Czarcasm started a thread asking people what one musical instrument they’d want to know how to play. And he specified that it couldn’t be a general category like trombone or guitar.
I’m not a musician so I have to ask - how realistic is that? Can you only know how to play an acoustic guitar and not know how to play an electric guitar? To get more extreme, can you only know how to play a Gibson Les Paul and not know how to play a Fender Telecaster?
Would a person who knows how to play a trumpet have any ability to play a trombone the first time he picked one up? A saxophonist trying a clarinet for the first time? A flutist trying a piccolo for the first time?
Learning on an acoustic guitar means the chord shapes I make are a little bit large for an electric guitar and I’m completely lost when it comes to using the knobs and pedals that come with electrics. My neighbour teaches both and swaps easily between the two.
None of those chord shapes transfer to ukulele.
It would be easier for me to learn electric as I just need to adapt/expand my knowledge base.
It wouldn’t be too hard to learn ukulele as I have some of the physical bases (strumming, finger strength etc) even if I have to learn different chords.
I’ve only played recorder and occarina and it was sort of similar - already had the breath control, just needed to adapt the fingering - easier than learning from scratch but not directy transferrable. It would be harder for me to learn trombone as the breath/mouth shape is very different as well as the slide instead of fingering.
My late Uncle apparently could learn new string instruments very quickly, a combination of perfect pitch (he’d work out the chords by ear) and just a knack for quickly re-mapping his responses to make the new chord shapes automatically.
Slide trombones are difficult to learn because you have to know how to adjust the slide properly; a trumpet player would not have that skill. I remember my old band teacher talking about it; that a trombonist needed a good sense of pitch. He was skeptical of another band leader who tried to teach it by memorizing the position of the arm for each note. In either case, that’s a big hurdle.
IIRC, a saxophone and clarinet has different fingering, but they’re pretty close.
The flute and piccolo have very similar fingering; musicians switch all the time.
You can play trumpet and euphonium or baritone as long as you can figure the embouchure out. I think it would be hard to go from trumpet to tuba, embouchure wise. But the fingerings are the same.
The embouchure for trombone and baritone/euphonium are the same (actually you can use the same mouthpiece) but there’s no way you can know the trombone positions without having learned them specifically. They do not translate to “fingerings.”
I’m a trombonist and I play baritone at Christmas but since I never was trained on the baritone I am not so much playing the baritone with any skill, rather playing the fingerings for each note and applying the same lip positions I learned as a trombonist. So my skills as a trombonist help but they do not translate 100%.
The strings are tuned differently as well; C G E A for a standard uke & EBGDAE for a guitar, so the same shapes would produce different chords anyway. Wouldn’t they? Happy to be educated here.
Correct. They are not the top four strings of a guitar. The chord shapes are completely different. And it had what’s called " re-entrant tuning" which means the highest sounding strings are on the outside, unlike a guitar.
Well, they do, in the sense that if a trombonist uses the same position for two different notes, the baritone player would (or could) use the same fingering for them, and vice-versa. And any valve brass player who stopped to think about it could tell you which fingering corresponds to which numbered position. But that’d only let you plunk out one note at a time, at best: It wouldn’t enable you to sit down and just play.
And switching between trumpet and tuba is hard, because of the different embrasures (I played tuba, and when I attempted a trumpet, it was actually physically painful), but going from tuba to baritone is easy (or probably vice-versa, though I couldn’t speak to that personally). Tuba players can even practice on a baritone, if a tuba isn’t available.
Breath control, meanwhile, is common to almost all wind instruments, but I think that’s probably about the only thing in common between the woodwinds and the brass.
My saxophone knowledge helped me learn clarinet. The concert C major scale uses very similar fingerings on both instruments, although it’s a G scale for alto sax and a C scale on the clarinet.
Same for trumpet, baritone, french horn (I think), and tuba. They all use the exact same fingerings for a concert C scale, although the individual instruments are playing different scales.
Correct, and having googled about the place a bit -
Correct depending on the type of ukulele. If you have a baritone uke, it is indeed DGBE or the top four strings of a guitar.
