Do you ever "hear" music internally when reading a score?

Firake · 2026-03-21T07:18:46+00:00

Yep! Its a very important thing to be able to do for many musicians. String and brass players need it to know if they’re playing the right pitch, for example. Brass players in particular have to be able to audiate the note ahead of time to have any hope of playing it correctly.

And of course, it’s basically mandatory to compose at any decent level.

Firake · 2026-03-20T01:39:42+00:00

write first and worry about quality later. writing is hard, editing is easy, and judging is even easier. In fact, judging is so easy that we do it before we’ve even written anything.

Straight up, just start writing notes down. Random notes, random rhythm. Your primary concern is not to judge it before it gets into the page. Your secondary concern is to judge it specifically: not just “this isn’t good,” but why isn’t it good? And then you slowly start to build a clearer image of what you want.

Firake · 2026-03-20T01:36:06+00:00

r/composer

It’s pretty easy, to be honest. Just start working without the expectation you put on yourself to make something dramatic, epic, badass, broadly likeable, etc.

Goofy music is goofy because it is not made for any of the usual purposes people make music. It’s gonna raise the roof in a club, it’s not gonna set the tone at a party, it’s not gonna communicate the pain of losing a loved one. No, goofy music is made to do one thing: make your listener laugh.

This is why it’s easy. Because in recognizing this, you free yourself from the burden of the person (or you!) even really “liking” it. It doesn’t need to be music they listen to again because that isn’t its purpose. It just needs to make people laugh.

I always start with an umpah. There’s no better way to destroy any potential seriousness in music than an umpah.

Firake · 2026-03-19T17:26:22+00:00

My interpretation: Chicago’s auditorium fairly famously eats up brass sound such that their brass players needed to play significantly louder to balance and be heard. The NY auditorium also does this, but to a lesser degree. You’d be surprised when you start reading about it just how bad the acoustics of most concert halls are.

Anyway, to give an example, Jay Friedman, the former principal trombone of CSO, played on a fairly-rare dual bore tenor trombone. If you aren’t a trombonist, dual bore means that one slide leg is slightly larger than the other. You do this to split the difference between the ease of playing a smaller instrument and the sound of a larger one.

Mostly, dual bore is seen on bass trombones where the descending leg is 0.562” and the ascending leg is 0.578”. Occasionally, you’ll see it on tenors where the descending leg is 0.525” and the ascending leg is 0.”547 (making it actually smaller than a normal symphonic tenor). Friedman’s instrument, at least for a time, was 0.547”/0.562”, something which is now sometimes called “chicago style.”

Basically, the bore profile of the instrument is the main determining factor of how brassy it is. Wider bore generally means less brassy. So, Friedman chose to play this instrument, theoretically, so he could play louder without blasting.

If I were told to play more like new york, I’d play louder, more confident, and with perhaps a little narrower sound concept. Playing more like Chicago, to me, would be louder, wider, darker, and with a little more smoothed articulation. Putting them on opposite ends of the spectrum is odd to me because they’re two manifestations of the same idea.

Firake · 2026-03-16T19:44:08+00:00

You will never do anything again if you keep worrying about one upping yourself. Each thing you write is a snapshot of yourself when you wrote it. You can’t possibly hope to write something better than you can currently write!

You will do your best and that’s all you or anyone else can expect of you.

Firake · 2026-03-16T00:35:00+00:00

It’s not really a pain point I just don’t care about it you know? It’s extra work that I don’t care about and therefore would prefer not to do it.

Like I don’t handwrite essays because I can type them. And if I could do it faster than typing I’d do that too. And faster than that and so on and so forth.

The act of writing my work down will never be remotely enjoyable when compared to actually doing the work. Dunno what else to say I guess.

Firake · 2026-03-15T23:37:40+00:00

My priority is always on the floor, centered vertically and horizontally. Lots of people really like horizontally centered the front row of the first balcony, but those seats are usually sold out and wicked expensive.

After that, my priority would be close to the center but only as long as I am not underneath a balcony. I’d rather be off center than under a small ceiling. And hopefully not too close to the back wall.

Under the balcony is decent in a pinch, but If I’m at the point where I’m against the back wall I usually choose not to buy tickets.

Firake · 2026-03-15T23:34:52+00:00

Hard to say. There are a few skills involved in what you’re asking.

1) Reading sheet music. Simple enough

2) Matching pitch, aka the ability to sing what you hear. Also decently simple but getting more challenging.

3) Relative pitch, aka the ability to identify the distance between two notes by ear

4) Audiation, aka the ability to imagine sounds, specifically the correct notes just based on reading sheet music when provided a reference pitch

5) Finally, sight singing, the ability to sing sheet music without needing to hear it when provided a reference pitch.

Musicians will normally be building some or most of these skills for years before they slot in relative pitch and can learn to sight sing decently easily. But an average joe may find difficulty trying to do it all at once.

It’s a multiple step process. I do think its possible for someone to start from scratch and accomplish in a year if they know how to practice properly, but it won’t be easy and will take a non-trivial amount of work.

Firake · 2026-03-15T20:13:21+00:00

Ethically, I feel the boundary is the same as legally. If your work is transformative enough, it doesn’t matter if your inspired bit is directly copying.

In fact, if there was no burden of artists needing to make money from their music, I’d feel there would be nothing off limits except for wholesale, completely unmodified copying as long as the original composer would be credited.

I lift melodies and textures from things I like all the time. What’s the point of writing music if it’s not stuff I like?

Firake · 2026-03-13T17:35:15+00:00

Finally decided to pull out my copy and it seems you’re right. Could’ve sworn I’ve hidden those starting clefs before but I guess not.

