Crossing over knowledge of musical instruments

Cafe Society
21

From a guitar standpoint:

  • Classical vs. steel-string acoustic vs. electric solidbody vs. archtop jazzbox, etc. - all typically strung and tuned the same way, and basic knowledge of chords, strums, scales, etc. will serve you well across each type. But all of the subtlety of technique could not be more different - the approach to strumming for steel vs. nylon string; how you hold your picking hand and whether you rest the meat of your pick-hand palm on the strings to mute them.

  • Fingerstyle vs. fingerpicking vs. fingerpicks vs. flatpick vs. slide - all are very different and someone good at one may stink at the others. Btw, “fingerpicking” typically means you have a picking pattern you maintain more or less as you change chords; “fingerstyle” means you don’t use a pick, but don’t necessarily pick in a pattern - folks like Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler, for instance, seem to just toss their fingers out there and see what happens :wink: And playing with fingerpicks on your fingers vs. just using your fingers (and some folks use their nails and others just the meat of their fingertips…)

  • Playing the guitar vs. playing the amp and effects - if you are playing an amp seeking a very clean sound, you are playing the guitar and using the amp to…well, amplify that. If you are playing with a lot of distortion, you are “playing the amp” as much as playing the guitar, if not more - Hendrix and Townshend played their amps more than their guitars. And if you use a bunch of effects - don’t get me started. Bottom line, learning out to sound good with a distorted amp and a tone of effects is completely different from playing a clean-sounding guitar.

  • Models - you mention a Les Paul vs. a Telecaster - well, yeah, it can be different enough, depending on what sound you are going for. But a Tele is especially well-suited to country-type chickin pickin and a Les Paul is esp well suited to Sweet Child O’ Mine tubey-sounding lead work. You can use either guitar to play the other style, but it is harder - and so, yeah, learning how to pull the best sounds out of a particular guitar design can be a next order of difficulty. If the guitar has a whammy bar of some sort, you have a whole 'nother level of moving part to learn how to include in your act…

So, yeah, there’s a very wide spectrum of 6-string, guitar-like instruments out there…

22

bump

So I killed this thread? Sorry…

23

I will add to the tuba discussion that it’s not at all uncommon for tuba players to choose electric bass as their second/side instrument. A bass line is a bass line.

24

I played your bog-standard B-flat trumpet through college. One day in high school I picked up a French Horn and was able to play it straight away. I was in no way an “expert”, but a lot translated directly from the trumpet. The embouchure was a bit different (the French Horn has a conical mouthpiece, whereas a trumpet mouthpiece is more of a cup shape), and I had absolutely no idea how to use the trigger at the thumb. To my surprise, however, the fingerings were the same, in the sense that a note on the bottom line of the staff was produced by depressing the first two valves (even though they were technically different notes).

I would have had no idea what to do with a slide trombone, but I would have liked to have tried out a valve trombone some time. I seem to remember getting musical tones out of baritones and euphoniums, and even a tuba, but I never fooled around enough to get the hang of them.

I’ve known plenty of people who were competent across a wide array of woodwind instruments; it seems like knowledge of one transfers pretty easily across others, particularly within the same reed type.

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Even with something like keyboard instruments, there is a different way you approach them, even though all the notes are in the same place. This doesn’t mean that somebody who plays piano couldn’t play organ (even disregarding the foot pedals) or synths or harpsichord, but there is a significant amount of adjustment you have to do to make it sound really good. Playing the piano well doesn’t mean you can play the organ well, much like being a great acoustic player doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll rock out on the electric guitar. That said, of course a lot of the skills crossover. Anybody who plays acoustic guitar should be able to pick up an electric and play something resembling music.

Let’s use the keyboard instruments as an example. With piano, you have an instrument that is touch/velocity sensitive (meaning, the harder you hit the key, the louder and “brighter” the sound), you have various pedals at your disposal for sustain and tone/loudness. You also have an instrument with a certain decay characteristics. The note doesn’t last indefinitely. It’s also an instrument that can handle very full chordings with lots of notes without getting too muddy sounding (unless you have a lot of closely spaced low notes.)

Now, when you go to the organ, you have all your notes in the same place, generally (you usually have at least one more manual/keyboard to play with, but let’s pretend we’re on something like a Hammond XB-2. Unlike a piano, the keys are not weighted, and the touch is not velocity sensitive. Hitting the note hard or soft produces exactly the same note. You also have an instrument that sustains the note at the same loudness for as long as you keep the key down. Basically, it’s just an on-off switch. The chord voicings you would use for piano often do not work well on an organ. An organ tone gets “thick” very quickly, so your full four-note clustered chords can sound muddy in a hurry, especially in the lower registers. Usually, playing on an organ requires you to stick with a more spaced-out voicing than on a piano. (These are all very general points, remember. You can certainly pull off thick chord stabs on a Hammond, but usually you don’t want to hold these as long as you would on a piano.)

