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Show HN: Learn piano without sheet music

• jjallen 3y ago
  How do you only have one review? This looks super cool and would make me basically immediately able to roughly play quite a few pieces. Need to setup my keyboard and try it out.
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Short answer, I’m terrible at marketing, and I’ve had bad luck with users I had to reset the rating a few months back because people would give me a 1 star review when a song didn’t open. I always try to be as helpful as possible here - when a song doesn’t open, it has a link to email me, and I’ve always fixed these issues. But those 1 star reviews never got updated. Hopefully now that’s a thing of the past, because it’s tested on all 800 pieces from the catalog, which all have to parse successfully to generate the previews If you’d like to add to the reviews, it would be really helpful!
• filcuk 3y ago
  That honestly looks amazing. Do you plan to release on Android by any chance?
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Unfortunately not! This is a SwiftUI app using a lot of Apple audio libraries - so it would be a complete rewrite to get it running on Android
• conkeisterdoor 3y ago
  I recently started looking into cheap electric keyboards that I could use to teach myself piano, and this looks so awesome for learning. I would pay for this app, but unfortunately I don't have any Apple devices.
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Sorry - yes it is Apple only. Their OSes have a tonne of audio stuff out the box which can be pricey to license from other places
    • conkeisterdoor 3y ago
      Understood and makes sense - best of luck with this, it really looks fantastic.
      • jacobp100 3y ago
        Thank you!
  • bityard 3y ago
    Be careful admitting this in public: you are going to get comments from people telling you that it is impossible to learn how to play piano on a cheap keyboard because it doesn't have the same feel as a real piano, and lacks pedals. Fortunately, they are wrong up to a certain point. There is a difference playing the two, to be sure, but it's like saying you can't learn to drive in a car with an automatic transmission.
    • conkeisterdoor 3y ago
      Hah that's good to know, the comparison to learning to drive makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the tip
  • nogridbag 3y ago
    I just did the same. I wanted to get something cheap-ish, but still feeling like a piano. Roland seems to the default choice, maybe with Yamaha being a close second. I wound up buying a Roland FP-30X, but I think the FP-10 feels basically the same. When we visit friends who went for cheaper options, their keyboards feel like toys.
• rwhyan 3y ago
  Looks cool design-wise, but who is this for? Although the upfront cost of learning sheet music is a few weeks of study, it quickly becomes worth it due to gains in speed of learning and sightreading skills. Maybe this can introduce people to piano and get them playing quickly, but it'll ultimately stunt their development.
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    If you already know and like sheet music, I don’t think this app will be for you I know at least one other person who didn’t bother learning sheet music. Maybe it’s because I came from guitar, where tabs aren’t particularly sight readable, so I just learn and remember the entire piece
    • rwhyan 3y ago
      Yes, this app could serve as an introduction to piano, but ultimately relying on it will be detrimental to long-term growth. I think the app would b more useful if it helped teach sheet music (which can be frustrating for beginners) through this friendly UI.
  • teo_mosce 3y ago
    Yeah that's true but I know for a fact that many of my friends would like to simply learn a few simple songs without really getting into the details of learning music! So this might be helpful for all those people like them!
  • tobr 3y ago
    This is wrong. Played piano all my life, and never learned to read sheet music fast enough for it to be any use. This has not stunted my development. I play by ear and chords.
    • abid786 3y ago
      You’re probably not very good at playing the piano. I’m not sure what you mean by far enough, but not being able to sight read a piece is not the same as being unable to read sheet music at all.
• jnovek 3y ago
  Is this just musical notation or do you hook up a MIDI device so it can point out mistakes?
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    For now, it’s just MIDI files rather than MIDI devices
• jsphsl 3y ago
  I've been taking piano lessons for several months now and I'm still struggling with sheet music notes. I may give this a try! It reminds me of playing guitar hero back in the day :)
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Yeah I was in the same boat. I came from guitar, so had some level of dexterity. I couldn't use beginner tutorials that show you what note to play, because they were far too basic. But then with sheet music, I'd spend 90% of the time counting EGBDF - and getting it wrong a lot of the time too!
• Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Does it support midi-in? I've got a small midi keyboard, being able to hook that up to this would be ideal. And if that's in there, what about a mode - like typing instructors - where the page only advances if you hit the right keys? I think that would be an ideal way to learn the notes, followed by a mode like Guitar Hero where you have to hit the right notes at the right time. Finally, given that the app is aimed at teaching, I'd add a progression path, have the user start with simple music and gradually progress. Finding rights-free midi files and assessing difficulty might be difficult though.
