Well, yeah, pretty much, one thing that might help is to work out all the really common notes that occur in all the usual open chord voicings. You get so you that you can quicly recognize the chords in the notation even when they’re arpeggiated. Being able to instantly recognize a line of notes as an arpeggiated A minor rather than as a series of notes helps speed things up a lot.
Assuming this is a serious question and not a joke, they read music as much or as little as guitar players do. Why would you think otherwise?
Bass guitar music is written on a bass clef, for the record.
And sounds an octave lower than written. It’s written that way to keep the notes in the staff, ledger lines are a drag.
your humble TubaDiva
who goes all over the staff and under it and over it and that’s the way it goes
Yep. for the cd, though, it’s written somewhere different, cause it’s smaller.
Si
Yeah, I played the sousaphone for about 4 years as a nice little interesting departure from the trumpet. I always got a kick out of how the tuba fingerings were close enough to the trumpet to be easily learnable, but different enough to be thoroughly confusing!
This sounds interesting, but I don’t quite get it. Could you clarify?
That’s because the physics behind the valves is the same for all valved instruments, so regardless of the pitch of the horn, the size, etc., pressing down the first valve alone lowers the tone one whole step, pressing down the second valve lowers the tone one half step, and so on and so forth.
There’s also variations when you have more valves. Tubas tend to have four or five or even six valves to aid in the production of notes that are not so easy to produce cleanly or accurately to pitch with only three valves. (As Jayrot also knows we can all also pull tuning slides in conjunction with pressing valves and “lipping” notes to get them correctly, but that’s more than any of you want to get into, I’m sure. Brass playing is on the order of patting your head and rubbing your stomach all at the same time, it’s just part of the deal.)
Sousaphone and trumpet, that’s an interesting double!
Not at the same time, mind you. 
I think what he’s saying is to take a common chord and write out the notes one on top of the other. Then be able to recognize the “shape” of the notes instantly, so that when you see them together or seperately in sheet music, you can process them faster.
Sounds like good advice.
That’s it precisely. Recognizing the chord shapes instantly saves you from having to work out what finger goes where.
It was not intended as a serious question. I don’t think I’ve played with any guitarists or bass players who could read music <<insert drummer joke here>>. Every keyboard player could.
Q: How do you get a guitar player to play softer?
A: Put sheet music in front of him.
Gadzooks, I just came across Guitar Fretboard Addict, which seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. And as a bonus it’ll work on my pocketPC (as well as Windows) so I can quiz myself on the go while out and about.
At $10 it’s probably worth a try. If anyone is interested, I’ll report back on how it is.