Interactive Music Theory Cheat Sheet | Hacker News Reader

Interactive Music Theory Cheat Sheet

muted.io

321 pointss4i51 comments

One bit of complexity that lots of tools like this seem to always punt on is the fact that most chords (at least in jazz) are typically played rootless and inverted and with lots of 'upper extensions'. It would be nice if a tool really did a deep dive in actual chord voicings that one would play in the real world (i.e. in a context where the bass player is covering the root and therefore it is best left out of the chord).

As an example of something that is very systematic (easy to put in an app), a rootless C maj 7 is equivalent to an E min 7. A rootless C min 7 is equivalent to an Eb maj 7. etc.

It is a pretty tough leap to learn rootless jazz piano comping when almost everything out there (except for the old-school dead tree books) only ever shows rooted voicings.

> a rootless C maj 7 is equivalent to an E min 7.

You mean just the regular E minor (triad)?

Anyway, there'a quite a lot of stuff on this site apart from this cheat sheet page: the chord page does indeed include inversions, e.g.: https://muted.io/c-major-chord/

Jazz sheets often write 7 assuming it may be played as 9, if not 11/13 even. A triad in the left hand being a bit too pedestrian, a rootless “Cmaj7” is virtually always played as a rootless Cmaj9 (EGBD), or more commonly a rootless C69 (EGAD) especially if the tonic. Inversions may include the root instead of a 9th, e.g. BCEG.

You are looking for The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0961470151

This is fantastic. I didn't grow up learning music and found so much of it seeming arbitrary and incomprehensible. This really pairs well with a 30min video[0] I watched taking away so much mystery and showing 'patterns in the madness'.

It would be good if there were some keybindings to play notes (e.g. digits for I, II, or letters for notes ignoring #/b, or "r t y u i o p ["). A toggle to label the notes that are part of the selected key could help a beginner like myself.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgaTLrZGlk0

If you want a longer, entertaining introduction to music theory with an emphasis on using things like modes to actually write songs, I highly recommend YouTuber Jake Lizzio (Signalsmusicstudio)

This is like my own little tonality calculator, except with good UI/UX, and with two changes (Ionian/Aeolian) instead of arbitrary changes. What would be super cool would be to combine the best of both somehow. My change calculator is at https://edrihan.neocities.org/changedex if anyone wants to derive harmony of changes which are not Ionian/Aeolian. Though it looks like a turd from 1997, and the audio doesn't work, it does expand this idea to include all 12-tone possibilities, which I call changes. Also hit me up if you like OP!

I made a site the other day to help me practice my chords - https://learnyourchords.com

If you have a MIDI keyboard you can play along as it prompts you with chords, or if not you can use it like chord flashcards.

Amazing! Great work! Any chance you could add the notes on a staff. Or is there any way to contribute or get in touch with you?

Shoot me a message - mz.adam@gmail.com

Check out https://github.com/ad-si/awesome-music-production for an extensive list of software, services, and resources to create and distribute music.

That is great! It would have been even cooler if it had some common chord progressions or resolutions for each scale. I'd also add the harmonic and double harmonic, melodic, phrygian dominant (flamenco/hijaz) and Neapolitan scales. Why not also break down the scales in to tetrachords and make it possible to navigate between scale-tetrachord?

See the link in my post.

Amazing. I only wonder why the post didn't link to the homepage instead. I would not forgive OP if I have missed all the other tools:

https://muted.io

A fair point. I was searching for an "interactive music theory cheat sheet" on Google the other day to see what's around, and I landed on this. It was really good and I played with the page for a while. I didn't realize until after submitting that the whole domain is full of awesome stuff.

What would nice is a circle of fifths that could be used as keyboard to play sounds. Everything else seems to respond to clicks.

