Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Music reading is easy, teachers agree. But can it be easier?

My TEDx talk. https://youtu.be/REBAIF327b4

Cool.

Note that he says he doesn't recommend it for children learning music or those pursuing serious or professional piano study....

I don't think the Hao staff is well-suited for sight-reading, because it takes too much vertical space on the page.

Hmmm... I wonder how hard it would be to learn how to read a traditional musical score after having learned first with a Hao staff. There might be something to learn from the experience of guitar players who started with tab and then later learned traditional score.

Basically, I think his starting point ("if you can type, why can't you type the piano keys") is the wrong place to start. Nevertheless, if it makes piano more accessible to more people, then that's all to the good.

yeah, but who would listen to a guitar player

There is still the teeny tiny issue of getting fingers to the right place at the right time and producing a sound that is worth listening to. I haven't seen how the haostaff addresses that.

It is the same as guitar players with tab, but it makes a lot less sense for piano than guitar, and it's already a controversial issue for guitar (ie. most serious guitar players will go on to learn to read sheet music).

Sheet music is already pretty good visually for pianists, it makes sense. No accidentals means white keys. 1 key for each note. On the guitar it's a mess, there's no white/black keys, and the one note can be played many different places on the guitar. In addition, guitarists typically learn songs by learning a few chords and a few riffs/licks or at most a 16 bar solo. Pianists normally want to learn entire songs though, so tab becomes much more hassle.

Finally, as seen in the video, Synthesia is already extremely popular and caters for people that want to learn this way. It uses software that does a good job of managing the clunkiness of the tab system compared with a printed format.



I don't think anyone's pretending this is 100% of playing the piano, but it is a main frustration of absolute beginners. Getting sound out of the keys is very simple, so the difficulty becomes knowing which keys to press.

Oh my goodness. I just realized that the OP is Mr. Hao. I shouldn't be surprised I guess.

So Mr Hao, I'm curious, did you ever learn how to read traditional musical notation?

Finger gymnastics! Need to practice that stuff. Doesn't matter how the notes are notated ;0

I did something very similar when I returned to the piano. I would mark the lines and spaces for the E/F and B/C keys - so that I knew where the black keys were. It's just a little trick, but it really helps to "see" the keyboard in the score. It made it much easier to match up the notation with my hands on the keyboard.

Yes, Jeff Hao himself here. Hi, all.

I've been asked that question frequently enough to know what will follow ... "standard notation is not that difficult if you learned it properly".

Because of what business I am in now (promoting Hao Staff as a new alternative for adults learning from scratch), I have learned to know the standard notation inside out. I am an EXPERT now in standard notation. But I remain a snail speed reader. Sightreading comes with training of reflexes, no matter how well you understand the theory part of it.

I am a guitarist, too, before being a pianist. The thing about guitar notation is, there is no single notation in the world for guitar pieces (classical pieces, or the solo of Hotel California) that even the best guitarist can sightread and play like a good pianist with a totally unfamiliar new piece. But they kind of live with that imperfection as long as they can figure out the positions of the notes on the instrument "fast enough".

To the guitarists, and drummers, those who are curious about piano playing, Hao Staff would look like heaven.

There are many grateful users of Hao Staff now, with some switching from standard notation even when they had good teachers. I know some are now even taking lessons from concert pianists to really get to their playing potential.

I hope some of you teachers here are willing to try to actually teach someone from scratch and give us meaningful feedback from actual teaching with it.

PM me and I will send you an actual course pack. Nothing commercial here, just for those with academic interest of trying it out and giving it proper assessment.

The Hao Staff addresses this issue just as well as the standard notation does. You should see an actual sheet.

I suspect that Malkin was addressing the title of that talk, which goes something like "Learn to play the piano in 10 days". That title is very wrong, and has the sounds of snake oil salesmen. If there is any merit to the system, then you have done it a disservice with that title.

Learning to PLAY the piano takes months and years, and it involves skills such as physical technique, honing one's listening abilities, interpretation skills and so forth. No notation system, either newly minted or traditional, will "teach" someone "how" to play the piano. You are only addressing the problem that some novices encounter in the process of reading, probably because of how that might get approached.

Hi! Thanks for responding!



Nope, that's not at all what I was thinking. Or rather, I should say, that wasn't why I was asking.

It is true that I don't think standard notation is all that difficult. And indeed, if someone were playing the flute, or almost any instrument (other than the guitar, classical guitar music is a separate issue), I think standard notation is just fine, because you only need to read one line of music. Standard piano notation is so difficult because you have to read two lines of music (well, and also piano music is often more complex than single-line music).

I was just curious whether you learned standard notation, and at what point in your piano studies. Did you learn standard notation first and then create your own notation system, or did you create the Hao staff and then learn standard?


And I would guess the same would be true of reading from a Hao staff. Are you saying that you can read-play Hao staff faster than you can a traditional score? Although, if the answer is yes, I would say "well, of course you can, if that's the kind of notation you've spent the most time playing from."

