![]() We already use relative notation for most instruments. Look at the notation device used for Gregorian Chants to see it yourself. It was in fact the first thing tried in notation. The musical world has already tried out relative scales. In short, the relative positioning of notes on the staff is good from a tonal perspective but crap from a finger perspective on most every instrument except piano. So you've just got a big jumble of movements.ĭon't even get me started on the totally unintuitive nature of woodwind fingerings or how they are almost totally disconnected from what's going on on the staff. On the Ukulele the top string is higher than the string below it so you end up jumping UP strings rather than down, AND the strings aren't tuned at even intervals. On a guitar the strings aren't all tuned evenly so the back and forth on the neck changes depending on which strings you're switching between. So you've got back and forth, and up and down motions to keep going in one direction tonally. As i proceed up the scale on a simple instrument like the bass i will proceed right on the neck on one string, then drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string, drop down a string, shift left, proceed right on that string. On a stringed instrument this is VERY far from the case. On a piano the relative position of notes on the staff almost directly correlates to position on the keyboard. I suspect this is because the gap between the two staffs would have required too many intermediate lines had they re-used treble clef for the bottom staff, but this doesn't mean it is a good readability choice. The exact same figure at the exact same place on each staff represents two different notes. I can read treble clef, and bass clef just fine, but stick them together as you do for piano and my brain has a conniption. I've read for piano, bass guitar, flute, and now ukulele. ![]() Drawing all the little balls and filling in the halfmoon C, up and down thingies seems tedious, when traditionally one writes a simple dot or a little slash instead of the note head. Then you realize that hand-written traditional notation is quite different from typeset one, just like handwritten text is very different from printed text. The part about it being easy to write by hand looks good, and made me feel good at first. ![]() This is a bit hard to read though when there are no stems to link them to the note and the pitch interval is big. in the left hand) are very important rhythmic cues, and replaced them with that horizontal thing with the arrow on the left. The author also recognized that the beams on eighth- and sixtheenth-notes (e.g. Spacing is not very important, and indeed especially in dense scores for solo instruments, that need to have few page turns, notes are often just spaced as tightly as possible. I have a feeling that is one of the stronger queues for reading rhythm. I also question removing the stem of a note. The position already encodes the pitch, and the ABCDEFG names kind of get in the way of understanding the melody, which is more about relative intervals than absolute values.Īnd what does the little parenthesis on the length line mean? For half- and whole notes it seems to mean it doubles the length (a quarternote with one or two parentheses), but for sixteenth-notes it seems to indicate that it halves it (an eighth-note with a single parenthesis mark). Similarly, writing a special symbol for each pitch seems it would get heavily in the way of transposing on the fly. Rather, it fits there because when I play in G major, I put my brain in G major mode, in which case it would be distracting to have an accidental on every single F. When playing in G major, the sharp accidental on the Fs is not put at the beginning of the line just to avoid printing it in the score. Removing the key signature is not a good idea. Here's something that was intended as constructive criticism, but maybe ended up more as just criticism: ![]() I'm very skeptical that this is an improvement (but kudos for thinking outside the box).
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