I had a related experience which is probably not unique to the way *my* brain is wired. When I was a guitarist, I could never wrap my head around playing and singing at the same time from a vocal/instrument score.. I know many pianists and guitarists who have the same difficulty. Curiously, as soon as I started to learn lute tablature it all just fell into place pretty much overnight. I assume that staff and tab notation take slightly different paths through our mental processes because one is a graph of pitch vs. time and the other is a plot of finger position vs time. I guess pitch and finger position are sufficiently far apart in our heads not to interfere with one another the way pitch and speech do. The curious thing is that after this discovery, I found to my surprise that not only did my ability to sing and play from staff - voice/tab - lute emerge, but also that reading both from staff notation became easier and to my complete mystification, my previously very limited keyboard reading skills improved too.
Has anyone else found that learning tab is the magic bullet for sightreading difficulties? Marcus Jon Murphy wrote: >Tony, > > > >>P.S. Does anyone else who dabbles in different instruments experience the >>same phenomenon as I do, one example of which is that I can play the gamba >>from alto clef, but I can't read it on the keyboard? >> >>TC >> >> > >Yes, in a sense. I play double strung harp (along with other instruments). >My left hand has a reading problem (nothing to do with my brain <g>). Pieces >written for the 2X will often use the treble clef for both lines, but as the >instrument has 3 1/2 octaves I'm often reading the bass clef for the left >hand, sometimes tranlating it up an octrave and sometimes in the written >range. It involves a mental adjustment (and there are some small harp pieces >that are all in one stave of the treble using up and down "whatchumacallums" >(note flags) to indicate the hand. > >Best, Jon > > > >To get on or off this list see list information at >http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > > >