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    No MIDI in for the moment. It’d be nice to have, for sure! For learning - I agree - I wanted to have some kind of ‘difficulty’ heuristic for pieces, and recommend easy ones. I just haven’t been able to come up with anything yet.
    • dbalatero 3y ago
      You can look up the royal grading the UK uses for classical pieces and use that. A single difficulty score is a bit difficult (hah) as a piece will have many technical dimensions to it, and ideally you're comfortable with most of it but a few dimensions push you out of your comfort zone. I think these standard grade scores attempt to give some kind of loose ordering to when you might want to tackle the piece.
      • jacobp100 3y ago
        I'm actually from the UK. Is this the grade system people normally refer to - like they say they're grade 8? I meant more an algorithm to determine the difficulty. Things like tempo and how much your fingers would need to move. But equally, I could probably just cherry pick some easier pieces far quicker
  • QVVRP4nYz 3y ago
    Synthesia works with midi(via USB) - at least the PC and Android versions do.
• teo_mosce 3y ago
  Tried to teach my girlfriend to play the piano for a while now. But reading notes was too difficult for her. I can see this be really helpful for newbies!
• awill 3y ago
  What's the pricing model here? the AppStore lists a yearly subscription as $10, but then an additional IAP to import songs of $5? It's confusing, and I never install apps when the pricing is unclear. Also, any plans for lifetime, as a lot of people simply don't want yet another subscription.
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    The subscription unlocks everything while it’s active The ‘lifetime’ option is $5 but only unlocks importing your own files (not the 800 pieces in the catalog) Its a good point - I should clarify this pricing
• AntonyGarand 3y ago
  Congrats on the release, looks great! Reminds me of Synthesia[1], with a better UX but less features! How do you handle the displaying all notes on a portrait phone per your homepage screenshot? Especially on songs with a large gap between both hands, seems like it would be pretty cramped so a tablet might be the better option. [1] https://www.synthesiagame.com/ https://www.synthesiagame.com/
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Yes - it is heavily based on Synthesia. It has a few different priorities - it won't play weird formats like MusicXML, but it has stuff like looping, a speed trainer (looping with an automatic tempo increment), transposition etc. Portrait on your phone is about the worse way to use the app, but it does technically work. You'll have to scroll side to side to see all the notes. Landscape is better - you fit all the notes in - and if you tap the screen once, it'll hide the header for a bit of extra space. But yes, an iPad or Mac is by far the best experience
    • AntonyGarand 3y ago
      Thanks for your response! I was confused on the portrait as the phone is shown as-is on the homepage, I would advice making it landscape instead as it seems to be a more usable format
      • jacobp100 3y ago
        Yes - that would make a lot of sense! I copied the layout from the TechniCalc page, and never gave it a second thought
• Octabrain 3y ago
  It's great to have tools that make easier to learn how to play music, which btw, I feel music should have evolved naturally itself towards something with better high level abstraction (kinda like programming languages). However, my fear with this kind of approaches in music is that you might end up being a simple "typewriter". I mean, you play by pure mechanical memory instead of due to develop a logical understanding of what you are doing. This was the main reason I ditched yousician for guitar. I saw myself just doing a more complex "guitar hero" kind of thing and I don't want that, I want music theory and understanding instead of moving blindly my hands following coloured dots on the screen.
• vcg3rd 3y ago
  I can play piano, trumpet, and trombone, but hardly ever do anymore. I have been able to read sheet music since I was 8. If the whole concept of this confuses me, and it does, it may confuse people who are eager to learn and get playing (without doing endless scales) and don't read sheet music. I have no idea what tabs means in this context, though I am vaguely familiar, I think, with it as a guitar term (which you or a commenter came from). Looking at the graphics on the site (I don't use Apple) gives me no clue how the notes for each hand are displayed "according to how they look on a keyboard." What am I missing? Will someone who uses Apple, can't read sheet music, has never played any instrument and wants to learn how to play piano be able to figure it out within app tutorials?
  • solardev 3y ago
    Looking at the screenshots, it reminds me of Guitar Hero / ROCK Band on like ultra hard mode, maybe?
  • karmakaze 3y ago
    The layout is a rotated & mirrored version of that commonly used on DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) so it certainly makes sense to professionals.
    • wizofaus 3y ago
      It's just a vertical piano roll (in fact that's the typical orientation of physical piano rolls - DAWs typically rotate them 90 deg as we're accustomed to the concept of time being the horizontal axis).
  • colonCapitalDee 3y ago
    See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2YF34XlfzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2YF34XlfzU
  • singleshot_ 3y ago
    If someone described to you how to play d above middle c on a trumpet by saying “1 & 3” that would be pretty close to guitar tablature. Instead of reading a score, they show you what frets to hit.
• ics 3y ago
  The pricing model is confusing at first and not very clear until you start trying to use the app (tried the macOS version for now). The App Store description does not mention the subscription and what features it unlocks, and in the app it doesn't trigger until you try to play a song. If you dismiss the window, you actually have to go back to playing a song (and wait) to see it again as there isn't a settings pane or other trigger just to see the subscription page. A few suggestions on that front: - Put the pricing either on a splash window after opening for the first time OR in a message tile on the library screen - Include certain (full) songs in the free version and give them a badge of some sort ("free", "included", etc.) - Put a badge in the toolbar indicating whether you are in a free or paid mode - Make it clear if a subscription is valid for iOS *and* macOS or if they are separate (2x the cost) (edit: downloaded on iOS and it's not limiting anything so it must be a universal subscription. Put that early in the description for sure.) I put a piano in my apartment in 2020, the year the app appears to have been first released. Several people in my household were looking for something exactly like this to practice and never came across it, though we did get suckered into a few $10/month or $75/year subscriptions for other things that ended up barely getting used. If the pricing stays the same but is much clearer to people I believe you could get decent conversion from a little bit of targeted advertising. Besides that, the import dialog could be less spartan. It is not indicated in the app itself that it takes MIDI files only. Normal users may not know what a MIDI file is at first but you might be surprised at how many would learn and go seek those if given a tiny bit of guidance. Tons of non-technical people have learned to get their hands on playable guitar tabs the same way. As for the playing interface, I like it quite a bit. Plenty of people will comment about how anything getting in the way of becoming an expert in sight reading is somehow evil (hyperbole) but this is silly. I could easily recommend this app to friends who played Guitar Hero as kids and now want to play along to stuff on the piano or keyboard– hey, we all got older and maybe acquired more "mature" instruments with black and white keys. I used to read standard sheet music for chamber/orchestra but it's been years and frankly it's the least important skill for the type of music that I play. However I do have a piano and once in a while want to play something without getting into a lesson on sheet music especially since what I used to read had far less range than a piano. App Store note: searching for "piano tabs" the app doesn't show up even after a lot of scrolling. "piano tabs learning & practice" finds it as the top result. I am a fan of the plain name; it's short and self-explanatory to the point that I imagine people do randomly search those terms without knowing about your app. That should be a good thing but in practice it seems the discoverability isn't there which is worth looking into.
• masukomi 3y ago
  on the one hand, yay. Tabs have made learning guitar stuff incredibly accessible, and dealing with the separate hands of the piano and separate clefs is a PITA. On the other hand... ugh. We've successfully churned out generations of musically illiterate musicians. We've also made it really hard to find the sheet music for a piece instead of the tabs, and the tabs are lacking in SO MUCH information.
  • avtar 3y ago
    Thom Yorke, among probably other great musicians, couldn’t read sheet music.
    • zengid 3y ago
      But Jonny Greenwood can. I completely agree with your point though, sheet music is an element from Western "Music Theory", and has nothing to do with being able to make music. It definitely does help if you want to have musicians trained in that Western cultural practice to play your music, but not everyone cares about that. Edit: my point about Mr Greenwood is that he is a huge part of the sound of Radiohead, as well as the other members.
    • sebastiansm 3y ago
      Maybe not, but he has an amazing ear and a vaste knowledge of music theory.
  • duped 3y ago
    Notation is always lossy. And for what its worth, for the entirety of human civilization music has been an aural tradition passed down from teacher to student, and primarily learned by ear. The notation is just whatever is most convenient to people for taking notes at the time.
    • vixen99 3y ago
      > The notation is just whatever is most convenient to people for taking notes at the time. That 'at the time' now seems to have extended to around 400 years (in Western classical tradition for instance, from pre-baroque). The evolution of another type of keyboard demonstrates that convenience is not necessarily the watchword. https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-computer-keyboard-1991402 https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-computer-keyboard-1...
