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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I wish piano methods would offer me the choice of genre (jazz, latin, classical, ...) and that they would start with songs that are perhaps technically simple, but still interesting from a musical viewpoint.

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I play a lot of jazz and blues on the piano, well enough that people pay me to do that. I can't read very well, and if I had to play Bach correctly (or, I'd really struggle even reading student etudes), but when I've played in big bands I've gotten by okay.

It's possible to learn the way I did, which was to first learn guitar and bass, and get an idea of how chord progressions work...

At that point, you can approach the piano like guitar, and play a bass line with your left hand and whatever chords you want on the right, and slowly move into reading and playing melodies from fakebooks.

That isn't, I think, a very hard approach to the instrument, and it gives you a lot of latitude on what you get from it. The first song I played on piano was Grateful Dead's tune Ripple... it's 3 chords and I just alternated the bass notes and sang the melody.

You're not going to find a method book that does that, because there's not a lot of method to it.

Most method books will touch on a wide variety of genres, usually to illustrate specific topics in music theory. If you can’t reason about intervals/scales, key, and chord progressions, “learning” genres like jazz will be like trying to learn differential calculus before linear algebra.

This is the same kind of logic that leads to whiteboard algorithm questions. Music theory and musicianship are not the same thing. There are many many great musicians who only enough to make the sounds they want to make. Sure they might be better if they took the time to learn, but not necessarily.

> Music theory and musicianship are not the same thing.

No, but it helps a lot to know a language that helps you write down and learn musical concepts.

> There are many many great musicians who only enough to make the sounds they want to make.

Are there great musicians who don't know what a scale, a chord progression or a key is?

While I agree with your overall point, and these people are definitely the exception to the rule, yes actually.

Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, Flea from Red Hot Chili Pepers, Omar-Rodriguez Lopez of The Mars Volta / At The Drive-In / Antemasque

https://twitter.com/davemustaine/status/942528968779096065?l...

https://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/flea-returns-to-scho...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080601005441/http://www.signon...

I’m curious if you are a musician? This description of music theory (whiteboard algorithms) feels really off to me (feel free to look at my sibling comments as to why).

If it’s your experience as a musician I would like to understand why.

Calculus in practice involves a lot of symbol manipulation, so it's important to understand the symbols. Jazz in practice involves a lot of playing an instrument, so it's important to understand…

Fill in the blank. I don't know about you, but I don't fill it in with “music theory”.

... how to use music theory to develop efficient practice routines for your instrument(s), goals, and current abilities.

— jazz musician of 25 years

(this calculus metaphor is pretty far off - music theory in practice, by a working jazz musician, doesn’t involve “manipulation of symbols”, at least not in the same way as one works mathematical problems and proofs. it involves a lot of time on your instrument, applying theory in practical and experiental ways. oftentimes we will write out a lead sheet, or transpose something, and use theory to do that. and so there’s some calculations happening. it becomes second nature with practice).

It's more akin to reading and writing than to calculus.

> Fill in the blank. I don't know about you, but I don't fill it in with “music theory”.

That's because you aren't a jazz musician. Jazz features lots of complex harmonies, and theory is a big part of writing and playing it. Certain subgenres are virtually impossible to perform without a solid theory foundation. You think you can just solo over Giant Steps by feel?

Not sure about this analogy, since linear algebra is largely orthogonal to single-variable calculus. Agreed on the musical part though.

Replace liner algebra with basic algebra and the analogy holds.

I'm working on something like this right now. Pieces that are accessible but not boring. Getting into jazz early can be tough, like how will you understand an extremely basic 3-6-9 voicing and how it connects to a 7-3-5 voicing in a circle of fifths progression if you haven't studied your basic triads, basic 7th chords and the circle of fifths? And not just reading about them but spending enough time to absorb them into your pianistic vocabulary. Sure you could do it by rote but that's about as fun as memorizing a page of Spanish and reciting it without any comprehension. Any who I don't want to knock your ambition, but rather let you know that from the other side of things I'm thinking of this as well. How do I build the best and quickest ladder of abstraction to jazz for amelius?

> Getting into jazz early can be tough, like how will you understand an extremely basic 3-6-9 voicing and how it connects to a 7-3-5 voicing in a circle of fifths progression if you haven't studied your basic triads, basic 7th chords and the circle of fifths?

Do you really need to? Why can't you just play something that 'sounds jazzy' but is simple enough without understanding any theory behind how it was written? Just for early interest/motivation/joy of having made that sound oneself.

The issue is that reading the notes in standard notation is, at least to me, much more difficult than reading Dm7 and come up with a reasonable inversion of the chord based on where my hands are in relation to the C#dim that I'm current playing.

It's a pragmatic thing, not just gatekeeping.

Absolutely, like I said, I'm working on stuff like this right now. Having said that, perhaps it's a combination of my own personal trauma from originally being taught in a very rote way and thousands of hours of helping students learn to read, but I have an aversion to not knowing what you are doing. I remember looking at stacks of chords 3-6-9 to 7-3-5, or even trying to read a basic root position C7 chord with the RH doing stuff on top and feeling really hopeless to get my LH to fall into those shapes. I've also seen this with many students. Chords are hard if you don't see them as words and try to look at every note every time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

because the GP asked for a method that would teach them based on a genre. If I teach you to play something that sounds jazzy I have not taught you anything about jazz.

> Getting into jazz early can be tough

I think that depends. The student may have been listening to jazz for their entire grownup life. To them, starting with "Jingle bells", etc. like some piano methods do can be very boring or off-putting.

Yes and no. There is an art to reaching someone with talent who is untrained. It's like their innate sense of music is a reservoir behind a damn and the damn is their facility on the keyboard. There's no shortcut to bringing that damn down no matter how much water is in your reservoir an often times the ones with the most water have so much pressure that it affects their ability to be patient and thoroughly build a channel through the damn. Sometimes my most successful students are the ones without much prior learning because, yah know, tortoise and the hair. But regardless, I'll do my best to connect to any student and help them build that channel.

I like First Lessons in Bach for this reason. It's public domain by now so you can get it from archive.org or imslp.

https://imslp.org/wiki/First_Lessons_in_Bach_(Bach,_Johann_S...

You might look at the Suzuki method; their melodies draw from both folk and classical traditions.

What is usually interesting from a musical standpoint in your personal music taste. Jazz is very interesting, but not everyone's cup of tea, etc.

Imposing variety on the student can also contribute to making them a better musician.

I found it fascinating and refreshing to see Brad Paisley (country star) playing Hot for Teacher by Van Halen.

Agreed - but imposing variety on an intermediate to advanced student can make them better. With a beginner starting lessons, the objective really is to make it fun + learn something.

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