Show HN: Learn piano without sheet music

[jacobp100]

I always found sheet music way too hard to read - and I literally spent a year at a company building a sheet music rendering engine. I wanted an app that would display music like the tutorials on YouTube, but not be focused on upselling lessons etc. like most current apps, and also would let me import my own files

This works on MIDI files. If it’s a valid midi it probably plays.

Since releasing, I did add a subscription for classical music - on a theory that most normal users don’t know what a midi file is. It changed about a month ago from an up front price to in app purchases and/or a subscription - which has absolutely tanked revenue so far - but maybe it will pick up

Would love to hear your thoughts and if you have any suggestions!

[kashunstva]

I’m a professional pianist; so I’m not in your target audience. There may well be some system of notation that is superior to the standard that has developed in Western music; but nothing I’ve seen matches the expressive flexibility and compactness of the way music is now notated.

Experienced players read music in a way that overcomes some of the limitations that form the assumptions that are behind these alternative notation systems. Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk. (I imagine reading code must be similar.) This is why the density of traditional notation isn’t intimidating - after a while it can be read as a whole.

Whether a system like this could be a pedagogical bridge to formal notation remains to be seen. I’ve encountered such bridging systems before. I’m an admitted skeptic because my orientation to this is that if you want to learn a thing, just start learning the thing. The struggle, within limits, is known to enhance learning.

[heleninboodler]

I spent decades not understanding music theory and thinking of music as a sequence of notes, and I never understood why music notation and the layout of a piano were so bizarre. It just seemed like something that we were stuck with due to tradition and lack of innovation.

Ever since I started learning something about music theory (just in the past couple years... I'm far from an expert), I've realized that both sheet music and the piano layout are both very clever in unexpected ways that, as you point out, make the music notation both expressive and more compact than a straight timeline of linear note values, because they lean on the fact that sections of music tend to skip very predictable parts of the range of notes. They tend to use them in particular patterns that make it useful to reduce your focus to a subset of the available range at any given moment.

[unc0n]

I'm an experienced musician and this really resonates with me. It's possible to see a scale written out in the score and know exactly what that means in terms of how it's supposed to sound, what fingering I should use, and whether there are any "aberrant" notes in there that I should watch out for. The same goes for many other common note patterns. Trying to decode something like this into something that makes sense to me musically is a huge additional burden that doesn't exist. That said, having been through the journey of being able to sight read music myself and then trying to teach it to a number of people, I agree that reading a score in real time is one of the greatest hurdles to beginner and intermediate players alike, and probably a huge impediment to many people learning to play a variety of instruments.

There is one particular instance in which getting away from traditional notation can help. I have absolute pitch, and I've played transposing (woodwind) instruments before. The mental link between specific finger positions and specific tones / notes on the score, is one that causes me untold issues with transposing instruments. If I could just focus on the finger positions without the distraction of the score, that would help me. I don't think this is a common problem though.

[_gabe_]

> Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk.

I’m not professional, but I have been playing for awhile and can sight-read fairly easily. What you said here is 100% true, and I liken it to learning to read a language. Watch how kids learn to read, they have to look at each syllable and letter and sound out each word. Eventually, after enough practice, you don’t read individual letters, you read words. Then, you begin to observe the nuance of the grammatical structure.

I feel like reading music notation has followed a similar trend for myself. I no longer read individual notes, I see chords and progressions. Just like stories tend to follow a plot line, and you can predict how the story may end, music follows a plot line, and you can predict the movement. This is also why certain styles of music is so interesting! We expect the plot to move in a direction and then are surprised by the twist. This video by 8 bit music theory gives a good overview of how that can be done[0].

I especially love when I’m playing through a new piece and every part of the song just makes sense. Yiruma’s music in particular feels very natural for me, and it’s an absolute joy to play through the song and have it all flow together so well.

Anyways, I think a lot of people just don’t give it enough time and give up a bit too early. It’s magical when you pass that point of reading individual notes and enter into the territory of really reading pieces. I still have so far to go, but music will always be a relaxing and fulfilling hobby.

[0]: https://youtu.be/gzK1CTxxRH0?si=H3aUQo83lVl-2BQK

[chimpansteve]

As a kid, I learnt violin and trombone to a very high orchestra level standard, and could read sheet music from a very early age. I then moved on in my late twenties to guitar, bass and keyboard in a rock band, and never looked at a piece of sheet music again in my life, and would have no idea how to translate musical notation to those instruments.

I know people who cannot play a tune without sheet music. I know some of the most talented musicians on this earth who cannot read sheet music. There is no right and wrong to this. It's what works for you.

I do think some form of formal music theory training is an absolute cheat code when it comes to playing multiple instruments, or just jamming and playing by ear though

[whartung]

Far from left field related.

  > Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk.

This is how Morse code is done. Not as individual letters, but as the sound of the stream. You don’t listen for letters per se, just rhythms of the sounds and patterns of letter combinations and words.

[singingfish]

My former piano teacher tells me that these non-traditional systems enable people to learn specific stuff fluently and quickly but it engenders various habits that are difficult to unlearn, and limits people's development.

Personally I believe there's no substitute to doing serious amounts of repetition of stuff that you're trying to learn to get it fluent, and using your ears (and on the piano to a lesser extent eyes) to get it. Personally I'm happiest when I'm able to step away from the sheet music, but I also read to an intermediate level.

It turned out what got me much more fluent with sheet music reading was copying out some scores that were a little bit of a stretch for me, at the time, due to having multiple performances of same music at short notice.

For most music I play (I'm on sax in a couple of street bands) I much prefer to have internalised the music and be able to operate from memory based on knowing the key and some intuition of the harmonic structure. In fact if I know a tune too well the sheet music starts to throw me if I try reading and playing.

Intuition is important. The fact that I already had good intuition on the sax, but that it was a struggle on the piano is what made me stop piano lessons because getting better at piano was eating in to my getting better at the sax time too much.

[yieldcrv]

> There may well be some system of notation that is superior to the standard that has developed in Western music; but nothing I’ve seen matches the expressive flexibility and compactness of the way music is now notated.

I like Ableton's Push system and associated sequencing software. I think it is superior.

Its an LED grid and matrix, but primarily within that grid it highlights all the C notes for every octave

for someone that doesn't have the discipline to already sense them, there is no need to ever gain or hone that sense anymore

its hard to describe, as the combination of hardware and software is quite comprehensive, but in comparison it really does seem like this just wasn't revisited for the last 700 years. the matrix is for playing and reading. whereas these would be separate things in analog devices and things that simulate them. hm, lines blur with the term analog. I mean in comparison to traditional physical instruments.

[vidarh]

I'm a very mediocre pianist, and my take would be that I'm not looking for a bridge because I know I'll never spend enough time to be good and I don't care about getting good, but I enjoy sitting down and playing (butchering) some pieces now and again. So if I found something simpler that helped improve my playing with minimal effort that'd be good for me even if it actively hampered any effort to get good.

I don't know whether or not this is it - judging purely from the screenshots I think it's too pared back and austere, e.g. making it harder (for me at least) to see expected duration of a note from length alone, but I love that people are trying.

[jrockway]

Looking at the screenshots, I think this notation was chosen because it's easy to generate from MIDI files. MIDI files just say what note is being played, when it starts, and when it stops. Sheet music is much richer than that (as you'll note if you've ever used a tool to turn MIDI into sheet music), so anything that takes MIDI as an input is going to be terrible if it produces traditional notation as output. (I bet AI could help a lot here, though.)

[snarkypixel]

I think I'm closer to the target audience as I usually learn either by "ear" or by watching someone play the song. Actually, what I prefer is looking/finding the chords first, and then I fill up the melody and everything in-between. So, an app like this is very helpful. My only feedback is I find the UI piano at the bottom of the screen hard to read without black keys

[djtango]

Ha when you described reading things in chunk I started wondering if you were a programmer.

I found that once I learned coding I started to internalise and conceptualise things about music I didn't before. The structure of music became so much more concrete and I also realised that not only are musical chunks (eg scale or arpeggio) an abstraction on paper but so too is the brain-muscle instruction to execute it. In some of the intermediate Beethoven and Chopin where it starts to get spicier you don't have time to think note by note...

[shadowfoxx]

I'm someone who's quite interested in learning to play music - took some classes in highschool (but my focus was the visual arts which is why I struggle to find time amongst my other hobbies, I'll get there)

I always wished that sheet music was rotated 90 degrees. The more I hear from musicians the more I think maybe that's not good... but there is something to be said about, "with experience you'll just get it, it become natural" especially with a system that's been around for hundreds of years...

