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I’ve played piano my entire life, but I’ve never learned to play sheet music, and have no interest in it. I play by ear and I mostly improvise. Just mentioning

by tobr 6y ago

I’ve played piano my entire life, but I’ve never learned to play sheet music, and have no interest in it. I play by ear and I mostly improvise. Just mentioning this because sometimes it seems that people think the way you learn to play an instrument is by learning to play a score. No! These things are about a different as learning to program and learning to type in a program from a magazine. Even the idea that you could grade how well someone plays seems antithetical to the joy of expressing yourself through music.

jacquesm 6y ago
This is very much true. I've played saxophone with lots of pleasure for many years without being able to read notes properly (spell notes would be more accurate). But I've found that being able to read notes is a useful skill and once I've decided on something like that I tend to plod away at it until I get it, I'm a pretty slow learner but I have good stamina which is what usually gets me to the end of the race. As long as I'm enjoying myself it will work out fine. The main takeaway from your comment is that whatever you do with music should be fun, to make sure you don't destroy your motivation. And just like there is fun in being able to improvise there can also be fun in being able to play some piece perfectly (which, as you can see from the linked video I still had a long way to go with on that piece when I made the recording, it is actually much better now :) ). Incidentally, the biggest consumer of the software in my house is my son Luca, who has taught himself a whole raft of pieces that he likes, he learns far faster than I do and his confidence is impressive, huge jumps from one end of the keyboard to the other without ever looking down, and all that with nothing but the software to guide him. He tends to come to me with some piece he wants to play, we find a youtube video, I extract the mp3, turn it into a score, we polish the score until it looks and sounds just right and then he's off to the races. Floors me every time how fast he will master something and how confident he is when playing.
- tobr 6y ago
  That’s great! I certainly don’t mean to say that there’s something wrong with playing specific pieces. The fact that you’re creating the scores yourself sounds great, as it should make it clear to your son that there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” way to play. If your son continues to be interested in playing, maybe consider encouraging him to learn some melodies on his own by just listening to a recording.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Yes, absolutely, I show him how to make variations on the pieces he knows, adding ornaments, stripping it down to chord changes, harmonizing with it when playing back a recording and changing the timing and so on. Music is like paint for time, you can mix it and apply it any way you want.
  - skeeter2020 6y ago
    I get the intent of what you're saying, but the reality is there are definitely "righter" and "wronger" ways to play. Music is incredibly mathematical, and the piano even more so. Written music provides input and queues to things like phrasing, fingering and the patterns that are often harder to decipher by ear. The true beauty to me is that we can use rules and technique to produce something that sounds so organic and pure. That's probably what also drives my deep love of computers and software.
- julian_t 6y ago
  "The main takeaway from your comment is that whatever you do with music should be fun, to make sure you don't destroy your motivation.” Absolutely. As a child, I encountered both music and maths in a way that destroyed any idea that they could be fun. I took piano lessons for eight years and got to a fairly advanced amateur level, but the emphasis on theory and having to play exactly what was written on the page led to me eventually hating it, and I haven’t touched a piano since. I later took up guitar, and discovered that I just like making stuff up, and seldom play anything exactly the same way twice. I think that now a little more understanding of the underpinnings might give me more to play with, but I still have a rather visceral reaction when I see written music...
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    This very much mirrors my own experience as a child (violin, piano), the later on saxophone was a lot of fun and now piano again, but this time without guidance just enjoying myself figuring it all out and using my software skills to help me.
tobr 6y ago
That said, it would be interesting to design a piece of software that helped you learn to play by ear! Maybe something that plays a short phrase or chord progression and asks you to repeat it. Improvisation is tougher because there’s no good way for software to say if you’re making progress or not...
- jacquesm 6y ago
  This exists: https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals
- browningstreet 6y ago
  Rick Beato has an ear training course. He’s big on YouTube.
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  The Suzuki method has been around forever. It typically targets children who don't yet know how to read period, but there's no reason an adult can't use it. It doesn't work as well with improvisation because you need to understand that improvisation is not just "different", it's different within a set of constraints. You can find this by accident but it's much easier to first understand the underlying structure, then experiment.
siraben 6y ago
I'm classically trained in piano (13+ years) and reading sheet music fluently was integral to practice, but I also have been getting into improvisation and playing by ear over the last few years. I think knowing how to read sheet music and play by ear are both valuable, sheet music provides a visual medium on which to notate time, pitch and dynamics (how precisely to follow the markings of course depends on the genre). It'd be a nightmare to learn a Bach fugue by ear though. Personally I think it's great fun to be able to read music and play a piece you've never heard before, and bring your own life into it just as it is fun to sporadically create the unwritten.
holri 6y ago
Yes you can talk without being able to read. Nevertheless is reading a very useful skill.
kstenerud 6y ago
Sheet music is about reproducibility, and is a means to quickly learn a piece. You learn new pieces MUCH MUCH MUCH faster once you have decent sight reading skills. It also allows you to put in your own notes, compose your own passages or variations, and have them available for reading years later. It also gives you a common vocabulary and framework for talking about musical and instrument techniques and common patterns in music. Learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to code without learning anything anything about programming theory and methodology, and without going back to look at any of your past work. Yes, you can do it, but you'll cut yourself off at the knees with all the bad habits you pick up, and any ability to deeply reason about it will be coincidental (just a "gut" feeling most of the time). Do yourself a favour and do it right. Get a teacher. Learn proper posture (stops you from getting tired or injuring yourself), proper techniques (allows you to play more complex things with less effort required), and a good training regimen (so you can get maximum coverage of all techniques available to you at a manageable pace). People ask me how I got so good at guitar in so short a time, when they've been plucking away at it for years, even decades. It's simply because I chose to find a teacher FIRST, and an instrument SECOND, and went through all the fundamentals, starting with very boring and basic pieces like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ysOIJFm3Rg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ysOIJFm3Rg
