I find that with the Irish tunes, I love them and they’re easy to memorize, so I learn them right away and don’t bother looking at the music again. I’m still not that great at reading music, but what’s helped the most is this book of classical exercises (Wohlfarht) my teacher has me doing to improve my technique. In five minutes I could pick out a dozen tunes I wanted to try out on the box - and also identify at least twenty well known ‘Irish’ tunes found in English publications from the 18th century under different names… but that’s a different thread □ I couldn’t do this from the ABCs, although there are probably people on this site who could. I find I can look at the dots and translate them into a good representation of the tune as it would be played, without picking up an instrument. Last night I flicked through a book of ‘1000 English Country Dance Tunes’ which I bought years ago for a song (pardon the pun). By reading the dots the number of tunes available to me is virtually unlimited. I might learn half a dozen in a year if I was lucky. Even playing in two regular sessions, I would rarely encouter new tunes. I use both ear learning and the dots, and I would be severely restricted without the latter. There are plenty of games for kids aimed at teaching musical notation you may as well make it fun. You’ll be able to find all you need on the web - including some useful programs to help ‘train’ your ear for identifying intervals etc. Among those that read variations but not dots, I never met and older musician who didn’t want to learn to read them… Again, that is my experience, on the whole, there are always exceptions… ↳ Then you can swing it on your own without anyone else looking on…Īs far as what some might call ‘illiteracy’ in this area, in a long history with music and old codgers, I never found an older musician in Eire or elsewhere who couldn’t read some kind of notation, and that includes you, you can read tab… There were several systems current in Eire and I saw a lot of collections too, with the dots… There were numerous scribbled crib notes here and there and little notebooks too.Ĭuriously, my experience, which has its limits, I have come across more younger musicians, the ‘born again’, who can’t read and who swear it off ~ as if it had demonic possession possibilities built in the arcane script ~ than ever in the past or with the older and more based trad musicians. Publisher: Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd (Jul 2000) Read Music from Scratch ~ by Neil Sissons Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD (Jun 1971) There was a fun little book simply called, I think, “Reading Music”… Let’s see if I can find it, one moment ~ It’s there… I’ve had to help others get past their preconceptions and mental blocks about notation… Generally I start with rhythm and later pitch… We have a lot of fun with it, stripping it of any serious take on it, and through games and lilting and slapping and the like they have always managed to break down that barrier and to in the end find enjoyment with the new language, without that taking over their soul and turning them into zombies… Once you have that, then it’s on to an understanding of sharps and flats, key signatures etc, but I think that’s too much to go into here. So for example the low D (all fingers down) is a dot immediately below the bottom line the G (holding down the top 3 fingers) is on the second line up from the bottom etc etc. All you have to do is equate the location of the dots on the stave with the position of a finger. Now, let’s say for simplicity that your instrument is a keyless flute. But if you join them all up they just run alphabetically: EFGABCDEF (see the FACE lurking in there…) There are a number of mnemonics for remembering this but the one I learned (which dates me I guess □ ) was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Learn the position of the notes on the stave - spaces are easy - FACE starting from the bottom, and the lines are EGBDF starting from the bottom. I’m not an expert, but I’d say that if you have a good ear and a good understanding of several instruments you should have no problem learning music very quickly indeed (I’m not going to go into the relative merits of “ear versus dots” as that’s already been done to death several times over □).įirst get yourself a good basic book on how to read music (there are loads) - it will give you a lot more info than I can in a short post, but here are a couple of useful learning tips that were passed to me a while back:
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