[keithalewis]

> if you want to learn a thing, just start learning the thing

This. After you have learned things feel free to come up with something others might want to spend their time on learning.

[jbaber]

I agree. Many comments point out analogies to reading code, alphabets, etc. Surely, this is just how it feels to grasp any written representation of something sufficiently complicated.

I'm almost more interested in an example of gradually evolved notation being tossed completely when a simpler modern replacement actually is better. Maybe Hangul?

[RogerL]

I want to expand on this. Not only do I agree with what you wrote, but this app is trading access to millions of available sources in a very well known writing system to one more or less unique to this app. That's a terrible investment for anyone who wants to do more than learn 1-2 favored songs.

If you need to sight read (and as rock/pop/jazz people point out, you don't have to for many genres), then you need to sight read.

There are so many other virtues to sheet music. Look at the cover image. I can see a few notes. I can see vastly more notes in sheet music. I can easily evaluate if the piece is playable, I can scan and look for broader patterns. I can see that a bass note is being held for 8 measures (and I may choose to repeat it at some point). I can look ahead quite a bit. I can understand the repeat structures - don't gasp, but you don't have to take repeats, or you can repeat more times than written, especially with 20th+ century music, where you are often expected to do things like choose your own ordering of measures or blocks of measures. There are fingerings. I can see if the composer is writing out finger pedaling explicitly (Couperin normally does, Bach normally doesn't). I can see the pedal markings, general contours of dynamics. I can see the trills, etc., which are often just suggestions rather than hard requirements. I can see the meter, meter changes, keys, key changes, accidentals. I can see a big scary chord coming up and spend a bit more time looking at it while I play a few measures behind. I can see that Bach is repeating a phrase a 5th down, or inverting it, or reversing it. I can see the difference between passages meant to be played in time, and fioritura type writing.

I haven't used these piano roll systems so there are undoubtedly some things that are nice about it for an experienced player that I don't know about, so that paragraph is one sided. But that one side is very important - I'd loathe to go without them, and can't imagine I'd ever trade them for whatever advantage the piano roll might bring. After all, a player can take a sheet of paper Chopin wrote, produce that music at a more or less performance level. So it gives you about everything you need. I could imagine a current composer might find something more expressive about the piano roll (maybe expressing note durations not evenly subdivided by 2 or 3).

I suspect there is something neurological happening that stops some people from sight reading well, just like some people struggle with text. I've read accounts of people trying for years, with seemingly good practice techniques, still struggling.

So things like this, synthasia, etc., seem to have a niche. But in general, I suggest, think about someone proposing an app that instead of displaying printed text output it sonically. Great boon for certain situations or people! Undoubtedly someone is using one to read this very post. But a terrible replacement for reading in general.

If a six year old was relying on screen readers because reading is too hard to learn, after testing for dyslexia and vision problems, you'd urge them to make the effort; the advantages of reading text vastly outweighs the 1st grade difficulties of learning to read (yes, that time span will differ by language and writing system, not the point). Literacy is empowering, and arguing that the auto mechanic down the street can't read yet makes a good living is probably not a convincing argument to not teach a child to read.

I learned to sight read at age 4-5 with a plastic brain (I recall my mother having to teach me the letters a-g, and how to write them, for example), so I may underestimate the difficulties of learning later in life. But if you are in a situation where some kind of notation is helpful (again, not all are), learn standard notation!

edit: I thought of a counter-example. Say you play in a band. You can record your output to midi, and then share it with others. You can quantize midi and turn it into sheet music, but chances are you playing is not rhythmically exact. Sight reading that sort of thing is painful (notes carry 1/16th note into the next measure, that sort of thing), and I imagine a piano roll would often be easier.

[dehrmann]

So it's a bit like the qwerty keyboard? Sure, there are better layouts, but it's good enough, and the benefits from switching aren't worth it in exchange for universality?

[Johnythree]

After reading this thread, I'm amazed that no one has mentioned the work being done on alternative keyboards (and on alternative music notation).

The main point is that the design of the piano has held beginners back for centuries, and likewise has hindered the development of music notation.

Unfortunately the design of the piano keyboard requires that fingering change when you change key. The guitar doesn't do this, neither does the button accordion.

Whatever, a number of keyboards have been developed where the fingering does not change as you change key.

Start here https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/

and https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/isomorphic-instru...

Particularly the https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/wicki-hayden-note...

