Anecdotal: there's a few different approaches to learning songwriting that seem to click for beginners. The "build up" approach is the most common and is what this link offers: It first teaches beats, then chords, then melodies and then, in theory, vocals etc. These lessons in this order make sense to many people, but not everyone.
If you're interested in learning to make music and the lessons in the link are confusing or overwhelming or boring, some students find a "peel back" approach to learning songwriting easier to grasp at first. A peel back approach just involves finding a song then teaching by stripping away each layer: start with stripping away vocals, then learn melodies, then chords, then finally learn about the drum beat underneath it all. A benefit of the peel back approach to learning is melodies and vocals are the memorable parts of a song and easiest to pick out when listening to the radio so a student can learn using songs they know and like. Either way, songwriting is hard and fun. Best of luck.
P.S. I think Ableton makes good software and I use it along with FL and Logic. They did a solid job with these intro lessons. But worth mentioning, there is free software out there (this includes Apple's Garageband) that offers key features a beginner just learning songwriting can practice on and mess around on before purchasing a more powerful DAW software like Ableton.
This is some good coverage of the music theory behind songwriting, which is important in making songs that sound good.
However, there's another part of making music which is not covered at all here, which is the actual engineering of sounds. Think of a sound in your head and recreate it digitally—it'll involve sampling and synthesizing, there's tons of filters and sound manipulation to go through, they all go by different names and have different purposes—it's a staggering amount of arcane knowledge.
Where is the learning material on how to do this without experimenting endlessly or looking up everything you see? I want a reverse dictionary of sorts, where I hear a transformation of a sound and I learn what processing it took to get there in a DAW. This would be incredibly useful to learn from.
I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).
I mean the conventional music notation represents tones in five lines, each capable of holding a "note" (is that the right word?) on a line, as well as in between lines, possibly pitched down and up, resp., by B's and sharps (depending on the tune etc.).
Since western music has 12 half-tone steps per octave (octave = an interval wherein the frequency is doubled, which is a logarithmic scale so compromises have to made when tuning individual notes across octaves) this gives a basic mismatch between the notation and eg. the conventional use of chords. A consequence is that, for example, with treble clef, you find C' in the top but one position between lines, and thus at a very different place than C (one octave below) visually, which is on, rather than between, an additional line below the bottom-most regular line.
I for one know that my dyslexia when it comes to musical notation (eg. not recognizing notes fast enough to play by the sheet) has kept me from becoming proficient on the piano (well, that, and my lazyness).
> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).
I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet.
I think the problem is that difficult to learn and bad are easily confused. It is difficult to learn.
Also keep in mind that music notation has undergone many iterations, and it represents developments over hundreds and hundreds of years and covers every instrument under the sun - the breadth of what it has done throughout history and what can do might be hard to see.
Think of it as data compression that shows you the notes you're most likely to play, without taking up space for notes you probably won't.
If there's a piece in C, for example, in most traditional Western music you're unlikely to play off-key notes. So why take up valuable space for those when you can denote that unlikely event with a sharp/flat symbol?
Traditional music notation made no sense at all to me until I realized this.
Edit: For those that don't know, in most western music you're only going to use 8 out of the 12 possible notes most of the time. This is not universally true especially of modern non-pop music, but traditionally if you played off-key notes people thought you might summon evil spirits so it's easy to understand why things would be written down this way. Not only is it space efficient, but you wouldn't accidentally summon the devil. To summon the devil you have to really want to and write a flat or sharp in there.
Agreed, but reading sheet music is a very small part of playing piano proficiently (say, at the 97th percentile). Once you get past knowing the notes in a piece, there's the much more difficult task of being able to manipulate the force that you exert from your fingers to create the right volume balance. For example, your untrained thumb will naturally play notes much louder than it should, and it takes a lot of practice to be able to play notes with it at the right volume; the opposite is true with your pinky and ring fingers.
...Not to mention the even more difficult task of knowing what you want the piece to sound like in the first place. A novice playing a piece at 100% accuracy sounds nothing like a concert pianist playing the piece. There's a world of depth to music beyond just learning the right notes.
Here's an example: listen to this performance of Debussy's "Reflets dans l'eau" by Arturo Michelangeli, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century:
> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the
> conventional musical notation system, and haven't come
> up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).
Before starting down that path, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the wide range of music notations that already exist and continue to be used, and then the ridiculously varying plethora of failed alternative music notations that have been invented over the centuries, and why they failed to see wider adoption.
And, of course, it's fascinating to study the evolution of the existing "standard" music notation, and see the changes that have been adopted, and the ones that weren't. For all its apparent stasis, it has definitely evolved over the centuries, in response to the changing needs of musicians.
I have played piano and guitar (piano for almost my entire life and guitar for several years) and have used both tabular sheet music and traditional sheet music.
Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string. However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)
Traditional sheet music has a steeper learning curve, however, I've found that reading this music becomes much more subconscious with practice and the bandwidth at which you can parse the notes is much higher. Also, it is much easier to notice patterns in sheet music - i.e. a major 7th chord in the key of the song is visually obvious no matter what the key.
Music notation does take time to learn how to read well at, but it's no different anything else that takes time to learn and master.
Once you get past a cursory "eff this" reaction, you start to see how downright brilliant notation is.
The vast majority of music focuses on 7 notes at a time. If you alter a key signature, you are playing 7 other (non-distinct) notes. Music notation encapsulates this concept very well.
That's only one example, but telling musicians their notation sucks and needs to be fixed because it's hard for a non-musician is akin to a musician telling a programmer that Python and Linux needs to be fixed because it doesn't look like a violin.
Oven the last 800 years, hundreds of different systems have been proposed to the system that has evolved to be the one in use today.
Generally it can be said that some have been better in a specific use case (klavar notation was pretty big in the Netherlands among those who didn't know regular notation), but they fall apart pretty quickly when you try to write Liszt or Rachmaninov in it.
I might be a bit rigid (I have played bassoon professionally for most of my adult life), but I can't really see how it can be made much better and still keep the same utility.
While chords might be not optimal today, we can still express things like enharmonics easily (which, at least for me, is something that can make sight reading easier as it allows for the notes to stay "in key").
As with the spoken word, music has an advanced coding system. Both coding systems are flawed in their own way (as someone with a different mother tongue than english, I have a hard time spelling just about anything), but they have also stood the trial of time.
Well, considering this article on Ableton never even uses conventional musical notation and many working musicians sit in front of their DAW all day, I think it's safe to say that the virtual piano roll has largely taken over the roll of classic notation. I don't think too many people making rock music, EDM, or hip-hop has really touched classic notation ever.
I'm a classically trained pianist, and I basically agree with you. I read sheet music because that's what there is. As a young composer, I wrote in standard notation because I hadn't questioned it. As an old composer, I don't think there's anything great about it, and I have no need of it. I 'write' all my music on hardware or software synths. It's much easier. All I care about are the parameters. What note, when, how long, how loud, etc.
It's clear that current music software is poor for conveying information when compared to editors for many other tasks. It is easy to blame musical notation for that, but in fact in most music software there are several equivalent views (tracks, piano roll, notation), and you'll find that notation is the _most_ efficient of those.
Consider this: In this system, your most complex Classical scores for an entire orchestra are written, and present day trained composers continue to work efficiently in it. That tells you about its expressive power. It is in fact not stupid, but very well tuned to a lot of music theory. Other than complex timbre manipulation (and even that), you can do probably everything you want to accomplish with just software that does nothing but notation.
Instead, what most music software lacks is in the organization department. The organization of non-linear ideas, their programmatic (as in music) occurrence, the automation of repetitive tasks, and the completion of obvious intent. Tracks and loops are probably not the right view of musical structure, at least far from a _complete_ view. There needs to be a better bridge between musical phrases and ideas at the local level (for which musical notation is perfectly suited) and the organizational structure of a complex piece at the macro level (for which tools are very lacking). There also needs to be a better bridge between some conception of events (for which musical notation is slightly ill suited, being restricted to notes) and the microscopic world of timbres, effects, and transformations.
Until music software makers recognize that what they should be helping with is neither engraving, nor mixing console simulation, but a non-linear creative task, music software will continue to suck.
Speaking as a classical pianist, I think the conventional musical notation system is actually pretty good. My only issue is having to memorize Italian, French, and German phrases to be able to read music properly. IMHO, music notation should be localized.
Many non classical musicians use other notations. For example, many guitarists and bassists use tab notation. It's simply a visual representation of the strings and a number for which fret to play.
It's not as expressive but is far easier to get started with.
There are a lot of books on the subject, but the short answer is that it's just the most common standard at this point. Yes there are some things about it that don't make sense, but for whatever reason it seems to be the most coherent way for musicians to communicate using a common language.
It's popularity also has to do with what sounds pleasing to the ear (and brain) on a biological level.
A number of people have come up with alternative scales and notations systems over the years, but none of them have really stuck for one reason or another. Nonetheless, they are pretty fun to read about.
Also, if you aren't familiar with John Cage, you should check him out. His music and writing deals with a lot of the stuff you just brought up, and it's also a really great jumping off point to find other interesting artists and musicians.
I once thought the same thing, but after months of studying our music system and our way of notating it, I came to understand why it's so difficult to improve upon staff notation.
First of all, Western music has complex structure both horizontally and vertically. This makes it rather difficult to encode and visualize, right at the outset. You need some sort of matrix visualization, like a staff or piano roll, to capture all of the nuance.
