[andrepd]

What's the deal with learning basic notation being made to be so difficult? It's by far one of the easiest parts of learning to play an instrument.

>It is NOT intuitive and you won't benefit from it immediately.

What? How do you hope to play anything other than basic melodies if you can't read music? You'd have to develop your ear, which is much harder than learning to read music x)

> Especially as piano has different clef for left and right hand... Mostly Because grouchy 18th century old Austrian white males hate you! :-D

It's because the grand staff is centered around middle C.

[compiler-guy]

People have been developing their ears their whole lives. It isn’t that hard to take that and convert it to keys.

I play several instruments but can only read music for piano. Guitar, banjo, and harmonica I play entirely by ear or sometimes with some tablature to get started.

[NikolaNovak]

Primarily, it's about payoff / benefit.

Imagine you're 40 years old and you've never played an instrument. You have limited ambition - you want to have fun and play a little bit around campfire. How do you start, let's say on a guitar:

1. I show you G, C, D chords and print out a simple, easily understandable chart you can take home. You now can play hundreds of songs after 30 min lesson and a few mins of practice. You can spend time playing around and slowly learning rhythm, strumming techniques and patterns, while singing to your songs and getting a feel for your instrument. A week or three later I show you E-minor and now you can play virtually every pop song made in last 20 years. [1] If you get excited and interested, we throw in Aminor, and eventually F Major and now you know power chords and you're the master of it all. You're having fun, you're playing, you're improving, and you're having FUN. You can focus on good techniques and sounding good. When and if you want more, we can learn basic music theory and pentatonic patterns, and then one day if you're serious and ready for some pain, you can learn some staff notation.

Or!

2. I give you some books and tell you to learn notes. You download an app or six to enable you to mindlessly practices notes every day. You spend months studying by rote and can maybe play Twinkle Twinkle Little star, poorly. But it's academic because you gave up a long time before you got there as there was no FUN to be had and you have children and work and household chores and this is a poor investment of your precious, precious time.

>>How do you hope to play anything other than basic melodies if you can't read music?

I mean, it's 2021. Look around. We are SPOILED for choices when it comes to learning! There's pianote and flowkey and casio lk line and songsterr and YouTube and tablature and karaoke apps and anything and everything. It's wonderful and we should embrace that every person can learn differently and enjoy themselves! :)

FWIW, I've played Amelie on piano, Green Onions on organ, I want to Break free on synth and made some small synthwave songs entirely from scratch without reading music (but with thorough understanding of what I was playing - keys and changes and transitions and inversions) . I've recorded a cover version of White room including Rhythm and Solo, and now play bass in a 3 piece band, for fun, without needing to read music. Yes I've learned it eventually, but frankly as a 43 year old it's brought no benefit yet in the two years since I've done so.

YES if you are a pro dedicated musician interacting with others you must learn it. But I think a lot of old-school musicians forget or don't want to understand what it's like to be a casual adult player who just wants to have some fun and jam. Empathy is lacking. Just because previous generation went through some enforced painful rite of passage, doesn't mean everybody has to - let's have an actual discussion on specific customized learning path that benefits each person's goals and constraints.

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Second point, I firmly believe, especially for Hacker-News audience, is that learning staff notation too early is counter-productive. It gives enormous undeserved privilege and primacy to C major and it prevents you from making crucial connections early on. In Western 12 note equal temperament, there are 12 notes. That's it, 12 notes, repeating. You can start wherever you want and it's the same. You don't care if you start from C or Bb. There are patterns and intervals and triads and chords and things that sound good that are completely relative and you can learn SO much without staff notation messing you up. Then you do learn staff notation, and you realize it's always lying to you. The spaces on staff notation are not representative to anything in the real world. Between E and F there's one semitone; but between F and G there are two semitones, even though they are the same spacing on the staff. And if you move from the safety of C major to anything else, you are SCREEEEEWED as na adult student wanting to have fun. Notation stops any pretense of sense logic and patterns and it's a quagmire of flats and sharps you're supposed to remember as you painfully make your way through. It takes something beautiful, built on relative patterns, and jams that lovely circle into jagged square hole that's on fire. Yes, eventually, you need to learn the same stupid crippling language everybody else uses, but that's not in any way to say that the language is beautiful or practical or helpful. It's just the notation we're stuck in Western music.

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I think most importantly, a lot of people completely conflate "music theory" with "staff notation".

I've spent a long time reading "Music Theory books" which just want to teach you staff notation, which has zero explanatory powers (and I firmly believe has negative initial explanatory value). Finally, I came upon on this [2] book, which starts with "If you want to learn staff notation, awesome; we have a sibling book for that; but this is a book on music theory which is independent on any specific notation system". I read that book and every page was revelation and insight and made me a better player. Modern motivated geeky interested enthusiastic adults don't have to be stuck in the method that our grandparents taught captive 10 year olds.

I dunno, maybe it'll blow your mind, maybe you cannot see it, but I could discuss dominant 7th and minor harmonics and modes and pentatonics and intervals and triads and augmented & diminished and all that good, meaty, fun, fascinating, geeky stuff with my instructor without needing or referencing staff notation at all.

>>It's because the grand staff is centered around middle C.

That explains precisely nothing. It's not even circular, it's a rote memorized factoid thrown out instead of explanation that can be understood and discussed. The bass and treble are off by two. Two!!! If you truly cannot see that for a student, let alone for anybody, it would've been better if Piano staffs were same notes but one or two straight octaves apart, I feel you're not making an effort to see it from anybody else's eyes. My challenge is to find a practical, discussable reason two hands on same piano are off by two notes on staff that has inherent value and cannot be trivially reduced to "because 18th century grouchy Austrians said so" :)

>>It's by far one of the easiest parts of learning to play an instrument.

Well that's just wrong, but we can agree to STROOOONGLY disagree on this one :P

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ

2: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1986061833/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_...

[oriolid]

> Second point, I firmly believe, especially for Hacker-News audience, is that learning staff notation too early is counter-productive.

I'd like to add that in 2021 learning writing and reading is counter-productive. Text-to speech and vice versa software is widely available, and spelling rules for English require a ridiculous effort for little benefit except backwards compatibility with legacy books. As an adult learner you are SCREEEEWED even trying to figure out how to pronounce the things written above.

[NikolaNovak]

I think that's intended as sarcasm, and uncharitably ignores my point was order of priorities, not absolutes; but sure, things like that Should be discussed - e. G. My ex-father-in-law was Insistent that kids MUST be taught cursive. When challenged why, he gave no particular reason other than to repeat it a lot.

More to the point though, Kids ARE taught speech FIRST (as is my point with an instrument)! They in fact DO learn complex sentences and language patterns and communication way way before we teach them writing. We are not even contemplating teaching 1 year olds writing before we teach them language. So you are 100% making my point for me :).

Similarly in languages, I once went through 2 years of learning foreign language by rote memorization of tenses and rules and declensions and it was awful (this was not in North America) . Got nobody in the class anywhere. 10 A-plus students couldn't make a conversational sentence after 2 years. Much more success is accomplished by teaching people here to speak and understand language first.

And again to address different part of your comment and my point: I claim staff notation for people who WANT to understand patterns and theory In music can be counterproductive. Get the feel for relativity of keys first, before we smash C major up your throat. Alphabets by and large aren't that counterproductive, so it's a bit of a false comparison on that level too, though we can have a good discussion of phonetic alphabets vs whatever the heck English has. Staff notation is not inherently logical and representative of patterns in 12 note equal temperament. It's just an archaic system we are stuck in though others have been proposed. It's qwerty! :)

Through all of this tough, I don't see an actual counter argument - this seems to always get people riled up and upset, But why SHOULD an adult wanting to strum or jam and have some fun, be taught staff notation FIRST? What goal does it accomplish, why is that a beneficial order of operation, other than "that's how I was taught"? Let's have a charitable, productive honest discussion :)

[oriolid]

Honest question: Did you read my post and write that all by yourself? If yes, why are you so hostile to the idea that music can be effectively communicated through writing and reading? Yes, you can teach a beginner to strum a few chords without any context, but once you want to play with others you need some concepts to be able to communicate and when you have to learn those concepts writing them down is the easy part.

Your language course sounds really odd to me and I'm not sure if I should believe it actually happened.

I don't really get why you are so hung up with C major. Sure, if you play piano the first few pieces are probably in C major unless one of them is Chopsticks but the method books that I have seen have all exercises in different keys almost from the beginning.

