It is simple, really: There are also many piano players who cannot make confident and accurate movements on the keyboard without looking at their hands! My process learning how to type on a computer keyboard without looking was very much like the process I experienced while working on my piano skills over the years: You graduate from fumbling with your hands and exhausting switching between looking at your hands and the sheet music to sight reading to playing with your eyes closed (if you want to). Though a lot of advanced players can and do play without sheet music and sight reading at all, interestingly, a lot of those players then keep looking at their hands instead! because the music progression is strictly following their mental model of the piece.
Having good memory is important. It seems to me you have a really good muscle memory and that has helped you play without looking at the score.
I've played the piano since a very young age and the thing is, learning to play without looking at the keys (eg whilst reading) is actually a good skill to have. The argument goes that this way you can look at one hand without worrying about missing with the other while in a concert. I tend to agree.
Also I scribble a lot in my sheet music because part of studying a piece is discovering things written in it (everything has a purpose, every staccato, forte, piano, etc.)
Most of the information a pianist uses for fingering are the feeling of the hand and the sound of the piano while playing. This is not visible. Eyes are of little use for musicians. There are blind master pianists.
if you ever watch a professional, especially a session musician, sightread, they don't look at the keyboard, even for big strides. it's all muscle-memory. and blind concert pianists play the whole repertoire, not just stuff in Eb.
I don't disagree with your points, however not having a reasonable level of sight reading inhibits you from learning some of the more dense pieces (e.g. Bach Inventions and Sifonias) in a timely manner.
Developing that skill allows you to get pieces under your hands (and in time packed into your lizard brain), so you can then focus on the musical expression.
You should think of Jacques software as a type of 'touch typing program' for the piano. Instant feedback allows you to build up the 'this means that' in terms of what you see on the sheet music and what your hands are supposed to do.
Learning to sight read, even to a very basic degree, always seems to be a big hit and miss for many of the people I've known over the years learning piano.
For me, being able to expedite the process of developing that skill so I can practice effectively, in order to be able to focus on the actual music is a huge boon! Less time trudging through the snow and more time learning and playing pieces!
When you see a pro performer crank out 2 hours of Chopin from memory, they always had to start with the music. It's a core competency for certain styles, and Jacques software would build that competency quicker due to the hyper short feedback loop (like the red/green/refactor loop).
Yet, there are plenty of real world examples of performers and composers who can't read music, there's nothing wrong with that, it just depends on what you want to do (and I want to play Bach Inventions, again!).
EDIT: I'd just like to add that my previous piano teacher was both very highly skilled in both classical and jazz disciplines, and he was of the strong opinion that it's not an either/or proposition, but commented that to not have experience in both camps hindered ability if you were a typical working musician.
People underestimate how difficult it is to learn to read written music. You have to learn the notation, parse its meaning, and then embed the finger movements required by the notation in muscle memory so you don't need to think about them consciously.
The most efficient fingerings are often not obvious and feel very clumsy to beginners - which is why they're written into piano scores. If you do what's easiest you'll cripple your progress later.
And ideally you need some awareness of phrasing, context, and other elements of musicality, which some people will be born with, while others have to learn.
Your brain is translating a complex set of symbols into a complex set of movements, while being aware of context and state.
A different kind of notation will do very little to make any of this easier.
I’m a beginner at piano and it’s amazing to me that I can play an entire piece UNLESS I look at my fingers. The moment I do the entire thing goes straight off the rails.
I also cannot resume at any location but only at specific “keyframes.”
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.
After about 9 years learning piano as a kid I had one year of tuition from a concert pianist when I went to University.
He was an excellent teacher - one of the things he majored on was ‘blind’ familiarity with the keyboard. He would get you to close your eyes, then ask you to pick out, for example, all the Cs on the keyboard going up the octaves. Made a huge difference to my confidence in positioning my hands at speed…
There is a balance between memorizing/finger memory and reading across piano players.
I think the skill you are talking about is sight reading, which isn't necessarily something that is required to play the piano at a high level. No matter what, you still need to practice. A lot.
For me there is a muscle memory component. I can easily switch between keys that I regularly play in, but going to something like c# is difficult because I don’t have the muscle memory for it. I mainly play by ear and chord notations too. I have never been able to read sheet music real time.
The problem with piano isn't reading the music, it's getting your hands in the right place, at the right time, with the least amount of effort, to be able to control the keys the way you want to. [...] That's why I'm amused when I see "learn keyboard" systems that somehow make you believe the problem is simply seeing a C# two octaves above middle C on the staff and figuring out where it is on the keyboard. You can learn all that in a week.
I humbly submit that this is the perspective of someone who learned to read music 50 years ago and at an early age, and so who has, for most practical purposes, never not known how to read music.
That perspective will not necessarily be shared by a beginner who has been learning to read music for a few weeks. Sure, you can learn what the lines mean in each clef, and then you can learn to recognise lines above and below the standard five, and then with time you even learn to recognise lines far above and below. You can learn which lines mean something different by default if you have sharps or flats in your key signature, and eventually you actually remember that natural sign just after the start of the current bar before you incorrectly play B-flat for the middle line of a treble clef because your key signature says so. Oh, and you're playing the piano, so you also have to do all of this for a major chord. And a minor chord. And chords with added sevenths. And chords with suspended seconds or fourths instead of thirds. And inversions that almost look like chords with suspended something but that actually have four notes at odd spacing. And then a further note on the octave to make sure all five digits get a workout. With a random double-flat in the middle. Which lasts a strange amount of time, because you're playing that chord as part of a quintuplet. With markings showing suggested dynamics over the whole phrase.
