How to Get Better at Reading Sheet Music [2/?]

there are two basic parts to learning how to read music first part is understanding the logic of the system you know we have the staff we have the lines and spaces abcdefg all that stuff i covered that last lesson and it took 20 minutes or so and by the end of it you should be in pretty good shape it's really just not that hard the second part though is getting good at reading it the same way you'd pick up a book and you just read the words now that takes years not minutes there are certain things about reading music that make it just really difficult plus it just takes a lot of practice you'll notice that i never write music notation in any of my theory lessons it's because it's so hard to read that most of the time it makes the theory harder to understand rather than making it easier so the plan is for this to play out over two or three videos i had said before i do one i don't know what i was thinking this is way too much stuff for one video but the only goal is to help you understand why reading music is so difficult and show you how to overcome those certain difficulties or give you a way to actually learn it if you don't have the right approach it's easy to end up wasting a lot of time reading music there's people who read music for years and they still suck at it you really need the right approach so we're going to start by comparing music to reading english in case of music we have staff lines and spaces and we get a symbol and we're trying to to attach this symbol to a meaning so we want to know what note this is now think back to being a little kid you know learning your abcs you get a symbol so in this case a letter and you're trying to attach that letter to a sound you're trying to learn that a makes an a sound now at first you have no way of connecting these things you're not born knowing how to read music or how the letters work so you're given some basic memory tricks to kind of get you started and be able to figure out pretty easily what's what so in the case of english you're given something like a is for apple or b is for bat or c is for car so that's your memory trick there in the case of music you learn something like space rhymes with face or the lines are every good boy deserves fudge and that's your memory trick for music now a is for apple is brilliant every good boy deserves fudge is terrible this is one of the main reasons why music is so difficult to read and it all has to do with the way our memory works so for example if i said name every character you can think of in the star wars universe you would not just rattle off a list of every single character in alphabetical order now it's not a challenge i'm sure some of you actually can do that but for most people you would think okay let's see star wars the iconic character is luke skywalker and his nemesis is darth vader and he works for emperor palpatine he killed obi-wan kenobi he worked for qui-gon or trained with kwydon you get the idea spoiler alert in case you've been putting off watching star wars for 40 years but the the point is that you don't think of characters like a computer does like some big index you think of them by linking them your mind links one piece of information with another piece of information which links to another and another and you wind up with this big long web of one little piece of information linking to something far away so if i say star wars you might have to think really hard and go through many links before you get to some obscure little character that was in the cantina on tatooine or whatever but that's how your mind works at least in terms of memory now a is for apple we're trying to link a symbol with a sound and in this case the way we're doing it using this little trick is to link a the symbol with the the idea or the visualization of an apple so there's my beautiful rendition of an apple and then the apple that idea links you to the sound ah pretty sure that's how you spell that so you basically have two links the symbol to the image the image to the sound or maybe not necessarily image but the idea the concept of an apple now in the case of music i have a symbol i have this little every good boy deserves fudge thing that i've learned so i think okay i don't know what lo what note that is so i'll think of every i'm linking the symbol to this word and then i'm linking that word to the next word good and then that links to boy and that links to deserves then the word deserves gets me to the letter d so i wind up with d so that's five links depending on how you count them maybe more which is a hell of a lot more than two but imagine we're trying to figure out a note like this in this case i may have to think well i don't know what it is every good boy deserves fudge this is an f g a b c so i could be going through 10 or 12 links now if time is not a factor say i'm taking a music theory test or something maybe this isn't a huge problem you know i can figure this stuff out eventually but even then i'm spending a lot of brain power having to figure out every note and that can take away from me being able to focus on the test itself but we are trying to read we have to do this in real time so the number of links it takes to get from the symbol to the meaning is the most important thing in the world so we're already off to a bad start with music this is really cumbersome it takes forever to figure out but that's not really even the real problem the goal is one link i want to see a note and i want to know what it means just like i see a letter and i know what sound it makes or a word for example if i say potato you think of a potato there's no system in your head you don't have to figure out what a potato is you have a direct link from the word potato