I'm slowly clawing my way through a music theory book, but I've already learned some tiny pieces of music on the side (like the beginning of Strobe by Deadmau5) and it's stunning how fast one can get from "absolutely clueless" to "hey that sounds like music".
It's enchanting and wonderful. Sure, music theory can be annoying there are many weird and semi-arbitrary rules about how things are called and there's lots of historical baggage attached to everything, but as soon as you touch the keys, everything just fades away. Man, you can pour so much emotion into that thing.
So if you find yourself (like I often did) thinking about how cool it would be to play the piano, but it's probably hard and it's too late and there's no time and you wouldn't even be a good player... Do it. It's easier than you think and YOU CAN do it.
I'm in the same boat as you (almost identical, different FP though), but i'm actually fascinated by the music theory.
In the way that some games touch the "software engineer" side of my brain (Satisfactory, Factorio) but is tiring, music theory weirdly gives me similar vibes without being tiring. Maybe it will be when i know more, but currently music theory just feels like patterns and patterns and patterns. It's remarkable how much you can learn with a handful of patterns. While you're learning one thing you'll often noticed patterns for another.. it's really interesting to me.
I also am a novice guitarist and i find piano much more interesting from the music theory standpoint. The patterns on the guitar are dynamic (based on tuning) and it feels like the guitar makes music theory more difficult. I've enjoyed piano much more for this reason.
I agree, piano is good fun to learn at any age. I highly recommend it.
I'm not saying alternate tunings are mandatory, just that you can't learn a single tuning with guitar and expect to only ever know just that. It's Very common to change tunings in guitar. Not so in Piano, that i've seen yet at least.
> Piano is also a stringed instrument, with one common tuning that most of us westerners play in.
Are there different tunings for Pianos? I'm not even sure what different tunings would look like, non-sequential pitch ordering? C next to G or something?
The only Piano "tuning" i'm familiar with is temperament, however that's functionally different than what we're talking about with Guitar.
Today I was trying out the Sweet Child O' Mine intro and that's in a different tuning, although the shapes remain the same. (it's like capo -1). I know Drop D or other tunings can change the shapes for sure. However, for a casual guitarist, we can just concentrate on standard tuning and learn all the music theory that way.
For piano, I only know of Just Intonation and Equal Temperament, which still have the notes in the same orders. Although theoretically you could string and tune a piano differently....
I'm sure you've already seen it but in case you haven't, Evan Duffy's rendition of this on YouTube is inspiring. Also check out The Veldt.
I feel like I’m unlucky since the vast majority of the devs I accidentally cross paths with IRL somehow do not have such interests.
[0] https://a16z.com/2021/01/12/rise-of-developers-creative-clas...
I'm not necessarily judging this, there's only so much one can focus on and I also find most of these subjects fascinating, but it's pretty clear a tiny subset of what's out there is what consistently gets to the frontpage.
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/physics-departme...
Music and programming have a couple of things in common. The most important thing being: the act of creating something. Anyone who's a creator at heart will be interested by many endeavours that allow you to create. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a disproportionate amount of woodworkers among software engineers (as opposed to among laywers, for example).
The thing is, not every programmer is a programmer because he/she wants to create. There are other aspects to programming that might be interesting to some.
I can see how it relates to various "creation" activities like cooking, painting, electronics/arduino,film-making, or even open-discussion/forum in general (creating community through participation).