Shortcuts to faster instrument learning
Among the ways to learn a musical instrument faster are these basic strategies:
- Find or create an instrument that is easier to learn
- Understand what you are, at more than a shallow level, trying to learn
- Leverage existing skills you might already have
The first I’m addressing on this website with the evolving incarnations of the jammer. The second I’m slowly gnawing away at, with postings on useful music theory.
The third strategy has now popped up. James (Jim) Fallgatter (of www.Aqwertian.com), a very interesting website, just suggested we leverage our ability to type on a qwerty keyboard as a stepping stone to learning to play music.
This idea has appeal! After all, if one can type at 40 words per minute, that’s 240 characters per minute (5 char per word + 1 space), or 4 characters per second. If a character was instead a quarter-note, that’s well in excess of the two quarter-note per second speed (120 BPM) of the typical song. Beginners could even rip out songs with eighth notes.
This leads to the question: Why The Heck (this is a family-oriented site) can’t good typists play “Twinkle-twinkle-little Star” on a computer keyboard when said keyboard’s keys are set to play musical notes? The answer is maybe they can, that perhaps with a couple of twists, the gap can be bridged.
One can't do this to easily by mapping a PC keyboard to a piano-like note layout because a piano lay is just plain too long. The folded layout of a jammer keyboard is much denser in useful notes.
The simplest way to do this would be to assign a "letter value" to each jammer key, perhaps with a clear plastic overlay. The ZipEx jammer's keys as derived from a M-Audio keyboard are 2.5 cm (1 inch) wide, and a PC keyboard is about 1/3 less, so it's a bit more of a stretch, but the fingers are used to such variation.
The assignment for the right hand is shown to the right:
Green = middle C. So to play the major scale just say:
'play "KL;UIOP8" ' and the song "Doe-a-deer, a female deer" would be "KL;-K;K;K;". This is a bit weird, but a bit of experimentation on this site shows it works. Such a translation would be simple to program.
Or, one could use a finer overlay, and have a letter on every musically important key and key combination, as shown at left. If nothing else, this shows just how "dense" this layout is - within the reach of the fingers, without moving the hand significantly (less than a centimeter or so), are 90% of the notes and combinations you need at a given time to play a piece.
Thirdly, Jim has a more dynamic assignment system that I'm hoping to get him to explain and post here ;-)
Drawbacks: The "feel" and timing action of the PC key board is a lot different, perhaps too much so for this to work. With this in mind, I'll lighten the feel of my ZipEx jammer's keys.
Other than that and this post, I'll put this idea on the back burner.
Sigh so many ideas and so little time.
