It's been almost 25 years since I last played a trombone. I had gotten pretty good (not great) through high school and spent many hours reading and playing music. Eight years of that makes it pretty natural to look at a piece of sheet music and be able to quickly decipher the notes and rhythm. Now that I'm trying to learn the bass guitar, that basic skill definitely takes some time to regain. The rhythmic patterns are pretty straightforward to figure out. But assigning a specific note on the sheet to a particular fingering on the guitar is going much slower than I thought it would. I really have to concentrate and repeat in order to consistently play each line. Now luckily most bass lines in rock music are pretty repetitive so a lot of it is just building up muscle memory.
If you play guitar or bass already then you are aware that reading Tablature (tabs) music can be much easier to learn the notes of a song. Tabs are basically just a way of representing notes by putting a fret number on a line for each guitar string. Like this:
The Studybass.net site offers a good overview of the pros and cons of Standard musical notation vs. bass tab notation. Basically, if I want to be able to play a wide variety of music and to potentially create my own music then I definitely need to be able to read traditional sheet music. Luckily I have the background so I just need to keep practicing to get my skills back up.
If you play guitar or bass already then you are aware that reading Tablature (tabs) music can be much easier to learn the notes of a song. Tabs are basically just a way of representing notes by putting a fret number on a line for each guitar string. Like this:
The Studybass.net site offers a good overview of the pros and cons of Standard musical notation vs. bass tab notation. Basically, if I want to be able to play a wide variety of music and to potentially create my own music then I definitely need to be able to read traditional sheet music. Luckily I have the background so I just need to keep practicing to get my skills back up.