What makes the staff so useful is that it also captures the tonal aspects of music in compact way -- those that relate to the key the music is written in. Every triad in the same inversion looks the same in every key. A triad is three consecutive lines or spaces. And then deviations from the standard triad for that tonal function are marked with accidentals.
This turns out to be extremely useful for performers, because you learn to play an instrument by learning to play in all the keys, rather than learning what the 12 notes are and playing note by note. I realized this when taking piano class and doing exercises where we'd transpose to another key while sightreading in the original key.
There are other notation systems that have been as successful as the staff, but they tend to be specific to particular instruments or styles. For example, most guitarists find tablature much easier to play than standard notation, especially if the tablature is augmented with note durations and rests.
Also, although I've become a true believer when it comes to the staff, I have less rationale for why the traditional clef system has stuck around. It seems like something that is more regular as you go up and down the scale would be more helpful. There are systems that use things like note shapes or colors to help mark the note name. I guess we just haven't found a standard.
I'm a programmer/musician and I can read on guitar and piano. I'm somewhere on the middle on this debate. I really dislike conventional notation but I also agree that the alternatives have some big downsides as well.
My biggest objection to conventional notation is that it gives a profoundly misleading picture of how music and harmony really work. It defines one reference key (C Major/A Minor) with a certain pattern of steps and gaps, starting on a certain note. Then for all of the other keys you add more and more sharps or flats until you get into ridiculous keys where all 7 notes are modified. The truth is that there's just one evenly spaced set of 12 tones, and all it means to be "in a key" is that you've picked a certain note out of the 12 to start the pattern on. There's nothing special about C. We could have chosen the key we call F# as the reference key and named it C, and everything would work the same.
It's hard to overstate the damage from this. Lots of musicians I know—serious players, people who took music in college—still think of "complicated keys" and "easy keys" and are only vaguely aware that the keys are actually all the same and they're just being tormented by the notation and terminology. I'm teaching guitar to a friend who was first trombone in high school and it blows her mind that she can play the same scales starting anywhere up and down the fretboard and it sounds the same.
It all comes from the design of the keyboard, where the notes of C major are evenly spaced (white keys) and the sharps/flats are stuck in between. There's also the fact that in the past the 12 notes weren't evenly spaced, so the different keys really did all sound different back then.
Conventional notation does have one big advantage, though: every line or space represents one note in the scale. This is more how musicians think: you don't care that much about the notes outside your key, and having the other ones "tucked away" in between makes it easy to see what's going on. That's why it's so quick to read once you know it. Out of the hundreds of alternative notations, I haven't seen one that's both key-neutral and also makes it easy to see things in terms of scale degrees.
(One idea I've had is a 12-tone staff with Sacred Harp-style shaped note heads to show you what scale degree you're playing. Not sure if that's ever been tried.)
Since music notation is a form of communication, wide adoption is a huge factor in what is considered better.
We could come up with more precise and effective languages than the ones we naturally speak, as well, but the good-enoughness of the ones we already have and the fact that others around us are very likely familiar with them is more important. Utility trumps quality, and worse is better.
That said, if all you want is a different notation system for you to use personally or with small groups of other proponents, there are plenty to choose from. ABC and MML variants use letters for notes and numbers for note lengths, for example. Probably not optimal for sight reading, but maybe better than staff notation when writing or transcribing music. There's also trackers and piano rolls. Neither is very good for quick conprehension, but maybe lay things out in a way that makes more intuitive sense.
One advantage of the 5-Line Staff is use of both lines and spaces. It's compact, easy to print, and easy to stack notes vertically.
Another advantage: each note of a diatonic scale is mapped injectively. Cf. representing each line (or space) as a whole-tone, which leads to hash-collisions (e.g. "is that a G or a G#?"). Each note on a line (or space) on which collisions occur would need an accidental. Which defeats the purpose of key signatures.
A diatonic scale contains an odd number of unique notes. The fact that C lies on a line while C' lies on a space is an unfortunate artifact of representing a 7-note scale with alternating lines and spaces.
> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).
Is this supposed to be satire? Invoking Poe's Law on this one
> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).
Me too. But you think about it, all you really is a graphical representation that describes the pitch of sounds relative to each other as well as their duration relative to the beat. And the conventional notation is not bad at it !
The current system is essentially:
a dot on a coordinate system representing the pitch, duration, and position of the sound in a sequence of sounds.
- a horizontal position axis: you draw an invisible x-axis representing the position of the note in its ordered sequence. It gives no indication on its duration.
- a vertical pitch axis defined by western notes (do, re, mi, etc): You draw your pitch lines, y-axis with y=Do, y=Re, y=Mi etc.
- a duration axis (let's say it points towards you): We can't draw it for a 2d representation of music, so we'll project this coordinate on the time-pitch plane which is your staff. We'll decorate the dot representing the note w.r.t. to it's duration coordinate: say it's duration is half a beat, the the dot is a black filled circle; if it's a full beat then it's a white circle; it's its a 4th of a beat the it'll be a black filled circle with a hook. Etc etc etc.
And then you start making all the addition of music notation: blank for 1/2 beats, vibrato, tempo, etc
Now there is this choice not representing note position and duration on a single axis. That may very well be so it's easier to standardise and read probably. You could also choose to represent the duration coordinate with colour, would that make it easier ? :)
Maybe the problem doesn't come from the notation, but the system in itself. The half step between B and C, the 12 notes but really it's more, etc. That's why solfeggio is hard ! I think some greeks considered the study of harmony to be at least as intellectual as that of counting ! I wonder if there's an algebra for harmonie. An H-Algebra why not ?
But really, it's not the only notation: guitar tabs, guitar chord representation, etc
Tempered tuning indeed divides the octave into 12 half-steps, but a huge amount of music uses only 7 or fewer of them for long stretches (or entire pieces) with a few exceptions. So think of the lines & spaces as being a compressed representation that doesn't waste vertical space for the tones that a piece isn't going to use.
Me, I love standard notation. Common chord voicings and interval patterns stand out as easily recognizable patterns on the page.
I wonder how many of us "skilled musical technicians" there are - people who can read music really well, produce those notes on our instruments predictably enough to play in a group, but just aren't that "musical" - we're boring to listen to on our own and have trouble singing. I'm a competent flute player, but it's a good thing I was just as interested in computers as a teen.
I'm actually working full time on a new DAW that should make writing music a lot faster and easier. Current DAWs don't really understand music. Also the note input process and experimentation is extremely time consuming and the DAW never helps. Current DAW : my thing = Windows Notepad : IDE. The HN audience is definitely one of my core groups.
I'm an amateur musician and one of the things I hate about electronic music is how "distant" it all feels.
I'm used to picking up the guitar, playing a few chords and writing a melody.
Ableton (or any other DAW) feels like a chore. I have to boot up the computer, connect the MIDI keyboard, the audio interface and the headphones, then wait for Ableton to load, then create a new track and add a MIDI instrument before I can play a single note.
I know the sessions view in Ableton was an attempt to make the music feel more like jamming, but it doesn't really work for me. A lot of musicians who play instruments I've talked to feel the same way.
I would love an "Ableton in a box" that feels more intuitive and immediate.
I purchased the Ableton Push 2 a month or so ago and it has to be one of the most beautifully engineered pieces of equipment I have ever used. Look up the teardown video. Extremely simple, yet elegant. The Push 1 was created by Akai, and apparently Ableton wasn't satisfied, so they designed and built their own.
Push 1 is still awesome and there's a ton on the second hand market for a fraction of the price of Push 2. You get way more than you pay for at those prices.
I'm happy with mine, I like the pads and it's fine for sequencing and playing. It still receives updates and improvements.
I do like the screen on Push 2, it looks like a nice update, but you are paying a lot for that screen, so you better use it!
I also own a Maschine Mikro MkII by Native Instruments, it's my go-to machine for finger drumming beats and sonic experiments... great pads, very precise, compact and enjoyable. The Maschine software is very good, and the add-on sound packs are great quality.
Oh man I've had mine for I think a bit over a year now and I love it so much. It really builds off the fundamentals mentioned on the first page of this shared post: you jam out little riffs and then mix and match them till you get something you like. There have been many days/nights where I've needed to do some programming on my game and instead burn 3-4 hours without realizing it because I hit a groove. It's so conducive to jamming it's unbelievable. Not to mention Ableton is a really powerful piece of software that doesn't get in your way when you're experimenting. The pairing makes it one of my absolute favorite pieces of hardware (that and my OP-1).
Related, this is trending on reddit this morning. Just fascinating to watch someone build a catchy track up on such a (apparently) basic piece of equipment...
What's especially impressive is that the OP-1 has only four tracks, and only does destructive recording with no undo. Meaning that if you want more than four instruments, you have to overdub the same track, and any mistake will ruin the current loop.
In other words, you really need to know what you're doing and have a really good idea of what you want to play to be able to make a song as elaborate as this.
As someone who has no musical talent whatsoever, I'm oddly intrigued by Ableton's products. I've occasionally stumbled across the Push[0] and been fascinated by it as an input device.
This site is another thing to add to my Intriguing Stuff list.
Love the simplicity, though it does seem to favor EMD (for obvious reasons).
I've always loved the idea of using Live in a live improvisation context, potentially with multiple instruments having their own looping setup; or just a solo thing. It's hard to find that sort of thing, though.
They put Tone.js to good use.
