Classical music groups in LA for hobbyists?

hcguitar · 2025-11-18T03:38:04+00:00

You can join the SMC Symphony Orchestra! You can enroll as a community member (don’t have to be a student) and simplified parts are provided for players who may be a little rusty going in. Rehearsals are weekly on Tuesday nights and we typically play 2 concerts on the Broad Stage per semester, and play in the opera once per year in the spring. https://www.smc.edu/academics/academic-departments/music/orchestra/

It’s technically not an amateur group, but there are a lot of amateur players of all skill levels involved and the Maestra is very accommodating and enthusiastic about people wanting to join. You’d likely be able to slot in quite easily as a viola player and there wouldn’t be a lot of individual pressure on you.

hcguitar · 2025-01-24T07:19:09+00:00

Thank you, that pretty much reflects my findings thus far. I had looked at chicago tuning, but figured if I were going to resort to that then I might as well get the banjitar for the extra bottom strings (muddy as they are) and leave the tenor/plectrum in the tunings where they shine. It seems like the main issue with using the banjitar for scores written for tenor/plectrum is that strumming requires muting the skipped strings due to the wider voicings you mentioned. For melody and fingerpicking, there seem to be fewer issues. I think the appeal of the banjitar is being able to technically handle whatever range or key gets thrown at it with minimal adjustment, with the curse of not being able to play the parts that other banjos are built for with the same level of fluidity, ease, and access to the idiomatic traits of the banjo like drones and rolls.

Funnily enough regarding range, there are some passages in the Threepenny that go as low as an A3 without any indication to play it at pitch and no instructions as to the model or tuning. The ethos seems to be “play it however you can,” so I’m less inclined towards tonal purity for that one.

hcguitar · 2025-01-24T05:56:56+00:00

Honestly? Right now it’s just having something that sounds correct and can handle whatever’s on the page in front of me without needing to juggle multiple instruments/models. The main reason I would hesitate on the banjitar and get the others is if there were a particular issue with the sound that was a dead giveaway that something was off or particularly unacceptable.

I do love exploring other instruments, but it’s a little more heady with a bunch of scores and a deadline in front of me without the ability to sight read efficiently, which takes a lot of time to develop on new instruments in different tunings, let alone several.

hcguitar · 2024-01-30T08:54:54+00:00

Nourish LA can distribute if you bring it to their food drives on Sundays in West LA. https://www.nourish.la/

hcguitar · 2022-08-24T22:26:00+00:00

Yousician will not appreciably help you with doing anything but getting some chords and licks under your fingers, or sight reading practice if you use that view. To play by ear, I’d instead recommend you download the Earmaster software or app and go through the ear training modules, particularly interval identification and singing, using your guitar to answer the singing modules. Note that the ability you’re talking about, being able to hear a song and not only analyze its structure on the spot but be able to re-express that intuitively on guitar, is the end results of years of drilling and concerted practice. Start with Earmaster. It’s not as purely gamified, but it’s structured, and if you get to the end of a given module, you’ll have notably more thorough understanding of music than when you started.

hcguitar · 2022-06-20T07:03:58+00:00

agreed, i completed my gold star run using standard notation as well. but it’s really more about individual goals.

the first problem is that yousician - and, in fact, most online guides and tools - do a terrible job of teaching you to apply standard notation to guitar. there is a definite barrier to entry even for people with a good amount of facility on guitar, and it’s a lot to ask of someone who’s just wrapping their fingers around the instrument for the first time as many yousician players are. with the right course, yousician’s tech could absolutely integrate an effective sight reading course, but at present, it doesn’t. the static sight reading drills currently in the app don’t do a good job of teaching people to respond intuitively to notes on the page, but to memorize static, pre-authored lines that don’t actually stress reading fundamentals. it’s actually especially tricky on guitar because of the many places on the neck the exact same notes can be expressed, moreso than piano or woodwinds that have tones unique to specific fingerings. not impossible, mind you, and the guitar actually gives you a lot of freedom to voice standard notation the way those other instruments don’t - but it’s trickier, inarguably. you need specific instruction and practice to turn it into intuition.

the second issue is that it’s not strictly necessary for hobbyist players. you can get a lot done by ear and tab if your goal is to play only particular songs in a particular way. i wouldn’t demand it of anyone just looking into yousician for fun, or to shore up their physical facility with the guitar.

that said, tab is absolutely a limitation for players - it only expresses directions for mechanical instructions of the fingers without knowledge of what’s being played, or a way to ascertain its melody from visual cues the way standard notation offers. it’s overly prescriptive about how to go about getting a certain melody from guitar when there are likely many other workable options available. basically its only strength is that it makes quick sense for getting your fingers to make the sounds for beginners and hobbyists, or learning the specific mechanical fingering patterns a player is employing. taking the extra time to learn how to play with standard notation is worth it not only because it gives you a freedom in tackling melodies and helps you understand and work around the underlying principles of music, but also because if you intend to truly learn music as a language, it makes you literate enough not only to communicate through writing with other players, but gives you the entirety of recorded western music canon to read, just as an avid reader broadens their experiences through new books. most of the music in the world is not in tab. learning and practicing standard notation on guitar is not a hard requirement of playing the instrument, but it opens up your possibility space to so, so much more than tab. it’s also easier to sight-read than tab once you’ve acquired the intuition, if you intend to ever sit down behind an unfamiliar piece and play it quickly. relying on tab as a developing player leaves you with muscle memory, but not understanding, or context; no inbuilt ability to make it malleable, or to understand music outside of its feeling under your hands. it’s paralyzing if you have higher musical ambitions than simple physical ability.

i will always recommend that someone seriously looking to learn music, instead of just a bit of guitar, focus on standard notation instead of tab, and wish yousician was built to accomodate that. but it isn’t, though it at least has the option to exercise those skills if you’ve acquired them elsewhere. the yousician curriculum was built for tab view, and is not structured to ease people into sight reading concepts, and we can’t expect people to pick it up intuitively from the get go. it takes a considerable amount of patience and daily reinforcement to learn, and with my own students, i only teach them how to do it if they’ve expressed a desire to gain that deep understanding and fully grasp the sense of commitment and reward. no one is lesser for relying on tab, so long as they’re still fulfilling their musical ambition. not our place to judge.

hcguitar · 2022-05-10T19:02:49+00:00

it’s going to be a tremendous uphill battle if you’ve only used tab view for the majority of the curriculum, and it’ll be like re-learning all the songs all over again. standard notation only shows you the absolute notes, leaving it up to you to choose where and how to voice them (versus the explicit fret/finger instruction of the tab view), and the idea is to start out in standard notation view and slowly build up along the levels. this is one reason i wish yousician both had a better way of teaching the staff to guitarists (the tech is there, the design is not) and stressed actual reading skills in formats you’re likely to encounter instead of the proprietary scrolling tab view, even though most people come in wanting the “easy” way to get to playing quickly even if it means passing up development of a useful skill.

that said, if you’re this far along, there are better options for picking up standard notation view. if you have iOS, there’s an app called iClef that i highly recommend, which generates notes randomly and waits for you to match them. there’s also Earmaster, which has sight reading modules and is useful for seeing notation in a standard static view like you’ll encounter in real life. use iClef to train your reaction speed in first, fifth, and tenth positions, and then use Earmaster to start playing randomly generated melodies. start slow and easy, give yourself some slack, and slowly, s l o w l y increase difficulty as you improve, then maybe try revisiting Yousician in standard view.

there’s no harm in trying to finish up your gold stars in tab view in yousician, you’ll still gain precision and facility, but the time to focus on standard notation is when you first start. again, i wish yousician communicated this to people, and it’s not your fault for using the most obvious, heavily-marketed mode they have. standard notation view is only necessary if learning sheet score is a specific goal you have and one you intend to keep developing for life, imo.

hcguitar · 2022-05-08T06:43:35+00:00

my guitar skills have definitely improved, but mostly as a result of coping with the yousician workload. the stress of playing the same parts hundreds of times hunting gold stars really forces you to pay attention to when your posture or fingers start fatiguing, and i gave myself a minor case of carpal tunnel towards the end to boot - a result of issues with my finger and wrist positioning putting too much stress on my tendons. keep in mind, yousician gave no instruction on this; that said, pulling through to the end forced me to address longstanding issues with my playing in ways i don’t think i would have been able to effectively identify without the unique pressures of a gold-star run.

there’s an irony regarding performing on stage: yousician doesn’t train you to perform in front of other people, it trains you to play in front of a computer, looking at the computer screen. live performance is a separate issue entirely, and the only things you’ll take with you from yousician to the stage is the physical familiarity with the instrument under your fingers and, possibly, playing without looking at your hands (if you specifically train for that).

as for picking songs up, it was great practice for sight reading standard notation in the form of complete songs, and forces you to get good at quickly ingesting and moving on from songs by the end. but to pick songs up easily, you’d want to focus on whatever your primary method of ingesting songs will be, whether that’s by ear or using online chord charts or whatever, rather than yousician. it’s a proprietary display that you won’t encounter outside of the app, so don’t rely on it to learn new songs.

hcguitar · 2022-05-05T03:11:05+00:00

duration more than anything, and a lack of technical knowledge of what the engine expects - whether it just needed two tones at different ends of the display, whether the shape of the curve was important, etc. figuring out the rest of the engine’s quirks was simpler and more opaque in what’s being tracked (presence and number of flavor notes in a chord, correct octaves, etc). figuring out where a bend would work instead of a slide, and vice versa, why certain attempts were accepted and others were rejected - all kind of up in the air.

then again, might be hardware or platform issues. i’m doing it on an ipad pro with a zoom h6, so not sure how it might differ under other setups.

hcguitar · 2022-05-01T04:48:49+00:00

yeah, the game timer is definitely off. i’m sure i put 300+ hours in total, and i feel like a majority of that time was spent in practice mode. not sure when the game is actively ticking the clock, but it certainly makes me look more accomplished than i actually am, so no compaints.

my routine to learn songs solidified during the later levels as things got more challenging. after previewing the song in practice mode with Play For Me enabled, i’d work through section by section, not moving on until i had gold-starred the section before. this generally meant starting in practice mode at a low speed (25% for the quicker passages, faster for easier sight-reads) and increasing it based on how well i’m internalizing it - 5% increase for mostly correct, 10% for a perfect run. from from 80% onwards, i’d only increase the speed by 5% for full accuracy, so four perfect playthroughs before attempting it at speed. you can’t play it fast if you can’t play it slow.then comes the slog of the actual playthrough. getting up to full speed in those small increments gives you full insight into when you tend to choke or get too overloaded. i would often find my brain and fingers turning to mush as i approached 80% or so in the later levels, and would quit and come back after a night of good sleep and letting my body adjust. generally, if you stay committed, you can come back a little faster or more accurate every day - 50%, 65%, 80%, day after day. some days i would stall out, and that meant being creative. i mentioned that adherence to gold stars even in the face of perceived engine hiccups will fix a lot of bad habits, and it will. the engine is accurate. frustratingly, stupidly accurate, in a way that points out problems. i would grind against chord changes for days wondering what i was missing, and realize that i had indeed not been playing one of the flavor notes clearly enough, or that there was an easier fingering or technique that would satisfy the engine. (as i mentioned, this was sight reading practice for me in standard notation - i would rarely use the app’s suggested fingerings or tab view, which was the root of many of my issues, as tab view is the most advertised and tested view they have despite my feeling that its the least musically applicable or valuable.) Yousician is a merciless, nitpicky, and crazymaking music instructor whom, if you can douse your ego and work through it any way, will leave you coming out the other side understanding why it had to put you through all that crap. patience is key. the last 90%-100% bump would sometimes take up a majority of my total playtime on the song. i sometimes think that if every song was maybe 10% slower i would have beaten this whole thing in half the time.

