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Show HN: Learn piano without sheet music (jacobdoescode.com)

222 points by jacobp100 ↗ HN
I always found sheet music way too hard to read - and I literally spent a year at a company building a sheet music rendering engine. I wanted an app that would display music like the tutorials on YouTube, but not be focused on upselling lessons etc. like most current apps, and also would let me import my own files

This works on MIDI files. If it’s a valid midi it probably plays.

Since releasing, I did add a subscription for classical music - on a theory that most normal users don’t know what a midi file is. It changed about a month ago from an up front price to in app purchases and/or a subscription - which has absolutely tanked revenue so far - but maybe it will pick up

Would love to hear your thoughts and if you have any suggestions!

257 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 355 ms ] thread
jjallen
How do you only have one review?

This looks super cool and would make me basically immediately able to roughly play quite a few pieces. Need to setup my keyboard and try it out.

jacobp100
Short answer, I’m terrible at marketing, and I’ve had bad luck with users

I had to reset the rating a few months back because people would give me a 1 star review when a song didn’t open. I always try to be as helpful as possible here - when a song doesn’t open, it has a link to email me, and I’ve always fixed these issues. But those 1 star reviews never got updated. Hopefully now that’s a thing of the past, because it’s tested on all 800 pieces from the catalog, which all have to parse successfully to generate the previews

If you’d like to add to the reviews, it would be really helpful!

filcuk
That honestly looks amazing. Do you plan to release on Android by any chance?
jacobp100
Unfortunately not! This is a SwiftUI app using a lot of Apple audio libraries - so it would be a complete rewrite to get it running on Android
rwhyan
Looks cool design-wise, but who is this for?

Although the upfront cost of learning sheet music is a few weeks of study, it quickly becomes worth it due to gains in speed of learning and sightreading skills.

Maybe this can introduce people to piano and get them playing quickly, but it'll ultimately stunt their development.

jacobp100
If you already know and like sheet music, I don’t think this app will be for you

I know at least one other person who didn’t bother learning sheet music. Maybe it’s because I came from guitar, where tabs aren’t particularly sight readable, so I just learn and remember the entire piece

rwhyan
Yes, this app could serve as an introduction to piano, but ultimately relying on it will be detrimental to long-term growth.

I think the app would b more useful if it helped teach sheet music (which can be frustrating for beginners) through this friendly UI.

teo_mosce
Yeah that's true but I know for a fact that many of my friends would like to simply learn a few simple songs without really getting into the details of learning music! So this might be helpful for all those people like them!
tobr
This is wrong. Played piano all my life, and never learned to read sheet music fast enough for it to be any use. This has not stunted my development. I play by ear and chords.
abid786
You’re probably not very good at playing the piano. I’m not sure what you mean by far enough, but not being able to sight read a piece is not the same as being unable to read sheet music at all.
tobr
> You’re probably not very good at playing the piano.

This is rude. What the heck do you base this on?

dbalatero
Yeah it's a moronic comment. I'm not even going to bother to compile a list of musicians that smoke everyone else without reading sheet music, but you can't throw a rock without hitting one.
pclmulqdq
In the professional music scene, you can go for an entire career without running into one. It is a relatively small set of outliers, and even then, there is a narrow set of genres (most of them Western and modern) where a professional player can get away with not reading or writing music.

Even in the poster child of learning by ear, Jazz, something like 99% of session and pro players learn to read music.

bityard
I've noticed that across my many hobbies, there are always people who insist that THEIR way of learning how to do a thing is the ONLY way to learn how to do a thing. This seems more prevalent in the music world, though. Especially if they had strict teacher.
djaychela
Wes Montgomery couldn't read music, but he was a pretty good guitarist [1]

[1] This is an understatement, by the way.

rwhyan
I'm sure you can play piano, but I'm also willing to bet it has put a ceiling on the types of pieces you can learn.

Have you tried learning a Chopin Ballade or Bach WTC fugue without sheet music?

dbalatero
GP might not want to play that kind of music. You can easily get away with no reading ability if you play in bands, pop groups, etc. (not that it's not useful to read)
tobr
Who is it for, you asked. Do you think there might be a few beginner pianists who see value in being able to play other music than 300-year-old fugues? If an interest in developing musical abilities in a different direction constitutes a “ceiling” and “stunted development” for you, you have a very narrow view of what it means to play an instrument.
rwhyan
It's objectively a ceiling if you can't work towards playing the most technically challenging music.

It doesn't have to be Bach. You will struggle to learn ANY advanced piano without sheet music.

Sure it's for "beginners," but I'm saying it will inherently stunt their growth compared to putting in the work to learn sheet music.

tobr
It’s not an objective ceiling when we disagree on which way is up! You have a super-weird and specific idea of what it means to play piano. I really can’t think of a less inspiring goal than playing “advanced” or “technically challenging” music. If you like to do that, go nuts, but don’t assume that anything else is meaningless.
rwhyan
How is that "super-weird" or "specific"? If anything, your idea of advanced pieces not being "up" is obscure.

> I really can’t think of a less inspiring goal than playing “advanced” or “technically challenging” music

Really? You can't understand how aiming to conquer a highly technical and musical piece is inspiring? It's the same as tackling any other difficult goal.

Music at a less technical level isn't meaningless, but it's an inherent limitation on your musicality if your repertoire is limited by technique.

Technique facilitates greater musicality. Sheet music facilitates greater technique.

Regardless, do as you please, but it's like saying, "I'll never learn code, because I can build no-code products!"

tobr
> You can't understand how aiming to conquer a highly technical and musical piece is inspiring?

You are putting words in my mouth - I am saying it’s not inspiring to me. I can understand that someone else might find it inspiring, sure! Like speedrunning a video game, some might find it an enjoyable challenge - but I think they can see that there are other reasons to play games. They wouldn’t say “who’s it for?” about a strategy guide because it’s not about speed.

