8 ms·

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 ski

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".
- quirmian 6y ago
  I’ve played piano for the last 20 years, starting off initially with a teacher and going through the usual sheet music pieces. I used to think as you do for the longest time - “The important thing is to have fun!” I still believe that, but I find that I learn new techniques every time I read, learn and play an existing piece - this makes my improvisation and jam sessions all that much better! So would highly recommend learning to read sheet music.
adkadskhj 6y ago
Curious what your thoughts are on the second best way to learn Piano, then? Second best to an in-person/live teacher.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  Second best is to do it without the support and discipline of a teacher. It's just like any other thing that takes skill. You can either stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from their wisdom, or you can go it alone and make the mistakes and form the bad habits they could have warned you about. And when it comes to a musical instrument, it's all about the FEEL and POSTURE as you play, which only in-person teachers can show you. Anyone can take a hammer and saw and build something that resembles a table, but the one who learned from a craftsman (even for just a little while) will be able to produce far better work with far less effort and mistakes. Knowing how to draft and read plans will also go a LONG way towards getting good results.
  - adkadskhj 6y ago
    Yea, right now i'm looking for resources that at least attempt to describe and teach posture, hand patterns, etc. I may at some point hire a virtual teacher, but that seems difficult to setup. I imagine they'd need cameras, my hands, body, etc - and it sounds like work. So i'm going to pursue some non-live methods i can find, if any.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      Fingering patterns are 'work in progress', we have some interesting ideas about this.
    - kstenerud 6y ago
      It's just not the same. At one point I moved away from the city where my teacher lived. We tried it over skype, with me changing the camera angle a bunch so he could observe properly, but it was slow, frustrating, and he missed so many things that came to light when I went to visit for an in-person lesson. Music teachers are cheap to hire. Even 1 hour a week for 6 months would do WONDERS, and not cost much. Plus, your teacher will likely be a student as well, or attempting to supplement their music career. Taking lessons is supporting the arts directly.
linknoid 6y ago
I think different individuals learn different ways. I had piano lessons from a young age, and everything was done off of sheet music. I would spend all this time reading through note by note, chord by chord, working my way through. But even after practicing reading music for over 10 years, I ALWAYS learn to play a song much, much faster by hearing it than by trying to read the music. My brain just can't automatically look at the position of black dots and translate that to which keys to press, I have to actively think about it, but once I can hear the music, my brain says, "I want to hear this note, so that's what note that dot must correspond to". Imagine trying to learn to read English, and instead of seeing words, you see a bunch of letters and have to decipher each letter. I'd almost describe it as dyslexia for musical notation or something (which isn't a problem for me when reading text). I can recognize C,D,E,F,G pretty instantly because of their position relative to the bottom bar of the treble clef, but as soon as you start getting above that, I start having to count spaces relative to a known position, because everything internal looks like a big jumble. So G-B-E (on the treble clef) is easy because I see G as the base, and then the other two notes are space by two, but if it's just B-E without the context of the G, I have to stop and figure out exactly where those notes fall. And as soon as I get below C (on the treble clef), I start having to stop to count the separator lines. But if I can hear what I'm trying to play, I can usually just jump to the correct note/chord. Maybe I'll have to stop and experiment to get the right chord periodically, but I don't have to stop and analyze the position of each dot on the score. To me, the greatest value of sheet music for me has always been in keeping place, so I associate the location of specific patterns on a specific page, and based on all the context, and know that I'm supposed to be at this point in the song that I've already taken the time to memorize beforehand. But I'm pretty much never paying attention to the actual notes on the notation at that point.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  > I can recognize C,D,E,F,G pretty instantly because of their position relative to the bottom bar of the treble clef, but as soon as you start getting above that, I start having to count spaces relative to a known position, because everything internal looks like a big jumble. It was the same for me until I really started practicing sight reading (there are special books for that). Just like learning the alphabet and how to read as a child, it took a couple of years of doing sight reading many days a week before I got good enough to sight read musical pieces. Becoming fluent at reading takes a lot of practice. And like learning to read and write in any language, it's best to do it at the same time while you are learning to speak and understand.
iamsaitam 6y ago
This is only "true" if you want to pursue a classical repertoire. For anything else you don't need to know music theory to make music or read it for that matter. A good ear and instinctive knowledge is far more valuable. Just look outside of classical music, plenty of examples where the musician has no idea of the theoretical part, but has a great grasp of it practically.
- jahewson 6y ago
  > instinctive knowledge There’s no such thing!