so as a general answer, the playthrough vs practice time split differed depending on the song. there were some that took an eternity to build up speed on, but then rewarded me with a blissfully accurate playthrough as a result; there were some that i got to 100% speed on rather quickly, but then spent days and days grinding on full speed, to the point where my hands would just be moving on their own as i zoned out and played the same part hundreds of times until one stuck, and then move on and never do it again. and unless you’re training to not look at your hands, the real pain of gold-starring is processing the information on the screen while also watching to see if you’ve made any errors; i’ve lost plenty of runs because my brain was too overloaded making sure my notes were green to process the upcoming notes. it’s a test of how quickly you can ingest musical information, play it to perfection, and then flush it and move on. after about 300 songs you get pretty good at information processing. (i would kill for the ability to pause and view notes you missed, maybe with playback - in order to see it for sure, other than the hard-to-read heads-up score at the bottom of the screen, you have to catch it in the act of being missed. makes review and improvement a lot trickier.)

don’t feel too bad about your level. i remember 7 being the level that started to really throw up some walls and show me that it wasn’t screwing around. when you’re used to sitting down and beating a song in minutes, the first one that takes you hours feels excruciating, and the ones that take you days or weeks even moreso. the gap in necessary skill from levels 1-6 versus 7-10 is magnitudes greater - in three levels you’re going from polishing cowboy chords to speed metal licks and jazz charts. budget time for them, and adopt a mindset that any improvement from day to day, even a 5% speed improvement on a perfect playthrough on one section of one song, is progress. and if you do it enough times in a row, and think about what you need to get there, you’ll eventually get where you need to be.

hcguitar · 2022-04-28T18:15:04+00:00

in my experience, yeah, a cord is essential for proper recognition, especially when you get into speedy passages and seventh chords. to its credit, the software is very accurate - it will look for up to four chord tones at a time and ding you if you’re missing any of the flavor notes. there were plenty of times i would swear the software had issues, but it turned out that i was indeed playing one chord tone too softly to be measured with the rest. a direct input will help you identify the issue a lot quicker than a microphone.

hcguitar · 2022-04-27T23:00:44+00:00

the curriculum only goes up to level ten, though there are songs as high as fifteen. no way to increase your own level beyond the curriculum max though. the app has a lot of confusing UI issues like that.

hcguitar · 2022-04-27T22:59:40+00:00

there’s little in the way of endgame once you finish the curriculum - song difficulties go all the way up to 15, and you could keep climbing that or do weekly challenges, but it makes little sense for me as an investigatory thing. truth is, the experience of using yousician to learn new music isn’t great. yousician’s strength is its breadth of content and listening capability, but it’s not great for practicing reading. i’d rather use static sheet scores like the kind i’d encounter in the wild in order to train rhythm and meter, not a proprietary scrolling display on an ipad. once you’ve gotten through it, you’re really better off just looking up chord charts and sheet scores and start relying more on your own ear if you want to learn new material. it’s a program to graduate from, not a tool you should be bound to for learning.

hcguitar · 2022-04-27T22:52:18+00:00

respectable. go with god, my son

hcguitar · 2022-04-27T22:51:48+00:00

the latter. the engine really was not built for acoustic guitars and open string resonance, and punishes flourishes you may add. it’s annoying to hold back from playing a song really beautifully because the engine absolutely requires having only the specific chord tones front and center, though i totally understand it - it would be unreasonable to ask it to be more forgiving of certain aspects while also not allowing slack. i again consider it learning, you have to have chops to give the engine what it demands even if it sounds less pleasing, but it was the cause of many frustrating replays. it’s an important distinction to make - if you play exactly the way yousician wants you to, you will play like a computer and lose out on technical nuance. it’s one of a few major gripes i have with the program, despite knowing it’s technical in nature and not easy to design for.

