Do you read music

[Geir]

Can't remember if this has been up before.

I got curious when I found some old sheet music of Rainbow songs, that I just now realised did not have TABs in them. Nevertheless I learned the solo to Death Alley Driver albeit with much effort. It took me some hours to stumble throug it and some days to learn it back in the 80s.

Kids these days have it sooooooo easy

[Oldrottenhead]

I can almost read sheet music but I can't get my head around tabs

[chapperz66]

I played trumpet and cornet in the school brass band so I learnt to read the dots a bit. Of course brass instruments are monophonic so a bit easier to read.

I still read fairly regularly.  I'm a bit tragic and often go through books of strange scales to see if I can do anything with lydian dominant or something.

[64Guitars]

An interesting question. As your poll choices suggest, there is a wide range of abilities when it comes to reading music. At the top end are sight-readers who can take a piece of sheet music that they're totally unfamiliar with and play it through on their first attempt. There are even some people who can read an unfamiliar piece of sheet music and "hear" it in their head without actually playing it on an instrument. That blows my mind.

I'm way down at the low end of the music-reading scale. I understand the meaning of (nearly) all of the musical symbols and can work out the notes and timing but it takes considerable time and effort. I can't sight-read. Although, I took piano lessons for a year or two when I was in my early twenties and I could just about sight-read simple melodies then. Where I stumbled was on chords. I'd have to stop playing and work out all the notes in the chord before I could play it. My piano teacher told me that, in time and with lots of practice, you eventually get to the point where you can recognize chords instantly without having to work out the individual notes. But I never got to that point. Another stumbling block for me was ledger lines.

When I was young, I sometimes bought sheet music to help me learn a particular song. But I was always disappointed because the result never sounded quite like the record of the song I was trying to learn. So I soon gave up on sheet music and learned songs by ear instead, listening to the record over and over and working out the notes and chords. I've continued to use this method to learn new songs ever since. I've never bothered with tabs or YouTube song tutorials.

[ODH]

I can remember pawing through sheet music note by note when I was first learning back in the eighties, but life's too short.

I have the greatest admiration for these who can play real-time but just sight-reading from sheet music. My brain doesn't work that way.

[Mike_S]

My Dad could pretty much sight read drum sheet music. I wish I had the patience he had. He taught me drums, well a few grades anyway but I got bored easily and preferred just drumming along to my favourite albums. Seem to remember enjoying playing along to Rainbow too. Think it was the Difficult to Cure album. Great album by the way.

Mike

[Blooby]

I have a Mahavishnu Orchestra book of sheet music (apparently for the pictures because I can't read a bloody thing.

I recall putting the opening to "Eternity's Breath" in front of my high school music appreciation teacher, and he sight read it almost at speed on an upright piano.

A regret but strictly by ear these days.

Blooby

[Ray Brookes]

Aaah ... sight reading ... the nemesis of every musician. When I was a kid working my way through the piano grades, sight reading was always part of the criteria for each exam. Bit of a bitch actually, mostly because having to sight read the two lines of music at once.

My piano teacher used to say just keep practicing and it will happen. Bullshit, I used to think; how can you practice for something you are going to see for the first time? Anyhow, practice I did and he was right, I guess as I did get better at it. Amazing what the human mind can do sometimes. Having said that, I doubt I could sight read a Bach fugue or a Beethoven sonata, especially these days.

[Jean Pierre]

aah...reading a score...the grail/fantasm of every self-taught musician
I only had the rudiments of solfege at school for the first 2 years of college...

Then I learnt guitar by ear and in the 60s there were no tutorials on the internet, tablatures didn't exist yet (I think guitar tablatures were brought up to date by the French guitarist Marcel Dadi in the 70s... but they had existed since the Middle Ages, for the baroque lute for example...).

When I did my military service as a conscript in 1970, I was posted to Germany (yes, there was still a French, American (Elvis Presley could confirm this...), British and Soviet army of occupation).

I applied to be part of the military music , because the military music was in Berlin (at the time there was still the wall) and at the time of the examination it was necessary to read a rather basic partition ...but with the partition placed backwards i.e. the top of the partition at the bottom! ...I was rejected

Translated with DeepL.com (free version) 

[Greeny]

Nope. Not a damn thing.