For what it’s worth, I disagree with almost all of your descriptions of what musicality consists of. It’s not about repertoire or technique. If you see what types of music most people enjoy listening to and playing, you can see that you have a niche point of view. Technically challenging music is not more enjoyable to play or hear. Sheet music is irrelevant to most types of music, both historically and today - music is fundamentally heard and felt, not written and read, nor conquered.

I’ll leave this conversation now as it doesn’t appear to go anywhere meaningful.

dbalatero
Yes, and, it's a niche view even if you restrict things to America/western music. From a global perspective it's even more niche, limiting, and boxed in.
eitally
That's not remotely true. if your objective is to play keys in a rock band, you really mostly just need chords and a little fill here and there.

I completely agree with your fundamental point, but it's a mistake to say someone needs to be able to be technically excellent in order not to feel like they've hit a ceiling in what they can do.

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ksenzee
I play by ear and chords too, but being able to jot something down, or read something someone else has written down, is as useful to me in music as it is in English. Literacy is just plain practical.
tobr
Practical and useful, yes! Stunting development is something different. I do know how to read sheet music, but I’ve never practiced it to be fast enough to sight read. I’ve never felt that this has stunted my development - if it had, I probably would have picked up speed naturally.
ksenzee
Sightreading is difficult enough that most pianists aren’t any good at it. Those who are get props and envy from other musicians.
OfSanguineFire
In the jazz world it is fairly common for pianists to be unable to read music. For example, Colin Vallon, one of the most successful jazz pianists of the new millennium, has admitted in a number of interviews that he never learned.
rwhyan
I wouldn't call it "fairly common."

There are certainly outliers who play by ear or rely on improvisation, but musicians in all genres rely on sheet music to develop their craft.

Rochus
Many, many "outliers".
nogridbag
I learned piano when I was young, but I never practiced and basically repeated the same lesson over and over. We started taking our 5 year old for piano lessons and I was inspired and wanted to start practicing as well, but I found I couldn't read any sheet music.

I found a course on Udemy: Read Music FAST and Read Music FAST! Part 2. I highly recommend those. It basically took a week or two to get through them and I was able to jump into the author's free Intermediate lesson.

ksenzee
For people saying “but there are amazing musicians who don’t read music,” yes, of course there are. Literacy isn’t required for poets, either. There are rich oral traditions that weren’t written down for hundreds or thousands of years. But you cannot convince me that reading and writing are unimportant for poets and audiobook readers. You can do both jobs without reading or writing, but they’re a heck of a lot easier if you do.

I think it also depends what instrument you play. It’s understandable that there are guitarists in this thread saying “eh, pianists don’t need sheet music, I do fine without it” but they are missing the fact that sheet music is way more useful for piano than it is for guitar. If someone truly does not want to learn to read music, they might consider taking up an instrument like guitar where you can get along without it.

Aeolun
> Maybe this can introduce people to piano and get them playing quickly

That’s good enough for the people that would otherwise never play at all.

jnovek
Is this just musical notation or do you hook up a MIDI device so it can point out mistakes?
jacobp100
For now, it’s just MIDI files rather than MIDI devices
conkeisterdoor
I recently started looking into cheap electric keyboards that I could use to teach myself piano, and this looks so awesome for learning. I would pay for this app, but unfortunately I don't have any Apple devices.
jacobp100
Sorry - yes it is Apple only. Their OSes have a tonne of audio stuff out the box which can be pricey to license from other places
conkeisterdoor
Understood and makes sense - best of luck with this, it really looks fantastic.
bityard
Be careful admitting this in public: you are going to get comments from people telling you that it is impossible to learn how to play piano on a cheap keyboard because it doesn't have the same feel as a real piano, and lacks pedals. Fortunately, they are wrong up to a certain point. There is a difference playing the two, to be sure, but it's like saying you can't learn to drive in a car with an automatic transmission.
conkeisterdoor
Hah that's good to know, the comparison to learning to drive makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the tip
nogridbag
I just did the same. I wanted to get something cheap-ish, but still feeling like a piano. Roland seems to the default choice, maybe with Yamaha being a close second.

I wound up buying a Roland FP-30X, but I think the FP-10 feels basically the same. When we visit friends who went for cheaper options, their keyboards feel like toys.

yepguy
I just did the same, and I think those Rolands are basically the cheapest options that will actually serve you well over the medium to long term.
jsphsl
I've been taking piano lessons for several months now and I'm still struggling with sheet music notes. I may give this a try! It reminds me of playing guitar hero back in the day :)
jacobp100
Yeah I was in the same boat. I came from guitar, so had some level of dexterity. I couldn't use beginner tutorials that show you what note to play, because they were far too basic. But then with sheet music, I'd spend 90% of the time counting EGBDF - and getting it wrong a lot of the time too!
Cthulhu_
Does it support midi-in? I've got a small midi keyboard, being able to hook that up to this would be ideal.

And if that's in there, what about a mode - like typing instructors - where the page only advances if you hit the right keys? I think that would be an ideal way to learn the notes, followed by a mode like Guitar Hero where you have to hit the right notes at the right time.

Finally, given that the app is aimed at teaching, I'd add a progression path, have the user start with simple music and gradually progress. Finding rights-free midi files and assessing difficulty might be difficult though.

jacobp100
No MIDI in for the moment. It’d be nice to have, for sure!

For learning - I agree - I wanted to have some kind of ‘difficulty’ heuristic for pieces, and recommend easy ones. I just haven’t been able to come up with anything yet.

dbalatero
You can look up the royal grading the UK uses for classical pieces and use that.

A single difficulty score is a bit difficult (hah) as a piece will have many technical dimensions to it, and ideally you're comfortable with most of it but a few dimensions push you out of your comfort zone.

I think these standard grade scores attempt to give some kind of loose ordering to when you might want to tackle the piece.

jacobp100
I'm actually from the UK. Is this the grade system people normally refer to - like they say they're grade 8?

I meant more an algorithm to determine the difficulty. Things like tempo and how much your fingers would need to move. But equally, I could probably just cherry pick some easier pieces far quicker

QVVRP4nYz
Synthesia works with midi(via USB) - at least the PC and Android versions do.
buffington
I use Synthesia on the iPad and it works great.
teo_mosce
Tried to teach my girlfriend to play the piano for a while now. But reading notes was too difficult for her. I can see this be really helpful for newbies!
awill
What's the pricing model here? the AppStore lists a yearly subscription as $10, but then an additional IAP to import songs of $5? It's confusing, and I never install apps when the pricing is unclear. Also, any plans for lifetime, as a lot of people simply don't want yet another subscription.
jacobp100
The subscription unlocks everything while it’s active

The ‘lifetime’ option is $5 but only unlocks importing your own files (not the 800 pieces in the catalog)

Its a good point - I should clarify this pricing

AntonyGarand
Congrats on the release, looks great!

Reminds me of Synthesia[1], with a better UX but less features!

How do you handle the displaying all notes on a portrait phone per your homepage screenshot? Especially on songs with a large gap between both hands, seems like it would be pretty cramped so a tablet might be the better option.

[1] https://www.synthesiagame.com/

jacobp100
Yes - it is heavily based on Synthesia. It has a few different priorities - it won't play weird formats like MusicXML, but it has stuff like looping, a speed trainer (looping with an automatic tempo increment), transposition etc.

Portrait on your phone is about the worse way to use the app, but it does technically work. You'll have to scroll side to side to see all the notes. Landscape is better - you fit all the notes in - and if you tap the screen once, it'll hide the header for a bit of extra space. But yes, an iPad or Mac is by far the best experience

AntonyGarand
Thanks for your response!

I was confused on the portrait as the phone is shown as-is on the homepage, I would advice making it landscape instead as it seems to be a more usable format

jacobp100
Yes - that would make a lot of sense! I copied the layout from the TechniCalc page, and never gave it a second thought
Octabrain
It's great to have tools that make easier to learn how to play music, which btw, I feel music should have evolved naturally itself towards something with better high level abstraction (kinda like programming languages). However, my fear with this kind of approaches in music is that you might end up being a simple "typewriter". I mean, you play by pure mechanical memory instead of due to develop a logical understanding of what you are doing. This was the main reason I ditched yousician for guitar. I saw myself just doing a more complex "guitar hero" kind of thing and I don't want that, I want music theory and understanding instead of moving blindly my hands following coloured dots on the screen.
masukomi
on the one hand, yay. Tabs have made learning guitar stuff incredibly accessible, and dealing with the separate hands of the piano and separate clefs is a PITA. On the other hand... ugh. We've successfully churned out generations of musically illiterate musicians. We've also made it really hard to find the sheet music for a piece instead of the tabs, and the tabs are lacking in SO MUCH information.
avtar
Thom Yorke, among probably other great musicians, couldn’t read sheet music.
zengid
But Jonny Greenwood can.

I completely agree with your point though, sheet music is an element from Western "Music Theory", and has nothing to do with being able to make music. It definitely does help if you want to have musicians trained in that Western cultural practice to play your music, but not everyone cares about that.

Edit: my point about Mr Greenwood is that he is a huge part of the sound of Radiohead, as well as the other members.

sebastiansm
Maybe not, but he has an amazing ear and a vaste knowledge of music theory.
duped
Notation is always lossy. And for what its worth, for the entirety of human civilization music has been an aural tradition passed down from teacher to student, and primarily learned by ear. The notation is just whatever is most convenient to people for taking notes at the time.
vixen99
> The notation is just whatever is most convenient to people for taking notes at the time.

That 'at the time' now seems to have extended to around 400 years (in Western classical tradition for instance, from pre-baroque). The evolution of another type of keyboard demonstrates that convenience is not necessarily the watchword.

https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-computer-keyboard-1...

klodolph
I think the real problem is that people are going for free tabs, and the free tabs online are just kinda awful. They don't just miss information, but they also contain outright errors.

If you’re serious about learning a piece, so you can perform it, you’ll want to transcribe it yourself, buy some better tabs, or buy sheet music. Or do some combination of those things. It’s not a problems with tabs themselves, but the general low quality tabs you see in ASCII art from random websites.

(For what it’s worth, I think it’s really easy to find sheet music for popular music. Sometimes too easy… I search for some pop song and get a couple dozen different arrangements for different instruments at different levels. The catch is that you have to pay a couple bucks.)

washadjeffmad
You know, tabs weren't always awful [1]. Before and during Web 2.0, back when the web was rife with JS-free, non-commercial labors of love, educated fans and scholars of music created phenomenal sheets and tabs, full transcriptions of their favored artists, scores, and bands.

Then came adtech, and when those goons rolled in, they just couldn't believe the opportunity that these idiots were wasting by doing all this work for free and just giving it awa... er- STEALING SALES from LEGITIMATE ARTISTS.

It usually started with campaigns of rude emails that threatened and insulted the site owner. "How could you do something as horrible as stealing the food out of the mouths of the artists you claim to love by competing with their official sheet music? You're lucky I found you first you first since you're such a small-fry, because if they knew what you were up to, they'd be disgusted by you, and their lawyers would sue you so hard, your grandkids would still be in litigation. Oh and by the way, your tabs are shit, your site is shit, and you're a shit person, so why don't you do everyone a favor and shut down?"

