[a_lieb]

Agreed. I whinge about this all the time. The C-based system is convenient for piano players but it's a mess for guitar players, violinists, and other instruments where there are no

There have been many attempts at a chromatic music notation, but nothing has caught on so far [1].

Things are a little better with solfege -- there is "chromatic fixed do" solfege, where every note has its own name, rather than only having a name for the "white notes," which leaves you to mentally calculate the sharps and flats.

It's a minority thing--maybe 5-10% in Europe? Even regular fixed "do" is rare in English-speaking countries, so I would assume the chromatic fixed "do" is almost unheard of in the US, Britain, etc.

At any rate, there're are at least seeds of hope for a chromatic fixed-do solfege to catch on more. I use it for my own learning.

[1] http://musicnotation.org/

[codeulike]

I find the paino-roll notation on DAWs to be a lot more intuitive. Not much good for perfomers of course, but it helped me understand things better. Each semitone is given the same amount of space.

[jacquesm]

Here's that one weird tip that you were looking for all your life but didn't realize it: pretend the front part of the piano keyboard isn't there, and just look at the part closest to the fingerboard. Presto: chromatic keyboard.

[kortex]

I find piano roll a lot easier to write/produce but a lot harder to sight-read.

I actually find hooktheory's system, where it's diatonic and accidentals are based on the active chord, not the current key, to be the easiest to understand relationships, but also hardest to translate into concrete notes to play.

[klodolph]

I find piano roll very hard to work with. The notes are just too far apart vertically.