• tnecniv 3y ago
  This is kind of a tangent, but I’ve played instruments all my life and I never really understood how to use sheet music beyond the initial learning of a piece. I always see musicians actively referencing it while playing, but I’ve never been able to read it nearly quickly enough to do so. That also holds for guitar tabs, which I can read more quickly than sheet music (for guitar or piano). For anything remotely complicated, I need to memorize the piece so I can focus on what I need to do with my hands. A chord sheet I can follow while improvising even if I haven’t seen the progression before, but my playing definitely isn’t as good because the mental load of reading, listening, and playing is too much. It’s like having one too many processes open on your computer and the OS / CPU can’t quite keep up
  • bibanez 3y ago
    Having good memory is important. It seems to me you have a really good muscle memory and that has helped you play without looking at the score. I've played the piano since a very young age and the thing is, learning to play without looking at the keys (eg whilst reading) is actually a good skill to have. The argument goes that this way you can look at one hand without worrying about missing with the other while in a concert. I tend to agree. Also I scribble a lot in my sheet music because part of studying a piece is discovering things written in it (everything has a purpose, every staccato, forte, piano, etc.)
  • powersnail 3y ago
    The ability to read unfamiliar music while playing is called sight reading, and generally speaking it's more of an exercise than a capability relevant to actual performance. During performance, sheet music is like a cheat sheet during exam, a reminder of something you already know. Most of the music is in your head and hand. The sheet music is just there to prevent a memory slip. Some orchestral music can be awfully repetitive, and having the page there helps you keep track of where you are. You are not supposed to devote lots of attention to the page itself, (unless you didn't practice before the performance and decides to sightread on stage, which, you know, happens).
  • pclmulqdq 3y ago
    I play a lot of piano and harpsichord at a very advanced level, and almost always use the sheet music. For me, it's a memory aid and a sort of "map" to the piece. You can also write stuff on your score to have reminders. This takes cognitive load off when you are performing. The goal of music is to play the music, so why waste brain capacity on getting to perfect memory of a piece when you can instead spend that on making the piece more expressive? I will also say that learning to play without looking at your hands is a great skill to have, and also takes off some of the cognitive load.
• tornato7 3y ago
  I agree that sheet music could be improved. The worst part to me is simply that notes are identical symbols just shifted up or down ever so slightly. But based on the screenshots your app does the same thing, just side to side. I think it would be more helpful if each note had a color to it.
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Yes - that is a problem with the format. There's a few visual cues I add for this, like the black notes extending all the way up into the score, markers on every octave. You can also scroll the score like a normal scrollview, and it'll highlight on the visual keyboard what's currently played, and also play the notes if you scroll slow enough
• jimmytucson 3y ago
  This is really cool! Guitar was my first instrument, then I went on to learn bass, drums, and a bunch of others, but I never bothered to learn how to read music - or, really, sight read. The few songs I know on piano, I learned from an electronic piano that had a display with an image of the keyboard and the keys would change color to tell you which one to play. When I play Maple Leaf Rag for other musicians they're often surprised to find out I can't read music. So I can definitely see a market for this and will probably try learning another song on piano with it. That said, I do wish I had just learned to read music up front, as I learned my first instrument. I think it would have opened up doors for me, particularly for playing with other musicians (like an orchestra or a jazz band). But who knows how much longer that will be the case - tomorrow's great musicians may learn on an app like this!
  • foobarian 3y ago
    I learned a soprano instrument and was able to sight read the treble clef since forever. But try as I could I never could teach myself to be fluent with the bass clef. It just messes with my brain somehow.
• zengid 3y ago
  This is really awesome, congrats on shipping. If you don't mind me asking, what do sales look like on average for an app like this? I'm hoping to someday make a "music education app", but I'm skeptical if people would pay for it. Thank you!
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    I don’t mind being candid about sales - I always found it really interesting reading about others So for 2022, this app was a $5 up front price, and made $200. I have a similar one for MP3 playback - also $5 up front - that made $900. Then you used to be able to buy both together for $8, which made $130 A month ago I moved to in app purchases and subscriptions - and since then I’ve only managed to get one subscription and zero IAPs. The downloads have also been terrible - with about 5 a day The level of marketing before has been having a good store listing, and some effort into keywords, but no active marketing (self promotion or ads etc.) Focus now is on marketing. The nice thing about it being free to download is it’s easier to get interest from posts like these. That was much harder to do before
    • zengid 3y ago
      Thanks for sharing! One thing I've thought about for marketing an app like this was to just sit down and do a Twitch stream or something and screen-share while using the app. I feel like if it looks cool enough you'll get a few folks that want to check it out.. and hopefully it snowballs. You could record it and slice up clips for YouTube with the good parts.. Good luck with marketing!
