Re: [LAU] Reading music (was Qtractor vs Rosegarden)

On Thursday 13 November 2008 10:02:44 Bob van der Poel wrote: 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.