Trumpet = Piano for the One-Armed
February 2nd, 2010Improvement!
Wow, this is freaky. I started using my trumpet sheet music for piano sight-reading. It’s fantastic. Now I can sort of almost play songs at sight. Granted, one hand is missing, but that’s not the point. The point is that I finally have something simple enough to use for sight-reading, without having to play the same ten things over and over. The left-hand stuff will still be a pain, but half a solution is way better than none, and progress with the right hand will help to some degree with the left hand.
Apart from that, the music is better. It beats dismal pieces by obscure classical composers, about depressed puppets.
For anyone trying to learn to sight-read on the piano, I recommend this highly.
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:48 PM
So you’re playing trumpet music written in “C”?
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:53 PM
No. I don’t know how you got that idea.
February 4th, 2010 at 10:50 AM
A commenter says you are talking about the necessity of writing the music in different keys to make it work with different instruments. I don’t know anything about that. It doesn’t matter. I’m just using the book for sight-reading practice.
February 4th, 2010 at 10:57 AM
It’s this harebrained thing publishers do for different instruments – they make the trumpet call a C an, I don’t know, E or something and right the music that way. Clarinets are E-flat, etc. etc. So when you buy trumpet music, it’ll be in some non-concert key. I don’t fully understand it – I read Bass Clef primarilly. But it could bite you in the rear at some point. Your dad probably knows all about it, if he played in a school band or something like that.
February 4th, 2010 at 10:58 AM
I don’t commit this stuff to memory. First of all, I would need the ability to do that.
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Anyway, it won’t be in my head to trip me up later.
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My dad played in the Army band with Chet Baker and Tony Bennett. He is quick to note that he was not exactly the star of the band.
February 4th, 2010 at 11:58 AM
Maybe this is why my G is the piano’s F-sharp.
February 4th, 2010 at 12:24 PM
“My dad played in the Army band with Chet Baker and Tony Bennett. He is quick to note that he was not exactly the star of the band.”
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So on the one hand he isn’t a beloved national treasure and singing star, but on the other he didn’t die an early, junkie’s death.
February 4th, 2010 at 12:30 PM
And he doesn’t wear a toupee like Bennett.
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Unless it’s an incredibly bad one.