Promoting Ableton by showing what cool stuff you can do with free js library that can work in browser, weird?
https://tonejs.github.io
To all the people complaining, I feel you. There is not one tool that takes you through the entire workflow of making music well, but they sell software pretending they do support the entire workflow. In truth, you write and arrange in specialized notation software, create samples in specialized synthesis software, or record live audio, then you use audio workstations to fix, edit, transform, and mix. Even there you may rely on external hardware or software plugins. These tools aren't meant for a one-person creator. They mimic the specializations in the music industry. A good all-in-one software simply does not exist, and small teams trying to work on these projects are trying to bite off a real big pie. It's very complex and requires a lot of specialized knowledge, and many of the pieces are probably patent-encumbered, too. But good luck!
The first page of that tutorial reminded me of a product I saw at the Apple store a few weeks ago called Roli.
They have a great app [0], but the hardware [1] itself is not ideal but unfortunately necessary to unlock some features... I will be waiting for a v2...
I was looking for an app like this for my son. He started with "My Singing Monsters" and some music lessons at school, but when I tried to get him into Garage Band it was too much for a beginner.
Thank you to the creator ... I will show it to him later today. I am not sure how far he can take it, but I like what I have seen so far.
Also, if anyone has other suggestions for music-making apps for tween kids I am all ears ...
It's designed in a way to make the user (e.g. anyone who likes music) just want to play with it in a way that's very intuitive via its simple, visual layout. And it provides instant feedback that makes you want to continually tinker with it to make something that you like more and more.
Web development/programming training tool makers should really take note of this.
[+] [-] hxta98596|9 years ago|reply
If you're interested in learning to make music and the lessons in the link are confusing or overwhelming or boring, some students find a "peel back" approach to learning songwriting easier to grasp at first. A peel back approach just involves finding a song then teaching by stripping away each layer: start with stripping away vocals, then learn melodies, then chords, then finally learn about the drum beat underneath it all. A benefit of the peel back approach to learning is melodies and vocals are the memorable parts of a song and easiest to pick out when listening to the radio so a student can learn using songs they know and like. Either way, songwriting is hard and fun. Best of luck.
P.S. I think Ableton makes good software and I use it along with FL and Logic. They did a solid job with these intro lessons. But worth mentioning, there is free software out there (this includes Apple's Garageband) that offers key features a beginner just learning songwriting can practice on and mess around on before purchasing a more powerful DAW software like Ableton.
[+] [-] djm_|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://twitter.com/AbletonDev/status/861580662620508160
[+] [-] JasonSage|9 years ago|reply
However, there's another part of making music which is not covered at all here, which is the actual engineering of sounds. Think of a sound in your head and recreate it digitally—it'll involve sampling and synthesizing, there's tons of filters and sound manipulation to go through, they all go by different names and have different purposes—it's a staggering amount of arcane knowledge.
Where is the learning material on how to do this without experimenting endlessly or looking up everything you see? I want a reverse dictionary of sorts, where I hear a transformation of a sound and I learn what processing it took to get there in a DAW. This would be incredibly useful to learn from.
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|9 years ago|reply
I mean the conventional music notation represents tones in five lines, each capable of holding a "note" (is that the right word?) on a line, as well as in between lines, possibly pitched down and up, resp., by B's and sharps (depending on the tune etc.).
Since western music has 12 half-tone steps per octave (octave = an interval wherein the frequency is doubled, which is a logarithmic scale so compromises have to made when tuning individual notes across octaves) this gives a basic mismatch between the notation and eg. the conventional use of chords. A consequence is that, for example, with treble clef, you find C' in the top but one position between lines, and thus at a very different place than C (one octave below) visually, which is on, rather than between, an additional line below the bottom-most regular line.
I for one know that my dyslexia when it comes to musical notation (eg. not recognizing notes fast enough to play by the sheet) has kept me from becoming proficient on the piano (well, that, and my lazyness).
[+] [-] dahart|9 years ago|reply
You're not alone, this is a common reaction to music notation by engineers; a lot of people have wondered the same thing, even here on HN. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844
I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet.
I think the problem is that difficult to learn and bad are easily confused. It is difficult to learn.
Also keep in mind that music notation has undergone many iterations, and it represents developments over hundreds and hundreds of years and covers every instrument under the sun - the breadth of what it has done throughout history and what can do might be hard to see.
[+] [-] drblast|9 years ago|reply
If there's a piece in C, for example, in most traditional Western music you're unlikely to play off-key notes. So why take up valuable space for those when you can denote that unlikely event with a sharp/flat symbol?
Traditional music notation made no sense at all to me until I realized this.
Edit: For those that don't know, in most western music you're only going to use 8 out of the 12 possible notes most of the time. This is not universally true especially of modern non-pop music, but traditionally if you played off-key notes people thought you might summon evil spirits so it's easy to understand why things would be written down this way. Not only is it space efficient, but you wouldn't accidentally summon the devil. To summon the devil you have to really want to and write a flat or sharp in there.