- devoutsalsa 6y ago
  I get your point that it's easier to learn music faster by learning to read sheet music. But there's also no such thing as doing it right without context. If someone wants to just jam & relax by playing the piano, learning to read sheet music may not be doing it right.
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    Yes, much like a non-programmer can relax and hack up an Excel script to do a bunch of automation stuff. In certain contexts there's nothing wrong with that. But on the other hand, the farther you go, the harder it becomes, and the more the equation shifts towards "it would have been better to start with the right fundamentals".
  - 6y ago
robomartin 6y ago
Classical guitar and piano, classically trained on both. While I admire those who can just grab an instrument and have a great time, musical notation isn't just a way to real and play something, it's the foundation of learning technique, growth, exploration and developing as a musician. The idea that practicing correctly makes perfect (no, practice alone does not make perfect) is at the core of this. Musical notation (along with a teacher) provides the guidance and structure necessary to learn and grow. There's also the ability to communicate about music in general. A simple example of this is a book I have with practice exercises for the piano. Once I taught my kids to read musical notation and use a metronome (super important) I could simply ask them to learn and practice the scale on page 42 and that was that. On the guitar, Scott Tennant communicated his practice exercises to the worth through "Pumping Nylon". It's easy to say "Yeah, but I can just listen to someone playing the scale and copy it by ear". Well, that's missing the point. None of this material would have survived decades or centuries if it were not for the evolution of domain-specific notation as a means of communication in the art. That's the other aspect of musical notation, it's a means for making works of art survive for centuries, something that is impossible without being able to write things down. To go into CS for a moment, the power of notation got driven into my head when my Physics professor in the early 80's convinced me to not take a FORTRAN class and sign-up for an APL class he was teaching instead. It was absolutely amazing. At the time it was like being from the future. In just a few characters I could do what took heaps of code in COBOL or FORTRAN, and the power of communicating such ideas through notation was just unbelievable. Sometimes I wonder if I took to APL (which I used professionally for ten years afterwards) because I was fluent in musical notation already. All of that said, I think it is great to "just play". Nothing wrong with that. I'll also add that it took me a long time to be able to pull away from sheet music and "just play". And so I do have a level of admiration for people who are able to do that and came at it without any form of formal training. At the end of the day, if your goals in music are not to be a concert pianist/guitarist, frankly, if you are having fun, go for it. Just be conscious of the fact that once bad habits are learned it is extremely difficult to unlearn them. That's were a formal and traditional beginning in music tends to be useful and important.
- cordellwren 6y ago
  It's no longer musical notation, but audio recordings that are the "text," or primary source for popular music. This principle applies even only from a practical perspective, as the pedagogy of popular music has a heavy emphasis on listening to and replicating or transcribing audio recordings. But more fundamentally, you're approaching from an outdated common practice-period perspective what should be understood from a (post)modernist, electronic framework. Transcribing Stockhausen or Xenakis into notation would be a worthy endeavor, but the output of such an effort is secondary to the recording itself. Not just in terms of importance, but in that the recording represents the ultimate creative decisions and expressions made by the musician, whereas the notation is a mere reduction produced for convenience. This was certainly not the case for classical music, but music has changed since then. And so the same goes for jazz, rock, or any other popular genre. Our music has evolved in such a way that those musical elements that do not lend themselves easily to being written down in standard Western musical notation have become central to the expression and stylistic idiom thereof. Finally, if you're interested in what I've had to say, look up a concept called "notational centricity" by musicologist Richard Middleton, and a book called "Everyday Tonality" by Philip Tagg.
tartoran 6y ago
I feel the same and am also an improviser on multiple instruments but a few times I regretted not being able to cursively read sheet music. However, all that effort and energy it would take, I’d rather spend creatively and enjoying myself just improvising.
skeeter2020 6y ago
Learning to read music just gives you some formal and consistent tools with which to learn and share music. If you are only playing by ear and always independently creating the music, you definitely don't need to learn how to read sheet music. I think this probably matches well with the big shift in general learning from textbooks to resources like YouTube. It is limited though; could you imagine a symphony orchestra working with a composer if no one knew how to read music? I'm not sure why you equate the more formal techniques of music with a lack of joy. This seems a false distinction like ranking oral storytelling traditions over the written word. Sometimes the most passionate lovers of a topic seek to understand how it works, which typically requires deep mastery of the theory and foundational concepts. You're welcome to improvise but that's a very different approach. Ironically the best improvisors often have the deepest technical competence; art still has rules and some things work better than others.
skybrian 6y ago
Learning to play by ear and learning to play from a score are both useful and reinforce each other. In addition, I would encourage learning to use music notation software like Musescore. These days I transcribe a lot of pieces because I have preferences about how they’re laid out on the page. (I prefer lead sheets and dislike turning pages.) Also, for some pieces I want to play, the sheet music isn’t available. Listening to a recording to figure out how it works can take a while, so why not write it down? You don’t want to forget and have to do it again. Having a three ring binder of music laid out how you like it is very nice. It makes it considerably easier to go back to a piece if you haven’t played it in a while. You can also change it whenever you want and print it out again, making it more your own arrangement.
