> 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.

No: learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to speak without learning to read, and doesn't imply anything about "reproducibility" or "theory" or "methodology", as all of those things existed before we had written language.

People who don't know how to read are still able to form beautiful and coherent thoughts/tunes and repeat what other people say/play... entire oral/audial traditions exist, and you would be hard pressed to find anything written down from some cultures.

More to the point: the way people write isn't even the same as the way people talk, and that isn't to say the people who are talking are somehow worse at the language; find some sheet music for an Irish jig and then see if even a single musician is literally playing what was actually written and I think you'll be surprised that sheet music doesn't even cause "reproducibility" outside of some music traditions that cared about that (such as classical orchestra).

And, hell: using sheet music can itself be a "bad habit". The greatest musicians I admire hear some music and then just join in and start playing it themselves, as they are fluent in music; and sure: some of them can also read sheet music. On the other side, I experience people who are somehow crippled by the lack of sheet music: who you whistle a tune to, and then they need sheet music to play it, as if they are some kind of player piano, and that's it... imagine if you couldn't speak--even if merely repeating what someone else just said--without first having written down what you are going to say... it would be a bit crippling, no?

(None of this has anything to do with your points about finding an instructor, learning proper technique, having a good training refining, etc. but you will find a ton of instructors who don't concentrate on sheet music... particularly with guitar, an entire instrument where sheet music isn't common at all, as the vast majority of use of the guitar in music people want to play is based on chord patterns.)

I think different individuals learn different ways. I had piano lessons from a young age, and everything was done off of sheet music. I would spend all this time reading through note by note, chord by chord, working my way through. But even after practicing reading music for over 10 years, I ALWAYS learn to play a song much, much faster by hearing it than by trying to read the music. My brain just can't automatically look at the position of black dots and translate that to which keys to press, I have to actively think about it, but once I can hear the music, my brain says, "I want to hear this note, so that's what note that dot must correspond to".

Imagine trying to learn to read English, and instead of seeing words, you see a bunch of letters and have to decipher each letter. I'd almost describe it as dyslexia for musical notation or something (which isn't a problem for me when reading text). I can recognize C,D,E,F,G pretty instantly because of their position relative to the bottom bar of the treble clef, but as soon as you start getting above that, I start having to count spaces relative to a known position, because everything internal looks like a big jumble. So G-B-E (on the treble clef) is easy because I see G as the base, and then the other two notes are space by two, but if it's just B-E without the context of the G, I have to stop and figure out exactly where those notes fall. And as soon as I get below C (on the treble clef), I start having to stop to count the separator lines.

But if I can hear what I'm trying to play, I can usually just jump to the correct note/chord. Maybe I'll have to stop and experiment to get the right chord periodically, but I don't have to stop and analyze the position of each dot on the score. To me, the greatest value of sheet music for me has always been in keeping place, so I associate the location of specific patterns on a specific page, and based on all the context, and know that I'm supposed to be at this point in the song that I've already taken the time to memorize beforehand. But I'm pretty much never paying attention to the actual notes on the notation at that point.

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.

> I can recognize C,D,E,F,G pretty instantly because of their position relative to the bottom bar of the treble clef, but as soon as you start getting above that, I start having to count spaces relative to a known position, because everything internal looks like a big jumble.

It was the same for me until I really started practicing sight reading (there are special books for that). Just like learning the alphabet and how to read as a child, it took a couple of years of doing sight reading many days a week before I got good enough to sight read musical pieces. Becoming fluent at reading takes a lot of practice. And like learning to read and write in any language, it's best to do it at the same time while you are learning to speak and understand.

This was the level I was at, which is why I wrote this software to begin with, it started out as a re-write of pianobooster, which is a very neat program with a bunch of hard to fix basic ideas. Now, about a year later it is very far ahead of pianobooster, and I've learned to sightread much better than I ever could have achieved with pianobooster.

I started learning piano just over a year ago and picked up reading sheet music decently in an extremely short amount of time.

The gaps is the treble clef are

    | F | A | C | E |

The bass clef is the same but shifted down one gap (and the highest note is G)

  F | A | C | E | G |

And then middle C is, well, C. Just remembering that FACE goes in two places you get:

    bass clef          (C)  treble clef
  F | A | C | E | G |   |   | F | A | C | E |

And from that it's easy to go to the closest note and the count up/down one note and gradually memorize more. This was, at least to me, a drop dead simple way to memorize where everything goes.

This is a little better, but don't do this. You still need to calculate what are the notes outside of F A C E. Just memorize each note independently, it may take longer but it is much easier after that. If you continue using clutches like this, you'll forever have to do the translation in your head, which takes a lot of time and effort.

The comparison with learning English is spot on. The way you learn your native language is by simply growing up in a context where you are forced to try to use the sounds of the language to make yourself understood. You start with the intuition; writing, spelling, and word classes come much, much later, when you’re really an expert on the language already.

For some reason when people learn a foreign language they tend to start with the written language, and actually holding a conversation or understanding a native speaker is often a less prominent part of learning. This, to me, is a lot like thinking that learning music starts with reading a score and studying up on music theory, when you actually already have an intuitive understanding of music because you’ve listened to it all your life, and should probably focus on building similar intuition for expressing yourself with an instrument.