Furthermore, an organ’s plastic keys makes certain techniques available that are not on a piano. For example, you can do “palm glisses” in which you play one chord in your right hand, and then smoosh the keys with your palm up or down the keyboard as you reach for your next chord, effecting a sort of slide between two chords. Then, you have all the other expression options available to you: drawbars or stops which shape the tone, vibrato effects, percussion (not a drum machine, but rather little “clicks” that are played on the attack of detached notes), etc. Also, the unlimited sustain makes it possible to play long drawn-out notes in the context of a song and have it fill up that sonic space in a way it’s not possible to with a piano (whose notes fade away.)

And I’m sure there’s a bunch more I’m missing. Anyhow, that’s one example of how two very visually similar instruments differ from a player’s point of view. And I’m not even going to get into synths, where you have a whole wide range of expression options available to you that don’t exist on either pianos or organs.

So, yes, the basic technical skills of how to play notes cross over, but to truly be proficient in that particular instrument, you have to develop a new skill set, and approach the instrument for what it is.

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That was very cool. Thanks for the insider perspective, puly.

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No. What I asked was what specific musical instrument people would want to be the absolute master at, not just learn how to play. It is totally possible to be a maestro when it comes to playing an acoustic guitar, but just very good when it comes to the electric guitar.

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Just trying to help you out and keep the conversation going. :slight_smile:

Actually a lot of the piano->organ points I have are transferable in the acoustic guitar->electric approach. For example, an electric in overdrive or distortion becomes very “thick”, and your full open chords that sound beautiful and rich on an acoustic suddenly sound like a muddy noise cluster of notes on an electric if you’re not careful. You can let single notes ring on and fill a sonic space the way you can’t on an acoustic without it sounding limp. Add to that all your expression options (tone control, various pedals, the whammy bar, etc.), and you have a whole new skillset to learn, just like in the move from piano to organ or synth.

With synths, it becomes even more complex. I’m a reasonable pianist, an okay organist, but synths are such a different way of thinking for me, even though I’ve owned a synth since I was 13. A good synthesizer player is not somebody only with good keyboard skills, but also one with good sound-shaping skills. You have all these possibilities for shaping your notes as you play them that are not available on piano or organ. From a raw technique perspective, you have to learn how to bend notes and use your modulation wheel (or stick, or ribbon, or whatever you have on your synth.) Maybe even “aftertouch.” (When you press harder into a note you’re playing to route that extra pressure information into whatever you want the note to do. Typically, something like vibrato would be effected, but you can route that to bend your note or change almost any parameter in your sound.) Add to that all the possibilities you have with twiddling the knobs as you’re playing to shape the sound, as well as the ability to craft and choose the proper sounds/patches for what you’re playing, all while changing your playing to be appropriate for the sounds you are using, and you’re almost learning a different instrument.

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In high school I made the transition from violin to viola. It involved learning a new clef and increasing the span of my left-hand fingers. The top three strings are identical to the violin’s lower three strings.

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All of that makes sense - I think of Greg Hawkes, who is more of a sound shaper in his work with the Cars than a keyboard player…

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I’m quite good at violin, or used to be. I can pick up a viola and play it immediately and sound decent, but I don’t sound great (since I don’t have the correct intervals – wider for a viola – programmed into my fingers). I can pick up something like a recorder or xylophone, where you don’t need much in the way of breath control or other technical ability to play notes, and snap out a tune with minimal effort (though someone who was actually good at the instrument would probably point out errors in my skill).

Wind instruments in general, though, completely faze me, because i have no idea how to do breath control (or even make sounds for many of them; I’ve never figured out, for example, how to get my lips to do the right buzzing thing for the trumpet). I took flute for one year in band and it was the most frustrating thing ever, because the band director was convinced I was this absolute musical moron because I never figured out breath control and I always sounded like total crap, and I always wanted to say, “Look, if this were an orchestra I’d be kicking butt!”

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I still don’t get how trombone is a class of instrument unless clarinet and flute are also a class of instrument.

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The many types of trombones.

34

…and sometimes vice-versa. I’ve played bass for many years and the right-hand technique is quite different compared to that for electric guitar. Granted, a lot of players are proficient at both. As for me, I can’t play guitar for squat, but I get paid to play bass.

35

Glad you guys got that chord shape/position business cleared up with regards to uke vs. guitar. I am a master of Left-Coast style baritone ukulele, by the way.