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by laurentoget 3993 days ago
From a musician's point of view this sounds like a dangerous idea. Training your hands on random sequences of notes which do not make sense musically and relying on visual feedback feels like it will do nothing to build the skill which you actually need which is the ability to associate hand movements to musical patterns.

But then it is probably just what you need if you want to play crazy atonal music. What do i know?

5 comments

Well, I'm on the fence... I'm not a great reader on the piano (I'm terrible) but I can read well enough to play gigs on the upright bass.

On on hand, my reaction was the same... I am usually trying to decide what chord I'm supposed to be playing at a given moment and to decipher what the bass and melody are doing... so this is more like a typing exercise where you do random typing.

On the other hand, I don't read much for the piano and all I can play are those patterns... I have 10 or so bass patterns and know how to come up with inversions of all the chords without thinking, so it is easy to play some elton john tune but very difficult to read beginner bach. Being forced to play a combination of notes that aren't already in my musical vocabulary sounds like a good way to learn to read.

Maybe there is a common ground where, like typing tutorial software the trainer generates somewhat normal musical patterns in a random fashion.

Yes, it sounds a bit like learning to read 'letters' instead of 'words'... You will read letters quite fast but what about the meaning? Playing the piano is not touch-typing, as far as I know.
There are many things you need in music though. Not just the ability to associate hand movement to musical patterns.
Sight-reading is an important skill, even essential for many studio and session musicians.
Atonal (actually, I'd argue microtonal) music is totally where it's at though...
good luck with microtonal on a midi keyboard, though..
Every midi workstation I've used for a while lets you make +/- cent adjustments.

Then there's the tonal plexus and similar.