[NikolaNovak]

- Yes I read your post, though I had the exact same question, as I feel we are talking past each other a bit :<

- (Yes, I wrote that by myself though that's a strange question to ask :)

- Yes that course was real. Two years of Latin, 1995, Prva Susacka Gimnazija u Rijeci. You can wake me up at 2 am and I can recite "Terra Terrae Terrae Terram Terra Terrae Terrarum Terris Terras Terris" in about 6 seconds (just measured:). And that's literally what our exams were for two years - conjugate this verb; recite declension of this noun; give me a list of propositions; at no point did we actually learn to speak it conversationally, or tested on reading comprehension or speaking skills. Extreme example but it exists!

Now let's see if we can productively engage on same topic together:

- I am not talking about "reading or writing" or "music theory" or "Communicating with other musicians in general". I am making claims very specifically about western music staff notation, being taught first or early, for casually interested potential musicians. Not that "communicating music is unimportant" or "professional musician doesn't need staff notation"

As such my claim specifically is:

- Staff notation is provably and demonstrably not necessary, and I claim not helpful, to either start learning an instrument or communicate with other musicians or learn advanced music theory; and further, a lot of fairly advanced fun can be had with music without learning staff notation.

That's it, that's my claim.

We need to arrive at better understanding of where we disagree. A LOT of very good musicians mentally, subconsciously do not distinguish between "Music theory" and "Staff notation". I am NOT claiming Music Theory is not helpful - I am enjoying it tremendously. Understanding what you're playing and how and why is great! But staff notation is completely lateral to learning Music Theory, as I mentioned above but may get missed.

Some examples that may help see where I'm coming from - You do NOT need Staff notation to:

- Tell your bandmate "hey, can you try doing a riff in E major pentatonic?"

- Understand keys, triads, chords, inversions, intervals, etc; or communicate them

- Learn a chord progression of a song

- Learn a solo, learn to improvise, learn to arrange

.... Whopsie, Sorry, kids are waking up from their nap, I'll write more in couple of hours, I'd be eager to continue this conversation, whether here or on Hangouts/Gmail/Whatsapp/Whatever :). But my central point here is - staff notation is perceived by some as necessary to a) learn music theory b) play an instrument c) communicate musical concepts, and today in 2021 there are plentiful counter examples to that, beyond theoretical discussion :)

[AlbertCory]

Surprisingly (maybe) I don't disagree with a lot of what you said.

Exhibit A: Paul McCartney, who's produced some of the most timeless music ever written, and can't read music.

Exhibit Others: it's too early in the morning for me to think of those. Give me some time.

However, everyone who plays on the studio session to record your composed-by-ear masterpiece for the CD will be an excellent sight reader. Guaranteed. They wouldn't have gotten the gig if they weren't.

"Staff notation" is pretty damn flexible, as you'll learn if you try to write a program to produce it as well as music publishers have done for centuries. You already said it's a way to communicate with other musicians, but I'd just add that oftentimes in popular music, that communication is just a score with a tempo and bar lines marked off, with chords and rests in the bars -- no individual notes.

Furthermore, there's immense room for interpretation: if the chord is G7#13, an experienced player will laugh and say to himself "ok, so that's just an altered seventh, and by the way, I always add a ninth to a seventh chord."

[oriolid]

> Yes that course was real. You can wake me up at 2 am and I can recite "Terra Terrae Terrae Terram Terra Terrae Terrarum Terris Terras Terris".

Interesting. My high school German classes involved repeating "an, auf, hinter, in, neben, über, unter, vor, zwischen" until everyone remembers it and that didn't really mean that there wouldn't have been conversation practice. Maybe it's the Latin language, I have heard similar stories from others too.

I guess it's possible to learn music theory without staff notation if you really try to do so, but to me it sounds just incredibly stubborn to not make the connection between the notes and the lines that dots are drawn on. The connection between the sounds and the letters is much more arbitrary than the connection to dots on lines and you don't seem to have problem with it. If anything, the note that's either H or B depending the culture is written the same way on staff everywhere. And if you're afraid of C major, you're not really getting away from accidentals by just using letters instead of staff notation.

Edit:

> Staff notation is not inherently logical and representative of patterns in 12 note equal temperament. It's just an archaic system we are stuck in though others have been proposed

Most music in European tradition is written in diatonic, not chromatic scales, and while equal temperament is common, it's not all there is. The staff notation with key signatures is just too handy for writing down diatonic music to ignore. Of course it's not a perfect fit for other tuning systems but from "let's play the riff in E minor pentatonic" I'd guess you're not thinking about going atonal or outside 12-tone system either.