  - jimmy2times 6y ago
    I think of this as analogous to self-supervised pretraining followed by training on a smaller labeled set. When you study theory you can ground it on music you've listened to throughout your life. Also to improvise confidently you have to internalize the theory, not just understand it and memorize it at a conscious level. I'd say "intuitive knowledge" is a good way to sum this up.
- TimTheTinker 6y ago
  I beg to differ. Music theory is essential regardless of whether you're playing off lead sheets, playing by ear, improvising, or reading scores. You can't get good at any of them beyond a certain point without having your theory nailed down.
  - jimmy2times 6y ago
    I would add that music theory and sight-reading are orthogonal. My partner learned piano at a young age, and she can follow a sheet but won't know what chords she's playing. I learned guitar by ear but I'm always thinking about intervals/chords/modes. Obviously having both of these skills would be great.
- lyricaljoke 6y ago
  "A good ear" and grasp of music theory go hand in hand. Strongly disagree that the latter is limited to classical music. The best musicians in jazz and pop music absolutely know how to incorporate the circle of fifths, types of cadences, Roman numeral harmony, etc., in their playing. That's... music theory! While there are musicians who can make it without that, they are the exception, not the rule.
saurik 6y ago
> 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. No: learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to speak without learning to read, and doesn't imply anything about "reproducibility" or "theory" or "methodology", as all of those things existed before we had written language. People who don't know how to read are still able to form beautiful and coherent thoughts/tunes and repeat what other people say/play... entire oral/audial traditions exist, and you would be hard pressed to find anything written down from some cultures. More to the point: the way people write isn't even the same as the way people talk, and that isn't to say the people who are talking are somehow worse at the language; find some sheet music for an Irish jig and then see if even a single musician is literally playing what was actually written and I think you'll be surprised that sheet music doesn't even cause "reproducibility" outside of some music traditions that cared about that (such as classical orchestra). And, hell: using sheet music can itself be a "bad habit". The greatest musicians I admire hear some music and then just join in and start playing it themselves, as they are fluent in music; and sure: some of them can also read sheet music. On the other side, I experience people who are somehow crippled by the lack of sheet music: who you whistle a tune to, and then they need sheet music to play it, as if they are some kind of player piano, and that's it... imagine if you couldn't speak--even if merely repeating what someone else just said--without first having written down what you are going to say... it would be a bit crippling, no? (None of this has anything to do with your points about finding an instructor, learning proper technique, having a good training refining, etc. but you will find a ton of instructors who don't concentrate on sheet music... particularly with guitar, an entire instrument where sheet music isn't common at all, as the vast majority of use of the guitar in music people want to play is based on chord patterns.)
tobr 6y ago
I can sit down at a piano and immediately play any melody I know by ear, with reasonable-sounding chords, unless there’s some very surprising harmony involved. I’m not sure how sight reading would improve on that speed. I’m also not sure why you assume I’ve never had a teacher, just because I haven’t bothered to learn to read notes well. All the benefits you talk about in sheet music, you can also get from listening to and making recordings, and playing with other people.
- siraben 6y ago
  I'm curious, how does this approach fare with classical pieces where learning by sheet is the norm? The melody and chord progression is not hard to for a lot pf pieces (e.g. pop and jazz if you have a trained ear for complex chords), but learning Listz's Un Sospiro by ear is going to be really hard no? I learned that piece by its 6 page sheet then memorized it, would be amazing if that could have been done by ear, if possible.
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    It would be like learning Romeo and Juliet by ear. You could in theory do it, but it's far easier if you know how to read. And far easier to refresh your memory down the road if you need to perform it again.
  - plank_time 6y ago
    I think the people who don’t want to master reading from sheet music are not interested in learning long piano pieces like that.
  - tobr 6y ago
    That type of music really isn’t a part of my life, but I can’t see why not. Even classical music tends to boil down to a melody + harmony. You wouldn’t get the exact fingerings right, but I don’t really find that interesting anyway.
  - jimmy2times 6y ago
    I guess it would take a lot of patience, but it should be doable, maybe even more feasible than some contemporary music that is heavy on sound fx. I don't find this as rewarding as trying to understand how a piece "works" though, or creating something new.
lc9er 6y ago
> It also gives you a common vocabulary and framework for talking about musical and instrument techniques and common patterns in music. This right here. Even if you want to play rock music it can help. Guitarists and bassists have tablature, which makes working with each other easy. But tab is foreign to other musicians. I’ve a background in music theory, so there’s been dozens of times I’ve had to act as translator between guitarist and another musician, explaining that “3rd fret barred shape, to this one” is a GM7 to CM progression. Not because it was impossible to figure out, but having a common language made it that much faster to get to work.

