Ability to play from the sheet without preparation if completely orthogonal to anything in this thread. Especially to ability to play all the scales in all variations to the perfection for the practice test.
Testing scales tests all of these things, and more simultaneously. I fail to see the problem. If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem?
> If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem?
So basically, you do not know anything about the test the guitarist complained about.
> Testing scales tests all of these things
I don't see how testing scales tests knowing the sharps and flats really. If you're playing all the (major) scales on a string instrument, it's all about starting on the right note, and then doing the scale pattern: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. On a guitar, half is one fret and whole is two, and you need to know how to jump to the next string if you don't want to just walk the length of the fretboard. I've never played a wind instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in others, and keyboards are setup for c-major, so it takes some practice to get the sense of where the whole and half tones are for other keys, but the example of guitar is not hard. If you can play guitar and have a week to practice it, you should be able to play any major/minor scale on demand.
If you can play the scale, you can probably take the time and think the sharps and flats, but that doesn't really mean you know them, IMHO.
It’s been a while since I played (stopped after college), but yes. Wind instruments really only play in one key. It is really rare to have sheet music in a different key and because of that transposing is not a skill that you really need to be successful. You still learn scales… I played one of the few instruments where you were expected to be able to transpose (F horn with some older music in Eb). Even then, while it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t a common skill.
Guitar, string, and piano are an entirely different beast. And that flexibility of scales and keys is probably why you don’t see many wind instruments professionally playing outside of orchestras.
This is more difficult on the standard piano because of the badly designed keyboard, but you can get isomorphic keyboards that let you play all the keys without learning all the sharps and flats.
Sure you might make a career as a musician playing everything by ear, and there is nothing wrong with that. But a university trained viola player can join an orchestra, be handed violin sheet music and then perform having never heard or practiced the music before.
You don't really need to go do a degree in music at all if your only goal is performance and you have intuitive aptitude, but if your plan is to teach, you're going to be a pretty awful teacher if you only can teach students to ape your specific methodology rather than being able to introduce them to the lingua franca that most musicians are using.