I have a chart on my wall to help me quickly figure out notes when I need to. Is this bad practice? Will it hinder me in the long run?
no
you will learn them over time
don’t worry
This^^^.
Once you learn them and use them it’s in your head. It’s also a badge of honor reminding you what you have uploaded. Growing up my parents used to put the notations and scales along the hallway and in the room one side the left hand and another right hand. Walking by the hallway and reading the notes really helped me with notation. While I’ve forgotten how to play but the ability to read is still there.
I say do what you have to do to learn something. We all have different learning styles, with some of us grasping concepts more easily with visual aids.
No way.
If I could get away with it, I would decorate my whole apartment with all kinds of music charts.
I have so much sheet music of various types lying around my house I have been tempted to use it as wallpaper.
its very useful. in fact i was getting annoyed i could not find a premade chart that visually works for me, until i remembered that i have two graphic design degrees so i made my own:
this is a fully fllled out 21-fret chart including fret numbers, dots, and every note, meant to be printed A3/tabloid so it is easy to see on a wall:
also i have found that memorization/learning fixed things like this is very effective if you literally write it out by hand, so this is a blank, A4/letter sized board you can print out and fill in on your spare time. note i have left out any of the empty shapes as that is too much of a clue what is a whole and what is a #/b:
you are welcome to grab these as PDF’s:
Thanks Mitch!
I find that visualizing things in my mind also works really well for memorization, once you’re comfortable filling out the blank you could take it a step further by trying to picture where the notes are in your head without any visual aids.
I’ll have a slightly different take: At some point, you may need to make a conscious effort to remove them/stop using them. Let me explain:
I come from a piano background. Like many (most? vast majority? all?) piano players, I was taught to remember the music clefs with “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “Good Boys Do Fine Always”. There are variants, but that was how I was taught.
With my neuro-divergent lizard brain, this was a bad thing in the long run. I used those phrases as a crutch. Instead of just associating the line with the letter, I had to run through the mnemonic every time I wanted to figure out a note. I held on to those sentences FAR longer than I should and, to this day, 30+ years later, I still have trouble sight reading music because for some ridiculous reason I can’t get rid of those phrases.
My case is, admittedly, a fringe case. Still, I would warn everyone to really pay attention to make sure the charts haven’t reached a point where they’ve stopped helping you and are holding you back.
Nope! However, try to move the information on the chart, to your fingers. That will take time but sounds like you are on your way.
Absolutely. When I was starting (I still do this), I’d walk up and down the fretboard if I couldn’t sleep. I’d done this with chords and now I’m doing this with memorizing the circle 4ths/5ths.
HAHAHA That made my day.
1000% - i sit at night on my ipad writing out scales around the circle of 4th/5th constantly, then pick one at random and see how fast I can replicate it.
It is amazing how much work this takes to memorize at this damn age.
It’s like moving Connecticut next to California.
It’s only bad if you have a non-musical partner you share your living space with!
Imagine if, to be literate, you needed to memorize about 2100 kanji. Each with multiple readings depending on use. These are in addition to the two simpler alphabets you need to know, none of which share shapes with your native language.
Yeah.
I wore out at about 350-400; of those I can write maybe 50 and since it’s been a few years I figure I can still read about 150.
Being illiterate does suck but the alternative is such a huge effort I am just kind of paralyzed at it. Need to get back on it
Uh, no, lol.
Not possible for me.
Good thing they teach this when young or we would all be illiterate.
Yeah vocabulary is the other biggie. I’ve got most of the grammar down, but I am still stuck at survival level despite immersion because most of the words I need day to day are relatively common. So I have to express complex ideas in very verbose ways. XKCD nailed this one:
The Saturn V rocket, explained using only the 1000 most common words.
This is my Japanese
Nope not bad… Actually it’s the opposite–it’s beautiful. Just a beautiful as the the Fibonacci sequence and Golden ratio that is likely displayed in one of your pieces of wall art. Embrace it, don’t fixate. Do what works for you. Then consider doing what @mr.crispy suggests and remove what might be a visual crutch, if you begin to notice it.
I do that with stuff all the time; i’d rather someone else did the work for me (even if it takes twice as long) Even if it’s not 100%, it’s usually a good starting point