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Musicians: do you notice your ability to hear and understand music is different depending on the instrument you play? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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I main on fingerstyle guitar, but I find my aural understanding on guitar feels impeded. Now I know music theory and how the fretboard works, but translating it is so damn laborious.

I've played other instruments, and this is what I've noticed about their impact:

  1. Penny whistle. It's mostly in one key. The root will always be the same fingering and the fifth will always be the same fingering. I think this helps with making associations with sound and scale degree, as opposed to more chromatic instruments played in different keys. [Also used a transposing electronic digital instrument to the same effect.]

  2. Clarinet: Having to figure out the fingerings made me painfully aware of key signatures and where the sharps and flats are. On guitar you can smoothly shift up or down a fret without much thought or just play in position, but on clarinet there is often a specific button or button combo you need to get one specific note.

  3. This is the big one: Piano. You do need to bring a little theory into it to know what chords you're playing, but the actual NOTES you are playing are immediately obvious, and since I'm building all these chords myself, I know exactly where the third is and how to lower it to make a major a minor, or where to add a major seventh, so I can also very quickly ask myself, "What if went with a minor chord here instead" and almost instantly be able to play it. On guitar, there's a tendency to just memorize chords as shapes without knowing where the chord tones are because each shape has them in a different configuration (which is why eyes-closed arpeggio exercises are absolutely vital for guitarists).

[On piano it's also easier to play the same inversions over and over again, which might help you learn the sound. You can play a whole song with Root-3rd-Fifth if you want, but on guitar, the common chord shapes are a kaleidoscope of chord tones. For instance, common chord tones on root chords:

C: O-R-3-5-R-3
F: R-5-R-3-5-R
G: R-3-5-R-3-R
]

I'm curious about violin, too, because I'm betting needing to intonation just right really sharpens your ear.

What's your experience?

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[–] 3 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

I’m a Trumpet player at heart but it shines in my vocal deliveries more often than not. I rap and I tend to get more Danny Brown with a microphone than say El-P. Danny was a Trumpet like me and El-P played sax. Love the prior’s lyrics more but Danny has energy.

I write on a keyboard and a Push 3 by Ableton. I can’t play keys great, my grandfather (abusive) broken three of 5 fingers so I had a rough time playing Trumpet. I actually had my right hand operated on which caused complete relearning of how to use my fingers again during my time playing Trumpet and keys. My left hand became a cheat and I obviously can get bass lines down even though I feel I can’t. I write melodies left handed still though.

The Push helps as it’s a Linnstrument with a keyboard layout from left to right and a guitar layout in a 4x8 matrix. It’s also more closely together so my badly healed broken fingers can jam on a melody and play easily without breaking my hands. The MPE makes it feel closer to a stringed instrument as well so I tend to play it closer to a guitar.

In total, all instruments influence how we play but we also influence the instruments. Black Sabbath’s guitar player made metal because he couldn’t play after loosing his finger tips but used plastic to continue playing, the looser strings made metal a genre but also made the plastic tips of his fingers stay on. J Dilla turned off Quantization on his MPC and gave hip hop GROOVE. So they do influence us but we influence them as we figure out how to get the sound we like.

Edit: Came to say, I play the Push in a C Major layout since it looks like a keyboard and I follow it like I would any other instrument. I know it can Scale lock but I don’t like doing that to a device I see as an instrument.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 20 hours ago

    Yes, Trumpet seems like an amazing tool to tune your ear because each button combo give your a harmonic series and you have to know what your note sounds like. It's kind of if you were going to purposely design an instrument to discourage playing by sight and rote, it would be a trumpet. You're also going to have that harmonic series embedded in your brain eventually.

    And you can add Django Reinhardt to your list of disabled guitar legends. I think some of his fingers fused in a fire and he's like, "fucking awesome, now I can bend the shit out these strings" and not worry about chords.

    I'll definitely look into the Push 3. I'm a pretty pure instrumentalist, that is to say I don't want to "mix" any music, I want to play everything, but I might be OK with live-recording a loop.

    I love piano, but the ubiquity of the piano keyboard depresses me. I played a chromatic button accordion and absolutely loved having all those little keys right next to each other and the relations between all the buttons being so static. Basically there are three rows of buttons, so there are really only three positions for a major scale, depending on which of those buttons you start on. You could easily transpose up or down a minor third just by shifting your fingers....

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