It might be refined and developed over centuries, but it's also the expression of overwhelmingly a single culture.

Western musical notation is not useless for denoting the music of other cultures, but it's also not very good and is frequently quite bad. If you think of western musical notation as "the system", you're at risk of remaining ignorant of the beautifully refined languages, developed over centuries, in other cultures.

It's also a highly abstract language that seems to frequently, somewhat like Javascript, lead its users to have very little familiarity with what is going on at lower levels.

As a classical guitarist, western notation is not particularly good at expressing the music our own culture. The high open E string can be and is regularly played on the other 5 strings too, potentially at the same time! Natural and artificial harmonics, which string to play on and which fingers to use, and all sorts of right hand notation all feel very much bolted on cluttering the actual score. The continual coming and going of voices due to technical limitations means that music has to be experimentally decoded with much backtracking.

They tried to teach me various instruments when I was a boy. I didn't mind the playing, but Lord Almighty how I hated the notation stuff. It simply made no sense whatever, and was - as you describe it - clearly invented by morons. Only when I ventured into tech-land in my teenage years did any of it finally click: So that's what they mean by 'octave' - a doubling of frequency. Why couldn't they just have said so? Harmonies, chords, what have you - it was all just frequencies and sine waves. Didn't musicians know anything?

These many years later, I still don't quite get it, but do of course realise there must be some sort of point to it all. High level language? Yes, I get it. Bach wrote in Python, not C. Time to revisit.

You can’t quite run it on different hardware: unlike on a piano, the note does not uniquely determine how something is played on, say, a guitar.

There's a different thing for that: tabulatures.

Tabulatures come with their own limitations though. They're mostly a far less portable way to express western music. They also lose a lot of meaning. Is a note part of a particular chord or melody line? A lot of this is not visible in tabulatures.

The point of OP was that sheet music is general and portable, but it really is not. Tabulatures make the Position you play on a guitar unique, but, again, are not portable.

What are some troubles guitarists are having with musical notation?

The same note can be found on different strings. Sheet music doesn’t tell you which one to play. That just one example that makes it hard

On a piano, musical notation doesn't tell you which finger or hand you should use. This seems similar.

Just for clarification, I asked because GP said:

> You can’t quite run it on different hardware: unlike on a piano, the note does not uniquely determine how something is played on, say, a guitar.

It’s not similar, because it doesn’t even tell you where to put the finger of your choice in a guitar, whereas that is uniquely specified on a piano. Of course, on top of that, you also have a wide range of ways to modify how you play on a guitar.

I still don't see the point. If you practice a piece, you have to practice how to put which finger where, on a piano or a guitar. It's part of practicing to figure this out.

> Of course, on top of that, you also have a wide range of ways to modify how you play on a guitar.

Yeah, same with the piano. And I think, with most of all instruments.

You can easily build a robot that you feed sheet music, and that robot will then be able to press the right buttons on a piano keyboard.

This is not possible for a guitar (and others) because there is no unique mapping between the note on the sheet and the position on the instrument.

This sounds needlessly antagonistic, but I hope I’m just reading nuance wrong.

You probably do. I play two instruments (not guitar obviously) and I want to know why musical notation is a problem for guitarists.

I know it's not really suited for e.g. non-western or modern quarter-tone music. But since I don't play the guitar I would like to understand the reasoning behind your qoute:

> You can’t quite run it on different hardware: unlike on a piano, the note does not uniquely determine how something is played on, say, a guitar.

Is that more clear?

It’s still antagonistic because sheet music is not ‘a problem’ for guitarists.

I never said it's a problem. I asked what's the problem that "You can’t quite run it on [...] say, a guitar."

You specifically refer to guitarists’ problem with notation, not the mathematical non-uniqueness. You ask you want to know why “musical notation is a problem for guitarists.”

It’s not.

Am I missing something, or are you directly contradicting your original comment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725817

If you actually read my comment (try it!) you will see that I make a statement about sheet music not uniquely specifying where on a guitar a specific note is to be played. I make no statement whatsoever about guitarists.

You seem to have trouble with the concept that the vast majority of instruments does not yield a recognizable melody simply by pressing the right button at the right time. All of those musicians are doing just fine, thank you very much.

On the clarinet you’ve got that awkward break at the twelfth so the registers have different fingering patterns. Piano notation seems to be mocking you.

Now I play the banjo, where a number of open tunings are commonly used, which allows fast rhythms with minimal fretting.