From: glenn@moeng2.morgan.edu (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.)
Newsgroups: alt.guitar.bass
Subject: A Learning Experience
Date: 3 Oct 1992 22:17:11 -0500
Organization: The Space-Time Fabrication Institute, Rockville, MD.
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

This is not a request for help or advice (though if suggestions
of things I should know or try come to mind, fine).  It is not
an opinion piece in which I get up on a soapbox.  And it does
not contain any usefull information.  It's just my way of talking
to myself in a way that might entertain someone.  So feel free to
skip to the next article if you've got better things to do.

A friend called me up at work and asked whether I play bass.
I said, "sort of", explaining that I don't quite sound like
most bassists I've heard when I play, since I improvise like
the guitarist I am, but I do play the instrument.

Has asked if I'm good enough to play for a musical he's
involved in.  I said I didn't know, but if he'd get me a 
copy of the score to look at, I'd tell him.

Fortunately, I've been learning to read bass clef lately.
Unfortunately, this is a recent development and I am not 
good at it yet.  Okay, I'll try to cope with that...

Wow.  Lots of flats in the key signatures.  There's one 
piece in C, one in G, a few in F, and everything else has 
at least three flats in the key signature.

I knew I wasn't a terrible _well_rounded_ musician, but 
I hadn't realized there was this particular hole in my
experience -- I'm not used to playing in flat keys.  Oh
sure, I know my way around F like the back of my hand, and
I've visited Bb once in a while, but I spend most of my 
time in C, G, A, and D.  And I chord a lot in E.  (When I've
read music in awkward and/or unfamiliar keys on guitar, I've
usually been chording, and I just switch to barre chords,
pick an arbitrary spot on the neck, sight-transpose, and
adjust my hand so that I'm in a convenient key (maybe even 
the written one, if I'm playing with other people).)

So here I am trying to read an unfamiliar clef in unfamiliar
keys, and worrying about whether I'm in the right octave.

I think this is called a "learning experience".

The fact that I don't have any of the music on tape to listen
to while I read isn't helping.  (And if you couldn't tell 
that I am not classically trained before, now there is no
doubt, right?)  This isn't music that I know well enough to
hum yet -- I've seen the movie version of this musical 
exactly once and never seen it live.

Of course, the music I'm looking at is just the bass line
(and chords).  Cues, but not lyrics -- no other instruments
to give me hints.  (*sigh*)

It looks like my answer will have to be either the believable
"I can't do this," which will leave me wondering whether I'm 
chickening out, or the honest "I _don't_know_ whether I can
do this, perhaps I should come to a couple of rehearsals and
find out," which opens me up to serious potential embarrassment.


I'll probably chicken out.  Either that or transpose it all
to treble clef.


-- 
D. Glenn Arthur Jr., The Human Vibrator, glenn@bessel.umd.edu
"Being a _man_ means knowing that one has a choice not to act like a 'man'."

How much interest is there in a Transvestite/Transsexual newsgroup?  How many 
would post there?   Anonymously?  How many would _vote_ non-anonymously?  And
what would you name it?  

You can send me mail anonymously at anonymus+262@godiva.nectar.cs.cmu.edu.

Newsgroups: alt.guitar.bass