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Comment by openquery | Hacker News Reader

I've been playing piano for a few years (no teacher, on and off) and have always been curious about the topic of sheet music. When you're first learning it's very painful. The notation isn't that bad, sharps, flats, time signatures etc - that part is ok. What _is_ difficult is corresponding a position on the staff to a physical note on a keyboard, especially when you have a treble clef and a base clef.

However over time it becomes easier and easier - and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time (also accounting for the fact that there is an enormous corpus of existing sheet music).

The question regarding this app (which looks awesome) is, is this format for reading music better than sheet music at the expert level (for professional musicians). And if not, how can we get that 10x improvement to make the switch from sheet music to something better.

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It is not.

I am, once again, asking people to understand that piano roll notation is no substitute for traditional notation when it comes to performance, among many other things.

It's even more frustrating on guitar where the literal same note in the same octave appears all over the fretboard. You have to figure out all the notes nearby to figure out what position you should be in. Even with years of experience I find tabs faster

The flip side of this is that chord shapes (in terms of hand shape, not intervals) are constant on the guitar (assuming no open strings). Learning piano after guitar, I was intimidated by the fact that – for example – an Am and Bm had different shapes, whereas on the guitar it's just the same shape transposed up the neck.

Anyway, I've noticed some music youtubers can read and write midi notation just as fluidly as sheet music. Which can result in some fun shenanigans[^1]

[^1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy_0mMcj0Q8

There's no standard Midi "notation" that's human-readable/writeable AFAIK - even written out in, e.g. hex, I would be flabbergasted if anyone could perform from a displayed Midi file. The YT video appears to show a piano-roll type display (common for DAWs etc.), nothing to do with midi (which doesn't even have the concept of notes or note lengths at all).

There's a lot of same shapes on the piano as well.

And the differing shapes are a bit like how A major and C major have different shapes on the guitar isn't it, for practical reasons you don't use the same shape for those two.

With the clarification that the same shape of the C major chord on the piano, when you move it up through the scale, the same shape produces all the diatonic three note chords of the scale, i.e C, Dm, Em, F, G, A, Bdim, C etc.

It might be, but it also might not. If you're just cowboy chording, sure, but if you're playing chord melody you'll find the chord you choose is highly contextual based on what you're playing and where you're going. An Am chord is a continuum of notes going up or down the neck A-C-E (G?) over and over-- wherever your hand sits, there's an Am available to you. It just might sound better (or more interesting!) or play easier to grab one set of A-C-E versus another.

I think the parent meant that those voicing are still the same when transposed all over the fretboard. E.g. the first inversion of a V7 has the same shape for all the notes horizontally. To go from A7 to B7, you just move two frets. And if you move vertically, the shape is slightly changed, but still recognizable enough.

A guitar has to be the easiest instrument for transposition (or maybe it's just the one I'm most comfortable with!).

Until you reach the B string. A shape that works on strings 4/5/6 does not work on 1/2/3. This is because G->B is 4 half steps, the rest of the strings are 5 half steps apart. So you need 2 forms for closed chords.

Then you move that note a half-step. The rest is the same. And actually, if you use drop-2 voicing, there are 3 forms because of that half-step, but still the overall shape is pretty much the same. You really need to remember one shape, and then adjust it accordingly.

Tabs are bad because they lack a sense of timing that sheet music has. I’d recommend going with a powertab or guitar pro file as that will show you the standard notation as well as the tablature. Many printed guitar sheet music books are also formatted like this. That being said knowing what sort of positon to play a note depends on what you are going for. You are right that you can play a single note all over the neck, but for a lot of those positions it will be awkward to get to the next few. Knowing your chord shapes and scales helps make this intuitive and automatic.

> and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time

I suspect traditional sheet music is like the the qwerty keyboard.

At this point it’s momentum is so large that it’s impossible to stop.

Sure, if traditional sheet music is the qwerty keyboard, then this new version is a 2x expanded keyboard, with separate keys for all the capital letters.

I think there’s no denying that the particulars of the current system of musical notation is more or less an accident of history. But it’s also a local minimum—if you want to improve on it, you’re probably going to have to come up with radical changes.

> if you want to improve on it, you’re probably going to have to come up with radical changes

Yeah, that’s sort of related to my point. Like, Colemak and Dvorak are theoretically (and practically, with enough practice) better than qwerty, but they don’t need to just be better, they need to be so much better that people will throw all the investment in qwerty away.

Sheet music feels the same.

...and a traditional piano is like a keyboard with no markings on the keycaps.

I think back when music notation was being actively iterated on, you had to convey all the information possible, because it’s not like you could share a recording. Things like guitar tabs - which typically erase timing information - only work because who ever reading them has already heard the song and know what it’s meant to sound like

Aren't guitar tabs typically combined with abbreviated notation to show the rhythm? No lettering of notes, but just an "X" associated with half-notes, quarter notes, etc?

Sometimes. Guitar Pro had a text format that could output them - but it's not frequently used. Bar lines are encoded pretty reliably, which is at least some timing information

Not really that I’ve seen, they are basically written in plain text and you are at the mercy of the tab writer. You really got to have a recording available to go along with the tab since theres no rhythm information at all usually.

There's always been a tendency towards shorthand-- medieval manuscripts elided certain parts of the harmony/accompaniment because it's just known to be there by the musicians of the day. Same for jazz lead sheets-- they give you the melody and a general sense of the harmony, with the understanding that specific voicings and reharmonizations will be left to the discretion of the performer in the moment.

This reminds me of this excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IkpUYlOx8

Can we get this guy to play the Super Mario World ending theme with the notation from TFA?

The nyan cat improvisation is even better imo.

It's really not, not even for professionals, but anyone playing at a decent hobby level. Consider, for example, Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique (accessible to many amateurs), starting with Grave (very slowly) and changes to Allegro.

Either you start with an impossibly long bar that covers the screen, where you can't see how the phrase flows into the next notes, or you later get to a dozen identical ultra-short bars mashed on top of each other.

And that's just one problem.

> What _is_ difficult is corresponding a position on the staff to a physical note on a keyboard, especially when you have a treble clef and a base clef.

This is my biggest issue. I played piano for years and still struggle with this. (though I never excelled, and started young)

Any suggestions on a simple way to overcome this issue?

Even experienced pianists would have trouble sight reading music that uses an excess of ledger lines - i.e. we can't accurately judge what note is intended just by estimating its vertical distance from the staff. But notes on the staff (or 3 or fewer ledger lines off) are rarely an issue - it's really just familiarity (I struggle reading off unusual clefs too). Which is why I don't think any sort of piano-roll based notation system is ever going to become the norm for performers, because it essentially does require accurately judging which key to hit, when to hit it and how long to hold it for just by its spatial position on the score.

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