It seems to me that your staff may be easier to learn in the beginning, but once the notation has been mastered, it's not going to be any easier to play from a Hao staff than it is from a traditional grand staff? I'm sure you've heard that criticism before, what's your response to it?


that explains a lot, because the idea behind your notation is very much like, or maybe even the same as the idea behind guitar tab.

Re this:


you should post that at the PW Piano Teachers Forum:
http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/forums/26/1.html

Now back to the question of your notation system...

I am an adult beginner (i.e., I began as an adult, I'm no longer a beginner) and I'm one of those who prefers playing from the score, and over the years, I've done a lot to improve my sightreading. I think I'm a relatively good sightreader (either in terms of prima vista or just read-playing IOW playing from a familiar score).

One of the concerns I have with your score is that it looks like it takes up too much space vertically on the page. I need to be able to see the bass and the treble clef together, but your notation is much more spread out. Can you comment on that?

The other concern I always have when people talk about alternative notation systems is that if someone can't read standard notation, they are unable to access a huge amount of music that is available in standard notation. For example, I like playing music by pianist/composers who are currently living (Einaudi, Hisaishi, Sakamoto, Winston, Nevue). The music of these composers is available in standard notation, but it's copyrighted so I don't think you'd be able to provide it in your notation.

Given that, I would say that any pianist who plans to continue playing, even at the level of piano as a hobby, would be severely limited if they could only read your notation. What is your response to that kind of concern?

It seems to be a solution where there is no problem, only a difficulty. Instead of overcoming the difficulty (learning to read music), a new solution is invented. A solution that would alienate those who learn it from the rest of the musical world.

Sam

That would confuse me. I see spaces between notes (because of the black keys) and I would think of them as a thirds. During my sight reading exercises I'm focusing on seeing relationships between notes.

bSharp, I think you and I are talking about different things. What I meant was that, on a traditional score, the grand staff takes up a certain amount of physical space vertically, on the page. It doesn't take extra effort to see the LH notes and the RH notes mostly simultaneously.

But in the Hao staff, the way the notation is set up requires that there be a line for every key, and the examples I've seen online take up a lot more physical vertical space on the page. That means I have to move my eyes up and down on the page to take in all the notes from the LH to the RH. It's like if you were trying to get information from a chart and one line of the chart is written at the top of the page and the other line is written at the bottom. you'd have to look up and down to visually take in all the info. Do you see what I mean? In terms of intervals, you might find the Hao staff easier to comprehend, especially as a beginner. But this does not address actually playing from the score.

I think this is a key question, because Mr. Hao is presenting his notation as an easier and thus superior notation. But from what I've seen of examples thus far, the Hao staff is easier to comprehend, but not easier to play from.

I note that in his TedX talk, the example he gives of someone playing the piano is someone who learned the music from the Hao staff, but who is playing from memory, not playing from the score.

I play from the score, so I need to be able to get both the treble staff and the bass staff in my eyes at the same time.

Mr. Hao, I am just getting ready to start learning a new song, if I give you the score, can you give me a copy of it on your staff so I can compare? It's "Last Sound" by Yiruma, I have the score but I haven't started working on it yet. I could be your test case for an adult hobby pianist who already plays traditional notation just fine.

Yes, this is one of the things that concerns me. I don't like the idea of pianists being restricted to what scores they can access...

Good job with the video presentation. Quite enjoyed that. If it helps get more people playing I'm generally for it.



Not a teacher here, but if I were my concern with teaching proprietary systems, regardless of how good they are, is that they are not portable. This may not be an issue for some, so long as you stay within a very tight circle. Otherwise, who ya gonna talk to? There was a gentleman I spoke with in Toronto a few years ago that taught by a numbering system that was supposed to be very fast. It was quite popular and expensive.

Reading is only part of the problem of course. Generally I like what you are doing, but will prefer and suggest for most people to start and continue as usual.

EDIT: On further thought, this is not really a new system, but more like an added visual to portray the grand staff. WYSIWYG as you say. I'd think best suited for very novice, but could help, some.

For people who haven't visited Mr. Hao's page, you can go here and get a free started pack with a sample of some simple scores:
http://haostaff.com/store/index.php?main_page=how_to_buy

I hope some other people (Sam?) who have played for a long time will look at it, I'm curious what you think about the vertical distance it takes on the page. It looks like it would be *very* hard to sightread because of that, and you'd have to be turning the page all the time because each score would take up more space.

Ah yes, if you only learn from the Hao score, you can only play music that has been transcribed into that system .... to date approx 50 classical and approx 60. Since I learned to read a traditional score, I have MANY 1,000s available at my fingertips... an infinite number absolutely free.

You can see what the score looks like on his web page.... frankly, I don't find it easier to learn at all. .. and certainly impossible to use in any sight-reading environment.

It would be interesting to see what the teachers on this forum think.... since they use traditional method books to teach music, I would be doubtful it would be accepted.