Music Theory
Jun. 13th, 2022 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitMy music theory background is haphazard at best, but given that it was also fairly extensive, I can do a good imitation of someone who has a firm grasp on music theory: I had beginning piano, intermediate violin, a school music class focused on writing and recording songs (in which I was not one of the favorites and so not given a ton of attention but I still absorbed some of it), some time in a very casual chorus... and all of this before high school.
The problem, of course, being that most of these things lasted for only a few years, and the only one to take into account where I was, individually, was piano. (Which was also the first one, and thus not in a position to cover the gaps of the others, and done when I was quite young and therefore did not go into a ton of detail.)
And so I've wound up in a situation where I can more or less describe what I'm missing but not come up with the keywords to research it. Namely the relationship of fretted instruments to melody. This was what kind of what tripped up my brief flirtation with the guitar-- it did not start with an explanation of the relationship of the frets to the sheet music, and with no grasp on "how to play a scale on this instrument" I completely lost my footing.
But in general, I can handle sheet music. I might handle it with tab, depending on the instrument (part of why I can do so much more on the mandolin than the harp is that harps are not really susceptible to tablature), but sheet music has a notation that corresponds to a particular note and length-- though admittedly note length, for me, is very much a function of practice; I do not have a great innate grasp of... anything that should normally involve a metronome.
Fretted instruments are not melody instruments and I do not have a good grasp on what they are. Because all of my sheet music is for the melody, and then there are names of chords written above the sheet music. I do not have sheet music that *contains* chords.
In mandolin class, we were taught chords and given chords but the way we learned the relationship of the chords to the singing was auditory-- we all played the songs as a large group, and sure, you had the chords written down in front of you next to the words, but the way you learned the real rhythm of when you were supposed to play each one was by listening to the group. So I have a bunch of songs that I can play-and-sing fine on the mandolin because I learned them in college, in the group, and a bunch of songs that I can't figure out how to do chords that sound right for and the melody sounds incredibly weird especially when paired with singing.
(I have also yet to figure out how to modulate the volume of my mandolin so I can sing audibly over the chords-- I learned to play this instrument in a group of thirty people who were all playing and singing at the top of their lungs.)
I feel like there has to be a written resource on this somewhere if I could just figure out what I'm supposed to be googling!
The problem, of course, being that most of these things lasted for only a few years, and the only one to take into account where I was, individually, was piano. (Which was also the first one, and thus not in a position to cover the gaps of the others, and done when I was quite young and therefore did not go into a ton of detail.)
And so I've wound up in a situation where I can more or less describe what I'm missing but not come up with the keywords to research it. Namely the relationship of fretted instruments to melody. This was what kind of what tripped up my brief flirtation with the guitar-- it did not start with an explanation of the relationship of the frets to the sheet music, and with no grasp on "how to play a scale on this instrument" I completely lost my footing.
But in general, I can handle sheet music. I might handle it with tab, depending on the instrument (part of why I can do so much more on the mandolin than the harp is that harps are not really susceptible to tablature), but sheet music has a notation that corresponds to a particular note and length-- though admittedly note length, for me, is very much a function of practice; I do not have a great innate grasp of... anything that should normally involve a metronome.
Fretted instruments are not melody instruments and I do not have a good grasp on what they are. Because all of my sheet music is for the melody, and then there are names of chords written above the sheet music. I do not have sheet music that *contains* chords.
In mandolin class, we were taught chords and given chords but the way we learned the relationship of the chords to the singing was auditory-- we all played the songs as a large group, and sure, you had the chords written down in front of you next to the words, but the way you learned the real rhythm of when you were supposed to play each one was by listening to the group. So I have a bunch of songs that I can play-and-sing fine on the mandolin because I learned them in college, in the group, and a bunch of songs that I can't figure out how to do chords that sound right for and the melody sounds incredibly weird especially when paired with singing.
(I have also yet to figure out how to modulate the volume of my mandolin so I can sing audibly over the chords-- I learned to play this instrument in a group of thirty people who were all playing and singing at the top of their lungs.)
I feel like there has to be a written resource on this somewhere if I could just figure out what I'm supposed to be googling!
