First time poster, he humbly said… Glad to be here though. As a musician, I figured I could chime in on this subject.
Playing the guitar was a tool for developing my intuition. I couldn’t read sheet music. I needed to feel the music. I would feel something within myself, and then translate that into music through the guitar. I would play intuitively. Hear the music in your head, feel the emotion of the song that you want to express, then translate what you feel into playing the guitar through feel not through cognitively reading sheet music.
Once you get past the basics of learning chords, scales, basic rhythm and playing techniques… It became about the feeling. As far as the cramping hands, and blistered fingers… ;) Goes with the territory, but it goes away after a bit. ;)
Learning piano I have been pretty skeptical about the importance of learning to read sheet music fluently. All piano players culturally seem to insist that it’s very important, but my sense is that it’s some kind of weird bias. If you tell piano players that you should hear it in your head and play it expressively, they will start saying stuff about, what if you don’t already know what it’s supposed to sound like, how will you figure it out, and they don’t like “I will go listen to it” as an answer.
So far, I am not very fluent at reading, so maybe I just don’t get it yet.
I have also seen the culture of pianists being used to playing reams and reams of new music, and this being a signal of proficiency more so than amongst other instrumentalists (e.g. violinists or flautists). I think it is probably because the majority of a pianist’s career is spent in accompaniment rather than as a soloist or in an equal ensemble (there are ~no serious piano quartets), and so the quantity of music quickly consumable is a much more competitive asset. When I was at music school, there were professional accompanists and everyone was assigned one, pianists employed simply to go around and accompany all of the students in their performances, so they needed to be able to play a great deal of complicated music very quickly or on-sight.
Personally, my primary goal with sheet music is to get off of it as soon as possible (i.e. learn the piece from memory). It is a qualitative reduction in the number of things my attention is on, and gives me much more cognitive space to focus on how to play the piece rather than what I’m playing next.
I’ve definitely noticed that “not reading sheet music” and “guitar” are concepts that go together, but I have to ask “why do beginning guitarists not learn sheet music?”. It feels something like algebra, where some percentage of the population just look at a different notation with some abstractions baked in and immediately decide it’s not for them.
The first two reasons that come to my mind are (1) other instruments have much more career incentive to do so (in that there are many more jobs for classical violinists or violin ensembles than for classical guitarists), and (2) it’s possible to have a much more successful career as a guitarist knowing only chord positions and not having a more detailed understanding of the fretboard, than it is with other instruments where a knowledge of how to play complicated melodies is required.
First time poster, he humbly said… Glad to be here though. As a musician, I figured I could chime in on this subject.
Playing the guitar was a tool for developing my intuition. I couldn’t read sheet music. I needed to feel the music. I would feel something within myself, and then translate that into music through the guitar. I would play intuitively. Hear the music in your head, feel the emotion of the song that you want to express, then translate what you feel into playing the guitar through feel not through cognitively reading sheet music.
Once you get past the basics of learning chords, scales, basic rhythm and playing techniques… It became about the feeling. As far as the cramping hands, and blistered fingers… ;) Goes with the territory, but it goes away after a bit. ;)
Learning piano I have been pretty skeptical about the importance of learning to read sheet music fluently. All piano players culturally seem to insist that it’s very important, but my sense is that it’s some kind of weird bias. If you tell piano players that you should hear it in your head and play it expressively, they will start saying stuff about, what if you don’t already know what it’s supposed to sound like, how will you figure it out, and they don’t like “I will go listen to it” as an answer.
So far, I am not very fluent at reading, so maybe I just don’t get it yet.
I have also seen the culture of pianists being used to playing reams and reams of new music, and this being a signal of proficiency more so than amongst other instrumentalists (e.g. violinists or flautists). I think it is probably because the majority of a pianist’s career is spent in accompaniment rather than as a soloist or in an equal ensemble (there are ~no serious piano quartets), and so the quantity of music quickly consumable is a much more competitive asset. When I was at music school, there were professional accompanists and everyone was assigned one, pianists employed simply to go around and accompany all of the students in their performances, so they needed to be able to play a great deal of complicated music very quickly or on-sight.
Personally, my primary goal with sheet music is to get off of it as soon as possible (i.e. learn the piece from memory). It is a qualitative reduction in the number of things my attention is on, and gives me much more cognitive space to focus on how to play the piece rather than what I’m playing next.
I’ve definitely noticed that “not reading sheet music” and “guitar” are concepts that go together, but I have to ask “why do beginning guitarists not learn sheet music?”. It feels something like algebra, where some percentage of the population just look at a different notation with some abstractions baked in and immediately decide it’s not for them.
The first two reasons that come to my mind are (1) other instruments have much more career incentive to do so (in that there are many more jobs for classical violinists or violin ensembles than for classical guitarists), and (2) it’s possible to have a much more successful career as a guitarist knowing only chord positions and not having a more detailed understanding of the fretboard, than it is with other instruments where a knowledge of how to play complicated melodies is required.