Lord Larehip

The dirty, little secret of pop music is that is dependent on arrangers. When you listen to Paul McCartney or David Bowie or Prince and you're thinking, "This guy was a genius to think of all this!" He actually didn't. The guy who thought of it was an arranger--in this case, a highly skilled theoretician/composer/musician named Clare Fischer. Fischer was a Detroit-area jazz and classical artist who got into arranging as a way of making money. He also arranged for highly skilled musicians as Dizzy Gillespie and he was Herbie Hancock's musical hero. When these guys wrote a song, they would play it for Fischer and would tell him, "I want a sax solo here" or "I need string orchestration here." And Fischer would write it and assemble the musicians he wanted to play on it. Sometimes they handed him bare skeletons of songs and let him do his thing to put flesh on them and give them life. By rights, he deserved co-writing credits on many of these songs.

All this stuff about "The Beatles couldn't read and they were great" is all well and good but the Beatles also had George Martin who knew his music theory behind them producing and arranging their material and they knew they could do without him and kept him for the entire run of the band's existence. There never would have been an "Eleanor Rigby" without skilled writers and readers to get those strings right--that wasn't done by ear or by people making fortuitous mistakes.

In the days before recording, music couldn't be transmitted or preserved without someone to write it down and someone else to read and play it and it really hasn't changed. Music is ultimately dependent on readers, writers and theoreticians. They carry the torch for everyone else. Without them behind the scenes, what's up front sounds mediocre and amateurish. I once was sitting with a bunch of skilled folk musicians--all skilled readers--and one's birthday was that day. When it was revealed, they broke into "Happy Birthday" which they spontaneously sang in perfect harmony. It's in their blood. It demonstrates the difference between real musicians and everyone else.

Maybe that's why so much of pop has turned to crap. Less and less skilled people in the business so that even ones with good ideas can't communicate them effectively and have to settle for substandard pap. Just give it a hip-hop beat and maybe no one will notice how bad it really is. And the sad thing is, most people don't anymore.

EPOCH6

I got carried away, especially with the shots fired at jazz, I was overly cynical there and came across as pretty ignorant. I agree with everything you're saying, and I'm not trying to discredit the significance of musical theory or its utility in writing, the general consensus we've all been agreeing upon in this thread is that both theoretical training and improvisational skill / self-learning are crucial in writing excellent creative music. I'm only concerned that musicians who have only experienced rigid classical training, being relentlessly coached to play from the sheet, won't develop the improvisational skills that are so helpful in writing music with strong creative personality and identity. Coming from a rock and blues background I've become so attracted to the idea of writing with a sort of organised chaos approach. I've always found the flexibility of having four or five members or whatever in the same room together, each with a reasonably solid foundational knowledge of music theory, sporadically trading off ideas with each other, improvising as they go, copy/pasting and altering each other's ideas together and letting the structure of the track form naturally over the course of the writing session. I believe that is a healthier environment for encouraging creativity than a composer writing a song and having his or her ensemble of whatever population learn it from the sheet. Obviously the well trained engineer with a strong professional background in structural engineering is going to build a more sophisticated, complex, and safe bridge, but it's the eccentric engineer who builds the florescent green bridge with swing sets hanging from the underside and trees planted upon each pillar who's bridge will be remembered.

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Lord Larehip

You have to remember, though, that there's always money involved. If you're hired to design a bridge, you design it the way they want it designed and you do it within the budget constraints they hand you. Good luck getting someone to pay for a fluorescent green bridge with swings. In classical music back in the day, it was no different. As a composer, you had to find a patron--some king or duke or prince--who hired you to compose and you composed what he told you to compose because he was paying your bills. And if he didn't like what you did, he trashed it and that was that. If he said to remove the love song from the opera he commissioned and you felt it was the very centerpiece of the thing--too bad--you took it out because he was paying for it. Maybe future generations would have agreed with you but they'll never hear it and that might cause some to even say you weren't all that great but it wasn't your call. You did what you were paid to do.

You take that bass I had commissioned if you saw that thread I posted--the guy who built it loved doing it because I gave him the chance to really stretch his creativity. But I also had to pay for it. I paid substantially more than a normal bass would have cost (and they ain't cheap). People might look at most of his basses and say there is nothing remarkable about them--they sound good but the designs were pretty generic. But that's not his fault, he designed what he was commissioned to design because his clients were not willing to pay for extra. But my bass would show those people they were wrong about him. If I had gone to someone else, they would have rated that person as superior to my luthier but that's not necessarily the case--it's more dependent on who the benefactors are. Lots of factors involved.

To show you how good some of these guys in the music biz are, here is a Bernard Hermann score for the first Twilight Zone episode. The thing is, this is not the original music but a later recreation as the original score is lost. But you can't tell the difference, it sounds exactly same. The director used Hermann's original charts, sheet music and notes to recreate it (I have it on CD and it's all explained in the liner notes). That's way more than I can do. I even know musical directors from colleges in the area who couldn't do it and they are WAY more skilled than I am. Just shows you how good some of these people are.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaBDx7S5pao

Chula Vista

^^^^

Beautiful piece of music.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Zack

The thing is, most self-taught musicians just plod along playing three-chord strumming guitar, or pounding out bland keyboard arrangements. Most trained musicians plod along playing more complicated sheet music and composing more complicated yet derivative music.

Creativity is something which is poorly understood, and THAT is the difference you are referring to.

Also, modern classical training is going to so VASTLY increase what you can do with your instrument(s) that in whatever style you choose, you will have the physical adeptness with your instrument to make it REALLY sing whatever you want it to, regardless of whether that's Renaissance chamber music, Jazz, Country, or Avante-Garde Neo-classicism.

Therein is the downside. The more serious and widely-versed the musicians you want to play with are, the more language they have. That's basically what most music theory is, unless you are really composing. It's a language. If you can identify chords and keys and scales and rhythms, you're good in most pop-oriented genres, because you can actually TALK to the other musicians about what you're doing or wanting to do. For more complex genres, more complex lingo is needed.

Not to know theory or read music at all and to try to play in professional settings with professional, well-rounded musicians, would be like being on Michelangelo's team painting the Sistine Chapel and not knowing anything about perspective, or the names of colours. You might be great, but you wouldn't he able to communicate to you what to do, and you wouldn't be able to communicate back with input.

Modality is usually only discussed in the West in Jazz and in classical music. If you're in classical music, you DO know about modes, and you DO compose with them in mind constantly.

And you cannot, simply CANNOT play any jazz from the past hundred years without a strong mastery of at LEAST the seven diatonic modes, but in most cases at a minimum also the modes of melodic minor, harmonic minor, diminished/altered scales, and hopefully a few other interesting ones as well. It's just such a basic part of jazz. You also need to be familiar with the corresponding extended chords that these modes reference, with a ton of varieties of each of these many, many chords, with how these chords tend to progress.

On top of that, you should probably be able to transpose all of that crap in your head on the fly. That requires training. A. Lot. Of. Training.

I have met jazz musicians who couldn't read music, but only a very few, and they were still top-of-the game when it came to applied theory. Also, they could slowly pick their way through sheet music, when I say the couldn't read, I mean they couldn't read fluently. It's like that kid in middle school who would spend twenty minutes agonizingly sounding out a page of in class reading.

But yeah, if you want to play pop-based or folk-based genres, and you don't want to get into arranging or producing and just leave that to others, you don't need theory.

If you want to get into any more complex genres, you CAN do it without theory, but not as well, and even in the lower rungs, you'll be missing a leg, trying to keep up with people who have both.

Plus, if you're trying to play with other people, it's severely limiting. I had a performance a while back that I was trying to find a stand-in guitarist for. I approached a guy I knew, who was EXTREMELY talented, on of the best jazz guys in my area. He said yes enthusiastically, and I was thrilled. Turned out he couldn't read music, so he couldn't learn any of the charts in time, and I would have had to have made him a recording of each one to go home and study. It just wasn't possible, so I settled for an inferior guitarist who COULD read, who could speak the language, because she could actually learn the material.

I felt like a jerk, but the guy was totally understanding. He got that i wanted him in, but he actually came to me and said, "Hey, I've been trying, but I'm just not going to be able to do it in time."

Early in his life, yeah. But then he got the riverboat gig, learned to read music, and was pretty versed in theory by the time he left his teens. By the time any of his recordings were made, he was as much a theory guys as the rest of them.

I've seen a bunch of photocopies of his original manuscripts. The guy had absolutely HORRIBLE penmanship, but once you deciphered his chicken scratch, he was definitely writing with a strong theory base.

You need that drive either way. I've had students, and seen students with and without that drive. Those with get great. Those without never do. In my experience, and in my general knowledge, formal music education doesn't drag you along, trying to get you to succeed. It says, "Here's a ****ton of work you're going to need to do, and be proficient at doing. I don't care if you keep up, but if you don't then get out."

