Notion in the Classroom

[wcreed51]

http://soniccontrol.tv/2013/08/04/notio ... classroom/

[Surfwhammy]

http://soniccontrol.tv/2013/08/04/notion-4-in-the-classroom/

This is a very interesting and detailed article!

Being what according to the article is a "non-traditional" person--at least somewhat, although I read and sight-sing soprano music notation and did this before I switched to "play by ear" mode--I am curious about what "take down" means in the following sentence, quoted from the article:

The first strength is that if they’re playing by ear (often guitarists and bassists) check to see if they’ve learned how to do take downs.

If this is talking about hearing something and then being able to play it either immediately or after a bit of experimenting, then (a) I understand it and (b) it is one of the advantages of the "play by ear" strategy . . .

On the other side of the coin, it can be a disadvantage in the sense that instead of mapping musical phrases to specific music notation, one tends to map musical phrases to songs and the musical groups and singers who did the hit record, where the detailed description of a new song tends to be a series of bits of other songs rather than a single coherent set of music notation, hence is not so universally comprehensible as music notation . . .

Thanks in advance!

P. S. I was a bit surprised to read that there is a rule about not teaching orchestration until the senior year of an undergraduate degree, which I suspected but never really verified one way or the other . . .

If "take down" means what I think it means, then "play by ear" folks also teach themselves orchestration pretty much simultaneously, since the general strategy involves having what colloquially is called a "garage band", where each player learns specific parts "by ear" from studying recordings, typically before the musical group or "garage band" has a practice session, and then during the practice session everyone focuses mostly on orchestration in the sense of determining how best to play songs based on a combination of (a) how well each player learned their respective part and (b) which instruments are available, which obviously is the case when a song has many more instruments than the musical group, in which case the activity probably is more along the lines of arranging, which is another skill one learns early when in "play by ear" mode . . .

In other words, the perspective here in the sound isolation studio is that "play by ear" folks learn first what the "music theory" folks learn last, which I think is the most important stuff . . .

For reference, I was mostly "music theory" until junior high school, at which time I discovered "Walk Don't Run" (The Ventures) and switched to "play by ear", but I always did a bit of "music theory", since it is handy at times in the "play by ear" universe, and it also is fascinating, which is the way I discovered Joseph Schillinger's System of Musical Composition (SoMC), which from my perspective is the source of all musical knowledge based on mathematics and acoustic physics in the known universe, even though only perhaps five percent of it makes any sense to me, which is the intriguing aspect of the SoMC, because all of it makes sense in one way or another when you understand the fundamental five percent, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous!