Where's the Am note though?
 
Oh wait, hidden in my bazz tracks.
 
My bad. 
 
Carry on.
 

 

bapu
Where's the Am note though?
 
Oh wait, hidden in my bazz tracks.
 
My bad. 
 
Carry on.
 

The bassist is always ignored - so your Am is an "Am NOT."

Every Good Bapu Deserves FSF? 

Bhav owes craigb a BAT for DAT!

eph221
I had a hard time, because I started so young and my teachers taught me PATTERNS on the fretboard instead of learning the dots.  This was very confusing to me because I could see, for instance a pentatonic PATTERN on the fretboard, but it was divorced from any harmonic meaning.

Also all my music teachers ever taught me for reading music was all cows eat grass, middle c, and face.

Bhav

Also all my music teachers ever taught me for reading music was all cows eat grass, middle c, and face.

THAT is where I have been going wrong. I thought it was "all communist eat gherkins"

eph221
I had a hard time, because I started so young and my teachers taught me PATTERNS on the fretboard instead of learning the dots.  This was very confusing to me because I could see, for instance a pentatonic PATTERN on the fretboard, but it was divorced from any harmonic meaning.

That was the case with me too, although I never had any lessons. I picked stuff out from tutorials in guitar magazines, and from learning all the solos off "Kill Em All" note for note 
 
I still have a very pattern-centric view of the fretboard, as I'm sure most guitarists who improvise do. But when I learned to read music, what it did was take my focus away from fretboard patterns. It did this mainly because I was forced to stop looking at the fretboard while I was playing. Instead of looking at frets, I was now looking at notes on a stave. Learning pieces stopped being about learning shapes on the fretboard and more about remembering what the music looked like on paper. The upshot is that when I learn a piece from sight reading the music, I find it hard to remember how to play it without the music. Whereas when I learn a piece by ear, all of my usual muscle memory and pattern recognition kicks in. 

The only lessons I had were the ones at school.
 
The music curriculum is seriously >no suitable expletive that isnt starred out<

My mother's aunt was a marvelous lady who was an organist in a Chicago area church.  When I was young and taking piano lessons she always used to admonish me to practice playing hymns in order to improve my sight reading.  Well, I hated playing hymns so that advice was totally ignored, but maybe she was on to something.
 
I have never been able to sight read piano music to save my life.  But sight reading vocal music (at least where words are not involved but you just sing "la la la") I find to be fairly effortless.  I'm suspect this has to something to do with the brain being able to efficiently process multiple notes on appearing on more than one clef - a talent some people probably naturally have more than others.  To that end, banging out hymns for 15 minutes every day might be an excellent way to "train" your brain to deal with multiple simultaneous notes on the page.  Hymns have multiple notes but are rhythmically simple and almost never in keys that have lots of sharps or flats.  Like I said, maybe my mother's aunt was actually on to something.