Originally Posted By: Bass Thumper
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As an example of a possible tool to acquire, a few mentioned reading sheet music. I don't doubt that reading is a valuable skill to have and maybe one day I'll acquire it. But how could reading music help improve the above song when there was no music to read? All there is is a chord sheet, that I produced.

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1.- Learning to read music is also learning music theory. The farther you get into reading music the more theory you will learn and that will kick start you off into more theory.

2- You will know what notes are in a chord, what notes you can play within said chord, what chord extensions you can add to said chords, and what notes may sound bad in said chord.

3- You can analyze what other bass and keyboard players are playing. You can analyze what you are playing.

4- You will know what scales can be used with what chords.

5- You can read notation of music that you like or may like to explore. (IMHO this is faster than trying it by ear.) Note this is much like picking new to you genre styles in BiaB.

There are three types of musicians:
1- some can only play by ear. Throw notation in front of them and they are lost.
2- some can only play by notation. That is they must have notation to play and are lost when someone says "lets play C-Am F-G7" or "lets jam a blues in the key of G", etc.
3- Some whom can play both ways. This is the category I am in and I believe many others are in.

The above is my opinion and others may not agree.

When you are at the checkout line and they ask if you found everything say "Why, are you hiding stuff?"

64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware