There’s something to singing it, but not everything. I sing off the page once per week, and while in choir even more. After a while, you can get a “feel” for intervals when you look at the page. But, in my case, I never counted the lines and thought, “Yeah, that’s a perfect fifth or that’s a minor third.” I can look at a page most of the time figure out the melody, but I’ll need the first note since I haven’t got perfect pitch. Otherwise, the tune will be in some other key other than what it’s written in. I think that’s where the really heaving lifting come in, recognizing those intervals for what they are.
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What to do if I can’t sing?
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Make whatever noise it sounds like to you. You’ll see a lot of jazz bassists speaking the melody while they’re playing like “Doo Doo DOO bee doo doo” or whatever. I think there’s a term for it but I don’t remember. 2:05
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I’ll give it try. Thanks!
Nicko McBrain “sings” his drums as he plays. OK, a lot of what he sings along with them is “fuck off” and “shut up”, but it’s in time and in pitch with the various bits of his kit… and it’s a large kit.
Rick reminds me of the New Yorker that complains in his car about issues while spitting all over his dash…
For me he’s mostly
except he’s not so old.
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I took an art class once where the early part of the semester was teaching us “how to see”. (I’m not an artist, but I thiiink most painters agree that drawing is a good/useful foundational skill for painting.) It basically focused on a kind of mental distortion people often have. For example, when we look at faces, our eyes jump around to “important features” of the face, like the eyes/nose/mouth. When then drawing the face, these features can be over-emphasized by beginners, leading to things like “chopped-head syndrome” and/or just generally drawing the head out of proportion and “child-like”. To exercise/break this, we did things like drawing without looking at the paper and (with looking at our paper) drawing upside down faces (the subject was upside down, and so the resulting drawing was too), and generally trying to “draw what you see”, with an emphasis put on that phrase specifically. In a sense, the end-result is kind of like relative pitch, in that one exercises drawing lines/angles relative to other things in the drawing. I suppose it’s also about building a kind of “earned trust” with yourself. An example breakdown: “the eyes are halfway down the face, the stash halfway below that. A vertical line from the pupils roughly intersects the corners of the mouth. The width of the face is 5 eyes. An average person is 7.5 heads tall. The groin is half the total height. etc…”, so the measuring sticks are an eye, a head, and “halfway”. That kind of stuff.
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