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".
quirmian 6y ago
I’ve played piano for the last 20 years, starting off initially with a teacher and going through the usual sheet music pieces. I used to think as you do for the longest time - “The important thing is to have fun!” I still believe that, but I find that I learn new techniques every time I read, learn and play an existing piece - this makes my improvisation and jam sessions all that much better! So would highly recommend learning to read sheet music.

adkadskhj 6y ago

Curious what your thoughts are on the second best way to learn Piano, then? Second best to an in-person/live teacher.

kstenerud 6y ago
Second best is to do it without the support and discipline of a teacher. It's just like any other thing that takes skill. You can either stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from their wisdom, or you can go it alone and make the mistakes and form the bad habits they could have warned you about. And when it comes to a musical instrument, it's all about the FEEL and POSTURE as you play, which only in-person teachers can show you. Anyone can take a hammer and saw and build something that resembles a table, but the one who learned from a craftsman (even for just a little while) will be able to produce far better work with far less effort and mistakes. Knowing how to draft and read plans will also go a LONG way towards getting good results.
- adkadskhj 6y ago
  Yea, right now i'm looking for resources that at least attempt to describe and teach posture, hand patterns, etc. I may at some point hire a virtual teacher, but that seems difficult to setup. I imagine they'd need cameras, my hands, body, etc - and it sounds like work. So i'm going to pursue some non-live methods i can find, if any.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Fingering patterns are 'work in progress', we have some interesting ideas about this.
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    It's just not the same. At one point I moved away from the city where my teacher lived. We tried it over skype, with me changing the camera angle a bunch so he could observe properly, but it was slow, frustrating, and he missed so many things that came to light when I went to visit for an in-person lesson. Music teachers are cheap to hire. Even 1 hour a week for 6 months would do WONDERS, and not cost much. Plus, your teacher will likely be a student as well, or attempting to supplement their music career. Taking lessons is supporting the arts directly.

linknoid 6y ago

I think different individuals learn different ways. I had piano lessons from a young age, and everything was done off of sheet music. I would spend all this time reading through note by note, chord by chord, working my way through. But even after practicing reading music for over 10 years, I ALWAYS learn to play a song much, much faster by hearing it than by trying to read the music. My brain just can't automatically look at the position of black dots and translate that to which keys to press, I have to actively think about it, but once I can hear the music, my brain says, "I want to hear this note, so that's what note that dot must correspond to". Imagine trying to learn to read English, and instead of seeing words, you see a bunch of letters and have to decipher each letter. I'd almost describe it as dyslexia for musical notation or something (which isn't a problem for me when reading text). I can recognize C,D,E,F,G pretty instantly because of their position relative to the bottom bar of the treble clef, but as soon as you start getting above that, I start having to count spaces relative to a known position, because everything internal looks like a big jumble. So G-B-E (on the treble clef) is easy because I see G as the base, and then the other two notes are space by two, but if it's just B-E without the context of the G, I have to stop and figure out exactly where those notes fall. And as soon as I get below C (on the treble clef), I start having to stop to count the separator lines. But if I can hear what I'm trying to play, I can usually just jump to the correct note/chord. Maybe I'll have to stop and experiment to get the right chord periodically, but I don't have to stop and analyze the position of each dot on the score. To me, the greatest value of sheet music for me has always been in keeping place, so I associate the location of specific patterns on a specific page, and based on all the context, and know that I'm supposed to be at this point in the song that I've already taken the time to memorize beforehand. But I'm pretty much never paying attention to the actual notes on the notation at that point.

kstenerud 6y ago
> I can recognize C,D,E,F,G pretty instantly because of their position relative to the bottom bar of the treble clef, but as soon as you start getting above that, I start having to count spaces relative to a known position, because everything internal looks like a big jumble. It was the same for me until I really started practicing sight reading (there are special books for that). Just like learning the alphabet and how to read as a child, it took a couple of years of doing sight reading many days a week before I got good enough to sight read musical pieces. Becoming fluent at reading takes a lot of practice. And like learning to read and write in any language, it's best to do it at the same time while you are learning to speak and understand.

iamsaitam 6y ago

This is only "true" if you want to pursue a classical repertoire. For anything else you don't need to know music theory to make music or read it for that matter. A good ear and instinctive knowledge is far more valuable. Just look outside of classical music, plenty of examples where the musician has no idea of the theoretical part, but has a great grasp of it practically.