Are you learning 50 min long difficult classical pieces by ear?

Nope, I pretty much stopped once I got to college. At some point I decided I was going to learn Rhapsody in Blue on the piano, and got the sheet music (book) and started practicing. I didn't make it too far, but I made it a lot farther by trying to imitate what I heard than trying to play it from the book.

This is only "true" if you want to pursue a classical repertoire. For anything else you don't need to know music theory to make music or read it for that matter. A good ear and instinctive knowledge is far more valuable. Just look outside of classical music, plenty of examples where the musician has no idea of the theoretical part, but has a great grasp of it practically.

"A good ear" and grasp of music theory go hand in hand. Strongly disagree that the latter is limited to classical music. The best musicians in jazz and pop music absolutely know how to incorporate the circle of fifths, types of cadences, Roman numeral harmony, etc., in their playing. That's... music theory! While there are musicians who can make it without that, they are the exception, not the rule.

Indeed, "theory" is not an all-or-nothing affair. There's a level of "theory" that's just learning why certain intervals are harmonious in the 12 tone system, and the names of things. I certainly learned those things, but if asked whether I know "theory," my answer is no. Virtually everything I know about harmony in jazz is due to hearing and recognizing recurring patterns.

In my case, I've gotten through 40 years of performing with jazz groups, so in some sense I'm doing OK, but I also know that I struggle with ultra-modern jazz harmonies. This came into pretty sharp relief when I played with some musicians who were composing all of their own tunes. I reach the end of my mental map, and then I have to fake it, or improvise directly from the melody.

But I agree that "ear" and perception of harmonic structure are closely related. It's hard to describe, and might make a psychologist cringe, but a musician develops a "mental ear." And I wouldn't recommend my approach to a young player. Most people want to become proficient in fewer than 40 years. ;-) There are things I can't do. I can't compose or arrange anything worth playing. Without exception, every musician I've played with who could compose or arrange decent jazz material has a music degree.

This is a bit like saying that all the best speakers know a lot of grammar. Maybe they do, but that’s not why they are able to put together complete sentences, let alone why they are able to move an audience with a speech.

Some of the best Jazz pianists started out as classical pianists. Friedrich Gulda for instance, and Keith Jarrett.

I beg to differ. Music theory is essential regardless of whether you're playing off lead sheets, playing by ear, improvising, or reading scores.

You can't get good at any of them beyond a certain point without having your theory nailed down.

I would add that music theory and sight-reading are orthogonal. My partner learned piano at a young age, and she can follow a sheet but won't know what chords she's playing. I learned guitar by ear but I'm always thinking about intervals/chords/modes. Obviously having both of these skills would be great.

Jazz was a genre mainly taught as an oral tradition, and of course improvisation was at the heart of it. Musicians played what they thought sounded good. That still didn’t stop George Russell’s book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization from becoming hugely popular and influential among jazz musicians in the ’50s. Even when performers have an intuitive understanding of music, they can still benefit from explicit discussion of theory.

Also, a lot of jazz musicians wanted to eventually learn musical notation at least so that they could write their own lead sheets for copyright-claim purposes.

There are some great musicians who have no formal training, but far more who actually do have formal training.

Musical pedagogy follows classical music out of tradition, but there are plenty of contemporary pieces available as well.

The thing about the classical pieces is that they're good showcases and practice pieces for the fundamental techniques of music (hundreds of years of development will do that), which you absolutely will use in your musical career, regardless of whether you're even aware of it.

The difference is that when you can read and speak music, you can read, understand, and construct music far more easily than you could without the named concepts, nomenclature, and writing system. It's no different from the power that language and writing in general confers. An illiterate person can make himself understood, but a learned person can do so much more with far less effort.

> Musical pedagogy follows classical music out of tradition

i think at some levels, of pedagogy, there's also an element of "and because it is cheap to free".

my piano teacher bemoans how we only teach music from "dead white men" (a common refrain in some parts of the internet), but is hesitant to suggest i spend money to purchase anything, instead, referring me to IMSLP for everything.

if you want music from living folks, it is still under copyright, regardless of their color or gender. that costs more.

There are other reasons to learn written music, even if you're popular musician. For example, you may want to become a studio musician, so you need to learn to play quickly (in a few minutes) a complex piece of music to perform immediately. Studio musicians need to do this all the time, and reading from a score is the easiest way to achieve it. You may need to write music for other musicians (for example, wind instrument players and pianists). Finally, reading music will help you to learn theory and have a better understanding of music.

> instinctive knowledge

There’s no such thing!

I think of this as analogous to self-supervised pretraining followed by training on a smaller labeled set. When you study theory you can ground it on music you've listened to throughout your life.

Also to improvise confidently you have to internalize the theory, not just understand it and memorize it at a conscious level.

I'd say "intuitive knowledge" is a good way to sum this up.

> It also gives you a common vocabulary and framework for talking about musical and instrument techniques and common patterns in music.