The school I went to has a reputation as the hippest place to learn music from real musicians, rather than college profs in this area. (Though it is a college and they are Profs with lame ol' PhDs and all... Oh well...)

Anyway, Freshman class is usually only 60-70 students. Most of them end up failing their jury at the end of the year and being required to repeat freshman year or drop out. A few do it several times.

Sophomore year is generally more like 15-20 students. Maybe two thirds of those pass their Jury and make it to Junior year.

Junior year is about 10 students, most years.

My graduating class was 4 students. 3 of them actually graduated. (I was the loser who dropped out!)

Those teachers aren't dragging kids along, they're providing music education for anyone who can keep up. They'll tell you what to study, but they aren't going to follow you home to make you do it, and they aren't going to check in when you skip out on class or lessons.

Difference being, a well trained musician can add that character intentionally. They don't have to screw up to make something unusual. I had nearly an entire semester where my private instructor didn't teach me anything, he would just come in, turn on a record, and tell me to "play stuff, babe," and then have me drag the tempo until I fell just a little behind the beat, and have me stay there, or play at faster and faster tempos until I was ending phrases a bar early, and then slowly drop it back. Or play and make sure I never started a phrase and ended a phrase in the same places in the measure. Or never play the tonic note. Or only play tonic harmonies over all the chords, and to play them with enough surety and creativity to make them work.

My point is, most people think music education is learning to name notes and read music and identify chords and write Bach chorals.

That's what you need to learn BEFORE you get to school. Music education assumes you already have a basic understanding and some technical ability for them to work with. They're not giving lessons on how to play an instrument, they're giving lessons on how to be a musician.

And there's a BIG difference between someone who can play an instrument and a musician. And I don't mean that the difference is theory and music reading, either...

All the Beatles did especially earlier on, basically, was come up with some chords, lrics, and melody, esentially song writing. George Martin came up with all the cool innovative stuff, the orchestrations, the production, those fancy hamronies ABOVE the melody, etc; it was all him pulling from his trainging in Classical Composition.

I know he's always called the "fifth" Beatle, but he really was more like the first Beatle. Honestly, he thought the Beatles were boring and pretty unskilled, but he liked their voices. George Martin WAS the Beatles, and I'm pretty sure that without him, no one would ever have known who they were.

Their break-out songs weren't even their own, they were tracks Martin made them do. Not saying that the intense training outweighed the complete lack of training, but it seemed to be what the people of the world wanted to hear.

That's a common viewpoint, but not a particularly worrisome one, I think. Classical music training is not necessarily playing Bach and Brahms and Beethoven. It can be, but "Classical" Music in the past 150 years or so, has become the strangest, most outside the box "genre" there is, especially since the Post-WWII era...

The "rigid" classical training (which granted, I do not have) is only in the technical sense nowadays. Students learn speed, they learn precision, they learn the physical athletic ability to play absolutely ANYTHING they want to play. Most contemporary classical musicians can and do play other stuff, too. They don't all go home and mindlessly hone the same four-bar passage to perfection every night. A lot of them go home and jam out with their neighborhood Blues buddies. They just do it with extreme prowess.

Also, Improvisation (Excuse me *couch,* adopt snobby face, "aleatoric music" or "indeterminism") has been a huge, famous part of Classical music for almost as long as it's been part of jazz.

Also also, until about 200 years ago, improvisation was expected of ALL classical musicians, and composers actually wrote stuff expecting performers to improvise on it.

Also Also Also, a huge amount of formal training is actually in Jazz, or even rock, pop, blues, folk, etc.

In fact, Folk musics, (from which blues and all modern varieties of rock, pop, EDM, whatever descend), in a technical sense, is music which is handed down with extremely rigid strictures of preservation, and "doing it exactly like it's always been done," whereas Classical music has for hundreds of years been about pushing boundaries and progressing and trying out new and bizarre things. A lot of what sounds stuffy now was the hippest, most outrageous music, in it's day. And most classical music of the past 120 years, the general public never even hears...

Even today, the few blues formats and song structures are so, so much more limiting than even the stuffiest of classical or jazz forms.

Very true, but the untrained eccentric engineers bridge might be remembered because it collapsed in under a month, whereas the trained eccentric engineer builds that crazy-*** bridge, but knows how to do it both with MORE innovation, because he knows more about what's already been done, AND his bridge will last, so that not only is it famous and remembered 200 years later, but people still drive across it.