      • zengid 3y ago
        And another note.. Free-to-play apps with IAP could benefit from learning about how it works in the gaming industry. I highly recommend the Gamecraft podcast from the incredible VC Mitch Lasky https://www.gamecraftpod.com/ https://www.gamecraftpod.com/
        • jacobp100 3y ago
• stenio51 3y ago
  I think it has potential! However to me the piano is too small and hard to see. Check the Flowkey app for reference, their piano representation is more sophisticated, but note that it takes half the screen (landscape mode) and there is no wasted space on the ending left and write. Either way, cool project!
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    If you're on an iPhone, landscape is definitely the better way to use it. I should advertise that more. Looking up flowkey, they have a video in landscape, and their screenshots are in portrait - I might look at doing something like that
• ksherlock 3y ago
  Maybe it's just me, and I'm not particularly good at reading sheet music but -- for piano -- I find all the alternative even worse. At least this sort of display eliminates the "akshually C𝄫 and A♯ are different"-type cranks.
• catapart 3y ago
  Oh, awesome! I'm working on something similar, to put out as a PWA. Seems I had similar aspirations/complaints that you did, but also didn't have an apple device (that I wanted to use for the app). Yours is a very nice presentation! I like the annotations feature, and the comprehensiveness of the features, even for the stated goal of such simple functionality. A lot of people might leave out percussion loops, or be a bit more stingy with the free tracks. This may be a stupid question, but I'll ask anyway: does it recognize Midi controller input? In my practice, I've found value in having the notes I play represented digitally, so that I can keep my eyes on the screen (and, let's face it, Rock Band/Guitar Hero is fun). But I didn't see that specifically advertised anywhere, so I was curious!
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Funny - this actually started as a web app! https://github.com/jacobp100/piano https://github.com/jacobp100/piano It does not recognize midi input at the moment
• duped 3y ago
  One problem I see with your design is that there's no way to deal with rubato, and presumably you can't alter the tempo on the fly as you're playing. The problem that sheet music solves is providing a static notation that can be read non-linearly for a dynamic piece of art that must be played linearly. There's also no way to represent dynamics, as far as I can tell? The MIDI file won't give you that information. Similarly unless you support MIDI 2 clip files (to my knowledge, no one does yet) you're also missing the key signature information, which is kind of important (otherwise the notes have no meaning - you need to infer their function from context, which is ambiguous)
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Midi actually supports a lot of this. You can change the tempo on the fly, and each note has a velocity that's effectively your dynamic Yes - there's no key signatures. It's something I may add in the future Don't forget - most people who use this app don't learn a lot of this stuff. They just want to play
    • duped 3y ago
      MIDI supports neither. It supports an encoded tempo change, there is no way for you to read a MIDI file back at the pace a player wishes to play using just the MIDI file. Velocity is not the same thing as dynamics, it represents the particular force applied to a key at a moment in time but cannot represent change in dynamics over time (or even leave room for interpretation). The thing is that if you want to play you need to learn some fundamentals first. A keyboard isn't a just slab of buttons to push at particular times.
      • Aeolun 3y ago
        > A keyboard isn't a just slab of buttons to push at particular times. Have you ever played any beginner songs? That’s literally what they are.
        • reikonomusha 3y ago
• openquery 3y ago
  I've been playing piano for a few years (no teacher, on and off) and have always been curious about the topic of sheet music. When you're first learning it's very painful. The notation isn't that bad, sharps, flats, time signatures etc - that part is ok. What _is_ difficult is corresponding a position on the staff to a physical note on a keyboard, especially when you have a treble clef and a base clef. However over time it becomes easier and easier - and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time (also accounting for the fact that there is an enormous corpus of existing sheet music). The question regarding this app (which looks awesome) is, is this format for reading music better than sheet music at the expert level (for professional musicians). And if not, how can we get that 10x improvement to make the switch from sheet music to something better.
  • strunz 3y ago
    It's even more frustrating on guitar where the literal same note in the same octave appears all over the fretboard. You have to figure out all the notes nearby to figure out what position you should be in. Even with years of experience I find tabs faster
    • b450 3y ago
      The flip side of this is that chord shapes (in terms of hand shape, not intervals) are constant on the guitar (assuming no open strings). Learning piano after guitar, I was intimidated by the fact that – for example – an Am and Bm had different shapes, whereas on the guitar it's just the same shape transposed up the neck. Anyway, I've noticed some music youtubers can read and write midi notation just as fluidly as sheet music. Which can result in some fun shenanigans[^1] [^1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy_0mMcj0Q8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy_0mMcj0Q8
      • wizofaus 3y ago
        There's no standard Midi "notation" that's human-readable/writeable AFAIK - even written out in, e.g. hex, I would be flabbergasted if anyone could perform from a displayed Midi file. The YT video appears to show a piano-roll type display (common for DAWs etc.), nothing to do with midi (which doesn't even have the concept of notes or note lengths at all).
