On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 01:53:20AM +0000, Jack Campin wrote: > > gets easier. After a while you're reading relative rather than absolute > pitches without thinking about it, creating new mappings between staff > positions and fingerings on the fly. > > This also makes it easier to pick up entirely different instruments. > The latest thing I've been playing is the ocarina; this (the European > type) has a fingering system which is like the whistle but one finger > position down (the tonic at the bottom has all your fingers on). I got > my head into that by telling myself "it's like when I play tunes on the > G alto recorder that I would normally play on the F alto". I have used > similar cross-references in learning the clarinet (which is like two > whistles a fifth apart glued together) - for folk clarinet playing, > there's not much point in learning how to play from transposed music; > either do it by ear or bite the bullet and use what the fiddlers do. As a clarinet player, I agree. If you need "your own" music before you can read anything, it puts a huge barrier in the way - you can't use any paper anyone else shows you. Much better to learn to use what you're going to be meeting.
Though, after 25 years of doing that it still slows me down when I'm writing a tune down. Out-by-a-3rd errors everywhere (A clt). -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
