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Playing with a capo sounds different to playing without one, and digital keyboards don't sound the same as acoustic instruments. Sure you might make a career a

Playing with a capo sounds different to playing without one, and digital keyboards don't sound the same as acoustic instruments. Sure you might make a career as a musician playing everything by ear, and there is nothing wrong with that. But a university trained viola player can join an orchestra, be handed violin sheet music and then perform having never heard or practiced the music before. You don't really need to go do a degree in music at all if your only goal is performance and you have intuitive aptitude, but if your plan is to teach, you're going to be a pretty awful teacher if you only can teach students to ape your specific methodology rather than being able to introduce them to the lingua franca that most musicians are using.

watwut 3y ago
I could be handed piano sheet music and play it straight away in elementary school. It is not that hard to read sheet music and it does not require scales which I never bothered to learn. I was not some kind of prodigy either. It is just that if you play enough, music sheet becomes like normal reading - you just know what is written there. The rest is manual dexterity. Ability to play from the sheet without preparation if completely orthogonal to anything in this thread. Especially to ability to play all the scales in all variations to the perfection for the practice test.
- ludston 3y ago
  Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in different keys in order to transpose, and musicians need to be able to play something they have rehearsed accurately, and musicians need to be able to play all across a large range. Testing scales tests all of these things, and more simultaneously. I fail to see the problem. If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem?
  - watwut 3y ago
    Like, none of what you wrote here has nothing whatsoever with the actual concrete practice test this particular guitarist complained about. Testing scales does not test any of these, actually. It is just absurd to claim that playing scales at practice test is done in order to test how you play "something you have rehearsed accurately" or "ability to transpose". > If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem? So basically, you do not know anything about the test the guitarist complained about.
  - toast0 3y ago
    > Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in different keys in order to transpose > Testing scales tests all of these things I don't see how testing scales tests knowing the sharps and flats really. If you're playing all the (major) scales on a string instrument, it's all about starting on the right note, and then doing the scale pattern: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. On a guitar, half is one fret and whole is two, and you need to know how to jump to the next string if you don't want to just walk the length of the fretboard. I've never played a wind instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in others, and keyboards are setup for c-major, so it takes some practice to get the sense of where the whole and half tones are for other keys, but the example of guitar is not hard. If you can play guitar and have a week to practice it, you should be able to play any major/minor scale on demand. If you can play the scale, you can probably take the time and think the sharps and flats, but that doesn't really mean you know them, IMHO.
    - mbreese 3y ago
      > I've never played a wind instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in others It’s been a while since I played (stopped after college), but yes. Wind instruments really only play in one key. It is really rare to have sheet music in a different key and because of that transposing is not a skill that you really need to be successful. You still learn scales… I played one of the few instruments where you were expected to be able to transpose (F horn with some older music in Eb). Even then, while it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t a common skill. Guitar, string, and piano are an entirely different beast. And that flexibility of scales and keys is probably why you don’t see many wind instruments professionally playing outside of orchestras.
      - ludston 3y ago
        You see wind instruments outside of orchestras all the time though. The main reason for the domination of guitar and piano is economic: you can play more notes at once and therefore have played richer sound with fewer players. You can split the gig money across less people. It really has nothing to do with the number of wind players that can transpose.
  - mrob 3y ago
    IMO knowing about sharps and flats is an impediment to transposition. I play alto recorder, and I was very careful to avoid learning any sheet music. Instead I wrote a simple Python script to convert MIDI files to numbers, with 0 representing the lowest note, 1 representing a semitone above it, and so on. I then memorized the fingering for each number. I can transpose in my head just by adding or subtracting. And I practice scales based on the semitone intervals between the degrees of the scale, so I only need to know major/minor/wholetone/pentatonic etc. and just change the starting note. This is more difficult on the standard piano because of the badly designed keyboard, but you can get isomorphic keyboards that let you play all the keys without learning all the sharps and flats.

watwut 3y ago

I could be handed piano sheet music and play it straight away in elementary school. It is not that hard to read sheet music and it does not require scales which I never bothered to learn. I was not some kind of prodigy either. It is just that if you play enough, music sheet becomes like normal reading - you just know what is written there. The rest is manual dexterity. Ability to play from the sheet without preparation if completely orthogonal to anything in this thread. Especially to ability to play all the scales in all variations to the perfection for the practice test.

ludston 3y ago
Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in different keys in order to transpose, and musicians need to be able to play something they have rehearsed accurately, and musicians need to be able to play all across a large range. Testing scales tests all of these things, and more simultaneously. I fail to see the problem. If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem?
- watwut 3y ago
  Like, none of what you wrote here has nothing whatsoever with the actual concrete practice test this particular guitarist complained about. Testing scales does not test any of these, actually. It is just absurd to claim that playing scales at practice test is done in order to test how you play "something you have rehearsed accurately" or "ability to transpose". > If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem? So basically, you do not know anything about the test the guitarist complained about.
- toast0 3y ago
  > Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in different keys in order to transpose > Testing scales tests all of these things I don't see how testing scales tests knowing the sharps and flats really. If you're playing all the (major) scales on a string instrument, it's all about starting on the right note, and then doing the scale pattern: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. On a guitar, half is one fret and whole is two, and you need to know how to jump to the next string if you don't want to just walk the length of the fretboard. I've never played a wind instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in others, and keyboards are setup for c-major, so it takes some practice to get the sense of where the whole and half tones are for other keys, but the example of guitar is not hard. If you can play guitar and have a week to practice it, you should be able to play any major/minor scale on demand. If you can play the scale, you can probably take the time and think the sharps and flats, but that doesn't really mean you know them, IMHO.
  - mbreese 3y ago
    > I've never played a wind instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in others It’s been a while since I played (stopped after college), but yes. Wind instruments really only play in one key. It is really rare to have sheet music in a different key and because of that transposing is not a skill that you really need to be successful. You still learn scales… I played one of the few instruments where you were expected to be able to transpose (F horn with some older music in Eb). Even then, while it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t a common skill. Guitar, string, and piano are an entirely different beast. And that flexibility of scales and keys is probably why you don’t see many wind instruments professionally playing outside of orchestras.
    - ludston 3y ago
      You see wind instruments outside of orchestras all the time though. The main reason for the domination of guitar and piano is economic: you can play more notes at once and therefore have played richer sound with fewer players. You can split the gig money across less people. It really has nothing to do with the number of wind players that can transpose.
- mrob 3y ago
  IMO knowing about sharps and flats is an impediment to transposition. I play alto recorder, and I was very careful to avoid learning any sheet music. Instead I wrote a simple Python script to convert MIDI files to numbers, with 0 representing the lowest note, 1 representing a semitone above it, and so on. I then memorized the fingering for each number. I can transpose in my head just by adding or subtracting. And I practice scales based on the semitone intervals between the degrees of the scale, so I only need to know major/minor/wholetone/pentatonic etc. and just change the starting note. This is more difficult on the standard piano because of the badly designed keyboard, but you can get isomorphic keyboards that let you play all the keys without learning all the sharps and flats.