Looks neat (and like you've put a lot of time and effort into it!), but why use the letter 'b' instead of a flat symbol in the section Diminished Chord Formulas (https://muted.io/chord-formulas-intervals/#diminished-chords)? I played around with the https://muted.io/mini-music-machine/ a bit, again, very cool - there's some curious use of terminology (esp. interval to mean essentially mean duration/frequency, and the various options under that same dropdown aren't immediately obvious in meaning). Would be awesome if you could save/export whatever you'd created! Is the record button supposed to work? It doesn't for me in latest Chrome on Windows, get this in console:

    tone.14.8.42.min.js:1 Uncaught DOMException: Failed to execute 'connect' on 'AudioNode': cannot connect to an AudioNode belonging to a different audio context.
    at De (https://muted.io/js/tone.14.8.42.min.js:1:14949)
    at uu.connect (https://muted.io/js/tone.14.8.42.min.js:1:29482)
    at Sd (https://muted.io/js/tone.14.8.42.min.js:17:36141)
    at I.connect (https://muted.io/js/tone.14.8.42.min.js:17:35056)
    at https://muted.io/mini-music-machine/:2403:12
    at Array.forEach (<anonymous>)
    at recordStart (https://muted.io/mini-music-machine/:2402:11)

This is nice. I think it has appeared before on HN. A nitpick is that the piano keys are drawn incorrectly; on a real piano the black keys are not centered between the white keys (most important), and they are also wider and longer.

Here are two ways to get the keys' measurements, which I made/use. The tricky part from a naive approach is that white keys are on a grid of seven whereas black keys are on a grid of twelve. I copypasta'ed from my code so I hope it's still correct. This is Python but it should be trivial to use any language.

  evenlySpacedWhites = True
  octaveWidthProportion = 2 #Piano keys longer/shorter
  blackKeyProportion = 0.61832 #Black keys longer/shorter
  height = 256 #This can be any number and controls total size
  if evenlySpacedWhites:
    CtoEWhites = 35
    FtoBWhites = 35
    CtoEBlacks = 21
    FtoBBlacks = 20
  else:      
    CtoEWhites = 20
    FtoBWhites = 21
    CtoEBlacks = 12
    FtoBBlacks = 12
  #before normalisation
  octaveNumberWidth = 3 * CtoEWhites + 4 * FtoBWhites 
  #using the proportion makes the output image have the same height, regardless if whether evenlySpacedWhites is True/False
  octaveWidth = round(height * octaveWidthProportion)
  proportion = octaveWidth / octaveNumberWidth
  CtoEWhites = round(CtoEWhites * proportion)
  FtoBWhites = round(FtoBWhites * proportion)
  CtoEBlacks = round(CtoEBlacks * proportion)
  FtoBBlacks = round(FtoBBlacks * proportion)
  blackKeyLength = round(height * blackKeyProportion)

Any good introductory guide for learning the very basics of music theory? I have no real practical need for it but have always been really curious about it. This cheatsheet is very cool but a lot of the terminology is beyond me.

Language Transfer have a course on music theory that I've been quite enjoying, for the low, low price of free (although if you like it, consider giving a donation): https://www.languagetransfer.org/music

Not free, but these books from "hook theory" are great and their tools are also amazing. Complementary to the tools at muted.io that the OP references...

https://www.hooktheory.com/books

One app I use frequently when composing is Tonaly on iOS. It has an interactive circle of fifths that also indicates the chord grades on the selected scale. The cheat sheet is also a good approximation.

I just started learning the piano again, and using modern apps (such as Simply Piano) makes it actually fun. Ten years ago, I couldn't bear through reading sheet music, making mistakes and got discouraged. But now, learning to play is like playing Guitar Hero. You get instant feedback, guidance on what and how to play. It's great. We'll see how long it stays "fun", but atm I'm making progress every day.

As your music ambition grows, at some point you'll get to the hard part: building the 5-way translation between what you hear, what you play, what you sing, what notes you see on the page, and what sounds you imagine in your mind. The more time you spend on only one line in this pentagram (for example translating from notes on the page to playing an instrument), the bigger the "imbalance" will be when you eventually realize you need the entire pentagram. You'll turn to sight-singing, dictation, audiation and all these other exercises everybody hates, your progress will be slow and difficult, but by then you'll know why it's necessary.

I'm on the fence about apps like Simply Piano. I have a subscription since more than half a year and yes it's fun and I'm making progress albeit slowly. But I have the impression that it focuses too much on simple songs or techniques.

