Comprehensive Muscianship in Music Technology

SJSU - Music Major

Recording Studio Rockistars – QUENTIN “Q” GILKEY – MIXING FOR DR DRE

Whenever you enroll as a music major in music conservatory are university, you study comprehensive musicianship.

This includes: Sight singing, air training, dictation and transcription, ensemble performance, repertoire, music notation, piano and keyboard proficiency,

And then as a music major, you are often given the opportunity to choose an area of specialty whether you wanted to be performance, composition, education, etc.

Many music technology students have not had have not yet had training in the area of comprehensive musicianship. That means you are potentially at a disadvantage. It's absolutely not required to have a high level of musicianship in order to have a very successful career path as artistic and financial as a Carter creator, music producer, film composer, etc.

Some music tech students got into music technology making beats, or playing around as a DJ, maybe played in a band, maybe marching band in high school, or jamming in the garage with their friends in junior high.

Other music tech students started taking piano lessons when they were four years old, and we're playing recitals by the time they were six.

I really interesting case study of an archetypal audio engineer that understands music theory

I realize that perhaps a better vernacular would be musicianship and audio engineering. I'm not just talking about music theory. I'm talking about comprehensive musicianship. I'm not talking about understanding traditional western music theory scales cords etc. I'm talking about really understanding the music. And quite honestly, in my humble opinion, it's way more important to be able to play it by ear without any intellectual understanding of the music theory, then it is to be a music theory geek and completely understand traditional western music theory without having the ability to play by ear.

For example there's a lot of street musicians that are amazing virtuosos, they have incredible musicianship, very able to play any song to hear, and are able to creates an endless river of original music, but I don't have any idea how to read music, they have zero training in formal music theory. So the end of the day I don't consider music theory the most important objective.

On the other hand, when we do a case study of many of the greatest musicians, composers, and even audio engineers, we will find that not only do they have a very good ear, they also have an intellectual understanding of music theory and everything that is contained within the category of comprehensive musicianship.