How I’d redesign piano sheet music

I've been playing the piano since I was a kid and found it very difficult to learn to read sheet music. There was a period for maybe 3 months where I was fluent in reading after 3-4 years of study but then took some time off and lost the ability.

I think very visually and find watching someone play a song on youtube infinitely easier than trying to learn with the equivalent sheet music. I really feel like this comes down to a left brain/right brain thing but I'm not sure how true that generalization is.

Are more visual approaches like youtube tutorials or this redesigned sheet music the way of the future? I wonder if it might it be detrimental to take this approach from the start?

A bit of a click-bait title, don't you think? Maybe "How I'd redesign piano sheet music for beginners."

This is basically just tablature for piano. Great for simple pieces, unweidly for anything more. Can you imagine notating Fur Elise with this? That's a fairly cmomon beginner/intermediate piece. Or etudes? Or any excercise that develops techincal proficiency?

Maybe it has a place, but like tab or lead sheets it is not a replacement for sheet music.

> I think piano needs its own version of the guitar tab to be more approachable

But then you end up with the same problem you get on guitar: beginners use tab as a crutch and don't develop skills as readily as they should once they're over the beginner hump.

I like playing the piano because the staves correspond more or less directly to the physical layout of the keyboard. If you flip a score 90 degrees, you end up with this, with the notes laid out over the keys. Compared to almost all other instruments pianos are ideally suited to sheet music. Manuscript notation is also (necessarily) very information dense.

It's an interesting approach; there are apps that will do something similar to this. They're very much like guitar hero. Some of the newer electric pianos will even illuminate the keys in the correct order.

I think one of the reasons that guitarists use tablature is that using sheet music notation for the guitar is more difficult to learn (at least to me). I've struggled with the guitar because I haven't put in the time to get my head around translating between manuscript and which strings/frets I need to be using. Violinists don't seem to have the same problem, but perhaps that's because most violinists are classically trained whereas most guitarists aren't?

guitar is also difficult because the same note can be played in as many as 5 different places. sometimes its hard to tell which string to actually play it on, since a choice has fingering and possibly picking ramifications later.