Clairnote: An alternative music notation system

For novices too! Just increasing the physical size of standard notation would be a big help. 13x19 sheet music would be nice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard

My main issue is that note in the middle of the stave are essentially unknowable for me. middle c-f is doable. but in the middle it get very fuzzy, too many lines.

I thought this notation might solve that, but instead of having notes with lines through them to indicate notes on a line, they are slightly above/below. That for me makes it very hard, even though most of the stave has been removed.

I think a musical notation system should not be driven by edge cases, which is what a bunch of HNers pointing out where this system falls short (microtonals, equal temperment sucks, etc, blah blah). Second, I think standard notation is designed for piano soloists, not for bands.

I've found the most effective system for sharing musical ideas with a band is the so called "Nashville Numbers System." Why is this? Well because you can't apply a capo to a vocalist. Every time I play with a different vocalist, there's going to be a key change. When we talk in terms of scale degrees "hey guys play 6m, 5/7, root", rather than "oh hey play a Em, D, G, wait j/k, that's too low, can you play G#m, F#, B? oh wait, earl over there says playing G#m on acoustic is impossible, go another half step up" everything is easy.

What does this require? Every musician needs to memorize scales, which isn't very hard. The process is: decide on the root as a band, then jam. And you handle accidentals as they come up as edge cases, rather than have them drive the bus off a cliff.

So how can we take this successful concept and apply it to notation?

I think there are two main issues with standard notation: First, the key signature is embedded into the notation. This was like HTML before CSS: the presentation should be separated from the content.

Here's the hill I'll die on: given that you're going to be playing in equal temperament, we don't need to have _any_ information about the key in musical notation. The only thing that matters is intervals. 99.95% of the audience doesn't have perfect pitch and they don't care either. All notes on the staff should be relative to some arbitrary root.

Which brings us to the second problem: Standard notation does not represent octaves consistently. This is the dumbest UX failure that annoys the absolute shit of out me as a bass player. If I want to mirror the melody line in a song for a section, I have to switch my brain from reading Bass clef where I live, to fumbling through Treble cleff notes, and they're all in the wrong spots.

Looking at the link, there are some improvements on the above two points. I do think there is still a leaky abstraction about the key signature. Given that I write things down as relative scale degrees anyway, I'd take this over standard notation any day if I learned to read it.