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[tZer]

Ya'll got some of it right. Can I ask a question?

Why in the world would anyone right something on a piece of paper???

Let me take a couple guesses. I might give that paper to someone else??? (and say "do this") or I might need that info later cuz my pea brain can't remember this stuff??? or is this something I need to learn or study later???

Is music better written in English, or Spanish or Russian or French??? Seems that's the debate here.

I love written music (tab, charts, 5 line staff) cuz I can safely say I know thousands of songs (I could say millions if I was better at reading)

But.....

I hate written music cuz as soon as you close the book I only know a few dozen songs. I've only been a musician since 1963 (I really am a slow learner huh!).

I say play off other musicians. Being able to play along with something you hear is a nice problem to have. I like the idea of wearing out vinyl records but the radio is less destructive and more spontaneous. Some here say match the kick drum. Others say follow hi-hat or snare or lead guitar. I think its cool when the bass and sax mirror each other. Seems to me the best musician does all the above.

Who is the genius that said we are allowed to write our own notes. Get that man a gumball, thats good stuff. I've never seen a musician do that but every one of my music teachers have done that .

My crutch is charts. At a glance I know what key, chord pattern and sometimes words. etc. There may be notes if I'm starting a song I don't know well. The rest is kinda up to band.

Here's kinda a new concept I have not seen mentioned here. BASS IS A LEAD INSTRUMENT. Oooops didn't mean to yell. What I mean is when the drummer clicks his sticks 1-2-3-4 who plays the first note (and it better be the right note) then LEADS the band thru the rest of the song.

Anyone that says always or never is always suspect to me cuz a smart man gets his information where ever he can find it.

Sorry, I only meant to give $.02 worth cuz I know my wisdom ain't worth half that much. Some folks here on TB told me so.

I am not sure what you are saying - but there are a couple comments I'd like to expand upon.

"Why in the world would anyone right (sic) something on a piece of paper???"

and the related comment (I think);

"Who is the genius that said we are allowed to write our own notes. Get that man a gumball, thats good stuff. I've never seen a musician do that but every one of my music teachers have done that."

In some circumstances - and especially when someone is not necessarily in the gigging mainstream, but is learning music properly - there is sheet music and a teacher/band director or other leader who is establishing some expectations of musical productivity involved.

In these situations, annotating sheet music to help remind you of where to shift - what stop/fret to originate a section from, for example - is the norm. If you are the guy in rehearsal who is always forgetting to go to the coda, the BL/teacher/director will almost always toss you a pencil and tell you to put a note there to help you remember - if you cannot remember to make your own notes.

The real value of sheet music is for people who want to go on to play in ensembles that use sheet music, rehearse and perform from it. It's also very valuable to beginners who are serious about leaning more than just how to play their instrument. In a bass guitar forum, however, you tend to run into a large contingent of self-taught, weekend warriors - many of whom have never had to learn, nor see the value in learning how to process written music because they have never needed it.

There is a great big world outside of the garage and bars where trained musicians write, read from and fully annotate sheet music as a regular part of their everyday life as musicians.

The biggest value to learning how to properly read and use standard notation is the fact that it gives you what you need to study, learn and perform music. Additionally it gives you the ability to compose, arrange and analyze music independent of your instrument. Personally, I love taking my lunch hour to sit by a local park lake and compose walking bass lines through changes. This helps wire up the brain to actually hear music even when music isn't playing.

How you play any instrument benefits from how much you practice, how good your ears are and how dedicated you are to becoming proficient - and we all know that you don't have to read effectively to do any of that. But should you want to move on to be a pit player, do regular jazz gigs or be a first-call studio musician who gets handed a book on the first day you show up and is expected to be able to read and execute from it - being able to read is essential.

This thread is dealing with a beginner's desire to understand these things quickly - not necessarily for all those other high-falutin' reasons. One of the biggest challenges for any beginning player - and teachers of beginning players - is patience. Tabs are a 'Siren' beckoning beginners to abandon ship and crash on the rocks of a faster way to get there. If your goals are only to play in the garage and parrot popular pop tunes, tab away! If your goals include taking your place in the world of musicians who are trained to deal with much broader musical circumstances, learn to read.

