Matthew Smith wrote: IMHO, that is your greatest limitation right there. Learning to read musical notation is very easy. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

There are high and low horses, some people seem to ride on very high ones. I once saw a program on one of my (then) favorite composes, Elvis Costello, he was working at the time with the Brodsky Quartet and had to finalise some parts. Costello basically sat at the piano and composed a whole album in an afternoon. The Brodsky Bunch bragged about how they were able to score his compositions as fast as he could play them, he in turn amazed by their notational skills. Decide for yourselves who was the most capable. Stories have been around for a lot longer than books, the ability to tell them has never been limited by pencil, paper, nor the knowledge of how to use either - the first 'authors' just wrote other peoples books for themanyway . If music is not in your body then it is definitely not going to suddently appear out of your biro and rest itself on a scoresheet. I mean we can all write or otherwise we would not be on this list but how many of us have a decent novel inside of us? If you can use your ear, man, use it. Let some other mother put it down on paper. Nick. _________________________________________________________________ Invite your mail contacts to join your friends list with Windows Live Spaces. It's easy! http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=/friends.…

Bob van der Poel wrote: In my case, music reading was hard because my eyes have different focal planes. The harder I tried to focus, the more it looked like the notes were dancing on the page. When I learned my piano recital piece at 12 years old, an Impromptu by Schubert, I was lucky. My mother had a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing the same piece, so I used the recording to learn the piece by ear, except that I learned and played it a half-step higher than it was written (it was written in B-flat). I learned that many years later when a friend played the same piece in what I thought was the wrong key. I think that there was at least one benefit in not learning to read music, and that is that my concept of music was not overly set or influenced by the conventions of sheet music. I learned more about sound, especially harmony. I learned that a key signature for example is mostly just a notational convenience, ever since the equal temperament system of tuning gave us a complete 12-tone chromatic scale. Most of the music since Bach's time depends upon this "keyless" tuning and its introduction of much more complex and rich harmonic possibilities. I'm sorry to be babbling. :-) Best wishes, Steve

Fons Adriaensen wrote: That's probably true, but at that time (when I was 1-13 years old) I lived in the Amazon rainforest of Peru, in a small settlement with no doctor and no place to obtain glasses from. Because I didn't complain about the issue, my parents never took me to a doctor later, when we came back to the U.S. I have learned to read books (mostly technical books, in order to gain the most from the effort expended) by concentrating on the vision of just one eye (my left eye), so my right eye is a little weak. :-) My teacher was my mother. :-) She was usually working in the kitchen while I played, or busy doing laundry or painting (she was an oil painter). She would listen and offer comments and encouragement while I was practicing my mandatory 1-2 hours per day, but she never sat beside me or looked over my shoulder while I was playing except when I was just beginning to learn. :-) Thank you for that correction. Now I want to do the research to find the difference. ;-) Very interesting. Are there any "unequal temperaments" that you particularly like? I feel, even after 48 years, that I have explored very little of the harmonic and melodic territory offered by the 12 tones of the equal temperament tuning. Thanks for your comments to my rather off-topic post, AND for creating the wonderful Aeolus application. I hope someday to be able to buy several MIDI keyboard manuals and a pedalboard from Classic MIDI Works in Canada: http://www.midiworks.ca/home/index.asp --to use with Aeolus and other software sound-producing programs. Steve

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 06:57:49PM -0500, Phil Sexton wrote: Yep. A major chord in that intonation is something *quite* different from the whishwhash you get used to when playing in equal temperament all the time. It has *power*. Ciao, -- FA Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica Parma, Italia Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa.