This right here. Even if you want to play rock music it can help. Guitarists and bassists have tablature, which makes working with each other easy. But tab is foreign to other musicians.

I’ve a background in music theory, so there’s been dozens of times I’ve had to act as translator between guitarist and another musician, explaining that “3rd fret barred shape, to this one” is a GM7 to CM progression. Not because it was impossible to figure out, but having a common language made it that much faster to get to work.

I can sit down at a piano and immediately play any melody I know by ear, with reasonable-sounding chords, unless there’s some very surprising harmony involved. I’m not sure how sight reading would improve on that speed.

I’m also not sure why you assume I’ve never had a teacher, just because I haven’t bothered to learn to read notes well.

All the benefits you talk about in sheet music, you can also get from listening to and making recordings, and playing with other people.

I'm curious, how does this approach fare with classical pieces where learning by sheet is the norm? The melody and chord progression is not hard to for a lot pf pieces (e.g. pop and jazz if you have a trained ear for complex chords), but learning Listz's Un Sospiro by ear is going to be really hard no?

I learned that piece by its 6 page sheet then memorized it, would be amazing if that could have been done by ear, if possible.

I think the people who don’t want to master reading from sheet music are not interested in learning long piano pieces like that.

It would be like learning Romeo and Juliet by ear. You could in theory do it, but it's far easier if you know how to read. And far easier to refresh your memory down the road if you need to perform it again.

I guess it would take a lot of patience, but it should be doable, maybe even more feasible than some contemporary music that is heavy on sound fx.

I don't find this as rewarding as trying to understand how a piece "works" though, or creating something new.

I think sheet music is a great way to see how a piece works since things are laid out spatially, and complex or subtle patterns can be teased out (e.g. voices in a Bach fugue). I often follow the sheet music as I listen as well.

Yes, excellent point. Notation can be a great aid to understanding. I should give this a try more often.

That type of music really isn’t a part of my life, but I can’t see why not. Even classical music tends to boil down to a melody + harmony. You wouldn’t get the exact fingerings right, but I don’t really find that interesting anyway.

I can also do what you describe. It’s just now happening after practicing way more in lockdown (1hr/day vs 20min before).

Had lessons as a kid but never practiced. Picked it back up 4 years ago.

I have a Beatles fake book. I play the melody and chords in the right hand, some simple metronome like bass line with the left.

This year I mastered every song and I found that I could play any other fake book song the same way on sight. Then I tried doing it without the book and was shocked to find it pretty passable.

The music (real chords and melody) is much more fun for me. It gives me a beautiful structure to play around with.

I get your point that it's easier to learn music faster by learning to read sheet music. But there's also no such thing as doing it right without context. If someone wants to just jam & relax by playing the piano, learning to read sheet music may not be doing it right.

Yes, much like a non-programmer can relax and hack up an Excel script to do a bunch of automation stuff. In certain contexts there's nothing wrong with that. But on the other hand, the farther you go, the harder it becomes, and the more the equation shifts towards "it would have been better to start with the right fundamentals".

I’ve played piano for the last 20 years, starting off initially with a teacher and going through the usual sheet music pieces. I used to think as you do for the longest time - “The important thing is to have fun!”

I still believe that, but I find that I learn new techniques every time I read, learn and play an existing piece - this makes my improvisation and jam sessions all that much better! So would highly recommend learning to read sheet music.

Curious what your thoughts are on the second best way to learn Piano, then? Second best to an in-person/live teacher.

Second best is to do it without the support and discipline of a teacher. It's just like any other thing that takes skill. You can either stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from their wisdom, or you can go it alone and make the mistakes and form the bad habits they could have warned you about. And when it comes to a musical instrument, it's all about the FEEL and POSTURE as you play, which only in-person teachers can show you.

Anyone can take a hammer and saw and build something that resembles a table, but the one who learned from a craftsman (even for just a little while) will be able to produce far better work with far less effort and mistakes. Knowing how to draft and read plans will also go a LONG way towards getting good results.

Yea, right now i'm looking for resources that at least attempt to describe and teach posture, hand patterns, etc. I may at some point hire a virtual teacher, but that seems difficult to setup. I imagine they'd need cameras, my hands, body, etc - and it sounds like work. So i'm going to pursue some non-live methods i can find, if any.

There's an app for VR on Oculus Quest [1] that the dev is working on live instructor collaboration as well as set learning pieces. He has upgraded the hand tracking for physical keyboards a few times I am not sure it's current state but this maybe of interest to you guys.

[1] Grand Reality https://sidequestvr.com/app/476/grand-reality-the-future-of-...

It's just not the same. At one point I moved away from the city where my teacher lived. We tried it over skype, with me changing the camera angle a bunch so he could observe properly, but it was slow, frustrating, and he missed so many things that came to light when I went to visit for an in-person lesson.

Music teachers are cheap to hire. Even 1 hour a week for 6 months would do WONDERS, and not cost much. Plus, your teacher will likely be a student as well, or attempting to supplement their music career. Taking lessons is supporting the arts directly.

Fingering patterns are 'work in progress', we have some interesting ideas about this.