Why Don't Rock Musicians Need Musical Scores?

Cafe Society
1

I know classical pieces can be much longer than your average rock song, and may contain multiple movements. And I know precision in timing, etc. is probably more important for “serious” music than in the context of a distortion-laden jam session.

But . . . I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rocker using sheet music, and certainly page turner for Maiden does not seem to be a growth industry. And it’s not like the rock guys don’t have a fair amount of material to memorize, or that timing and being in tune with your bandmates doesn’t matter. Plus, these guys are having to hit their notes in an amplified, strobe-lit setting, while jumping around in many cases (and, while half in the bag or hepped up on goofballs, in many cases). And it’s not as though they are classically-trained or (in some cases) necessarily rehearse all the time. So how do they (generally) manage not to totally forget or mess up the music, when a concert pianist or symphony member can’t do this so easily?

2

  1. The material is easier to memorize than classical – generally not many chords

  2. Scores wouldn’t really help with distractions and the like

  3. Many rock musicians can’t read music, so they have to be able to get by from memory or cues

I’m a guitarist who used to play in rock bands. And no, I can’t read.

PS: I remember the sound/light crew for Yes in the late 1970s used what looked like sheet music.

3

I asked a guitarist friend this very question awhile back. He goes with F.U. Shakespeare’s #3 – they play by ear.

He also said he thinks that musicians who play using sheet music don’t learn the music – they don’t memorize – because their eyes are always moving ahead to the next note. He says it’s harder to memorize if you aren’t focusing on what you’re playing right now. We put some old country CDs on the player – stuff he said he’d never heard before. Sure enough, he listened for a minute and then played them.

Playing by ear is fascinating. I played clarinet in the high school band and had lots of stuff memorized – 2-3 minute songs from sheet music. But I’d never be able to figure out how to reproduce a song just by listening to it.

4

a) They’re often playing material they’ve written themselves, and they remember how it goes :wink:

b) Memorizing music, especially something you’ve written yourself, is no more difficult than memorizing the lyrics.

c) There is no sheet music. They musicians sat down together with their instruments in their hands and made up the song as they went along by playing what they heard in their heads, with a certain amount of give and take between the different musicians. Nothing was written down to begin with, or if there was it wasn’t sheet music - probably just a map of how the sections of the song were put together.

d) A lot of them can’t read music anyway.

That being said, my above points generally refer to actual bands. If you’re talking about a solo artist who lays down vocals on top of an accompaniment performed by studio musicians, then those studio musicians usually have some form of written music in front of them. Depending on the skill of the songwriter/composer, this written music could be as complete as a fully notated score (‘Weird Al’ Yankovic does this) which is ideally followed exactly, or as simple as a lyric sheet with the chord progression written in, leaving the studio musicians free to experiment until the desired results are achieved.

When the solo artist goes on the road he or she is backed by top notch professionals, and there is plenty of rehearsal before the tour starts to make sure everybody knows their parts. In that case, one of the backup musicians is designated the “musical director” (most often the keyboardist, or surprisingly often, the bass player, but it could be any one of them) and this person is responsible for, among other things, keeping things moving and properly timed and organized. The musical director usually has some form of written score with him on stage. These musicians are there to back up the solo artist, not so much to “perform” themselves, and most are quite disciplined (they have to be - they need to be ready, when Little Miss Pop Diva stumbles out on stage drunk, to make the show happen and make her look good :smiley: )

If an act requires an orchestra or similar accompaniment, the orchestra is indeed provided with sheet music. However, this is mainly because the artist doesn’t travel with an orchestra in tow — that would be prohibitively expensive! Rather, since most major cities have an orchestra in one form or another, the promoter books the local orchestra to accompany the artist when they come to that city.

5

I play guitar (and I use that term loosely)…funny thing is, when I was in school, I played trombone in marching band/concert band/stage band. I read music then and pretty much had to use it to play, except for the few short numbers used in halftime shows in marching band, which I memorized. I can read musical notation for guitar, but I couldn’t play it in real time to save my life…it’s too distracting.

6

You’ll notice that folk musicians and jazz musicians, etc., also don’t use written scores. It’s a combination of all the things that have been mentioned in this thread.

The key differences with respect to the music itself are that classical pieces are a lot longer and the style and the number of instruments involved usually require a much higher precision in coordinated playing.

Also, less formal music makes use of improvisation much more often, as well as severely syncopated beats and complex rhythm structures, which, even if they were written down, would be immensely difficult to read.

7

The other point is that a rock band like U2 will build its career around playing the 20 biggest hits and the few others that they feel like slipping in from the very old catalog and the current album. They’ve played some of their set literally about 1000 times, especially if you include rehearsals.

8

On another note (heh), is the relative simplicity of individual parts. I do hope I don’t get anyone’s dander up, but consider the individual parts of a rock song–almost all of them are hummable, or easily fit in the song. Now take the third French Horn part to Shasta-colavitch (no, I’m not looking that up) and try and hum it. Disembodied, periodic, almost nonsense without more. Try keeping that in your head for a while, and you’ll see the importance of earnestly studying sheet music when playing in an orchestra. Not everyone gets the first violin part, and even that, aside from main themes has a host of complicated, non-linear frufru bits that don’t lend to easy memorization.

