Notes or Intervals

BigLicks67

Roland said:

There's a lot of truth in the idea, even if guitarists do use it as an excuse. I once met one of the Abbey Road engineers who worked at the Menhuin Grappelli session. He told the story of the two of them getting their violins out of the cases. Menhuin tuned up, and played a classical piece. Grappelli improvised a variation of it, and then tuned up. Menhuin asked where he could get the sheet music for the variation. It became clear that not only could Grappelli not write it down, but that he could not even remember what he had played. When he showed what he might have played Menhuin, who was getting quite old, could not remember it. Nevertheless they produced an interesting LP, Menhuin reading from scores, and Grappelli playing whatever came into his head.

I heard this same story but in the version I was told - Menhuin was replaced by Segovia and Grappelli became Reinhardt and there was no album involved.

Sporky

There's also the variation where it's Vai and the guys from Korn.

PolarityMan

Danny1969 said:

Ideally we would all be able to do both. One thing I do notice is today's tab happy kids have a shit ear for intervals because they aren't working anything out themselves 

I count myself in that group...takes me effing ages to work stuff out.

paul_c2

Danny1969 said:

The conductor keeps the tempo and the dynamics, your on his timing not yours. For a big competition a band will often bring in a big money conductor at £2k a week or more and the difference in the band is immense so you can see it's a whole different bag to playing by your own ear and timing, intonation aside. 

Some of the tempo and time sig  changes in some of the test pieces though are incredibly difficult and seem to make no sense to me but the conductor guides them through it. They can get through it alone but with nothing like the verve and aplomb exibited with a conductor

The £2k conductor could probably phone in sick on the night of a concert, and the band would still play better, because their job is 95% done by the night of the concert. There is a lot of work which goes into coordinating a band to play together by the conductor, which is done in rehearsals by working with the band as a whole, then smaller sections, then one instrument (or even one player alone) to get the phrasing, dynamics, etc right. By the time of the concert, the players know how the conductor wants it played. The thing they do on the night is to give cues to this, and other stuff, basically to make it simpler/easier for the players. But 90% of players would probably remember/know anyway - just be more stressed without the guy at the front making their life easier.

paul_c2

Regarding intervals vs notes, I think its down to how you've learnt the instrument. As an extreme example, if you never learnt to read music and always played numerical tabbed music you could in theory not know most of the notes you're playing, except for obvious stuff like the open strings, 12th fret, or the 5th fret when you tune it etc.

And if you learnt how to read music but concentrated on things like symmetrical patterns on the fretboard rather than traditional scales, played with other guitarists improvising, etc you'd probably be more aware of intervals than the underlying notes - but still know them, if pressed. But if you also learned loads of scales, played with wind/brass instruments, pianists, etc then you'd be much more aware of the notes themselves in addition to the intervals.

Also obviously, if you learned to play a different musical instrument too eg piano or a woodwind/brass, you'd be more aware of notes (yes I know its complicated with transposing - I suppose there's a similar issue where some woodwind players never know what true notes they're playing either!!!)