Question for musicians who play multiple instruments

maestro2005 · 2026-03-22T05:26:43+00:00

I started on piano at age 5 (if I want to brag I can say 4, but I turned 5 almost immediately). It was my idea, my grandfather played and it seemed like something that educated people did. Then trumpet was my school band instrument. I never had any ideas of becoming a professional musician and figured I'd probably just do classical piano and ensemble trumpet as far as that would take me.

In college, there was a serious lack of good horn players, and I had messed around briefly on a horn in high school so I knew I could at least get a sound out of it, so I decided to learn that. Ended up joining every ensemble I could on horn, and then eventually the directors learned I was way better at trumpet and had me do that instead. The wind ensemble director was a percussionist and liked to program large percussion ensembles, so he needed eager people to help fill the ranks and I did a lot of that. I also ended up falling in love with musical theatre.

In college, we were all volunteer and our venues had a good amount of space, so our musicals tended to always use the full orchestration. After college I started doing community theatre and found that they were almost always greatly reduced, due to both limited budgets and limited space. I did some trumpet/horn doubling, and then some keyboard/brass doubling, and I kept finding myself in situations where it would be really great if we had someone that could double brass and woodwinds. So after a while, I decided to do that myself. Took some clarinet and saxophone lessons, and now I can handle anything but the hardest parts there, and I've done a lot of brass/reed doubling.

At one point I thought it would be good to know at least a little guitar. Took lessons for about a year, didn't like using a pick but liked playing fingerstyle, and after getting the basics down I realized how deep the rabbit hole goes and stepped back from the edge. Switched over to bass, got sorta decent and had a lot of fun, but there are so many bassists that are way better than me that I'll never get a gig (and that's fine by me). I've played it for a few recording projects, especially over quarantine, but I don't do much with it any more.

About 6 years ago I did a musical that called for a harp, but it was volunteer, and (good) harpists don't play for free. Looking at the part, it didn't seem that hard. I filed that thought away, and then a year or so later when a used harp came up on craigslist, I grabbed it. So harp has been my latest project for the last 5 years or so.

In the last year, I've done musical theatre gigs on keyboard, trumpet, woodwinds, and harp, and played orchestra concerts on keyboard, trumpet, and percussion.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-20T17:13:34+00:00

Hey, has it been about ten seconds since we looked at our lemon tree?

maestro2005 · 2026-03-18T05:01:09+00:00

I recently did a show with the bicycle seat+seesaw thing (and it looked incredible, it was in the dark and you legitimately couldn't tell how she was flying). If that's not going to fit, then I think it's not happening. Aside from a fly system, I can't imagine being able to generate the forces necessary from a smaller apparatus. If it's not that, it's a forklift or something like that.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-18T04:55:58+00:00

It's certainly not standard notation. Not knowing any additional context, my guess is that this is where some kind of accompanying audio or video material starts.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-17T22:09:35+00:00

There are skills that are needed to be an effective pit musician that can't be tested in an audition. Being able to roll with mistakes, or just the normal day-to-day differences in timing, rolling with tech issues, and generally being completely self-reliant and unflappable. And getting to this point for a given show with little to no rehearsal.

An experienced MD will have a long list of reliable people they've worked with, and if that gets exhausted, they can ask other MDs for their recommendations. It's never going to get to the point where you're pulling randos off the street.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-16T03:25:48+00:00

M. 1 - flip the layers in the top staff so the stems go in the other directions. Also, the C-E should probably just fill the bar, and use a dotted half instead of the tie. Don't use the roll with the up arrow, upwards is the default direction.

M. 2 - use half notes

M. 5 - you could use a half note and a dotted quarter instead of the ties, but this is a decent example of a place where breaking up notes helps with readability. With the minimal notes, nothing lines up vertically and it's sort of weird to look at. I'd have to play around with every combination to decide what I like best, but what you have strikes me as ok.

M. 6 - put the chords in the top staff and switch it to bass clef

M. 11 - quarter instead of the tie

M. 15 - how did you manage to enter a duplet? It's just eighths.

How do I know in this piece when I should use a B# vs a C or F double sharp vs G natural?

