Want to play well? Stop using ocarina tabs!
Ocarina tabs can be a great way to get started with playing music, and if they have helped you to get started playing the ocarina, or music in general, that's awesome. Playing music is a lot of fun, and can lead to some great social experiences.
Unfortunately, ocarina tabs have limitations that will quickly limit you as you progress in your music journey:
Ocarina tabs look simple because they omit information. Rhythm, phrasing and note emphasis are all absent, leaving you to work them out by ear or from memory. It often leads to mistakes, and without the guidance of a teacher, these can go unnoticed for months or years.
Secondly, ocarina tabs are verbose. Showing the fingering for every note at legible size takes up a considerable amount of space. Consequently, tabs can only represent simple music. If you only use tabs, you will never be exposed to more advanced ideas.
On this same train of thought, ocarina tabs will limit your repertoire. Only a tiny portion of the world's music will ever be transcribed into ocarina tabs.
At some point you'll want to play something that does not exist in tab form. What options do you have? Beg on social media, or a web forum for someone to transcribe it for you? Unless you learn to work form the source material, be it sheet music or by ear, you will never become an independent musician.
Also, The nature of tabs often leads to false assumptions, such as "if I am using the right fingering, I am playing the correct note", which is false. Ocarinas change pitch with how hard you are blowing.
And finally, tabs obscure the mechanics of music. While ocarina tabs allow you to play the notes of a tune, they reveal little about why those notes are used. To this end you are blindly following instructions.
Moving beyond ocarina tabs
To move beyond ocarina tabs, I advise doing three things:
These are easier than you might assume, and the list above links to dedicated pages on those topics. The basics of each are summarised below.
Do be aware that if you've been using tabs for any amount of time they will feel natural to you, while approaching something new will feel more stressful. This is normal and things quickly gets easier.
Learning your ocarina's fingerings
One of the issues with ocarina tabs is that they encourage you to consciously think about the positions of your fingers. Isn't it more important to think about the music you are playing?
With a little practice, you can train your subconscious mind to do the fingerings for you, much as you can walk while having a conversation without thinking about every joint movement you need to make.
Each fingering on your instrument represents a different note, and these notes all have names. Learning the fingerings is just a matter of breaking your fingering chart down into groups of 3 or 4 fingerings, and looping through them while saying their names.
See 'Learning the ocarina's fingerings'.
Learning to read sheet music
Learning to read sheet music is easier than you might think. Sheet music is essentially a graph where:
- Vertical position represents different notes on your instrument,
- and symbols of different shapes represent how long each note will be played before you move to the next one.
Notes are read left to right, and each vertical position represents a different fingering on your instrument. For example, the following shows the note G, and how you would finger that note on an alto C ocarina.
Learning to read sheet music is just a matter of:
- Associating the shapes of notes to the rhythm they represent.
- Associating positions to fingerings / blowing pressures on the ocarina.
Note that the order that you learn these matters, and I suggest learning to read rhythms before learning to read pitches. A melody is a rhythm with a series of pitches played to it.
The basics of learning to read sheet music is discussed on the page The basics of playing the ocarina with sheet music.
Learning the basics of reading sheet music is hugely freeing as it is so common. It is almost certain that you will be able to find the music you want to play.
Learning how to play by ear
Contrary to common belief, the ability to play music by ear is not something you must be born with. It is a skill that can be developed with practice.
Like any skill, it must be developed starting from the basics:
- You'd want to start out with a very small range of notes.
- Get a friend to play you a simple melody using those notes.
- Try to copy it yourself.
As you get better, you can start increasing the range of notes used, and also playing longer melodies. How to develop this skill is is covered in the article The basics of playing the ocarina by ear.
Playing by ear is a very useful skill to develop as there are details in human performances that sheet music cannot represent, subtle changes in rhythm and pitch that bring a performance to life.
Also, you may find it easier to learn melodies by ear, instead of reading sheet music, that's fine. Different people will find one or the other approach easier than the other. What I'd suggest is to just try both and see which feels the most natural for you.
Though both skills are useful.
