I’ve dabbled with multiple instruments in my life
off topic celebration of playing by ear
but I’ve been acoustically crippled with a bad ear. About 2 years ago, I started working on playing by ear and, holy shit, it totally changed the game! Before, I had to laboriously read music and look up fingerings. Now, I know what it’s supposed to sound like and I keep pushing buttons (clarinet) until I get it right because I know what it’s supposed to sound like, and now I know if I want to flat that position it’s this button, and to sharp that note, it’s this button, etc. Quite painless and not laborious–even fun!
It seems crazy to me someone would learn all the fundamentals of music and not at least be able to play rudimentarily another instrument. I mean, why not? You already understand music, you just have to figure out the instrument, which is a pretty small investment relative to musicianship, and opens up a lot more possibilities.
What have you learned from your different instruments?
Well it’s not like it takes 6 months to jump from piano to violin to oboe.
I think if you’re trained musically, it’s not that big a jump. For instance, if you have developed a good sense of pitch, the violin’s intonation will come much easier to you.
If you know how chords on constructed, you can hop on a piano pretty easily.
I think the issue is a lot of “music education” (in the US, anyway), is really just about translating sheet music to an instrument and lots of people never learn musical sense. So to them, learning a new instrument is almost starting from ZERO.
I think you’re grossly underestimating how hard it is to go from theory to actually playing half decently in lots of instruments.
Recorder, well you’re probably right. Piano, strings, guitar, drums and any woodwinds or brass: hell yeah
Intonation is not the hardest part of playing violin. NOT playing like you’re killing a cat is the hardest part for beginner.
Maybe I’m overestimating people’s willingness to tolerate sounding bad. I’d expect 1-2 years for basic proficiency but you can start having fun and making music long before that.
I’ve found instruments typically come on groups, where learning an instrument in a group will help more with another. Eg learning guitar will help more with playing a mandolin than a piano. Instruments that typically use the same clef are closer together etc.
I tried learning guitar once thinking that my skills at violin would translate well.
I remember how infuriated I felt when my partner explained that the guitar is more of a percussion instrument and that I wouldn’t really be able to hit all notes perfectly while playing hahahaha
I forgot to add: violin may not be a percussive instrument, but fiddle certainly might be! Check out some fiddlers in bluegrass bands. Things get chonky.
I mean the left hand probably translates well. Hitting the notes depends more on the construction of your guitar, since if the neck bends, the strings have to stretch further. Unlike on a violin, you can’t move your finger in the fret to change the pitch much, so it will never sound that good. Not sure why your partner thinks that a guitar is like a percussion instrument though. Unless they only played tamboura haha.
Yeah as a violinist, hitting the exact note was very much drilled into me. So having the guitar be so loose and free with pitches threw me for a loop haha
Yep except if you press too hard the pitch goes up and you can’t slide the finger a mm up to compensate
Just play everything with vibrato and noone will notice ;)
Absolutely! But I think if you stay within in the same family, you’re refining the same skills more than expanding on new ones.
Have you tried mandolin? It’s just a violin with frets and doubled strings.
Yeah, equal temperment is sort of annoying. It’s nice to be able to just play the exact right note on strings. I think reed instruments are pretty good about intonation, too, but I’m not good enough to play with other people yet.
I have played the mandolin. I prefer to try to master one instrument than play loads, but piano is too useful not too know the basics. I still have a long way to go to achieve mastery of guitar…
Have you tried mandolin? It’s just a violin with frets and doubled strings.
Oh now that is tempting to look into. Thanks for the suggestion!
For me:
Voice: First stop for learning any melody. Not bad for learning harmony, either, theoretically–I still suck at singing and recognizing harmony notes.
Guitar: Rhythm and a bit of intuitive harmony. Most importantly it’s given me something to accompany and support my singing.
Clarinet: Really makes you think about what notes you’re playing because the layout is not intuitive at all! Also forces you to think about phrasing because you have to breath. Also gives you a lot of options with the envelope I don’t have on guitar without a pedal.
Piano: King of theory! Very easy to read and construct chords. Guitar: “flat 5? what is the fifth of this chord again? where is it? ok, so it’s this, and i move it down a fret, but now I have to move my pinky here, but shit, then I have to grab that with, what, my index finger? no, I need that there…” Piano: “boop! flat 5!”
Wish list: drums, accordion, lap slide guitar, saw, fiddle.