Wiki [spoiler]Traditional tuning for the soprano ukulele was D6-tuning: A4 D4 F#4 B4, but standard tuning for concert and tenor ukuleles the C6-tuning instead: G4 C4 E4 A4. A good way to remember this is with the phrase “Goats Can Eat Anything”. The G string is tuned an octave higher than might be expected. This is known as reentrant tuning. Some prefer “Low G” tuning on the tenor, with the G in sequence an octave lower. The baritone is usually tuned to D3 G3 B3 E4, which is the same as the highest four strings of the standard 6-string guitar.[citation needed]
Another common tuning for concerts is D-tuning, A4 D4 F#4 B4, one step higher than the G4 C4 E4 A4 tuning. D tuning is said by some to bring out a sweeter tone in some ukuleles, generally smaller ones. This tuning was commonly used during the Hawaiian music boom of the early 20th century, and is often seen in sheet music from this period. D tuning with a low 4th, A3 D4 F#4 A4 is sometimes called “Canadian tuning” after its use in the Canadian school system, mostly on concert or tenor ukuleles.[/spoiler]
From top string to bottom string, ie thickest to thinnest on the guitar, a guitar is EADGBE and the ukelele is typically GCEA. Take away the two top (thickest) strings on the guitar and you’ll see that the ukelele is the bottom four strings of the guitar tuned 5 steps higher. Sure the G is normally tuned an octave higher but that in no way changes what shapes work or don’t work.
If you look at the G chord on the ukelele chord chart you’ll see that it is the same shape as a D chord on a guitar. This means all the guitar chord shapes work on a uke and if you don’t care about your music being transposed you can happily pick up a uke and strum your favourite songs without learning anything new.
Edit: In my original post I said “top four” because that is how I think of them, “top” in terms of musical note. I’ve changed terminology to being physically top to bottom with the instrument being played because I always find guitar string terminology confusing and looked it up. Sorry if that confuses things.
I am an amateur musician, and I don’t understand such limitation. To me a general category would be horns, or strings, or reeds, or fretted. Trombone and guitar are specific instruments. Granted there are variations of them, but no way would I call trombone or guitar a “general category.”
Most electric guitar players imagine they can play bass. They can, but usually very badly. Scales are the same as the thickest four strings on a guitar, but technique is quite different for most styles of music.
Personal experience: I played classical violin for ten years. I play acoustic guitar for pleasure.
Someone let me have a go on their mandolin. It’s tuned like a violin but picked like a guitar. Within five minutes of getting used to a violin left hand with frets, I could play it, and sight-read music for it too, something I can’t do with the guitar. Then I went and got my own. Apart from the chord shapes, I’ve never actually had to learn how to play it.
Yeah pretty much. The chord shapes you know are there they just have different names than you’re used to. There are some minor variations because only having four strings frees up fingers on your fretting hand and the neck is shorter so you can reach frets that you wouldn’t be able to on a guitar. As an example the D chord on the uke chord chart is what I would call an A shape chord from the guitar but they have the 5th fret on the bottom string fretted instead of leaving it open.
When I was a wee tot, I played the clarinet in the school band. I was told that many, if not most, Clarinetists went on to learn the saxophone and vice versa, as these instruments were very similar to each other. FWIW, I never developed an interest in the saxophone.
Clarification: Ukulele is like a guitar, top 4 strings, with a capo on the 5th fret. If you know barre chords at the 5th fret and higher, these patterns translate 100% to the Uke.
My oldest child plays nine instruments, although a few a bit indifferently. Many of them are because learning one instrument translates easily to learning another. Some are just because she has a very good ear.
She started on the piano and had lessons for three years. She now plays mallet percussion in the marching band, things like a xylophone only bigger and with names I can never remember. They are laid out almost exactly like a piano keyboard. Because she learned the mallet percussion she was asked to be the percussionist in a community college musical production’s orchestra pit. She plays Tympani quite well now. She was assigned clarinet in 6th grade band and learned to be competent on it but never loved it. She switched to bassoon (and luckily rents from the school. We can’t afford an instrument that costs the same as a good used car.) She loves bassoon and it’s her favorite, however, it did her no good when she wanted to join the jazz band. For that she needed to learn sax. Because of her earlier experience with clarinet, she plays the baritone sax since it’s in the same key.
She also sings and sometimes can pick out a few chords on a guitar.
All this musical ability comes from her father. Luckily the other children thus far have been more traditional and have stuck to one instrument.
anyway, it seems to be a progressive thing. Learning one instrument gets you closer to learning another. They always seem to lead progressively into each other, which is how I ended up with a daughter who’s a bassoonist who plays tympani drums and the bari sax.
