> Musicians never play notes one at a time. They always use chords.
This guy has also obviously never met the strange and rare creature known as a 'bass player'.
This guy has also obviously never met the strange and rare creature known as a 'bass player'.
Singers who are not overtone singers (pretty much everyone).
What kind of weird musician is this person limited to?
[1]: Yes, it's an opinion. Yes, it's an informed opinion, and implying in one way or another that I just must Not Get It will not faze me. I do Get It, and that's why I find it distasteful.
Then, I took a class on electronic music composition. For my own project in the spirit of the avant garde, I wanted to challenge myself to write something "musical" without resorting to the traditional concepts of pitch-based melody and harmony or quantized rhythm. It turns out, there are many other levers you can play with to create the effect of an musical arc. Not to pat myself on the back, but I think the end result is evocative in a similar sense as tonal music. If I had the time, I would do more.
Check it out here, if you like: https://soundcloud.com/acjohnson/wanderers
I have neither the time nor the desire to fully explain my point in an HN post, but I would note that the music community itself has been asking questions in this direction in the last decade or so, if you want to follow up on it, as the academic music community asks themselves exactly how they got to where they are now, so disconnected from the rest of the world at large and so utterly irrelevant to almost anything musically occurring today. (Not just pop music; that is structurally inevitably insipid, really, so who cares, but irrelevant to anything other than their own very little world.)
I learned this by asking a friend in the CouchSurfing meetup who brings a guitar or a roll-out piano. And as I say, I can't play any instrument myself.
Maybe if I want to learn, I should choose an instrument that uses single notes, it might be easier.
Regarding singing though, my ex-girlfriend told me to sing more quietly in church because it sounds so bad.
It's not just limited to bass/lead guitarists either - finger style acoustic guitarists don't play just chords. OK, often the fingerings are chord patterns, or arpeggiated chords, but that's not always the case. Checkout the title track from Bensusan's album, "Intuite", that is mostly just a single note melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di1qQsGcaIc (it would appear the ending is cut off this track here, but it gives you the idea).
I'd say the easiest / most immediately rewarding way is to pick up a guitar or similar (banjo / uke / banjolele / mandolin etc) and learn a few chords. Although people who can do that aren't exactly in demand so there's a case for learning the onde martineau or glass harmonica or something - that way if you get decent at it you can actually get paid to do it.
And that's without mentioning oddities like most varieties of bagpipes or the hurdy-gurdy, where a constant drone is present. It doesn't exactly form chords with the other notes, but it's still more than one note being played at a time!
Source: I am a bass player