Pursuent to an interesting discussion in another thread (http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?p=461623#461623) I’ve begun to wonder how many of us in whistleland are comforable, or proficient sight readers of music. More specifically, how many people can read whistle music; can easily play the notes on a sheet of music, on their whistle (I’m assuming here that the class of whistle players who can sight read music is larger than the class of whistle players who can sight read music and translate that music onto their whistle)?
Also, how many people can read fluidly for whistles in various keys? Do some people learn on a D whislte, and just do the mental gymnastics to convert to other keys if they are on the spot, but are not really comfortable sight reading in other keys?
Does reading music matter - is it an important skill? I have assumed so, but am I wrong - at least in the context of Irish folk music?
I must admit that I have actually thought about this before. When I first discovered ABC (which, posting conveniences aside, I still find annoying), I got the impression that a lot of whistle players may not read.
Another question, then: is ABC mostly used for posting convenience, or because it is more accessible to non-readers. Clearly it has both virtues, but what really motivates people to use this medium?
Progress on the Brigadoon score continues. I am playing it on D, C, and Eb whistles (or rather, 3 tubes on me Syn). I do the mental gymnastics (as you very eloquently put it) to play all of the different keys.
I believe that the score actually uses every single major key. So it’s a lot of gymnastics.
I don’t believe I would be able to do this if I weren’t a concert flute player first, and a singer. I did a lot of sightreading in vocal competitions, and my mother insisted that we all have a sturdy foundation in music theory. Now, many years later, I’m grateful for her being such a stickler.
I don’t think that whistle players who only play whistle really need to have this kind of a music theory education, but if you’re in it for more than tunes (and don’t get me wrong, I LOVE playing tunes, and warm up with a whole slew of them before I tackle my Brigadoon practice), it’s definitely helpful.
Sightreading is just a good thing to have a proficiency in. Just like driving standard or knowing CPR. You might not need it, but then, you might.
Put me in the sightreader / sight transposer extraordinaire wannabe class.
Sightreading jigs at speed with some ornaments is as far as I go on whistle, for now.
For the ‘extraordinaire’ part: One of our 5th year conducting tests was to play 4 lines from a modern orchestral score on the piano, with no rehearsal. I pulled 2nd violin (C), clarinet in Bb, Horn in F, and Bassoon (C Bass clef). I survived, but I couldn’t do it today. This kind of reading skill is essential for only a smallish group of people on Earth. Those from Alpha Centauri Beta can do it from birth.
My buddy, on the same test, pulled Db Piccolo, Eb Clarinet, Viola (alto clef), and BBb Contra Clarinet (transposed trble clef, about 5 feet away from Picc). That was just plain mean.
BTW, Brigadoon sounds great with a sax quartet, piano, percussion, and bass in the pit. You shoulda heard our all-sax impression of GHBs!
I can sight read D whistle music at basically full speed. It’s actually gotten harder over the years as I get better at playing by ear; I’ve developed a tendency to play the tune like I think it should go rather than what the music says, which means every now and then I get confused between what it says and what I’m doing.
I can read C whistle at about 80% full speed, probably any other key at about half speed, though I don’t try very often. I have to admit, though, that I’m usually feeling too lazy to bother, as it is very easy to print transposed ABC files.
I can play Eb treble clef music (like alto sax) on bassoon pretty effortlessly, and Bb treble clef or C tenor clef at about 80% as well. Though it’s been a while since I had much use for the transposing – not much call for it playing in orchestra, and all the recent pits I’ve played for had full bassoon parts for me. (I’ve never played Brigadoon.)
I suppose I should have shown my hand as well when I asked the question. Well, I’m not an “extraordinaire” at anything, but I can also read jigs at tempo on E, Eb, D, C, Bb, and G whistles. These are all the keys I own, so I haven’t had much practice on whistles in other keys (though I am getting a tuneable chieftain low F this week ). I do stumble occasionally, though, when improvising embellishments.
I also play Guitar and Sax with some competence, so my theory extends a little beyond this, but I’d be in no position to take a conducting test (in any year, I’m sure)!