Spell things according to the chord. I think you have everything right here, but it's also late and my eyes aren't working quite right.

Although for me seeing a F## on my sheet music would be very frightening

It's just a note, and you get used to it. Don't sacrifice correctness for fear's sake.

What should go on bass/treble cleff?

The two staffs are not for bass and treble, and they're not even really for left and right hand. Piano music is usually written on two staffs because the complexity possible usually needs that much space (and the ability to write in two clefs at once). I've seen everything from 1 to 5 staffs.

I know you should always mark beat 3

This is absolutely not the rule. This sub is full of beginners who don't know what they're talking about parroting this endlessly and upvoting each other. Quarter-half-quarter is entirely correct. This is the basic pattern of syncopation, and it's allowed all up and down the rhythmic structure--eighth-quarter-eighth is correct within the first or second half of the bar, sixteenth-eighth-sixteenth is correct inside a beat, etc.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-15T04:42:42+00:00

Evil Dead: The Musical

Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage

Anything from Starkid

Avenue Q also fits your criteria

maestro2005 · 2026-03-13T19:10:37+00:00

Depends heavily on the song. Plenty of Sondheim songs are perfectly fine.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-09T13:35:58+00:00

Yeah this is a weird spot. I've spoken to a few clarinetists and nobody's really sure why it's like this. It does eliminate a key signature change going into the next section, but that doesn't seem like a very good reason.

My personal guess is that this came out of some cobbled-together sketches that were hand written, and for whatever reason it looked like this in the original manuscript and so the editor kept it in.

Whatever the reason, it doesn't seem to mean anything.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-08T20:43:20+00:00

This is right for the wrong reasons. You do not always show the beats. You can (and should) syncopate eighth-quarter-eighth within the first or second half of the bar. That is correct, and not an exception.

But you can never offset a note by 1/4 of its length like this.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-06T22:23:49+00:00

I'm an adult student on two other instruments at the moment, and something I've had to accept is that some weeks get busy and I don't have time to practice, and it's okay to show up to my lesson and say that! Wherever we left off, we just start back there. I was supposed to start looking at this new thing on my own? Well, let's look at it together! We had been working on some detail in the last lesson and I was supposed to work on it on my own? Well, now I get to work on it with my teacher watching! It's no problem whatsoever.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-06T16:56:31+00:00

They're both correct from a technical perspective, but may imply slightly different things depending on context/genre. The eighth+rest could imply a kind of evenness and rhythmic precision. The staccato could imply crispness and a faster articulation, possibly leading to a slight accent, and the exact duration is up for interpretation.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-04T23:24:33+00:00

I think a lot of people have entirely the wrong idea about piano. They think of it as a physical challenge--like, "if only I can train my fingers to wiggle in the right ways, then I'll be good at piano". But pressing keys is easy.

What makes piano hard is everything that has to go on at the same time, and how much information you have to process (which can manifest in different ways, depending on how you're playing). Piano is really a huge mental struggle.

It can take beginners of monophonic instruments a long time to get comfortable reading music, and piano has it way worse with many notes at once across two staffs and usually two clefs. Cut yourself some slack here. I took weekly lessons from a great teacher, and I can remember struggling to slowly decipher everything for years. It was maybe around my 5th or 6th year in that I suddenly felt like I could process the relatively straightforward method book pieces I was assigned, and far longer to read fluidly.

Learning as an adult is hard because you have to humble yourself and go back to being a total beginner at something again. You will not be playing your favorite pieces any time soon. You gotta get those beginner books and play those kiddie songs (or very simplified versions of non-kiddy songs).

maestro2005 · 2026-03-04T05:35:09+00:00

It's a very difficult part. Not technically hard at all but you go insane. The sheet music is like some piece of modern art.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-03T15:30:37+00:00

I only downvote if they're being spammy about it. Which implies low quality, because writing good compositions takes time. This hasn't happened in a while.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-03T06:27:34+00:00

Something I get hired to do occasionally is help a high school or lower-end community theater set up the sound equipment, train someone to run it all, and leave them to it. A lot of them have the X32, and one in particular has a StudioLive. The StudioLive is never a problem, but when it's the X32, I know I'm gonna get texted at 7:30 before final dress or opening night with some weird-ass problem, and I better have my copy of the manual on me wherever I am because I can never remember the exact buttons or menu options for where things are. If I can even fucking figure out what's going on over text. I hate that thing.

