I agree with this. And I don’t think anyone should be discouraged from learning anything.
But I also think there’s a kernel of truth to what @millionrainbows is saying. Do people who tune to Eb or D re-learn the note name positions across the entire neck by rote for the chromatically shifted tuning? Does not knowing the note names by rote when you tune to Eb diminish your ability to follow the changes in jazz standards from that tuning? I still think knowing the note names can be useful, particularly for communicating with other musicians, but I think knowing the relative positions of the intervals from any given root note is even more important. And I think on guitar understanding the harmony of your licks in terms of intervals has more practical value than learning how the note names of your licks change when you play them in a different key, since changes in sharps or flats when you transpose a lick don’t affect the fingering.
Setting aside the issue of tuning to Eb, knowing note names IS useful when reading music. Note-names are related to music notation more than anything else, and reading music is visually biased, not aural.
For communication with other musicians, knowing note names applies best to writing a score or lead sheet, or reading, and for using loosely applied chord names and lead sheets as a reference or convenience.
Real music is created by ear. My biggest breakthrough in improv came when I jettisoned all theory except the most basic, general concepts, like chord names (if they come in handy). But improv is done on the fly; cumbersome concepts and labels will only slow you down.
I can read “heads” of jazz tunes, but I memorize them as quickly as possible. The sheet music will then be only a reminder, or refresher.
As usual, I’m being misinterpreted. I’m simply saying “don’t put the cart before the horse” when improvising. I doubt that Frank Zappa was thinking about note names or using sheet music when he soloed. He used notation to convey his ideas to the other members of his bands.
I don’t believe Zappa was a ‘great sight reader’ on guitar, either. He knew how to write his own ideas down; but remember that he got Steve Vai to do his guitar transcribing.
If ALL of Zappa’s music had been written down, with no improv, it would have been boring.
For me it’s a tool that goes along with ear training, I can hear the intervals in my head and know where they are on the fretboard without having to struggle and “hunt and peck” and get frustrated because I can’t find the notes. It helps massively with improvisation too if you know what key something is in, once you learn it completely you don’t even think about it anymore, it’s just second nature.
It’s like being a writer and knowing how to type, it’s more efficient.
Is it necessary? No. I get what you are saying. But playing should be musical and not just patterns and techniques you’ve practiced over and over, bag of tricks is important but true expression is always doing something new with what you know. The the better you are able to convey your musical thoughts, the faster you can do it and increase your pleasure. It also opens your eyes to things you didn’t know were there.
Could Frank sight read as well as his band? No, he said himself he couldn’t pass his own auditions. Did he know precisely what he was doing? Yes, very very much so.
This description sounds like you’re talking about sight-reading music, which I agree knowing where note-names are on the fingerboard is helpful. However, it seems that ‘hearing the intervals in your head’ is a separate ability, which exists on its own. I don’t see how knowing locations of letter-names contributes to that exclusively, in opposition to what I am asserting.
As I said, general concepts like key areas and chord names are useful, but for guitar, knowing note-names is most useful on the 5th and 6th strings, when locating or building chords. If I’m improvising over a certain chord, or in a certain key, I already have memorized locations of positions and patterns for certain keys. For example, I know where all the C minor chords and scales are on the neck, so I use that knowledge to locate my riffs and patterns; not specific note-names. This is more like visual pattern-recognition than sight reading using letter names. Letter names are for reading and writing scores; I play by ear, and with visual patterns. This is guitaristic. Reading notation and letter-names is pianistic. I’m not a piano player, I’m a guitarist, and I openly acknowledge this fact.
To me, musical expression and doing something new with what you know is largely a matter of playing by ear, not reading pitch-names.
It seems to me that the entire history of guitar playing contradicts much of what you are trying to emphasize. Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, and Wes Montgomery learned things by ear, off of recordings, not by reading music. In the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and even later, guitar players learned music off of records, by ear.
This era of the internet, and a proliferation of teaching materials, has created many players who do not do things by ear any more, and/or who de-emphasize the importance and primacy of playing by ear. After all, music is an art of the ear, not the eye.
The best things to come out of this new era are play-along tracks.
Playing by ear should be more important to guitar players than to pianists, because as I have said in the past, the entire music notation and letter-name system is best suited to the piano keyboard, where each pitch has one specific and unique location, such as A in a certain octave range.
The guitar is not like that; our pitches do not correspond to notation’s letter-names in such a one-to-one way. We could have several different A’s, in the same octave, for example. This is the difference between the guitar and the piano, which I think should be emphasized more, and recognized more explicitly, especially in the area of music notation, playing by ear, and pattern recognition.
I like the word ‘visualizing’ in this thread. Though I prefer to think about it as ‘mechanization’. I mean, I just hear the sound in my head and then my fingers play it. I don’t know how they do it but they do )
I use my vision only to move to some new position correctly, focusing on some reference point. Beyond some tempo it’s impossible for me to use visual approach. And something telling me that it’s not jsut me. I mean, do you guys really visually choose every position for every fret and every finger when playing at 180bpm?
