sightreading - it pays off

[Deep]

dodgy_ian......That is wonderful that you got your reading together in 9 months. Now all sorts of doors are opening for you.
Reading is relatively easy.....you just gotta do it. Take time out to practice it. Whenever you feel it's getting hard.....REMEMBER.....there are thousands of children out there that are good readers....so why shouldn't you be able to?

 

[dodgy_ian]

yeah, i guess you're right that it is pretty cool, i still gotta lotta prac to do but i've done a lot of the hard work done and the doors have opened. Seems to be very few bass players in the uk that can read so really sorts you out!

Dodge

 

[Deep]

That's great. The more you read the better you read. There is no secret to it. You'll see grammer school kids doing concerts all the time. If they could read then all of us could read too. Even if you do gigs that require no reading.....that first gig that the band has a chart for........and you can read? That makes you feel so confident.
I've got relatives that are not even musicians.......they took lessons when they were younger on an instrument....they can still read. Believe me...that makes you wanna get your stuff together. And we all can. It's not brain surgery.

 

[RyanHelms]

It's good to see so many players hip to reading. It definately does sort you out, my flagged audition is proof of that. My drummer and I had a long talk about it the other night and it boiled down to pretty much this - it's up to the individual player what sphere they're aiming for because the whole music community *is* cut up into so many niche segments. I personally would rather have the edge that reading affords, rather than being excluded from any situation that requires it.

 

[daddyo]

I'm learning to read bass clef now. I've been able to read treble clef for guitar since I was 10 but only played the bass casually using a root 5 strategy. Now I'me getting serious because I have a lot of opportunities to play bass but few to play guitar since I play in church and there your guitar players are usually singing as well which I can't do. Already it has opened up musical doors such as being able to take piano music (old hymns) and write the chords for guitar and get the piano bass line which usually works for electric bass. You can arrange and transpose from sheet music. None of our guitar players can read music or even know what a major triad is. I'm using Friedman's "Building Bass Lines" which I love because there is no tab. I find the tab sucks your eyes down and steals your skills. I have the same problem with guitar music. The tab degenerates your reading skills. I'm going to keep at it.

 

[dodgy_ian]

yeah tab is bad, fully sucks your skills. keep up the hard work dude, its worth it!!!

Dodge

 

[Passinwind]

But how many people got into music as a means of self-expression and will tell you that giving them a written line to play stifles that... It's a tricky subject. My faculty instructor at college used to talk about freedom within limitations. Man did we argue that one!

The point though is this. If you want to audition for a band that works from a book (why are those the bands that seem to always have respectable work ) you have to be able to sightread.

Out of 300+ tunes in my jazz fakebook, maybe 7 charts have written bass figures. So much for that...

Interesting points. I came into my present jazz gig not by sightreading, but by being able to work off chord charts on the fly. Our keyboard player occasionally writes out bass figures, but he doesn't bother with standard notation, which I would prefer, actually. The band uses a few different bass subs, and their reading skills are highly divergent, so he does the dreaded "note names under the staff" deal. I want to improve my reading skills, but in the couple of situations where that could've happened, I was always told to play my own lines, that they sounded better anyway. Improv is my strong suit, so they may even have been right, given the band contexts. I have no idealogical problem with playing defined, written parts though. "My own" lines are frequently stolen from records anyway, for the half or so of the tunes that I'm already familiar with.

I realize that the solution is to write out my own bass charts for the tunes, but it's a daunting task, with 200+ songs in our book, plus new ones constantly being added. I guess I'll start with the tunes I solo on, which cuts it to maybe 100 or so.