Then, once the site owner had a very predictable panic attack and crisis of faith, typically chronicled publicly on their home page, they'd be made an offer of a few hundred dollars. "Look, the only way out of this is to sell. We're connected, partnered with artists. Unlike you, you lowlife, you thief, we make money so we can PAY the artists. It's the only way to do this fairly. If you really think about it, you'll understand and do the Right Thing."

Then, if the site owner sold, the site would be stripped, frozen, and crammed with ads until it was a desiccated husk of itself, or else forwarded to its new home. Either way, there would be no more new tabs, no photos from tours, event updates, band recommendations, or community interaction, all waning value siphoned into some traffic-whoring cramscammer's [2] pocket.

And if they didn't sell, either the interaction left enough of a negative impression they they lost their passion, or they were legally harassed until they shut down, but only after they were scraped and hoovered up into trashy meta-sites like ultimate-guitar.

This is the slum web we live in today, but with more aggressive authoritarian identity management.

[1] For reference: https://www.classtab.org/tabbing.htm#history

[2] I wonder if anyone can name the top two private forums for this prior 2005? Bonus points if you can name a person we all know today who was part of them!

vcg3rd
I can play piano, trumpet, and trombone, but hardly ever do anymore. I have been able to read sheet music since I was 8.

If the whole concept of this confuses me, and it does, it may confuse people who are eager to learn and get playing (without doing endless scales) and don't read sheet music.

I have no idea what tabs means in this context, though I am vaguely familiar, I think, with it as a guitar term (which you or a commenter came from).

Looking at the graphics on the site (I don't use Apple) gives me no clue how the notes for each hand are displayed "according to how they look on a keyboard."

What am I missing? Will someone who uses Apple, can't read sheet music, has never played any instrument and wants to learn how to play piano be able to figure it out within app tutorials?

solardev
Looking at the screenshots, it reminds me of Guitar Hero / ROCK Band on like ultra hard mode, maybe?
karmakaze
The layout is a rotated & mirrored version of that commonly used on DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) so it certainly makes sense to professionals.
wizofaus
It's just a vertical piano roll (in fact that's the typical orientation of physical piano rolls - DAWs typically rotate them 90 deg as we're accustomed to the concept of time being the horizontal axis).
singleshot_
If someone described to you how to play d above middle c on a trumpet by saying “1 & 3” that would be pretty close to guitar tablature. Instead of reading a score, they show you what frets to hit.
kjkjadksj
And thats it though. No information on things like how you should hit the notes or for how long.
singleshot_
Depends. You could be looking at the worst tab on earth, which is just lines representing strings and numbers representing frets, which pretty much require that you be listening to the song and reading the tab for it to make any sense.or you could be looking at tablature alongside sheet music, which is much more enlightening.

Some folks even have MIDI enabled tablature with sheet music, which is awesome [0], but is not merely tab.

[0]: https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/metallica-one-tab-s444

kjkjadksj
Yeah power tabs and guitar pro often have this coupled. I’d guess though most people viewing tabs are looking at the plain texts on ultimate guitar though. It doesn’t help that for a lot of music there is no official tab, only what the community has been able to make for the good of the community. Sometimes also those ‘official’ tab books are not correct to the recording.
ShamelessC
> I have been able to read sheet music since I was 8. If the whole concept of this confuses me, and it does

It’s been my experience that most people who are fond of sheet music learned it at a very young age.

Or perhaps I’m just stupid? I’ve tried several times to learn sheet music in my 20’s and it is brutally difficult. Guitar tabs? Easy. Chord charts? No problem. Sheet music? Go fuck yourself!

What is it with the musicians in the comments here having _zero_ awareness? Sheet music is probably great! Sure, fine. But to claim that OP’s idea or even YouTube tutorials are outright not a good idea is laughable and tone deaf.

Not everyone’s folks bought them a Steinway and piano lessons at age 5-13 (the age when humans can magically pick up on absurdly difficult concepts with relatively little effort).

balfirevic
> I’ve tried several times to learn sheet music in my 20’s and it is brutally difficult.

What do you mean by "learn it"? Just being able to decode what notes are supposed to be played and how long they should last from sheet music, given no time limit? Or doing it in near real-time?

ShamelessC
The latter, obviously.
beautron
Pianists call real-time reading "sight-reading", and it's not what pianists usually focus on. Even the most skilled pianist is probably not going to sight-read a Bach fugue (or be satisfied with the result).

The more common way to read music (at least in terms of the large and marvelous classical piano literature), is as part of a careful process of studying. You read to learn and understand the music, but the reading doesn't need to be real-time (it normally isn't, when learning a piece).

Real-time sight-reading is its own special skill, which you can practice for its own sake. But it's nowhere near as important as the non-real-time learning process mentioned above. I got pretty good at sight-reading when I worked as an accompanist, but I still hate it: It's not how I like to learn a piece. (And the music I find most interesting [like Bach!] can't even really be learned that way).

Aeolun
Is there any point to learning to do it not in real time?
balfirevic
Well, of course. I can only do it pretty slowly, and I can still learn songs, intros, licks etc. by finding sheet music online and spending time with it. Isn't that pretty obvious?
Aeolun
Isn’t that essentially the same as memorizing the notes for the whole song?

I dunno, I guess it’s useful, but if I were trying to learn to read sheet music it would be so that I could pick up and play.

navane
I'm pretty fluent in reading sheet music. Still, for most songs the process is figuring out what notes to play in sub realtime, then slowly speeding up where both reading and fingering are limiting my speed. Then, as I "know" the whole song, looking at the sheet music helps my fingers remember which notes come next—together with muscle memory. And here sheet music notation shows its strength. At this point I don't see individual notes, but groups of notes, both in time and in harmony, and because I see them as groups at once, my sight reading can keep up with the song. But that takes practice for each song.
reikonomusha
Children have to put in the hours, maybe the same or slightly less than an adult does, to learn to read music. A 9 year old will need to practice reading and playing daily for at least 3 years before they can kinda sorta (sight-)read through beginner material with some facility. Most (middle-class with supportive parents) children who are learning to play an instrument benefit from having the time, space, and energy to do this as a part of their ordinary schooling routine. This is of course in contrast to many adults who have to attend to work, family, and other life things.

