Musician help, sharinng tips and techniques - Beginner friendly but also advanced musicians feel free to share techniques, all instruments welcome

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What instrument are you most proficient in

  • Guitar

    Votes: 19 54.3%
  • Bass

    Votes: 8 22.9%
  • Piano/keyboard

    Votes: 12 34.3%
  • Woodwinds or Brass

    Votes: 4 11.4%
  • Other stringed instruments

    Votes: 6 17.1%
  • Drums/ Percussion

    Votes: 3 8.6%

  • Total voters
    35
46 years playing bass guitar and double bass with a bit of guitar thrown in when my arm is twisted (lightly).
Highly sought after session musician, albeit in a particular genre, mostly because I'm too old and ugly to be part of a band lineup...
To me session musicians are usually more talented than the bands that use them. I'll use John Paul Jones as an example, he's was my inspiration to start playing bass when I was 13, he was great session player and could play almost every stringed instrument and piano/keyboard/organ. At the time of the Jimmy page and Robert Plant were in the Yardbirds, they were recording in a studio where Jones was playing bass for some tracks and they drafted him in and created Led Zeppelin. The rock stars get all the recognition but session players are the real deal.
 
I looked at the beginner book and found a pdf for it, I thought it would go over where the notes are on the staff. I think I'll just get my church pianist to teach me. I come from a church that uses old hyms, but she takes the notation as a suggestion and adds more to it. She kinda puts some swing into her playing as well as little fills. She's really good. She's probably been playing for 60 years.
Easiest way to remember where notes are on staff:
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Never realized that the cancel crowd went against the old school mnemonics for the notes.

Unless your going for full out classical music and orchestral pieces you really are not going to see songs go off the main ledger often.
Some go insane though:
 
I think musical theory can be taught without reading musicical notation. I can't sight read notation without really having to think about it. But I understand music therory and intervals. Leaning to read music is just another tool to make you a more well rounded musician, just like improv, chord sheet reading, tablature reading. Some people are blessed with perfect pitch, unfortunately I only have relative pitch. But studies have shown that as people get older they lose perfect pitch. When I teach my students, I like to use scale degrees and teach them the Nashville numbering system
Yeah I also don't think it's necessary but it's generally treated as such. +1 to scale degrees and Nashville numbers, that's generally what's going through my head if I'm playing something unfamiliar rather than specific note and chord names. Though that's very much a luxury of guitar and bass being isomorphic instruments where the fingering for something doesn't appreciably change when transposed to another key; I feel for pianists, having to care which notes they're playing rather than intervals.
To me session musicians are usually more talented than the bands that use them. I'll use John Paul Jones as an example, he's was my inspiration to start playing bass when I was 13, he was great session player and could play almost every stringed instrument and piano/keyboard/organ. At the time of the Jimmy page and Robert Plant were in the Yardbirds, they were recording in a studio where Jones was playing bass for some tracks and they drafted him in and created Led Zeppelin. The rock stars get all the recognition but session players are the real deal.
Page was also a session player. I think Bonham may have been as well. If anything it's more evidence to your point but Zeppelin is just a bad example, they were no slouches.
 
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How would someone go about teaching themselves how to sing assuming they're a complete amateur?
 
Being given sheet music for an "original" is something of a luxury in my experience.
If I'm lucky I''ll perhaps get handed a scribbled set of lyrics with some guitar chords floating about in a purely experimental fashion.

That, for me, is where understanding music theory becomes essential if I'm going to add something more to the composition than just a ploddy root note bass line with an added cliche or two.
 
To me session musicians are usually more talented than the bands that use them. I'll use John Paul Jones as an example, he's was my inspiration to start playing bass when I was 13, he was great session player and could play almost every stringed instrument and piano/keyboard/organ. At the time of the Jimmy page and Robert Plant were in the Yardbirds, they were recording in a studio where Jones was playing bass for some tracks and they drafted him in and created Led Zeppelin. The rock stars get all the recognition but session players are the real deal.

I guess another exception would be Toto.
From what I remember, the original lineup were all well seasoned session musicians.
Not really my taste, but they were all superb craftsmen.
 
How would someone go about teaching themselves how to sing assuming they're a complete amateur?
Just start. Sing in your car if you have one, where you can hear yourself off the window and you have some privacy. Pick songs you like that aren't too challenging, avoid anything that feels physically uncomfortable or leaves your voice strained. There's plenty of technique to obsess over but to a large degree it's just a matter of training a muscle you're not used to using and trying to develop control over it, which just means practice.

Personally I started with songs from pretty bad singers like Cake, The Hold Steady and Elliott Smith and worked up from there.
 
Just start. Sing in your car if you have one, where you can hear yourself off the window and you have some privacy. Pick songs you like that aren't too challenging, avoid anything that feels physically uncomfortable or leaves your voice strained. There's plenty of technique to obsess over but to a large degree it's just a matter of training a muscle you're not used to using and trying to develop control over it, which just means practice.

Personally I started with songs from pretty bad singers like Cake, The Hold Steady and Elliott Smith and worked up from there.
Sure, but "just do it" is really vague. What are some specific techniques you'd say are important or widely applicable and is there anything specific you did to practice those?
 
Sure, but "just do it" is really vague. What are some specific techniques you'd say are important or widely applicable and is there anything specific you did to practice those?

The missing parts here are "what can you do right now?" and "where do you want to get to?".

"Just do it" will at least get you started on a path and allow you to acknowledge where the technique "gaps" are..
 
