asked:
I bet you didn’t know that many of the best Rock Musicians in the world today cannot read sheet music!
Hard to believe, but true. Today many singers and musicians can’t read music, havn’t ever read music, and probably won’t ever.
Therefore one could easily ask the question if its necessary at all to read music. Rock Musicians can pick up what they are playing by ear, so why do they need to learn to read the notes?
This article is really just to share with you some ideas as to why it is so difficult, not to argue the rights and wrongs for a musician of reading music in the first place. If reading music is something that you’d really like to achieve, then hopefully this might give you a couple of things you can do to get there.
There is a multi-dimensional aspect to reading music, which is what makes it so difficult. What does that mean? Every element or musical event that appears on a music score has two elements – its pitch (what note to play) and its duration (how long to play it for). That is further complicated by it having expression and articulation marks, and a measure of volume as well (Its dynamic markings). In an instant the musician needs to read the note, Interpret all those aspects, then they need to be able to play that note on their instrument. Add to that the fact that the musician has to read sometimes 2-3-5 or 10 notes at once!
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I bet you didn’t know that many of the best Rock Musicians in the world today cannot read sheet music!
Hard to believe, but true. Today many singers and musicians can’t read music, havn’t ever read music, and probably won’t ever.
Therefore one could easily ask the question if its necessary at all to read music. Rock Musicians can pick up what they are playing by ear, so why do they need to learn to read the notes?
This article is really just to share with you some ideas as to why it is so difficult, not to argue the rights and wrongs for a musician of reading music in the first place. If reading music is something that you’d really like to achieve, then hopefully this might give you a couple of things you can do to get there.
There is a multi-dimensional aspect to reading music, which is what makes it so difficult. What does that mean? Every element or musical event that appears on a music score has two elements – its pitch (what note to play) and its duration (how long to play it for). That is further complicated by it having expression and articulation marks, and a measure of volume as well (Its dynamic markings). In an instant the musician needs to read the note, Interpret all those aspects, then they need to be able to play that note on their instrument. Add to that the fact that the musician has to read sometimes 2-3-5 or 10 notes at once!
Caffeinated Content – Members-Only Content for WordPress
