Why can bands play for hours often utilizing different instruments without ever looking at sheet music, but orchestra musicians always read from sheet music?

Question

I saw a clip where a pianist was playing and someone was turning her pages for her, but they fumbled and dropped the sheet music. The pianist kept on playing, but it got me wondering why have the sheet music if she knows the song anyway. Do they really need it? Why can’t they just learn the songs like all bands do?

In: 5311

Answer 1

Short answer, rehearsal. Bands rehearse alot more than orchestras.

Longer answer : chord charts and song similarly.

I used to be the guitar/singer for a blues band that also dabbled in bluegrass and rocknroll. We had about an 80 song repitoire. At the drop of a hat, my band could play just about any of those 80 songs.

However, about 30 of those songs had identical chord structures. A song that uses A, D, and E as it’s chords and a song that uses E, A, and B are more or less identical. They both are 1,4,5 songs. At the very least, these songs are parallel.

Then of our 80 song repitoire, about 20 more were also identical as far as chord structure, just not the same structure as a 1,4,5 song.

So, of our 80 song repitoire, over half of them could be played by learning just 2 chord structures (and knowing those chord structures in multiple keys). Lots of 1,4,5 songs, and lots of 1,4,5,7 songs.

I’d say only 15-20 of our songs were “unique” in that they didn’t really follow a pattern similar to anything else we played. One example would be the song House of the Rising Sun. It’s an easy song to play. But it’s not a “typical” chord structure or at least not one you see that often.

This is why I always tell students to learn how to play a blues song first because you will have actually learned thousands of songs by learning that one song, just need to learn new lyrics.

But if you spend 20 hours learning Classical Gas as your first song… Well that’s great, but now you can only play classical gas and that’s it.

Learn a single blues song and you have learned most of the genre and it also sets you up with a nice foundation for learning other genres.

Fun fact: even ancient pythagoreans used primarily the 1,4, and 5 chords. So while this does apply to blues, it is not unique to blues. All music relies heavily on those 3 chords. That’s why they are called the Major chords as opposed to the minor chords.