This, by the way, is one of the things that makes bands like P-Funk et al stand out as unbelievable musicians. Individual parts that meld together so well are extraordinarily complicated and don’t necessarily fit into a cohesive whole without the rest of the band.

9

R.E.M.'s lead singer uses lyric sheets. I’ve seen pub bands and folk singers using sheet music before.

10

I agree with most of the comments above. I play rock, blues, and jazz guitar, and have dabbled in classical though never performed it. Another element to playing rock as well as nearly any form of pop music is that the songs have the form AABA or ABABCAB, so you don’t have to learn much, it’s repetitive. Secondly the guitarist is playing either a memorized or improvised solo plus chords, and in rock it’s almost always major, minor, and dom7 chords. Also, touring rock bands play the same set of songs several times a week for up to a year. Even local cover bands typically play the same three sets week after week with minimal changes.

In my last band I tried to bring written music in for us to learn “Jessica” by the Allman Brothers. I had more experience playing in jazz bands with written music , and you can learn it a lot faster that way. But even though the keyboard player had a music degree (30 years ago) he wanted no part of it. The drummer said, “We don’t read dots, man.” So we limped along playing the CD over and over and over and over until everybody gradually figured it out.

In classical music, you are playing single notes or complex chords for much longer than the average pop song. A classical musician might spend 1-4 weeks learning a piece for a performance, then not play it again for months, years, or ever. A classical musician typically does not have much time to learn a piece, and reading music is an essential part of their education. I have heard stories of classical musicians doing a couple of cold read-throughs and then doing a recording! Also, with dozens of different parts in a symphony orchestra, your part might be a counterpoint to the main melody; you can’t just strum along if you know the tune.

One things I will mention about a comment in the OP. Precise timing can be essential in rock. Some of those old Zep tunes had unbelievable timing, like The Ocean and Black Dog. But as another poster mentioned, these guys worked out these songs as they wrote them. That’s a completely different experience than picking up a piece of written music.

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Yeah. Do classical musicians that play roughly the same set every night need sheet music?

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And some classical musicians, primarily pianists, do memorize.

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Came in to mention this, actually. I bet It’s The End Of The World As I Know It (And I Feel Fine) would be a royal pain in the ass if he didn’t.

Another point might be that rock musicians usually play live on tours straight after recording the set ceaselessly for months in a studio. That’s some deep-seated muscle memory for a song.

After I rehearse a song for guitar - and I’m a bit dim, so it goes very slowly - I can get into what I think of as a groove when I start playing the first chords. Like the only way is forward.

That doesn’t leave much room for improvisation, of course, but I’m usually playing alone to pass the time and relax, so that doesn’t matter. Problems would arise - for me, at least - if I was part of a band that loved to improvise or re-imagine songs, stretch them out or tighten them up.

Also note that there’s a lot of visual cues going around on stage on a concert, with almost all instruments being easy to look up from. If you’ve played the guitar for long enough to be on a big stage, you’ve played long enough to play without needing to look at it almost at all. It’d be easy to catch a lowering hand movement from the vocalists to signify, say, lowering the tempo, the volume, repeating certain parts, etc.

Most rock songs are also very easily structured - almost modular. It makes it easier for me playing, for instance, the guitar soloes in Flogging Molly’s Black Friday Rule when I know they have an entire two minutes to themselves and what the idea is behind them.

(And in the end, most modules seem just like ideas - start on one chard and work your way up in a scale or harmony, drop, repeat, etc)

14

What exactly is the notation for “bite the head off a bat”?

15

Nobody memorizes music like bag pipers. It is not uncommon for an accomplished piper to have a hundred or more tunes commited to memory. Most of them DO read music, as an aid to memorization though.

16

To be fair, their written music consists entirely of ‘annoy the foreigners’ in various typefaces.

-Derleth, a fan of bagpipe music.

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Blues and rock are traditionally improvisational anyway. So is jazz, although jazz musicians are more likely to be musically literate, as this would seem to be necessary in communicating the arrangement to the rest of the band. On the other hand, there have been some, such as guitar great Wes Montgomery, who couldn’t read a note.

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Moving to Cafe Society.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

19

I’ve always wondered about this as it applies to prog rock. Did Yes use staff paper to write out their songs when they were composing them? Did they read the notation in early rehearsals before being able to memorize it and play it in concert? Some prog rock is just ridiculously complicated and I can’t imagine how the musicians composed it without using notation.

20

No kidding - especially considering that a lot of prog isn’t nearly as repetitive as other rock styles. Even the “simple” stuff can be deceptive, and I wonder how on earth they could memorize it. For example, the bass line during the last 3:12 of Rush’s “The Necromancer”. The chords are a very simple repeating two bar pattern: E / / / A / / / E / / / A / / / all the way to the end of the song … but Geddy Lee never repeats the same two-bar sequence of notes (what a joy that was to transcribe!). OTOH, I don’t know if “The Necromancer” has ever been performed live. But there are other Rush songs with a similar idea, where Geddy never repeats himself and still reproduces them exactly as recorded when performing them live.