As the piercing sound of ‘hot-cross buns’ on the recorder reverberated throughout the classroom, I began to wonder why it is that as students we were required to participate in music learning exercises. I’ve always been a musician. From an early age I began learning the piano, self-taught myself the guitar and drums and was unfortunately forced to play the violin. I still enjoyed my violin lessons however. I preferred playing music by myself and I’ve always preferred listening to music by myself. That changed when I was asked to join the jazz band by my music teacher.
I was hesitant at first but I reluctantly agreed to show up every Wednesday after school to play the piano for the jazz band. One thing my music teacher had known was that I had trouble reading music. It’s not the fact that I can’t read music, but the fact that using my ears to me were the best tools when playing music. My music teacher understood my struggles. I was a percussionist so I could get away with my poor reading ability, but in a jazz band that would be a different story.
In jazz band, I was forced to step out of my comfort zone and my bandmates held me accountable to make
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What he didn’t know was that I had been using guitar tabs to help me learn the songs and had them pulled up on my phone. I explained this to him and he was dumbfounded. I had been using my brief knowledge of chords along with my ear to figure out how to play the songs. After I told him this he ended up giving me more songs throughout the year to play for the concert and more improv sections. He printed out guitar tab sheets instead of piano sheet music and I started to learn the songs at a much quicker rate. Practices went by faster and my band mates were having a lot more fun experimenting and trying out new stuff for improv. My band teacher was happier than ever to see me progress and have fun while playing