interesting idea. i wonder if the difficulty you
experience in singing while playing the guitar is due
to the guitar being your first instrument. was it?
having got over the hurdle of learning one instrument
- any instrument - learning the second becomes more or
less a case of adapting what you already know. this
could free your mind to take singing on board as well.
i can sing and play when i have to but "play" in this
instance usually means strumming two-finger chords.
notation is simply beyond me and learning by tab is a
very slow, step by step procedure. luckily, all i'm
interested in playing are early dance melodies. if i
had to tackle anything more lengthly and complex i'd
have to buy a foot stool ... and a music stand ... and
then i'd have to get one of those finely crafted
cabinets for sheet music ... where would it end?
- bill
--- Marcus Merrin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com