I started learning to play music as an adult with zero training as a child, and in my observation, adults (such as myself) don't actually have a problem learning sheet music, so long as they're comfortable practicing reading for several years daily, just like a child would. I'm several years in with daily practice, and I can work my way through sight-reading early-intermediate classical repertoire, albeit slowly.

Adults, at least those with the privilege of learning music, are usually already quite literate and perhaps even quite formally educated. Moreover, said adults also have a strong conception of music—their ears are good and attuned to their preferred styles of music. To many such adults then, it feels agonizing to start learning to read, and dedicate oneself to the pursuit at a child-level for many years. No doubt plasticity is a factor, but I genuinely think it's grossly overstated.

vcg3rd
It feels like most of that frustration is (or should be) directed at other commentors. I tried to frame my questions in a way that someone who does not read sheet music and is also unfamiliar with tabs might frame them. I saw the developer had been replying to comments or I wouldn't have bothered. I was hoping he might elaborate for potential users of his app. I certainly didn't claim it wasn't a good idea, merely that my frame-of-reference gave me no indication of how it worked for piano.

My parents never bought us a piano. My grandmother passed her decidely-not-Steinway down to us, and also paid for lessons with a school music teacher. I joined the band in 5th grade and played a school-issue trumpet until my parents could afford a used one. After my 10th grade the band teacher lost almost all his trombone players to graduation, so he taught me over the summer before I started my junior year and gave me an old trombone with lots of dings, which I used through my freshman year in college, after which I dropped band because it was a 1 hr credit and took about 25–30 hours a week (practice with band, practice on own, perform at games), and I wasn't a music major.

ics
The pricing model is confusing at first and not very clear until you start trying to use the app (tried the macOS version for now). The App Store description does not mention the subscription and what features it unlocks, and in the app it doesn't trigger until you try to play a song. If you dismiss the window, you actually have to go back to playing a song (and wait) to see it again as there isn't a settings pane or other trigger just to see the subscription page. A few suggestions on that front:

  - Put the pricing either on a splash window after opening for the first time OR in a message tile on the library screen
  - Include certain (full) songs in the free version and give them a badge of some sort ("free", "included", etc.)
  - Put a badge in the toolbar indicating whether you are in a free or paid mode
  - Make it clear if a subscription is valid for iOS *and* macOS or if they are separate (2x the cost) (edit: downloaded on iOS and it's not limiting anything so it must be a universal subscription. Put that early in the description for sure.)
I put a piano in my apartment in 2020, the year the app appears to have been first released. Several people in my household were looking for something exactly like this to practice and never came across it, though we did get suckered into a few $10/month or $75/year subscriptions for other things that ended up barely getting used. If the pricing stays the same but is much clearer to people I believe you could get decent conversion from a little bit of targeted advertising.

Besides that, the import dialog could be less spartan. It is not indicated in the app itself that it takes MIDI files only. Normal users may not know what a MIDI file is at first but you might be surprised at how many would learn and go seek those if given a tiny bit of guidance. Tons of non-technical people have learned to get their hands on playable guitar tabs the same way.

As for the playing interface, I like it quite a bit. Plenty of people will comment about how anything getting in the way of becoming an expert in sight reading is somehow evil (hyperbole) but this is silly. I could easily recommend this app to friends who played Guitar Hero as kids and now want to play along to stuff on the piano or keyboard– hey, we all got older and maybe acquired more "mature" instruments with black and white keys. I used to read standard sheet music for chamber/orchestra but it's been years and frankly it's the least important skill for the type of music that I play. However I do have a piano and once in a while want to play something without getting into a lesson on sheet music especially since what I used to read had far less range than a piano.

App Store note: searching for "piano tabs" the app doesn't show up even after a lot of scrolling. "piano tabs learning & practice" finds it as the top result. I am a fan of the plain name; it's short and self-explanatory to the point that I imagine people do randomly search those terms without knowing about your app. That should be a good thing but in practice it seems the discoverability isn't there which is worth looking into.

ics
Some suggestions and features based on personal preference, so I'm putting in a separate comment.

  - Put an "Import MIDI file" button in the Imported Files section
  - Star or bookmark icon, pick one for favorites. Currently one is used on the library screen and a different one in the song view.
  - Sidebar for the different sections with hide/show toggle, for example I don't like to scroll through stacked Sections and don't really care to see Recents at all
  - Options for thumbnail, tab display could be one but some variations would be interesting:
    - Color based on tempo
    - Dot-based graphic (primarily aesthetic, but recognizable at a glance)
    - Size S/M/L option which assigns per section
  - Tags for tracks, ideally color-codable. Maybe I want to tag something "mastered", or "difficult", "somber", etc.
    - After entering the search box, escape key or outside click should dismiss and return to the home layout. Currently the sections get reorganized, Favorites and Recents disappear and Pieces shows up at the bottom, but I can't get back without closing the app.
  - "Choose Random" button to open a piece
  - Composer interface, create new pieces from scratch or modify from the library using something similar to the playing interface
    (n.b. a decent interface for this if no keyboard/midi-in would be present a 1+-octave keyboard with some modifiers, so multiple key taps can create individual notes, optional rest interval, or extend a continuous note. Row-level actions so you can duplicate creating repeats, shift up/down, etc. Slight differences between macOS/iOS.)
  - Allow user editable text, emoji, or color highlight in the play scroll. Noting a section of the piece is one obvious use but it could be handy for several uses.
  - (semi serious) watch integration to vibrate on tempo.
  - Music box mode, notes only play as you scroll (I see you did this actually. My daughter is gonna love this...)
jacobp100
Thanks again for the suggestions!

What OS were you using where you couldn't get out of the search page? On the main page, the layout is altered so there's no duplication on results - but if you exit the search interface, it'll go back

Also note you can press the chevron to the left of a section to collapse it, and it'll remember that setting

ics
On macOS 13.5, entering the search shows no obvious way to end/return. However I just pressed Enter and that took me back, which was unexpected. So it works, just oddly mapped I think. On iOS the search+cancel is just fine.

For the sections, I noticed that but still find it odd that the home library view doesn't actually show me... the full library. You have to discover pieces by composer which I missed at first. BTW, there is a typo on both mac/iOS versions where the header is missing an r in "Lib[*r]ary".

jacobp100
Ah yes - mac is particularly difficult to get that interaction right

Thanks for pointing out the typo. I'm really bad for those!

jacobp100
Thanks for the suggestions! A few people are saying they were confused, so I'll put some more effort around that wording

The import dialog is unfortunately just the system dialog - I have some other apps using it and it's frequently something people are confused about. There's no real way around it though.

I'm still experimenting with the catalog. The app used to have a lot of links to places to get MIDI files from, but I just don't think it's something most people wanted to bother with. But that remains to be seen!

ics
On iOS, I don't think the term MIDI is mentioned anywhere in app. Unless you recalled it from the app store description then the Import button seems quite mysterious; average users might mistake it for something to interpret and extract notes from MP3s or whatever.

I have this site bookmarked for fun: https://bitmidi.com/ If I showed this app to some friends, the first thing they'd go looking for would be some video game music which is a whole different set than classical. Considering that, it would be nice to have separate libraries or playlists for genre organization. Offer some pre-populated as IAP, e.g. Classical is default but you can get popular songs, SNES tracks, etc. for $1-2 per collection if doable with individual licenses.

jacobp100
It’s advertised in the screenshots - but I’ll double check the description

I’d love to expand the catalog. Classical was easy because they’re all dead and everything is in the public domain. Anything current I’d have to license and I don’t have the foggiest how I’d even do that

tnecniv
This is kind of a tangent, but I’ve played instruments all my life and I never really understood how to use sheet music beyond the initial learning of a piece. I always see musicians actively referencing it while playing, but I’ve never been able to read it nearly quickly enough to do so. That also holds for guitar tabs, which I can read more quickly than sheet music (for guitar or piano). For anything remotely complicated, I need to memorize the piece so I can focus on what I need to do with my hands. A chord sheet I can follow while improvising even if I haven’t seen the progression before, but my playing definitely isn’t as good because the mental load of reading, listening, and playing is too much. It’s like having one too many processes open on your computer and the OS / CPU can’t quite keep up
bibanez
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.)

powersnail
The ability to read unfamiliar music while playing is called sight reading, and generally speaking it's more of an exercise than a capability relevant to actual performance.

During performance, sheet music is like a cheat sheet during exam, a reminder of something you already know. Most of the music is in your head and hand. The sheet music is just there to prevent a memory slip. Some orchestral music can be awfully repetitive, and having the page there helps you keep track of where you are. You are not supposed to devote lots of attention to the page itself, (unless you didn't practice before the performance and decides to sightread on stage, which, you know, happens).

pclmulqdq
I play a lot of piano and harpsichord at a very advanced level, and almost always use the sheet music. For me, it's a memory aid and a sort of "map" to the piece. You can also write stuff on your score to have reminders. This takes cognitive load off when you are performing. The goal of music is to play the music, so why waste brain capacity on getting to perfect memory of a piece when you can instead spend that on making the piece more expressive?

I will also say that learning to play without looking at your hands is a great skill to have, and also takes off some of the cognitive load.

bstpierre
I’m basically the opposite — really struggle to memorize music, and will almost always read while playing.

Maybe because I was taught to read music for piano as a kid?

The only exception was learning banjo (as an adult) because I basically learned it all from youtube and forced myself to memorize songs. But when I could play piano I only ever remembered a few bars from a couple of songs, everything else had to be written down. Even just playing chords on a uke!

tornato7
I agree that sheet music could be improved. The worst part to me is simply that notes are identical symbols just shifted up or down ever so slightly. But based on the screenshots your app does the same thing, just side to side. I think it would be more helpful if each note had a color to it.
jacobp100
Yes - that is a problem with the format. There's a few visual cues I add for this, like the black notes extending all the way up into the score, markers on every octave. You can also scroll the score like a normal scrollview, and it'll highlight on the visual keyboard what's currently played, and also play the notes if you scroll slow enough
jimmytucson
This is really cool! Guitar was my first instrument, then I went on to learn bass, drums, and a bunch of others, but I never bothered to learn how to read music - or, really, sight read. The few songs I know on piano, I learned from an electronic piano that had a display with an image of the keyboard and the keys would change color to tell you which one to play. When I play Maple Leaf Rag for other musicians they're often surprised to find out I can't read music.

So I can definitely see a market for this and will probably try learning another song on piano with it. That said, I do wish I had just learned to read music up front, as I learned my first instrument. I think it would have opened up doors for me, particularly for playing with other musicians (like an orchestra or a jazz band). But who knows how much longer that will be the case - tomorrow's great musicians may learn on an app like this!

foobarian
I learned a soprano instrument and was able to sight read the treble clef since forever. But try as I could I never could teach myself to be fluent with the bass clef. It just messes with my brain somehow.
stenio51
I think it has potential! However to me the piano is too small and hard to see.

Check the Flowkey app for reference, their piano representation is more sophisticated, but note that it takes half the screen (landscape mode) and there is no wasted space on the ending left and write.

Either way, cool project!

jacobp100
If you're on an iPhone, landscape is definitely the better way to use it. I should advertise that more. Looking up flowkey, they have a video in landscape, and their screenshots are in portrait - I might look at doing something like that
zengid
This is really awesome, congrats on shipping. If you don't mind me asking, what do sales look like on average for an app like this? I'm hoping to someday make a "music education app", but I'm skeptical if people would pay for it. Thank you!
jacobp100
I don’t mind being candid about sales - I always found it really interesting reading about others

So for 2022, this app was a $5 up front price, and made $200. I have a similar one for MP3 playback - also $5 up front - that made $900. Then you used to be able to buy both together for $8, which made $130

A month ago I moved to in app purchases and subscriptions - and since then I’ve only managed to get one subscription and zero IAPs. The downloads have also been terrible - with about 5 a day

The level of marketing before has been having a good store listing, and some effort into keywords, but no active marketing (self promotion or ads etc.)

Focus now is on marketing. The nice thing about it being free to download is it’s easier to get interest from posts like these. That was much harder to do before

zengid
Thanks for sharing! One thing I've thought about for marketing an app like this was to just sit down and do a Twitch stream or something and screen-share while using the app. I feel like if it looks cool enough you'll get a few folks that want to check it out.. and hopefully it snowballs. You could record it and slice up clips for YouTube with the good parts..

Good luck with marketing!

zengid
And another note.. Free-to-play apps with IAP could benefit from learning about how it works in the gaming industry. I highly recommend the Gamecraft podcast from the incredible VC Mitch Lasky

https://www.gamecraftpod.com/

jacobp100
Thanks! I'll give that a listen. I think I have a lot of learning to do here
ksherlock
Maybe it's just me, and I'm not particularly good at reading sheet music but -- for piano -- I find all the alternative even worse.

At least this sort of display eliminates the "akshually C𝄫 and A♯ are different"-type cranks.

catapart
Oh, awesome! I'm working on something similar, to put out as a PWA. Seems I had similar aspirations/complaints that you did, but also didn't have an apple device (that I wanted to use for the app).

Yours is a very nice presentation! I like the annotations feature, and the comprehensiveness of the features, even for the stated goal of such simple functionality. A lot of people might leave out percussion loops, or be a bit more stingy with the free tracks.

This may be a stupid question, but I'll ask anyway: does it recognize Midi controller input? In my practice, I've found value in having the notes I play represented digitally, so that I can keep my eyes on the screen (and, let's face it, Rock Band/Guitar Hero is fun). But I didn't see that specifically advertised anywhere, so I was curious!

duped
One problem I see with your design is that there's no way to deal with rubato, and presumably you can't alter the tempo on the fly as you're playing.

The problem that sheet music solves is providing a static notation that can be read non-linearly for a dynamic piece of art that must be played linearly.

There's also no way to represent dynamics, as far as I can tell? The MIDI file won't give you that information.

Similarly unless you support MIDI 2 clip files (to my knowledge, no one does yet) you're also missing the key signature information, which is kind of important (otherwise the notes have no meaning - you need to infer their function from context, which is ambiguous)

jacobp100
Midi actually supports a lot of this. You can change the tempo on the fly, and each note has a velocity that's effectively your dynamic

Yes - there's no key signatures. It's something I may add in the future

Don't forget - most people who use this app don't learn a lot of this stuff. They just want to play

duped
MIDI supports neither. It supports an encoded tempo change, there is no way for you to read a MIDI file back at the pace a player wishes to play using just the MIDI file. Velocity is not the same thing as dynamics, it represents the particular force applied to a key at a moment in time but cannot represent change in dynamics over time (or even leave room for interpretation).

The thing is that if you want to play you need to learn some fundamentals first. A keyboard isn't a just slab of buttons to push at particular times.

Aeolun
> A keyboard isn't a just slab of buttons to push at particular times.

Have you ever played any beginner songs? That’s literally what they are.

reikonomusha
Most good classical music teachers will instill, as early as possible, that piano isn't just hitting buttons at particular times. Even music like Three Blind Mice or Mary Had A Little Lamb will be augmented with some instruction on how to play it musically, such as balance of the hands and some phrasing. Of course, at this level, one wouldn't expect mastery of these ideas, but one would certainly be exposed to them.
openquery
I've been playing piano for a few years (no teacher, on and off) and have always been curious about the topic of sheet music. When you're first learning it's very painful. The notation isn't that bad, sharps, flats, time signatures etc - that part is ok. What _is_ difficult is corresponding a position on the staff to a physical note on a keyboard, especially when you have a treble clef and a base clef.

However over time it becomes easier and easier - and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time (also accounting for the fact that there is an enormous corpus of existing sheet music).

The question regarding this app (which looks awesome) is, is this format for reading music better than sheet music at the expert level (for professional musicians). And if not, how can we get that 10x improvement to make the switch from sheet music to something better.

strunz
It's even more frustrating on guitar where the literal same note in the same octave appears all over the fretboard. You have to figure out all the notes nearby to figure out what position you should be in. Even with years of experience I find tabs faster
b450
The flip side of this is that chord shapes (in terms of hand shape, not intervals) are constant on the guitar (assuming no open strings). Learning piano after guitar, I was intimidated by the fact that – for example – an Am and Bm had different shapes, whereas on the guitar it's just the same shape transposed up the neck.

Anyway, I've noticed some music youtubers can read and write midi notation just as fluidly as sheet music. Which can result in some fun shenanigans[^1]

[^1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy_0mMcj0Q8

wizofaus
There's no standard Midi "notation" that's human-readable/writeable AFAIK - even written out in, e.g. hex, I would be flabbergasted if anyone could perform from a displayed Midi file. The YT video appears to show a piano-roll type display (common for DAWs etc.), nothing to do with midi (which doesn't even have the concept of notes or note lengths at all).
kzrdude
There's a lot of same shapes on the piano as well.

And the differing shapes are a bit like how A major and C major have different shapes on the guitar isn't it, for practical reasons you don't use the same shape for those two.

kzrdude
With the clarification that the same shape of the C major chord on the piano, when you move it up through the scale, the same shape produces all the diatonic three note chords of the scale, i.e C, Dm, Em, F, G, A, Bdim, C etc.
warcher
It might be, but it also might not. If you're just cowboy chording, sure, but if you're playing chord melody you'll find the chord you choose is highly contextual based on what you're playing and where you're going. An Am chord is a continuum of notes going up or down the neck A-C-E (G?) over and over-- wherever your hand sits, there's an Am available to you. It just might sound better (or more interesting!) or play easier to grab one set of A-C-E versus another.
rtsil
I think the parent meant that those voicing are still the same when transposed all over the fretboard. E.g. the first inversion of a V7 has the same shape for all the notes horizontally. To go from A7 to B7, you just move two frets. And if you move vertically, the shape is slightly changed, but still recognizable enough.

A guitar has to be the easiest instrument for transposition (or maybe it's just the one I'm most comfortable with!).

RogerL
Until you reach the B string. A shape that works on strings 4/5/6 does not work on 1/2/3. This is because G->B is 4 half steps, the rest of the strings are 5 half steps apart. So you need 2 forms for closed chords.
rtsil
Then you move that note a half-step. The rest is the same. And actually, if you use drop-2 voicing, there are 3 forms because of that half-step, but still the overall shape is pretty much the same. You really need to remember one shape, and then adjust it accordingly.
kjkjadksj
Tabs are bad because they lack a sense of timing that sheet music has. I’d recommend going with a powertab or guitar pro file as that will show you the standard notation as well as the tablature. Many printed guitar sheet music books are also formatted like this. That being said knowing what sort of positon to play a note depends on what you are going for. You are right that you can play a single note all over the neck, but for a lot of those positions it will be awkward to get to the next few. Knowing your chord shapes and scales helps make this intuitive and automatic.
RobertRoberts
> What _is_ difficult is corresponding a position on the staff to a physical note on a keyboard, especially when you have a treble clef and a base clef.

This is my biggest issue. I played piano for years and still struggle with this. (though I never excelled, and started young)

Any suggestions on a simple way to overcome this issue?

wizofaus
Even experienced pianists would have trouble sight reading music that uses an excess of ledger lines - i.e. we can't accurately judge what note is intended just by estimating its vertical distance from the staff. But notes on the staff (or 3 or fewer ledger lines off) are rarely an issue - it's really just familiarity (I struggle reading off unusual clefs too). Which is why I don't think any sort of piano-roll based notation system is ever going to become the norm for performers, because it essentially does require accurately judging which key to hit, when to hit it and how long to hold it for just by its spatial position on the score.
jacobp100
I think back when music notation was being actively iterated on, you had to convey all the information possible, because it’s not like you could share a recording. Things like guitar tabs - which typically erase timing information - only work because who ever reading them has already heard the song and know what it’s meant to sound like
bumby
Aren't guitar tabs typically combined with abbreviated notation to show the rhythm? No lettering of notes, but just an "X" associated with half-notes, quarter notes, etc?
jacobp100
Sometimes. Guitar Pro had a text format that could output them - but it's not frequently used. Bar lines are encoded pretty reliably, which is at least some timing information
kjkjadksj
Not really that I’ve seen, they are basically written in plain text and you are at the mercy of the tab writer. You really got to have a recording available to go along with the tab since theres no rhythm information at all usually.
warcher
There's always been a tendency towards shorthand-- medieval manuscripts elided certain parts of the harmony/accompaniment because it's just known to be there by the musicians of the day. Same for jazz lead sheets-- they give you the melody and a general sense of the harmony, with the understanding that specific voicings and reharmonizations will be left to the discretion of the performer in the moment.
phlakaton
It is not.

I am, once again, asking people to understand that piano roll notation is no substitute for traditional notation when it comes to performance, among many other things.

yongjik
It's really not, not even for professionals, but anyone playing at a decent hobby level. Consider, for example, Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique (accessible to many amateurs), starting with Grave (very slowly) and changes to Allegro.

Either you start with an impossibly long bar that covers the screen, where you can't see how the phrase flows into the next notes, or you later get to a dozen identical ultra-short bars mashed on top of each other.

And that's just one problem.

Aeolun
> and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time

I suspect traditional sheet music is like the the qwerty keyboard.

At this point it’s momentum is so large that it’s impossible to stop.

klodolph
Sure, if traditional sheet music is the qwerty keyboard, then this new version is a 2x expanded keyboard, with separate keys for all the capital letters.

I think there’s no denying that the particulars of the current system of musical notation is more or less an accident of history. But it’s also a local minimum—if you want to improve on it, you’re probably going to have to come up with radical changes.

Aeolun
> if you want to improve on it, you’re probably going to have to come up with radical changes

Yeah, that’s sort of related to my point. Like, Colemak and Dvorak are theoretically (and practically, with enough practice) better than qwerty, but they don’t need to just be better, they need to be so much better that people will throw all the investment in qwerty away.

Sheet music feels the same.

userbinator
...and a traditional piano is like a keyboard with no markings on the keycaps.
bregma
Hmm. Looks like the classic piano roll notation.
Emigre_
Hey this is really cool! Thanks for sharing it!