[jacquesm]

Hah! Great you found your 'match'. Trying my hand at the piano for the third time in my life and having a ton of fun with it but I know I still suck and probably will for a long time to come. That moment you talk about hasn't arrived yet, it still requires a lot of thinking rather than that it is playing. I remember clearly the changeover moment on the sax when I could simply play what I wanted rather than to have to study each song from the beginning to find the right notes. And I can't wait to reach that level on the piano but piano is a lot harder than sax on account of the polyphony and I suspect at some level playing a monophonic instrument for a long time doesn't really help when you want to play piano, all I hear in my head is the 'lead'.

[bityard]

You're the pianojacq.com guy, right? I love the idea of the site and wish there was a way to use it with my accordion. I've been meaning to hook up my MIDI keyboard and give it a proper try. Although I play pretty much only by ear, being able to read sheet music well enough to use as a reference or guide would be a good tool to have in my belt someday.

I'm still early in my journey but from what I can tell, the key to learning piano/accordion is practicing scales and chords more or less relentlessly _before_ trying to play anything more complex than Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Once you get the hang of them, and spend a lot of time playing around with them in various combinations, finding the melody of any given song by ear is quite often trivial.

And for what it's worth, the piano can be a monophonic instrument too. :) On the accordion, I'm still somewhat inexperienced so I generally only play one note at a time on the piano side. Which I can get away with and still sound decent because the bass side of the instrument is far easier to play and sound good on than the piano side. Put together, they sound passable even if you barely know what you're doing (like me!).

[jacquesm]

Hehe, I'd much rather be known as 'the pianojacq.com guy' than 'the webcam guy' :) Thank you for making my day.

Accordion is going to be very tricky. I've been toying around with synthesizing the notes/chords and then to compare the spectrum with the microphone input, that just might work for accordion as well though those tines tend to have lots of harmonics that may make that harder than it seems. I haven't gotten this to work for piano yet, the idea is to have a 'virtual midi' device that just listens to the microphone and turns everything it hears into note on/off pairs. That way you could use the site with non-midi instruments.

Agreed on sheetmusic reading skills being useful. For accordion jazz lead sheets might be useful as well.

> the key to learning piano/accordion is practicing scales and chords more or less relentlessly _before_ trying to play anything more complex than Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

Yes... it is also stupendously boring which I think is why a lot of people get turned off from practicing. There has to be some way to make this fun.

> Once you get the hang of them, and spend a lot of time playing around with them in various combinations, finding the melody of any given song by ear is quite often trivial.

Picking out the lead is trivial, picking out all of the chords is not (at least, not for me!).

> And for what it's worth, the piano can be a monophonic instrument too. :)

That's very true :)

> On the accordion, I'm still somewhat inexperienced so I generally only play one note at a time on the piano side. Which I can get away with and still sound decent because the bass side of the instrument is far easier to play and sound good on than the piano side. Put together, they sound passable even if you barely know what you're doing (like me!).

My dad was very good at the accordion, he could play both the clavier one and the 'button' style (chromatic) one. He's long dead so I can't ask him for any tips.