• bregma 3y ago
  Hmm. Looks like the classic piano roll notation.
• Emigre_ 3y ago
  Hey this is really cool! Thanks for sharing it!
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Thank you!
• john61 3y ago
  There has always been a very old method to learn music without sheet music. It is called playing by ear. It is incredible that we have a word for that. Because nobody is saying he is learning to talk by ear. Because talking and making music is an acoustic thing, and the natural thing is to use primarily your ear for that. The eye can be helpful, be it sheet music or a midi visualisation like this app. But an eye can not hear music.
  • Fervicus 3y ago
    Is this something you have learnt? If so, any suggestions how to go about learning music this way?
    • wizofaus 3y ago
      Practice. Trial & error. Playing along with the recording. I still do it regularly and it can often take a few goes to get all the chords just right, even with the relatively simple tonal/rhythmic language of most pop music.
    • analog31 3y ago
      I learned by playing along to the radio. This was in the late 70s and early 80s, and I still remember a lot of the "classic rock" repertoire for this reason. It can help to have a teacher give you a head start on easy songs before diving in head-first, and also, learning your way around your instrument independently from ear training. You develop a reflexive connection between your ears and your hands, so the signals flow through your spinal cord and reptilian brain, while you're thinking consciously about the higher levels of musical structure and what's going on around you.
  • layer8 3y ago
    The problem with this is remembering what you want to play, for pieces of any length and complexity. The comparison in that case is not talking, but reciting a long poem/article/novel.
    • utexaspunk 3y ago
• distantsounds 3y ago
  This doesn't teach you how to play piano, this teaches you how to read vertically scrolling notes. It doesn't actually teach you where the notes are on the piano, when key changes are made, or when to play a note strong or soft. This is gamifying an actual skill without teaching the actual skill. Good for a few parlor tricks but actually learning piano, requires, well, actually learning how to read the sheet music.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• billfruit 3y ago
  Does Casio Chordana play do something similar?
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Looks like it! I'm definitely not the first to do this
• kashunstva 3y ago
  I’m a professional pianist; so I’m not in your target audience. There may well be some system of notation that is superior to the standard that has developed in Western music; but nothing I’ve seen matches the expressive flexibility and compactness of the way music is now notated. Experienced players read music in a way that overcomes some of the limitations that form the assumptions that are behind these alternative notation systems. Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk. (I imagine reading code must be similar.) This is why the density of traditional notation isn’t intimidating - after a while it can be read as a whole. Whether a system like this could be a pedagogical bridge to formal notation remains to be seen. I’ve encountered such bridging systems before. I’m an admitted skeptic because my orientation to this is that if you want to learn a thing, just start learning the thing. The struggle, within limits, is known to enhance learning.
  • unc0n 3y ago
    I'm an experienced musician and this really resonates with me. It's possible to see a scale written out in the score and know exactly what that means in terms of how it's supposed to sound, what fingering I should use, and whether there are any "aberrant" notes in there that I should watch out for. The same goes for many other common note patterns. Trying to decode something like this into something that makes sense to me musically is a huge additional burden that doesn't exist. That said, having been through the journey of being able to sight read music myself and then trying to teach it to a number of people, I agree that reading a score in real time is one of the greatest hurdles to beginner and intermediate players alike, and probably a huge impediment to many people learning to play a variety of instruments. There is one particular instance in which getting away from traditional notation can help. I have absolute pitch, and I've played transposing (woodwind) instruments before. The mental link between specific finger positions and specific tones / notes on the score, is one that causes me untold issues with transposing instruments. If I could just focus on the finger positions without the distraction of the score, that would help me. I don't think this is a common problem though.
    • nescioquid 3y ago
• notorandit 3y ago
  Learning piano without reading scores (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin...) is like learning C without bitwise operators and pointers...
• Madmallard 3y ago
  Synthesia has done this exact solution for well over a decade now. But there’s also the option to read generated sheet music and adjust the playback and gradung in many ways. https://synthesiagame.com/ https://synthesiagame.com/
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    Yes - the core app is similar. Synthesia for sure has better import support and connects to physical keyboards. This app focuses a lot more on UI/UX, and still has some unique playback features, like setting up a loop that starts slow and speeds up after each iteration
• Madmallard 3y ago
  What we actually need is a program that effectively teaches sight reading sheet music well. That would be the music school winner.
