<story><title>Piano Practice Software Progress</title><url>https://jacquesmattheij.com/piano-practice-software-progress/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tobr</author><text>I’ve played piano my entire life, but I’ve never learned to play sheet music, and have no interest in it. I play by ear and I mostly improvise. Just mentioning this because sometimes it seems that people think the way you learn to play an instrument is by learning to play a score. No! These things are about a different as learning to program and learning to type in a program from a magazine. Even the idea that you could grade how well someone plays seems antithetical to the joy of expressing yourself through music.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>c_e</author><text>Coming from a background as a professional music performer and educator (now a software engineer), seeing highly-upvoted comments like this one that are so confident and yet so completely wrong is a great reminder that you should always take what you read in an internet comment section with a grain of salt, no matter how many people are nodding virtually in agreement.&lt;p&gt;Of course, there&amp;#x27;s nothing wrong with anybody learning to play piano entirely by ear and never picking up a music score. If that brings you enjoyment, that&amp;#x27;s truly fantastic, and I mean that sincerely. But for the vast majority of pianists, being unable to read sheet music will cut you off from many genres of music entirely, make in-person instruction mostly impossible, render all written pedagogical resources inaccessible to you, and enormously limit your ability to play in ensembles. Even jazz pianists who improvise and play by ear for all of their meaningful playing can read music; in fact you&amp;#x27;d probably find that most of the really good ones are incredible sight-readers.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; These things are about a different as learning to program and learning to type in a program from a magazine.&lt;p&gt;I think a better analogy is probably something like &amp;quot;these things are about as different as being able to understand a spoken language, and being able to speak and write it&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Piano Practice Software Progress</title><url>https://jacquesmattheij.com/piano-practice-software-progress/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tobr</author><text>I’ve played piano my entire life, but I’ve never learned to play sheet music, and have no interest in it. I play by ear and I mostly improvise. Just mentioning this because sometimes it seems that people think the way you learn to play an instrument is by learning to play a score. No! These things are about a different as learning to program and learning to type in a program from a magazine. Even the idea that you could grade how well someone plays seems antithetical to the joy of expressing yourself through music.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kstenerud</author><text>Sheet music is about reproducibility, and is a means to quickly learn a piece. You learn new pieces MUCH MUCH MUCH faster once you have decent sight reading skills. It also allows you to put in your own notes, compose your own passages or variations, and have them available for reading years later. It also gives you a common vocabulary and framework for talking about musical and instrument techniques and common patterns in music.&lt;p&gt;Learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to code without learning anything anything about programming theory and methodology, and without going back to look at any of your past work. Yes, you can do it, but you&amp;#x27;ll cut yourself off at the knees with all the bad habits you pick up, and any ability to deeply reason about it will be coincidental (just a &amp;quot;gut&amp;quot; feeling most of the time).&lt;p&gt;Do yourself a favour and do it right. Get a teacher. Learn proper posture (stops you from getting tired or injuring yourself), proper techniques (allows you to play more complex things with less effort required), and a good training regimen (so you can get maximum coverage of all techniques available to you at a manageable pace).&lt;p&gt;People ask me how I got so good at guitar in so short a time, when they&amp;#x27;ve been plucking away at it for years, even decades. It&amp;#x27;s simply because I chose to find a teacher FIRST, and an instrument SECOND, and went through all the fundamentals, starting with very boring and basic pieces like &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=5ysOIJFm3Rg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=5ysOIJFm3Rg&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>