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Comment by willhf | Hacker News Reader

Scales are nice. Too bad most people must learn twelve per mode. I encourage all to renounce the normal piano's inefficiencies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janko_keyboard

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That's the Scheme of musical instruments if I ever saw one. Nice in theory, but problems with practicalities overwhelm any advantage you could possibly gain by using it.

I bought one from Japan a couple years back, and I like it a lot. I see it more as the Dvorak of piano keyboard layouts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82xaEGgiiRs

Very interesting. As much as I love the piano, sometimes it feels pointless to struggle just to play chords and arpeggios.

I see that the Chromatone costs "only" 190k yen now (~=U$1700),

actually, more like 2200 $US these days...

http://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-64 is an alternative. There are many others like it if you look around.

I dinked around with a prototype iPhone app for this before the iPad was a twinkle in Jobs' eye. Someone's probably got out an iPad app for this by now.

I'd prefer we just discard the concept of sharps and flats entirely, and name each of the 12 notes as an individual.

This completely ignores the fact that the chromatic note relationships in different keys are not the same. F# is not the same pitch as Gb. In fact, I find thinking about notes in terms of a moveable do solfege (not as static names at all) to be by far the most effective system, since it really manifests the relationships in the key that you're playing in. When you realize those functional relationships, along with the requisite tensions in pitch, which you can emphasize on a non-justified instrument, music making becomes a lot more fun and easy.

There's nothing special about sharps and flats in that regard. Depending on your tuning system C could be different in every scale. That doesn't make it something you want to encode in your notation.

Your point about the "white keys" is well taken, which is why I mentioned moveable do solfege. The absolute pitch of "C" takes on a different name in every key, which respects its relationship within that key.

However, there's a reason that scales like the melodic minor are written with sharps (or "sharped flats"/naturals) ascending and flats/naturals descending. Sharps emphasize rising pitch and flats emphasize falling pitch, and can thus be bent slightly higher and lower, respectively. You would lose that with fixed chromatic note names.

(And as an aside, recognizing when a note in a scale has been modified from its normal position, and in which direction it was modified, is yet another reason to practice your scales!)

That only works for music that sticks to a western scale though. What if you are playing blues or jazz or indian classical music?

Which is exactly my point. One size fits all doesn't work. The scale or notation system should be appropriate to the music. AFAIK, Indian classical has its own way of doing things, and most blues and jazz isn't notated the same way as classical music, either. Going to a fully justified/chromatically-based system is just sweeping the intricacies and nuances under the rug. Plus, naming "all twelve" tones doesn't even begin to address what you would do with microtonal music.

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