When I’m playing fast, I use scale positions I have already memorized. These have a position, and every finger is part of that. I see them as visual patterns.
It’s interesting. I guess because of my piano background I treat this stuff a bit differently.
Now I’m curious about this visual approach. Can you play a scale without looking at fretboard?
“Visual patterns” does not mean “looking.” It refers to a way of thinking. It means “pattern recognition” as opposed to some sort of note-naming way of thinking. The term “visual thinking” is a common term.
Pattern recognition does not depend on note naming as its primary way of identifying a scale, chord, or a riff.
Visual patterns exist on the keyboard as well. Scales on the piano can be seen in this way, apart from their letter names as notes.
For example, notice the progression of how sharps are added to scales:
C major has no black notes;
G major has one sharp, F#, which is “the first black note in the group of three.” The rest are white notes.
D major has two sharps, which are “the first black note in the group of three,” and “the first black note in the group of two.” i.e, F# and C#.
A major has three sharps, which are “the first two black notes in the group of three,” and “the first black note in the group of two.”
Guess what comes next in the patttern?
It will be four black notes:
“The first two black notes in the group of three,” and “both (two) black notes in the group of two.”
I.e., the E major scale.
If you simply mark piano notes with masking tape, you can see these visual patterns.
Even a person who does not know the note letter-names could use visual keyboard patterns like this, and “play by ear.”
We’ve all heard of trained players who can read music, but only the music that is put in front of them. They have no ability to improvise or play by ear, because they have not developed a method of thinking or visualizing keyboard patterns.
As we advance as players, we can develop our sense of “feel” and play these patterns without looking.
Maybe that’s another difference in players who are trained to look at sheet music and sight-read; they of course must do things by feel, because they are looking at a sheet of paper. This also explains why the notion of note letter names is so central to them: it’s their way of identifying the notes on their instrument.
“Visual thinking” is also used in sight reading, when readers can recognize chords and scales in the notation. But this applies to the score, not the physical instrument. Sight-reading piano players don’t memorize patterns on their instrument; they memorize what patterns look like in the score.
Oh, now I see! Patterns, patterns everywhere )
In this case I use ‘visualization’ indeed. Thouh often my fingers do all the job without me even thinking, but once again it’s because I’ve played those lines (patterns) thousands of times.
As for piano - I wouldn’t advice to focus on visual elements. It works pretty differently from a guitar. Say, if you want to play a major scale on a guitar, you jsut choose some shape and move it along the fretboard. While with a piano you have 12 different shapes for every particular scale. It’s more about tactile and motor sensation. That’s why in my musical school we started from E-major instead of theoretically simpler C-major. It allows to develop that feeling under your fingers.
Every pitch on a keyboard has one unique location, whereas with guitar, each note can have several locations.
With piano, you only have to memorize one unique form for each different scale. That’s 12 different unique forms.
While it’s true that with guitar, we can just move scales up or down along the neck chromatically (as in C-C#-D-Eb-E-F-F#-G-G#-A-B, giving us all 12 scales), we have 7 different forms for each scale. While that’s one scale form for 12 different keys, you must multiply that by 7.
I still think the main difference in ear players vs. readers is whether or not the player is looking at a page. We all eventually play by feel.
In improvising, we are using our ears, and this is not “note letter naming” or sight reading. So what would you call it?
It’s even worse since I use not only 3nps approach, which gives even more variations.
Hell if I know. As I said earlier I just hear a melody in my head and my fingers play it. With my guitar I pretty often don’t even know the name of a note I’m currently playing. I mean if I stop and watch carefully I could tell the note, but why bother if it sounds good )
I use the major scales as shapes, to play over 7 different roots, meaning all the modes.
Once I know the scale shapes/patterns by feel, I use my ear to navigate and “play” within that shape. My ear tells me where the root is, and I try to make sense out of that.
You completely missed my point, I have pretty good developed relative pitch, I hear intervals and know roughly what they are by ear most of the time (except some complex chords). This gets better with practice and training, if I have a reference pitch of any kind I can know what they key is, and where to play. I don’t have to think about patterns and scales. I don’t sight read at all, I’m not interested in that at this time. Yes it has a lot to do with your ear, and you can train your ear. What I hear in my head is music, and I want to get it out on to my instrument. That has nothing to do with sight reading. Music is not some purely mechanical construct for many people, and ideas come into your head and you “hear” them. It sounds to me like you just run on automatics and it’s all muscle memory stuff, which is fine we all strive for that too.
Try looking into it, maybe it will be beneficial to you, maybe not.
There is also way more to theory than basic scales and modes, that’s just the tip of the iceberg so to say. There are also other systems than western music theory, particularly in jazz and fusion where there are other concepts to melody and harmony that don’t fit in the western school.
Point is, there is no be all end all way of things. Open systems, closed systems.