When I look at the introductory piano books of my wife I'm completely overwhelmed. Like my mind is unable to process the notes without an app that tells me what keys to press. Can't really explain it. I won't cancel my subscription yet. but I think that at some point 1-to-1 interactions with a teacher is invaluable.

Same to be honest, I am pretty grateful just for the fact that the app got me back into piano but I was pretty alarmed when I tried to play some beginner’s songs from a songbook and really struggled. I just finished Pre-Advanced so I was kind of thinking it would be a cake walk. I think the downside of the immediate feedback is you can kind of guess a few times until you get the note right and then just do it from memory and don’t really have to learn to read at sight, I noticed my reading of the bass clef is really not there at all when you take that away. Thinking of finishing the program and getting a real teacher. I am sure they will also tell me my technique is crap but all part of learning I guess.

I get that, too. I struggle to even play "Over the Rainbow". Moving the hands, coordinating the hands is still a big brain fuck in week 1. But, I'm not sure how much a teacher would help me at this stage. I think I just have to practice more, recall which key plays which note, and nail down the individual parts. A teacher might be more valuable later down the line when I somewhat know what I'm doing and correct my path.

He would help you in preventing you from learning the wrong things that can take a long time to "unlearn" again later.

"Learning the piano" is nothing like Guitar Hero, though. These apps just tell you (and check) which key to press in what order. They don't teach you anything about musicality like dynamics or articulation. They often can't even tell if you played multiple notes simultaneously or if your timing was correct.

If you cannot already play the piano, what you get is just a fancy way to learn reading (parts of) sheet music with the ability to connect a MIDI keyboard.

I've seen similar references before but this is very well done, so I've bookmarked it. Particularly like the overlapping keyboard

This and the other one you posted with the chords (I assume that was also you?) are really useful and handy! Thanks for this!

I don't think it was me but maybe it was another page someone else shared from this cool site? Please share what it was if it's relevant.

Neat. A version for guitar might be quite popular. Also extending the range of scales. Pick your favorite ones from the 4096 possibilities or maybe all of them :-) [0]

[0] https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/

There are several guitar-specific tools on the site.

Ex:

https://muted.io/guitar-scales/

https://muted.io/guitar-chords/

https://muted.io/guitar-fretboard/

ahh, missed those. very cool. even caged / tnps patterns.

Very interesting, would be nice to have a switch to change the notation (at least the solfeggio/solfege one). I'm European and really I can't work with C D E F G A B.

Europe has a fair split between solfege and letters, don't put us all in the same basket my fellow European :)

Southern European I should specify, then :)

Germans also name the notes differently (C, D, E, F, G, A, H) which has unfortunately spread to some other countries too (like in Finland, which confuses me a lot because I've learnt so much music stuff online that uses the more logical naming).

I was taught H instead of B 30 years ago, and it makes me mad - my brain still refuses to think of notes as simply a rotating portion of ordered alphabet letters. I spent last two years trying to get back into piano and guitar and I feel I'm constantly hampered by not having that intuitive "oh, c to g is 5 notes" or even "what comes after B is C" and "what comes after G is C". I literally have to count on fingers as if they're randomized symbols (and fwiw I am pretty good at intuitively grokking mod 7 in other contexts) It's awful.

I need a harmonization cheat sheet. Hmmm - I should check out ChatGPT and see if it's able to harmonize. Piano and guitar would be great.

Neat! I like it.

I get no audio on my iphone though for the interactive keyboard. Might just be my setup.

Your phone is on mute.

This website has been posted here at least once a month since launch.

It’s not. I can listen to audio from anywhere else except this site.

Just hooked my phone up to look at the console and noted that the resources are not being loaded.

I have a pihole running and checked that log and can see that fish.muted.io is being blocked due to it being listed in in one of the pihole default blocklists that it downloads.

That’s enough for me to give it a miss anyway.

Well that is extremely odd, would you agree?

Thanks for this Fish note. Well spotted.

This is very cool man, love having things like this when I go to write.

Great apps, love the amount of effort put into these.

Great job! This was really, really well done.

This is great, nice work, bookmarked!

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