least, not knowing how to read music is just like being a novelist and not being able to read English (fill in your language). "very hard". It really isn't ... Just to jump on my whipping horse a bit more ... - There's a huge difference between reading sheet music and listening to something and putting it down on paper. I'd guess that 95% of the folks who read well (even very well) can't do the later. Quite a different set of skills. I can do a bit of transcription work, but I am VERY slow at it. I think if I did a lot more, like anything, it'd go easier. - If you don't want to read and do it all by ear, be my guest. I think it is great to be able to take a lead sheet for some music I have never heard and play it and discover its beauty. - There are different levels of reading. As a start, I'd suggest that one might start by having a lead sheet and simply follow it as a tune is played. You'll soon discover that as the melody goes up in pitch, so do the note positions on the staff. Bar lines serve to indicate where each measure starts (and you should be able to hear that). Repeats, etc should indicate just that :) . And, if you really can't follow the up and down, you should be able to follow the lyrics and get a feel/sight of the sheet. - 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. - As far as guitar players go, most only play a limited set of chords. Nope, I'm not going to joke about only needing to know 3 chords ... but, using TAB to figure out the chord figuring really can't be any easier than following a lead sheet with chord symbols ... after all, how many times do you need to look up the figuring for C or G chord? - And to continue on levels: At one point in my life I could read 3 lines of organ music and do a decent rendition on the first pass. For many years I've been concentrating on saxophone (and composition) and I need to think hard when anything is bass clef, let alone sight reading 3 staves. Just depends on what skills you need at the time ... And having ranted about this ... let me add that like many other "classically" trained musicians I envy the shit out of the guys who can pick up an instrument and play by ear! I can't even play Happy Birthday once the music stands disappear. -- **** Listen to my CD at http://www.mellowood.ca/music/cedars **** Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA ** EMAIL: bob(a)mellowood.ca WWW: http://www.mellowood.ca

Quoth David: I'd change that to _can_ be very easy - for some people, in the same way that some people find learning languages easy and some people find mathematics easy. Quoth Bob: Once again, for some people. I have tried to learn to read musical notation on a few occasions and have given up every time. I have to count the position of every note on the staff every time; whatever mechanism is needed in the brain to be able to work it out at a glance is either not there or broken. The only other things with which I have had similar difficulties are mathematics and card games. But then I can write Perl regular expressions and complex SQL queries in my sleep (literally - a lot of my problem-solving comes from dreams) and I would say that these are also very easy - for me. I fully appreciate, however, that other people struggle with them. The problem arises when the people who say "it's easy" are teachers; they can't fathom that some people may not think in the same way and may struggle with concepts which, to them, are intuitive. The worst maths teacher I have ever head was a mathematician, the best was an engineer who himself struggled with the subject, but could thus understand the problems for others. I'm not saying that people who excel in a subject can't teach it, but they also need to be good teachers too. OK, that's me done with making the case that learning music - or any other subject - is not necessarily easy for everyone. I won't deny the need for musical notation - it certainly has its uses - but would point out that no symbolic notation is truly essential, either in music or in any other form of language. Consider oral tradition - a great story-teller can be completely illiterate. (I refrain from saying "novelist" as per Bob's example because this term implies a written medium whilst story-teller does not.) At this point, I have no intention of having another go at reading musical notation. Mathematics is higher on my personal-development list, at least as much as is needed for the VCO, VCA, VCF design required for the synth I'm thinking of building. (Digital control, analogue sound. I'm a digital electronics man dabbling in the black art of analogue design.) Maybe one day. Cheers M -- Matthew Smith Smiffytech - Technology Consulting & Web Application Development Business: http://www.smiffytech.com/ Personal: http://www.smiffysplace.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/smiffy

Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote: I use Rosegarden. The piano-roll presentation seems like the most useless way to work with music that I can imagine. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 08:37:45AM +0000, Rui Nuno Capela wrote: Oh, not there, why ... aha, this here is 0.1.3-1.1 Debian package, bugger, my analysis worthless, I shall have to grab the source from CVS. ;-) -- James Cameron mailto:quozl@us.netrek.org http://quozl.netrek.org/

Matthew Smith wrote: if by matrix editor is what someone else names a piano-roll editor, then qtractor also has it: it's called "midi clip editor" there :) byee -- rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela rncbc(a)rncbc.org

Danni Coy wrote: duh! i thought it had automation. so take those as general, not at vs. rosegarden in particular;) byee -- rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela rncbc(a)rncbc.org