confused me and interfered with the relative fun i was having without constraints. While i certainly could benefit from lessons- i think EVERYONE could- i learned more by simply watching really good players live and seeing what positions they chose to play and letting that sink in. I don't necessarily consider myself to be "good", although i think i could easily play in most cover bands ive seen, i choose instead to play along with difficult pieces, as fusion remains my choice of music and at my age, i can't imagine finding like-minded folks to play with in a band situation. Last week i taped myself for the first time and was pleasantly surprised by my proficiency. I was able to play Anthony Jackson's line on a Steve Khan composition-"What I'm Said ", a difficult piece to be sure, but something i was intimately familiar with, having heard it easily 100 times. If i thought i would ever be able to play at this level, i probably should have learned to read, but i can't put the bullet back in the gun. TLDR- i was able to teach myself to play on my terms without reading and i still feel that had i taken a different approach i may have felt intimidated and thrown in the towel years ago.

 

[Dbassmon]

Music is a language. Reading and writing are part of becoming fluent.

The benefits are numerous. Like reading any literature, you will be exposed to different ideas and expand your vocabulary. Reading also enhances your value as musician for hire.

Learning this skill requires that you do it regularly. Pattern recognition is mental muscle memory that allows you to know what a rhythmic figure sounds like without having to count it. Fluency in the language also lets you communicate with other educated musicians in ways not possible without those skills.

There is another benefit to reading music; it uses more of your brain than just about any other activity. It involves eye-hand coordination, dexterity, imagination, artistic and aesthetic/artistic choices, and emotion, all at the same time. CAT Scan of brain activity when reading music while playing an instrument, show the entire brain lit up in all hemispheres. Its unbelievably good brain exercise.

Like anything worthwhile, it is not easy to learn and requires dedication and practice. It slows you down at first until you get to the point where it supercharges your musical journey.

 

[Bevan777]

You see, I myself have never learned to read music because I thought of it as a gateway drug.

Tab is the gateway drug, standard notation is the hard stuff

 

[Deleted member 409896]

I don't have a whole lot to add, as OP has already gotten lots of good advice.

I will say I am enjoying the heck out of finally learning to read music properly. It is also helping me sight-read. I am about halfway through volume 2 of the Hal Leonard series. At this point, I can pretty much nail both the rhythm and pitch on the first try, on most of the exercises.

I still make time to go through it again, both with and without a metronome, vocalizing the rhythms and notes, clapping along etc., to really dial it all in. That stuff works. It's lot of fun to see how the reading gets a little more automatic between practice sessions.

That does not mean I have mastered sight reading; it only means I am where I should be at for the level of material. The curriculum thus far has not done a whole lot with sixteenth notes or "weird" time signatures (3/4 doesn't count, it's pretty standard) or extremely fast tempos, for example.

It's very satisfying. I was terrible at both slow-reading and sight-reading in high school, and did not get a lot better through college.

One set of music I remember struggling with back then was the score for the musical "Little Shop of Horrors." I need to find the sheet music and see how I do, playing it fresh off the page.

I don't think any of it was actually technically "difficult." It probably only seemed that way in some parts, because I was garbage at reading/sight-reading.

 

[bigboy_78]

Reading music is like reading books. When you start reading "Spot can Jump.....Can spot jump" you read it a few times and you basically have it memorised, but then you get "Spot can walk..." and you realise that you're actually pretty good at reading "Spot can...." correctly every time you see it.

By the end of high school you should be able to read a text cold in front of the class. That's sight reading.

You get good at sight reading, by reading all the time. Don't over analyse it, just keep reading.

 

[jimmydean]

You have to work with new lessons , for years I would break out my old books until it became obvious I was just playing from memory and not really reading the notes anymore .

 

[Whousedtoplay]

CAT Scan of brain activity when reading music while playing an instrument, show the entire brain lit up in all hemispheres. Its unbelievably good brain exercise.

The average age of our TB members is (minimum) 50 plus, and getting any brain activity is very important for aging people.
Just read music as some anti-aging "cream."

 

[dbsfgyd1]

I've been working out of the Hal Leonard series, and while playing I've tried not to let myself memorize the written music, even as I may memorize the melody by ear. My thinking has been that this would help my sight reading later on. Lately it has occurred to me that this might be detrimental to my general learning to read music. Should I be letting myself memorize the written music?

IMO, it's ok to memorize songs and no it's not going to slow down your development. What will slow your development is not reading a lot of different a charts. At this point you want to work on knowing what you are reading means and what it should sound life before you play a note.

 

[Richard Lindsey]

Can you be good at sight reading without reading music?

No, but you can certainly read music without being good at sight-reading, which is a somewhat specialized subset of reading. Just as you can be a fully literate person without being a speed-reader.

 

[Richard Lindsey]

What will slow your development is not reading a lot of different a charts.

This. You won't get better if you don't push yourself.

 

[thehindteet]

Two completely different skills?

Can you be good at sight reading without reading music?

To clarify what I think dreamadream99 means, when I think of sight reading I think of being in an ensemble where everybody has just been handed a chart that none of us have seen with the expectation that we are going to play through it together. Obviously this is probably not a very common thing to have going on at your house during practice time, but for example if you are playing in a college level jazz ensemble (and these days even my kids' competitive high-school ensemble does it), pretty much every time the ensemble rehearsed we would play one new chart, usually because the director had come across it and just wanted to hear how the ensemble would sound.

We would always spend about 5 minutes reading through our part before the whole ensemble played, the idea being that you'd figure out the feel, the key, and the structure. Then you'd scan through the chart looking for anything difficult or confusing and try to work it out on the instrument so that when its time to play it for real you have a sense of how it should sound.

When you're learning a piece on your own and you can start and stop whenever you like, there are at least two big differences from cold sight reading a piece with an ensemble. First, you might mis-read a passage and think that you have it right, but because its just you playing its easy to get a rhythm or a pitch wrong without realizing it. In an ensemble you will hear your mistake right away and then you have to correct. Second, in a cold reading session like this, we generally never stopped unless things went so far off the rails that we couldn't get through it. This means that when you get to a passage and start playing clams, you still need to be paying attention to where you are in the chart so that you can quickly catch back up.

Both of those skills are-- at least in my experience --difficult to develop unless you're playing new charts every day, since its hard to simulate playing in a real human ensemble and its not east to get access to an endless supply of charts. I also found that I only stayed decent at cold reading charts while I continued to do it. If you make a little progress and then stop doing it, the cold sight reading skill gets week. You don't completely forget how to read notation but if somebody drops a chart on you with a bunch of complicated passages it'll be difficult.

When I started playing in ensembles like this, even though I could sit down at a piano or pick up a bass and figure out how to play a piece from a chart with some trial and error, I was not prepared to do the kind of cold reading that professionals do routinely and it took years of doing it routinely before I wasn't a disaster, and now that I don't do that kind of playing anymore I'm not great at it. So it's a noble ambition but you have to be realistic about how good you can get based on your situation.