esrosedotblog

SHEET MUSIC

When I was a younger jazz pianist and even younger rebel from the straight jacket of my piano lesson music, I played popular music off of sheet music.

When I was a kid, this meant that I went to a store. Everything from a music store to, for more popular stuff, a five and dime, to buy the publisher's full urtext version of the song. Words, music and chords.

Sheet music was everywhere. I remember buying it at news stands. You remember news stands don't you?

Later, I went to various copy shops to buy so called "cheat sheets" under the counter. Big books of standards, jazz and otherwise, with simple melody lines, no words, and chords.

From these, one would deduce the general "picture" of the work one wanted to play or improvise upon.

These were often a bit raggedy andy and did not include the subtleties that one might hear on a record, so the next thing to do was to go to the record itself. This involved a lot of needle dropping and scratch of the record.

Then tape! I could stop the tape and RW and do the thing over. I could even take a section or even a phrase and repeat it over and over.

CD's pretty much fucked this up although there is still tape, it requires a bit of scavenging to find tape blanks and keep a machine in working order.

A teacher that I had, the last one, taught me to improvise and work out my own charts. He also had me sing the song in various versions. Sing with a vocal artist or two. I could even sing non-lyrics da-da-da.

I haven't done a chart in a long time. I sold the piano in Boston a year or two before we moved and bought a keyboard which I never quite warmed up to.

I kept up the work but dropped the study.

Now, even the keyboard is gone.

But LOOK!

I recently asked Tom how one goes about doing a rock work for a band. How do they study it? Both he, his brother and some grandsons have bands or are in them.

In some respects, they do it the same old ways. Get the record. Replay. Not tape apparently.

But mostly they have a new resource.

Suppose my band wanted to do Van Halen's Unchained. Which I would definitely want to do.

I would go to

Songsterr

and there it is. The full Van Halen charts and the sound track and a moving green line and there you are.

You can play like Eddy! I guess you can also get Alex on drums and Michael on bass and become a tribute band. Maybe not.

Well, not exactly. You could get close. But there is always that live factor that no one but those guys can do.

You would not, I am sure, be able to do anything like the singing of David Lee Roth. That is not on the charts. And uniquely David Lee's.

Labels: music