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Comment by tonystride | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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