Are you guys agree, when you continuesly improve your sight reading, ear can also follow? I’m curious what Jeff Berlin said on his interview. he said learn reading music is a valueble thing. so should players learn sight reading and ear training before to proceed learn songs or increase repertoire, etc.
My ear is my weak point. that’s why I’ve spent time more time on reading. while studying that I also do ear training but still can’t learn songs by ear. I’m trying to adapt his opinion when it comes to reading music.
I don’t know what interview you are referring to, so I can’t evaluate his advice.
Is learning sight reading valuable? Yes.
Will it help you train your ear? Maybe. It certainly won’t hurt. Arguably it will, although I’m not convinced that sight reading notation will massively help train your ear more than reading TAB will.
Is it the most valuable tool to train your ear? Should you learn sight reading before learning songs? No, and no.
The most valuable and effective tool to train your ear is singing. Listen to music, and sing/hum/whistle individual lines. Even if you’re not a great singer, this will help your audiation more than anything. Once you’re moderately competent at this, THEN reading music will become valuable to further refine your ear.
What reading music (whether TAB or Notation) will do is point out to you nuances or details that you may have missed through just listening. It will involve another part of your brain in processing music.
Think of it like learning to talk or learning a new language. Because it’s basically the same thing.
The first thing you did learning language is listening. Then you started making noises. Then you started attempting to copy the noises you were making to what adults around you were doing.
Then, only AFTER you already knew how to talk, people started trying to teach you to read. They did it by first sounding things out to you and showing you the writing, and how the language you already knew corresponded with words on the page. Then you started trying to read and trying to take those words and find ways to make them correspond with your language. Finally you became a fluent reader.
Approach learning to read music just like reading language.
Any time practicing anything helps develop your ear. Mine is terrible and also confusing as I play sax as well and between C Bb and Eb instruments I have no idea what note a tone is lol.
Remember, these damn kids have the luxury of spending countless hours a day with their instruments. Us adulters do not. And it’s a sadness. Damn work. Damn you.
Well, no. It’s like saying “I have weak upper body strength, that’s why I’m spending more time woking on my leg strength”.
I study music, no to be more precise, notations reading not theory, at very young age learning piano/ keys the ratio was 70/ 30 notation to playing, because I was young and not a prodigy that was the regiment that the music school was teaching. I could read and recognize music like reading a book but can’t transfer that to my playing, not even close.
Sight reading is very valuable skill to have and the benefits can bleed into better listening skills but it’s not a guarantee benefits. If you want to have better listening skills then start with the basic. Pick a song, preferably simple song listen to the first few notes then play those first few notes by ear.
I like Charles’ approach to this it’s simple. The progression for me is listen, read then write, like how we learn everything else. Since this is an instrument, the playing part should always come first. Then practice your weakness to improve your playing. That said, if you are more visual person then I can see that path as not all of us learn the same way.
If you have not try or playU2 With or Without You I highly recommend you start with that song. You’d feel very accomplished right off the bat.
Yeah it was exactly the same with me, learned it in grade school and used it constantly in at least one music class per term until the start of high school. Call it 5 years or so of music lessons as a kid. And then when it came time for a band in college, I played synths so I used it then too.
I’ve only been able to transfer sight reading at speed to one instrument (trumpet) and was close on a second (recorder), and even then it was more of as a shorthand and not a substitute for learning the song (i.e. I still had to go slow until I learned the song by muscle memory). I’m just not a player piano when it comes to music.
I had nearly perfect pitch as a kid. Which was great for piano and cello. Then I started playing trumpet in junior high and it ruined that. I could still name a note being played, but couldn’t tell if that was in C or Bb.
I spent about a dozen years playing multiple instruments while reading from standard notation and it did little to nothing to help my ear.
There’s no “should”, do what you want/enjoy and work on the techniques that allow you to accomplish that. People go their entire lives/careers playing from notation or learning songs by ear, there’s no one way to do things.
