This is great. Can you please add Czerny?
Added to the list.
thank you!
Show HN: Hanon Pro – piano technique and exercises for the digital age
101–108 of 108 posts
Re: Show HN: Hanon Pro – piano technique and exercises for the digital age
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> one-finger pianist That reminds me there are people who type on the (computer) keyboard with two fingers, searching for each key and pecking at it. I was fortunate to have "blind typing" classes as a child, including a fun game where you type to shoot at words falling on a city. That skill has been really valuable over the years. I wonder if there are similar concepts for learning to play on the piano keyboard, lik…
Yes, there are gamified learning apps like this. Some of the more well-known ones are Simply Piano, Yousician, Skoove and Synthesia and various clones but just searching "piano" on iOS app store gave me longer list than I cared to scroll through. The nice thing is that you have to learn to play without looking at your hands because your eyes are fixed at the screen. The less nice part is that especially with Synthesi…
Thanks for the recommendation. Ah yes, Synthesia looks familiar - I've seen YouTube videos of people playing fast compositions with colors flying by in 3D.
Good point about the game interface, how getting too used to playing with the color indicators does not translate to sheet music during performances. I think I'll prefer to look at sheet music during practice too.
I'm checking out the other apps you mentioned. So interesting to see successful implementations of the "gamified learning" concept, with piano and other instruments. I can imagine a similar approach might work for other areas of study, like language learning.
Re: Show HN: Hanon Pro – piano technique and exercises for the digital age
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, there are gamified learning apps like this. Some of the more well-known ones are Simply Piano, Yousician, Skoove and Synthesia and various clones but just searching "piano" on iOS app store gave me longer list than I cared to scroll through. The nice thing is that you have to learn to play without looking at your hands because your eyes are fixed at the screen. The less nice part is that especially with Synthesi…
Thanks for the recommendation. Ah yes, Synthesia looks familiar - I've seen YouTube videos of people playing fast compositions with colors flying by in 3D. Good point about the game interface, how getting too used to playing with the color indicators does not translate to sheet music during performances. I think I'll prefer to look at sheet music during practice too. I'm checking out the other apps you mentioned. So…
Yes, the giant in the language learning area is Duolingo and there are probably too many to list smaller ones. I wrote one word quizz app for myself when I was in high school, too bad startups weren't a thing back then.
Re: Show HN: Hanon Pro – piano technique and exercises for the digital age
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The purpose of Hanon is to build muscles into typically weaker fingers like the fourth and fifth. The exaggerated movements are specifically designed to build memory muscle and power. Hanon is battle tested and all the great virtuoso have gone through it whether they like it or not. The problem with modern apps and paid learning online is the idea that the boring and hard parts can be skipped with some clever marketi…
> and all the great virtuoso have gone through it whether they like it or not. It would be interesting to see some citations about this. > If this was true then we would be churning out new pianists at faster rate but its falling but the age is dropping I suspect that these days people are smart enough to ask why should new pianists be churned out and is there something more valuable these people could do with their…
> people are smart enough to ask why should new pianists be churned out and is there something more valuable these people could do with their time.
Being a classical pianist would have been a dream career for me if I had started early enough
Some of the deepest fulfillment I have gotten was teaching myself how to play Bach
Re: Show HN: Hanon Pro – piano technique and exercises for the digital age
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and all the great virtuoso have gone through it whether they like it or not. It would be interesting to see some citations about this. > If this was true then we would be churning out new pianists at faster rate but its falling but the age is dropping I suspect that these days people are smart enough to ask why should new pianists be churned out and is there something more valuable these people could do with their…
> people are smart enough to ask why should new pianists be churned out and is there something more valuable these people could do with their time. Being a classical pianist would have been a dream career for me if I had started early enough Some of the deepest fulfillment I have gotten was teaching myself how to play Bach
Yes. The problem is that the field is insanely competitive, as in there are so many beginner pianists and so few paying gigs. Yes, there are many people who have made it as concert pianists, but concerning childhood dream careers, it is far easier to become an astronaut or formula 1 driver instead. Even the fallback jobs playing bars or accompanying when full orchestra is not available are going away.
Re: Show HN: Hanon Pro – piano technique and exercises for the digital age
#106I've definitely thought about how one goes about coding an intelligent agent that can identify what you're playing and the make accurate guesses about where in the piece you're playing. The player could make mistakes as well, which means any intelligent algorithm would need to apply some degree of probabilistic calculations to find the most likely point. Very often, when practising, you'd constantly repeat passages m…
There are multiple parts to this problem, but it seems quite doable. Shazam can do generic look-up of music since around 2003, see for example this page on abracadabra [1]. I'd guess that if you limit things to a piano, one could relatively easily find the notes being played with some Fourier magic, and then solve a Hidden Markov Model to find the most plausible position in the music. Using a MIDI interface makes it…
One day I hope to be so mathematically inclined to understand the math behind that.
Re: Show HN: Hanon Pro – piano technique and exercises for the digital age
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> people are smart enough to ask why should new pianists be churned out and is there something more valuable these people could do with their time. Being a classical pianist would have been a dream career for me if I had started early enough Some of the deepest fulfillment I have gotten was teaching myself how to play Bach
Yes. The problem is that the field is insanely competitive, as in there are so many beginner pianists and so few paying gigs. Yes, there are many people who have made it as concert pianists, but concerning childhood dream careers, it is far easier to become an astronaut or formula 1 driver instead. Even the fallback jobs playing bars or accompanying when full orchestra is not available are going away.
Perhaps there's too much of an obsession on stardom and fame rather than talent? And hence the number of "openings" for concert pianists is reduced, while the demand on the stars is increased
And thus those who are equally talented simply didn't get their chance to shine as well as learn and grow from opportunities
I believe if Martha Argerich hadn't been absent from a concert, Yuja Wang (now famous) who replaced her that time wouldn't have had her big break
Re: Show HN: Hanon Pro – piano technique and exercises for the digital age
#108On this note, does anyone know some books in references to applied music theory? I'm a pretty advanced piano player, but a lot of more basic piano players can make up chords to play with with simple tunes that sound pretty good, most of those people seem to know a certain of rules that I don't know. And googling books about piano music on google books or the likes has not yielded any useful results.
What are some good books for composing music using DAWs?
You could take a look at Making Music, partially available (pdf might be free even) here: