Piano Cheat Sheet | Hacker News Reader

Piano Cheat Sheet

stephango.com

4 pointsliamswayne9 comments

That natural minor is incorrect; it's missing the 3rd degree. It could be argued that the melodic minor is only correct when ascending, but I suppose I'm just being nit-picky.

I can see how this makes someone comfortable playing scales on the piano, but I'm not sure how this teaches someone the circle of fifths. I'm probably only saying this because I know it already, but I think learning the circle of fifths is easier without an instrument in front of you, instead of trying to find a way to use the instrument as a vehicle to learn it. Applying it to an instrument becomes easier when you know it in your head first.

I thought that, too. Ascending and descending are not the same for melodic minor. I don't think modern music takes that into account anymore, but certainly classical music does. So at the least, it would be best to label which one it is, as to avoid confusion after learning it this way and coming across a piece of music that uses the ascending/descending versions. (It sounds pretty wonky if you ignore them in practice, too!)

Author here! Oops. You're right there was missing note on the natural minor. That's fixed now.

Keep in mind I am a complete novice and made this for myself. The purpose is not necessarily to teach someone the circle of fifths but rather help me develop a better visual and tactile relationship with the position of those notes on the keyboard.

Looks cool. The natural minor is missing the flat 3rd, though. You might want to fix that both on the screen and in the PDFs.

It might be helpful to put a flat sign or sharp sign in the dots to really drive it home, too. That way you don't have to reference the blacked keys so often.

Since you're using it to learn piano, it seems confusing to me that your scale notes look like black keys, which are all flats on the piano. Wouldn't it make more sense to have a piano octave skeuomorph there?

I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding your suggestion, but if I am, the flats and sharps in the dots could be misleading. In the dots it, the accidentals would be relative to the tonic, but it wouldn't actually mean that the note being played is sharp or flat.

It wouldn't be, since you've already decided they refer to the note and not its position. It'll help keep you cognizant of the sharps and flats without looking at the bottom every time.

Although this is for piano, your scale at the bottom looks like a really wonky piano keyboard. The black keys are actually all the white keys. Unless this is for a harpsichord, but I digress. It does show that you haven't decided whether a sharp or flat would refer to the note name or its position. If it was numbers at the bottom, it would indeed mean something different than if it has the alphabetic note names there, as it does. That shows very well what at least one of the problems with this chart is.

The way this is laid out means you are constantly doing multiple translations in order to learn a scale.

Fixed that missing natural minor note! Oops.

The reason for the notes being black is because I have a B&W laser printer and it was the best way for me to create something distinct and visible next to the piano keys.

I'm still wondering why the emphasis on the blues scale. Wouldn't knowing the mixolydian (good for building dominant chord) and aeolian (good for natural minor) be more complementary to the current scales?

I like the way it sounds, and so far these are the only ones I have learned :)

The way the sheet is printed out makes it easy to add/remove scales once I feel more comfortable with them.

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