But please start searching and reading on the following topics:

Isomorphic Instruments, the Xenharmonic Keyboard, the Janko Keyboard, Linnstrument, Lumatone, Dodeka, Chromatone, Balanced keyboard.

And for just a glimpse of an alternative music presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ7LkWCzKxI

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Start here https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/

That is an absolutely horrible idea. It might seem intuitive at first ("Just alternate keys!") but its impracticality becomes immediately apparent and is directly acknowledged in the site you linked:

>> There’s just one drawback: the monotony of such an arrangement. How can we find our way on such a keyboard? Recently, the French musicologist Laurent Fichet remarked: “This system would certainly be much more rational than the keyboard of today, but one may wonder how players would locate the different notes with such a systematic and uniform layout.”

The French version of the article then goes on to suggest many variations of ways to avoid being lost on a keyboard without any obvious pattern (the English version only lists one, briefly). Some include coloured keys.

It is beyond obvious that the simple, intuitive solution proposed at the start produces a cavalcade of complications none of which has a simple solution.

Not to mention: despite what the linked site suggests, learning how to position your fingers on the keyboard is the least of your problems when you learn the piano, just as learning to touch-type is the least of your problems when you learn how to code.

I vote no.

[greffer]

The symmetric keyboard is a fun concept, but its existence as niche is similar to why QWERTY is still dominant. Inertia. Most keyboards have it, and computer keyboards are much easier to change than pianos. Once you have reached a certain fluency, the jump needed from this local optimum to a new one is prohibitively high/far. For musical instruments, this would mean you would be unable to play anywhere but at home.

That's a huge drawback and it's really underappreciated by everybody advocating for the "better" concept.

Besides, there is the unrelated drawback that especially for a beginner, it's really easy to learn simple tunes with just the white keys on a piano. Throw in a black one now and then and you can get quite far and have fun as a kid. This would be much more intimidating with a symmetrical layout.

[jerpint]

The symmetric keyboard seems “as obvious” as using tau instead of pi as a universal constant, but then again I don’t play piano

[4gotunameagain]

The last link is very interesting, but it doesn't look like a sheet music alternative, since it only gives you the chord progressions and not the constituent notes.

Also, good luck printing it on paper without the animations :)

[zharknado]

I want to try to articulate an idea I see represented elsewhere without dismissing the value of what’s being offered here.

There are many comments to the effect that this is a crutch that will inhibit future learning. I agree with that assessment.

I also agree that such a tradeoff is probably fine for many people, depending on their goals.

I studied music composition in college and then worked in adult world language curriculum. Perhaps a useful analogy is the use of Romanization to teach world languages to native English speakers (romaji, pinyin, etc.)

For languages like Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) where there is (virtually) no phonetic information in the writing system, it’s just too dang hard for a lot of people to make the leap to pronouncing characters as they are reas by natives. Pinyin or its equivalents are an “inauthentic” but valuable tool, but eventually you have to discard it to progress.

With straightforward phonetic languages like Korean, it’s actually counterproductive to try to bridge people to familiar symbols, because there’s very few resources for the learner until they start mapping sounds to Hangul.

That’d be my argument—-if you find you can’t easily make the leap to reading music and just want to get playing, sure, use this. But know that there’s a whole world of communication out there that you’ll be missing until you abandon this simplified representation and cross the full chasm.

[jhbadger]

This whole argument in favor of sheet music reminds me quite a lot of the defense of Chinese/Japanese characters. Yes, there is a long glorious tradition of using them, but assuming that they are the optimal solution and that any exploration of better methods is wrongheaded seems unsupported. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese, Korean developed its own superior phonetic replacement for the characters (Hangul) and Vietnamese is now written in the Roman alphabet (originally for the convenience of French colonizers but independent Vietnam shows no desire to go back to characters).

[openquery]

I've been playing piano for a few years (no teacher, on and off) and have always been curious about the topic of sheet music. When you're first learning it's very painful. The notation isn't that bad, sharps, flats, time signatures etc - that part is ok. What _is_ difficult is corresponding a position on the staff to a physical note on a keyboard, especially when you have a treble clef and a base clef.

However over time it becomes easier and easier - and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time (also accounting for the fact that there is an enormous corpus of existing sheet music).

The question regarding this app (which looks awesome) is, is this format for reading music better than sheet music at the expert level (for professional musicians). And if not, how can we get that 10x improvement to make the switch from sheet music to something better.

