I read music pretty well, but sometimes I think my guitar instructor thinks I’m an idiot, because I read music strangely.
He’ll say ‘Start from the E’ and it will take me 5 or 10 seconds to find the right note from which to start. When I read music I don’t read notes as their names, I read them as tones. I suppose the best analogy I can come up with is that when you read this, you don’t read each letter and think A‑D-A‑M adam I‑S is D‑U-M‑B dumb. You just read it as: Adam is dumb. I’ve always read music this way, but I used to be better at picking up the notes on the staff, but since I had an 8 year break from reading music, that semi-ability is slow to come back.
In the other direction, sort of, I can’t play things by ear unless I’ve read and memorized the ‘passage’ first. I’ve got a good memory for rote things.
See, I’m all about their names. Though, granted, I can read staff like a 3 year old. So you think about the passage, as a whole, not the indiv. notes within it?
I have a hard time converting the auditory to the visual. I have always been able to pick things out by ear and hear whether something is on key or not (what some refer to as ‘perfect pitch’, altho most people think that means you can sing perfectly on key). It’s my one genuine musical talent that I got from being on the end of generations of musicians (my grandparents met at Westminster Choir College). What this means tho is that I can sort of play any instrument I pick up, but cannot really play anything because I absolutely cannot read music without thinking “ok — e‑g ‑b — yah — that’s a b!”, so in all my lessons I never could play anything longer than about a page because i had to be able to memorize it to play it.
On guitar for example, once I’ve got the note fully associated with its position on the neck, I ‘forget’ what the note is called and instead relate it to the notes around it, almost like I have an intuitive grasp of what something should sound like.
I think that shows you were meant to play, intuition is not widely granted in the musical scope.
🙂
yeah, intuition i’ve got, the creative spark, not so much.