thsowers 6y ago
Fellow pianist here who also feels like sometimes too much emphasis is placed on score reading! One interesting counterpoint that was brought up to me by my teacher in uni was that for certain pieces, mainly old old ones (think way before recording), is that sometimes the score is the _only_ thing that we have left from the composer to base our interpretation on! I hadn't really considered this before, and it did make me appreciate score reading more (altho I still mostly improvise these days :D)
analog31 6y ago
I took classical lessons on cello and played in a community orchestra while also learning to play jazz on the bass. Today I'm mostly a jazz bassist but I also play with folk musicians due to my family's musical interests. Among folk musicians, the one thing more offensive than playing the bass is playing the bass and not actually bringing it. So I bring my bass. ;-) So I live in both the "reading" and "ear" worlds, and in fact my jazz band requires both, since we're a 19 piece "big band" and play from written charts. The bass parts in those arrangements range from being written note-for-note, to being fully improvised. In my view the main reason for learning to read is if you're interested in one or more of the musical genres that revolve around written repertoire. That's going to be "classical" (which extends beyond the classical era in both directions) and some jazz. You can get lost in that repertoire, and it's a blast to play, by yourself or with friends. There's so much of it that you will never run out of "new" material. Even with "ear" music such as much of jazz, reading helps you function in a band if you happen to know some but not all of the tunes being called. And you're never completely removed from playing by ear. If anything, written material forces you to improve your ear because in most cases the notes are coming at you too fast to play without some mental processing that involves hearing it in your head. There are two secondary reasons: 1. Access to material that stretches your physical technique and ear by design (etudes etc) or just due to being difficult. It's hard for improvisers and ear players to get beyond the plateau of playing what their hands and ears are already accustomed to. 2. Commercial work. But even there, reading puts you into a category of employable musicians, that is already overcrowded with musicians. But if it doesn't interest you, or is an insurmountable obstacle, then leave it behind and don't look back.
loceng 6y ago
Would there be a way to grade or allow someone to orient themselves on multiple spectrums for different skills related to the instrument or music in general? Grading inherently isn't bad, it's the gradient on a spectrum - however the way the word has been used as all-or-nothing pass-fail with the perception that your future access to education riding on it is of course terrible. But I would like to be able to orient myself somehow and I can imagine some insights and direction could be gained by being able to input the output of your music/sound generated into a system could be useful, so long as the output isn't presented in a harmful way.
kerng 6y ago
Although of course not necessary but as a personal advice, I would pick up site reading early on. It teaches you a lot about music and it's a formal way of persisting your musical thoughts. Also, finding a good teacher and taking regular lessons helps. I would be suspicious of a teacher who wouldn't recommend learning to read the score. Progress in the beginning might be slower, but long term trajectory and possibilities are greater when a student knows how to read/write also. But of course everyone is free to use an instrument and music how they get most joy out of and can express themselves the way they want.
agallant 6y ago
There are absolutely folks - usually parents without musical experience who want their kid to have it (often for status, as a "good" extracurricular) - who push the sort of perspective you're countering. Onerous practice routines and robotization of expression are indeed antithetical to joy, and often result in the kids quitting sooner or later. But just because it is commonly misapplied and misperceived doesn't mean musical literacy is a bad thing. It has many benefits, just as regular literacy does - but it doesn't have a monopoly on expression or storytelling any more than prose, and indeed there can be bad writing and excessive concern over grammar as well. And, just as anyone who does live poetry readings often memorizes the words, actual musical performance should not heavily lean on the written copy - even in an orchestra, players should know the music well enough to also keep the conductor in their vision. Lots of benefits of musical literacy are pretty similar to regular reading and writing - you can explore ideas from past creators, serialize and share your own ideas more broadly, and more consistently track something that you're making subtle changes to over time (ink on paper doesn't shift or falter as our memory does). But one non-obvious benefit - it's also critical to coordination for larger ensembles. Musical expression is a joy, and a very individualistic thing. But the creations of an orchestra or similar ensemble require intense coordination - I believe this doesn't rob them of value, but rather adds another dimension to them. It's not unlike the difference between making a solo or small group project versus trying to build something as a company with more employees. People have to align on the basics so, as a group, they can achieve larger things. A mantra I have for this is "Play the Indicated Pitches at the Indicated Rhythms", which I explain more here - https://gallant.dev/posts/play-the-indicated-pitches-at-the-indicated-rhythms https://gallant.dev/posts/play-the-indicated-pitches-at-the-...
- tobr 6y ago
  > you can explore ideas from past creators, serialize and share your own ideas more broadly, and more consistently track something that you're making subtle changes to over time (ink on paper doesn't shift or falter as our memory does). Recording does it even better! > But the creations of an orchestra or similar ensemble require intense coordination - I believe this doesn't rob them of value, but rather adds another dimension to them. Again, recording is an amazing tool for this. In modern music protection it’s not uncommon to coordinate many hundreds of tracks into a single song, without the involvement of sheet music.
snarfy 6y ago
I'm a big fan of videos like this[1]. Feels like guitar tab for piano. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FYU72jwEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FYU72jwEA
- derriz 6y ago
  Really? I guess everyone is different but I get absolutely nothing from those types of videos and I've tried a few times. How do you do actually use these videos in practice? They provide no key signature, timing, chord, fingering or expression information at all? It's just pitch and duration on a fast scrolling marquee. It feels like like trying to read a book when someone else who reads at a different pace keeps turning the pages. My preference is the standard youtube "piano lesson" format - someone sitting at the keys who plays it once and then breaks the piece down into digestible chunks, explains a bit of theory/musical context, provides fingering advice, goes over the harder parts, etc. If not that, then traditional sheet even though I'm useless at sight reading but at least, given time, I can work it out.
