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by pseudocomposer 1044 days ago
So, as someone who made a living for a time with piano sightreading skills… there’s already a near-endless supply of free sheet music to practice sightreading with. I guess you could use it as an input for some LLM and practice against its outputs… but just… why? Part of the benefit of practicing sightreading (in a non-paid context) is that you’re playing material that you might have to “sightread” for money (quoted here because yes, it may be the second or third time you’ve seen it… sightreading vs. memorizing a piece is a whole spectrum, but customers only really care if you can play things well). I guess, there could be a market for sightreading LLM-generated music (“write me Chopin lines but with Monk chord progressions”)… at a cocktail party… for an audience that was into that? This seems really unnatural and unlikely to me though.
3 comments

Amateur guitar player here, I feel like sometimes I don't know if my fingers have gotten the concept or if I've just learned a difficult passage by rote.

I'd love to have something that generates the same right hand picking pattern with a different left hand.

Also, I think there are licks that you have to be very precise with fingering or picking pattern. It would be cool to generate those.

For the latter, I’m working on something like this with my app BeatScratch. (Though I’m currently picking it back up and updating to Dart 3 after a hiatus to work on what will be its new backend in place of Reddit…) The notation format is a bit limited but does have a novel way of choosing enharmonics (like F# vs. Gb) to maximize readability. https://beatscratch.io
> I guess you could use it as an input for some LLM and practice against its outputs… but just… why?

The same reason you might want to use an LLM to generate language or a meal plan or anything really: it's interactive and you can customize it arbitrarily on the fly instead of browsing pages of content until something kinda lines up with what you want over and over again.

Is there free sheet music for popular music like there are for guitar tabs? I've tried to find this in the past but not been able.
MuseScore is a good source! But there is absolutely an art (with deeply mathematical influences) to producing pleasant-to-read sheet music. You’re better off paying for even mediocre songbooks, say Hal-Leonard or Alfred press, for musicians or even just genres you like, than sticking purely to free sources. For $5-20 a book (of say, 8-20 songs) I would argue it’s better to pay for it.
Thesession.org, imslp.org