Four years of sight reading practice

Yes, that's the problem with this approach. You don't learn random notes, you learn note patterns.

It's the difference between learning to recognise letters and learning to read words. Music is made of words - scale-specific gestures, of which there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, typically arranged in some kind of harmonic context so you can make reasonable guesses about what's coming next.

This matters because finger positions have to be optimised for the smoothest and fastest motion. Piano sheet music usually includes this information, but random note sequences won't.

All of it contributes to look-ahead, where you're reading a bar or two ahead of the music to give your brain time to assemble the finger movements it's going to need.

Yes the notes are in a random sequence. The "chords" appear to be chosen as major or minor triads, with random inversions or random "common intervals" like octaves, fifths and fourths, I don't think I've ever come across a tritone or "wierd" intervals.

I have gone through various phases in how it feels to play these random notes. Right at the beginning there is obviously the mechanical skill of just being able to put your fingers in the right place. This is less pronounced on piano than guitar, since single notes on the piano are obviously pretty easy for anyone. But when I switched to chords, I definitely felt the feeling I remember from learning the guitar, where the campfire chord shapes seemed to be just impossible to achieve with my fingers.

Keep in mind that this is not the only thing I'm doing to learn - I am also learning pieces, playing arpeggios and scales and studying music theory. Lately I've been gaining speed on the random notes by identifying runs and reading ahead a bit like you're describing.

I am quite proficient at guitar, played in a band and did a lot of pop music playing where you're handed a lyric sheet with chords and you have to just play. I can do that pretty much without prep. I can also "sight read" tablature for reasonably simple finger picking for novel songs quite a bit faster than I am able to do it on piano at the moment. I could never quite get there for traditional notation although I tried. I struggled to improve because once I knew the piece, I could play it without reading the music. So I would laboriously figure out the fingerings, then just play the piece from memory once I had done that. This was all happening in the early 1990s so I also didn't have the glut of music we would have now. Tablature was much more available for the pieces I wante to learn than traditional notation. I guess there is a mode where you force yourself to only learn new pieces all the time, but I found that pretty frustrating coming from zero.

I'm finding with piano, now that I have the notes in my fingers, that first step is much less frustrating and I can focus on building the mechanical dexterity to execute the phrases and remember the music.

When you don't start with music theory (which took many centuries to develop) you end up with lots of things that work but not as well.

You don't have to learn music theory yourself, so long as theory is something someone knew in the past to design how you learn. What matters is that you learn the useful patterns, why those patterns are useful is not something you need to know (except if you are trying to break the rules - understanding the rules means you understand what happens when you break them and thus can come up with good breakages instead of unmusical noise)

"I am still not quite sure how other people are learning this..."

We practice our scales through the circle of fifths. I don't really follow what they mean by "activates" at F#.

If this is getting the author to play and they're having fun, then that's great. But having a great teacher is invaluable, particularly when you're trying to lay down the fundamentals. It's going to be more difficult to unlearn bad habits in the future.

Yes, I guess this is what self-taught looks like. Although I have seen the use of mnemonics to remember the order of things in many contexts in music, including formal teaching. I thought some of these were universal: FACE and Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge for the note names on the staff, Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle, Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles' Father.

By this time I must admit that the random note playing is just an activity that I enjoy improving at independently, while I do think it's also making it easier for me to pick up new pieces quickly.

60bpm of random notes!

  >> This is easier to get
  >> into your fingers than 
  >> any other memorisation 
  >> technique.

Four years playing the piano is still a beginner level of experience against an adult standard of piano playing. Even if it is a lot for an eight year old child.

I agree. Reminds me of that story about chess grandmasters having incredible memory for valid chess positions but performing no better than average when remembering random piece arrangements. There's likely some efficient compression you can achieve by playing real-world music patterns rather than random notes. And it sounds better!

An interesting middle ground might be using LLMs to generate plausible melodies based on real-world music patterns and emphasizing the unfamiliar patterns, but if the goal is to play real music fluently, nothing beats practicing with actual pieces from the repertoire you want to play.

This is the first thing I noticed when I saw a sample of music. How useful could sight reading random notes actually be? I can't imagine it's completely useless but a lot of music is remarkably similar and quite predictable. I'd imagine practicing sight reading music with real structure would be far more useful for understanding those patterns and helping learn new and more complex pieces.

+1 for SRF. The generated pieces tend to be a bit more "musical" in nature as well and it also supports other instruments (guitar, violin, etc.)

The one additional thing I forgot to mention is that random notes as per TFA are almost entirely unrelated to the activity of sight reading but random rhythms are not. I made myself a bunch of flashcards with every conceivable combination of notes and rests adding up to a crotchet/quarter note on each card. Then I would scramble the deck , set the metronome and deal myself out say 4 bars of 4/4. Then sing or tap the rhythm in tempo. That helped a lot for reading more rhythmically intense stuff.

But isn't this a good thing?

I always try to avoid learning by pattern, because it would make me less flexible when composing.

Agreed. Among pianists Bach's four-part chorales [1] are a widely used practice resource for working on sight reading because of the sheer volume of the catalog.

[1] https://www.bach-chorales.com

I was intrigued by your mention of custom keycaps, so for the first time since I bought the keyboard I pulled off one of the caps to find a kind of usable fader still left there with a little red mark for the center. Now I'm googling for custom keycap options. So much for avoiding GAS.

There is an app called Piano Maestro that makes it much more fun, a large pool of pop songs, and increasing difficulty. We use multiple apps at home with our Yamaha piano that has a Bluetooth midi connected to it, including Notequest, Notevision and recently Piano Maestro.

I have found this to be less boring than trying to plough through my copy of Hanon, since there is rapid feedback. It's a different kind of game. I struggle to get to 10 minutes of scales or Hanon stuff, but have no issue on the random notes.

I feel like learning random notes would be the musical equivalent of the Chinese Room. You would be good at sight reading, but not be 'musical'.

A bit like when people tell you to learn Morse code, not to learn it letter by letter.

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Thank you, I will look into it