  - snarfy 6y ago
    I've been playing long enough I can usually pick up a melody by ear, but sometimes it is transposed. Even without a key signature the videos help knowing what key it's in. Timing and expression are in the actual audio, so for me it's not needed in the display. I'm trying to play it how I hear it, not how I see it.
    - derriz 6y ago
      I also have an ok ear for melody and given a bit of time can usually come up with some sort of harmonisation so I get learning by ear. But for me that process is about listening to the music or replaying it mentally. I don't get what this seemingly popular falling note/guitar hero style display brings? You mention that you use it to tell the scales used in a piece? To me, the "falling note" representation is a poor and indirect way to communicate that information.
      - 6y ago
c_e 6y ago
Coming from a background as a professional music performer and educator (now a software engineer), seeing highly-upvoted comments like this one that are so confident and yet so completely wrong is a great reminder that you should always take what you read in an internet comment section with a grain of salt, no matter how many people are nodding virtually in agreement. Of course, there's nothing wrong with anybody learning to play piano entirely by ear and never picking up a music score. If that brings you enjoyment, that's truly fantastic, and I mean that sincerely. But for the vast majority of pianists, being unable to read sheet music will cut you off from many genres of music entirely, make in-person instruction mostly impossible, render all written pedagogical resources inaccessible to you, and enormously limit your ability to play in ensembles. Even jazz pianists who improvise and play by ear for all of their meaningful playing can read music; in fact you'd probably find that most of the really good ones are incredible sight-readers. > These things are about a different as learning to program and learning to type in a program from a magazine. I think a better analogy is probably something like "these things are about as different as being able to understand a spoken language, and being able to speak and write it".
- jacquesm 6y ago
  > speak and write Read and write.
- resource0x 6y ago
  Quite a few outstanding jazz performers couldn't read music. https://www.reddit.com/r/Jazz/comments/2hpzzp/who_are_some_of_the_best_jazz_artists_who_couldnt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jazz/comments/2hpzzp/who_are_some_o... This is not to say the ability to read music somehow hurts your musical abilities. Sometimes thing are simply not that correlated. E.g. having an absolute pitch - does it help to become a great musician/composer? No one knows.
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    From that page: "do you even really need to read music to become a good jazz musician? It seems like everyone tells you to NOT rely on it anyways if you're just starting out,and to transcribe every sound you've ever heard in your life." (Jazz musician here) I found the OP's "I’ve never learned to play sheet music, and have no interest in it" strange - because for me, being able to write music is far more useful than just to be able to read it. (Although reading is super-useful also, whatever the genre.) I hear something I like in the street, or in my head, or on a recording - I write it down! the notes, rhythms, harmonies. How do you do that if you can't "read music"? Not to mention transcribing, i.e. writing out tunes and improvisations. When they're more than a certain speed, learning from just playing along with it becomes impossible, and you really have to write it down first before you start to play it.
hungryhobo 6y ago
Pure speculation, but does this impose an upper limit on the complexity of music you can play? Personally I cannot fathom someone play Liszt complete my by ear.
- haswell 6y ago
  Exactly my thought and contention. I took piano lessons for years, but was never good at reading music. I excelled at playing by ear. But when I wanted to learn something truly technical and challenging, there's no way I could have done it without sheet music. Case in point: Imagine trying to learn this [0] by ear. - [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJbg9V2KnD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJbg9V2KnD8
glaugh 6y ago
I’m not qualified to have an opinion here, but interesting to note that Thom Yorke of Radiohead has never learned to read sheet music (and they have a decent number of piano-based tunes)
Beldin 6y ago
> people think the way you learn to play an instrument is by learning to play a score. No! These things are about a different as learning to program and learning to type in a program from a magazine. In the time of home computers, before Internet emerged, just about everyone learned to program like that. (Arguably, with StackExchange seen as a magazine, many still do.)
alfiedotwtf 6y ago
Classically trained pianist here, but never learned to sight read at good speeds... instead, I read enough of the piece to memorise it. To be honest, I think this was really bad and essentially locked me into pieces I memorised rather than allow me to learn others at a faster pace. Now, 21 years since I even touched a piano, I'm going back to basics (learning to sight read is my main aim). Nice job OP.
ryan-allen 6y ago
I don't disagree with your points, however not having a reasonable level of sight reading inhibits you from learning some of the more dense pieces (e.g. Bach Inventions and Sifonias) in a timely manner. Developing that skill allows you to get pieces under your hands (and in time packed into your lizard brain), so you can then focus on the musical expression. You should think of Jacques software as a type of 'touch typing program' for the piano. Instant feedback allows you to build up the 'this means that' in terms of what you see on the sheet music and what your hands are supposed to do. Learning to sight read, even to a very basic degree, always seems to be a big hit and miss for many of the people I've known over the years learning piano. For me, being able to expedite the process of developing that skill so I can practice effectively, in order to be able to focus on the actual music is a huge boon! Less time trudging through the snow and more time learning and playing pieces! When you see a pro performer crank out 2 hours of Chopin from memory, they always had to start with the music. It's a core competency for certain styles, and Jacques software would build that competency quicker due to the hyper short feedback loop (like the red/green/refactor loop). Yet, there are plenty of real world examples of performers and composers who can't read music, there's nothing wrong with that, it just depends on what you want to do (and I want to play Bach Inventions, again!). EDIT: I'd just like to add that my previous piano teacher was both very highly skilled in both classical and jazz disciplines, and he was of the strong opinion that it's not an either/or proposition, but commented that to not have experience in both camps hindered ability if you were a typical working musician.