Off the list: most other single-note instruments; might mess about with more reed instruments like sax or some folk reeds, but I feel like I’d be investing a lot to duplicate what I can do on clarinet (expressive single note playing on wind instruments).
To my apartment neighbors: I’m sorry.
To the builders of this building: thank you for using so much brick.
I think you have piano and guitar partially reversed. Isomorphic keyboards and guitar fretboards both have the property that you only have to learn a chord or scale once, whereas for piano you have to learn it twelve times.
On guitar you have to learn each key SEVEN times, though, through all the different positions.
But my point is this: it SEEMS like a lot of work, but it really isn’t if you understand music! If you can sing Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do and know that every step up is a whole step except between Mi & Fa, and Ti & Do, it’s trivially easy to build the scale on the fly, and if you screw it up, your ear will guide you back on course. And I do use note names as a guide posts.
On any instrument, you can play completely by ear (eventually), but a little knowledge goes a long way.
On guitar, you can play a whole major scale octave with the pattern 0-2-4-5-7-9-11-12–which you can figure out yourself either by ear or by applying the major scale formula. That immediately gives you access to an octave in A, D, G, B, and two octaves in E (open strings). Then you can start playing around with a low E drone and a high E melody, and the fifth, B, is happily always one string below you. Then maybe you notice the A, the fourth, is the next string below the low E and you can hit that every once in a while, maybe while playing the notes of the A major triad, A C# E; you don’t need to memorize them because you know the fourth starts on the fourth note of the scale, which is the 5 fret, and then you skip every other note to get the triad–5-9-12. And for a little flavor, you can throw in a major seventh, which you know is one fret below the root, 4. And you would also know that the octave starts at again as 12 so you can also use the 16 fret (12+4).
If you keep yours wits about you, maybe while you’re noodling, you try to keep note name in mind, so pretty soon you know where E B and G# are on the high E string, and merrily you go along, experimenting, and playing, and learning, and having a good time.
Contrast that with the traditional learning method of: ¨THIS musical note corresponds to THIS string at THIS fret position. Keep drilling until it sinks into that thick skull of yours. I will be judging you on your performance of this scale next week.
No wonder people think learning a new instrument is an incredible chore!
Edit: My FAVORITE isomorphic keyboard are the button accordions: French and Bayan (they go in opposite directions). Basic version is a a stack of three buttons, each one a semi-tone higher than the last. So you really only have to memorize three scales, for starting on each of the three different buttons. Fancier version add duplicate rows for ease of fingering.
That said, it’s much less of a hurdle if you have a good ear and can immediately correct yourself and say, “ooops, that ain’t right.”
Saw?
Yeah, musical saw.
Don´t have the sound plugged in, but this looks right:
Main is guitar.
Fiddle, its less effort to play notes quickly, but the technique is tricky. At first its like whack-a-mole: if I think about my bow, my left hand goes out of pitch. Think about the left hand, the bow gets wonky. It takes a long time to get things to be more automatic so you can concentrate on the tune, or more advanced techniques like vibrato. Also, the fiddle is really loud and its right there next to your ear. I use an earplug.
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I’ve played the cello for most of my life and I like to think I’m quite good at it, but it’s transferred very little to other instruments - I can play the fiddle but only if I hold it like a tiny cello, and can pretty much get a tune out of anything else with strings but only just
No experience with blowy ones though so I wouldn’t know where to start there, and I wasn’t any good on the keys
I play every instrument terribly but good enough to have fun.
Here’s my arsenal:
- Guitar: I started my journey with acoustic guitar and learned music theory using that. After that I learned to use electric guitar. I also learned how to create tones using guitar gears (pickups, preamps, pedals, etc. Tone wood doesn’t matter for electric guitar fite me!!)
- Bass: Even though both electric and bass guitars are fundamentally similar, bass has a different place in music. My favorite instrument to play is bass because it gives me more freedom of expression in songs.
- Drums: Drums are the best way to hammer down the rhythm to your bones. It’s very fun to play especially in metal music, but it’s hard to access to because it’s pretty expensive. I sometimes rent a kit in practice studios to play the real deal.
- Vocals: I don’t think my singing voice is good, but I can do brutal vocals for a long time. It taught me how to protect my larynx and utilize my diaphragm properly.
N0 sticking to my kazoo
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What do you mean?
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