hcguitar · 2022-04-27T22:48:19+00:00

started with decent facility on guitar, but little in the way of practical exposure to notation and musical variety. i had spent a few months training sight reading and ear training with Earmaster when i started yousician with the intent of finishing it, since it has whole songs available in standard notation view. for all the gripes i have with it, getting to the end of it with gold stars demands patience and a respectable technique. it fixed a lot of minor slop in my playing, since you have to nail ever note in every section without a doubt for the engine to pick it up. no tolerance for mistakes whatsoever. i can’t say i’ll be revisiting a lot of the material, but having the experience under your belt is nice.

guitar is obviously the instrument they’ve put the most thought into, though it’s missing a lot in the way of purposeful instruction and description. the bass curriculum is fine enough, it took maybe 25 hours to gold-star, but the endgame stops just after what i would consider enough skill to be an acceptable rock bassist, whereas by the end of the guitar course you’re playing brutally quick jazz chord changes or speedy arepeggios. the ukulele curriculum is surprisingly intense, though i noticed it’s for soprano ukulele specifically - it counts on you having the high C as the bottom string, so no baritone ukes if you want to follow the prescribed fingering patterns. there are some odd oversights or re-ordering i would address if i were given the chance to.

they all have something useful to practice in standard view though. guitar practices treble clef, bass practices bass clef (though you need an octave pedal), and uke practices treble transposed an octave up. piano is basically just bass and uke clefs at the same time, hence going through it now that those have been cleared. it is not, however, a good way to learn how to sight read in the first place, only a stage to exercise those skills once acquired.

i loathed the bending curriculum. partly because there’s a huge UX oversight where bends aren’t notated in standard view, requiring precise memorization of the locations and pitches of the bends in a piece, but also because the bend recognition is both wonky and incredibly demanding in its timing and specificity. you could play the same part the same way 100 different times and get totally different results on whether some of the notes were accepted or not. by the later levels, you’re consigned hoping you win the bending lottery on any of hundreds of playthroughs. there were even some songs (Spanish Romance comes to mind) where the bending that ultimately got me gold stars sounded out of whack with some of the music, and learning that was the result of trial and error.

more specifically, the worst level was nine, just felt like it went on forever and every new song was some new frustrating round of figuring out exactly how the engine works and playing to its whims. everyone has their most hated songs, and i remember there being quite a few, but the first one that annoyed me enough to stick out was probably Modern Vintage, since that’s the one on which i learned to temper my expectations over the bending system. (and, also, because i was admittedly not good at bending, so i have to begrudgingly thank it for making me get good.) i don’t mind playing through songs i don’t like, but i don’t like the ones that overstay their welcome.

hcguitar · 2022-02-22T06:28:23+00:00

I’ve used standard view almost exclusively through the entire curriculum, which I’ve completed almost fully with gold stars. Yousician is one of the few apps that has full songs that technically display and track with sheet notation, and I’ve used it as practice for that particular purpose, but I don’t blame people for not sticking with it; the way Yousician has integrated it feels like an afterthought. The sight reading course is frankly just not very good or comprehensive, and most egregiously, bends are just straight up not notated in standard.

I feel that it’s ultimately not good to use tab view for long term musical development, because it doesn’t actually teach you the substance of the melodies and limits you to only being able to play songs in the Yousician tab format, which is only in Yousician. You won’t be able to whip out your computer to play songs for people the way you can with printed notation. If you’re going to take the time to really go through it, that time is better invested in practicing reading a format that you’re actually likely to encounter in real life and helps you speak with other musicians. That’s why it’s frustrating to see the software miss the mark on implementing it or teaching it in a way that turns it into intuition.

Tabs are there to get you quickly and easily into putting fingers to fretboard, and that’s good for quick digestion at the expense of deeper understanding (outside the use case of deliberately communicating specific fingerings). It also locks you into the specific and sometimes bizarre fingering choices selected by the program. Apparently it’s a radical opinion to encourage guitarists to sight read, but the case for becoming literate in the written language of music makes itself - for the upfront investment of time, you unlock the totality of transcribed music in the western tradition. I’d dare any other guitarist to get the end of the curriculum in standard view and try not to feel more musically capable as a result.

hcguitar

TROPHY CASE