I’m not a professional musician, though I have been paid on occasion for playing, but I have played bass and guitar for about 15 years now. I have played at least once gig every week for the past 10 years. I can’t read music fluently.
I know EGBDF on ledger lines, but it would take me five minutes to go through the process of identifying the notes in one measure. I learned to play by memory and by ear first, so reading music now serves no purpose in what I personally need to do.
My feeling is that if you can’t read fluently, then you can’t count yourself as a reader of music. I know basic French, but I definitely wouldn’t say that I can speak French.
So, I am sure that there are plenty of musicians who know the basics of reading music, but rely more on there ear to play.
A great example would be many bluegrass musicians–some of which are incredible virtuosos on their instruments, yet wouldn’t know the first thing about reading music.
*FWIW, many bass players consider Paul McCartney one fine plucker.
I’m pretty much the same way…I can read and write music, but it’s such a pain in the ass that that’s not the way I do it. I’ll bet many of the “can’t read music” are really just “don’t use music notation”.
I started learning to read music when I took up trumpet. My trumpeting days ended when I got braces, and I didn’t touch an instrument again until I started playing guitar, which I learned initially by ear. As I got more advanced, I sort of started teaching myself music again, and as I branched out to keys, that got a bit more serious. I have to say though, without considerable pressure, the musical autodidact, given what I’ve accomplished myself, and what I’ve seen of others, is not terribly proficient. I can read it and write it, sort of, very slowly, but anything approaching sight-reading? No way. Best I can manage is to strum along with some chord boxes. I can learn to play a song with just the musical notation and no tabs, but it take hours, days, weeks, depending on the piece. My wife, who is formally trained and has a masters in voice, just reads it. You slap a piece of music in front of her, and she either sings it or plays it on the piano, and that’s it, just like you asked her to read the newspaper out loud.
I can’t do that. I’ll never be able to do that. If I’d studied rigorously while young, maybe, but it’s really too late now. Everything I’ve seen of yeoman songwriters and the average performer in the small-time folk and rock clubs is they have, at best, the level of musical literacy I have, which, compared to a trained musician like my wife, may as well be none.
This is your situation, but does not mean that all other untrained musicians fall into that category. I can pick up a new song within a matter of minutes normally, sometimes I can play along from the first note.
Have you ever heard Earl Scruggs play the banjo? He basically revolutionized the way banjo was played, and he started at a very young age with no formal training. Check here for more details.
That is just one of many examples of an untrained musician with incredible skill.
Like RancidYakButterTeaParty, I can learn songs on guitar by ear, often on the first listen. This is attributable, I think, to a decent ear and 35 years of playing covers by ear. I taught myself to read music while I was in my 30s. I’m glad I did, because it helped me teach myself some theory, but it has not been useful in playing pop and rock covers. In over 30 years of playing in bands professionally, the only players I’ve worked with who were good readers were keyboard players, who usually started their musical lives with piano lessons. Most guitar players, bassists and drummers I know started out playing covers by ear. I suspect many pop and rock stars started the same way. I know for sure that Springsteen, the Beatles, the Stones and lots of others did.
I wonder if this old chest nut is true about Elvis Presley. Since he couldn’t read music, he learned his songs from recordings by other singers, and always sang in the same key that the song was originally recorded in.
In the liner notes to The Juliet Letters, Elvis Costello’s collaboration with classical string quartet The Brodsky Quartet, Costello writes that they taught him to read music.
There are probably many ‘acclaimed’ musicians whose careers were jump-started by their capacity for imagination and creativity more than their technical abilities. As their gifts were recognized, I’m sure that some came under the tutelage of technicians who were able to lend their expertise.
I began learning to read notation at age 10, by age 14 I was playing in bar bands and had no use for it. As I got older and began studying theory, it once again became important. However, I still play in a bar band, and there’s very little need for sight-reading as most of the musicians at that level have only a rudimentary understanding of theory and/or notation, and play mostly cover tunes learned by ear.
A friend of mine went to Berklee. He now plays the kind of lite jazz that I can’t stand but keeps Kenny G, and my friend, in work. He can both read and write music.
As others have noted, there are semantics problems with the phrase “reads/writes music”. Sometimes, people say they can’t read when they mean they can’t turn the little golf clubs into notes from sight. Others hear it and think that it means a lack of all knowledge of theory. There is a huge middle ground.
Paul McCartney clearly understood basic theory as early as 1965 – on the first take of “Yesterday” (the well-known recording is the second take with strings added), George Martin is heard asking him what key it’s in. Paul replies that it’s in F, but since he’s tuned his guitar down two half-steps, he’s playing it in G, and proceeds to tell Martin what chords he’s playing: “G, Fm7, B7,…”
There is also a tendency for some to tear down giants – Albert Goldman, in his hatchet job book on John Lennon, implied that since McCartney was once heard referring to Fmaj7 as “the pretty chord”, he didn’t know its real name.
A musician’s goals play a role in what skills they pick up. (I’ve known plenty of classical musicians who couldn’t improvise – this didn’t take away from their capabilities at their strong suit). Sight-reading is pretty much a must for some gigs (e.g., studio musician, string player in an orchestra). It helps out in a lot of others. And in some, it would offer not much of an advantage, to the point that it isn’t worth the time for an adult to learn it. (Elvis doesn’t violate this – a talented guy (obviously), who encountered a project that made it worth his time to learn).
E.g., I play pre-war Delta blues guitar, steel guitar and Dobro. For these styles, tabulature is much more useful than standard notation (although it’s no substitute for learning by ear and watching). Consequently, I can’t sight-read. But I do have a pretty good grasp of theory, which is very important for dealing with multiple tunings. I’ve met some outstanding players of these styles, and the only ones who could sight-read standard notation picked it up playing other instruments.