[+] [-] aoeusnth1|9 years ago|reply
...Not to mention the even more difficult task of knowing what you want the piece to sound like in the first place. A novice playing a piece at 100% accuracy sounds nothing like a concert pianist playing the piece. There's a world of depth to music beyond just learning the right notes.
Here's an example: listen to this performance of Debussy's "Reflets dans l'eau" by Arturo Michelangeli, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLbpQl1cCl8
And then listen to this student play it (she is still a high-skill player, just not world-class talent):
https://youtu.be/l2gJSVOdaG8
[+] [-] breadbox|9 years ago|reply
Before starting down that path, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the wide range of music notations that already exist and continue to be used, and then the ridiculously varying plethora of failed alternative music notations that have been invented over the centuries, and why they failed to see wider adoption.
And, of course, it's fascinating to study the evolution of the existing "standard" music notation, and see the changes that have been adopted, and the ones that weren't. For all its apparent stasis, it has definitely evolved over the centuries, in response to the changing needs of musicians.
[+] [-] ganonm|9 years ago|reply
Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string. However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)
Traditional sheet music has a steeper learning curve, however, I've found that reading this music becomes much more subconscious with practice and the bandwidth at which you can parse the notes is much higher. Also, it is much easier to notice patterns in sheet music - i.e. a major 7th chord in the key of the song is visually obvious no matter what the key.
[+] [-] dizzystar|9 years ago|reply
Once you get past a cursory "eff this" reaction, you start to see how downright brilliant notation is.
The vast majority of music focuses on 7 notes at a time. If you alter a key signature, you are playing 7 other (non-distinct) notes. Music notation encapsulates this concept very well.
That's only one example, but telling musicians their notation sucks and needs to be fixed because it's hard for a non-musician is akin to a musician telling a programmer that Python and Linux needs to be fixed because it doesn't look like a violin.
[+] [-] Johnny_Brahms|9 years ago|reply
Generally it can be said that some have been better in a specific use case (klavar notation was pretty big in the Netherlands among those who didn't know regular notation), but they fall apart pretty quickly when you try to write Liszt or Rachmaninov in it.
I might be a bit rigid (I have played bassoon professionally for most of my adult life), but I can't really see how it can be made much better and still keep the same utility.
While chords might be not optimal today, we can still express things like enharmonics easily (which, at least for me, is something that can make sight reading easier as it allows for the notes to stay "in key").
As with the spoken word, music has an advanced coding system. Both coding systems are flawed in their own way (as someone with a different mother tongue than english, I have a hard time spelling just about anything), but they have also stood the trial of time.
[+] [-] deckard1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psyc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pishpash|9 years ago|reply
Consider this: In this system, your most complex Classical scores for an entire orchestra are written, and present day trained composers continue to work efficiently in it. That tells you about its expressive power. It is in fact not stupid, but very well tuned to a lot of music theory. Other than complex timbre manipulation (and even that), you can do probably everything you want to accomplish with just software that does nothing but notation.
Instead, what most music software lacks is in the organization department. The organization of non-linear ideas, their programmatic (as in music) occurrence, the automation of repetitive tasks, and the completion of obvious intent. Tracks and loops are probably not the right view of musical structure, at least far from a _complete_ view. There needs to be a better bridge between musical phrases and ideas at the local level (for which musical notation is perfectly suited) and the organizational structure of a complex piece at the macro level (for which tools are very lacking). There also needs to be a better bridge between some conception of events (for which musical notation is slightly ill suited, being restricted to notes) and the microscopic world of timbres, effects, and transformations.
Until music software makers recognize that what they should be helping with is neither engraving, nor mixing console simulation, but a non-linear creative task, music software will continue to suck.
[+] [-] tylercubell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lprubin|9 years ago|reply
It's not as expressive but is far easier to get started with.
[+] [-] nileshtrivedi|9 years ago|reply
I guess it's just inertia.
[+] [-] fefesafaea|9 years ago|reply
It's popularity also has to do with what sounds pleasing to the ear (and brain) on a biological level.
A number of people have come up with alternative scales and notations systems over the years, but none of them have really stuck for one reason or another. Nonetheless, they are pretty fun to read about.
here's the whole history of notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation
Also, if you aren't familiar with John Cage, you should check him out. His music and writing deals with a lot of the stuff you just brought up, and it's also a really great jumping off point to find other interesting artists and musicians.
Indeterminacy, a work he did with David Tudor is a great starting point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lOMHUrgM_s
[+] [-] acjohnson55|9 years ago|reply
First of all, Western music has complex structure both horizontally and vertically. This makes it rather difficult to encode and visualize, right at the outset. You need some sort of matrix visualization, like a staff or piano roll, to capture all of the nuance.
