[LAU] Reading music (was Qtractor vs Rosegarden)

[Danni Coy]

On Thursday 13 November 2008 10:02:44 Bob van der Poel wrote:
> - I don't understand why someone who can't learn to follow (note I'm not
> even saying read here) a lead sheet due to the mass confusion of the
> meaningful dots on the page can tell me that TAB is really easy to
> follow. After all, TAB is set in bars just like standard notation.

Imagine you don't know the names of the notes or cords you play on the 
instrument but just the shapes and patterns - a lot of guitarists I know are 
like this. At least one guitarist I know can figure out pretty much anything he 
listens to in terms of relative pitches and if he wants to share that 
knowledge with somebody else he just shows what he is playing.

Where Music Theory can really help though is transposing musical knowledge 
from one musical instrument to another. It wasn't until I picked up a second 
musical instrument (violin) that I really got into learning basic music theory 
and the names of all the notes on my fretboard. Before that I did at least 
know the names of the chords I was playing.  It also helps when I want to try 
playing something in an altered tuning

Notation is not simple - first you have to have a good grasp of western music 
theory, know the names of the notes on your instrument  (a typical guitar has 
over 100 possible notes on it with quite a bit of overlap between note ranges 
and no visual indications of equivalent notes). You have to understand what 
what scale you are using and how key effects the notes played - we use a 12 
note scale shoehorned into a 7 note scale and a dot on that staff could be one 
of three possible notes depending on the key. visually staffs are easy to loose 
your place vertically - you have to know which position on the staff 
corresponds to which note. All of this takes time away from actually playing 
and exploring music.

I am not saying that it is not worth it  - I have done or this because I am 
interested in composing bits of music and finding as many possibilities of how 
different bits of music can fit together - Western music theory is useful for 
this as long as you realise that it is one way of making music and not 
necessarily the be all and end all.

-- 
You have a deep appreciation of the arts and music.