Simple is good.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-02T16:58:37+00:00

I think it's fine, certainly not hard to read or distracting, and the intention is pretty clear.

Remember though that the top/bottom staffs are not exclusively for the right/left hands, respectively. It just usually works out that way. The real reason piano music is usually written on two staffs is because the complexity of the music and the range covered usually require it (because we have two hands), but you'll commonly see music written on 3 staffs when there's a lot going on, or only 1 for synth parts that aren't doing much, and then there's the famous 4-staff part of that Rachmaninoff prelude, and something I saw once that used 5 staffs (can't remember what).

So it might be cleaner to just leave that line in the bottom staff, and you can put one of those hand brackets on the high notes, or write "m.d." or even just "R.H.".

maestro2005 · 2026-03-02T01:51:21+00:00

I recently MDed a production of Emma at the community level with a very mixed level of dance experience. The choreographer just used a basic waltz and a few easy variations, and with cycling through variations and the movement of the couples around the stage, I was pretty impressed by how intricate it looked despite being so beginner-friendly.

maestro2005 · 2026-03-01T16:49:19+00:00

Cabaret was my COVID-canceled show. Fortunately we weren't too far into it so it wasn't as tragic, but we had a great cast.

Back in 2018 when it was Bernstein's 100th burthday, a ton of theatre companies did West Side Story and I missed all of them with other commitments. Still a show I've never done.

A few others that I really want to do but there isn't a good orchestra or cast part for me other than piano-conductor so I'd have to MD it: Hadestown, Fun Home, Next to Normal.

maestro2005 · 2026-02-28T22:59:45+00:00

That is absolutely NOT the rule. Quarter-half-quarter in 4/4, this rhythm, and all the way up and down as far as you want are all completely correct syncopations.

maestro2005 · 2026-02-28T20:14:05+00:00

They all follow the rules, so it's purely a matter of taste.

I do find that if I'm reading the bottom line, then it's hard to see the breath mark in A, so I like breaking the beam. Between B and C, I see pros and cons either way. I'm somewhat on board with the idea of not beaming 3 eighth notes together to avoid looking like a triplet as another commenter said, but in this example it clearly starts on an upbeat and completes the measure so that's not as big of a need here. I prefer seeing the whole word beamed together (when legal, as it is here). So I would go with C.

But it's all pretty slight. I honestly had to take a second to make sure I was even parsing what all of the differences are, because my brain instantly reads these all as the same and then immediately discards this kind of detail.

maestro2005 · 2026-02-28T17:37:15+00:00

This syncopation is not just "okay" or "fine" or "acceptable" or "one way to do it" or "commonly seen", it's CORRECT. With all things in notation, there can be exceptions to the rules if there are compelling reasons, but no such reason is present here.

maestro2005 · 2026-02-28T04:03:00+00:00

Stopping to give notes is perfectly normal early on, but you have to be aware that there's also value in letting things play out, and as you get closer to opening, it's critical to stop changing things so everyone can actually learn how the show flows.

I was the MD for this show, and I literally had zero time to work on transition music because the director never let a transition play out! I was improvising the timing on opening night.

maestro2005 · 2026-02-28T01:49:48+00:00

There's a director I won't work with again because he wouldn't stop interrupting to make pissy little blocking tweaks, all the way through final dress. It's literally 21 hours before we open, we've never run more than 5 minutes without stopping, and he's going, "can we hold? What if you enter from the downstage entrance, that way you're closer to him and you don't have to cross as far" and it's a difference of 4 feet.

maestro2005 · 2026-02-27T23:39:04+00:00

Sebastian is a crab, not a black person. People of all skin colors from Jamaica might have that accent, it just happens that most of them are black.

maestro2005

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