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hello farmers, i recently started seriously learning how to play guitar after half assing the bass for about 4 years. can you suggest some book of etudes or something for practice? whats the best way to learn to play chords and switch between them? also, what's the best way to start ear training? i have a small midi keyboard so i can use that too if need be.
 
That worked for particular genres of music but would be overkill for todays comparatively simplistic compositions.
That and the fact that I'd be a nervous wreck after three tunes...
Understandable, I gave it a try once and shat the bed about 4 chords in haha

But man, does that require a level of theory mastery that is just crazy.
 
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I don't know if it still exists but Justin Guitar used to have an interval ear trainer that was good. Whatever you do, you should train on something that sounds like guitar, or whatever you want your primary instrument to be. It makes a difference.
I used to have song examples for really learning interval training. Ultimately, learning to sighting in Solfege is what really hammered it home.
 
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Easiest way to remember where notes are on staff:
View attachment 5975348
Never realized that the cancel crowd went against the old school mnemonics for the notes.

Unless your going for full out classical music and orchestral pieces you really are not going to see songs go off the main ledger often.
Some go insane though:
My uncle tried to teach me and other children in the church how to read music, even using the mnemonics (that was the word I was trying to think of earlier) but the thing is 8 year-olds don't pay attention. I wish I did. I know the mnemonics, I'm just super slow at it. If I had known 22 years ago that I would be a musician, I would have paid attention.
Yeah I also don't think it's necessary but it's generally treated as such. +1 to scale degrees and Nashville numbers, that's generally what's going through my head if I'm playing something unfamiliar rather than specific note and chord names. Though that's very much a luxury of guitar and bass being isomorphic instruments where the fingering for something doesn't appreciably change when transposed to another key; I feel for pianists, having to care which notes they're playing rather than intervals.

Page was also a session player. I think Bonham may have been as well. If anything it's more evidence to your point but Zeppelin is just a bad example, they were no slouches.
Page might have been before joining the Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. But he wasn't when page and plant found Jones
Bring back figured bass
There can be beautiful melodic bass lines when applicable. Some styles of music sound better with just roots. It really just depends on what the music calls for.
 
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I used to have song examples for really learning interval training. Ultimately, learning to sighting in Solfege is what really hammered it home.
One good way of ear training is to listen to music, and play each note along the low E string. You're looking for the note that sounds like the home note or the most resolved note. That'll tell you the key, then ask does the song sound happy or sad. Then you'll know the key like G Major, F minor. It'll take a little time. But when you figure out the key, you can figure out each chord that's in that key.
 
I feel like this is the trouble with chords. A lot of these are four-note chords which, while I guess have a similar character to C-G-Bb, aren't quite the same, and the addition of the fourth note takes a way a degree of freedom in how much more notes you can incorporate vertically without sounding too dissonant.

Yeah I think when I worked it out visualising a fretboard I added the open strings.

It's technically just C7 without a 3rd?

ETA; my sleeping medication was kicking in as I was typing that.
I'd done near on an all nighter, was trying to reset my fucked sleep routine and fell asleep at the desk for like 2 hours after a glass of wine with dinner.

I like Ableton, the effects rack GUI is really intuitive if you're used to physical gear like guitar pedals, and people make cool stuff with Max.

Havent used it for years but I recall an ex liked it for drum and bass.

Overloud THU is the same like looking at a room but its in landscape mode and even on an ultrawide you still need to horizontally scroll unless you zoom right out to see everything but then the pedals etc are too smol to control.

One of the main reasons I like GR5 is it's like a GUI rackmount setup with the amp/cab - mic studio incorporated in a very intuitive way, how a real chain works and is in portrait mode, you can float/snap it from the daw onto a portrait/document monitor and have one widescreen for the daw and if you have another for drum software or synths. Plus it scales well so you aren't trying to click on a knob like some 1337 fps headshot.

Highly sought after session musician, albeit in a particular genre, mostly because I'm too old and ugly to be part of a band lineup...

Gypsy Jazz?
 
One good way of ear training is to listen to music, and play each note along the low E string. You're looking for the note that sounds like the home note or the most resolved note. That'll tell you the key, then ask does the song sound happy or sad. Then you'll know the key like G Major, F minor. It'll take a little time. But when you figure out the key, you can figure out each chord that's in that key.
I liked to teach interval training without attaching key, or even telling notes. I'd rather be able to play 2 notes without telling you anything and have you know what the interval is. That way, you can find your way around by ear without having to think about the chord structures. In music school we learned in parallel but separately from written theory. Allows you to combine the two in your head at your own rate, and doesn't marry you to an instrument for training. A major 6th sounds functionally the same regardless of key, and most people know the NBC jingle, so it's easy to point that out. Or that the Simpsons opens with a tritone, or that the jaws theme is a minor 2nd, or Somewhere Over the Rainbow is an octave, etc etc.

Personally, I would get comfortable with melodic intervals before starting to tackle any serious chord identification. Not many people are going to come across, say, a half-diminished chord in popular music, but you're not going to recognize it if you can't identify the tritone in the middle.

Take all this with a grain of salt, everyone has their own method for sure, this is just how they did it at my school, which is different from the Paris Conservatory curriculum, which is different from some of the German takes (as a sax player the Sigurd Rascher school comes to mind, where as I came from the Larry Teal line by way of Fred Hemke, Technically my teaching tree puts me at 5 degrees of separation from Adolph Sax).

As for figured bass, obviously it doesn't always work, but dear God is it amazing to see realized by an absolute pro. Our organ professor could play masses from memory but would always realize the figured bass differently, was truly incredible to watch.
 
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