to the idea of a potato that's why i can talk to you in real time and you can understand in real time because every word i say is linked directly to a definition so that's the direct link that's what we're ultimately after now in general the more steps it takes to go from the symbol to the meaning the harder it is to establish that direct link by the time i've sat here and counted my way around and figured it out i'm not really focusing on the original symbol and the actual meaning anymore there's way too much other clutter happening so a is for apple transitions into the direct link really well for two reasons the first is that there's only two links and in general it's just way easier to connect these two things if there's less stuff happening in between but the second part is that i'm tying this symbol to something very memorable i'm tying it to the image of an apple this tangible thing that i can feel and taste and smell and all that stuff it's the kind of thing that just sticks in your memory really well now every good boy deserves fudge it's memorable i mean it's easy to remember when you're first told that it's visual you can picture it but it doesn't really help associate with this symbol directly it's not helping me tie this to this it's using this very roundabout way of getting there i'm having to count through other stuff and i'm using that same image or visual for every single line or or something else for every space so it just doesn't work the same way that this does so you get the idea the way we learn music sucks so what do you do well learn music the same way you learn your abcs so let me clear this off and i'll show you what i mean so say i want to learn the note c rather than think okay it's on a space space rhymes with face f a c e rather than that garbage try to associate this note with a car picture a little car c is for car now this gives us the two links that we had with the a is for apple rather than the three or four or however many we'd have using the other stuff now it's not quite the same as a is for apple with the alphabet you have these nice these nice symbols like a b c and they all look different it's you don't tend to mix them up but for music everything pretty much looks the same so you have to really go out of your way to engage your mind with the actual line or the space that it's on try to picture yourself in the car imagine looking down and seeing the two empty spaces underneath you imagine reaching up and feeling the empty space over your head do whatever you need to do to build a strong visualization between this space the idea of a car and the note c now let's say for this space up here right above the staff and this is a g maybe you picture gasoline picture this little like pool of gas kind of dripping down through the lines and spaces or on the bottom this is an f picture fire or something like the basement fire spreading up through all the lines and spaces now i'm not going to do all these for you i know my drawing skills are pretty breathtaking but it's actually better if you do all of this like sit here and try to come up with something and come up with a visual and try to make it really strong and start to build that that little two-step association between a note and a visual now if you think this is kind of weird um like yeah this is sort of silly this doesn't really feel like the the right way to do it um go pick up a memory book moonwalking with einstein is one that i recommend but there's there's plenty of others go look up the major system or the dominic system look at how i mean there's there's people who compete in memory competitions one guy like learned a 500 digit number in five minutes or something like that all of that stuff all the memory stuff involves exactly this it's building strong visualizations which is something your mind can really grab onto and remember and then it involves linking one thing to another so this is i promise you the right approach and these little things as silly as they seem they go away pretty quickly just like the a is for apple thing does it very nicely transitions into the direct link where you see this space and you know that it's a c and nothing else actually happens in your head now there's another method you should know about that kind of helps with all of this and it's called spaced repetition so obviously if you're going to learn something and especially when you're trying to build that direct link you need to repeat it and like continuously revisit that but you have to be very careful with repetition you'll see sometimes like a teacher will tell a student like oh you write this word over and over something like that that's almost completely useless because it just holds something in your short-term memory here's an example imagine that you're on the phone with somebody and they tell you a phone number and you've probably done this they tell you the number and you sit there and you try to remember it and you like repeat it over and over and you eight seven one two three one eight seven one two three one you hang up keep repeating it eight seven one two three one and you dial into the dialer and you make the call and then two or three minutes later that number is 100 gone it's not there anymore because you sitting there repeating it over and over you're not building any kind of long-term memory you're just holding it in short-term memory so spaced repetition part of the idea is to deal with that so the way it works is you have it's essentially like a card system so like flash cards um so you have the thing on the front the answer on the back and what you would do is you see the flash card and if you know it you set it aside if you don't know it it goes back into the deck and you sit there and like essentially