[phlakaton]

It is not.

I am, once again, asking people to understand that piano roll notation is no substitute for traditional notation when it comes to performance, among many other things.

[strunz]

It's even more frustrating on guitar where the literal same note in the same octave appears all over the fretboard. You have to figure out all the notes nearby to figure out what position you should be in. Even with years of experience I find tabs faster

[Aeolun]

> and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time

I suspect traditional sheet music is like the the qwerty keyboard.

At this point it’s momentum is so large that it’s impossible to stop.

[jacobp100]

I think back when music notation was being actively iterated on, you had to convey all the information possible, because it’s not like you could share a recording. Things like guitar tabs - which typically erase timing information - only work because who ever reading them has already heard the song and know what it’s meant to sound like

[airstrike]

This reminds me of this excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IkpUYlOx8

Can we get this guy to play the Super Mario World ending theme with the notation from TFA?

[yongjik]

It's really not, not even for professionals, but anyone playing at a decent hobby level. Consider, for example, Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique (accessible to many amateurs), starting with Grave (very slowly) and changes to Allegro.

Either you start with an impossibly long bar that covers the screen, where you can't see how the phrase flows into the next notes, or you later get to a dozen identical ultra-short bars mashed on top of each other.

And that's just one problem.

[RobertRoberts]

> What _is_ difficult is corresponding a position on the staff to a physical note on a keyboard, especially when you have a treble clef and a base clef.

This is my biggest issue. I played piano for years and still struggle with this. (though I never excelled, and started young)

Any suggestions on a simple way to overcome this issue?

[john61]

There has always been a very old method to learn music without sheet music. It is called playing by ear. It is incredible that we have a word for that. Because nobody is saying he is learning to talk by ear. Because talking and making music is an acoustic thing, and the natural thing is to use primarily your ear for that. The eye can be helpful, be it sheet music or a midi visualisation like this app. But an eye can not hear music.

[vcg3rd]

I can play piano, trumpet, and trombone, but hardly ever do anymore. I have been able to read sheet music since I was 8.

If the whole concept of this confuses me, and it does, it may confuse people who are eager to learn and get playing (without doing endless scales) and don't read sheet music.

I have no idea what tabs means in this context, though I am vaguely familiar, I think, with it as a guitar term (which you or a commenter came from).

Looking at the graphics on the site (I don't use Apple) gives me no clue how the notes for each hand are displayed "according to how they look on a keyboard."

What am I missing? Will someone who uses Apple, can't read sheet music, has never played any instrument and wants to learn how to play piano be able to figure it out within app tutorials?

[duped]

One problem I see with your design is that there's no way to deal with rubato, and presumably you can't alter the tempo on the fly as you're playing.

The problem that sheet music solves is providing a static notation that can be read non-linearly for a dynamic piece of art that must be played linearly.

There's also no way to represent dynamics, as far as I can tell? The MIDI file won't give you that information.

Similarly unless you support MIDI 2 clip files (to my knowledge, no one does yet) you're also missing the key signature information, which is kind of important (otherwise the notes have no meaning - you need to infer their function from context, which is ambiguous)

[masukomi]

on the one hand, yay. Tabs have made learning guitar stuff incredibly accessible, and dealing with the separate hands of the piano and separate clefs is a PITA. On the other hand... ugh. We've successfully churned out generations of musically illiterate musicians. We've also made it really hard to find the sheet music for a piece instead of the tabs, and the tabs are lacking in SO MUCH information.

[Octabrain]

It's great to have tools that make easier to learn how to play music, which btw, I feel music should have evolved naturally itself towards something with better high level abstraction (kinda like programming languages). However, my fear with this kind of approaches in music is that you might end up being a simple "typewriter". I mean, you play by pure mechanical memory instead of due to develop a logical understanding of what you are doing. This was the main reason I ditched yousician for guitar. I saw myself just doing a more complex "guitar hero" kind of thing and I don't want that, I want music theory and understanding instead of moving blindly my hands following coloured dots on the screen.

[AntonyGarand]

Congrats on the release, looks great!

Reminds me of Synthesia[1], with a better UX but less features!

How do you handle the displaying all notes on a portrait phone per your homepage screenshot? Especially on songs with a large gap between both hands, seems like it would be pretty cramped so a tablet might be the better option.