What makes the staff so useful is that it also captures the tonal aspects of music in compact way -- those that relate to the key the music is written in. Every triad in the same inversion looks the same in every key. A triad is three consecutive lines or spaces. And then deviations from the standard triad for that tonal function are marked with accidentals.
This turns out to be extremely useful for performers, because you learn to play an instrument by learning to play in all the keys, rather than learning what the 12 notes are and playing note by note. I realized this when taking piano class and doing exercises where we'd transpose to another key while sightreading in the original key.
There are other notation systems that have been as successful as the staff, but they tend to be specific to particular instruments or styles. For example, most guitarists find tablature much easier to play than standard notation, especially if the tablature is augmented with note durations and rests.
Also, although I've become a true believer when it comes to the staff, I have less rationale for why the traditional clef system has stuck around. It seems like something that is more regular as you go up and down the scale would be more helpful. There are systems that use things like note shapes or colors to help mark the note name. I guess we just haven't found a standard.
[+] [-] a_lieb|9 years ago|reply
My biggest objection to conventional notation is that it gives a profoundly misleading picture of how music and harmony really work. It defines one reference key (C Major/A Minor) with a certain pattern of steps and gaps, starting on a certain note. Then for all of the other keys you add more and more sharps or flats until you get into ridiculous keys where all 7 notes are modified. The truth is that there's just one evenly spaced set of 12 tones, and all it means to be "in a key" is that you've picked a certain note out of the 12 to start the pattern on. There's nothing special about C. We could have chosen the key we call F# as the reference key and named it C, and everything would work the same.
It's hard to overstate the damage from this. Lots of musicians I know—serious players, people who took music in college—still think of "complicated keys" and "easy keys" and are only vaguely aware that the keys are actually all the same and they're just being tormented by the notation and terminology. I'm teaching guitar to a friend who was first trombone in high school and it blows her mind that she can play the same scales starting anywhere up and down the fretboard and it sounds the same.
It all comes from the design of the keyboard, where the notes of C major are evenly spaced (white keys) and the sharps/flats are stuck in between. There's also the fact that in the past the 12 notes weren't evenly spaced, so the different keys really did all sound different back then.
Conventional notation does have one big advantage, though: every line or space represents one note in the scale. This is more how musicians think: you don't care that much about the notes outside your key, and having the other ones "tucked away" in between makes it easy to see what's going on. That's why it's so quick to read once you know it. Out of the hundreds of alternative notations, I haven't seen one that's both key-neutral and also makes it easy to see things in terms of scale degrees.
(One idea I've had is a 12-tone staff with Sacred Harp-style shaped note heads to show you what scale degree you're playing. Not sure if that's ever been tried.)
[+] [-] Kiro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomlinde|9 years ago|reply
We could come up with more precise and effective languages than the ones we naturally speak, as well, but the good-enoughness of the ones we already have and the fact that others around us are very likely familiar with them is more important. Utility trumps quality, and worse is better.
That said, if all you want is a different notation system for you to use personally or with small groups of other proponents, there are plenty to choose from. ABC and MML variants use letters for notes and numbers for note lengths, for example. Probably not optimal for sight reading, but maybe better than staff notation when writing or transcribing music. There's also trackers and piano rolls. Neither is very good for quick conprehension, but maybe lay things out in a way that makes more intuitive sense.
[+] [-] Double_Cast|9 years ago|reply
Another advantage: each note of a diatonic scale is mapped injectively. Cf. representing each line (or space) as a whole-tone, which leads to hash-collisions (e.g. "is that a G or a G#?"). Each note on a line (or space) on which collisions occur would need an accidental. Which defeats the purpose of key signatures.
A diatonic scale contains an odd number of unique notes. The fact that C lies on a line while C' lies on a space is an unfortunate artifact of representing a 7-note scale with alternating lines and spaces.
[+] [-] barryfandango|9 years ago|reply
http://buzzcola.github.io/lightspeed-music/
Requires windows and a MIDI keyboard.
[+] [-] vitalus|9 years ago|reply
Is this supposed to be satire? Invoking Poe's Law on this one
[+] [-] globuous|9 years ago|reply
Me too. But you think about it, all you really is a graphical representation that describes the pitch of sounds relative to each other as well as their duration relative to the beat. And the conventional notation is not bad at it !
The current system is essentially:
a dot on a coordinate system representing the pitch, duration, and position of the sound in a sequence of sounds.
- a horizontal position axis: you draw an invisible x-axis representing the position of the note in its ordered sequence. It gives no indication on its duration.
- a vertical pitch axis defined by western notes (do, re, mi, etc): You draw your pitch lines, y-axis with y=Do, y=Re, y=Mi etc.