(The metaphor being that eccentric but sloppy music might make a splash, but eccentric but schooled music makes a splash that people still listen to decades or centuries later.)

---------------------------------

Well there we go, I've always been a "don't go to music school, it's pointless and will indebt you for life" kind of guy, and this thread has got me defending formal education.

That said, get a structured music education, but get it through skilled private instructors, and the recommended books and recordings from them and other musicians you know, don't pay $20,000-200,000 for the piece of paper.

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The Passage of... ------- (Classical Synth)
Danceables ------- (Dance Synth with a Latin Flair)
Meanderings ------- (Classical Synth)
Raven ------- (Rock Opera)

Chula Vista

Whoa.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

CoNtrivedNiHilism

Does this Zack guy know what they're saying, I mean are they the real deal, all knowledgeable and such, or is this just some person that likes to be long winded and really doesn't know what they're talking about?

Don't get upset now, Zack. That's just me attempting to be playful, or poke fun with no ill intent meant. I tried reading all that, but I couldn't keep my focus long enough. I am up all night, you see, and so this time of morning, I'm not too good at sticking with anything for...oh look, it's raining again.

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Rexx Shredd

I have been avoiding this thread like the plague....My credentials are simple: I am a (so far) lifetime working musician - as in, its my job

First and foremost is understanding what the OP is asking -- The thread title is decieving because Post 1 is really asking about the differences between reading music (the "schooled" musician) and playing by ear (the "street" musician)...It is NOT about self-taught vs taught.....I can both play by ear AND read music AND I know music theory out the wazoo BUT I am all self-taught. Get it?

One of the biggest differences is the approach of each discipline....Players who learned by reading usually approach music LINEAR, as in they are taught to follow the sheet in front of them from start to finish. They tend to be more accurate as sheet players follow a defined score and have the added advantage of all playing with each other accurately with minimal (or no) rehearsal if all competent readers following the same score....but, as musicians, they learned music and how to play their instruments with a LINEAR mindset

Conversely, Ear players tend to learn music MODULAR, as in they learn the sections as individual parts (intro, verse, bridge,chorus,etc) and assemble the music to their liking, sometimes exactly like the original but often not as to suit their own needs. Because ears can vary from person to person, they have a higher susceptibility to play inaccurate but they have advantages that pro veteran players learn over time, such as telegraphing chord changes (feeling where the next chord is by how the music sounds) and being able to improv or change impromptu...They learn to play with other players by body language, eye contact, and basic "heads-up ball". To take that one-step further, players that can NOT read BUT know music theory have the Nashville Numbering System at their disposal, which allow ear players to follow quick charts like readers using the Major Scale as a "road map" (Ionian, although I have had charts where "7" is the flatted 7 a la Mixolydian is used) to improv parts together quickly and efficiently like readers... It is also possible to follow many Real Book-style charts knowing theory alone

Here is where it gets screwy: Ear players cant play in a pit orchestra for the reasons stated above: a specific score is written for whatever is going on stage and must be performed with accuracy. This is why sheet music players get some of the better paying gigs - gigs like Disney have a pre-requisite to be able to sight read

But where many readers fall apart on is the ability to jam - to be able to deliver the correct feel into a situation with no music in front of them -- I have seen some incredible sheet players fall apart like a Dollar Store toy at a Blues Jam -- and cant even get through a simple I - IV - V blues shuffle

...but the biggest issue is mainly the LINEAR vs MODULAR way of thinking. A case in point happened during Christmas 2013 when the showband I was playing in was doing a very well paying Corporate Christmas party, and hired on a horn section that we normally do not use....We were playing "Shining Star" by Earth, Wind, and Fire and the guitarist, who was singing the song, saw that we had a full dancefloor so he gave the international sign to keep it going (finger whirling in the air). The guitarist, keyboard player, myself (bass), and drummer all took the cue (eye-contact mentioned above) and went back to the verse. However, the horn players, following their sheet music and completely oblivious to the fact that we went back to the verse, just kept reading their sheet music, and drove straight (LINEAR, remember?) off the cliff, doing all the outro parts without paying attention to the guitarist - or hearing the rest of the band for that matter - go back to the first verse

The moral of this story is the answer: do BOTH or at least have a good working knowlege of both-- thats how I have worked for so long. Many of the names thrown around in this thread in previous posts to support someone's argument are guys that can do BOTH. If you are a reader, take the sheet music away and go to a blues jam. Talk to working musicians that play by ear and understand their philosophies and trade secrets. If you are an ear player, teach yourself how to read a little but at the very least- and I cant stress this enough: LEARN MUSIC THEORY and Chord Construction - Not only will you discover an amazing bag of new chops and your old ones will make better sense, but you will also be able to follow Nashville Numbers and many Real Book-style charts

Elvis Presley sometimes never did a song live the same way twice -- same for James Brown, Tom Jones, SRV, and many many others....You, as a musician had to be able to know the parts of a song, be able to execute them with precision (LINEAR), but also be able to be flexible enough to anticipate any impromptu changes by Elvis or James Brown or whoever if they feel the moment to take it somewhere else (MODULAR)

hope this helps

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OK :)

URBAN SHOKKER -- Old School P-Funk Style FUNK -- out NOW on Carbon 12 Records

Zack

I'm stupidly long-winded in conversation. Get some alcohol in me, and then ask me a nice, convoluted question, and the conversation takes care of itself for the next thirty minutes, minimum. It's a vice, I apologize!

Regarding what I talk about, I know some stuff, I don't know most stuff, I dunno, I guess google what I write and see how many facts check out, and see how much rings true to your own experiences and understanding?

But mostly I'm just incapable of being succinct.

Ain't been pissed of by strangers on the interwebs yet, ain't planning to be. Actually, I think I've been pissed maybe three times in my brief life? I'm definitely a slow burn kind of guy...

Honestly, re-reading the first post, he mentions reading in passing, almost by way of an example of the "schooled" musician, and then uses creativity and the trained ear as examples of skills gained by self-teaching, and he definitely begins by explaining a bit about reading and learning aurally, however, the title and the final, clearly worded question asks:

"What are your stories and opinions of self taught musicians in contrast with non-self taught?"

That makes me think the OP was really asking generally about stories and opinions on self-taught versus taught by others, and merely using reading and creativity and aural as examples. The OP jumps back in later talking about theory, analysis, etc. I think his/her emphasis of reading is most likely because (s)he is new to the whole shebang, and notation is what (s)he has mainly experienced.

The thing that still strikes me as odd, is how many people seem to associate self-taught with not knowing anything about theory or notation, and formal study with lack of improvisation and a huge reliance on notation, and apparently a complete disinterest in exploring music on their own. Maybe in some cases, but in my area, the people around me who sort of liked music and dabbled in it were not the ones who tried to get some formal education on the subject.

The ones who cared enough to track down teachers or audition for schools were the ones with the real drive to be musicians, and they all wrote their own music, experimented, loved to improv.

Granted, I went to a Jazz and Contemporary music program, so obviously there was a sliiiiight emphasis on improvisation. (Given, I went for the contemporary classical music composition, so I got away with less improv, but hey, ya know...)

I was self-taught for a few years, and was so obsessed, that eventually I decided to draw on local talent, and got a teacher. He taught me a ton of stuff, but I think the only music we ever read through was some Bach. The rest of the time he was teaching me how to pick apart Joe Satriani, Coheed and Cambria, Pain of Salvation, giving me tips on songwriting, helping me harmonize things by ear.

The next guitar teacher I got was actually a prof from the local college, but our high school had a program where you could take one "course" for free per year. Apparently private guitar lessons counted as course, so I got free college private instruction early, weeee! Anyway, that guy was that guy was the one who called me "babe" (as well as "hot dog"???) and made me do all the weird improvisation practice, that I mentioned earlier.

The third private instructor I had was a lot more theory based, but he still almost never broke out anything notated, he just gave me cool systems for experimenting with chord types, bass-melody, bass-chord-melody playing styles, etc.

The last private instructor I had was a guitarist but he taught me in composition. This was the first instructor who had a focus on notated music, after a good 8 years of private and college music education. Also, we did a fair bit experimenting with non-notated Spectral Harmony too, in Pure Data, a graphical audio coding program.

So yeah, that's my stupidly long-winded way of saying that getting someone to help you explore music doesn't have to mean Mrs. Badcrumble sits you down at the keyboard and forces you to learn all of the Well-Tempered Clavier. I suppose it CAN, but not in my experience...

__________________
The Passage of... ------- (Classical Synth)
Danceables ------- (Dance Synth with a Latin Flair)
Meanderings ------- (Classical Synth)
Raven ------- (Rock Opera)

CoNtrivedNiHilism

Haha, glad you saw the humor in my post and didn't take offense.

I'm a bit long winded myself at times, and that's without alcohol, by the way. And it's not like I don't agree with some of what you say, you do make sense. But I just can't read all of that post of yours that you wrote up.

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