by tobr 6y ago

jacquesm 6y ago

This is very much true. I've played saxophone with lots of pleasure for many years without being able to read notes properly (spell notes would be more accurate). But I've found that being able to read notes is a useful skill and once I've decided on something like that I tend to plod away at it until I get it, I'm a pretty slow learner but I have good stamina which is what usually gets me to the end of the race. As long as I'm enjoying myself it will work out fine. The main takeaway from your comment is that whatever you do with music should be fun, to make sure you don't destroy your motivation. And just like there is fun in being able to improvise there can also be fun in being able to play some piece perfectly (which, as you can see from the linked video I still had a long way to go with on that piece when I made the recording, it is actually much better now :) ). Incidentally, the biggest consumer of the software in my house is my son Luca, who has taught himself a whole raft of pieces that he likes, he learns far faster than I do and his confidence is impressive, huge jumps from one end of the keyboard to the other without ever looking down, and all that with nothing but the software to guide him. He tends to come to me with some piece he wants to play, we find a youtube video, I extract the mp3, turn it into a score, we polish the score until it looks and sounds just right and then he's off to the races. Floors me every time how fast he will master something and how confident he is when playing.

tobr 6y ago
That’s great! I certainly don’t mean to say that there’s something wrong with playing specific pieces. The fact that you’re creating the scores yourself sounds great, as it should make it clear to your son that there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” way to play. If your son continues to be interested in playing, maybe consider encouraging him to learn some melodies on his own by just listening to a recording.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Yes, absolutely, I show him how to make variations on the pieces he knows, adding ornaments, stripping it down to chord changes, harmonizing with it when playing back a recording and changing the timing and so on. Music is like paint for time, you can mix it and apply it any way you want.
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  I get the intent of what you're saying, but the reality is there are definitely "righter" and "wronger" ways to play. Music is incredibly mathematical, and the piano even more so. Written music provides input and queues to things like phrasing, fingering and the patterns that are often harder to decipher by ear. The true beauty to me is that we can use rules and technique to produce something that sounds so organic and pure. That's probably what also drives my deep love of computers and software.
julian_t 6y ago
"The main takeaway from your comment is that whatever you do with music should be fun, to make sure you don't destroy your motivation.” Absolutely. As a child, I encountered both music and maths in a way that destroyed any idea that they could be fun. I took piano lessons for eight years and got to a fairly advanced amateur level, but the emphasis on theory and having to play exactly what was written on the page led to me eventually hating it, and I haven’t touched a piano since. I later took up guitar, and discovered that I just like making stuff up, and seldom play anything exactly the same way twice. I think that now a little more understanding of the underpinnings might give me more to play with, but I still have a rather visceral reaction when I see written music...
- jacquesm 6y ago
  This very much mirrors my own experience as a child (violin, piano), the later on saxophone was a lot of fun and now piano again, but this time without guidance just enjoying myself figuring it all out and using my software skills to help me.

tobr 6y ago

That said, it would be interesting to design a piece of software that helped you learn to play by ear! Maybe something that plays a short phrase or chord progression and asks you to repeat it. Improvisation is tougher because there’s no good way for software to say if you’re making progress or not...

jacquesm 6y ago
This exists: https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals
browningstreet 6y ago
Rick Beato has an ear training course. He’s big on YouTube.
skeeter2020 6y ago
The Suzuki method has been around forever. It typically targets children who don't yet know how to read period, but there's no reason an adult can't use it. It doesn't work as well with improvisation because you need to understand that improvisation is not just "different", it's different within a set of constraints. You can find this by accident but it's much easier to first understand the underlying structure, then experiment.

siraben 6y ago

I'm classically trained in piano (13+ years) and reading sheet music fluently was integral to practice, but I also have been getting into improvisation and playing by ear over the last few years. I think knowing how to read sheet music and play by ear are both valuable, sheet music provides a visual medium on which to notate time, pitch and dynamics (how precisely to follow the markings of course depends on the genre). It'd be a nightmare to learn a Bach fugue by ear though. Personally I think it's great fun to be able to read music and play a piece you've never heard before, and bring your own life into it just as it is fun to sporadically create the unwritten.

holri 6y ago

Yes you can talk without being able to read. Nevertheless is reading a very useful skill.

kstenerud 6y ago

Sheet music is about reproducibility, and is a means to quickly learn a piece. You learn new pieces MUCH MUCH MUCH faster once you have decent sight reading skills. It also allows you to put in your own notes, compose your own passages or variations, and have them available for reading years later. It also gives you a common vocabulary and framework for talking about musical and instrument techniques and common patterns in music. Learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to code without learning anything anything about programming theory and methodology, and without going back to look at any of your past work. Yes, you can do it, but you'll cut yourself off at the knees with all the bad habits you pick up, and any ability to deeply reason about it will be coincidental (just a "gut" feeling most of the time). Do yourself a favour and do it right. Get a teacher. Learn proper posture (stops you from getting tired or injuring yourself), proper techniques (allows you to play more complex things with less effort required), and a good training regimen (so you can get maximum coverage of all techniques available to you at a manageable pace). People ask me how I got so good at guitar in so short a time, when they've been plucking away at it for years, even decades. It's simply because I chose to find a teacher FIRST, and an instrument SECOND, and went through all the fundamentals, starting with very boring and basic pieces like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ysOIJFm3Rg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ysOIJFm3Rg