weed out everything that you know really well and you don't see that again for a while anything you don't know you're going to see it again soon but not immediately it keeps it outside of that short-term memory now usually this is a piece of software not necessarily using your own cards and there's there's like some complicated rules on how long you delay a card and if you if you know it the second time you see it you delay it for even longer but usually use a piece of software to do this so anki is what i've used a-n-k-i it's free if you download it on a desktop i think if you get it on your phone it costs money and you would download a deck that somebody's created or you can create your own and it just kind of handles this for you the main point though is that it it causes you to have to to remember and focus on something once it's outside of your short term memory where you're you're actually addressing that deeper like committing it to long-term memory link and it helps you focus on the parts that you have trouble with not the stuff that you already know so that that stuff gets kind of pushed off until much later and you can start with like 10 cards you know on the first day work on those and you would build up your visualizations focus on that and then the next day you'd add in some more and you'd keep going through them like that the point though if you use that or not whether you're just reading music and practicing that way you have to be very careful about how you remember a note you can cheat i mean once you understand the basics any given note you can figure out by counting through or using the little memory tricks but if you're trying to learn this you have to force yourself not to do that unless you simply haven't built a visualization or you simply can't remember you want to force yourself to use at most two links to get from the symbol to the meaning or the note to what it actually means and you're trying to transition into the direct link where you're not using that at all so if you do the flash cards or you're working on sheet music just be very diligent that you're doing it right if you feel like this is a lot um like ugh it's gonna be exhausting having to come up with everything and build a visualization don't be a baby i mean there's 26 letters in the alphabet you learned that as a little kid you know there's only five lines and four spaces on the staff so that's only nine things you could go up to you know three ledger lines up and below and it's still less things to remember than you when you learned your alphabet so it really is not that hard and it saves you a ridiculous amount of time in the long run like i said this is i'm very convinced the right way to approach learning now this is just a first step though obviously there's more to reading music than this and the same way that there's more to reading english than just learning what sounds the letters make you have to assemble notes into patterns and phrases in the same way that you assemble letters into words and phrases but anyway that stuff for a net for the next video for now your main first goal is to start establishing the direct link from a note to its meaning you can't really get anywhere else without doing that now one final thing not everyone needs to be good and reading music depends on your goals depends on your instrument depends on the style you want to get into and i've done i've done videos on how to figure that out you know i've been comparing music to english and people like to talk about music as a language like oh you playing music is like speaking it and you have to learn how to read and write it there are some parallels between music and language and maybe we'll do a kind of a philosophy video on that at some point but for now they're totally different music is not a language most musicians need to learn to read and write it to some degree but you don't really have to be super good at it there's this misconception that when you sit down to learn a piece you should be able to sight read it all the way through but most of the time when you're sight reading something it's because somebody's giving you a sight reading test you know most music is that you're actually going to sit there and learn is way too difficult to even play the first time you have to practice it for weeks so there's no way you can sight read it likely you're going to wind up memorizing it either completely where you play without the music at all or partially where you have a lot of it memorized and you're relying on the music in front of you for some small things getting good at reading music makes the learning process much faster and much easier and usually a lot more pleasant and it can let you rely more on your reading skills if you do have the music in front of you you don't necessarily have to memorize quite as much you should work on reading music because it makes your life as a musician way easier the learning process is simpler and easier and you don't have to memorize as much although in general you should be memorizing a lot but even if you suck at reading that should not prevent you from learning good music don't don't mix these up in your head being a good reader is something you can work on in parallel to working on learning difficult music and being a good player all right more to come that is not it this is just where you start when it comes to learning to read well but we'll deal with the other stuff in later lessons i have a patreon if you want to help support but otherwise that's all for now see you in the next one

Channel: Michael New

Views: 74,870

Keywords: sheet music, read music, music lesson, reading sheet music, read quickly, play music fast

Id: QRWMz0P-ebA

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017