Q: Want to know how to stop a guitar player from playing?

A: Put sheet music in front of him.

I'd just let a note or chord sustain long enough to turn it around, and keep playing.

I picked the last choice.

Matt

Fast Cars & Loud Guitars!

I'm somewhere between the top 2 choices. I too learned how while playing trumpet in grade school.

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

Playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Formerly a guitarist in The TomorrowMen and Meshugga Beach Party

Latest surf project - Now That's What I Call SURF

I'm very good on the piano at reading music, although I'm way out of practice - but it comes back pretty quickly if I work at it a little.

Not too much practice on guitar - seems like a lot less sheet music for guitar, other than chord charts. I can pick out a basic melody by sheet music - translate the notes on paper to the correct ones on the guitar.

Music theory, that's a whole other can of worms. I should have paid more attention during piano lessons.

"You can't tell where you're going if you don't know where you've been"

I've had a semester of theory, so I know what everything means. Using it is a different story. I've got a couple of books I'm working through, as I'd like to remember enough of it to actually put it to use. I can find the notes I read on a keyboard, but haven't learned the fretboard yet.

Will

"You're done, once you're a surfer you're done. You're in. It's like the mob or something. You're not getting out." - Kelly Slater

The Luau Cinders

I learned "how to read music" studying violin in grade school back East where the stringed instruments are occasionally studied in school. I understand the system fairly well in the abstract, and still remember it, given a few refreshers with kids taking lessons and needing help, but even when I remembered how to apply it to violin my practical fluency was at a very mechanical level and for the violin only. I could never look at sheet music and hear the song. I could only look at it and play it on a violin (woodenly, and in the first position only).

I never considered what I was doing to be truly "reading music," though some people thought it was and thought I was holding out on them when I denied reading music and later admitted that I could play a violin from music notation. At that point my notion of "reading music" was "reading it for the piano" or "for any instrument" or at least being able to do more than the simple mechanical thing that I could do a little for that one instrument. "Being able to read music for real" was some mysterious elevated state of being that I couldn't conceive in concrete form.

I am beginning to realize that if a person put some moderatetly extended serious effort into it it might be possible to get so you could hum or vocalize something from music and not just play it on a certain instrument. Maybe only in relative pitch. It never really occurred to me that anything like that was possible when I was young. I thought you would always need some instrument to know what the note actually was.

With so many improvements in elementary music teaching these days, I hope they will eventually think of ways to address the question of what music is and how to read and write it.

One breakthrough for me was realizing that Enstrume'n'tal's Sol Si Do Si Mi Re La is named for its opening notes and that I could work out the sequence from the name. (OK, quit laughing! That was a big step! I missed the point of that part of the Sound of Music.)

tonetti

DannySnyder
I'm somewhere between the top 2 choices. I too learned how while playing trumpet in grade school.

Put me down as another former trumpet player Could there be some sort of link between playing the trumpet in our youth, and surf music in our adulthood???

Well, it was either surf music for me or the Tijuana Brass..but you might be on to something...;-)

Mel

i learned how to read music in jr. high school playing clarinet and also started playing guitar in my 40's. can i sight read? absolutely not. but i can take a piece of music and very slowly pick out the notes. i find it's easier to learn by ear.

www.surfintheeye.com

We lived in Seattle for a couple of years when I was about 10 or so. Took guitar lessons from a lady named Gerry Allen. There was no question about music or music therory she could not answer or explain. I only wish I could have spent 10 or 12 years studying with her......no telling where I would be with my playing and I could have easily answered #1. Instead I answered #3 although I am probably between 2 and 3.

2012-2013: FILTHY POLAROIDS

i can take a piece of music and very slowly pick out the notes. i find it's easier to learn by ear.

That pretty much sums up my condition. When I was studying guitar a few years ago, my teacher made reading music a condition of his tutelage. We went over simple tunes and he got me to the point where I could slowly follow the score while clumsily plucking out the notes. Later, I sat in on his jazz session where the accomplished players would play melodies with improvisations out of the Real Books and the rest of us would chunk along on rhythm. He also had sessions dedicated to reading out of a tutorial book. I sat in on these a couple of times but got lost easily and would just freeze up. I think this is what caused me to stop taking lessons (that and losing my job and thus, the ability to pay for those lessons).

-- Woody

It takes a lot of mussel memory to avoid clams.

Maybe it's on the easy end of things, but last night CCR's "Susie Q" was playing on the 'net-based "radio" station I listen to, so I grabbed my nearest guitar and started picking. Didn't quite get it on the first try, but started picking along with the second try...what I missed on one phrase, I tried for the next time it came around. With a bit more work, I can add "Susie Q" to my repertoire; lead, rhythm and bass, if I get ambitious enough.

I don't necessarily have to be listening to a song, in order to start picking it out by ear, however. Sometimes, I'll just think about a particular song, and start picking notes until I'm playing that song. That's how I came up with my arrangement of "Green Onions," with the Hammond organ part transposed to two guitars. I've added to my CD collection, at times, for wanting to be able to listen to a particular song, to help me pick out parts that eluded my memory.

Learning songs by ear isn't without any dangers, though. I've been frustrated, at times, for not being able to pick out certain guitar parts in Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon, then several years back a The Making Of...DVD came out. Imagine my surprise, to learn that those particular parts I couldn't pick out were because Gilmour did them using a pedal steel guitar.

Matt

Fast Cars & Loud Guitars!