[1] https://www.synthesiagame.com/

[jimmytucson]

This is really cool! Guitar was my first instrument, then I went on to learn bass, drums, and a bunch of others, but I never bothered to learn how to read music - or, really, sight read. The few songs I know on piano, I learned from an electronic piano that had a display with an image of the keyboard and the keys would change color to tell you which one to play. When I play Maple Leaf Rag for other musicians they're often surprised to find out I can't read music.

So I can definitely see a market for this and will probably try learning another song on piano with it. That said, I do wish I had just learned to read music up front, as I learned my first instrument. I think it would have opened up doors for me, particularly for playing with other musicians (like an orchestra or a jazz band). But who knows how much longer that will be the case - tomorrow's great musicians may learn on an app like this!

[catapart]

Oh, awesome! I'm working on something similar, to put out as a PWA. Seems I had similar aspirations/complaints that you did, but also didn't have an apple device (that I wanted to use for the app).

Yours is a very nice presentation! I like the annotations feature, and the comprehensiveness of the features, even for the stated goal of such simple functionality. A lot of people might leave out percussion loops, or be a bit more stingy with the free tracks.

This may be a stupid question, but I'll ask anyway: does it recognize Midi controller input? In my practice, I've found value in having the notes I play represented digitally, so that I can keep my eyes on the screen (and, let's face it, Rock Band/Guitar Hero is fun). But I didn't see that specifically advertised anywhere, so I was curious!

[tnecniv]

This is kind of a tangent, but I’ve played instruments all my life and I never really understood how to use sheet music beyond the initial learning of a piece. I always see musicians actively referencing it while playing, but I’ve never been able to read it nearly quickly enough to do so. That also holds for guitar tabs, which I can read more quickly than sheet music (for guitar or piano). For anything remotely complicated, I need to memorize the piece so I can focus on what I need to do with my hands. A chord sheet I can follow while improvising even if I haven’t seen the progression before, but my playing definitely isn’t as good because the mental load of reading, listening, and playing is too much. It’s like having one too many processes open on your computer and the OS / CPU can’t quite keep up

[rwhyan]

Looks cool design-wise, but who is this for?

Although the upfront cost of learning sheet music is a few weeks of study, it quickly becomes worth it due to gains in speed of learning and sightreading skills.

Maybe this can introduce people to piano and get them playing quickly, but it'll ultimately stunt their development.

[notorandit]

Learning piano without reading scores (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin...) is like learning C without bitwise operators and pointers...

[pascalxus]

Two fatal issues I discovered: - the apple store was so biased, even when I typed in "piano tabs", it couldn't find your app in the top 10 results. I had to type in the name of the entire app: "Piano Tabs: Learn & Practice"

Then I attempted to install it and got this: - "This application requires iOS 15.0 or later". This is a deal breaker on so many apps. I don't trust apple enough to change my iOS version. Note: this happened on a pretty recent iphone 7+

[irrational]

> It changed about a month ago from an up front price to in app purchases and/or a subscription - which has absolutely tanked revenue so far - but maybe it will pick up

This doesn’t surprise me. I abhor all subscriptions. I’ll pay for things once, upfront, but I’d rather do without than have continuous payments.

[Gigachad]

These days I avoid upfront payments unless you come out ahead within a year. I don't want to buy something that takes 5 years to be cheaper than the yearly payments. I have no idea if I'm going to want this thing for x years, most of the time I don't end up getting good value from upfront payments. With subscriptions I can just cancel and move to the best option at the time.

[tornato7]

I agree that sheet music could be improved. The worst part to me is simply that notes are identical symbols just shifted up or down ever so slightly. But based on the screenshots your app does the same thing, just side to side. I think it would be more helpful if each note had a color to it.

[Madmallard]

Synthesia has done this exact solution for well over a decade now. But there’s also the option to read generated sheet music and adjust the playback and gradung in many ways.

https://synthesiagame.com/

[jacobp100]

Yes - the core app is similar. Synthesia for sure has better import support and connects to physical keyboards. This app focuses a lot more on UI/UX, and still has some unique playback features, like setting up a loop that starts slow and speeds up after each iteration

[ksherlock]

Maybe it's just me, and I'm not particularly good at reading sheet music but -- for piano -- I find all the alternative even worse.

At least this sort of display eliminates the "akshually C𝄫 and A♯ are different"-type cranks.