I doubt anyone learns to read all of that fluently in a week, or a month, or even a year unless they are playing far more than any normal beginner. Yes, you can learn the main lines on a stave in a week, but the other 99% of reading music also takes years for most students.
This isn't to say that getting your hand to the right position efficiently and then playing with the action you want doesn't matter; of course it does. I'm just arguing that reading "the right position" from realistic, non-beginner scores is itself a significant challenge for most players, often for many years.
> How do those that can play "fluently" know which keys to press?
There are a lot of possibilities. I'll take a stab at one.
Let's say I want to play The Eagles' Desperado on the piano. Here's what I'm doing in realtime:
* I start singing the melody
* I visualize a piano keyboard and imagine the note where I start the melody
* I play a note on an invisible keyboard in the air with my right hand
* for each note I sing, I move my fingers synchronously to play the corresponding note on the invisible keyboard (right hand only)
* I get comfortable doing this. If my hand goes to a note that I feel uncertain about, I do a quick sanity check to make sure my hand is still playing the correct invisible note to correspond with what I'm singing.
Here's a simplified example of the error correction-- if I'm in C major and I know I'm singing middle C, I make sure my hand is playing an invisible middle C. If it's instead playing a different note then I messed up somewhere along the way. Playing and identifying the pitch "C" when playing in C major is really easy to do, so it makes a good anchor point for beginners. In practice I've got about three types of anchor points that I can track in realtime: the key I'm in, the relationship of the pitch I'm singing to that key, and the relationship of the pitch I'm singing to the chord I'm playing. Those anchors greatly limit the degree to which I can make a mistake, at least in a simple tonal piece like Desperado that doesn't modulate.
* as I do this, I start noticing that I'm singing grace notes so I make my right hand play those invisible grace notes. It goes alright.
* Now I try singing the corny Sax riff from George Michael's "Never Gonna Dance Again" over the B section-- where the lyrics go, "Don't you draw the queen of of diamonds, boy." The riff actually lines up alright and my hand keeps up.
* Now I try singing some hemiolas and some gospel-type melismas. My hand plays some questionable pitches. I go back and analyze the parts I messed up, trying to figure out where my fingers got tangled up. (Also noticing that I messed up due to singing in a very inaccurate manner.)
* Now I add the left hand. C chord, C chord, C 13, C chord, F chord, F minor in first inversion, 16th octaves descending stepwise from Ab down to E. That creates a doubled 3rd in the chord but the right hand melody leaps away... During this I drop the melismas in the right hand and play the melody straight to keep the harmony shared by both hands moving in realtime. Once I dropped the inner voices (i.e., stopped playing them) and just got the bass in octaves and melody...
When I actually sit down at a piano, I'll be more fluid and accurate at playing Desperado. Because the process I just described away from the instrument is essentially the same process that I follow at the instrument.
Now, if I wanted to add some more interesting chord substitutions and develop something like, say, a gospel style in the inner voices and bass patterns, I'd probably be back where you refer to as "trial and error," working out details without being able to play them in realtime at first. That is to say, most people never gain "fluency" in the sense of just sit down and play anything that you hear with ease. So make sure you're having fun guessing and checking now. Because once you improve to your desired level you'll still have the feeling of guessing and checking with new techniques and sounds.
This response blows my mind. I'm not a piano player, but I have played stringed and brass instruments of various kinds since high school (over 20 years, sheesh).
On every instrument I played, there are fundamentals that are required to get beyond the beginner level. Without proper form more advanced techniques can be harder to learn, and even worse can lead to injury. Louis Armstrong couldn't play trumpet at the end of his career because his lips constantly hurt. I would imagine there are pianists with wrist or finger injuries due to years of playing with improper form.
So on a computer keyboard, the things you want to optimize for are speed, accuracy and ergonomics. It's not like a piano. Expression is not a factor. Nobody cares if you type staccato or legato. Home row typing is the most common way to optimize for this, but not the only way.
I don't use the proper home row, but I did learn to type that way originally courtesy of Mavis Beacon.
I was self taught on piano for years, and when I finally started taking lessons I had so many bad habits to break that were holding me back.
Reading notes was not the problem, but my technique for how I was physically striking the keys needed a lot of attention. Legato, phrasing and dynamics are the real challenge and it’s tough to practice things with such subtlety on digital keyboards at all. I still do it, but every time I play on a real piano I have to recalibrate.
The author says he chose a piano without weighted keys, I think that’s ultimately not the right choice if you are truly interested in learning piano and eventually want your skills to translate to a real piano. Pretty early on the proper technique is based on weighted keys.
I absolutely WAS there when it came to sight reading; able to play songs on the piano with a lot of practice, but not able to sight read, despite years of lessons and practice. It largely comes down to studying the songs before you play, looking for the key, patterns, and difficult parts, and keeping your eyes a measure or two ahead as you play
I’ve been playing piano for over 40 years, the first 10 years through lessons. I’m not good, as in I can’t and do not want to perform for people. I play for personal pleasure which means I might play it once every few weeks.
But things like sight reading come very naturally to me. I read music the way that I read a language. I don’t have to think hard at all to recognize notes, chords, etc and then to play them. So my ability to pick up a new song is faster than even my wife, who is about an order of magnitude better than me. She can transpose songs, learn songs by listening to them, the whole gamut. But in that one small area of sight reading, I can pick up a moderately complex song pretty quickly relative to my wife, despite the fact that I practice much less frequently than her. It must have something yo do with how the brain is wired or some sort of hand eye coordination, but it’s very interesting how I perceive sheet music vs her.
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