jahewson 6y ago
> instinctive knowledge There’s no such thing!
- jimmy2times 6y ago
  I think of this as analogous to self-supervised pretraining followed by training on a smaller labeled set. When you study theory you can ground it on music you've listened to throughout your life. Also to improvise confidently you have to internalize the theory, not just understand it and memorize it at a conscious level. I'd say "intuitive knowledge" is a good way to sum this up.
TimTheTinker 6y ago
I beg to differ. Music theory is essential regardless of whether you're playing off lead sheets, playing by ear, improvising, or reading scores. You can't get good at any of them beyond a certain point without having your theory nailed down.
- jimmy2times 6y ago
  I would add that music theory and sight-reading are orthogonal. My partner learned piano at a young age, and she can follow a sheet but won't know what chords she's playing. I learned guitar by ear but I'm always thinking about intervals/chords/modes. Obviously having both of these skills would be great.
lyricaljoke 6y ago
"A good ear" and grasp of music theory go hand in hand. Strongly disagree that the latter is limited to classical music. The best musicians in jazz and pop music absolutely know how to incorporate the circle of fifths, types of cadences, Roman numeral harmony, etc., in their playing. That's... music theory! While there are musicians who can make it without that, they are the exception, not the rule.

saurik 6y ago

> 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. No: learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to speak without learning to read, and doesn't imply anything about "reproducibility" or "theory" or "methodology", as all of those things existed before we had written language. People who don't know how to read are still able to form beautiful and coherent thoughts/tunes and repeat what other people say/play... entire oral/audial traditions exist, and you would be hard pressed to find anything written down from some cultures. More to the point: the way people write isn't even the same as the way people talk, and that isn't to say the people who are talking are somehow worse at the language; find some sheet music for an Irish jig and then see if even a single musician is literally playing what was actually written and I think you'll be surprised that sheet music doesn't even cause "reproducibility" outside of some music traditions that cared about that (such as classical orchestra). And, hell: using sheet music can itself be a "bad habit". The greatest musicians I admire hear some music and then just join in and start playing it themselves, as they are fluent in music; and sure: some of them can also read sheet music. On the other side, I experience people who are somehow crippled by the lack of sheet music: who you whistle a tune to, and then they need sheet music to play it, as if they are some kind of player piano, and that's it... imagine if you couldn't speak--even if merely repeating what someone else just said--without first having written down what you are going to say... it would be a bit crippling, no? (None of this has anything to do with your points about finding an instructor, learning proper technique, having a good training refining, etc. but you will find a ton of instructors who don't concentrate on sheet music... particularly with guitar, an entire instrument where sheet music isn't common at all, as the vast majority of use of the guitar in music people want to play is based on chord patterns.)

tobr 6y ago

I can sit down at a piano and immediately play any melody I know by ear, with reasonable-sounding chords, unless there’s some very surprising harmony involved. I’m not sure how sight reading would improve on that speed. I’m also not sure why you assume I’ve never had a teacher, just because I haven’t bothered to learn to read notes well. All the benefits you talk about in sheet music, you can also get from listening to and making recordings, and playing with other people.

siraben 6y ago
I'm curious, how does this approach fare with classical pieces where learning by sheet is the norm? The melody and chord progression is not hard to for a lot pf pieces (e.g. pop and jazz if you have a trained ear for complex chords), but learning Listz's Un Sospiro by ear is going to be really hard no? I learned that piece by its 6 page sheet then memorized it, would be amazing if that could have been done by ear, if possible.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  It would be like learning Romeo and Juliet by ear. You could in theory do it, but it's far easier if you know how to read. And far easier to refresh your memory down the road if you need to perform it again.
- plank_time 6y ago
  I think the people who don’t want to master reading from sheet music are not interested in learning long piano pieces like that.
- tobr 6y ago
  That type of music really isn’t a part of my life, but I can’t see why not. Even classical music tends to boil down to a melody + harmony. You wouldn’t get the exact fingerings right, but I don’t really find that interesting anyway.
- jimmy2times 6y ago
  I guess it would take a lot of patience, but it should be doable, maybe even more feasible than some contemporary music that is heavy on sound fx. I don't find this as rewarding as trying to understand how a piece "works" though, or creating something new.

lc9er 6y ago

> It also gives you a common vocabulary and framework for talking about musical and instrument techniques and common patterns in music. This right here. Even if you want to play rock music it can help. Guitarists and bassists have tablature, which makes working with each other easy. But tab is foreign to other musicians. I’ve a background in music theory, so there’s been dozens of times I’ve had to act as translator between guitarist and another musician, explaining that “3rd fret barred shape, to this one” is a GM7 to CM progression. Not because it was impossible to figure out, but having a common language made it that much faster to get to work.