Posted by Rick Denney on August 14, 2002 at 21:39:01:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Bflat trumpet to BBflat Tuba? posted by Mary Ann (long) on August 14, 2002 at 11:40:56:
I can't figure out how what you describe is any different than what I do. I certainly know all the overtone patterns and what the different fingerings do, and when I learned F tuba I applied all that knowledge to the process. But processing knowledge is too slow--I had to get to the point where a dot on a page was a pitch and a set of button presses in my mind. As you say, that takes a while.
The recognition of the note is relationship of where the notehead appears in relation to the lines. Different clefs have different relationships. Some people can just say, "This clef has a C on the middle line" and everything else translates from there intuitively. That is not the case with me at all. Each new clef is a new process of memorizing the relationships so that they don't have to be derived on the fly. I hate music written in divisi lines where the lower part fills densely packed ledger lines, because I lose track of where I am in the clef if I'm playing the upper part.
I do read each clef in its concert pitch, as a piano player would. I can therefore name the concert-pitch notes without any trouble, and I know what buttons to press to get those notes. Again, this is too much to do when reading music, at least for me. I don't have anything resembling absolute pitch, and can easily be off by a large fraction of an octave if I haven't carefully warmed up my pitch sense along with my embouchure. But I have just enough sense of absolute pitch so that I often have trouble playing a CC tuba after playing a BBb tuba. They are too close and I keep trying to find the pitch I expect to hear. The F tuba is different enough so that this isn't a problem. I treated it as a different instrument.
I suspect that your music reading skills are honed well beyond what you consider your tuba-playing skills, but with most folks it keeps pace.
Is reading chord patterns on the piano enough? That seems the same as reading individual notes in a tuba part. It seems to me that one had to see a progression of chords to be able to reading basic stuff at sight, and the really good piano sight-readers are able to read and follow individual voices simultaneously. But even if it is as you say, that sort of reading is orthogonal (literally) to reading a single voice, and my way of describing it is multidimensional by comparison. My brain can't fathom it, and I suspect the major problem is that I'm missing the simplifying key and making it hard on myself. No matter--not being able to read the music aceptably well is only one of many tolerated (by me) weaknesses in my piano playing.
Rick "trying to express cognitive process poorly understood" Denney