“I realized playing classical music on guitar was pretty cool and really fun.” It was the first step on a journey taking her from rock to Bach, and on to Western, where she’s earning a bachelor of music (classical guitar-performance major).Įven though she still finds Bach intimidating, “I was able to teach myself how to play the piece,” said Hall, who started playing piano at age three. She recalls heading to Long and McQuade and buying sheet music for Bach’s Cello Suite No. Still, when her mother asked, “Will you please play something nice on your guitar for my birthday,” Hall obliged. These give the lyrics and melody in staff notation, but also gives the chord changes for a lead performer to follow.If 12-year-old Madeline Hall was told she’d one day be pursuing a career playing classical guitar, the now fourth-year music major says she would have scoffed at the thought.Īt that time of her life, Hall was passionate about playing rock, insisting to her mom, “metal’s not a phase.” Understanding both gives you flexibility, and allows you to use variations like lead sheets. If you go this route, we recommend that you still learn staff notation. This is useful if you plan to play in bands, jazz or otherwise. A chord is a set of notes that creates a specific harmony, with a naming system that tells you which notes to include.Ĭhord notation usually appears in chord charts, which give chord changes and sometimes add rhythmic notation. Instead, musicians just need to follow a sequence of chords. Genres like pop or jazz are often less specific about what the backing instruments play, so full staff notation offers unnecessary detail. But first he was note-perfect on the originals, which meant studying and building upon the composer’s written music. Duke Ellington created jazz masterpieces based on Grieg’s Peer Gynt and Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. You need to know the rules before you can break the rules. No boundaries. Just because you know how the composer intended it to be played, it doesn’t limit you to playing it in this way. But when there is a universal language already in place, why bother? If you don’t have a perfect memory, you can develop your own notation. Written music offers a record of anything you have ever learned, or plan to learn.

If you read the music, you will know instantly what the notes are and how they are supposed to be played, ready to get on with it.Ī permanent memory aid. Playing by ear means remembering everything you ever decided to learn. If you can’t read music, you need to slow it down, play over and over, and still be unsure if you have heard it correctly. Say you hear a piece of music and you want to learn how to play it. It is especially tough to identify one note among many, or a rapid succession. This is a powerful skill, but even pianists who spent years developing their ear will have difficulty sometimes. But learning by ear alone requires training to identify notes, intervals and chords at an advanced level. Reading removes doubt. Your “musical ear” develops naturally over time. Since written music is widely available online, learning to sight read music gives you the ability to immediately play practically anything. It takes time and practice, but eventually if you have the written music, you can play it. Sight reading. This is the ability to read a piece of music for the first time and play as you go, as easy as reading this sentence out loud. Work systematically, gradually build up knowledge of new notation, and you will be surprised how quickly you understand literally everything. Notation may look like lines and dots on a page right now, but you will be reading and playing your first piece of music in no time. But if the only downside to learning is time and effort, it’s worth stressing that it doesn’t take that long. It’s quicker than you think. This isn’t strictly a “good thing”. In the long term, however, being able to read music holds a range of benefits, and you limit yourself without them. Like any language, you can get by without taking the time to read or write, especially in the beginning. But there are plenty who wish they had learned earlier. We challenge you to find a pianist who learned to read music and regretted it.

I want to break sheet music