devoutsalsa 6y ago
I get your point that it's easier to learn music faster by learning to read sheet music. But there's also no such thing as doing it right without context. If someone wants to just jam & relax by playing the piano, learning to read sheet music may not be doing it right.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  Yes, much like a non-programmer can relax and hack up an Excel script to do a bunch of automation stuff. In certain contexts there's nothing wrong with that. But on the other hand, the farther you go, the harder it becomes, and the more the equation shifts towards "it would have been better to start with the right fundamentals".
- 6y ago

robomartin 6y ago

Classical guitar and piano, classically trained on both. While I admire those who can just grab an instrument and have a great time, musical notation isn't just a way to real and play something, it's the foundation of learning technique, growth, exploration and developing as a musician. The idea that practicing correctly makes perfect (no, practice alone does not make perfect) is at the core of this. Musical notation (along with a teacher) provides the guidance and structure necessary to learn and grow. There's also the ability to communicate about music in general. A simple example of this is a book I have with practice exercises for the piano. Once I taught my kids to read musical notation and use a metronome (super important) I could simply ask them to learn and practice the scale on page 42 and that was that. On the guitar, Scott Tennant communicated his practice exercises to the worth through "Pumping Nylon". It's easy to say "Yeah, but I can just listen to someone playing the scale and copy it by ear". Well, that's missing the point. None of this material would have survived decades or centuries if it were not for the evolution of domain-specific notation as a means of communication in the art. That's the other aspect of musical notation, it's a means for making works of art survive for centuries, something that is impossible without being able to write things down. To go into CS for a moment, the power of notation got driven into my head when my Physics professor in the early 80's convinced me to not take a FORTRAN class and sign-up for an APL class he was teaching instead. It was absolutely amazing. At the time it was like being from the future. In just a few characters I could do what took heaps of code in COBOL or FORTRAN, and the power of communicating such ideas through notation was just unbelievable. Sometimes I wonder if I took to APL (which I used professionally for ten years afterwards) because I was fluent in musical notation already. All of that said, I think it is great to "just play". Nothing wrong with that. I'll also add that it took me a long time to be able to pull away from sheet music and "just play". And so I do have a level of admiration for people who are able to do that and came at it without any form of formal training. At the end of the day, if your goals in music are not to be a concert pianist/guitarist, frankly, if you are having fun, go for it. Just be conscious of the fact that once bad habits are learned it is extremely difficult to unlearn them. That's were a formal and traditional beginning in music tends to be useful and important.

cordellwren 6y ago
It's no longer musical notation, but audio recordings that are the "text," or primary source for popular music. This principle applies even only from a practical perspective, as the pedagogy of popular music has a heavy emphasis on listening to and replicating or transcribing audio recordings. But more fundamentally, you're approaching from an outdated common practice-period perspective what should be understood from a (post)modernist, electronic framework. Transcribing Stockhausen or Xenakis into notation would be a worthy endeavor, but the output of such an effort is secondary to the recording itself. Not just in terms of importance, but in that the recording represents the ultimate creative decisions and expressions made by the musician, whereas the notation is a mere reduction produced for convenience. This was certainly not the case for classical music, but music has changed since then. And so the same goes for jazz, rock, or any other popular genre. Our music has evolved in such a way that those musical elements that do not lend themselves easily to being written down in standard Western musical notation have become central to the expression and stylistic idiom thereof. Finally, if you're interested in what I've had to say, look up a concept called "notational centricity" by musicologist Richard Middleton, and a book called "Everyday Tonality" by Philip Tagg.

tartoran 6y ago

I feel the same and am also an improviser on multiple instruments but a few times I regretted not being able to cursively read sheet music. However, all that effort and energy it would take, I’d rather spend creatively and enjoying myself just improvising.

skeeter2020 6y ago

Learning to read music just gives you some formal and consistent tools with which to learn and share music. If you are only playing by ear and always independently creating the music, you definitely don't need to learn how to read sheet music. I think this probably matches well with the big shift in general learning from textbooks to resources like YouTube. It is limited though; could you imagine a symphony orchestra working with a composer if no one knew how to read music? I'm not sure why you equate the more formal techniques of music with a lack of joy. This seems a false distinction like ranking oral storytelling traditions over the written word. Sometimes the most passionate lovers of a topic seek to understand how it works, which typically requires deep mastery of the theory and foundational concepts. You're welcome to improvise but that's a very different approach. Ironically the best improvisors often have the deepest technical competence; art still has rules and some things work better than others.

skybrian 6y ago

Learning to play by ear and learning to play from a score are both useful and reinforce each other. In addition, I would encourage learning to use music notation software like Musescore. These days I transcribe a lot of pieces because I have preferences about how they’re laid out on the page. (I prefer lead sheets and dislike turning pages.) Also, for some pieces I want to play, the sheet music isn’t available. Listening to a recording to figure out how it works can take a while, so why not write it down? You don’t want to forget and have to do it again. Having a three ring binder of music laid out how you like it is very nice. It makes it considerably easier to go back to a piece if you haven’t played it in a while. You can also change it whenever you want and print it out again, making it more your own arrangement.

thsowers 6y ago

Fellow pianist here who also feels like sometimes too much emphasis is placed on score reading! One interesting counterpoint that was brought up to me by my teacher in uni was that for certain pieces, mainly old old ones (think way before recording), is that sometimes the score is the _only_ thing that we have left from the composer to base our interpretation on! I hadn't really considered this before, and it did make me appreciate score reading more (altho I still mostly improvise these days :D)

analog31 6y ago

I took classical lessons on cello and played in a community orchestra while also learning to play jazz on the bass. Today I'm mostly a jazz bassist but I also play with folk musicians due to my family's musical interests. Among folk musicians, the one thing more offensive than playing the bass is playing the bass and not actually bringing it. So I bring my bass. ;-) So I live in both the "reading" and "ear" worlds, and in fact my jazz band requires both, since we're a 19 piece "big band" and play from written charts. The bass parts in those arrangements range from being written note-for-note, to being fully improvised. In my view the main reason for learning to read is if you're interested in one or more of the musical genres that revolve around written repertoire. That's going to be "classical" (which extends beyond the classical era in both directions) and some jazz. You can get lost in that repertoire, and it's a blast to play, by yourself or with friends. There's so much of it that you will never run out of "new" material. Even with "ear" music such as much of jazz, reading helps you function in a band if you happen to know some but not all of the tunes being called. And you're never completely removed from playing by ear. If anything, written material forces you to improve your ear because in most cases the notes are coming at you too fast to play without some mental processing that involves hearing it in your head. There are two secondary reasons: 1. Access to material that stretches your physical technique and ear by design (etudes etc) or just due to being difficult. It's hard for improvisers and ear players to get beyond the plateau of playing what their hands and ears are already accustomed to. 2. Commercial work. But even there, reading puts you into a category of employable musicians, that is already overcrowded with musicians. But if it doesn't interest you, or is an insurmountable obstacle, then leave it behind and don't look back.

loceng 6y ago

Would there be a way to grade or allow someone to orient themselves on multiple spectrums for different skills related to the instrument or music in general? Grading inherently isn't bad, it's the gradient on a spectrum - however the way the word has been used as all-or-nothing pass-fail with the perception that your future access to education riding on it is of course terrible. But I would like to be able to orient myself somehow and I can imagine some insights and direction could be gained by being able to input the output of your music/sound generated into a system could be useful, so long as the output isn't presented in a harmful way.

kerng 6y ago

Although of course not necessary but as a personal advice, I would pick up site reading early on. It teaches you a lot about music and it's a formal way of persisting your musical thoughts. Also, finding a good teacher and taking regular lessons helps. I would be suspicious of a teacher who wouldn't recommend learning to read the score. Progress in the beginning might be slower, but long term trajectory and possibilities are greater when a student knows how to read/write also. But of course everyone is free to use an instrument and music how they get most joy out of and can express themselves the way they want.

agallant 6y ago

There are absolutely folks - usually parents without musical experience who want their kid to have it (often for status, as a "good" extracurricular) - who push the sort of perspective you're countering. Onerous practice routines and robotization of expression are indeed antithetical to joy, and often result in the kids quitting sooner or later. But just because it is commonly misapplied and misperceived doesn't mean musical literacy is a bad thing. It has many benefits, just as regular literacy does - but it doesn't have a monopoly on expression or storytelling any more than prose, and indeed there can be bad writing and excessive concern over grammar as well. And, just as anyone who does live poetry readings often memorizes the words, actual musical performance should not heavily lean on the written copy - even in an orchestra, players should know the music well enough to also keep the conductor in their vision. Lots of benefits of musical literacy are pretty similar to regular reading and writing - you can explore ideas from past creators, serialize and share your own ideas more broadly, and more consistently track something that you're making subtle changes to over time (ink on paper doesn't shift or falter as our memory does). But one non-obvious benefit - it's also critical to coordination for larger ensembles. Musical expression is a joy, and a very individualistic thing. But the creations of an orchestra or similar ensemble require intense coordination - I believe this doesn't rob them of value, but rather adds another dimension to them. It's not unlike the difference between making a solo or small group project versus trying to build something as a company with more employees. People have to align on the basics so, as a group, they can achieve larger things. A mantra I have for this is "Play the Indicated Pitches at the Indicated Rhythms", which I explain more here - https://gallant.dev/posts/play-the-indicated-pitches-at-the-indicated-rhythms https://gallant.dev/posts/play-the-indicated-pitches-at-the-...

tobr 6y ago
> you can explore ideas from past creators, serialize and share your own ideas more broadly, and more consistently track something that you're making subtle changes to over time (ink on paper doesn't shift or falter as our memory does). Recording does it even better! > But the creations of an orchestra or similar ensemble require intense coordination - I believe this doesn't rob them of value, but rather adds another dimension to them. Again, recording is an amazing tool for this. In modern music protection it’s not uncommon to coordinate many hundreds of tracks into a single song, without the involvement of sheet music.

snarfy 6y ago

I'm a big fan of videos like this[1]. Feels like guitar tab for piano. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FYU72jwEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FYU72jwEA

derriz 6y ago
Really? I guess everyone is different but I get absolutely nothing from those types of videos and I've tried a few times. How do you do actually use these videos in practice? They provide no key signature, timing, chord, fingering or expression information at all? It's just pitch and duration on a fast scrolling marquee. It feels like like trying to read a book when someone else who reads at a different pace keeps turning the pages. My preference is the standard youtube "piano lesson" format - someone sitting at the keys who plays it once and then breaks the piece down into digestible chunks, explains a bit of theory/musical context, provides fingering advice, goes over the harder parts, etc. If not that, then traditional sheet even though I'm useless at sight reading but at least, given time, I can work it out.
- snarfy 6y ago
  I've been playing long enough I can usually pick up a melody by ear, but sometimes it is transposed. Even without a key signature the videos help knowing what key it's in. Timing and expression are in the actual audio, so for me it's not needed in the display. I'm trying to play it how I hear it, not how I see it.
  - derriz 6y ago
    I also have an ok ear for melody and given a bit of time can usually come up with some sort of harmonisation so I get learning by ear. But for me that process is about listening to the music or replaying it mentally. I don't get what this seemingly popular falling note/guitar hero style display brings? You mention that you use it to tell the scales used in a piece? To me, the "falling note" representation is a poor and indirect way to communicate that information.
    - 6y ago

c_e 6y ago

Coming from a background as a professional music performer and educator (now a software engineer), seeing highly-upvoted comments like this one that are so confident and yet so completely wrong is a great reminder that you should always take what you read in an internet comment section with a grain of salt, no matter how many people are nodding virtually in agreement. Of course, there's nothing wrong with anybody learning to play piano entirely by ear and never picking up a music score. If that brings you enjoyment, that's truly fantastic, and I mean that sincerely. But for the vast majority of pianists, being unable to read sheet music will cut you off from many genres of music entirely, make in-person instruction mostly impossible, render all written pedagogical resources inaccessible to you, and enormously limit your ability to play in ensembles. Even jazz pianists who improvise and play by ear for all of their meaningful playing can read music; in fact you'd probably find that most of the really good ones are incredible sight-readers. > These things are about a different as learning to program and learning to type in a program from a magazine. I think a better analogy is probably something like "these things are about as different as being able to understand a spoken language, and being able to speak and write it".

jacquesm 6y ago
> speak and write Read and write.
resource0x 6y ago
Quite a few outstanding jazz performers couldn't read music. https://www.reddit.com/r/Jazz/comments/2hpzzp/who_are_some_of_the_best_jazz_artists_who_couldnt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jazz/comments/2hpzzp/who_are_some_o... This is not to say the ability to read music somehow hurts your musical abilities. Sometimes thing are simply not that correlated. E.g. having an absolute pitch - does it help to become a great musician/composer? No one knows.
- yesenadam 6y ago
  From that page: "do you even really need to read music to become a good jazz musician? It seems like everyone tells you to NOT rely on it anyways if you're just starting out,and to transcribe every sound you've ever heard in your life." (Jazz musician here) I found the OP's "I’ve never learned to play sheet music, and have no interest in it" strange - because for me, being able to write music is far more useful than just to be able to read it. (Although reading is super-useful also, whatever the genre.) I hear something I like in the street, or in my head, or on a recording - I write it down! the notes, rhythms, harmonies. How do you do that if you can't "read music"? Not to mention transcribing, i.e. writing out tunes and improvisations. When they're more than a certain speed, learning from just playing along with it becomes impossible, and you really have to write it down first before you start to play it.

hungryhobo 6y ago

Pure speculation, but does this impose an upper limit on the complexity of music you can play? Personally I cannot fathom someone play Liszt complete my by ear.

haswell 6y ago
Exactly my thought and contention. I took piano lessons for years, but was never good at reading music. I excelled at playing by ear. But when I wanted to learn something truly technical and challenging, there's no way I could have done it without sheet music. Case in point: Imagine trying to learn this [0] by ear. - [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJbg9V2KnD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJbg9V2KnD8

glaugh 6y ago

I’m not qualified to have an opinion here, but interesting to note that Thom Yorke of Radiohead has never learned to read sheet music (and they have a decent number of piano-based tunes)

Beldin 6y ago

> people think the way you learn to play an instrument is by learning to play a score. No! These things are about a different as learning to program and learning to type in a program from a magazine. In the time of home computers, before Internet emerged, just about everyone learned to program like that. (Arguably, with StackExchange seen as a magazine, many still do.)

alfiedotwtf 6y ago

Classically trained pianist here, but never learned to sight read at good speeds... instead, I read enough of the piece to memorise it. To be honest, I think this was really bad and essentially locked me into pieces I memorised rather than allow me to learn others at a faster pace. Now, 21 years since I even touched a piano, I'm going back to basics (learning to sight read is my main aim). Nice job OP.

ryan-allen 6y ago

I don't disagree with your points, however not having a reasonable level of sight reading inhibits you from learning some of the more dense pieces (e.g. Bach Inventions and Sifonias) in a timely manner. Developing that skill allows you to get pieces under your hands (and in time packed into your lizard brain), so you can then focus on the musical expression. You should think of Jacques software as a type of 'touch typing program' for the piano. Instant feedback allows you to build up the 'this means that' in terms of what you see on the sheet music and what your hands are supposed to do. Learning to sight read, even to a very basic degree, always seems to be a big hit and miss for many of the people I've known over the years learning piano. For me, being able to expedite the process of developing that skill so I can practice effectively, in order to be able to focus on the actual music is a huge boon! Less time trudging through the snow and more time learning and playing pieces! When you see a pro performer crank out 2 hours of Chopin from memory, they always had to start with the music. It's a core competency for certain styles, and Jacques software would build that competency quicker due to the hyper short feedback loop (like the red/green/refactor loop). Yet, there are plenty of real world examples of performers and composers who can't read music, there's nothing wrong with that, it just depends on what you want to do (and I want to play Bach Inventions, again!). EDIT: I'd just like to add that my previous piano teacher was both very highly skilled in both classical and jazz disciplines, and he was of the strong opinion that it's not an either/or proposition, but commented that to not have experience in both camps hindered ability if you were a typical working musician.