I can sight read music fast enough to keep up with my very slow whistle playing. As soon as I can hum the tune I don’t use the music anymore and that happens long before I speed up a bit, so my reading speed isn’t an issue for me. My sight reading is the same in all keys, but I can’t transpose in my head easily. I have stuck with tunes in the keys easily played on the D whistle. I really don’t think it matters for traditional music if you read music or not as long as you have music you can listen to. However, it is sometimes hard to find recordings of certain tunes, so then it seems that standard notation would be a good thing to read if you can find the sheet. I guess I thought ABC notation was for people who didn’t read standard notation. But it seems just as hard, so maybe it is more for the convenience of posting tunes. I hadn’t thought of that. I am too lazy to learn to read it well, so I always use a translator with it.
I can sight read at a first grade level. I can “sound” out melody lines, painfully slowly. It is excruciating and I don’t do it unless forced. ABC notation is a bit easier for me. I have zero chance at reading and playing an unfamiliar piece of music.
I have a good ear for music and learn quicker that way but many people are faster at that too. My talent is improvising new melodies. I can write ten new melody lines in the time it takes me to learn one known piece of music. It is no surprise that I much prefer to write my own music. I have to really, really like a known tune to take the time to learn it (usually by ear).
Years ago I could sight-read for classical guitar. During my time as a rock&roll/pop musician the skill slipped away. Now attempting the whistle I find I can read a midi piano-roll at tempo, but I gotta go back to the dots to confirm the original melody. Ornamentation seems to be coming from ear/tutorial/slow-down-software - its such a grab bag of method, but so far so good. I suspect when I start doing more advanced stuff it’ll be back to the dots
To me, the term “sight read” has always meant the ability to take a sheet of music that is unfamiliar to the musician and to immediately read and play it without any rehearsal. For example, my former guitar teacher was often sent out on jobs that were referred to him from the local musicians union. He would get to the gig, be handed the sheet music, sit down and play it. That is what I call sight reading.
I can not do that. If I know the tune beforehand I can play it from the music. If I’m unfamiliar with the tune it’s much more difficult. I played classical guitar for 20 years and I never got past the “deciphering” phase. But I didn’t start trying to read music until I was 21 years old. It’s like learning a second language - the earlier you start the better you will be abel to speak it.
Mike
I can sightread on a D with no problems, and can transpose in my
head for a C whistle (same as transposing to Clarinet, so I’m used
to it). For any other key, I usually transpose it first, then sight read as if I were playing a D whistle.
That is a subject that has been discussed ad nauseum already, with
no end in sight. Search for “dots vs. ears”
Back in the early days of the internet, bandwidth was scarce. So
people used methods to encode things in a small format, which
could be rendered into human readable format by a program once
it was downloaded. So, while a .gif file of the music might be a few
hundred KBytes (which used to take forever to download over a
modem), the equivilant .abc file was just a few hundred bytes. Once
you spent the 10 seconds downloading the .abc file, you could run
a program to convert it to the same .gif file, and save 2 minutes of
online time. Also, huge databases of tunes could be kept in abc
format in a fraction of the diskspace that it would take to keep the
same tunes in .gif format (for example).
Nowadays, this may not be quite so important. But I think the format
persists because it is easier to search through text, and it’s much
easier to change text. If the notes only exist as part of a graphics
file, they are not discrete entities, so you can’t transpose or change
anything without first typing the whole tune in by hand.
Out of curiosity, why do you find ABC annoying? All you have to do
is copy it into any abc interpreter, and you get nice, familiar sheet
music…
This is the definition I was taught as well. But then I guess a person could do it with varying degrees of success depending on what music one is given, so maybe a person can talk about how well one sight reads. When I took piano lessons I was always given things in an easy book to practice sight- reading from. My piano sight reading is better (how good it is depends on how hard the piece is, but it’s not that good) than my whistle sight-reading. Maybe I should just say I can pick out the tune at about the speed I can play it at first—which is very slowly. I was wondering how people were defining “sight-reading” and “reading music”.
For the record, I’ve just taken a glance at the relative file sizes for my compositions. Total file size for ABC files: 6,033 bytes. Smallest PNG (like GIF) file size for just one of the tunes in the ABC file: 17,887. Total size for all the PNG files: 488,802 bytes. So ABC is about 80 times more efficient. (At least if your graphics files are high enough resolution to look good – if you follow the link in my sig and click on one of the “dots” links, you’ll see what I mean.)
When you add in how much more flexible it is, there’s just no contest. I don’t know about you, but I think most of the tune GIFs I’ve seen on the net look pretty bad due to low resolution, and downright ugly when printed. With ABC this isn’t an issue at all – I just convert the ABC file to Postscript, and print it out at the highest resolution possible on my printer.
And if you need bigger notes, a different key, or a MIDI file version of the tune, these things are easy to generate from ABC and pretty much impossible without re-entering the tune if all you have is a graphics file.
Much smaller, human readable, easy to e-mail/post, more flexible, searchable, transposable, free, and able to generate better looking results. Why the heck would anyone want to use something else?
I can ‘decode’ on a soprano/tenor recorder or D-flute but playing at speed upon first reading is waaaay beyond my capabilities. I totally envy anyone with this skill.
For strictly tunes, I don’t know how important it is to have this skill, being a hardcore proponent of ear learning. then again, the real utility of notation for Irish music is for purposes of archiving a tune setting. But strict sight-reading isn’t required for that purpose.
BUT, for many if not most other genres of music, sightreading is tremendously beneficial. I should really sit down someday (or decade) with another instrument and learn to do it proficiently.
Thanks for the actual numbers. That’s pretty good compression, really.
Agreed. The record companies would never want you to be able to modify
their sheetmusic, so you’ll never be able to buy a Gun’s ‘n’ Roses song
in ABC, but for public domain music, it’s the only way to go.
I use the book and CDs ‘‘110 Irland’s Best Tin Whistle Tunes volume 1.’’
This will keep me busy for a long time. I would go nuts trying to play by ear 100%. There are some notes that come along and are gone before I find it. I listen to the CD and follow the written music before I play then go from there. The CD has a guitar player in the background. The book has the guitar chords in it also. It would be nice and fun if there were a CD with only the guitar chords to play whistle along with. I have found a few on the internet and burned them to a disc but that is very time consuming searching and then listening to all the versions before choosing one.
Thanks for the info on ABC’s i didn’t know they could do all those things.
As for sight reading. It was always the act of taking a piece of unknown notated music and picking up your instrument and playing it perfectly as it is supposed to be played.
Example… in Royal School of Music grade exams, about half way through the exam the examiner dumps a piece of music in front of you. You have a quick look at it and then you have to play it at the speed stated without mistakes (and they don’t give you a metronome either).
The pieces are graded in difficulty to the level of exam one is taking. You don’t get grade 8 level music to sight read at grade 5.
It takes a very long time (years) to be able to sight read to a professional level with an instrument.
I don’t “sightread”, as in plunk it down on the music stand and play it at tempo–I’m just not there yet. I do “read” music though–a skill that I haven’t used in 20 years, and have just trotted out again as I’ve picked up the whistle. In my college days, I got hit with music theory, and some exposure to the piano, and by then I’d been singing since I was in grammer school. I’m sure that this background has given me the foundation to pick up the whistle without the immediate need for an instructor. Then again, I’m a terrible player!
Well, ABC’s CAN’T really do all of those things. ABC is just a text format for describing notes. But there is a lot of software out there (free and otherwise) that can do all of those things.
It’s especially good for changing things around, like others have said…you can open the text document in a text editor, or an ABC editor, change note 10, for instance, and then reprint sheet music if you’re so inclined. With a graphics file, you can print the sheet music, and get out your Sharpie and mark the thing up instead
For the technically savvy, or those willing to invest time investigating the software required to mess with ABC’s, they have a lot of advantages over image files…for those who couldn’t be bothered with all of that stuff, nothing really will beat the simplicity of an image file on the web, which is why I try to make the files on my site as aesthetically pleasing as possible.
(Colomon: most of my 1-bit black and white gif files run about 7K. Smaller than what you’re getting with PNG, but much bigger than ABC to be sure)
I’ll have to verify when I get home, but I think L.E. McCullough’s session tune book has the accompianiment on one speaker channel, and the whistle on the other..so to get rid of the melody instruments you just turn your balance knob all the way one way, and to get rid of the background you turn it the other way. Might be worth trying on your CD too.
). I do stumble occasionally, though, when improvising embellishments.
I do “read” music though–a skill that I haven’t used in 20 years, and have just trotted out again as I’ve picked up the whistle. 