 

[Clef_de_fa]

I am not sure what you are saying - but there are a couple comments I'd like to expand upon.

"Why in the world would anyone right (sic) something on a piece of paper???"

and the related comment (I think);

"Who is the genius that said we are allowed to write our own notes. Get that man a gumball, thats good stuff. I've never seen a musician do that but every one of my music teachers have done that."

In some circumstances - and especially when someone is not necessarily in the gigging mainstream, but is learning music properly - there is sheet music and a teacher/band director or other leader who is establishing some expectations of musical productivity involved.

In these situations, annotating sheet music to help remind you of where to shift - what stop/fret to originate a section from, for example - is the norm. If you are the guy in rehearsal who is always forgetting to go to the coda, the BL/teacher/director will almost always toss you a pencil and tell you to put a note there to help you remember - if you cannot remember to make your own notes.

The real value of sheet music is for people who want to go on to play in ensembles that use sheet music, rehearse and perform from it. It's also very valuable to beginners who are serious about leaning more than just how to play their instrument. In a bass guitar forum, however, you tend to run into a large contingent of self-taught, weekend warriors - many of whom have never had to learn, nor see the value in learning how to process written music because they have never needed it.

There is a great big world outside of the garage and bars where trained musicians write, read from and fully annotate sheet music as a regular part of their everyday life as musicians.

The biggest value to learning how to properly read and use standard notation is the fact that it gives you what you need to study, learn and perform music. Additionally it gives you the ability to compose, arrange and analyze music independent of your instrument. Personally, I love taking my lunch hour to sit by a local park lake and compose walking bass lines through changes. This helps wire up the brain to actually hear music even when music isn't playing.

How you play any instrument benefits from how much you practice, how good your ears are and how dedicated you are to becoming proficient - and we all know that you don't have to read effectively to do any of that. But should you want to move on to be a pit player, do regular jazz gigs or be a first-call studio musician who gets handed a book on the first day you show up and is expected to be able to read and execute from it - being able to read is essential.

This thread is dealing with a beginner's desire to understand these things quickly - not necessarily for all those other high-falutin' reasons. One of the biggest challenges for any beginning player - and teachers of beginning players - is patience. Tabs are a 'Siren' beckoning beginners to abandon ship and crash on the rocks of a faster way to get there. If your goals are only to play in the garage and parrot popular pop tunes, tab away! If your goals include taking your place in the world of musicians who are trained to deal with much broader musical circumstances, learn to read.

I want to add that you can have situation where you never heard the music before and so the music is only on a sheet of paper.

I played more music that I never heard before reading it.

 

[tZer]

I want to add that you can have situation where you never heard the music before and so the music is only on a sheet of paper.

I played more music that I never heard before reading it.

Me too! Most of what I learned outside of the rock/pop stuff - was learned by reading sheet music and charts of material I'd never heard before. Most of my introduction to jazz and classical came from reading first, then hearing it later and saying, "Hey, I used to play that! What's it called? Oh yeah! Wow... It sound interesting hearing it outside of jazz band/orchestra..."

Our teacher used to get us up to speed on our book - then he'd find examples of pros playing those charts and classical pieces for us to hear. But this was AFTER we learned it ourselves. Sure, we could have sought out these recordings - but this was the early 80's - MP3 downloads were not the norm and if you wanted to acquire all that recorded material, you had to hit the local vinyl shops and buy it. You think us 13 and 14 year olds were really going to spend our allowances on Count Baise and Prokofiev?

Why read?

Some music situations require it.

You can fool yourself and embrace the "Paul McCartney doesn't read" mantra and feel like the world is still your oyster - but I guarantee you, Wil Lee reads. Vic Wooten reads. Jaco did. JB does - almost everyone on the DB side does - and all that music that you hear in movies, on TV, in live shows on and off Broadway - and more - all those players do too.

There is a world of music and musicians beyond what you hear on the radio. It's far less 'glamorous' (in appearance) than becoming the next "U2" or whatever - but EVEN U2 hires musicians who read - even Lady Gaga - even Justin Bieber... They aren't the ones whose faces are on the play bill - but those faces wouldn't really be on the play bill in many instances if it weren't for the stable of 'readers' who were providing the music that makes them sound so "great".

Reading won't make you a better player per se. It will, however, open doors that are not open to non-readers.

If your goal is fame and fortune - study how to get attention by a lot of people. Most of that has very little to do with music reading skills and more to do with how effectively you make a spectacle of yourself - most of which doesn't require much talent at all.

If your goal is to have a lifelong, fulfilling and diverse relationship with music, reading is fundamental.

 

[HuntYouDown]

I think nothing is wrong with tabs, its all just practoce. I believe scales are important bcuz they familiarize you with the neck and many positions.

 

[tZer]

I don't see this as a debate between devices - it's a discussion about how to best prepare oneself to be a musician. Tabs can be a short-cut that provides someone with the ability to learn a particular song quickly. If one's ears aren't trained enough to learn the song by ear and there is a need to be able to play that song soon, tabs may be the best solution.

Don't get bogged down in things said here that sound like someone is saying "what you do is wrong" - that clouds the issue. In a world of infinite possibilities, there is always another way - let's get past that.

I think it's a matter of knowing what you want out of music. Some people just want to play one instrument, one style, with other players of the same mind, and nothing more.

That's perfectly fine. For those people, taking the time to study theory and discover how doing that might influence their musical path takes away from what they want to do - play. For them, tabs may be the way they've found that gets them where they need to be in a way that works for them.

But if that same person suddenly wishes that the already rich markup language to describe music that exists should be updated to include new things just to help people who don't want to study quickly be able to know stuff that studying will to show them - that's when things get funky.

If you want more out of any art or science, you have to be patient and willing to dig into the minutia - and be hungry for that process. You can't study music with a 'tabs' mentality - as if you just want the studying to be over so you can get on with it. The studying is never over - but it also never prevents you from doing anything. If you aren't finding the balance and you are blaming the study or the practice, you are blaming the wrong things. Studying doesn't get in the way if the path you are on requires study.

This is why teachers are so important. They help you to reign in your imagination when you start to think in counter-productive ways. They also help you expand your imagination by focusing you in on using the skills of the craft instead of wondering about this or 'what if-ing' that. If left to your own devices, you might accidentally re-invent the wheel (10,000 monkeys and typewriters and all that jazz) - but really, why?

 

[Kamael83]

One of the way our brain is memorizing things (i don`t remember scientific name of it):
Let`say you keep forgetting name Miles Davis (i know it`s impossible) But you somehow memorized his songs..."Tutu"...every time you will think Tutu you will think Miles Davis...without magical password (Tutu) in this case you are unable to recall his name....same with patterns...if you are memorizing things by patterns it`s a natural way..lets say you can`t recall where is C on E string...but you remember that to play C major scale you have to start from 8th fret...in the end of the day you know where C note is...although if I would ask you to play C you wouldn`t be able to do it without that...cycle of thinking...i think is a natural way....our job is to practice practice and practice to be able to simplify and by that speed up our thinking....

 

[Kamael83]

One more thing:
Since as I can see we have majority of music sheet readers... could you please tell us poor apes where we can find sheet music (not classical) i mean rock, pop, funk, blues etc...I studied Dummies books for music theory and bass...problem i find is: Tabs are common and popular...music sheets are rare expecially for popular music...i mean sure I could get Chopin...but i would like to get Pink Floyd for instance...where I can get it? In my city there are like 3 music shops...when you will sum amount of books / magazines in them you will get to maybe 80....when you will look for bass related books you will get down to maybe 10 out of those 80 (and i doubt that there will be 10) bookstores are the same if not even worse....Sure someone will say Internet, ebay etc....problem is: I don`t like buying books if I don`t know if they are any good for me....So my question : WHERE I CAN GET MUSIC SHEETS For popular music??

 

[SurferJoe46]

Prolly the reason Tab is so available (for free I might add) is that it is generally incorrect, incomplete and cheap to produce. Besides every wannabe can Tab something, put in on the internet and call it good.

Scored music usually has to be paid for and that's the way it is. I have no trouble finding scored music in all venues of musical style.