How I’d redesign piano sheet music
161–165 of 165 posts
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I challenge "easily printable." This way of writing sheet music is vastly more space inefficient. Each beat requires an entire row of space, whereas a beat in sheet music might require 3 square inches at most. Having many pages of sheet music, like in coding, makes it much harder to understand the song as a whole and navigate repeats. I do like the fact that — unlike with sheet music - the 12 semi-tones are spaced ev…
As long as you're playing tonal music, chord types and intervals will be strongly associated with the 7 note names, not just the 12 semitones. A perfect fourth will always be the same size on the staff, for example. If it's "spelled" differently -- if an interval of that size is actually written as C-E#, for example -- then that's a sign that something weird is going on and you're not supposed to think of this interv…
I know little music theory, but I've been playing instruments "by ear" for a long time and it made many things easier to me when I learned that if you're using diatonic scale, it's very unlikely that you'll use notes outside of the scale; e.g. if you're playing a song in C Major, most of the time you'll play C and D, not C# or Db, so if you need that note, it's easier to switch than having an almost unused line in the sheet.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#163Just call it piano tab. It's fine for chords and pop songs. There's no way it's going to work for complicated music. I love the project though. It's a fantastic job, I hate to be negative. You did a ton of thinking on this.
For pop music, fake books are easier. That's how you play pop music.
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like code, music sheets are unoptimized for learning. And at the end music sheets are just here for you to learn a music, they are nothing more. Personally I'm very fond of that kind of music sheets: http://herbalcell.com/static/sheets/legend-of-zelda-twilight... I've learned complex musics in weeks while it would have taken me month with a real music sheet.
> And at the end music sheets are just here for you to learn a music, they are nothing more. Professional session musicians play directly from the sheet, and can promptly forget the piece afterwards. They do not intend to learn the music. Interesting enough, a similar observation can be made about writing prose. A printed book isn't usually a tool to learn a novel by heart for recitation.
Professional session musicians play directly from the
sheet, and can promptly forget the piece afterwards. They
do not intend to learn the music.
Another thing that the classical teachings seem to ignore (or view with distain (People in my orchestra viewed it as 'hard work')) is cultivating the ability to hear a long piece of music and replicate it -- something that a significant minority of folk players also seem to be able to do.
[1]: celtic/irish folk, in my case
[2]: Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule
Re: How I’d redesign piano sheet music
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And at the end music sheets are just here for you to learn a music, they are nothing more. Professional session musicians play directly from the sheet, and can promptly forget the piece afterwards. They do not intend to learn the music. Interesting enough, a similar observation can be made about writing prose. A printed book isn't usually a tool to learn a novel by heart for recitation.
Professional session musicians play directly from the sheet, and can promptly forget the piece afterwards. They do not intend to learn the music. As someone who has had 'both sides' where classical and folk[1] music are concerned, I can say it is only[2] the professional classical session musicians that do this. From personal experience, I can say that most classical musicians miss out on one part of music learning e…
Thanks for the insight!