• crtified 3y ago
  I applaud tools like this, which give alternative options for people to access the music world. Traditional sheet music is a very competent tool, but it's also a very specific form of translation (of sound, to print). Certainly not the only one, and not even necessarily the best possible one. I am getting a little off-track here, and I'm probably doing my suggestion few favours by burying it here where few will ever see it, but on a similar track, I envisage music tuition being a huge potential application for augmented reality. The possibilities there are mindblowing.
• fortran77 3y ago
  I've been playing the piano for 55+ years, and still practice daily. What makes piano difficult isn't reading music notation. You can learn to read music notation in a week. What makes it difficult is the physical challanges. Skipping music notation may save you a few weeks at the very beginning, but you'll quickly hit a wall and need to learn the physical skills. And if you can't read music, you won't be able to make music with other people. This is a very, very bad idea.
  • paddim8 3y ago
    People have different goals and ideas of how they want to play. I don't think that's something that should be gatekept.
    • fortran77 3y ago
      I’m trying to help this guy not hit a wall after six months.
• pascalxus 3y ago
  Two fatal issues I discovered: - the apple store was so biased, even when I typed in "piano tabs", it couldn't find your app in the top 10 results. I had to type in the name of the entire app: "Piano Tabs: Learn & Practice" Then I attempted to install it and got this: - "This application requires iOS 15.0 or later". This is a deal breaker on so many apps. I don't trust apple enough to change my iOS version. Note: this happened on a pretty recent iphone 7+
  • callalex 3y ago
    If you don’t trust Apple to maintain your phone why even bother buying a phone from them in the first place?
    • pascalxus 3y ago
      i didn't buy it. I got it as a hand me down.
      • jacobp100 3y ago
        I'm not sure what OS you're on, but iOS 13 was about the buggiest OS they ever released. If you're on that, I'd highly recommend upgrading. iOS 14 was pretty solid - but I'd still recommend upgrading
  • golergka 3y ago
    iPhone 7 was released 7 years ago. It's definitely not recent, and I wouldn't expect any app developer to support such an old device.
    • junar 3y ago
      Ironically, OP can still upgrade their iPhone 7 to iOS 15. Apple claims that 94% of iPhones are on iOS 15 or later. [1] https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store/ https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store/
  • crazygringo 3y ago
• zharknado 3y ago
  I want to try to articulate an idea I see represented elsewhere without dismissing the value of what’s being offered here. There are many comments to the effect that this is a crutch that will inhibit future learning. I agree with that assessment. I also agree that such a tradeoff is probably fine for many people, depending on their goals. I studied music composition in college and then worked in adult world language curriculum. Perhaps a useful analogy is the use of Romanization to teach world languages to native English speakers (romaji, pinyin, etc.) For languages like Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) where there is (virtually) no phonetic information in the writing system, it’s just too dang hard for a lot of people to make the leap to pronouncing characters as they are reas by natives. Pinyin or its equivalents are an “inauthentic” but valuable tool, but eventually you have to discard it to progress. With straightforward phonetic languages like Korean, it’s actually counterproductive to try to bridge people to familiar symbols, because there’s very few resources for the learner until they start mapping sounds to Hangul. That’d be my argument—-if you find you can’t easily make the leap to reading music and just want to get playing, sure, use this. But know that there’s a whole world of communication out there that you’ll be missing until you abandon this simplified representation and cross the full chasm.
  • jhbadger 3y ago
    This whole argument in favor of sheet music reminds me quite a lot of the defense of Chinese/Japanese characters. Yes, there is a long glorious tradition of using them, but assuming that they are the optimal solution and that any exploration of better methods is wrongheaded seems unsupported. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese, Korean developed its own superior phonetic replacement for the characters (Hangul) and Vietnamese is now written in the Roman alphabet (originally for the convenience of French colonizers but independent Vietnam shows no desire to go back to characters).
    • zharknado 3y ago
      I agree in the sense that in both cases the argument that holds water is less about what’s “better” and more about what’s practical. The status quo is how millions of people do it, so if you want to communicate with them you’ll probably be more successful learning their conventions vs. convincing others to use your own. Getting philosophical, I believe there could be a more efficient/learnable notation system, but I’m bearish on one inventor or committee inventing it in a lonely tower, because of how e.g. the French and Spanish academies try so hard to prescribe clarity for their countries’ official languages and then people just go and do the organic language evolution thing to meet their local communication needs anyway. But there are rare counterexamples like Shong Lue Yang, a spiritual leader who created an effective writing system for Hmong. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shong_Lue_Yang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shong_Lue_Yang
• julienmarie 3y ago
  Was interested in the concept because weirdly i'm an ok average+ piano player but just suck at sheet reading. Just downloaded it on my M2 mac. It doesn't work? Clicking on a track just show a picture of the track. Clicking on a composer just show a picture of the composer. Clicking on View All just show a page with View All written in the middle.
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    I've figured out what causes it - the navigation system on older versions of iOS and macOS was broken. I'm releasing an update to fix it now and it will be with you as soon as Apple has reviewed it
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    That does not sound right. Don't suppose you could record a video, then tap the 'help' button and email me it?
• Johnythree 3y ago
  After reading this thread, I'm amazed that no one has mentioned the work being done on alternative keyboards (and on alternative music notation). The main point is that the design of the piano has held beginners back for centuries, and likewise has hindered the development of music notation. Unfortunately the design of the piano keyboard requires that fingering change when you change key. The guitar doesn't do this, neither does the button accordion. Whatever, a number of keyboards have been developed where the fingering does not change as you change key. Start here https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/ https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/ and https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/isomorphic-instruments/ https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/isomorphic-instru... Particularly the https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/wicki-hayden-note-layout/ https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/wicki-hayden-note... But please start searching and reading on the following topics: Isomorphic Instruments, the Xenharmonic Keyboard, the Janko Keyboard, Linnstrument, Lumatone, Dodeka, Chromatone, Balanced keyboard. And for just a glimpse of an alternative music presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ7LkWCzKxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ7LkWCzKxI
  • 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    The last link is very interesting, but it doesn't look like a sheet music alternative, since it only gives you the chord progressions and not the constituent notes. Also, good luck printing it on paper without the animations :)
  • jerpint 3y ago
    The symmetric keyboard seems “as obvious” as using tau instead of pi as a universal constant, but then again I don’t play piano
  • YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
    >> Start here https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/ https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/ That is an absolutely horrible idea. It might seem intuitive at first ("Just alternate keys!") but its impracticality becomes immediately apparent and is directly acknowledged in the site you linked: >> There’s just one drawback: the monotony of such an arrangement. How can we find our way on such a keyboard? Recently, the French musicologist Laurent Fichet remarked: “This system would certainly be much more rational than the keyboard of today, but one may wonder how players would locate the different notes with such a systematic and uniform layout.” The French version of the article then goes on to suggest many variations of ways to avoid being lost on a keyboard without any obvious pattern (the English version only lists one, briefly). Some include coloured keys. It is beyond obvious that the simple, intuitive solution proposed at the start produces a cavalcade of complications none of which has a simple solution. Not to mention: despite what the linked site suggests, learning how to position your fingers on the keyboard is the least of your problems when you learn the piano, just as learning to touch-type is the least of your problems when you learn how to code. I vote no.
• irrational 3y ago
  > It changed about a month ago from an up front price to in app purchases and/or a subscription - which has absolutely tanked revenue so far - but maybe it will pick up This doesn’t surprise me. I abhor all subscriptions. I’ll pay for things once, upfront, but I’d rather do without than have continuous payments.
  • Gigachad 3y ago
    These days I avoid upfront payments unless you come out ahead within a year. I don't want to buy something that takes 5 years to be cheaper than the yearly payments. I have no idea if I'm going to want this thing for x years, most of the time I don't end up getting good value from upfront payments. With subscriptions I can just cancel and move to the best option at the time.
  • jacobp100 3y ago
    The old offering is still available as an in app purchase (it only unlocks importing, but doesn't expire) - but I think the conversion rates for IAPs are far, far lower
• gcanyon 3y ago
  Does anyone have recommendations for a learn-to-play-on-it keyboard? Not too expensive, but not a toy?
  • reikonomusha 3y ago
    Roland FP-10 is en entry level "not a toy" keyboard.
• wirrbel 3y ago
  Having been trained to read sheet music, I definitely wouldn't be your customer. The notation system is so smart, the closer you look at it, that I cannot imagine that it can be replaced with something just as good, especially for the more complex scores. Definitely some alternative solutions may be good for beginners, but I wonder how they would perform with the Kreisleriana.
• pseudosaid 3y ago
  this is beautiful. id love a color changing ability. i use synthesia and you should take notes from that app. Id use your app if you could also show sheet music and let me have greater granularity on how I practice, eg. left and right hand, practicing the notes and then the timing