- a duration axis (let's say it points towards you): We can't draw it for a 2d representation of music, so we'll project this coordinate on the time-pitch plane which is your staff. We'll decorate the dot representing the note w.r.t. to it's duration coordinate: say it's duration is half a beat, the the dot is a black filled circle; if it's a full beat then it's a white circle; it's its a 4th of a beat the it'll be a black filled circle with a hook. Etc etc etc.
And then you start making all the addition of music notation: blank for 1/2 beats, vibrato, tempo, etc
Now there is this choice not representing note position and duration on a single axis. That may very well be so it's easier to standardise and read probably. You could also choose to represent the duration coordinate with colour, would that make it easier ? :)
Maybe the problem doesn't come from the notation, but the system in itself. The half step between B and C, the 12 notes but really it's more, etc. That's why solfeggio is hard ! I think some greeks considered the study of harmony to be at least as intellectual as that of counting ! I wonder if there's an algebra for harmonie. An H-Algebra why not ?
But really, it's not the only notation: guitar tabs, guitar chord representation, etc
[+] [-] pklausler|9 years ago|reply
Me, I love standard notation. Common chord voicings and interval patterns stand out as easily recognizable patterns on the page.
[+] [-] MandieD|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JusticeJuice|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|9 years ago|reply
I sat down and did this in an hour: https://github.com/exabrial/sonic-pi-beats/blob/master/house...
Sam Aaron is the guy behind the project, he does a lot of ambient type stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts
[+] [-] adamnemecek|9 years ago|reply
If you are interested, sign up here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-aQzVbkbGwv2BMQsvuoneOUPgyr... and I'll contact you when it's released.
[+] [-] jarmitage|9 years ago|reply
He even made an interactive essay about the GRAIL text recognizer from the 1960s https://jackschaedler.github.io/handwriting-recognition/
[+] [-] puranjay|9 years ago|reply
I'm used to picking up the guitar, playing a few chords and writing a melody.
Ableton (or any other DAW) feels like a chore. I have to boot up the computer, connect the MIDI keyboard, the audio interface and the headphones, then wait for Ableton to load, then create a new track and add a MIDI instrument before I can play a single note.
I know the sessions view in Ableton was an attempt to make the music feel more like jamming, but it doesn't really work for me. A lot of musicians who play instruments I've talked to feel the same way.
I would love an "Ableton in a box" that feels more intuitive and immediate.
[+] [-] fil_a_del_fee_a|9 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YItWQdJgXLs
[+] [-] exodust|9 years ago|reply
I'm happy with mine, I like the pads and it's fine for sequencing and playing. It still receives updates and improvements.
I do like the screen on Push 2, it looks like a nice update, but you are paying a lot for that screen, so you better use it!
I also own a Maschine Mikro MkII by Native Instruments, it's my go-to machine for finger drumming beats and sonic experiments... great pads, very precise, compact and enjoyable. The Maschine software is very good, and the add-on sound packs are great quality.
[+] [-] khalilravanna|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radiorental|9 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK5cU9qWRg0
[+] [-] danielskogly|9 years ago|reply
> That's actually a $900 synth/sampler/effects processing unit called the Op-1 by Teenage Engineering.
From this thread on /r/ArtisanVideos:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtisanVideos/comments/6a2yq4/guy_m...
[+] [-] sgdesign|9 years ago|reply
In other words, you really need to know what you're doing and have a really good idea of what you want to play to be able to make a song as elaborate as this.
[+] [-] Mister_Snuggles|9 years ago|reply
This site is another thing to add to my Intriguing Stuff list.
[0] https://www.ableton.com/en/push/
[+] [-] ahoglund|9 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCVuLh5Io9A
[+] [-] thatwebdude|9 years ago|reply
Love the simplicity, though it does seem to favor EMD (for obvious reasons).
I've always loved the idea of using Live in a live improvisation context, potentially with multiple instruments having their own looping setup; or just a solo thing. It's hard to find that sort of thing, though.
Checking out Tone.js now.
[+] [-] gcoda|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pishpash|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calflegal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geoffreyy|9 years ago|reply
[0] https://roli.com/products/noise
[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HKFR2VC/A/roli-lightpad-b...
[+] [-] ilamont|9 years ago|reply
Thank you to the creator ... I will show it to him later today. I am not sure how far he can take it, but I like what I have seen so far.
Also, if anyone has other suggestions for music-making apps for tween kids I am all ears ...
[+] [-] stevenj|9 years ago|reply
It's designed in a way to make the user (e.g. anyone who likes music) just want to play with it in a way that's very intuitive via its simple, visual layout. And it provides instant feedback that makes you want to continually tinker with it to make something that you like more and more.
Web development/programming training tool makers should really take note of this.
[+] [-] dyeje|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Splendor|9 years ago|reply