| I was a kid who learned enough music to be barely good enough to do music at church... Now a few decades later I'm learning the drums using Rock Band [0] (and similar, I have almost a complete collection); the video game using a "toy" drumkit on a 10 year old console. Back in the day I read that a motivation behind the drums implementation of the game was that if you can play the song in the game, you can play in real life. [1] It's perfect for doing in small doses and providing good motivation,and so I've reached the point now that I'm good enough now that I am buying a proper e-drumkit. Yes, guaranteed I will pick up some terrible habits, but I've always failed to learn things when the barriers to achieving each goal aren't as simple as possible, and I'll take some proper lessons later on. Now... how's this relevant to OP? Well, the 'music notation' it uses is best explained via analogy to a road, imagine you are standing on a bridge looking up a highway. There are 4 lanes, each lane representing a drum, and coming towards you at a constant pace are symbols (gems) representing the hits (and bars across the whole road for the kick). There are horizontal markings for the bars as well. Song plays, hit the notes correctly and you'll hear them in the song. Get them wrong and you'll hear a clanging and the drums drop out of the song. Then you get feedback at the end of the song. Just search YouTube for "rock band drums" or "guitar hero drums", and you'll quickly get the gist. Now this "notation" can be via the application of some simple steps turned into the real thing. These don't necessarily have to be in order either, perhaps some different sequence is better to make the jump. 1. Rotate the 'highway' sideways, remove the perspective distortion, and it looks like a regular music staff 2. Scroll it at first... but then swap to stationary with a moving playhead 3. Remove the playhead so the player has to keep their place. 4. Make the changes to turn it into proper notation [3], but keep the colouring. 5. Get rid of the colour altogether and you're left with regular notation. Now referring back to [1] again, this is the same idea covered there. A project idea I've had floating around is to actually implement the above steps in a game/app on a device that can take MIDI input and use the same charts format that the amazing CloneHero [4] developed. And for regular tonal notation rather than percussive? While I haven't looked into it much... Rock Band 3 has the "ProKeys" mode which is meant to do the same thing with a 2-octave keyboard, and perhaps the same concept could be applied [5]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band [1] This wasn't the original article... but this one is even better, and deals with the notation discussion. I swear I only found it when I was adding references in at the end of writing this comment! https://www.destructoid.com/how-rock-band-can-teach-you-to-p... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussion_notation [4] https://clonehero.net [5] https://www.gameinformer.com/blogs/editors/b/gijeffm_blog/ar... |