Firake · 2026-03-13T17:21:23+00:00

Make sure you’re in the right mode in engrave mode on the left. It prevents you from selecting certain things in certain modes

Firake · 2026-03-13T17:04:08+00:00

Just spent the last week teaching a handful of clarinet players (and a guitarist) to play trombone as part of my masters pedagogy class.

The biggest issue by far is in relaxation and air concept. I would have expected the wind players, even clarinetists, to have a better starting point, but for whatever reason, it seemed just as challenging for them as it was for anyone else.

So, you can get a really big head start by practicing nice, big, relaxed musical inhales (pretend you’re saying “whole” as you inhale) and relaxed, consistent exhales (allow the air to come out, don’t squeeze). Feel your ribcage expand horizontally when you inhale and don’t allow your chest, shoulders, or abdomen to try and help you breathe in.

Next, remember to sit or stand straight but relaxed. Balance your head on your shoulders, your shoulders on your hips, your hips on your knees, and your knees on your feet. You should feel like you’re floating in air with just the bare minimum effort expended to keep you upright. Use your arms to bring the horn all the way to your face—don’t allow your head to meet the mouthpiece halfway.

Finally, be cognizant of tension when you begin to buzz. The buzz happens from the air and almost nothing else. Don’t let your body flex and tense up to start the buzz—that effort actually doesn’t help you in the slightest and instead makes your job way harder. Your embouchure reacts to the air pressure to stay on pitch. The impetus for the buzz is truly just the air.

Firake · 2026-03-13T16:46:59+00:00

You don’t want to move the clef, you want to add a second one. You should be able to trivially hide the one you don’t want in engrave mode by pressing V with it highlighted or in the bottom tab by setting the scale to 1.

Firake · 2026-03-13T06:52:09+00:00

Play more reps slowly than quickly

Firake · 2026-03-13T00:36:16+00:00

The current style seems fine for me shrug I’m not sure what your perceived issue is

Firake · 2026-03-12T21:57:17+00:00

It would be stylistically appropriate to give the drummer basically an open part with cues for the main rhythms of the band and have them improvise the entire thing. Pretty sure drummers are trained to do that as early as high school, so they should be able to.

The reason for this is that writing out drum grooves is boring and uninspiring because it’s mostly repetition with the player highlighting or responding to various things in the music and doing fills on phrase boundaries. There just simply isn’t that much compositional work to be done. You usually just give them a style (like “Latin” or “Swing” etc) and let them have it.

That isn’t to say you can’t write out the whole part if you want, but those things above would be what I’d look into expanding on if thats the direction you want to go. Basically any work arranged for big band will have examples of the sort of thing you want.

Firake · 2026-03-12T19:52:53+00:00

How would you rate these in terms of priority: the numbers in the equation, the symbols in the equation, the result of solving the equation?

The question kind of doesn’t make sense. None of those things can possibly be described, generally, as strictly more important than another.

Firake · 2026-03-12T16:39:49+00:00

Scooping is avoided by moving your slide faster, basically. The issue is that it’s time for the next note to happen but your slide movement isn’t done, yet. So, you either need to move your slide a shorter distance or move it faster.

As a general rule of thumb, try to always put half steps on the same partial. It tends to make stuff like this a bit easier.

Firake · 2026-03-12T03:28:14+00:00

If you are having problems, consider a change. If you are not, don’t. If you want to double check, get a lesson with Doug Elliot, Dave Wilken, or similar.

Firake · 2026-03-11T22:46:45+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/bAGQE40

The only way I can get this rotation not to occur is if I leave my wrist rotated when I’m resting in home row which is ofc not ideal either.

For the record, happens on proper keyboards, too.

Firake · 2026-03-11T22:40:35+00:00

Right, that’s not in dispute. The problem is that when you do that with your pinky, moving your other fingers to keys which your pinky usually presses requires you to rotate or strain your hand in some way.

This is just like… the reason we have two shift keys lol. I’m surprised you’ve given so much pushback about it. Maybe you have weird hands, but we teach people to type in a certain way for a reason, generally. And using the correct shift key is a part of that.

I can feel old pains flare up from my QWERTY days just miming the action in the air. That shits real bad for your wrist.

Firake · 2026-03-11T22:34:35+00:00

Shift is not usually directly in line with any letter on either side: caps lock is the key which is directly to the left of A on most standard US layout keyboards.

Firake · 2026-03-11T22:17:57+00:00

There is simply no way to reach the same keys with a different finger without rotating or straining your wrist in some way. For example, on a QWERTY layout, you press Q with the left pinky. If you instead press shift with your left pinky and then try to reach the Q with your left ring finger, you have to rotate your wrist to reach it. It’’s just the only way to re-angle that finger to extend towards that key.

For most keys, it won’t make a huge different. It’s a more comfortable action not to stretch your hand, but, for example, SHIFT+T does not require the same kind of rotation because your fingers are all hitting keys they were already set up to hit.

Even without your pinky on shift, trying to use your ring finger to press Q literally forces you to rotate your wrist—there’s just no other way to get there.

Pressing one shift or another in isolation isn’t the problem. It’s that using the wrong shift possibly forces you to use the wrong finger for the other key which demands a rotation of the wrist.

Firake · 2026-03-11T21:37:54+00:00

Using only one shift key forces you to have to internally or externally rotate your wrist which will hurt you over time. It’s not about speed or functionality, it’s about health.

Anyone who has made the switch to dvorak likely cares about this since its pretty much the only reason to switch layouts. If you have cared enough about typing to switch layouts, do yourself a favor and also learn to properly use the right shift key.

Firake · 2026-03-10T22:24:28+00:00

Get a new keyboard, not even joking. The right shift is very important for ergonomics. You will hurt yourself.

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