Author: Dutchy
Date: 2009-10-28 15:43
If you've only been doing it a couple of months, it's early days. Learning to read music from a printed score is, as Suzan says, like learning to read a new language.
It's also mainly a physical, rote skill--you don't play a note on the oboe by reading and then mentally processing the note on the page the same way you would read and process a word in a book. It's more of a physical training thing, closely akin to learning to touch-type on a keyboard. You train your fingers to press keys in *this* combination whenever your eye sees *this* note on the page. You're thinking about this too much, is the problem. Just keep doing it, and eventually your fingers, eyes, and brain will get coordinated and it will all be automatic.
I've been doing it 4 1/2 years now, and I still sometimes blank out on a note--IF I stop and look at it and read it and try to process it. I am learning the highest notes in the third octave, and if I look at the note on the page, and try to *think* about how to finger that note, try to rack my brain and remember what the fingering is, I'm stumped and have to go look it up in the fingering chart.
But--if I focus instead on playing the scale up to the note, IOW, if I don't think about the note itself, if I just automatically play the entire scale that includes the note, it pops right out.
So stop thinking about it so much. Just play.
I highly recommend plain vanilla scales for this sort of training, BTW.
Guitar tabs aren't going to help you with reading music, because they don't involve "reading music" as such. What you need is a short beginner's course in piano. I'd get a copy of any children's beginning piano book and work your way through it, just to get a feel for how reading music works. This is completely different from guitar tabs.
As for Hinke, yeah, he's pretty turgid sometimes. I recommend you get the Hal Leonard Essential Elements 2000 Book 1 for oboe (make sure it's the 2000 because it has the playalong CD.)
Link here is from Music 44 but you can get it practically anywhere that sells band music.
Essential Elements 2000 Oboe Book 1.
This is the fun stuff. The focus in the Essential Elements series is on getting incoming band students every September, which in the U.S. means 5th graders or 10-year-olds, up to speed on playing actual songs by Christmas so they can wow their moms and dads at the Christmas concert in December. So you will find lots of short, easy, familiar ditties in here, along with solid grounding in the basics, and easy scales and things like that. Pretend you're 10 years old, and just kick back and relax.
Also the playalong CD is quite useful, because one of the challenges of playing the oboe is of course playing in tune with another instrument, and you need practice in that, as well as in fingering and embouchure. Otherwise you may find, a few months down the pike, that while your fingering is accurate and your tone is lovely, you are congenitally 1/2 step flat from everybody else. I had this happen to me as a beginner--after several months of getting a lovely tone all by myself, I tried to play along with the CD and was dismayed to find myself atrociously flat. So now I never practice without either a CD or my Korg tuner.
Post Edited (2009-10-28 15:46)
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