For me, sight reading was a good ear training exercise, too. The course over at Talking Bass has you play single whole notes while you look at the notation, and not the bass. That means when you mess up, you hear it. I think that helps a little with your musical ear.
As has been said before, Mark’s Sight Reading course is different than any other sight reading method out there. First, it’s designed specifically for playing bass. Second, it teaches a very practical way to learn the location of notes on the fretboard and how they directly correlate to notes on the page. And, third, Mark does incorporate some practical ear training by means of short exercises that stress several aspects of reading, playing and listening, simultaneously.
Now, this isn’t to suggest that this particular Talking Bass course provides everything a dedicated ear training course does, but it is a sight reading course for bass that provides several ancillary music/playing training benefits.
One of the benefits of reading sheet music (not so much TAB) is that the spacing of the notes allows someone to quickly read intervals. This can reinforce interval recognition and for instruments like piano can greatly accelerate an understanding of chord voicings. For example, triads go from stacks of thirds to stacks of a fourth and a third when inverted. Being aware of these things while practicing can reinforce ear training and internal audiation, but it’s not going to be a universal substitute for those things.
Tabs can technically do the same as above, it’s just a pain that involves some extra mental overhead. Instruments like guitar and bass are particularly silly in this situation since it might be easier to just learn the interval shapes and study the intervals/theory in hindsight rather than through reading. But at that point the reading part isn’t contributing to the ear training part.
“Sight reading” usually refers to reading and performing music without prior practice. It’s a useful skill for musicians performing in bands or competitions that might not apply to you. This skill is always going to be below the level of what you can perform and can develop naturally just by reading and practicing more. Imo, the only people who should practice “sight reading” specifically are the ones who have run into a problem with it in a real life situation.
so should players learn sight reading and ear training before to proceed learn songs or increase repertoire
Do you need to learn about every piece of equipment before going to a gym? No. The benefit to learning to read sheet music early is that it tends to be a lot easier when doing beginner songs or method books. It’s a useful skill that’ll let you read a huge range of music from different sources and (with a bit of work) apply it to any instrument.
Some people only learn by ear, some never learn to do so. Same with sheet music. Don’t stress over specific skills if you aren’t even sure if they benefit you yet. Someone might claim you need to use that thing in the corner of the gym that looks like a torture device, but at the end of the day you’re the one in control of your workouts.
If you sing what you’re reading I’d expect that to improve your ear. If you’re just playing the notes on the page as they come along it’s better than nothing but probably not providing much.
Off topic, but you can sing what you’re reading is the biggest advantage of sheet music over tab.
The best key I had to both of these was learning to competently and cofidently sing solfege.
Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.
I learned it for my musicianship/ear-training class in college, and that really helped.
I’d put a drone on and then just sing improv solfege while walking, driving, riding - I practiced it a ton.
And I learned it with the hand signs as well which was also helpful.
I highly recommend going deep on that if you haven’t and you’re struggling to develop your musical ear. It’s a great system for identifying and naming and anticipating sounds.
The Tenuto app “games” (they’re not really games, but they are fun) can get you some ear training while on the bus or waiting for appointments or other situations where you’d rather not be singing out loud.
Tenuto also has fretboard learning options, too. That’s fun on airplanes when you can’t really hear and identify notes over the engine noise.
I believe everyone learns differently and what works for some, even if it is the majority, doesn’t work for others. I am a 76 year old dyslexic. When I was growing up learning disabilities were not worked with, you were just labeled slow learner. Ha, not really. Anyway, I found connecting reading sheet music, acknowledging the note name and hearing the sound was a much more useful way to associate and memorize notes and sounds. It is in valuable for me. When using tabs I was faster but the association wasn’t the same. Speed does pick up when you come proficient in reading notes. Just my 2 cents.
I started with tabs with rhythm, but now I prefer looking at tabs and sheet music at the same time. This helps connecting both systems to each other as well as connecting them to the sound of the note.